I love Sartre right now. Let’s start with him here.
Everything takes place, in fact, as if our essential and immediate behavior with respect to anguish is flight. Psychological determinism, before being a theoretical conception, is first an attitude of excuse, or if you prefer, the basis of all attitudes of excuse. It is reflective conduct with respect to anguish; it asserts that there are within us antagonistic forces whose type of existence is comparable to that of things. It attempts to fill the void which encircles us, to re-establish the links between past and present, between present and future. It provides us with a nature productive of our acts, and these very acts it makes transcendent; it assigns to them a foundation in something other than themselves by endowing them with an inertia and externality eminently reassuring because they constitute a permanent game of excuses.
I’m having some existential dilemmas when it comes to integration right now, and I got to thinking about the helpfulness of psychology toward authenticity.
Sartre captures the very problem that I am having with psychology, or I should say therapeutic advice, in my present circumstance. It’s the creation of an independent self, an entity that has actions of its own, and therefore controls our freedom. Sartre is right there to smack it down, and it’s the same thing that Zen talks about. It jazzed me up when I first read that excerpt the other day, and sparked a new campaign of writing, however, today it became even more clear to me realistically.
The presentation of reality to us causes fear and our natural reaction flight. That kind of encounter with existence is easy to keep away from by distraction and denial. I love doing those things, but now I find myself tired of it. I feel like I have to stop all the distractions and sit down for a while, and face it. I hate emotions, and I hate being emotional. My latest crisis is how to do what I feel to be authentic when there is no one around to do it with. This is where I really need Sartre, or some Zen master, to sit down with for like five minutes.
That’s more of a side rant to the bigger issue, and that is where do I find truth in the milieu I exist in? I’ve told my friends that coping is okay, that it’s natural to do it. But I also believe that at some point that coping has to come to account. I am an existentialist in my psychology, and I know that eventually all of these things will only keep you away from the root issue for a time. I think that it’s imperative to meet that root issue, and that it’s okay to have it destroy you at times. When you are secure enough to start recognizing your coping, you are secure enough to start working past the coping.
And that’s where I think that I’m having my current conflict. I get sage advice from friends about dealing with life, finding ways to be happy. And then one friend asked me, what makes you truly happy? It was rhetorical in context, but I chose not to take it that way. What makes me happy is not all the distracting coping mechanisms. Those aren’t real, and as soon as I know that, they are more hinderance than help. But what is the path to follow?
In a cognitive behavioral sense, we would just identify the behavior, and consciously change it to something that we want. I see this as trading one thing for another. It doesn’t really do anything about the basic level of whether we live for ourselves, or for our fear. What part of psychology is actually moving us toward authenticity? It seems that anything which strengths the idea of an independent self is really a move toward bad faith and away from enlightenment. ‘Do not mistake your finger for the moon.’ I may be an existential hedonist, that we should undergo as much pain as it takes to obtain the ultimate pleasure. It annoys me when people will not.
I suppose it annoys me more when people tell me not to do what I’m doing. Because I trust them, but I don’t think they’re right. I think they might be falling prey to bad faith themselves. ‘Don’t think, just go out and do.’ But even Zen recognizes that you have to ponder the idea of not thinking. You have to let the mind settle as it will. For me, part of the settling is recognizing all that which clouds my root issue. It’s like a simple exercise of noticing and letting go. I notice these things, these coping things, and then I let them go. (At least that’s what I really want to end up doing.)
It seems that ultimately, all actions that merely affirm the self as an independent entity, one that Sartre would see as the root of all excuses, and one that gives to the self our freedom, would be a move toward bad faith, inauthenticity. Yet, I know that I have received psychological comfort from the teachings of psychology, and given some in return. I suppose that is why they call it an existential crisis. Dilemma may be more appropriate in my case, ironic sense that is the root of the problem from Zen’s perspective, and perhaps this is my duality which must be transcended. But it looks like not today. I am puzzled as ever, but feeling deeply on account of it. Perhaps when I meet my zen master, she will rap me on the head and I won’t think so much.