Existentialism: It’s All Just Relatively Meaningless |
“What I really lack is to be clear in my mind what I am to do, not what I am to know, except in so far as a certain knowledge must precede every action. The thing is to understand myself, to see what God really wishes me to do: the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die. ... I certainly do not deny that I still recognize an imperative of knowledge and that through it one can work upon men, but it must be taken up into my life, and that is what I now recognize as the most important thing.”
Søren Kierkegaard, Letter to Peter Wilhelm Lund dated August 31, 1835
The existentialist view sees things as meaningless, everything is relative, there is no God and all are simply accountable to their own self. Since God does not exist for the existentialist, people are responsible to themselves only. Because God is nonexistent there is no plan for man as Aristotle believed there is. Man is doomed to wander through life without goals and hope from a higher being of creation that fashioned all for a purpose. People can rely only on themselves and whatever they do is a reaction.
Are we all “…alone in the midst of…happy…” people who “…agree with each other [?]”[1] This particular mindset does not give hope, rather leaves people to wander through life with fears of what will become of them because they disbelieve in a higher being who guides. Jean-Paul Sartre asked himself that question in Nausea when he glimpsed upon the old man with the tumor: he was alone, dying, ugly to look upon because of the growth: “Is that what awaits me?”[2] Sartre asked himself. The existentialist view is that of Being and Nothingness. Nothing awaits man. There is no faith, no aspiration, and no plan.
Is there any reason for us to care what we do to others if the existentialist view is correct?
The existential personality displays a grave negativism that can have disastrous effects in the realm of politics. To Sartre, objects were nothing. They exist simply for use and “nothing more.”[3] That right there has dangerous political allusions: people are nothing but objects to be used. And, if people are not real, but simply illusions and essence, then it is not wrong to control those we view as unfit. If Sartre was correct in his beliefs that God is not real and we are only accountable to ourselves and simply essence formed after birth, than Hitler did nothing wrong in exterminating human beings. The Jews were then at fault for being in the wrong place at the wrong time and Hitler simply reacted when he massacred Jews.
Sartre says of himself and his diary that “I admire the way we can lie, putting reason on our side.”[4] Is that not what takes place politically; men lie with “reason” in order to gain power from those unsure of the world around them? Lenin and Trotsky lied to the Russian people who blindly followed them. Many followed all the way to the Gulags as a result. To this day there are those who do not view communism as wrong and Stalin as evil. He is now a saint with a glorified statue of him in Russia. The mass murderer is now an icon who is viewed as saving Russia.
Sartre describes himself the way he views all “self-taught” peoples: “I live alone, entirely alone. I never speak to anyone, never; I receive nothing, I give nothing.”[5] The political implications of this type is they tend not to be politically involved, not caring what happens to their nation, who leads, viewing all as the same and nothing, not true, not valid, no matter the individual or situation. The consequences for the rest can be drastic in the worse sense: this uncaring, alone person who refuses to associate with others has no idea how people think and feel or how much power they have in political decisions. This person considers people’s thoughts to be false, artificial essence.
The existentialist does not concern his self with the world. The world is made-up. The rest suffer for this flippant view.
Again, this makes Hitler’s vile actions simply relative and no one should feel outrage over something that was simply a reaction. Therefore, Hitler was, and is not, responsible for his actions.
The existentialist tends to overstate and over think, yet believes everything is simply nothingness. There is lost the love to simply take in life’s beauty and breathe the wonder of everything given us, seeing it as a gift from God: nature, the world around us. Sartre, like all existentialists over analyzed everything he looked upon and then discarded simple joys as relative. He saw a crushed paper with writing on it, a story, something from a child’s “school notebook.”[6] He wanted to pick the paper up to read it, he obviously felt a natural curiosity all have, but then refused. He said he “…was unable.”[7] This is false. He simply refused. If he truly wanted to read the child’s notebook he could have. After all, if there is no God, was Sartre not in control of his self?
Sartre’s existential ideology held him back through a false permeating fear and bogus belief that nothing he saw or felt was real: “I am no longer free, I can no longer do what I will. Objects should not touch because they are not alive.”[8]
Once again, Hitler was not committing wrong if Jews were not in actuality real. Mao did nothing wrong, Stalin did nothing wrong. All those massacred people were simply existences occurring before their essence, which was not created by God, who does not exist, thus they were not meant for anything. Killing hundreds of thousands of human beings was simply removing a relative extract. This ideology justifies survival of the fittest theories, giving validation to murdering those viewed as unfit.
This outlook has serious implications. Politically, it negativity seeps into society. If others take on the mindset, what is to happen to the political process; who would people choose as a leader? If people believe nothing is real and all is just relative, anyone with the worse intentions can take control and all follow because they are not sure what they believe. After all, life is not real; nothing is simply nothing, what we commit does not require or have consequences.
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