How To Be Free
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How To Be Free

Thrown into a meaningless existence--how do we find meaning?

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How To Be Free
Joey Juarez

Human existence can be seen as being regularly marked with attempts at understanding itself, whether it be contemplating God, becoming masters of science, or, in the case of many of the Existentialists, finding purpose in meaninglessness. I think, in essence, what humanity has been seeking is Freedom—although they may not know it in its totality. This Freedom is different than the conventional “freedom” discussed in politics; it isn’t the freedom provided by a government, or a church, or by national security. The Freedom we have been seeking is our unchaining from powers we believe govern the universe around us.

We have created laws and gods, given names to forces of physics and forces of our minds in order to create a semblance of Order that allows us to feel free. If we are not accountable for our actions, or the inescapable processes of the world, then we are “free” by default, since there is little else we can do. If these powers exist, no amount of rallying against them will change our lot in life. But if we make an effort to grasp our Freedom, to take possession of our accountability, our happiness, our being—then is it really so absurd? I believe the answer is yes—its pure absurdity, unhindered by the creature comforts of God or Fate or Purpose—and the only question left to ask is, do we want that kind of Freedom, or are we happier at the whim of something else, always something else?

There are many beliefs, methods, lifestyles and individuals who claim to hold the “key” to the happiness and freedom we oft strive for; contentment could be yours if only you pray, pay or play by someone else’s rules. In all that promise, though, an essential element is lost somewher: You. I. We are asked to submit our will, our possessions—our identity—in order to “find meaning”. To find meaning, however, there must be an assumption that we don’t already have it. I contend, however, that it is possible to live with less to hold on to—less comfort, less surety—and yet live more. I will be utilizing a synthesis of Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus to demonstrate that in the Absurd it is not only possible to find freedom and purpose, but to realize that we already have it. I want to show that these nihilists and Existentialists, who are accused of believing only in Nothing, may just have the true key to reclaiming our Identity, our Purpose, and most importantly—our Freedom. So we will start in that Nothingness and work our way out into something more.

Friedrich Nietzsche is often condensed to his philosophical label and nothing more—he is a “nihilist”, a killer of God, of morals and value, and apparently, any type of conventional order we so desperately cling to. As a man who penned the words that “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him”, it is easy to see how this synopsis can be accepted. As for all truth-seekers though, it is the case that it is required of us to look beneath the preconceptions, in order to find the substance that leads us to new revelations. If one were to take the time to consider his words, and not his labels, then those words write a different man entirely, one who sees all around him constrictions on human identity, human power, nobility and purpose, and seeks only to sever those constraints. Consider some of his words from a little known piece titled Schopenhauer as Educator, which he published at age thirty as a professor at Basel University:

“…men are even lazier than they are timorous, and what they fear most is the troubles with which any unconditional honesty and nudity would burden them. Only artists hate this slovenly life of borrowed manners and loosely fitting opinions and unveil the secret…the principle that every human being is a unique wonder; they dare to show us the human being as he is, down to the last muscle, himself and himself alone—even more, that in this rigorous consistency of his uniqueness he is beautiful and worth contemplating, as novel and incredible as every work of nature, and by no means dull."

Himself and himself alone. Beautiful. Novel. Incredible.

These are not the words of a man enamored with “nothingness”, but a man enamored with the human as he is. Nietzsche, beneath all his common works on the deconstruction of morality, the death of God, the meaninglessness of “good” and “evil”, pens these words at age thirty, building a foundation for every other piece of work his nihilism creates: That we—that I—am a unique wonder, that there is a beauty to humanity in its physical form, detached from one who grants purpose. And to balance out his “crusade” against the same humanity he seems to reject, he has this to say:

“When a great thinker despises men, it is their laziness that he despises: for it is on account of this that they have the appearance of factory products and seem indifferent and unworthy of companionship or instruction.”

This Laziness, I believe, is an undercurrent in the works of the Existentialists I have studied, as well as the pursuit of Freedom I believe we are involved in. And as with all matters of Existentialism, we must reject the standard definition of the terms we are faced with. When Nietzsche speaks of Laziness here, it is not the equivalent of sleepiness, or lack of activity. It is a laziness that permeates us, that permeates our existence. It is the stopping force that prevents us from acknowledging the beauty of our individualism, that sends us to seek shelter in conventions, in group mentalities that shield us from the unusual, the strange, the transcendent. This laziness is, as I interpret it, the absence of our active acknowledgement of our will to power, discussed throughout many of his other notable works, such as Beyond Good and Evil and Will to Power. He explains it thus:

“Suppose, finally, we succeeded in explaining our entire instinctive life as the development and ramification of one basic form of the will—namely, of the will to power…suppose all organic functions could be traced back to this will to power…the world defined and determined according to its ‘intelligible character’—it would be ‘will to power’ and nothing else…”

A better description of the reason for this will to power is noted in his The Antichrist:

“What is good? Everything that heightens the feeling of power in man, the will to power, power itself. What is bad? Everything born of weakness. What is happiness? The feeling that power is growing, that resistance is overcome.”

Born in the face of such potential power—this power over ourselves—it is hard to conceive of why we would not eagerly grasp this control. It is no coincidence that Nietzsche points at things such as Christianity as the antithesis to his philosophy, and it is because Christianity embodies his hated laziness. It actively rejects the acceptance of this Will as greedy, as wicked and tyrannical, for the “true” good of the Christians, according to Nietzsche, are the weak and meek and sick and lowly. To willfully belong to a collective that denies your own will—that punishes you for taking hold of it—is to embody this Laziness, this automatic comfort in convention and leaving our condition to something Else. Nietzsche’s concepts of the Ubermensch—or the superman—is the attempt to formulate an antithesis to this embodied weakness. The superman essentially transcends this Laziness, and is in a constant state of overcoming, rather than submission. The superman is the physical incarnation of the will to power, because he is nothing else but the continuation of achieving power over himself, and consequentially, humanity.He takes pride in his strengths, does not glorify weakness, and is unafraid to demonstrate his power. He is more than what we allow ourselves to be:

“I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man?”

To relate this to my main theme is rather simple: This Will to Power is a Will to Freedom, Freedom from systems and powers—such as Christianity—that seek to subvert our inherent willpower, and consequentially, deprive us of the Freedom from our own weaknesses and the whims of the universe or a controlling God. Indeed, in The Gay Science, Nietzsche perfectly captures the feeling one should have upon the realization that we are freed from the forces which cause us to create less of ourselves:

“We philosophers and free spirits feel…as if a new dawn shone on us…at long last the horizon appears free to us again, the sea, our sea, lies open to us again.”

The allusion to the sea, a seemingly infinite body of free space, is no accident, nor is the assumption that upon the “death of God”, this unchained space is again “free” to us. What Nietzsche writes is the reclamation of our freedom, as we are freed from the expectations and dedication to “another world” upon the absence of any God. Now we have only this sea to tread, without a thought to the celestial one we try so hard to sail. At this point, however, we are crossing into the realm of Absurdity—of seeing this world we live in, deprived of divinity or given purpose—and to better understand how to forge our Freedom amidst it all, we shall turn to Albert Camus.

Camus gifted to us wonderful works on how to understand the absurdity of the life we live. The Stranger taught us how to view life when we stand outside of all its conventions, even in the face of our own end:

“…for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still…all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.”

This simultaneously uplifting and morbid mentality permeates the ideas of Camus’ work: That, in the face of the plain absurdity of a “benign indifference of the universe”, the strongest action we can take is to rebel against it. The requirement, then, to grasp the freedom of the absurd is two-fold. First, we must accept that the universe is absurd, that it is indifferent to our actions and our status. Then, we must rebel against the absurdity by embracing it, by taking our challenges, our judgments and our errors and feeling a sense of happiness, down to the bitter end, as our friend Meursault does above. This mentality of revolt is even better demonstrated in another of Camus’ famous works, the essay The Myth of Sisyphus:

Living is keeping the absurd alive...One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between and his own obscurity…it is the constant presence of man in his own eyes. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it.”

This revolt is embodied by Sisyphus, who was punished by the gods for his transgressions against them by being forced to ceaselessly roll a rock up a hill, only to have it roll back down, in an eternal loop. This, of course, is the absurdity of our own existence. In our own endeavors, we take action only to have this boulder of essential meaninglessness roll it all back down, because if life is absurd, then what we do lacks meaning. Camus, however, insists on revolt against the despair—as Sartre will as well, in the conclusion of my essay—while still accepting the absurdity:

“I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile…the struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

It is within that last sentence that we see the Freedom that Sisyphus has obtained, that even in the face of a punishment decreed by the gods, he still is able to maintain his freedom by owning his punishment. If the universe is devoid of a master, by revolting against the absurdity of that absence, we in essence each become our own master. Sisyphus is not the slave of his rock, but its negation and purpose. The question remaining, however, what the embrace of the Absurd really means—that is, if we are to become our own masters of our burdens, as Sisyphus, is that Freedom? Sartre, I believe, has the answer to that question.

There is purpose in Sartre being left for last; his ideas tie together those of Nietzsche—what conditions leave us free—Camus—how to act when we are free—and finally, Sartre, why our Freedom is in fact inescapable, and what to do about it. In a separate text, Happiness: Classic and Contemporary Readings in Philosophy, Sartre was included in the covered material. I found this highly intriguing, since we don’t often connect Existentialism with happiness. Since I have proposed they are connected, however, I think it’s important to cite the excerpt this text included:

"…I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet, in other respects is free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does…but then we are forlorn.”

What does such a statement have to do with happiness? When Sartre says we are responsible for everything we do, we may tend to lean towards the “negative” implications of such a truth. While we could despair that there is not “higher power” to blame our failures on, there is an alternative approach: To rebel. As Camus believed that we only achieve victory in the face of absurdity when we fully embrace it, we must do the same with Sartre’s condemnation. Sartre goes on to say, speaking directly to the core of my ideas, “Man is free, man is freedom.” These two statements may seem similar, but there is a grand meaning in their difference. As I said before, it is one thing to speak of a man’s freedom, as is given to him by a government or a god, but it is a wholly different thing to call upon his Freedom as it pertains to the absurd universe. Sartre believes that our existence precedes our essence, that first we are, and then we choose what we will be. To say that we are Freedom is to say that Freedom is our existence; we are physical aspects of what it means to be free. Later, in St. Genet the Martyr, we are presented with a case in which, even in the worst circumstances, we cannot evade our Freedom. When faced with the label of “thief”, young Genet must decide how to live from that point, and his decision is reminiscent of the rebellion of Camus and the overcoming nature from Nietzsche:

“…Yes, one must decide. To kill oneself if also to decide. He has chosen to live; he has said, in defiance of all, I will be the Thief…so fierce a will to survive, such pure courage, such mad confidence within despair will bear their fruit. Twenty years later, this absurd determination will produce the poet Jean Genet.”

In this excerpt alone can be found all three of my examples—the Will to power in his will to survive, the rebellion of Camus in his defiance of his label, and the essence of being free by making a choice to empower yourself in a situation that limits your options.

It is one thing to academically cite these sources in order to prove a connection between the philosophers and my thesis, but I feel it is more powerful still to speak on how I live it all. The entirety of the reading I have done has taught me that we stand behind things like conventional values, religions, social groups and powerful status because doing all of these things is easier than admitting the possibility that we have been thrown into a meaningless, chaotic universe--and the sole responsibility for creating our life purpose lies solely on our shoulders. To accept the view of Sartre and Camus is to accept that we are not bound by the universe, because the universe doesn't even acknowledge our existence. We create gods and rules and inhibitions in order to justify our inability to realize our will to power—our inability to create ourselves as we wish to be. Given the ultimate freedom—not the freedom of a State or a society, but over our existence—we still choose the easier route of handing the reigns over to an "Other". There is always something, someone, else that is responsible for our fate, our destiny. However, to walk in the steps of the Existential philosophers is to understand that all of our social constructs are just moments of our Bad Faith, moments of us attempting to escape the inescapable truth that we are Free. It means to understand that the world is an absurd place to be in, and that in that absurdity we can still find contentment, if we are only willing to embrace the absurdity and rebel against the expectation of despair. And finally, it is to tell ourselves that our will power is what drives our passions, our strengths and our character, and those systems that ask us to suppress it only do so to mask their own shortcomings.

My studies so far have taught me that life can be an absurd thing. Anything can happen at any time, because, without god or real values, when definitions change and actions just become actions, anything goes. It’s easy to just cop out, to give up on all this meaninglessness and just subscribe to the group that will give you some semblance of order. But it seems infinitely more beautiful to take the absurdity, take the freedom, and construct ourselves and everything around us. Sartre may have said we are condemned to freedom, but it is no more a condemnation than to say we are condemned to breathe oxygen, or condemned to die, eventually. Rather than see these things as limitations on our Freedom, we can simply say they are part of the "facticity" of things—they are the things that are, but are not the things that make us. I feel that if we realize all of this, if we stop dwelling on the possibility of all the things that limit us, we instead focus on the possibility that we have Freedom. Despite this being the harder choice, instead of hiding being the Laziness that Nietzsche detests, the resignation that Camus rebels against, or the Bad Faith that Sartre says we hide within, it is the choice that allows us not simply to survive, but to exist, to be. We live in a world of choices, a universe of choices, of where we want to go, who we want to be, what our purpose is and how we can be happy. Those choices can be terrifying at times, but that fear should not force us to abandon the adventure, to take the easy way out and hide behind our excuses. So, if what these Existentialists have told us is true, and there is Nothing out there—in the face of all these choices of how to live, how to Be, can we too ever really be nothing?

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This article has not been reviewed by Odyssey HQ and solely reflects the ideas and opinions of the creator.
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