Louis C.K. and Philosophy by Mark Ralkowski

Author:Mark Ralkowski
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812699173
Publisher: Open Court
Published: 2016-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

Free to Be . . . You and Me

What Louis describes as profound sadness closely parallels how existentialists understand anxiety. According to German existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger, when we’re anxious we no longer feel at home in the world. Our ordinary mode of being in the world is replaced with a feeling of alienation from it. Our concerns and projects lose the meanings and values we ordinarily attribute to them, and, similar to Louis listening to “Jungleland,” we’re confronted with the possibility of our own deaths and the nothingness (or forever emptiness) that is their defining feature. Being aware of the nothingness that surrounds us and lies beneath everything we do, Heidegger thinks, reveals that meaning and value lack an objective foundation. From his perspective, then, Louis was right: every project we undertake, goal we pursue, and concern or care we have will ultimately be all for nothing.

But if value doesn’t exist out there in the world, then where does it come from? The absence of an objective source of value, according to French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, whose work built upon Heidegger’s, means that we possess the radical freedom to create it for ourselves. It also means that we’re free to create our selves. We do not each possess a self prior to or independent from our actions, in Sartre’s view; instead, our selves come into being as a result of our choices, especially the roles we choose to adopt and projects we choose to undertake. We choose and thus exist authentically, according to Sartre, whenever we commit to our roles and projects both consciously and passionately. This requires taking full responsibility for every action we choose to perform. (With radical freedom comes radical responsibility.)

That we’re free to choose what to do and who we are may sound rather uplifting—the stuff of every high-school graduation speech. Yet, Sartre believes that most of us will fail to live authentically most of the time. To be fully authentic at every moment would require reviewing our possibilities and committing to one of them and thereby taking responsibility for ourselves. The mental and emotional effort this would demand would be almost impossible to sustain under the best circumstances; however, as nearly all of Louis’s work attests to, the world provides us with anything but the best circumstances. It’s much easier to give up our freedom and responsibility for ourselves. We do this whenever we thoughtlessly or indifferently accept values, play roles, or pursue goals that others (family, society, religion)—including our past selves—have set for us. Whenever we give up the tasks of value-creation and self-creation in this way, according to Sartre, we live inauthentically and act in bad faith.

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