Existentialism

Camus, Sartre, and Saint-Just

Saint-Just

If we are to take bad faith as living life in accordance with a solution to which there is no problem, or living a role as if that is who we are, like an inkwell is an inkwell, and where this bad faith is to be contrasted with good faith, then we find in Camus’ The Rebel a precise date for the emergence of this bad faith—1789. More precisely, Camus argues that ‘Seventeen eighty-nine is the starting-point of modern time,’ for with the French Revolution, Camus claims, humanity ‘overthrew the principle of divine right and…introduce[d] to the historical scene the forces of negation and rebellion…’ (Camus 2000 [1951], 64). Before the French Revolution, whether it be the ‘Inca and the pariah,’ or those who endorsed the principle of divine right monarchy, Camus believes that ‘the problem of revolt never arises, because for them it has been solved by tradition before they had time to raise it—the answer being that tradition is sacrosanct. If, in the sacrosanct world, the problem of revolt does not arise, it is because no real problems are to be found in it—all the answers having been given simultaneously’ (ibid., 8). It may seem that it is the sacrosanct tradition that characterizes a world of bad faith, of living life in accordance with solutions to which there is no problem, for indeed Camus does point out that ‘no real problems are to be found’ in the sacrosanct world. If this is indeed true, and it is debatable, then Camus’ point is that prior to 1789 living in good faith, or as a rebel, was not truly possible for only then could one live with the awareness of the problems inseparable from solutions (to put it in the terms being used here).

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By Jeffrey Bell, ago

Anxiety of Freedom

Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence anxiety is the dissiness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself.

Søren Kierkeggard – Concept of Anxiety

In Towards a Critical Existentialism (forthcoming), I take up two common ways of thinking about freedom, popularized by Isaiah Berlin. The first is what Berlin refers to as the “’negative’ freedom,” by which he means “simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others. If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree…” (Berlin 1969, 156). This seems by far to be the sense of freedom most people have in mind when they worry about their freedoms. Is the government preventing me from purchasing a gun, preventing me from going to a restaurant, football game, or to school unless I am vaccinated against Covid-19 or wearing a mask? Just a brief survey of the signs people bring to freedom rallies offers an indication of what they are concerned about—they don’t someone someone, and in particular a government, preventing them from doing what they “could otherwise do.” One attendee to the rally brought a sign saying, “My Grandma did not survive the Holocaust for me to be masked or vaxxed against my will!”; another’s read, “I call the shot not you”; and finally, a common sign at one rally in Bloomington, Indiana, read “Ethical health care equals right to refuse.” The shared sentiment, it seems clear, is that the mask and vaccine mandates are forcing a choice upon them that they ought to be free to make for themselves. Berlin refers to this sense of freedom as negative for it is a freedom from government, or it concerns itself with the space where government does not have a say in what one does or chooses to do.

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By Jeffrey Bell, ago