Lecture 3: Existentialism and JP Sartre

This week’s lecture began with Chris playing “Heroine” by Velvet Underground and showing Edie Sedgwick (Twiggy) in “Screen Test” by Andy Warhol as examples of the Existentialist Movement’s influence in popular culture.

Horrie described Existentialism as “a movement in post-war arts and culture, especially in France and the USA” which mainly covered music, theatre and literature, although as with all cultural movements, it affected every part of popular culture and has had huge influence on today’s society. It is all about ‘abstract post-expressionism’, to do with phenomology, Freud and the development of psychology, and most importantly, drugs.

The term ‘heroin chic’ aptly describes the fact that it was ‘cool’ to be spaced out and the ‘in’ thing was the New York androgyny scene, of which Edie Sedgwick, Nico and Yoko Ono were poster girls. The drug scene seemed to go hand in hand with revolutionaries and protestors against the Vietnam War, with stunts such as spiking town water supplies with LSD and the Magic Bus that travelled across the US on this mission. This was in the midst of the Hippy movement, with icons such as Bob Marley, Leonard Cohen, Malcolm X, Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters (on said LSD bus) and John Lennon. As Tom Wolfe’s The New Journalism describes, popular culture is full of heroin users and references to drugs. Camus’ portrayal of state of mind and outlook in The Outsider is very similar to that of someone on a heroine trip.

J.P. Sartre’s Existentialism is Humanism was based on his doctrine that you can judge the freedom of a society by how free and well-regarded its journalists are, regardless of what the constitution says. Sartre was a follower of Heidegger and Husserl, believing that consciousness is an act of intention, not an object, and that the world is will representing itself. This follows the ideas of phenomology that mind is action. This is opposed to Locke’s views and similar to Kantean ways of thinking.

Sartre is also known for rehabilitating Marxist and Hegelian ideas (in Critique of Dialectical Reason) which had become steeped in dogma and buried in meaningless slogans. Sartre believed that followers of Marxism had perverted Marx’s original meanings, and so goes back to his early work to look at Marx as a neo-Kantean moralist. He argued that Marx’s main message was that the point was not to come up with endless interpretations of the world and why we are here, but to change the world and make our mark on it, which I wholly agree with (or at least so far as I understand it).

Existentialism and Literature put forward the idea that ‘you cannot write for slaves’ because writing is the act of human freedom. It is not given to you, but something that you must act upon. This brings to mind the idea that you do not have to settle for your ‘lot’ in the world, if you are unhappy with what you have, strive to change it. In this way we are all equal because we have been given the ability to change our situation and make the most of the opportunities that surround us.

In Being and Nothingness, Sartre puts forward his Ontological system. First of all, he talks of ‘things in themselves’ which are objects that are indeterminate but completely bound by their ‘facticity’ and which change constantly and decay. This constant change and decay, Sartre argues, is depressing which makes you feel angst.

Sartre’s answer is to face up to this and not be bothered by it: easier said than done! This rotting and decay is a constant theme of existentialist art, as well as Buddhism, the New Left and the Hippie movement. Sartre also spoke of ‘things for themselves’ which are self-determining, self-creating things, such as free people, which can do something about ‘being’ and not just accept it as a constant state. Linked to this are ‘things for other’s which are slaves/carers/wives (because, of course it is the women that are subservient to men) who don’t live for themselves but to do things for others. These ‘things for others’ are hated and feared by existentialists because they are not trying to be their real ontological being but are living in ‘bad faith’. This is similar to Heidegger’s idea of the ‘inauthentic’ life.

Criticism of Sartre which Horrie spoke about seems to have been mainly from Conservatives, and say that his doctrines are really just a re-working of Marxism, with the categories of the bourgeoisie and the proletariat being re-interpreted as ‘the determined’ (people as objects) and those who determine others.

We also talked about Simone de Beauvoir, who had an ‘open marriage’ with Sartre and can therefore be expected to have picked up on some of his key ideas. Her book The Second Sex describes being female as a narrative and argues that everything that is female is determined by men. She challenged prejudicial thinking as a narrative that can be re-written and so, in my opinion, was quite optimistic about human nature and the nature of women in particular.

The New Left, as I understand from Chris, is all about prejudice and being. It promotes personal expression and freedom, and can be seen, especially in France, in the fight for human rights for homosexuals, different races, disabled people and women.

Heidegger (a proponent of the New Left?) saw ‘being’ as a structure of previous decisions. This is linked to the drug culture of the 1960s as Heroin’s chemical effects keep you in the now, with no particular significance on anything as it removes the pain and pleasure neurons, or at least masks them for a while. Therefore, people on heroin have no past or future in consciousness.

This made existentialists, and New Journalists, very interested in junkies and drug users. When on drugs, you can’t trust your senses as often they are chemically blocked or changed. Heroin, for example, turns off the amygdala part of the brain, while LSD turns off the short term memory and slows perception mechanism, affecting the cerebral cortex.

Examples of the effects of drugs in literature include; Tom Wolf’s book in which he writes about the hippie movement as a ‘gonzo journalist’, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and loathing in Las Vegas which greatly influenced feature writing, and the development o f the Non-Fiction Novel by writers such as Truman Capote, Tom Wolf and John Steinbeck.

I will now sum up the political orientation of a few Existentialists which Horrie talked about:
Sartre/Camus were Marxist, to an extreme level in that they approved of Maoism. They both saw Capitalism as cultural repression and thought that the purpose of life is to fight for liberty.
Simone De Beauvoir was socialist, democratic, feminist and Kantean, supporting equal rights. She has been said to have started feminism, arguing that women are only restrained by the facticity of their reproductive organs, but partly blames women by saying that women are self-repressed by guilt and fear.
Fanon was Marxist, Maoist and terrorist, believing that violence is the answer and inspiring Malcolm X to use violence in the Black Civil Rights Movement.
Kierkegaard was Christian, moralising (nihilist – life is without objective meaning or purpose), subjectivist and anti-rationalist. His work can be seen as the end of Christianity as an intellectual force, and many have referred to him as the ‘first existentialist’. He worshipped jesus as is rock in an existentialist world; this was his way to come with the problem of being. He was totally against organised religion.
Nietzsche was elitist, anti-democratic and hermeneutic (it is only possible to interpret something in relation to its context) and had a great influence on existentialism.
Heidegger was fascist, anti-technology and ‘green’ and believed in the idea of ‘authenticity’ – being yourself not what others want to mould you to be.

The basics of existentialist politics are the ideas that you should not let other people determine who you are or change other people to how you want them to be. An apt statement is ‘don’t sum me up’ just let people be instead of constantly trying to interpret and pass judgement. It also emphasises the centrality of choice which is endless. Heidegger emphasised self-creation through the structure of choices. A popular existentialist saying is ‘existence comes before essence’. It is basically a rejection of all forms of teleology, saying that the past doesn’t matter and the future hasn’t happened yet, emphasising the ‘eternal now’ which drug users love. This is similar to Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence. Existentialism is full of Eastern influences and often rejects Western, capitalist values.

It is all about personal liberation and the fact that we are all in the same boat, trying to deal with the same problem of ‘being’ and we are thus liberated to create ourselves and allow others to do the same. A key quote from Chris is that “a truly authentic person who lives in Good Faith will determine themselves and have no expectations of others, and make no attempt to make demands on them”.

One of my favourite points of the whole lecture is that existentialists see people as bundles of opportunity, saying that we need to ‘just do it’ and express ourselves, work for our own freedom and set yourself free; “You cannot be set free by others, you must liberate yourself by a means of passionate commitment to something (anything).” This is how I want to live my life, not worrying about how or why we are here etc, just living life to the full and enjoying our circumstances.