Life Is Not Perfectible

Many people have the silly idea, gleaned from movies, adverts and glossy magazines, that life is perfectible. The idea that other people out there have achieved the perfect life. So, they feel dissatisfied with the life they have or even downright cheated out of the life they think they deserve but don't have, the life that no one has.  They yearn for a life of perfect happiness that is impossible, while failing to take control of the life they do have and make it more rewarding through decisive, realistic action. Existentialists are nihilists because they recognize that life is ultimately absurd and full of terrible, inescapable truths. They are anti-nihilists because they recognize that life does in fact have a meaning: the meaning each person chooses to give his or her own existence. They recognize that each person is free to create themselves and make something worthwhile of themselves by striving against life's difficulties. Life, or rather death, will win in the end, but what matters is the striving, the overcoming, the journey.

—Gary Cox, How to Be an Existentialist, New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2012, p. 15.

Three Quick Notes

• Sunday I went running for the first time in years. I did a simple walk-run workout, i.e., I walked for 2 minutes, then ran for 2 minutes, then back to walking, alternating each for a total of 22 minutes. I covered 1.7 miles (2.7 kilometers). I found out the way I had been taught to run in college was all wrong, and I'm re-learning how to run, so it will be slow going for a while.
  
• I finished Gordon Marino's excellent anthology Basic Writings of Existentialism, and I recommend it. As any really good anthology does, the book has me wanting to read more by some of the authors represented, especially Kierkegaard and Camus. Also, the excerpt from Sartre's essay "Existentialism Is a Humanism" is the best summary of Sartre I've ever read. I wish I read this essay before reading Being and Nothingness.
  
• That being said, I can say affirmatively that I am not an atheist, and am only an agnostic in the strictest, most limited definition of the word, namely, that I don't "know" that God exists. I believe God exists, not out of some logical proof, but because I need to believe God exists. It is a matter of faith, and a matter of acknowledging, like Douglas Coupland's narrator in Life After God that:

  "I need God to help me give, because I no longer seem to be capable of giving; to help me be kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond being able to love."

Condemned to Be Free

I dare not attempt a recap of Being and Nothingness, for fear of committing abject butchery of the topic. I freely admit I didn't understand half of what I read. But I did glean some insights from the text, and think it is worth reading, re-reading and studying.

We are free because regardless of any situation we find ourselves in, we have choices. What we choose will be based on what we value most, and what we value most is based on our image of ourselves, in part from choices we've made in the past. We are 'projects' of ourselves. We can make radical breaks in choices, and remake ourselves into new projects. But to try to deceive ourselves about our freedom or our essence is to act in bad faith.

Although we did not 'ask to be born' we are nonetheless fully responsible for our lives; choosing not to choose is still a choice. Our freedom consists in what we do with what has been done to us, including what we have done to ourselves in the past.

There are things in Sartre I do not agree with (for instance, I think he'd be appalled by the idea of a sexual 'orientation' - for him it would always be a 'preference'), but I find his radical assertions of freedom and responsibility to be challenging.

I have other philosophy texts to consider, but I am not through with existentialism. Aside from an anthology of Sartre by Cumming, I also have two anthologies of existentialist texts in general (Kaufman and Marino) and a study of Mulla Ṣadrā that takes an existentialist view of his philosophy. And sooner or later it will be time to read Camus's The Plague for a third time.