Loneliness is absurdity : Humans need Humans
During the infinite way of the search of self, it’s important, according to Kierkegaard, to meet the other self. Meeting the other self makes us probably closest to meeting our own self. I found this idea in Kierkegaard’s philosophy very interesting, so i wanted to write about it, but through a thinker i’m more familiar with, our local Jean Paul Sartre who was, i think, very familiar with Kierkegaard’s writings.
I’ve always been very interested in the way Sartre considers the « other » as the most important need of a human being. How this other can be vital ? why do we need this other presence, this other consciousness to Be ? why is the other our last hope to fight against absurdity ?
Last week, i went to the theatre for Huis Clos, one of Sartre’s greatest plays. The play is about three people who died meeting somewhere that is supposed to be hell. They knew they were going to stay together for a lifetime, they first thought it was very cool, a hell without any fire, without any torture, but then, they learn that being obliged to be face to face 24/7 is worst than any hell. Hell, is the other looking at me, the other making me feeling guilty, the other that is torturing me because i still feel alive through him, through his positive or negative judgments.
According to Sartre in Existentialism is a Humanism, when trying to discover oneself, we need that Other. It’s the Other that makes us as a human being, a self. Since the other is there, facing me all the time, there is a part of me that is his’s and i can’t help it, i cannot avoid that whatever i do. I cannot be the self i want to be in people’s eyes, they have their own eyes, and their judgments are going to affect me, their judgments are probably the side of my self i dont want to see or the SURD i personally ignore about my identity. The presence of the others is oppressing, they are our permanent judges, they hold us in a prison because they can have a part of us and judge it, so they have this power on us and we cannot run away from that, we actually won’t like to run away from that because it’s through the other that we exist, if the other is not there anymore,with his judgments on our acts, we are half dead, we don’t existe anymore.
The presence of an other, the Other, is important. If we want to use religious mythology we can think, from a different perspective, that God created Eve because Adam couldn’t evolve, invent, become a better man if there was not this other self that is Eve. Maybe, Eve was not created to be Adam’s wife and create earth’s population the way it is explained in christian mythology, maybe, the main reason of creating Eve is existentialist, : to be Adam’s conscious. God couldn’t let a human being alone on earth because if there is no conscious of the self, no comparison to that «other self» there would be no progress, and no life.
God is dead : i still have you !
Now « God is dead, and we are alone » said Nietzsche. God is dead , may be seen as Dad is dead, so we are orphans which is very sad, but not absurd. Absurdity is not the death of God. I believe absurdity is the death of the other self, the other self that is not me, but that is just like my own-self, the « alter ego », a human i can be compared to, i can see me evolving through his eyes, the other i’m always trying to impress, the other that makes me want to become a better self. We are all permanently on stage, acting for that other, because we need his looks, we need his attention, we need his judgments even though we sometimes try to stop that and think we are fed up with it.
I always find that funny, when i hear people talking about someone who achieved something and say , he is a self-made man. I believe Self-made man is a myth, we are the product of other selves, of the selves we wanted to look like, of the selves we wanted to avoid to be like, of the selves that made us doubt about our dreams ones, of the selfs that once made us feel ridiculous and worthless, it’s the participation of all those people that made a « man » out of us, we are a construction that a lot of people build, starting with the parents, our success is a success of a project, all the merit is not for us.
Hi =) First of all, I would like to say that I appreciated your argumentation: it is concise and efficient.
ReplyDeleteYou say that “their judgments are going to affect me, their judgments are probably the side of my self i dont want to see or the SURD i personally ignore about my identity”. I would say that this argument can be linked with Huis clos and the quotation “God is dead”.
Indeed, people are going to influence themselves in the closed space because they are together all the time. In this way, we can claim that they are like God, that is to say an individual who is going to know and see all actions of other. At this moment, God isn’t dead, but among us, or to be precise, God is us. I would have that his affirmation doesn’t entail negative consequences. Contrary to this, it could be the way that we miss it to realize our subjective truth. In fact, we can have a dialogue with other people, whereas it is more difficult with God…
So I would prefer term of “God is us”, and then we agree about “self-made man”. In my opinion, we have to distinguish God form Metaphysics on average. Then, it’s because we stopped to consider metaphysic concepts like faith or devotion that we succeed in getting closer with God: we integrated Him. God is us, we are God, to link us better and to reach in realizing our true self, our subjective truth.
Hey there! First of all, your post was great! Loved you analysis and your way of interpreting Eva and Adam, really deep.
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand, I found great the comparison with Sartre, i also found really interesting his play. What I wanted to add, is that although Sartre thinks that heel is other people, how can we imagine life without anybody else? How could we survive? Wouldn’t we go mad?
During life there are a lot of moments where you will be lonesome, you will feel alone and that feeling will make you feel blue. I am not saying that it isn’t good to be alone for a while, it is great because you get to know yourselves, but existing alone would be an error. We would seriously go mad and desperate, what would we the goal of life? Just merely exist? This made me remember the movie Cast away! I guess you have seen it!
Another thing that came to my mind was the fact that we think of ourselves in one way, at the same time we think people believe that we are in a certain way. And third but not least, people perceive us in another different ways. What I want to point out is that we will never know who we truly are, because we are in this constant tug of war with our ego. So, maybe we believe people make us feel like hell when it is actually us who makes us do so.
Dear Quentin,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your constructive comment. Of course, i believe god is human, from a christian perspective, god was once a man, therefore human being can also have God's nature. Human is a God because he is able to judge and that his judgment is going to affect, set free or condamne. I find your idea of desacralizing God very interesting and i share with you the fact that men got closer to become Gods when they stopped considering him as a holy perfection . I also think the sacralization of God was a necessary step because it make men imagine a whole system that was out of their world, and i think that this beginning of believing in something that did't exist was the beginning of becoming gods, men started believing in irrational ideas and actually realize them : finding another planet, fly... So God is only one of human beings inventions they couldn't bring to reality, or they brought to reality by including it in their own being.
Think that humans needed to have an external target is a very good point, and I totally agree with it. It makes me think Pierre Clastres' analisis, which consists in studying Society without State. In this case, the only available way to order Society is Religion, which embodies a kind of perfect world, outside human Society. It's a research of "Theoria", a form of social organization which would allow us to have the most peaceful and pleasant life.Then, there wouldn't be any domination
Delete==> So, I recommend you his book, entitled La Société contre l'Etat ;)
Dear Quentin,
DeleteI also read thins book and i agree it's very interesting about the subject. Marx's thoerty prooves this also. When we destroy religion, we have to replace it by something else, in Marx we replaced it by communist ideology that became a real religion. I believe people need systems, that's why any way of existence would inevitably be it's social organization, wether it's based on religion, on the state or something else.
You are of a good disposition ;)
DeleteQuestion is then about domination or not. With Marx, Communism orders Society with internal division, between Proletariat and communist managers. It is about this that it differs from Religion : Religion entails external division : Human Society v. Theoric Cosmos.
Good discussion, my pov is like yours : we need system to be ordonned and to live.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI'm very glad you liked my post, thank you for the constructive questions you asked. First, i don't think that Sartreconsiders the presence of "others" as a hell in a negative meaning. In fact, in Huis Clos, when they are in hell, Garcin chooses Ines rather than Estelle, the main reason is that Ines is judging him while Estelle just wants him to like her and flatter him all the time. Garcin chooses Ines because since she judges him, he's still a life and there is a part of him that belongs to Earth. So even though she reminds him the dark side of his personnality, he would still choose her to live. Therefore, yes, i'll answer that we may exist without the other, but there would be no existence, but is that worthy ?.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with you on the fact that the absence of other may drive us crazy, Cast Away is the perfect illustration of this, the whole movie was based on the man surviving, he was not living, because life is a based on social links and the presence of the Other stimulates our brains while his absence would drive us crazy or damage our brain in a certain way. About your last point, Sartre explains this point in a very interesting sentence " i'm what the other thinks i'm", je suis ce que l'autre me voit. So maybe, we should accept that we are this aggregation of what people think we are and what we also think we are, that there is no separation between what i think i'm and what people think i'm. I think once we accept this, hell would not exist any more, and the existence of the other would be for us, more of an opportunity than a torture.