Being, Nothingness and Love

Sartre/Camus

I am suprised when people proclaim that it is not possible to truly know one’s self. One of the earliest great philosophers, Socrates, wrote “We must know thyself to be wise, as the unexamined life is not worth living”. What comes out of knowing one’s self? True introspection exposes the deceptions we weave for ourselves and we must choose to recognize them for what they are or justify why we will live with them. That decision affects what we present to the outside world; that face we want others to see.

I have found that most relationships developed later in life are created by people's attraction not to another person but rather how that person makes them feel about themselves and how they want to be perceived by their own delusion of what they should be. If I embrace what I project myself to be, delusions and all, do I care if the relationship is based on the deception that I have embraced as the “true me”. I believe this leads to an emotional alienation whereby a person avoids experiencing their subjectivity by identifying themselves with what others should perceive them to be. The consequence of this is conflict and cognitive dissonance, and the silent voice in our head that claims, “They do not truly know me”.

Many wiser then I have written that the striving we make is for nothing or no thing. This is at the core of the Existential dilemma. We interpret the world through the rose-colored glasses of our own design. We seem to be required to live our lives to collect things, from material to intellectual to spiritual cargo that we carry with us until we are no more. Possessions are fleeting at best, only attainable in the course of the time of our own existence. Possession as legacy has little meaning to those who come after us unless they too share our delusion and embrace something from nothing. It is cruel to make our delusion the substance of an innocent’s purpose in life. In the end, it is the illusion that leads us to the ruthless probing and clawing toward an achievement that is borne from our own personal fantasy. What we have collected is for our own selfish benefit.

There are four basic tenets of Existentialist thought that are central to human experience: 1) death, 2) freedom, 3) isolation, and 4) meaninglessness. The problem with Existentialism is that it presents the bleakest view on life that has been produced by the philosophy of man. As a youth, I figured myself to be part of a revolutionary movement and the zeitgeist of the great Existentialists, Sartre and Camus, fit my expectations of man as separate from the natural world, God is dead and we are nothing more than the sum of our individual actions and lonely existence. Embracing Existentialism was a call to heroism in the face of cruel facts about existence, and answering that call, we must respond to every day as if it is the first day of our existence. This was what I believed I witnessed when I was younger.

From an intellectual perspective this makes a great deal of sense. Embracing the purely intellectual component though is emotionally sterile, devoid of those elements which we embrace as essential to how we see and interact with our world. Passion, true friendship, empathy and all the other great traits that we have inherited and practice instinctively in the natural world. One of the main problems with Existentialism is that it does not allow for the power of love, which is itself a force that destroys all reason and causality but in a compelling, creative way. From my experience, a great love can have a transforming effect upon you. It can be physical (warmth and fullness), intellectual (inspiration) and spiritual (acceptance of an alternate reality beyond our perception). The ideas of existentialism resonate with our political self, but in my experience, living seems to be truly all about negotiation and compromise, hope and faith, love and forgiveness. These are the profound mechanisms for dealing with others on a common ground beyond the intellect. Experiencing a great love is one force that can open you up to change. Some great early philosopher once wrote that there are two human certainties of our existence, death and change.

Love, of course, does not fit into the realm of the four Existential tenets but is part of the two certainties. I would hope it fits into the certainty of change though for some love and its consequences are a destruction of freedom and brings us that one step closer to a metaphorical death. Considering the Existentialist perspective on love from Sartre where “love is the apprehension of the other's subjectivity, in order that I may know my ‘being-for-others’”. From this perspective love is about a pursuit to know one's self in a way that we cannot on our own. By pairing with someone who is choosing to be with you that you can come closer to knowing a most important aspect of yourself, which is what you are for others or you are “being-for-others”. Sartre put a great deal of emphasis on the fact that the pairing must be one that maintains subjective freedom of the individual, because to possess the other would be to pervert the reflection of knowledge of the "being-for-others". Continuing from Sartre, “In reality and for the existentialist, there is no love apart from the deeds of love; no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving”.

We extend love to culminate in the Western institution of the traditional church marriage and verbatim wedding vows that tend to make a love relationship seem like one of possession. Belief in God and church impose a coercive aspect over marriage. This forces a relationship that, by definition, needs to be based on a sense of freedom into one of possession that will be held together by a sense of pending guilt. From this perspective, the obligatory coercion that is imposed upon the relationship turns people into objects.

There is an alternative force that is seen as a catalyst for love that is known as "fate". Lovers often believe that their encounter had to be; there was no choice. We are soul mates. This fateful version of a relationship is delusional but appears to solve the paradox of freedom leading to bondage by removing freedom from the equation. Fate can be a cruel tyrant and fateful lovers may become confined to live out their lives in the pages of their own story.

Sartre's idea of a free separate individual is idealistic. A more realistic view recognizes that seldom are lovers free separate beings, but rather, each lover is a member of strict social hierarchy. The swirling intoxication of unfettered love feels like liberation but is truly a brief reprieve from our other entanglements. We all possess bonds, obligations, and duties associated with other relationships to family and friends. Eventual the love sick must awaken from their enchanted dream. The usual course of intense initial romance is to pass through a brief stage of exclusivity when the paradox of freedom and devotion is most intense or the notion of fate is most believable. The inevitable more mundane and enduring social contract is the next step leading to the long and great plateau that will the resting place of love. The Self is subjugated by the We.

The intense act of falling in love is only a temporary reprieve from isolation where we inevitably will return to the constant tension that is; you are not me. In the beginning of a relationship after the intense romance, we often find that our needs will be out of synch, our desires will diverge, our biological rhythms and tendencies will be different and those differences will have a tendency to enlarge if we have had increasingly divergent life experiences.

Here is where change is required to allow you to adapt to the new requirements of “being-for-others”. Maintenance of self and knowing one’s self allows you to embrace, or at least, except differences from your mate as you accept their place in your life and in relation to you. Is true love and commitment to another incongruent with Existentialism? I hear the voice of the Existentialist and its message resonates within me, but mercifully, my heart belongs to a more encompassing love.