Table Of ContentHow to Be an Existentialist
By the Same Author:
Sartre: A Guide for the Perplexed
Sartre and Fiction
The Sartre Dictionary
Also available from Continuum:
The Good, the True and the Beautiful, Michael Boylan
How to Make Good Decisions and Be Right All the Time, Iain King
How to Win Every Argument, Madsen Pirie
Sex and Philosophy, Edward Fullbrook and Kate Fullbrook
How to Be an Existentialist
or How to Get Real, Get a
Grip and Stop Making
Excuses
Gary Cox
Continuum International Publishing Group
The Tower Building 80 Maiden Lane
11 York Road Suite 704
London SE1 7NX New York, NY 10038
www.continuumbooks.com
© Gary Cox 2009
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any
form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or
any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the
publishers.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 978-1-4411-8843-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cox, Gary, 1964-
How to be an existentialist, or, How to get real, get a grip,
and stop making excuses / Gary Cox.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).
ISBN: 978-1-4411-8843-4
1. Existentialism. 2. Conduct of life. I. Title. II. Title: How to get real, get a grip, and stop
making excuses.
B819.C66 2009
142’.78–dc22
2009005317
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall
Contents
Introduction 1
1 What is an Existentialist? 7
2 What is Existentialism? 12
Brief overview and quick history lesson 12
Existentialism and consciousness 21
Temporality 31
Being-for-others 36
Freedom and responsibility 44
Freedom and disability 49
Possible limits to freedom 51
Freedom and anxiety 54
3 How Not to Be an Existentialist 56
Bad faith is not self-deception 58
Flirting and teasing 59
Waiters, actors and attitudes 62
Homosexuality, sincerity and transcendence 65
Wilful ignorance 69
Contingency, nausea and the Existential
Alka-Seltzer of bad faith 71
Moustaches and salauds 74
4 How to Be Authentic 81
Authenticity and getting real 82
Being-in-situation 83
Freedom as a value 85
The problem of being authentic 87
vi Contents
Authenticity and intelligence 92
Authenticity and other people 95
Nietzsche on authenticity – regret nothing 97
Heidegger on authenticity – authentic being-towards-death 102
5 Existential Counselling 107
Bibliography 114
Further Reading 116
Index 117
Introduction
According to hard-line existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre, whatever
anyone does, ever, short of falling off a cliff, they choose to do it and
are responsible for having done it. You, therefore, have chosen to pick
up this book and open it. You are responsible for what you have done,
even if you did so in the most idle and seemingly thoughtless way.
Perhaps you are killing time in a bookshop while you wait for your
lover to arrive on the three o’clock train. You have no intention of buy-
ing this book because there are, after all, more important things to
spend your money on than books. Your lover will expect you to treat
them to a litre of designer coffee when that train gets in and Starbucks
isn’t cheap. Shortly, you will slip this book back on the shelf or the 3 for
the price of 2 table display with that tiny grimace that says to anyone
who might be spying on you, ‘I am in here to buy a book, but that one
isn’t what I’m looking for.’ Of course, I shouldn’t assume your actions
are so predictable. You have free will and will do as you choose. It is
because you have free will, as everyone does, that you have the poten-
tial to become a true existentialist, if you’re not one already that is.
Perhaps you are babysitting at a neighbour’s house and having
finally tucked their rug rat up in bed you have decided to check out
their book collection to see how uncultured they are. This book has
caught your eye because you know a lot or a little about existentialism,
because it is a slim volume whereas most books on existentialism you’ve
2 How to Be an Existentialist
ever seen are fat and heavy, because it has a practical sounding title
and not one that is totally obscure and pretentious like Being and Time
or Phenomenology of Perception, because it appears to offer you the
opportunity to become something quite mysterious and special, if only
you can be bothered to read it all.
Perhaps you haven’t picked this book up in an idle and thoughtless
way at all, but with a very clear purpose. Good. With that kind of deci-
sive attitude you are already well on your way to becoming a true exis-
tentialist. You ordered it on the internet the other day using that much
abused credit card and found it lying below the letter box a moment
ago. You’ve ripped open the bubble wrap lined envelope and dived
straight in. You are looking for direction in your life and to that end you
have decided to become an existentialist; to join that most peculiar and
misunderstood of cults, that society which has no membership fee
unless it is your sanity and your very soul, that exclusive club which is
comprised of the kind of independent minded people who never join
clubs or follow the crowd. The comedian Groucho Marx – not to be
confused with the philosopher Karl Marx, although equally intelligent –
once said, ‘I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a
member.’ Well, a true existentialist wouldn’t join a club that had
members.
Once all the preliminaries are out of the way the first thing this book
tries to do is explain in as simple and straightforward a way as possible
what existentialism is. There are hundreds of other books that explain
existentialism in far more philosophical detail, a few of which I have
written myself, so if you want to get really deep into the theory of exis-
tentialism and possibly never surface again, check out the further read-
ing section at the end of this book.
Having given it some thought, I’ve decided that a person can’t be an
existentialist unless he or she knows a bit about the philosophy or
world-view of existentialism. Knowing a bit or even a lot about existen-
tialism, however, will not, by itself, make you an existentialist. To be a
true existentialist you also have to try to live in a certain way, or at least
Introduction 3
adopt a certain attitude to life, death and other people. Being an exis-
tentialist is definitely not just a matter of knowing stuff. For this reason,
some of the most famous philosophers of existentialism were not in fact
true existentialists at all, because although they knew a lot of theory
they didn’t live the life; they didn’t practise what they preached.
Perhaps the main value of having a working knowledge of existen-
tialism as a philosophical theory is that you will hopefully understand
why it makes sense to live according to the existentialist world-view;
why it is a more honest, more dignified, even a more moral way to live
than other ways you might live.
The founders of Western philosophy, the Ancient Greeks, guys like
Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, thought that the most important philo-
sophical question in the universe, the question to which all other philo-
sophical questions lead, is the question, ‘How should I live?’ If you are
at all interested in becoming an existentialist then it is in fact the oldest
and most important question in philosophy, ‘How should I live?’, that
you are really interested in. Unlike a religion, existentialism does not
say, do this, don’t do that, eat this, don’t eat that, follow all these petty
rules and don’t dare question them. Instead, it describes in a coherent,
honest and uncompromising way what it is like to be a person passing
through this weird and wild world. It aims to show you what you really
are when all the nonsense and bullshit that is talked at you by scientists,
preachers, parents and school teachers is binned. It aims to reveal to
you that you are a fundamentally free being so that you can start living
accordingly; so that you can start asserting your individual freedom,
your true ‘nature’, rather than living as though you were a robot pro-
grammed by other people, social convention, religious dogma, morality,
guilt and all the other age old forces of oppression.
Existentialism is all about freedom and personal choice. It is all about
facing up to reality with honesty and courage and seeing things through
to the end, as well as being about putting words like choice in italics.
Becoming an existentialist requires a certain amount of effort. The real
difficulty is keeping it up, sustaining it, maintaining what existentialists
