The Borderlands of Freedom
2011
The race started around eight minutes ago, and I’m just crossing the starting line. I was about ten thousand back in a field of 20,000 plus — at least, that was the rumoured figure circulating in starting corral G — and there are still plenty of people behind me. I hope it stays that way. As they say: there’s always someone slower than you — but they might not have shown up today. The shuffling walk turns to a scuffling jog, I cross the starting line and then … I have to quickly make my way across to a strip of grass at the side of Biscayne Boulevard. It’s not the calf- so far, so good with that — it’s my bladder. Dehydration increases the risk of cramp, which increases the risk of a muscle tear, so I made sure I drank numerous bottles of Gatorade between my 4 a.m. train ride and the 6.15 a.m. start. So far, everything was going precisely as planned, and as a consequence I was beginning to feel quite sanguine about my prospects today. On my final prerace visit to the Port-a-Loo, at a time when I was supposed to be in the starting corral, the queues were so deep and were moving so slowly I had to relieve myself in Bayfront Park, in full view of Metro-Dade cops who would have, at the very least, Tasered me if I had done this in any other circumstances. I am far from alone on this little patch of grass by the starting line — there’re probably around a hundred or so men and women. We were all hanging around in the starting corrals for more than thirty minutes, and many people seem to have had the same problem as me.
With the necessaries taken care of, I get back in the race and begin the gentle ascent of the slip road up onto the MacArthur Causeway. I’ve more or less reached my planned full marathon pace by now — I would estimate it to be a dizzying five and a half miles per hour — and, so far, the calf has held together: now for the first tricky bit. The first part of the MacArthur Causeway provides the biggest gradient on the entire course. Some people decide to walk up it — which makes perfect sense: the small amount of time you save by running is more than offset by the extra energy you expend, energy that might be crucial from, say, twenty miles and beyond. I’m quite happy to run up it. My problem is different. I don’t want to run down the other side. The calves have to bear more weight during a descent. That, of course, was how my long history of calf issues began. No one could compare the gentle gradient on the MacArthur Causeway with the hills of Kinsale, of course. But my most recent calf affliction announced itself when I was running down a tiny, barely discernible, slope where the road had passed over a canal. So I am taking no chances. I knew this was coming — I have studied the course video obsessively since I picked up my registration package on Friday — and I’ve always planned to walk down it. And that’s what I do. When I get to the bottom, calf still in one piece, it feels like victory. I’m starting to believe that everything is going to be okay, at least as far as my calf is concerned. My general fitness and ability to run 26.2 miles — that’s an entirely different matter.
As I see it, I have two strikes against me at this point. First, my training was severely truncated — I have about half of the recommended first-time marathoner’s training under my belt, and I have been able to do nothing for the last two months. Second, I am not a good runner. I have no natural aptitude to fall back on. All I can do, therefore, is be smart, in other words ultra conservative, at least for the first half of the race. So I tuck in behind the 2.30 pace runners. This was not planned: before the race, I didn’t even know there were such things as pace runners, let alone that they were kind enough to hold up signs for the entire race indicating the times they were running. What a wonderful idea — whoever first had it deserves canonization. I make myself as comfortable as I can behind the signs that read ‘2.30’: the plan is now to stay there for the first 13.1. I lose them for a while at the other end of the MacArthur — there is another descent there, as we cross over into South Beach, and I walk that too. But after that, I speed up a little until I find them again, then just keep my nose down, drink four cups of water or Gatorade at every aid station — there is roughly one every mile from the three-mile mark on — and just generally relax and enjoy myself. As we enter South Beach, the new sun hangs low like a golden promise over the towered skyline. I am relieved, excited and happy.
I have lived in Miami for four years, but rarely ventured to South Beach, with its bars, restaurants and nightclubs — that’s what happens when you have two young children and you are the sort of parent who has an unyieldingly authoritarian attitude towards their 6 p.m. bedtime. In fact, as I run up Ocean Drive at around 7 a.m. on this cold — by Miami standards, it’s around 18oC — but bright morning, it occurs to me that this is probably only the third time I’ve been here. Here, there are lots of smiling faces lining the streets, shouting and hooting at everyone — me included! Apparently, it’s encouragement. Americans like being encouraged and the louder the better. Me — not so much. No doubt it is a British thing. What am I supposed to do? I could ignore them — but that just seems rude and ungrateful. I could flash an appreciative smile at each of these shrill supporters, perhaps proffer some small waves or even high-fives; but that just seems distracting and onerous. I have enough to contend with already. I’m tempted to speed up a little, to get through this part of the race as fast as I can — increase the cadence to escape the stridence. But I know that would bring disaster later on. And so I take the first option: rudely and ungratefully onwards I puff and thud.
Up Ocean Drive, with its empty cafes and restaurants, east along some streets I don’t know. North past Lincoln Road, more streets I’ve never seen before. Then we meet the Venetian Causeway that takes us away from the beach and back to Downtown. The Causeway is a series of short bridges interspersed with small islands. Over to my left, I can see the towering hotels that line Biscayne Boulevard — the finishing line of both the half and full marathons. Eight miles gone, five to go until the end of the half marathon. The pace runners, bless them both, are spot on. At around 2.20 clock time, I find myself at the 12.8-mile mark. Now it’s decision time. I can stop at the half marathon. I’m registered for the full, and have been since my faux-gouty episode back in September. But stopping at the half is an available option — I think they would even give me a half-marathon finisher’s medal.
A brief perusal of my condition yields ambiguous results. I am tired — there’s no getting around that. I’m certainly not bone-weary: there’s still some gas in the tank, but I’m not sure it’s enough to see me through the next 13.1 miles. But I suspect this conscious appraisal is really epiphenomenal, merely a pretence in which my conscious mind likes to engage, a game it likes to play. I always knew, deep down, that unless my calf went, or my legs were about to give way under me, I was going to go on and attempt the full. It’s the knowing: I want to know what will break me. I can just imagine myself during the next week if I stop here — hating myself for my contemptible caution: all week wondering ‘what if?’ I would be insufferable. If I try and fail — if the second 13.1 is too much for me — then at least I’ll know that I gave it everything I have, and I’ll know exactly how far everything I have will take me. Sometimes it is enough to know.
The left lane turns off to the half-marathon finish and so I run down the right lane. The contrast is glaring. The half-marathon finish — that is a swarming lane of smiling faces and happy shouts, of fist pumps and raised arms, enveloped by the cheering throngs of friends and families. The marathon lane is largely empty, mostly silent: the road of the damned rather than the saved. I give Emma a quick call — my mobile phone was tucked away in my running belt for just this eventuality — and let her know not to bother coming in to meet me for another few hours. And then I run on over the 4th Street bridge to my fate.
I may not have been able to train for this marathon, specifically. But I have been doing the long run for many years. I did it at the beginning of December — twenty miles — and I did it back in France last summer, at least that run was not too far away from twenty miles. And I’ve been doing it, off and on, all the way back to my days in Alabama. When the pack that ran with me was young, I would run long and hard, because that is what they needed. Sometimes they would wake me up in the mornings, bouncing off the walls and I knew we were going to run twenty miles today just for fun. As they grew old, our running would taper off — maybe five stolid daily miles. And after that, just gentle walks. When they die, the pack eventually becomes young once more and the cycle begins again. These two decades of running, even if intermittent, have got to count for something today, I tell myself, and I’m sure they will. But for how much, exactly, is something I am just going to have to find out.
When you are starting to run, or working your way back after a long lay-off, your run is likely to contain multiple episodes of what I, quite recently, decided to call the ‘Cartesian phase’ — after the seventeenth-century French philosopher René Descartes. According to Descartes, the body, which for Descartes’ purposes incorporates the brain, is a physical object, differing only in the details of its organization from other physical objects. But the mind — or soul, or spirit, or self, Descartes was comfortable thinking of these interchangeably — is very different. The mind is a non-physical thing, made up of a different substance and obeying different laws and principles of operation than physical things. The resulting view, Cartesian dualism, sees each one of us as an amalgam of two very different things: a physical body and a non-physical mind.
The Cartesian phase and I go back many years together. Today it makes its first appearance — no doubt there will be others — sometime after the fourteen-mile marker. Just get me to fifteen, I tell my legs, then you can walk for a while. But of course I must make sure I am just as much a liar today as I was in November, when I was working on getting my long run back up to twenty miles. There is nothing wrong with walking on the long run — at least as far as I am concerned, although others may disagree — as long as you absolutely have to. One way of approaching a marathon when one is in an inconveniently under-trained state is by deliberately inserting periods of walking into the race. For example, one might run for twenty minutes and then walk for five — that was one of the pieces of advice I was offered when I picked up my race packet on Friday — or, if you prefer, run for five minutes and walk for one. For some, this may be excellent advice but I do not think it will work for me. I’m far too undisciplined. Walking, for me, is simply too addictive. If I start walking now, I’m not sure I’ll be able to start running again. There may come a point when I am going to have to walk. But I need to postpone that point as long as I possibly can. And so, sometime after the fourteen-mile marker, the lies begin. But who is the liar, and who is the lied to? It certainly seems as if my mind is lying to my body. It is my body that is suffering. It is my body that needs convincing. But how can my mind lie to my body if they are not two different things? It was this kind of intuition that decisively set Descartes on his course.
In some ways, I suppose I should find these dualist intuitions surprising. For much of my professional life, dualist intuitions have simply been things to ignore. Descartes’ dualism is beset with empirical and logical problems as long as one’s arm. Few, these days, think that mind and body are two different types of being. Generations of philosophers have made it their business to construct persuasive arguments against dualism, or failing that to invent catchy slurs — for example, ‘the ghost in the machine’ — with which to disparage the view. Descartes cannot be right. I know that. And yet sometimes on the long run I can almost believe he is. Nevertheless, erroneous or not, these dualist intuitions, these Cartesian meditations if you like, are just the beginning. The illusion of spirit is merely one way that the long run can unfold.
After a while, the Cartesian phase usually gives way to my old friend, the phase of dancing thoughts. It now occurs to me that one might christen this phase after another philosopher. This is a Humean phase of the run, after the eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume. There is a famous passage in his book A Treatise of Human Nature where Hume remarks: ‘Whenever I enter most intimately into what I call myself I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself at any time without a perception and never can observe anything but the perception.’ When Hume talks about venturing ‘most intimately into what I call myself’ he is talking about what we, today, refer to as introspection. When you introspect, when you turn your attention inwards, what do you find? Hume claims, and I think he is right, that you find things like thoughts, feelings, emotions and sensations. When you introspect, you encounter what it is you are thinking, what it is you are feeling and so on. Thoughts, feelings, emotions and sensations are all what are sometimes called states of mind. Hume’s point then is this: you never encounter your mind or self as something separate from ‘states of mind’. Or to put the same point another way: the only way you encounter your mind or self is by encountering its various states.
I used to think the Cartesian and Humean phases were separate phases of the run, each interesting in its own way, but for different reasons. I now begin to see that there is a more global pattern at work. We might think of Cartesian and Humean phases as part of a larger process: a process of dissolution of the self. I think back to how I began this run, a little over two and a half hours ago. Then I was a thoroughly embodied self. My iPod nano was turned up as far as it would go with suitably rage-filled music — things such as Saliva’s ‘Click Click Boom’, Rage Against the Machine’s ‘Killing in the Name’ (believe me, ‘Fuck you, I won’t do what you tell me’ is exactly what one needs to hear from twenty miles on), Kid Rock’s ‘Bawitdaba’ (the live version with plenty of profanity) and perhaps most testosterone-fuelled of all, the third movement of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. My bodily awareness is razor sharp, keenly tuned to any disturbance in my reluctant calf — will it go, will it hold? — and, indeed, in any part of my more or less reluctant body. What does sensation in my calf mean? What is the significance of this pain in my Achilles tendon? What is the import of this this sensation in my back? At the beginning of the run, and in its early stages, I am the indivisible amalgam of mind and body in action. I am the self as imagined by Spinoza.
In the Cartesian phase, however, this heightened bodily awareness disappears. Far from being the centre of my experiential world, the body is largely dispensed with — relegated to the gullible recipient of promises unlikely to be kept. What I have now become is a mendacious spirit: a maker of promises to be broken. This is the first stage in the shrinking of the self. The embodied self has turned into a disembodied self. The body is no longer part of what I am — not the essential me — it is simply what I am using to get where I am going. Nevertheless, despite styling itself as the master, the position of the Cartesian spirit is a precarious one. The flesh may become wise to its ruses, or for some other reason simply stop obeying. The master can quickly become the slave. The Cartesian or disembodied self is, by its nature, a troubled one.
The Humean phase heralds a further retreating of the self. The Cartesian phase of the long run is characterized by the feeling that there is a non-physical self running the show — giving the body permission to do this or do that if it meets certain specified conditions. But when I enter the Humean phase, the controlling ego begins to dissolve in front of my eyes. In the Humean phase, there is no obvious mind, no obvious controller or thinker. Instead, I am mesmerized by thoughts that seem to come from nowhere, and just as quickly disappear into nowhere. No longer the duplicitous master, what remains of the self is simply the dancing of thoughts in the empty blue sky where I took my mind to be. My mind is simply the transient configurations it adopts. The self is the dance — there is no dancer over and above the dance.
Far from being made up of different, unconnected parts or facets, I now see the long run as the unfolding of a process whereby the self is progressively transformed from the Spinozist embodied form, through the Cartesian disembodied version, to the Humean self of dancing thoughts. The long run does not have to unfold in this way. Any given run may contain all or none of these phases. And even if the Humean phase is reached, it is so quickly and easily lost again. But the run can unfold in this way. And when it does, I now understand the path I am running. With each successive phase, I am journeying deeper into the beating heart of the run. And in this heart, with each successive breath I take, the self that I am evaporates.
The absence of the fifteen-mile marker is very worrying. The first mile after turning down the road of the damned had been surprisingly easy, almost pleasant. It was, of course, a mile dominated by the adrenalin rush that goes with starting something I have no idea if I am going to be able to finish. But the adrenalin is now long gone, just like the fourteen-mile marker, and there’s still no sign of fifteen. I’ve become very, very tired since the last marker, and the pain is beginning — an aching in the groin and upper-thigh area. I’ve come prepared. I take a couple of tablets of ibuprofen I had inserted in my belt, and suck down my first packet of GU — a caffeine-infused carbohydrate gel. The fact that I didn’t touch any of my four packets during the first 13.1 — that I was unconsciously saving them for something — was, I now realize, rather telling. When my calf didn’t go early on, I always knew I was going to attempt the 26.2, and find myself here: a long way gone, and almost as far to go. I knew also — and I must keep this firmly in the forefront of my thoughts now — that if I made it this far, this was always going to be the hard part of the run. I’m running through some rather nondescript back-streets of Coconut Grove. If I can make it as far as the downtown Grove, see the shops of Cocowalk and once again hook up with the bright blue waters of Biscayne Bay, then I’ll know I am going to be okay. Probably.
In this race I have already been through Cartesian and Humean phases, several times for each in fact. That is no surprise — but what follows is entirely unexpected. Seeing Spinozist, Cartesian and Humean phases as successive stages in the dissolution of the self, I had thought that was as far as the process could go. I had assumed that the Humean phase was the culmination. I was wrong. I am now presented with a phase of the run that I have never experienced before; a phase I had no idea even existed. Initially, I was far too surprised to give it a name. But for some reason or other I seem almost preternaturally good at finding labels for things today. As the phase slowly unfolds, it occurs to me that it might appropriately be labelled the ‘Sartrean phase’ — after the French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. The Sartrean phase is, fundamentally, a further stage in the shrinking of the self.
In the Humean phase, I discern no thinker behind the thoughts. But nevertheless I am tempted to identify these thoughts with myself. I may not be the dancer — not any more — but at least I am still the dance. I am still something. This feeling is tenacious. But it ends when and where the Sartrean phase of the run begins. In the transition from Spinozist, through Cartesian to Humean phases, the self shrinks from body-mind continuum to mind, then from mind to thoughts. In the Sartrean phase, the mind shrinks further — from thoughts to nothing. Now, finding myself for the first time in the Sartrean phase, I come to see these thoughts as not part of me at all. They are transcendent objects, existing irrevocably and decisively as things outside of me. And, gradually, like a smile that slowly comes to play on the lips, I begin to understand that this has an implication of overriding importance for my ability to finish this race: these thoughts have no authority over me.
I am getting weary, there’s no getting around that. I’m somewhere past the fourteen-mile marker, but my scanning of the distance in front of me still reveals no sign of the fifteen-mile mark. I’m hurting: the pain is still pretty minor, but I shall hazard a guess and say that it is going to get worse. I wouldn’t say I was suffering yet, not much anyway, but I’m not too far off that point. In some ways, I want to stop, or at least walk for a while. On a certain level, I would be delighted to do either of these things. Weariness, desire: these are reasons why I might stop. But now I realize — not a sudden realization, more like a whispered rumour that slowly becomes audible — that there is no reason that can ever make me stop my plodding eleven-minute-mile, one-foot-in-front-of-the-other progress. I could add up all the reasons there are for me to stop, I could allow these reasons to congeal into a dark, persuasive mass, but still they have no power over me. All the reasons in the world to stop are still compatible with my continuing to run — with my legs continuing their stride-by-stride onward journey. There are no reasons that can make me stop. To this extent, I am free. In fact, I suspect this is the purest experience of freedom possible for a man of my age.
In his classic investigation of the nature of consciousness Sartre defended a rather remarkable claim, one that, I am beginning to suspect, few since have really understood. He wrote: ‘All consciousness … is consciousness of something. This means that there is no consciousness that is not a positing of a transcendent object, or if you prefer, that consciousness has no “content”.’ Consciousness has no content — there is nothing in it. Consciousness is nothing — a little pocket of nothingness that has insinuated itself into the heart of being. To the extent that I am consciousness, I am nothing at all. And because I am nothing I am free.
‘All consciousness is consciousness of something.’ When I think, for example, that the fifteen-mile marker can’t be too far away, my thought is about the marker and its likely spatial proximity to me. If I look up and see the marker — it is an electronic board that will read ‘15 miles’ and also tell me the clock time of the race — then my visual perception is of the marker. States of consciousness — thoughts, beliefs, memories, perceptions and so on — are always of or about things. This ‘aboutness’ — as philosophers refer to it, this ‘intentionality’ — is, Sartre thought, the essence of consciousness.
However, no object of consciousness is ever about anything — at least, not in the way conscious states are about things. The expression ‘object of consciousness’ means merely something of which I am aware or conscious; something I am seeing, or thinking about, or desiring, or hoping for, and so on. When I am thinking about the fifteen-mile marker, or if I see this marker, it is an object of my consciousness in Sartre’s sense. The fifteen-mile marker may seem to be about something. It is about the distance travelled from the starting line, and the time taken to travel this distance. But it is about this only because we humans — especially, in this case, we human runners — interpret it that way. In itself, it is just a collection of lights on a board. We have linguistic and mathematical conventions that associate certain patterns — whether they are patterns of lights or patterns of ink on paper — with numbers and letters. It is because of us, and our interpreting abilities and conventions, that the pattern of lights on the marker means that I have run fifteen miles in two hours fifty minutes — at least that is what I hope it will say and mean when I actually get there. But in themselves, these patterns of light mean nothing at all. In other words, the fifteen-mile marker sign is about distance and time from the line and the start, but only in a derived sense — a sense that derives from our linguistic conventions. And our linguistic conventions derive from our consciousness. However, our thoughts, beliefs, desires, hopes, fears, expectations and other states of consciousness are not like this. My thought that the fifteen-mile marker can’t be too far away is not about the fifteen-mile marker and its spatial proximity to me because I, or someone else, have interpreted it to be about this. The thought is intrinsically about things. And the same is true of my other states of consciousness.
Sartre claimed that any object of consciousness is only about things in a derived sense: what it is about, if it is about anything at all, is a matter of how we interpret it. This — and here we come to the really controversial part — is true even when the object of consciousness is a mental one. Suppose I close my eyes and start picturing the fifteen-mile marker. I form a mental image of the sign or of what I think the sign will look like. I am aware of this image, so it is, as Sartre puts it, an object of my consciousness. This image certainly seems to be about the fifteen-mile marker. But, in fact, it is about the fifteen-mile marker only because I interpret the image in this way. Taken in itself, the image could mean — be about — pretty much anything. It might represent the fifteen-mile marker. Or I could be using it to represent markers in general. Or I could be using it to represent things that display numbers, things with lights, things to be looked-out-for, and so on. In principle, an image like this could mean any one of an indefinite number of things. In order to fix its meaning — in order for it to be one thing rather than another — it needs to be interpreted. And this means that, in itself, it is not about anything. Its ‘aboutness’ comes into the picture only with the consciousness that interprets it. All objects of consciousness, all the things of which we are aware, require interpretation if they are to mean anything. Therefore, they are not intrinsically about anything.
Consciousness is intrinsically about things. No object of consciousness — physical or mental — is intrinsically about anything. Therefore, Sartre concludes, no object of consciousness can be part of consciousness. The expression ‘object of consciousness’, one should remember, simply means ‘something I am aware of’. Therefore, if Sartre is correct, nothing I am ever aware of can be part of my consciousness. And since I am consciousness, this means that nothing I am ever aware of can be part of me: it is an object ‘for’ me — something I can interpret in one or another way — but it cannot be part of what I am.
Think of Sartre as supplying a challenge: try to point to consciousness — try to point to something that is in consciousness. As you say, ‘Here it is!’ — mentally pointing to a thought, experience, feeling or sensation, for example — this becomes an object of your consciousness and so is, if Sartre is correct, precisely not a part of your consciousness; it is not part of you. The entire world is outside you — for the world is simply a collection of things of which you are aware; or, at least, of which you can be aware if your attention is suitably engaged. Therefore, consciousness can be nothing at all. Therefore, Sartre concludes, consciousness is simply a pure directedness towards the world — a ‘wind blowing toward the world’ as he once put it. Consciousness is a directedness towards things that it is not and it is nothing more than this. From this perspective, the error of Descartes was to think of consciousness as a thing — albeit a thing of a special sort, a non-physical thing, a spiritual substance. Consciousness, in reality, is no-thing. It is nothing. The error of Hume was to suppose that the thoughts, feelings and other mental states of which I am aware are parts of me. They are not: they are outside me, irreducibly alien to me.
All the reasons I have to stop running have no authority over me because they are not part of me. They are not part of me because I am aware of them. Because I am aware of them, they are not intrinsically about anything; their meaning is not intrinsic to them. Whatever meaning they have is something I must assign to them. And this assignation is my choice. This is the core of the argument of Sartre’s monumental early — and best — work, Being and Nothingness. Everything else in those six hundred pages is merely an attempt to work out the implications of this idea that consciousness is empty: there is nothing in it; it has no content. I have never before understood Sartre as well as I do today, in these anxious, vicious minutes as I scan the distance for the fifteen-mile marker.
A reason is something I am aware of. If I am not aware of it, then it is not a reason, but something else — a cause. But if I am aware of a reason, then it is not a part of my consciousness. As something I am aware of, a reason can mean anything at all. In order for it to mean one thing rather than another, I must interpret it. And this means that no reason can ever compel me to do one thing rather than another. Whatever implications the reason has for my action is a matter of what that reason means. And, since the reason is something I am aware of, its meaning must come from me. Therefore there will always be a gap between reasons I have and the things I do, and there is nothing in the reasons themselves that can bridge this gap. Freedom lies in this gap. I am free to the extent that my reasons cannot compel me. And so today, somewhere past the fourteen-mile marker, I come to properly understand, for the first time, the gap between reasons and actions. The gap is always there — between every reason I have and every action I perform — but perhaps it is only on this long and difficult run that this abstruse logical point receives vivid experiential confirmation.
Every step I am going to take on the remainder of this run is a choice. Choices can be made on the basis of reasons, but I now understand that no reason can ever compel a choice. There is always a gap between the reason and the subsequent choice. At every step I take in the long run, I have a choice to make: to take another step or to stop. The only thing I cannot choose is whether or not to make this choice, and there is no reason that can compel me to choose one way or the other. At the 12.8-mile mark, I decided I was going to go on and try to run a marathon, and I have very good reasons for wanting to complete this race. But each new step requires a reaffirmation of my decision. Each new step requires a reiteration of my desire. At each new step I take in this long run, my desires and decisions can mean different things. Perhaps I shall regard them as utterly binding, or perhaps I shall see them as merely the caprices of a previous hour that should now be discarded. What they are, how they should be interpreted, that is my choice. And nothing can ever make me choose one way rather than another. An old memory briefly flashes through my mind, of Alan Sillitoe’s novella, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, whose anti-hero Colin Smith walks away a few yards from the finish line, even though he is winning and the consequences of this action will, for him, be grim. But fuelled by this Sartrean realization, I’m in far too upbeat a mood to be detained by this sort of negativity. Smith chose to stop, because there was no reason that could compel him to continue. My concerns point firmly in the other direction: there is no reason that can make me stop. No reason at all. If I stop, it will be because I have chosen to. If I stop, this will be because I have allowed a reason to deceive me — to convince me that it is more powerful than it really is.
Out of the corner of my eye I see it: the fifteen-mile marker. Hah! Not fifteen: sixteen! Apparently, I had missed the fifteen-mile marker — that’s what happens when you become overly preoccupied with neo-Sartrean ruminations. Sixteen: just ten miles to go — less than two hours. I can do that. Sartre used the term ‘anguish’ to describe one’s experience of one’s own freedom. When I realize that no reason I have can ever determine what I do, then, Sartre says, I experience angoisse: anguish. I wouldn’t call it that at all. Even before I saw the sixteen-mile marker, I wouldn’t have called it that. When I understood that no reason could ever make me stop, what I experienced was joy. Joy — the most reliable symptom of what is intrinsically valuable making its presence felt in life. To run on in freedom — to run in the freedom of the gap between reasons and actions — is one of the intrinsically valuable ways of being in this world. To run in this freedom is to run in joy.
I am now beginning to suspect that Sartre’s view of freedom is widely misunderstood. Some people think he is claiming less than he, in fact, is. All Sartre is doing, they say, is describing the experience of freedom — what it feels like to be free. Others think he is claiming more than he, in fact, is. They interpret Sartre as claiming that there are no limits to our freedom — that we are free in some absolute sense. No external factors or circumstances can ever shackle us or constrain what we do. That is a silly view, and I am now pretty sure Sartre did not hold it. According to Sartre we are free in this sense and to this extent: no reason can ever compel us. For us, reasons decide nothing. This is not simply a matter of feeling free: I actually am free in this sense and to this extent. But this does not, of course, mean that nothing can make me stop running. There are not only reasons there are also causes. Reasons may decide nothing; but causes certainly can.
The difference between a reason and a cause is easy to understand in principle, but sometimes difficult to pin down with any precision. The basic idea is that reasons are things we have, whereas causes are things that happen to us. I am running today because, apparently, I want to try to run a marathon — this want or desire is part of my reason. I also need to have associated pertinent beliefs. I have to believe, for example, that today is marathon day and that I am currently on the marathon course — if I didn’t believe these things, then my simple desire to run the marathon would not explain why I am now running here, in this place. A standard way of thinking of reasons is as desire-belief combinations of this general sort. Together, the combination explains why I am running. Contrast this with a very different explanation. I am running because someone has tied me behind their car, and is driving the marathon course, on marathon day, at roughly five and a half miles an hour, with me in tow. This would be a cause of my running — and this cause is not something that I have; it is something that has happened to me. It is common to think of reasons as a species of cause — causes that we have rather than causes that merely happen to us. I am free, Sartre argued, to the extent that my reasons cannot compel me. But this is, of course, compatible with the idea that causes — the causes that happen to me, not the ones I have — can compel me. And obviously they can: indeed, not merely compel me, they can crush me.
There is nothing in consciousness; it is empty, a wind blowing towards the world. Consciousness is akin to a hole in being. But holes can’t exist by themselves. A hole is defined by its edges, and these are not part of the hole. So a hole can exist only if there is something that is not a hole. The same is true of consciousness. Consciousness can only exist if there is something that is not consciousness. Indeed, for Sartre, consciousness is defined by its relation to things that it is not. Sartre often put this by saying — perhaps a little unhelpfully, but he was, after all, Parisian — that I am what I am not and I am not what I am. Suppose I am conscious of the things that I am, or the things I could be said to be. I am a 48-year-old man, a husband and a father of two; I am a professor of philosophy; I am from Wales, but am now a resident of Miami; I am a mediocre runner; I am severely under-trained. All these things are true of me; all these things I think I am. However, Sartre argued, I am really not any of these things. I am aware of being these things, and therefore am not any of these things. Rather, I am that which decides the significance of these things, what these things mean. Sartre argued that what I really am must escape these sorts of characterizations and any other ones that I might put in their place. What I really am always slips away from, and so cannot be captured by, the ways in which I think of myself. This is what Sartre means when he says I am not what I am. But there is also a clear sense in which if I am not a 48-year-old, running, philosophy-professing father of two who was born in Wales and is a resident of Miami, then I am not these things in a very different sense than the one in which I am not a blind blues guitarist, or the female CEO of a multinational company. I am defined as not being a 48-year-old, running, philosophy-teaching father of two, born in Wales now living in Miami. But I am not defined by my failure to be any of these other things. For Sartre, I am defined by not being what is true of me. I am not defined by not being what is false of me. This is what Sartre meant when he said that I am what I am not.
I am defined by not being what is true of me. As consciousness, I am nothing. But nothing can only exist as a relation to something. And the something that I am not is what Sartre called my ‘facticity’. Facticity is equivalent to the edge of the hole — the thing that is not a hole but without which the hole cannot exist. I am not my facticity, but can exist only in relation to it. Facticity changes from moment to moment. My current facticity is, roughly, the situation in which I now, at this time, find myself. My current situation is that I am running, or at least trying to run, a marathon. I have no natural aptitude for this, quite the contrary in fact. I haven’t been able to train very much; in fact training has gone very badly indeed. Then there is my specifically bodily facticity — the bodily baggage I bring to this situation. This body is forty-eight years old. It’s been around the block. It has history. There are certain criminal elements of it that have what we might call ‘form’. I am a tissue of injuries, scars and weaknesses sown together in the mere semblance of a man. If I hadn’t been so focused on my calf issue, there would have been plenty of other things for me to worry about.
There are, for example, my arthritic knees. There’s my failing back, which will occasionally go into spasm during the course of a long run (one reason I always carry a mobile phone with me these days). There is my almost constantly complaining Achilles tendon — which, I am pretty sure, is a ticking time bomb. There is my recently torn calf, and my resulting lack of anything remotely approaching marathon fitness. It is my facticity that explains why I am not going to breeze through today’s 26.2 miles. Maybe I am not my facticity; but it is my facticity — rather than someone else’s facticity — that therefore defines me. I am not Mark Rowlands: forty-eight, untalented, under-trained, overweight, with questionable calves, knees, Achilles and back. My facticity is a ridiculously undercooked facticity. I’d much rather I had the facticity of someone younger, lighter, or who had four months of unblemished training behind them. But that is not the way things turned out.
When you are working with this sort of facticity, then pain during the long run is entirely normal and is something I generally try to ignore rather than address. Some think of pain as a warning sign. But pain is part of my facticity. If I stopped running every time I felt a little pain, I’d never get any running done at all. Now, closing in on the nineteen-mile mark, I’ve been cramping up for the past two miles. My right, uninjured, calf has been the most vociferous in its complaints, and I suspect I must have been unconsciously favouring my left leg. Fantastic — rather than running a marathon, I must have been limping my way through it. Strangely, I’m not too worried about this calf, although that might simply be because I am too tired to realistically assess its condition. I tell myself that a cramp in a smaller muscle like the calf can be stretched away — and, indeed, a vigorous calf stretch every mile or so has done the trick so far. And even if it goes, I further tell myself, goes like my left one did a couple of months ago, I can limp the last seven miles to the finish line — although given that I’ve never limped seven miles anywhere in my life, I can hardly be certain of this.
Shortly after the nineteen-mile mark, my hamstrings start to tighten noticeably. But again I am able to effectively stretch them out. Around this time also, I am buoyed by the appearance of the five-hour pace runners. I haven’t seen them since I continued on to the full marathon. They pass me when I’m closing in on the twenty-mile mark, and I shove my tightening, hurting muscles into the little box of what does not matter, and dig in behind them. Two months ago, I would have been devastated by a time of five hours. Today, I would regard it as a result.
It’s around the twenty-three-mile mark — as I am running east over the Rickenbacker Causeway — that the cramp really starts to hit hard; and this time it’s in a big muscle group, my quads — both of them. This is much more difficult to stretch away. It’s partly because I’m so tired, and tend to topple over every time I stand on one leg to do a quad stretch. But even when I manage to stay upright for more than a few seconds, the quad stretches just don’t quite seem to be doing it. Cramp in the quads is a lot more worrying than in the calves. I may be able to limp home on shattered calves, but if a big muscle group like the quads go into spasm, I’m going to go down like a ton of bricks. And I doubt I’ll be getting up any time soon. I’m three miles away from the finishing line, but I might as well be three hundred. I manage the problem as best I can: I stretch, then run as far as I can until I feel them starting to spasm, and then stretch some more.
When you run in pain, you are running on the borderlands of freedom. You still belong to the land of reasons, but are flirting dangerously with the line that marks the land of causes. The last long run I did, at the beginning of December, I began during an arthritic flare-up of one of my knees. I forget which one, but I do remember that the first eight miles or so were very unpleasant indeed; but after that it seemed to sort itself out. The pain in my quads today I judge to be considerably less than the pain in my knee then. But on that run I wasn’t skirting the borderlands between reason and cause. That is the difference.
The pain in my knee was a reason to stop. But it was never going to become anything more than a reason; and no reason can ever compel me. The pain in my knee was manageable, it would get no worse and my knee would not seize up. The pain in my quads is quite different. It has everything to do with possibilities: it has little to do with what is happening now — the level of severity of the pain — and everything to do with what might happen in a moment.
Suppose I somehow knew that this pain would not lead to any more severe cramping, of the sort that would deposit me on the tarmac as if I’d been shot. It doesn’t really matter how I knew this. I might imagine, for example, that there is a God kind enough to take an interest in my fortunes during this race, and He appears to me on the Rickenbacker Causeway. God tells me: okay, Mark, the pain is what it is. But it’s not going to get any worse. Your quads are not going to cramp any more than they already are. You don’t have to worry about collapsing in a broken heap on the ground. Just keep doing what you’re doing, and you’ll finish the race. If I knew this, could I keep running? Yes, without a shadow of a doubt. It wouldn’t be entirely pleasant. But it would certainly be bearable.
The borderlands of freedom are the shadow lands — populated not by the concrete and reassuring what is, but by the shadows of what might come to be. When I run in this sort of pain, I run the borderlands — skirting the line that divides reasons and causes. Pain — certainly moderate pain of this sort — is a reason, and can never make me stop running. But this particular pain is a reason of a special sort: a reason that signifies the imminent appearance of a cause that can crush me. The pain in my knee of two months ago was not this sort of pain at all, even though it was significantly more severe. It was what it was: it signified the imminent appearance of nothing. With the pain of today, I must push and push and push, right up until the last second: the second before the transformation occurs — the moment when a reason that I have becomes a cause that simply happens to me. I must push and push on to the borderline of the land of causes. But I must not step over.