In one account of human affairs, an all-pow-er-ful deity rules over every-thing. Noth-ing can occur with-out the knowl-edge and sanc-tion of the omnipo-tent cre-ator god. In a much more recent iter-a-tion, we inhab-it an unimag-in-ably com-plex com-put-er sim-u-la-tion, in which every thing—ourselves included—has been cre-at-ed by all-pow-er-ful pro-gram-mers. The first sce-nario gives mil-lions of peo-ple com-fort, the sec-ond… well, maybe only a hand-ful of cult-like Sil-i-con Val-ley techo-futur-ists. But in either case, the ques-tion inevitably aris-es: how is it pos-si-ble that there is any such thing as true free-dom? The idea that free will is an illu-sion has haunt-ed philo-soph-i-cal thought for at least a cou-ple thou-sand years.
But in the exis-ten-tial-ist view, the real fear is not that we may have too lit-tle free-dom, but that we may have too much—indeed that we may have the ulti-mate free-dom, that of con-scious beings who appeared in the uni-verse unbid-den and by chance, and who can only deter-mine for them-selves what form and direc-tion their being might take. This was the ear-ly view of Jean-Paul Sartre. “We are left alone, with-out excuse”—he famous-ly wrote in his 1946 essay “Exis-ten-tial-ism is a Human-ism”—“This is what I mean when I say that man is con-demned to be free.” Free-dom is a bur-den; with-out gods, dev-ils, or soft-ware engi-neers to fault for our actions, or any pre-de-ter-mined course of action we might take, each of us alone bears the full weight of respon-si-bil-i-ty for our lives and choic-es.
Emerg-ing from com-fort-ing visions of human-i-ty as the cen-ter of the universe—says the nar-ra-tor in the video above from philo-soph-i-cal ani-ma-tion chan-nel Kurzge-sagt—“we learned that the twin-kling lights are not shin-ing beau-ti-ful-ly for us, they just are. We learned that we are not at the cen-ter of what we now call the uni-verse, and that it is much, much old-er than we thought.” We learned that we are alone in the cos-mos, on a com-plete-ly insignif-i-cant speck of space dust, more or less. Even the con-cepts we use to explain this over-whelm-ing sit-u-a-tion are total-ly arbi-trary in the face of our pro-found igno-rance. Add to this the prob-lem of our infin-i-tes-i-mal-ly brief lifes-pans and inevitable death and you’ve got the per-fect recipe for exis-ten-tial dread.
For this con-di-tion, Kurzge-sagt rec-om-mends a rem-e-dy: “Opti-mistic Nihilism,” a phi-los-o-phy that posits ulti-mate free-dom in the midst of, and sole-ly enabled by, the utter mean-ing-less-ness of exis-tence: “If our life is the only thing we get to expe-ri-ence, then it’s the only thing that mat-ters. If the uni-verse has no prin-ci-ples, then the only prin-ci-ples rel-e-vant are the ones we decide on. If the uni-verse has no pur-pose, then we get to dic-tate what its pur-pose is.” This is more or less a para-phrase of Sartre, who made vir-tu-al-ly iden-ti-cal claims in what he called his “athe-is-tic exis-ten-tial-ism,” but with the added force in his “doc-trine” that “there is no real-i-ty except in action… Man is noth-ing else but what he pur-pos-es, he exists only in so far as he real-izes him-self.” We not only get to deter-mine our pur-pose, he wrote, we have to do so, or we can-not be said to exist at all.
In the midst of this fright-en-ing-ly rad-i-cal free-dom, Sartre saw the ulti-mate oppor-tu-ni-ty: to make of our-selves what we will. But this dizzy-ing pos-si-bil-i-ty may send us run-ning back to com-fort-ing pre-fab illu-sions of mean-ing and pur-pose. How ter-ri-ble, to have to decide for your-self the pur-pose of the entire uni-verse, no? But the phi-los-o-phy of “Opti-mistic Nihilism” goes on to expound a the-sis sim-i-lar to that of the Zen pop-u-lar-iz-er, Alan Watts, who has soothed many a case of exis-ten-tial dread with his response to the idea that we are some-how sep-a-rate from the uni-verse, either hov-er-ing above it or crushed beneath it. Humans are not, as Watts col-or-ful-ly wrote, “iso-lat-ed ‘egos’ inside bags of skin.” Instead, as the video goes on, “We are as much the uni-verse as a neu-tron star, or a black hole, or a neb-u-la. Even bet-ter, actu-al-ly, we are its think-ing and feel-ing part, the sen-so-ry organs of the uni-verse.”
Nei-ther Sartre nor Watts, with their very dif-fer-ent approach-es to the same set of exis-ten-tial con-cerns, would like-ly endorse the tidy sum-ma-tion offered by the phi-los-o-phy of “Opti-mistic Nihilism.” But just as we would be fool-ish to expect a six-minute ani-mat-ed video to offer a com-plete phi-los-o-phy of life, we would be painful-ly na?ve to think of free-dom as a con-di-tion of com-fort and ease, built on ratio-nal cer-tain-ties and absolute truths. For all of the dis-agree-ment about what we should do with rad-i-cal exis-ten-tial free-dom, every-one who rec-og-nizes it agrees that it entails rad-i-cal uncertainty—the ver-tig-i-nous sense of unknow-ing that is the source of our con-stant free-float-ing anx-i-ety.
If we are to act in the face of doubt, mys-tery, igno-rance, and the immen-si-ty of seem-ing-ly gra-tu-itous suf-fer-ing, we might heed John Keats’ pre-scrip-tion to devel-op “Neg-a-tive Capa-bil-i-ty,” the abil-i-ty to remain “con-tent with half-knowl-edge.” This was not, as Lionel Trilling writes in an intro-duc-tion to Keats’ let-ters, advice only for artists, but “a cer-tain way of deal-ing with life”—one in which, Keats wrote else-where, “the only means of strength-en-ing one’s intel-lect,” and thus a sense of iden-ti-ty, mean-ing, and pur-pose in life, “is to make up one’s mind about nothing—to let the mind be a thor-ough-fare for all thoughts.”
Keats’ is a very Zen sen-ti-ment, a moody ver-sion of the “don’t-know mind” that rec-og-nizes empti-ness and suf-fer-ing as hall-marks of exis-tence, and finds in them not a rea-son for opti-mism but for the indef-i-nite sus-pen-sion of judge-ment. Still, the approach of Roman-tic poets and Bud-dhist monks is not for every-one, and even Sartre even-tu-al-ly turned to ortho-dox Marx-ism to impose a mean-ing upon exis-tence that claimed depen-dence on the hard facts of mate-r-i-al con-di-tions rather than the unbound-ed abstrac-tions of the intel-lect.
Per-haps we are are free, at least, to com-mit to an ide-ol-o-gy to assuage our exis-ten-tial dread. We are also free to adopt the trag-ic defi-ance of anoth-er Marx-ist, Anto-nio Gram-sci, who con-fessed to some-thing of an “Opti-mistic Nihilism” of his own. Only he referred to it as a “pes-simism of the intel-lect” and “opti-mism of the will”—an atti-tude that rec-og-nizes the severe social and mate-r-i-al lim-its imposed on us by our often painful, short, seem-ing-ly mean-ing-less exis-tence in a mate-r-i-al world, and that strives nonethe-less toward impos-si-ble ideals.
Relat-ed Con-tent:
Free Online Phi-los-o-phy Cours-es
Alan Watts Explains the Mean-ing of the Tao, with the Help of the Great-est Nan-cy Pan-el Ever Drawn
Josh Jones is a writer and musi-cian based in Durham, NC. Fol-low him at @jdmagness
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