Everyone Needs a Little Pessimism

Life is not all flowers and sunshine (unless you live in Hawaii and even they have tsunamis).  Existentialism receives a bad rap for statements like Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Existentialism is not despair. It declares rather that even if God did exist, it

would make no difference,” from “Existentialism is a Humanism.”  To those who live only for the sake of their faith, this sounds a lot like despair.  If God need not exist, if there is no quantifiable end goal, then what and why for what?

My argument is that the exercise of freedom is our objective.  Sartre rationalized that as free rational beings, we make decisions, and those decisions are projects.  We are free to participate in our projects, and yet we are restricted by them and choose to do so.  Even choosing not to act on a project is the creation of another project.  In class there was a wonderful example:  a pair on a date, say Jack and Jill.  Jack tries to hold Jill’s hand, and Jill decides not to decide whether or not to reciprocate. Thus, rather than create the project where she holds Jack’s hand and he is on to the next objective, or likewise create the situation where she and Jack are awkwardly walking along with an imaginary wall between them, she causes Jack the frustration of deciding continuing to try to hold her hand.  There was no case where Jill could not have exercised her freedom and likewise where she would not have caused further sexual tension with Jack.  Sartre explains this as “being what one is in the mode of not being it.”  Freedom is behind all of our actions by this distinction, and thus it is the case that we must freely choose not to be free.  If God existed, then it sounds like we are working to achieve freedom in actuality in God.  In other words, we want to exercise our freedom and receive freedom in return as opposed to the case of Jack and Jill awkwardly holding hands in the park.

Without God, and as beings of freedom that freely choose not to be free, we must still be working towards ultimate freedom.  This resonates with Aristotle’s argument that we are working towards eudaimonia, which is the highest happiness, and declared by Aristotle as unachievable.  The goal is to come as close to the top as possible.  If there is a God and some paradise that is to be earned at the end of life, then there is a goal to be worked for.  For those pessimistic existentialists, if there is no God, but there is a conceptualization of freedom that can never be reached, sounds like a challenge.  As humans, do we not live for good competition?

            Of the pessimists who realize that this is too much work and give up, just as the runner who can see the finish but no longer has the will to fight, what can be said then? What do they do with their lives, and how is this just as much of a project as moving forward?