Human Freedom, the Focus of Existentialism - Essay Example

Freedom Human freedom, the central focus of existentialism, is unquestionably one of the most basic ideas that have driven the development of democratic politics in the last few hundred years. It is taught in schools as one of the essential tenets of human life, and the lack of it is used as a reason for meddling in the affairs of others (Leo Franchi, n.d.). Many philosophers have discussed the concept of freedom for many years, centuries even. It is so fundamental that freedom was defined by different people with different views on its scope and limitations. Alan Singer stated in The Meaning of Freedom in the Modern World that Libertarians identify freedom with the absolute right of individuals to control their own lives and want sharp restrictions on the power of government to interfere with the social and economic market place… In communist countries such as China and the former Soviet Union, freedom was defined as a collective or social value. Individual choices were circumscribed in order to achieve the more egalitarian distribution of goods and services like education and health care. In some contemporary Islamic nations, individual freedom must conform to religious practices. Individual behavior is also restricted by religious belief in Israel on the Jewish Sabbath and religious holidays and in some communities in the United States on Sundays because of Christian beliefs, On the other hand, religious conservatives often want governments to severely limit the options available to women who want to terminate pregnancies and oppose extending certain legal rights, including health benefits for partners and the right to marry the person they choose, to homosexuals (The Meaning of Freedom in the Modern World, Winter-Spring 2001). When we talk of existentialism, we talk of freedom, choices and action in connection with being human. Christine Daigle stated that “Existentialism is a philosophy that focuses on human existence in its concrete occurrence and on the fact that the human existence is radically free and must make choices and a philosophy that preoccupies itself with themes such as intentionality, being and absurdity, and angst and death. (Existentialist Thinkers and Ethics, 2006). Jean-Paul Sartre, commonly considered the father of Existentialist philosophy and arguably the best known philosopher of the twentieth century (Jean-Paul Sartre, 2011), defines freedom as “not a being; it is the being of man-i.e. his nothingness of being. If we start by conceiving of man as a plenum, it is absurd to try and find in him afterwards moments or psychic regions in which he would be free. As well look for emptiness in a container which one has filled beforehand up to the brim! Man cannot be sometimes slave and sometimes free; he is wholly and forever free or he is not free at all” (Being and Nothingness, Tr. Hazel E. Barnes (New York. 1966), p. 539). For him, man is freedom. He is always free and that it is impossible for man to be “not free”. A human being responds to specific situations they are faced with and is free to choose as to how to act on them. But in freedom man has some things that he cannot do. He says that we cannot refuse freedom, which is kind of conflicting to his statement that “man is freedom” if we take it at face value. When he says we cannot refuse freedom, by opting not to choose, man is still choosing, thus exercising freedom. We also cannot escape responsibility. For we are to take responsibility for the consequences of our choices and actions as role models, that others may act accordingly and that every choice he makes not only affects his future but the future of humanity as well. Responsibility is the price that freedom exacts from mankind. According to Existentialism in two plays of Jean-Paul Sartre: One of the most famous claims of ‘Being and Nothingness’ by Sartre is that, we are aware to some extent of our freedom, and the responsibility that comes with it, but we try to hide this from ourselves. We are aware, claims Sartre, that the pressures and demands that the world presents to us are the result of the ways in which we see and engage with things, and that this in turn is the result of our changeable characters rather than any fixed natures (Cagri Tugrul Mart, 2012). We are responsible for everything we do. It is our responsibility to live in a way that we will serve as a model of how man will live his life. To be an example that others will follow. As Sartre stated in Existentialism is a Humanism, “And, when we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men” (p. 3-4). This is what Sartre meant when he said “Man is condemned to be free”. Because freedom becomes a burden when choosing between good and evil, and when choosing man’s action, knowing that his choice will also affect the future of humanity. Taking into consideration Sartre’s conception of freedom and his theory on human beings, the issue of heterosexuality falls under the last chapter of Being and Nothingness wherein he argues that” bad faith constrains our relations with other people, including our sexual relations, to follow certain basic formulas. The project of bad faith is pursued in all of our activity, he thinks, including expression of sexual orientation. This might not itself be part of our character, but the precise ways in which it influences our perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and actions are a matter of our character, and result from the projects that we pursue” (Jonathan Weber, 2009). According to the article “Are heterosexuals “born that way”?’ no-one appears to be born heterosexual. Rather, heterosexual attraction is learned, developing over a period of time in response to certain environmental factors, in particular: • Good maternal nurture from the earliest stages and through the first few years: nursing, feeding, loving, touching, talking, closeness, eye contact, and care of physical needs. This develops the ability to experience or show affection both to the opposite sex or to the same sex. • Identification with and imitation of the parent of the same sex (or other close same-sex models). • Acceptance by and identification with same-sex peer groups including elder brothers or sisters. • Identification in a boy with what is culturally “masculine” and in a girl with what is culturally “feminine” (gender conformity). • The day-in-day-out treatment of boys and girls, as boys or girls respectively. • The biologically-programmed hormonal rush of puberty. This adds sexual drive to whatever prevailing psychological gender identity is already present. That is, it reinforces existing gender orientation but doesn’t change it. • Falling in love. This appears to be unrelated to genes or puberty; it is something environmentally conditioned that requires a minimum chronological and social age. • Culturally prescribed sexual behaviors, like arousal over women’s bound feet. • Personal sexual preferences and behaviors that can be traced back to early sexual arousal in unique circumstances. If anything was going to be programmed into the DNA, you would think heterosexuality would be. The urge to survive and reproduce ought to be one of the most basic in the species. But heterosexuality including falling in love seems to be a psycho-social learning process spread over many years. And for many heterosexuals the desire for a satisfying family life has come from their own experience of a good-enough family (NE and BK Whitehead, 80-81). The fact that heterosexual attraction is learned, and developed during an individual’s lifetime in response to different stimuli such as the people he comes into contact with, hormonal changes in his body, emotional development, culture and other such circumstances, indicates that it is in fact of social and not of physical development. Sartre will not agree to the idea that heterosexuality cannot be changed. Heterosexuality has nothing to do with what Sartre was saying about existence. “We can think of sexual orientation as a standing fact about a person which impacts on their experiences and actions only insofar as it is integrated into their character, whether this be a matter of their habits or their projects or anything else, and the individual’s overall sexuality as formed by this integration (Weber, 148-149) We then can say that heterosexuality is like a character that is developed and pursued in the course of an individual’s growth as he exists and coexists in society. Sartre criticizes psychoanalytic theories that postulate sex drives and nervous temperaments, for example, as basic causes of our behavior. He claims that these are described as basic purely because of a ‘refusal to push the analysis further’. We have seen that he thinks of sexuality as manifesting the projects that the individual pursues, and he would say the same about levels of confidence (Weber, 2009). Heterosexuality does not come with birth. And since it is learned, it can also be unlearned, or changed. As stated in The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, “Issues surrounding the notion of character and its place in our ethical, social, and political thought are central concerns of Sartre’s philosophy. The account he provides in Being and Nothingness is one that developed out of various difficulties with his earlier writing on issues in philosophical psychology, as we shall see over the next couple of chapters, and one that he continued to refine and apply until his death nearly four decades later. Character is not a given that determines our actions and destiny, according to this theory, and is therefore neither the inevitable result of one’s genetic make-up nor the outcome of the contingencies of one’s formative years” (Weber, 2009). Heterosexuality, like character is not a given and has its place in our thought where it is developed and pursued if man so chooses to. An individual has the freedom to choose, to act and to think. In his Existentialism as a Humanism essay, Sartre defined existence precedes essence to “mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards”. He further stated that “man will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself… Not that he is simply what he conceives himself to be, but he is what he wills, and as he conceives himself after already existing – as he wills to be after that leap towards existence. Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself”. In this context, man has a choice to be heterosexual or not. Unlike most people, and most psychologists, who think of heterosexuality as traits that are not the result of choice, and cannot be changed through choice, at least not easily, Sartre, like Whitehead will surely say otherwise. Works Cited Daigle, Christine. Existentialist Thinkers and Ethics, Canada: McGill-Queen's University Press. 2006. Print. Flynn, Thomas, "Jean-Paul Sartre", ed. Edward N. Zalta  The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Spring 2012 Edition. Web. 5 December 2012. Franchi, Leo. Sartre and Freedom. n.d. Web. 5 December 2012. Mart, Cagri Tugrul. “Existentialism in two plays of Jean-Paul Sartre”. Journal of English and Literature Vol. 3(3), 50-54, March 2012. Web. 5 December 2012. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism as a Humanism. Trans. Philip Mairet. ed. Walter Kaufman, Meridian Publishing Company, 1989. Web. 5 December 2012. The Meaning of Freedom in the Modern World. Ed. Alan Singer. Social Science Docket, 1 (1). Winter-Spring 2001. Web. 5 December 2012. Weber, Jonathan. The Existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre. NY: Routledge. 2009. Print. Whitehead, B.K. and N. E. Are heterosexuals “born that way”? n.d. Web. 5 December 2012. Read More