Freedom, Choice, and Success: The Real Existentialist Stance

radical freedom doesn’t mean total responsibility for failure and success

Perspectives of Existentialist Authors

A very interesting conversation occurred during one of my talks in the Glimpses Into Existence lecture series, carried out in large part by participating audience members. That session focused on Franz Kafka’s works and thought. As far as Existentialist thinkers go, he can be a cagey one when it comes to coming right out and expressing his own perspective on matters.

In this, he differs not only from Existentialist philosophers, theologians, and psychologists. You would right expect them, to speak in their own voice, so to speak. Even if many of them are deliberately anti-systematic, just by the very nature of that kind of writing, those authors are going to reveal to us, their readers, what it is that they think about matters. It’s a bit different with literature, though — Existentialist plays, novels, short stories, and poetry — and their writers.

When reading those types of media, it is not always so simple to identify the position staked out — or even just assumed — by the author. The persona speaking through one of Rilke’s poems need not be the stance of Rilke himself, for instance. The characters arguing about philosophy in Dostoyevsky’s novels need not represent his own settled convictions. We could say the same about the words placed into the mouths of the figures in a play. Does Sartre really think that “hell is other people?” or does the fact of it being expressed by a character impose upon us a requirement to reserve judgement, and refrain from attributing that stance to the author?

It is possible, of course — particularly when we correlate what is done, what is said, the explanations, the choices, the confusions in a literary work with some of the other writings of an author —for us to piece together a picture, and determine more or less what the author’s stance could arguably be.

With Kafka in particular, however, it is not quite so easy as that. Some very interesting questions can be asked about what it is that he aims to say, what truths or even just suggestions he wants to communicate.

Freedom and Responsibility for One’s Outcomes

One central theme running throughout the literature and philosophy which gradually became associated into the “Existentialist movement” is that of the relationship between freedom, experienced in choice, and what appears to us as freedom’s opposite. We can call this constraint, control, or even fate, a kind of determinism in which we human beings find ourselves enmeshed.

So then, what was the issue that was raised — and what does it reveal to us? One of the participants in the session on Kafka expressed a kind of dislike, disagreement, perhaps even disgust (you’ll have to listen to the video and judge for yourself) for a position commonly enough expressed in our society.

This is a perspective that a certain misreading of central Existentialist texts and doctrines — a misreading with something else foreign to those texts added in — naturally enough leads to.

The idea is this: According to certain Existentialists, a person is free — radically free — that is, able to choose not only within ranges of alternatives or options, but free as well even about how to understand those alternatives. Free to choose what criteria or authorities (or anything else) to use to decide, to base one’s decision on. One is even free to decide who one will be. . .

Here’s where things get dicey. You take that radical freedom, and add something else to it. And then the upshot then is: you are completely responsible for who you are, what your basic conditions of choice are, and whether you experience success or failure.

Generally, this sort of thing gets said to those who have not come out well in the crapshoots and lotteries of life. People say: if you wanted to be successful, you would have chosen to be, because you would have chosen what you needed to do. . . and that was entirely up to you.

This is one thing you’ll definitely not find most genuine existentialists actually saying. Willing, choosing, using one’s freedom in ways conducive to success may very well in many cases (though not all) be a necessary condition for success — but those are no way a sufficient one.

You can choose — in fact, you have to choose — and it can all go to crap, because your choosing doesn’t determine any more of reality than the portion you’ve got some capacity to determine.

And, that portion of reality is much less — despite whatever means we may use, technology, knowledge, connections, talents, disciplines to widen that range — than the larger reality whose grips and toils we cannot avoid.

Real and Fake Existentialisms

One might balk at my uses of terms like “genuine” and “not-really” here to distinguish between real and fake existentialists — after all, isn’t it at the core of Existentialist philosophy that one gets to decide things for oneself? So, by extension, who am I to say that certain interpretations of themes or doctrines, claiming to represent existentialism, are less true or valid than others?

My simple retort to that is simply to throw back a paradox asking in turn— who is the critic to tell me that I’m not equally free to say that some people have got it right and others wrong? But this kind of relativizing-gotcha is a pretty stale pastime — and there’s a better, more on-point response.

If “Existentialist” is to mean anything substantive, while not confining itself to mere slavish repetition of tropes drawn from its key authors and texts, one nevertheless does have to return to those thinkers and works continually as sources upon which to draw for inspiration and orientation. And, at least on this issue of the relation between a person’s radical freedom and the worldly success of their projects and choices, there is both a wealth of clearly articulated discussions by the members of the movement and a rough consensus between them.

To review briefly, the position that came in for criticism is an instance of what we might call “ontological bootstrapping,” or the philosophical equivalent of prosperity theology. The general idea runs like this: Existentialists hold that human beings are radically free, some of them pushing that so far that they declare that (as opposed to other animals, or pieces of technology) the human being has no essence or nature and instead has to choose what his or her essence is.

A person exists, to be sure, within an environment, a world of objects, a cultural and historical world formed by other people’s choices and actions — but what that person makes of the location, the position, the opportunities, the chances he or she has, that is up to that person. And each person thus bears responsibility for what he or she does with that freedom — which includes the capacity to remake oneself into a different person.

So far, so good, actually — so where do things go wrong? In going a bit further and saying that our success or failure is entirely, or even essentially, up to us — in relation to the rest of reality.

Pseudo-Existentialist Freedom and Responsibility

The pseudo-existentialist says to others: “you have the capacity to decide your own fate.” They mean by this that by your own choices and actions — if you just will or choose or desire intensely, consistently, single-mindedly enough — you can make the rest of reality (natural, technological, historical, cultural) conform to your own choices or decisions.

Success within the world then becomes, from that perspective, entirely up to oneself — and likewise one’s failures are entirely up to one as well. If you’re not rich, if you don’t have a good position or prospects, if you’re unattractive or undesired, if . . . if. . . if. . . well, that’s your own fault. You must have chosen failure for yourself. Or you didn’t choose success strongly enough. Or. . . well, there’s a number of ways to blame the unsuccessful.

After all, you are as radically free as anyone else. You are no less radically fre than the pantheon of the successful that people can parade forth (and which so many success-worshippers write biographies and self-help guides about). So, if you’re a failure, or even less than astoundingly successful, it’s nobody’s fault — except yours.

What Real Existentialists Have To Say About This

There’s a number of things wrong with this, but I’ll confine myself to noting just one problematic, which I think is particularly well illustrated by many of Franz Kafka’s stories — particularly, though not exclusively, The Trial. Before that, though, let me mention some corresponding ideas from just a few other existentialist thinkers.

Theistic existentialists, like Soren Kierkegaard, Lev Shestov, and Gabriel Marcel, will already see some significant problems with this notion that the human being — through the free use of his or her will — can coerce reality into some configuration counting as “success.” After all there would also be radical freedom on the part on the part of the divine, involving an entire dimension, gracious and mysterious, permeating the phenomenal, seemingly secular word and age.

Atheist existentialists also harbor no illusions that our freedom — while always offering us choice and incessantly imposing on us responsibility — affords such quasi-divine capacity to shape reality.

As one example, Albert Camus in his Myth of Sisyphus, sees the very essential structure of the absurd residing in the disconnect, the “divorce” between our desires and reasonings on one side and the irrational world on the other. We are certainly free to try to remake the world or our situation into something more in conformity with our wishes, but no amount of effort will actually bring that about.

Simone de Beauvoir provides another example. In her Ethics of Ambiguity, she goes further than Sartre in her examinations of what “facticity” (the set of conditions and contents the world continually imposes upon us) entails, arguing that the marginalized, the exploited and oppressed, do not possess the same degree of freedom and responsibility than those in more privileged positions.

What Does Kafka Add To This?

What Kafka reveals to us in a narrative framework, and thus by example and analogy, in the case and character of Joseph K. — who finds himself accused of a crime and progressively more enmeshed within the workings of the Law as The Trial proceeds — is an alienating world, mysterious but always susceptible of clarifications, which nonetheless reproduce alienation in new forms.

This is a world in which Joseph K. is free. He chooses and acts, usually on the basis of some reasonable expectations, but then finds his projects miscarrying over and over. His continual frustrations and lack of any lacking progress or success are not simply because there is some shadowy, all-powerful, totalitarian system of the Law stymying his efforts at every point (though that certainly doesn’t help!)

Instead, it turns out to be a matter of other people — who are also free and at the same time constrained by circumstances, which are in turn often enough conditioned by, or even the products of yet other people’s use of freedom. “Other people” are not necessarily “hell”, as Sartre might have us believe, but their existence as free, undetermined, self-determining beings does intersect, and often condition or conflict with our own choices, actions, projects. Often without meaning to, the uses they make of their own capacities to decide plays some part in generating our own seeming successes and failures.

The Existentialist situation is not really one of an individual versus the world, let alone versus the System — but the significantly more complicated and real one of an individual in a world composed of — and compromised by — others who are both like and unlike oneself.

The pseudo-existentialist, as I pointed out during that session, is really a type of solipsist. Other people exist for that person, but not really. . . To acknowledge the Other or the world of others — to realize that they too are free and conditioned beings — is to live in an anguish for which solipsism would provide a soothing but illusory remedy. And, though the act of living in that anguish often has to be repeated, and often is merely implicit, that is what genuine Existentialists do.

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Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.