How to Be an Existentialist By the Same Author: Sartre: A Guide for the Perplexed Sartre and Fiction The Sartre Dictionary Also available from Continuum: The Good, the True and the Beautiful, Michael Boylan How to Make Good Decisions and Be Right All the Time, Iain King How to Win Every Argument, Madsen Pirie Sex and Philosophy, Edward Fullbrook and Kate Fullbrook How to Be an Existentialist or How to Get Real, Get a Grip and Stop Making Excuses Gary Cox Continuum International Publishing Group The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane 11 York Road Suite 704 London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038 www.continuumbooks.com © Gary Cox 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-8843-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cox, Gary, 1964- How to be an existentialist, or, How to get real, get a grip, and stop making excuses / Gary Cox. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ). ISBN: 978-1-4411-8843-4 1. Existentialism. 2. Conduct of life. I. Title. II. Title: How to get real, get a grip, and stop making excuses. B819.C66 2009 142’.78–dc22 2009005317 Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall Contents Introduction 1 1 What is an Existentialist? 7 2 What is Existentialism? 12 Brief overview and quick history lesson 12 Existentialism and consciousness 21 Temporality 31 Being-for-others 36 Freedom and responsibility 44 Freedom and disability 49 Possible limits to freedom 51 Freedom and anxiety 54 3 How Not to Be an Existentialist 56 Bad faith is not self-deception 58 Flirting and teasing 59 Waiters, actors and attitudes 62 Homosexuality, sincerity and transcendence 65 Wilful ignorance 69 Contingency, nausea and the Existential Alka-Seltzer of bad faith 71 Moustaches and salauds 74 4 How to Be Authentic 81 Authenticity and getting real 82 Being-in-situation 83 Freedom as a value 85 The problem of being authentic 87 vi Contents Authenticity and intelligence 92 Authenticity and other people 95 Nietzsche on authenticity – regret nothing 97 Heidegger on authenticity – authentic being-towards-death 102 5 Existential Counselling 107 Bibliography 114 Further Reading 116 Index 117 Introduction According to hard-line existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre, whatever anyone does, ever, short of falling off a cliff, they choose to do it and are responsible for having done it. You, therefore, have chosen to pick up this book and open it. You are responsible for what you have done, even if you did so in the most idle and seemingly thoughtless way. Perhaps you are killing time in a bookshop while you wait for your lover to arrive on the three o’clock train. You have no intention of buy- ing this book because there are, after all, more important things to spend your money on than books. Your lover will expect you to treat them to a litre of designer coffee when that train gets in and Starbucks isn’t cheap. Shortly, you will slip this book back on the shelf or the 3 for the price of 2 table display with that tiny grimace that says to anyone who might be spying on you, ‘I am in here to buy a book, but that one isn’t what I’m looking for.’ Of course, I shouldn’t assume your actions are so predictable. You have free will and will do as you choose. It is because you have free will, as everyone does, that you have the poten- tial to become a true existentialist, if you’re not one already that is. Perhaps you are babysitting at a neighbour’s house and having finally tucked their rug rat up in bed you have decided to check out their book collection to see how uncultured they are. This book has caught your eye because you know a lot or a little about existentialism, because it is a slim volume whereas most books on existentialism you’ve 2 How to Be an Existentialist ever seen are fat and heavy, because it has a practical sounding title and not one that is totally obscure and pretentious like Being and Time or Phenomenology of Perception, because it appears to offer you the opportunity to become something quite mysterious and special, if only you can be bothered to read it all. Perhaps you haven’t picked this book up in an idle and thoughtless way at all, but with a very clear purpose. Good. With that kind of deci- sive attitude you are already well on your way to becoming a true exis- tentialist. You ordered it on the internet the other day using that much abused credit card and found it lying below the letter box a moment ago. You’ve ripped open the bubble wrap lined envelope and dived straight in. You are looking for direction in your life and to that end you have decided to become an existentialist; to join that most peculiar and misunderstood of cults, that society which has no membership fee unless it is your sanity and your very soul, that exclusive club which is comprised of the kind of independent minded people who never join clubs or follow the crowd. The comedian Groucho Marx – not to be confused with the philosopher Karl Marx, although equally intelligent – once said, ‘I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.’ Well, a true existentialist wouldn’t join a club that had members. Once all the preliminaries are out of the way the first thing this book tries to do is explain in as simple and straightforward a way as possible what existentialism is. There are hundreds of other books that explain existentialism in far more philosophical detail, a few of which I have written myself, so if you want to get really deep into the theory of exis- tentialism and possibly never surface again, check out the further read- ing section at the end of this book. Having given it some thought, I’ve decided that a person can’t be an existentialist unless he or she knows a bit about the philosophy or world-view of existentialism. Knowing a bit or even a lot about existen- tialism, however, will not, by itself, make you an existentialist. To be a true existentialist you also have to try to live in a certain way, or at least Introduction 3 adopt a certain attitude to life, death and other people. Being an exis- tentialist is definitely not just a matter of knowing stuff. For this reason, some of the most famous philosophers of existentialism were not in fact true existentialists at all, because although they knew a lot of theory they didn’t live the life; they didn’t practise what they preached. Perhaps the main value of having a working knowledge of existen- tialism as a philosophical theory is that you will hopefully understand why it makes sense to live according to the existentialist world-view; why it is a more honest, more dignified, even a more moral way to live than other ways you might live. The founders of Western philosophy, the Ancient Greeks, guys like Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, thought that the most important philo- sophical question in the universe, the question to which all other philo- sophical questions lead, is the question, ‘How should I live?’ If you are at all interested in becoming an existentialist then it is in fact the oldest and most important question in philosophy, ‘How should I live?’, that you are really interested in. Unlike a religion, existentialism does not say, do this, don’t do that, eat this, don’t eat that, follow all these petty rules and don’t dare question them. Instead, it describes in a coherent, honest and uncompromising way what it is like to be a person passing through this weird and wild world. It aims to show you what you really are when all the nonsense and bullshit that is talked at you by scientists, preachers, parents and school teachers is binned. It aims to reveal to you that you are a fundamentally free being so that you can start living accordingly; so that you can start asserting your individual freedom, your true ‘nature’, rather than living as though you were a robot pro- grammed by other people, social convention, religious dogma, morality, guilt and all the other age old forces of oppression. Existentialism is all about freedom and personal choice. It is all about facing up to reality with honesty and courage and seeing things through to the end, as well as being about putting words like choice in italics. Becoming an existentialist requires a certain amount of effort. The real difficulty is keeping it up, sustaining it, maintaining what existentialists