Episode #104 ... Sartre and Camus pt. 5 - Consciousness is Freedom
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For more information and full transcripts of the podcast, check out philosophizethis.org. For updates about new episodes, check out Instagram at philosophizethispodcast, all one word, on X at I am Stephen West. Be well, and I hope you love the show today. So consciousness is freedom. What exactly was it that Sartre meant when he said that? Because it's not obvious, right? I mean, it sounds like one of those things you'd say, consciousness is freedom. And people would be like, yeah, no, I totally get where he's coming from there. But do you really? Do you?

Let's talk about it for an episode. And let's also talk about if Sartre is correct here, that consciousness is freedom. How do human beings typically respond to that reality? And what does it mean for us personally when it comes to how we approach the world? You know, we talked about a lot of stuff on the last episode, but I hope one of the major takeaways was that throughout the history of philosophy, we've had this pretty stubborn recurring problem that just doesn't seem to go away. Turns out it's a little more difficult than you might initially think to actually prove the existence of the external physical world.

Tons of thinkers have taken a crack at it, but the problems all begin in the same place. The problem is, once you make that distinction between consciousness and the world, it becomes extremely difficult to say with any level of certainty that what you're perceiving is really the world and not just the world as it appears to you. Remember Descartes talking about how our senses often deceive us. The stick in the water looks bent. It's not actually bent. We don't have a direct awareness of the objects of the world, just how they appear to us.

And this has created this dynamic throughout the history of philosophy where philosophers are kind of like these prisoners in a cage trapped up inside of their own minds. I mean, imagine an actual prisoner in a cell. Right outside of this cell are four walls so you can never directly see what's going on outside of the cell. But in the floor of the cell, there's a hatch that opens up once a day and it gives you a newspaper and this newspaper tells you everything that's going on in the world outside. Well, Solipsism would say, hey, wait a second. How do we know that this newspaper is fair and balanced?

How can we know that this is actually an accurate representation of what's going on outside and not just written by somebody that wants to try to deceive us into thinking what they want us to think is going on out there? No, we can't know anything about what's going on outside of these four walls, can we? An idealist might say something like, all right, well, maybe we can't be certain about what's going on out there. But one thing we can be certain of is the fact that we have this newspaper. Let's make sure we're careful. Let's make sure we understand the biases we're bringing to this paper as the prisoner reading it.

Let's make sure we try to understand the biases of the people writing the paper. The ultimate point is, let's take this newspaper seriously, because at least we have a newspaper. And it seems like the contents of it may be all that we ever have access to. Husserl, he'd be doing something psycho. Maybe he'd be studying the structural integrity of the cell, what holds it together. He'd be studying the hatch in the floor that delivers the newspaper. Well, Sartre would be the guy on the prison monitor looking at all of them through a security camera, wondering how they don't all see the key that's hanging around their neck.

Because see, tons of thinkers over the years have tried to come up with all kinds of different prison break techniques to get out of this cage. But Sartre would say, what if consciousness is not some realm or some cage that we're trapped in up in our heads? What if we don't have some secondary level of awareness of things in the world? What if consciousness and the world are a unified thing and that when you look at consciousness closely enough, this is a way of escaping the cell, what if consciousness is essentially nothingness?

Again, it's not exactly obvious what he means when he just says it like that, but it's the reason he calls his seminal work being in nothingness. To understand what he means by consciousness is freedom, we have to understand what he means by consciousness is nothingness. So let's get into it. So part of the reason there's so much wordplay and qualifying going on is that Sartre's trying to do something that's really quite difficult.

He's trying to merge these two ways of thinking that we've been talking about. On one hand, delineating things in a very Cartesian way between consciousness and the world, while also trying to preserve Heidegger's point that being and the world are a unified thing.

Now, just living in the Western world, we're a little bit sabotaged when it comes to understanding this concept. And it makes sense. I mean, when you live in a world where every sentence you say is structured in terms of subjects acting upon objects, where every piece of information you get is framed in these subject-object terms, this whole concept Heidegger introduces about being in the world as a unified thing can be kind of confusing to wrap your head around. But try to think about it like anything else that's fundamentally interconnected.

Not that this is a perfect metaphor, because it's certainly not what Sartre and Heidegger are saying, but just to get us thinking in these terms, think about the way that people typically think of the mind and body as being interconnected. Right? You know, you can meditate, you can quiet the mind, and your body feels relaxed. You can constantly focus your mind on all the things you're miserable about, and it's going to produce in your body a feeling of misery. In other words, you can change the state of your mind, and it goes on to change the state of your body.

But it goes the other way too, right? And we've all seen that TED talk where they talk about the power poses. Stand in front of a mirror, hold your hands up over your head like you just want to race. It feels like you just want to race. You can change your posture and feel better about yourself. Tons of ways to change the state of your body, to change the state of your mind. But the point is, if you're trying to write a book about either one of these things, for example, if you try to write a book about the mind without ever referencing the body in it, you can imagine how that book might be massively incomplete when you finish it. Almost doomed to failure from the start.

Well, to Sartre, this is what philosophers have been doing for hundreds of years with these elaborate books written about just consciousness, or just the world. Again, consciousness and the world are a unified thing. We can never comprehensively talk about either one of them without directly referencing the other. Still, nonetheless, we do need names for them so we can talk about the details of what they are. And the names Sartre gives them are on the one hand, being in itself, or the world, and on the other, being for itself, or consciousness.

being in itself and being for itself. Let's talk first about being in itself. You know, when teachers try to explain Sartre's concept of being in itself, they'll oftentimes say to think about it almost the same as the concept of matter. And it's not because Sartre's a scientist or something, or that he thinks being in itself is just a combination of molecules. They use this word matter because it's a general vague term about something physical that exists without giving many details about it.

See, because the way that Sartre describes being in itself is extremely similar to a description given by a guy we talked about on the first or second episode of the show, a guy named Parmenides. Parmenides famously argues, really quite simply, that what is is and what is not is not. Something either exists or it doesn't exist. Seems pretty reasonable. What follows from this, if you're him, is that something can never come into being, because in order to do that, where did it come from? Non-being? That doesn't exist.

But it goes the other way too. Something can never go out of being, because where would it be going to? Something that doesn't exist? Things coming and going out of being to Parmenides is an illusion created by our feeble senses. Things changing and time moving and even things being separate from each other are all illusions created by the senses.

What follows from this for Parmenides is that what being actually is, is this giant, featureless, unmoving, unchanging, inert sphere of existence, and that anything else we humans try to say about it is just imposing our feeble senses onto it. He describes it like this, quote, "...it is uncreated and imperishable, for it is entire, immovable, and without end. It was not in the past, nor shall it be, since it is now, all at once, one, continuous."

For what creation wilt thou seek for it? How and whence did it grow? Nor shall I allow thee to say or think from that which is not. For it is not to be... I mean, look, you get what he's saying, right? Well, just listen for a second. Listen to how Sartre describes being in itself at the beginning of being and nothingness. Quote, Transition, becoming, anything that permits us to say that being is not yet what it will be and that it is already what it is not. All that is forbidden on principle. It is full positivity. It's important.

It knows no otherness. It never posits itself as other than another being. It is not subject to temporality, end quote. So this picture that Sartre presents of being in itself is not much different than the way Parmenides describes being as a giant, timeless, featureless, unchanging, inert blob of existence. When Sartre says in that quote that being in itself is full positivity, he means more or less the same thing Parmenides means when he says what is, is, and what is not, is not.

Being in itself is what is, and any talk about what is not has nothing to do with it. In other words, being in itself is fully positive or affirmative in its existence. It doesn't depend on anything for its existence. It doesn't exist as opposed to some other being out there. Like, hypothetically speaking, you could fully describe being in itself without ever using the word not or ever referencing something that isn't the case.

When it comes to being in itself, what is is and what is not is not. Things like motion and change and time are all not aspects of being in itself. And while both Parmenides and Sartre arrive at the same place, the difference between them is that while Parmenides arrives at this place, he sees this motion and change and things seemingly coming and going out of being in the world, and he just writes all this stuff off as a paradoxical illusion created by the senses.

But Sartre explains all these things as the ways that consciousness interacts with the world. Or in other words, the way that being for itself interacts with being in itself. Consciousness being for itself, the world or matter, being in itself. Now, given the fact that being in itself is full positivity, fully affirmative, consciousness or being for itself is what allows us to consider the other side of that. What is not? Now, let's

Let's get out of describing this stuff in terms of is and is not. I mean, the reason I did it is because if consciousness allows us to consider what is not, you can start to see the direction this is heading in of consciousness being nothingness. Consciousness to Sartre is not a box. It's not a cage up in our heads that we're trapped in. Consciousness is an activity. It's an activity of pure directedness towards being in itself, pure intentionality.

The big move here is that unlike Descartes, who talks about us not having access to the things of the world, but only the way that they appear to us, and how that whole strategy effectively locks us up in our heads trying to decipher these mere appearances of things, you know, it's a three-step process. There's the actual things, the appearances of the things, and then there's us sitting up in our head trying to decode them. Sartre cuts out the middleman.

Yes, things still appear to consciousness in a particular way, but the objects of consciousness are the things in the world, not this sort of internal picture being projected up in our heads that was caused by the things outside of our heads, like so many philosophers have assumed. So let's just try to picture consciousness then. Picture rays of light coming out of a flashlight illuminating a little circle of things in an otherwise dark room. Except here's where it gets weird. Picture there's no flashlight causing these light rays. That was an assumption too.

And consider the fact that consciousness doesn't just passively reveal things in the dark room like the light rays do. Consciousness reveals things based on a very particular scheme that we can study. Picture light rays as if they were animated by something that gives them a particular structure. But it's even weirder than that, because to even picture light rays is to be picturing some thing, some apparatus made up of photons interacting with the objects of the room. But consciousness isn't some thing.

It's an activity of pure awareness. And what follows from that, if you're Sartre, is that other than this strange relationship between consciousness and the objects it's revealing, consciousness is nothing, really. Consciousness is nothingness. But it's nothingness in another sense, too. It's nothingness in that...

It's the source of all nothingness in our experience of the world, Sartre. That feeling that something's lacking, of what is not. It's the source of something about the way we interpret the world that at this point is an age-old problem in philosophy. It's called the problem of negation. Here's an example Sartre uses. Let's say you were going to meet your friend Pierre at a bar. Let's say you get there and Pierre hasn't gotten there yet. And when you get there and you turn your consciousness towards the bar and you examine whether Pierre's there or not, you don't go, okay, well, I see five tables, ten chairs,

I see some glasses, some pictures on the wall, tiles on the floor, lights. There's a man in a nice hat over there. Some alcohol behind the counter. Hey, you know what? I've taken a pretty exhaustive inventory of this bar and I just don't see Pierre on this list of things that I have. No, that's not how consciousness works. What actually happens is you look around and you perceive a sort of lack of Pierre.

In other words, if you walked into the bar and Pierre was sitting there, it would be a full positivity, affirmative, being-in-itself-style fact that Pierre was sitting in the bar. But when Pierre isn't there, what you end up getting access to is this weird sort of negative fact, an awareness of a non-Pierre-ness, right, an absence of Pierre. But what is that really? What exactly are we conscious of there?

These sort of negative facts, as they're called, deeply worried people like Parmenides. And I mean, he went so far as to say that you can't even speak of what is not without being contradictory. But for Sartre, one thing's for certain about that scenario. This awareness of what is not didn't come from being in itself. No, to be able to see this lack or negation or nothingness of non-Pierre in the bar, we get that from consciousness. Consciousness is the source of nothingness in our awareness of the world.

Now if you're someone out there saying, "Okay, this is all very interesting, but it's also all very deep and analytical." Look, you can explain until you're blue in the face, Sartre, but if consciousness really is this way, on this fundamental level, is there any way on a more practical level I can experience this nothingness of consciousness you keep talking about?

And it's almost like I wrote that question ahead of time. It turns out there is. There happens to be several different situations that we can all relate to. I'll talk about a couple of them. Two of the more famous ones are often called the gambler and vertigo. Let's talk about the gambler first. Sartre says to imagine a guy that's a compulsive gambler. He goes down to the casino every day and gambles all of his money away. His family's struggling, his children are starving, and he realizes something's got to change about this whole scenario. So he makes a resolution to never gamble again for the rest of his life.

But then the very next day, he goes down to the casino. Always a wise move. And he walks past the gambling table and that demon, that demon just starts talking to him. Ooh, maybe we could gamble a little bit. You want to? No, no, no, no. I need to stop. This is ruining my family. This is ruining my life. But what if I just made a really small bet? It wouldn't be that bad, would it?

Sartre writes about his inner monologue as he looks back at the compulsive gambler he used to be. He says, quote, that man back there in the past is me. It's not someone else after all. I recognize myself in that past man. And yet in the sense that matters right now, that man is not me. That man has good resolutions that speak to him and are persuasive.

But those resolutions do not affect me one bit unless I make those resolutions anew now. I don't find his resolutions affecting me. End quote. What he's saying here is that here's this compulsive gambler that's trying to stop. He's looking into the past at the man he used to be, thinking about the moment he decided to stop gambling. He made all the resolutions, never going to do it again. But now he finds himself in this moment. And while in one sense, that person in the past that decided to stop gambling is him,

But for all intents and purposes, that guy that made those resolutions is essentially a different person in a different time and place. He realizes that all those resolutions he made that day mean nothing if he doesn't in each and every moment moving forward make those very same resolutions. Now you can imagine this with anything. You can imagine it with weight loss or drinking or meditating twice a day. But the point is, Sartre would want us to ask ourselves the question, when we make these changes for the better in our lives and we look back at the person we used to be,

What is stopping us in this very moment from going back and becoming that person again? What's stopping us from going back to the gambling table or to the bar or to the fast food drive-thru? Well, Sartre would say, nothing. Nothing is stopping you. And it's that realization that at any moment you could choose to go back to living in your own little personal hell that you created, that reality produces in us a feeling that Sartre calls anguish. Not a good feeling. We'll talk more about it in a second, but let's talk about vertigo. New story.

A person's going on a walk one day, and they come to the edge of a giant cliff. And they look down, 400-foot drop-off. They see the ravine below, jagged rocks. And all of a sudden, their palms start sweating, fingers start tingling, they get a little dizzy, and so they back up away from the edge. Let's not look down there anymore. Well, what just went on there? Why did their body react that way? Well, the default answer might be to say, uh,

Look, I was at the edge of a cliff. I looked down, and it doesn't look very fun down there. I was scared I was going to fall. But Sartre would say, it wasn't that you were scared to fall, it's that you were scared about the possibility that you could jump. Just like the gambler looked into the past, what happened was, you looked into the future, you saw yourself laying there at the bottom of the cliff, looking like a human swastika, just mangled from the fall. You looked at that person in the future, and you said,

And while in one sense, that person is a completely different person and a different time and place. But in another sense, all it would really take is one choice, about 15 seconds and the effects of gravity to turn you into that person. In other words, what's stopping you in this moment from hurling yourself off the cliff to your death? Nothing. Nothing is stopping you.

Look, if there was some essence that preceded your existence, maybe you wouldn't have the choice to jump off the cliff. But the fact is, you do have a choice. We always have a choice. And the fact that nothing stops the gambler from going back to the tables, and nothing stops this person from throwing themselves off the cliff, and nothing is stopping anyone listening to this from being the best or worst person they could ever possibly be, this nothingness, when you think about it, it ends up being just another word for freedom. Consciousness is freedom.

And when we're hit with this reality, that every second of every day is a choice moving in the direction of our potential bad or good selves, when we truly face that fact, it doesn't make us happy like we just got out of jail. It's terrifying to us. It produces in us a feeling that Sartre calls anguish.

We feel a sense of anguish when we truly consider just how much freedom we have to choose and how responsible we are for our actions. And Sartre says most people spend their entire lives coming up with all kinds of creative ways to tell themselves a story, blaming their behavior on something other than themselves, all in an attempt to escape this feeling of anguish. Let's talk about a few of the ways Sartre thinks people shift this blame off of themselves and pretend like they don't have a choice.

One of them happens to be a prevailing idea in the field of psychology during Sartre's life. It's the Freudian idea of the unconscious mind. People will tell themselves, I did something, but it wasn't really fully me that made the choice to do it. See, I have this thing called my unconscious mind. It's up in my brain. It affects and sometimes even governs my decision making. It's really sad. Sartre uses an example like, say that you were walking out of a restaurant and you see a little girl bleeding out of her head on the sidewalk looking for help.

Now, most of us, when faced with this situation, consciously think, oh, here's a girl that needs help. I care about this girl. I'm a good person. The right thing to do here is to help this little girl. And then we do it. Now, a common criticism of this description of what's going on there is that what really happened is you saw a little girl bleeding out of her head. That visual produced in you a very unpleasant feeling of distress and worry.

And you went over to help the girl really on a self-interested mission to get rid of that distress and worry. In other words, consciously, you told yourself that you're a good person and that what you like to do is to help people who are in need. But unconsciously, you were acting in a self-interested way.

Now, nobody gets hurt in this particular example, but you can imagine how having this cordoned off place up in your head called the unconscious mind that we have no awareness of when making choices, but nonetheless sometimes governs our behavior. You can imagine how people might sometimes use that as a way of taking the blame off themselves and not admitting that they were free to make another choice. You can imagine how Sartre might have a problem with it.

And an important thing to note is it certainly may be true that most of the stuff we do is done without us directly reflecting on it. No question. The thing Sartre wants to avoid is people using this unconscious mind as a scapegoat that they can evoke anytime they want to justify horrible behavior. Right. Like imagine the police talking to you, sir. Sir, what happened here?

Uh, yes, officer. Yes, I did trample that small child. But you know what? When I heard the fire alarm go off in the store, I had this unconscious natural urge to protect myself and my kids and everything else just went out the window. Police talking to you again. Sir, what happened? Look, man, I was just sitting there. This guy rolled up. I was like, bro, bro, you better get out of my face. You better get out of my face. And then unconsciously, I was just like, bam, I laid him out. Unconsciously, officer. I had this instinct to protect myself.

This is what he's trying to avoid. And think about it. Is it absolutely necessary to have this hidden realm called the unconscious mind that we have no awareness of? Sartre would say, sure, it is true that seeing the little girl makes me feel distressed and worried. And it's true that helping the little girl removes this feeling of distress and worry that I have.

But what's also true is that once I helped the little girl rub some dirt on it and wrap it up in a bandage, how convenient that I'm never surprised at that point that I feel good about myself and that these bad feelings have left me. It's almost like I was always aware of the fact that I was acting selfishly. I just wasn't reflecting on it in that moment. It's almost like this motive wasn't hidden away in some unconscious mind that I have no awareness of, but that I was just aware of it in a different way.

Sartre makes a distinction that consciousness is not this single wave of awareness, like many psychologists assume, that every consciousness has what he calls both positional and non-positional awareness. But the ultimate goal that Sartre has here is to do away with this mysterious and unnecessary realm called the unconscious mind that supposedly can dictate behavior with motives that are impossible to be conscious of. Oh, and by the way, can be evoked at any moment to allow people to escape from the anguish of how truly free they are.

Now, the unconscious mind is just one of these clever ways people have come up with to avoid responsibility. Sartre says people do it with all kinds of other stuff. People do it with a God that has a plan for them. They'll do it by reducing themselves to some social role. The point is, there's no shortage of these creative ways people have come up with to avoid how truly free they are and how responsible for their behavior they are.

And one of the most common things people use as an excuse for why they behaved in a particular way that they didn't have control over are their emotions. Sartre writes an entire book on emotions, talks about them extensively in other books. And it's a tempting place to take issue with Sartre, right? I mean, when you hear somebody make a radical claim like that, that we're totally free and absolutely responsible for our behavior, one of the first places you might go is to say, look, I'm down with freedom and responsibility. But let's face it, we aren't totally free.

The fact is, we are emotional beings. Sometimes we get overwhelmed by emotions. Sometimes these emotions cause us to behave in crazy ways. But Sartre wouldn't agree with that. Sartre would say that emotions ultimately are choices that we make. Let me explain what he means. He's responding to a really common way that people look at emotions. The basic idea is that what happens when we have an emotion is that we have some perception. For example, we see a news story about somebody getting stabbed.

That perception causes us to have a particular physiological response. Our stomach drops, we get butterflies, blood rushes to our face, etc. And then we become aware of that physiological response and just sort of marinate in it until it goes away or we use some sort of mental trickery to get rid of it. Point is that our awareness of that physiological response that was caused by some perception, that is what the emotion is. But Sartre would say it's not that simple.

The first thing he'd want to point out that isn't explicitly stated in that theory is that emotions are intentional. In the same way consciousness is always consciousness of something, it has intentionality, that there's no empty consciousness out there not directed at anything. Sartre thinks emotions are the same way. Whenever you're angry, you're angry about something that happened. Whenever you're sad, you're sad about something. For example, a story on the news of somebody getting stabbed.

What he's getting at here is when you say that you're sad, you're not just in some physiological state of sadness. You're always sad about something. Some state of affairs happened in the world, and then that sadness came about. Well, why did it come about? It's tempting to say that it was against our will, that I saw the story on the news, and it caused me to be sad.

But Sartre would say what's really going on there, whether we realize it or not, is that we use our emotions as strategies. Strategies that we employ to escape some otherwise unpleasant situation in the world. In the event we can't totally escape the situation, the emotion at least makes us feel better off than we would otherwise be. Now at first this may seem just downright counterintuitive. My emotions aren't strategies. I don't even think about them.

Well, just picture for a second what it looks like when people do use emotions in an overtly strategic way. For example, imagine some super manipulative person. You go to a restaurant, and they want to go to a different restaurant. "I'm so sad. Look at me and how sad I am. If only someone took me to a different restaurant, I might feel better."

This isn't what Sartre says we're doing. I'm just giving an example of how even feigned emotions can be used as strategies to bring about a particular end. And maybe emotions are more than just some force within us that leads to an involuntary physiological response. Sartre would say that when the guy cuts you off in traffic, most likely it was an accident. But for the sake of this example, let's imagine he cut you off on purpose. Imagine he was staring at you directly in the eyes through the back window of his car as he cut you off. Well, what exactly happened there?

Well, this guy was really inconsiderate of you. He put your life in jeopardy, other motorists' lives in jeopardy. He essentially just reduced you to this subhuman level where you don't even deserve the space on the road as much as he does. That's basically his road now, and you're this little insect that's in the way. That guy's preference of which lane he wants to drive in is essentially more important than your overall safety and well-being. That's you now. Congratulations.

Now this is a particular state of affairs that you might be faced with. And how do people sometimes respond when they're faced with this scenario? They get angry. Why do they get angry? Well, to Sartre, it's a strategy they're using. Because let's say you really looked at someone cutting you off in traffic the way I just described. Let's say you were that miserable.

In that event, you got a few options here. You can sit there and just revel in this new status this guy's given you as this insect that's in the way of this guy's 1987 Honda Accord, an insect that doesn't even deserve the consideration of their own space on the road. Or what else can you do? You can get angry. Yeah, you can feel indignant.

Now instead of being this little insect, I've restored my honor as a human being. This guy's got expectations that that guy's not living up to. And he should feel horrible for being such a worse driver than me. How dare he be so inconsiderate of somebody that's so much more important than an insect? Being angry can be an uncomfortable feeling. But it's a much more comfortable feeling than being subhuman and just in the way of all the real people.

To Sartre, we evoke the emotion of anger, and all the emotions for that matter, as a strategy to escape from an unpleasant situation. Even positive emotions. You know, when somebody's going throughout their day and they're walking on sunshine, hey, nothing can bother me today, I'm in too good of a mood. Sartre would say that person's doing that as a way of escaping the reality of being a human being. That we do have responsibilities and obligations. That we do have things that annoy us and inconvenience us.

Emotions, whether we realize it or not, are choices. And it may not be that we have something happen to us and then we say to ourselves, okay, now I'm going to be sad to cope with this. Go. But nonetheless, these are strategies that we're using. And Sartre would say, how convenient that people that have alternative coping skills are less moody people. Again, what Sartre is ultimately trying to get away from here are people making excuses for their behavior, blaming their emotional state, and denying the true level of freedom that they have.

You know, it's so easy to say, hey, sorry I acted that way. I'm an angry person. But Sartre would say, no, you're not. Where did that come from? There's no essence to your being given to you by some creator that makes you a more angry person than everybody else out there. Maybe you're not angry because you're an angry person, but instead, maybe you're an angry person because you consistently choose anger as a response to cope with the things that happen to you. Maybe you're not a slave. Maybe you have a choice.

Maybe your consciousness is not something being constantly controlled by some powerful force called emotion. Maybe in reality, consciousness is freedom. Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.