Sartre and Anguish in Existentialism

Sartre and Anguish in Existentialism

Introduction

At the age of 30, Edward Munch painted The Scream. Self described as the try to represent "an infinite scream passing through nature", is probably the most known representation of Angst or Anguish. It expresses the artist's anxiety and pessimism, caused by the confusion and loneliness of existence.

The term existentialism was adopted as a self-description by Jean-Paul Sartre, and became identified with a cultural movement that flourished in Europe in the 1940s and 1950s. It has been applied to more or less every  philosopher for whom human existance was a key philosophical topic.

Among the major philosophers identified as existentialists (many of whom-for instance Camus and Heidegger-repudiated the label) were Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger. The nineteenth century philosophers Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, came to be seen as precursors of the movement.

Existentialism was as much a literary phenomenon as a philosophical one. Sartre's own ideas were and are better known through his fictional works -such as Nausea and No Exit- than through his more purely philosophical ones such as Being and Nothingness and Critique of Dialectical Reason.

Kierkegaard

Soren Kierkegaard was the first philosopher to define this feeling in his work "The concept of Dread" (also translated "The concept of Anxiety"). He was the first thinker to define Angst as a "what is not".

"Angst is the dizziness of freedom", he said, is a deep spiritual condition of insecurity and despair felt by the free human being. Kierkegaard believed that the freedom given to people left them a constant fear of failing its responsibilities to God. It is a proper feature of mankind, because it is a spirit in a body. It is absent in angels, because they are pure spirit and in beasts, because they don't have a conscience and act only by instinct.

With an analysis of the original sin, the thinker showed how Angst is the starting point and, at the same time, the consequence of sin, a passage from innocence to guilt that the human being is doomed to live. Innocence is ignorance, the absence of knowledge on good and evil, that arises Anguish.

Very often, Kierkegaard is referred to as a "christian existalist", because he pointed out the importance of God in the life of human beings: the utlimate solution to Angst resides in It. The believer has no anguish for what is possible, because it is all in the hands of God.

Heidegger

Martin Heidegger, as a student, studied under Husserl, who was deeply influent for his philosophical method, even though he repudiated him after joining the Nazi party. In 1927 he published the first volume of Being and Time, where he analyses Angst, as the best way to understand the nature of human beings. It is a feeling that we feel when we are put in front of an indetermination or to the nothingness in itself.

For Heidegger, the best way of living was living-for-death: life is authentic only if the human being make choices thinking of the finite nature of life. If we were immortal, it would be meaningless to make choices, because we would have the possibility of making every choice, to chose every path of our life: our life would be meaningless.

Heidegger exorted human beings to have the courage of Anguish, as he considered it a positive feeling, linked to the authentic life.

Sartre

Sartre analyses Anguish and, in particular, "bad faith", as the solution that human beings have found to ignore the Angst, which is the result of the terror they experience in front of freedom. Human beings pretend to accept rules and social hierarchy. But it is impossible to escape, because in the very same moment that man escapes from itself and its Anguish, it becomes aware of them and trying to escape from its freedom, it uses it completely.

To be conscious of something is to be conscious of not being it, a "not" that arises in the very structure of consciousness as being for-itself.

Anguish, as the consciousness of freedom, is not something that human beings welcome; rather, we seek stability, identity, and adopt the language of freedom only when it suits us. We are "condemned to be free," we can never simply be who we are but are separated from ourselves by the nothingness of having perpetually to re-choose, or re-commit, ourselves to what we do.

Human beings are condemned to be free and to live incomplete. The only choice we have is to live life to the full, Sartre says, making a choice of commitment and living in accordance with it.

Determinism and Sartre view on Freedom

The realistic and pessimistic view of Hardy is linked to the atheist existentialism for his view of a world deprived of all Divine provvidence. This is probably an influence of Greek tragedies he read, in which cruel Gods, indifferent Nature and hostile Fate appeared.

The second influence is certainly Darwin's On the Origin of Species, in which the scientist describes how the natural selection led the humanity to what it is now.

For Hardy, human life was purely a tragic process upon wich man had no power, geverned by an "insensible chance". We can easily say that his philosophy was purely deterministic.

Determinism is a philosophical response to the question of freedom. It explains that we are free, but that we are shaped by our previous choices, our temperament and our environnment, upon which we have no power nor control.

We are free, or, at least, we believe we are free, even though we all agree that we aren't one hundred percent free. A person would be totally free if there is no obstacle between it and its objective. Our freedom is limited by our humanity and by limits put by others.

In the case of Jude the Obscure, the limits of the freedom of Jude and Sue is a mixture of both. They are heavily limited by their will to not accept the bounds imposed by society, but they are also limited by an internal struggle which is particular of the deterministic view.

For all these aspects, the theory of freedom advanced by Sartre is almost acceptable in his contemporary environnment, France in the fifties, but moving to any other place or time make it become inacceptable. In that period, Stalin's dictatorship, which is coming to an end, still limitated every freedom of Russians. Ten years before, Nazism did the same in europe.

Sartre view on freedom is unsatisfying because his conception of human freedom does not account for political and institutional creations of inequality among people and of obstacles that a majority of them encounter in the path of their search for freedom.

Existentialism was one of the most fashionable philosophy in Europe in the period immediately following World War II. It flourished not only in a university environnment, but even in plays, poems and in less philosofical places, such as cabarets and nightclubs. One of the writers that criticized this "existentialist fashion" was Boris Vian.