In the Odyssey, Odysseus is never more free, or more himself, than when he declares himself to be ‘Nobody’.
In Stephen Daldry’s 2002 film The Hours, Julianne Moore plays Laura Brown, a pregnant housewife living in 1950s California. She spends the morning baking a birthday cake for her husband, caring for her young son, and performing all the duties expected of a devoted wife and mother.
But all is not as it seems.
Beneath this picture of domestic contentment, something has begun to shift. Perhaps for the first time, Laura seems to experience her own life as though she were standing outside it. Later that day, she books into a hotel room. Alone at last, she lies on the bed reading Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. For a few precious hours, she escapes the life waiting for her outside the door.
Some years later, she vanishes without trace, abandoning her husband and young children and inventing a new life for herself in Canada. What she did is difficult to understand, or forgive. But it is not her decision that makes the story so compelling. It is the feeling that precedes it. Long before she acts, she has begun to look upon her own life as though it were not her own.
Many thoughtful people have experienced something similar.
Perhaps you are at a birthday party or sitting in a meeting when, suddenly, everything feels strange. You zoom out of the room and wonder, How did I end up here? Or perhaps it happens on the homeward commute or while changing a nappy in the middle of the night. The feeling lasts only a few seconds before necessity kicks in. But for that brief moment, you are no longer simply living your life. You are looking in on it.
It was precisely this human potential that fascinated the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980). For Sartre, human beings are unlike anything else in the natural world. A tree simply exists. A stone simply exists. But human beings are conscious not only of the world but also of themselves within it. We can step back from our own lives and ask questions that no other creature appears capable of asking: Who am I? How did I become this person? Whatnow?
This capacity for self-reflection is both our highest freedom and our heaviest burden—for we are never wholly identical with the life we happen to be living. Had things been only slightly different, we would be living an altogether different life. Indeed, there are countless lives that we could have lived, and could still live.
Most of the time, however, we do our utmost to forget this unsettling truth. Sartre called this mauvaise foi, or ‘bad faith’.
Bad faith is not ordinary lying. We do not consciously deceive ourselves. Rather, we come to identify with the roles we occupy. We begin to see ourselves as nothing more than a teacher, a doctor, a parent, a husband, or a wife, forgetting that these are only the lives we happen to be living. We begin to mistake our lives for ourselves.
One example of bad faith that Sartre gives is that of a waiter who does his best to conform to everything that a waiter ought to be. His every movement is a little too precise; his every smile, a little too practised. He is trying so hard to be a waiter that he forgets that he is first a free human being who happens to be waiting tables.
When I was a junior doctor, I too played at being a doctor—partly because it was what everyone expected, and what many of my patients needed. But because I had read Sartre as a teenager, I could sometimes catch myself doing it.
Like Laura Brown, I would suddenly become aware that my role was only a role. Laura had not ceased to love her husband or her son, nor had she forgotten her responsibilities towards them. But she could no longer identify with the life that she happened to be living. A gap had opened up between herself and her life.
Most people expend a great deal of effort trying to close that gap. They tell themselves that they have no real choice, that it is too late to change, that people depend on them, or that this is simply who they are. Often these rationalisations contain a good deal of truth. We are born into circumstances that we cannot simply wish away, and we acquire obligations that we cannot lightly discard.
Still, there is a world of difference between acknowledging our constraints and denying our freedom altogether. The first is maturity. The second is bad faith.
For Sartre, freedom does not mean doing whatever we feel like doing. Laura Brown is not some heroine of liberation. Her story is tragic because freedom and responsibility so often pull in opposite directions. Sartre’s point is not that we should walk away from our commitments whenever they become alien or burdensome, but that we should not simply endure them as though we had no choice in the matter.
That is why those fleeting moments of estrangement matter. When you suddenly wonder, How did I end up here?, you are not necessarily having a crisis. You are opening a window of choice and freedom.
We are something more than the lives we have cornered ourselves into. We could have been a million different people—and still could.
Rebels on the run. Hume leading Rousseau to safety in England.
Rousseau’s ideas on freedom, education, inequality, and the corrupting influence of civilisation transformed politics, philosophy, and literature, inspiring figures from Immanuel Kant to the leaders of the French Revolution. Yet the man who urged humanity to return to nature lived a life marked by poverty, exile, and growing paranoia. Few thinkers have had so great an influence while living such a turbulent—and scandalous—life.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born on 28 June 1712 in the Republic of Geneva, more precisely, at 40 Grand-Rue, which still stands on the hill of Geneva’s quaint old town. The French reformer Jean Calvin had arrived in Geneva in 1536, a few months after the city had turned to Protestantism and shaken off the dukes of Savoy. Surrounded by Catholic states, the self-governing city became a haven for Protestant refugees drawn to Calvin’s teachings, and came to be known as the Protestant Rome.
Although he once forfeited his Genevan citizenship (in 1728, at the age of sixteen, for converting to Roman Catholicism) and once renounced it (in 1763, after Geneva condemned the Social Contract and Emile, leading to a warrant for his arrest), Rousseau always pointedly signed his books, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Citoyen de Genève [Citizen of Geneva]. His political thought and religious puritanism are deeply rooted in the Cité de Calvin (or Kalvingrad, as locals still call it, on account of Calvin’s austerity), which he held up as a foil to frivolous Paris and absolutist France.
Rousseau’s father, the watchmaker Isaac Rousseau, also had strong Republican sympathies. His mother Suzanne had been raised by her uncle Samuel Bernard, a Calvinist preacher, and had come with a handsome dowry—hence the house on the Grand-Rue. Only three months after the birth of their first child, Isaac left for Constantinople to serve as watchmaker to the sultan (or so he claimed). He returned after a full six years, shortly after Suzanne’s live-in mother had died and Suzanne had come into 10,000 florins. Soon after his return, Jean-Jacques was born.
Childhood in Geneva
A few days after giving birth to Jean-Jacques, Suzanne died from puerperal fever (a postpartum infection). Isaac’s younger sister moved in to help with the children, and Rousseau grew close to his aunt. From the age of six, he, together with his father, began reading a collection of classics left by Samuel Bernard. Plutarch, who emphasised character over deeds, made the deepest impression on him. Although (or because) he did not receive a formal education, Rousseau rose into a master of French prose.
At the age of ten, Jean-Jacques’s father entered a quarrel and fled to nearby Nyon (then administered by Berne), taking his sister with him. Jean-Jacques and his brother were handed over to the Bernards. The Bernards sent Jean-Jacques and his cousin Abraham Bernard to live with the Calvinist minister Lambercier and his sister Gabrielle in Bossey, a village just outside the city walls, where Jean-Jacques discovered a passion for nature.
At the age of thirteen, Jean-Jacques was sent back to Geneva to work as an apprentice, first to a notary and then to an engraver who frequently beat him. At the age of sixteen, he ran away after returning from a walk and finding that the city gates had been locked.
Madame de Warens
On the run in Savoie, he found shelter with a Catholic priest. The priest put him onto the attractive Françoise-Louise de Warens, who had separated from her husband, converted to Catholicism, and become a proselytiser in the pay of Victor Amadeus II of Savoy (since 1720, Piedmont-Sardinia). Completely smitten, Rousseau completed his conversion to Catholicism in the Piedmont-Sardinia capital of Turin, where he supported himself by working as a footman and secretary to an ailing countess. After the countess died, he pocketed a pink and silver ribbon, which was discovered in his room. He blamed a cook, Marion, who of course denied it. The Count de la Roque dismissed them both with the prophetic words, ‘The conscience of the guilty will avenge the innocent.’
At the age of twenty, Rousseau returned to Madame de Warens in Chambéry, and their relationship turned sexual. Although Warens was also intimate with her household steward, he considered it the greatest love of his life. He began to call her Maman, and she him Mon petit. So far, so French.
In those years, he struggled to establish himself and spent a year travelling. He went mostly on foot, meeting people from all walks of life. When he returned to Warens, he pursued his love of music and read deeply. But Warens could no longer support him, so, at the age of twenty-seven, he took a post as a tutor in Lyon, which gave him the opportunity to reflect on pedagogy.
The Paris Years: The Greatest Scandal of All
With Warens growing cold on him, in 1742, at the age of thirty, Rousseau moved to Paris to present a new system of musical notation to the Académie des Sciences. The Académie praised his mastery of the subject but found his system impractical and rejected it. In 1743, his Enlightenment connections led him to a job as secretary to the French ambassador in Venice. He revelled in the superior Italian music, but did not get on with the ambassador and, the following year, returned to Paris.
He met a laundry girl, Thérèse Levasseur, who would become his life companion and, in time, his wife. In 1746, she bore the first of their five illegitimate children. All five were immediately handed to a foundling hospital, where the chances of surviving into adulthood would have been slim. Later, Voltaire would anonymously publish a pamphlet to expose this secret and discredit Rousseau as a moral and educational authority. Rousseau took in Thérèse and her mother to live with him as servants, and assumed the burden of supporting her large and feckless family.
Rousseau wrote ballets, with little success. He began to spend a lot of time with Diderot, Condillac, and d’Alembert, and became involved with Diderot’s brainchild, the Encyclopédie, to which he contributed almost four hundred articles on politics and music. The Encyclopédie, a pillar of the Enlightenment, was denounced by both the king and the Church.
The Paris Years: The First Discourse and the King’s Pension
In 1749, Diderot was imprisoned in Vincennes for his Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who Can See. While walking to Vincennes to visit him, Rousseau read an announcement in the Mercure de France for the Dijon Academy’s essay contest, on the question, ‘Has the restoration of the sciences and arts contributed to the purification of morals?’ This led to the radical and distinctly un-Enlightened idea that the arts and sciences had led to the moral degeneration of man, who began as moral and vigorous—or, at least, uncorrupted by vanity, superficiality, inauthenticity, luxury, and inequality. Whereas the spirited Spartans set all of Asia trembling, the sophisticated and self-indulgent Sybarites let themselves be overrun by a bunch of peasants. In his Confessions, Rousseau wrote, ‘Within an instant of reading this [advertisement], I saw another universe and became another man.’ With his prize-winning essay, Discourse on the Arts and Sciences (the ‘First Discourse’), Rousseau rose into a cause célèbre.
In 1752, Rousseau wrote a simple, Italian-inspired one-act opera, Le Devin du village, which premiered at the royal court at Fontainebleau. The king liked it enough to offer him a pension, which he declined—gaining further notoriety as ‘the man who had refused a king’s pension’.
Return to Geneva and the Second Discourse
In 1754, Rousseau returned to Geneva, converted back to Calvinism, and had his Genevan citizenship restored. He embraced a personal, natural religion, or ‘religion of the heart’, which, together with his belief in the corrupting influence of civilisation, set him apart from the other Encyclopédistes, who championed reason and progress, and atheism.
In 1755, he completed his second major work, the Discourse on Inequality (the ‘Second Discourse’), in which he painted a rosy picture of man in the original ‘state of nature’ and argued that private property is the original source and basis of all inequality and misery. The ‘social contract’ was essentially a conspiracy by the rich to legitimise their ownership and enslave the masses. Though it is impossible to return to the state of nature, it is possible to correct some of the errors of civilisation. When Voltaire received his copy, he wrote back to Rousseau: ‘No one has ever employed so much intellect to persuade men to be beasts. In reading your work one is seized with a desire to walk on all fours.’
Madame d’Epinay, Sophie d’Houdetot, and Julie
The saloniste Madame d’Epinay, having noticed the second discourse, offered Rousseau a pension together with a cottage on her estate in Montmorency. He refused the pension but moved into the cottage with Thérèse and her mother. He resented being in the keep of Madame d’Epinay and soured things by falling head over heels for her cousin and sister-in-law, Sophie d’Houdetot. He came to believe that there was a plot against him and wrote a series of letters to the likes of Diderot and Hume that damaged his reputation. In 1757, he moved with Thérèse into a villa on the nearby estate of the duc de Luxembourg, who became his patron. His bestselling novel, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761), is inspired by his liaisons with d’Houdetot and Warens.
The Social Contract and Emile
After Julie, Rousseau turned his pen to his two most acclaimed works, the Social Contract and Emile. In the Social Contract, which begins with the famous sentence, ‘Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,’ Rousseau sets out how to create a just state in which we may recover some of our natural freedom and goodness. Only the general will [volonté générale], which aims at the common good of a people, has the right to legislate. Although Rousseau advocated for direct democracy, the general will need not coincide with the majority vote if citizens are misinformed or motivated by self-interest rather than the common good. The general will, which is the sovereign power, can only legislate laws that apply equally to all, and must be separate from the executive power, which deals with matters of application of the law. Only under the general will can the people be said to be freely obeying themselves.
In Emile, Rousseau, an autodidact with no formal education, set out a system of education which might preserve the individual’s innate vigour and morality. Having encouraged the child to become active, curious, and critical, it remains, in adolescence, to make him into a loving and feeling being, ‘to perfect reason by sentiment’. Emile, however, is aimed exclusively at wealthy orphan boys with a dedicated, live-in tutor (orphan, to remove the corrupting influence of the parents). In the section on Emile’s female counterpart Sophie, Rousseau states that ladies should be ‘passive and weak’ and ‘put up little resistance’. Book IV contains the incendiary ‘Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar’, in which the vicar’s argument leads to natural religion, that is, to an unmediated, self-discovered relationship with a creator God. In a letter, Voltaire deemed Emile ‘a hodgepodge of a silly wet nurse in four volumes, with forty pages against Christianity, among the boldest ever known’ [C’est un fatras d’une sotte nourrice en quatre tomes, avec une quarantaine de pages contre le christianisme, des plus hardies qu’on ait jamais écrites].
On the Run
The Social Contract and Emile were banned from both France and Geneva, with warrants issued for Rousseau’s arrest. Over the next few years, Rousseau moved from place to place until his reputation caught up with him. For a time, he lived on an island on Lake Biel, where no one could throw stones at his windows. Frederick the Great, on principle rather than from shared conviction, offered him protection and assistance. His nemesis Voltaire invited him in vain to Ferney (nowadays, Ferney-Voltaire) on the Geneva border, where renegade writers could border hop to escape the authorities.
In 1766, Rousseau travelled to England with Hume. Tasked with escorting Thérèse to England, Boswell seduced her en route, with Thérèse telling him, ‘Don’t imagine you’re a better lover than Rousseau.’ Perhaps understandably, Rousseau’s paranoia intensified, and he began to suspect Hume of being at the centre of a plot to ridicule him. The two men fell out when Hume, seeking to protect his reputation, published an account of the whole affair.
Final Years
Rousseau returned to France in 1767 under an assumed name, and spent the next three years in paranoid retreat. He married Thérèse, practised botany, and wrote his disarmingly candid Confessions, published posthumously in 1782.
He died in 1778, at the age of sixty-six, from what was recorded as apoplexy (some said suicide). He was buried at midnight by torchlight on the île des Peupliers on the estate of the marquis de Girardin in Ermenonville. In 1794, his remains were moved to the Panthéon and placed next to those of… Voltaire.
Despite his love of hosting, conversation, and fine dining, Kant’s house was unadorned and austere. He had only one picture, which hung above his bureau. This picture was of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who was only twelve years older than him.
In his Remarks on the Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764),Kant acknowledges his debt to Rousseau, who, he says, ‘set him right’:
I feel a consuming thirst for knowledge, and a restless passion to advance in it… There was a time when I thought this alone could constitute the honour of mankind, and I despised the common man who knows nothing. Rousseau set me right. This blind prejudice vanishes; I learn to respect human beings, and I should consider myself far more useless than the common labourer if I did not believe that this consideration could impart a value to all others in order to establish the rights of humanity.
Rousseau had taught Kant to judge people by their moral worth, rather than their education and standing—a lesson that would have resonated with Kant’s memory of his mother.
Rousseau’s influence also extended to Kant’s moral philosophy. If for Rousseau, it is by following the general will that we can be said to be free, for Kant, it is by obeying those moral laws that we would will as universal laws. Moral laws that we would will as universal laws are given not by our individual will but by our rational will, which we have in common with all other rational beings. We often experience this dichotomy in our minds: this is what I selfishly or frivolously want to do, and this is what I truly ought to do—because I want to live in the kind of society that abides by this principle, and would resent it if other people behaved in such a selfish, thoughtless way. To conform to the universal law is not to be a slave; on the contrary, it is to follow reason and free ourselves from our irrational and disordered appetites. For Kant, this capacity to overrule our individual will lies at the heart of our special dignity.
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If you want to know what happened next, read The German Greeks, which tells the story of how Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and others responded to the philosophical revolution that Rousseau helped to create.
Aristippus of Cyrene believed that pleasure is best enjoyed by those who remain its master.
History has largely forgotten Aristippus of Cyrene (c. 435-c. 356 BCE). It shouldn’t have. A disciple of Socrates and the founder of the Cyrenaic school, he was the original hedonist— far more radical than the better-known Epicurus (341-270 BCE). He was also one of antiquity’s sharpest wits, perhaps even its funniest philosopher. Yet to dismiss Aristippus as funny but shallow would be to miss the point entirely. His philosophy is far deeper—and far more demanding—than first appears.
Before we turn to his celebrated wit, it is worth pausing over philosophy itself.
Ancient philosophy, for all its theoretical underpinnings, was above all an art of living, which aimed, through self-transformation, at controlling the passions, relieving suffering, and attaining wisdom. Philosophy was to the soul as medicine is to the body, and the philosopher, first and foremost, a healer of the soul. In the words of the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero, ‘Unless the soul is cured, which cannot be done without philosophy, there will be no end to our miseries.’ According to the Roman Stoic Musonius Rufus, ‘We must live like doctors and be continually treating ourselves with reason.’ For the Greeks and Romans, philosophy was not merely something to discuss, but something to be lived.
The conception of philosophy as therapy can be traced back to Socrates. After his death by hemlock in 399 BCE, his closest students each carried away a different aspect of his teaching. Plato inherited his theoretical side and founded the Academy. Antisthenes embraced his ethic of self-sufficiency and laid the foundations for Cynicism. Aristippus, by contrast, established the Cyrenaic school, which taught that the only intrinsic good is pleasure—especially the vivid, immediate pleasures of the present moment.
The Philosophy of Pleasure
Aristippus emphasised present and physical pleasures over distant hopes or abstract ideals. For Aristippus and his followers, pleasure meant not merely the absence of pain but positively making the most of every moment.
Aristippus first encountered Socrates while visiting Athens for the Olympic Games. Captivated by the philosopher, he remained in the city and became one of his closest followers. Yet he was never content merely to imitate his master. Once, he had the temerity to tell Socrates that he preferred living in Athens because it spared him the politics of his native Cyrene—the sort of remark that alienated fellow Socratics such as Plato and Xenophon, who regarded civic duty as an obligation rather than a burden.
Aristippus was also the first of Socrates’ followers to take money for teaching. When he demanded five hundred drachmas from a man for tutoring his son, the man protested, ‘For that much money, I could buy a slave!’ ‘Go ahead,’ replied Aristippus. ‘Then you’ll have two.’
Many stories are told of Aristippus, and even if some are later inventions, they capture something essential about the man.
One day, Diogenes the Cynic was washing the dirt from his vegetables when he saw Aristippus passing by. ‘Had you learnt to make these your diet,’ called Diogenes, ‘you would have no need to pay court to kings.’ ‘And you, Diogenes, had you learnt to associate with men, you would have no need to wash vegetables.’
When someone chided him for his extravagant tastes, he retorted, ‘Wouldn’t you have bought this if you could have got it for three obols? Very well then, it is no longer I who am a lover of pleasure, but you who are a lover of money.’
When someone remarked that philosophers were always to be found at the doors of rich men, he replied, ‘Physicians are always calling on the sick, but no one would therefore rather be sick than be a physician.’
When Dionysius I, the tyrant of Syracuse, asked why he had come to his court, Aristippus answered, ‘When I needed wisdom, I went to Socrates; but now that I am in need of money, I come to you.’
On another occasion, Dionysius spat in his face. When someone reproached him for enduring such an insult, Aristippus remarked, ‘If fishermen are prepared to be drenched in seawater in order to catch a gudgeon, should I not be prepared to be sprayed with spittle in order to take a blenny?’
When Dionysius gave him his choice of three courtesans, Aristippus carried off all three, explaining, ‘Paris paid dearly for preferring one out of three.’
For many years he was intimate with the celebrated courtesan Lais of Corinth, reputedly the most beautiful woman in Greece. Yet he maintained, ‘I possess Lais, but I am not possessed by her.’
The Hidden Depths of Aristippus
By now, Aristippus might seem little more than a witty opportunist devoted to luxury and pleasure. But appearances can be deceptive.
Aristippus was far from amoral. He simply believed that we ought to make the most of every situation. When criticised for his love of pleasure, he replied, ‘It is not abstinence from pleasures that is best, but mastery over them without ever being worsted.’ Pleasure, in other words, is not our master; we are.
One day, as he entered the house of a courtesan, one of the young men with him blushed. Seeing this, he said, ‘It is not going in that is shameful, but being unable to come out.’
Vitruvius, in his treatise on architecture, recounts the story of Aristippus’ shipwreck. Cast ashore on Rhodes, Aristippus made straight for the gymnasium, where he spoke with such eloquence that the Rhodians provided for all his needs. When his companions later prepared to return home and asked what message they should carry back, he bid them tell their children to acquire possessions that could swim with them even out of a shipwreck.
Despite having two sons, Aristippus appointed his daughter Arete to succeed him as head of the Cyrenaic school. Her own son, Aristippus the Younger, would later formalise the principles of Cyrenaicism.
Several later Cyrenaics departed from Aristippus’ original teaching. Theodorus the Atheist (c. 340–c. 250 BCE) placed greater emphasis on mental than physical pleasures, identifying the good with prudence and justice. Hegesias of Cyrene (fl. 290 BCE), perhaps influenced by Buddhist missionaries sent out by Ashoka the Great, argued that happiness is unattainable and that the true goal of life is merely the avoidance of pain and distress. According to Cicero, his book Death by Starvation persuaded so many people that death was preferable to life that Ptolemy II Philadelphus banned him from teaching in Alexandria.
A Philosopher for Our Time
Within little more than a century, the Cyrenaic school had been eclipsed by Epicureanism. Yet Aristippus deserves to be rescued.
Contrary to the caricature, Aristippus did not teach people to become slaves to pleasure. He taught them never to become slaves to anything. He could enjoy wealth without depending on it, luxury without being possessed by it, and the company of tyrants without surrendering his independence. Pleasure, for Aristippus, was never an excuse for self-indulgence. It was a test of self-mastery.
In an age that often swings between thoughtless excess and puritanical self-denial, Aristippus still has something important to teach us. Freedom lies neither in rejecting pleasure nor in chasing it blindly, but in remaining its master. His life looked like a celebration of pleasure. His philosophy was really about freedom.
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If you enjoyed this article, you might also enjoy The Gang of Three, the story of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle—and how they laid the foundations of Western philosophy.
Inauthenticity involves pretending to be something other than one is and so, by implication, casting off the freedom to create, express, and fulfil one’s own self. Inauthenticity is often reinforced by sociocultural forces such as peer pressure and advertising, and is motivated by the subconscious desires to fit in, avoid criticism, and minimise or put off the existential anxiety associated with choice and responsibility. Examples include the teenager who acts ‘cool’, the person who takes an interest in something because others do, and the person who gets married because he has arrived at the ripe old age of 30, 35, or 40 years old.
The 20th century philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre calls such inauthenticity mauvaise foie, ‘bad faith’. His paradigmatic example of bad faith is that of a waiter who does his utmost to conform to the archetype of the waiter, that is, to everything that a waiter should or is expected to be. For Sartre, the waiter’s exaggerated behaviour is evidence that he is play-acting at being a waiter, an automaton whose essence is to be a waiter. By sticking with the safe, easy, default ‘choice’ and failing to entertain or even recognise the multitude of other choices that are open to him, the waiter places himself at the mercy of his external circumstances. In this important respect, he is more akin to an object – ‘a waiter’ – than to a conscious human being who is able to transcend his existence to give shape to his essence. As Freud himself commented in his book, Civilization and its Discontents, ‘Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.’
The concept of authenticity does not begin with Sartre or Freud, and stretches at least as far back as Plato. In the Greater Alcibiades, Socrates asks a young and foolish Alcibiades how one is to go about gaining self-knowledge. Socrates maintains that, if one were to say to the eye, ‘See yourself,’ the eye should look into a mirror to see itself. Since the pupil of the eye is just like a mirror, the eye could see itself by looking into an eye. Similarly, the soul can see itself by looking into the soul, and particularly into that part of the soul which has most to do with wisdom and which is therefore most akin to the divine. Self-knowledge, Socrates concludes, is, in fact, no other than wisdom; unless Alcibiades finds wisdom, he will never be able to know his own good and evil, nor that of others, nor the affairs of states. If Alcibiades were to become a statesman – as indeed he intends – without first having found wisdom, he would fall into error and be miserable, and make everybody else miserable too. What is more, he who is not wise cannot be happy, and it is better for such a person to be commanded by a superior in wisdom; since that which is better is also more becoming, slavery is more becoming to such a person. Socrates’ conclusions may seem abhorrent to modern sensitivities, but it does stand to reason that the person who unconsciously defines himself according to the likes and expectations of others and, by extension, of society also condemns himself to by far the most dishonourable kind of slavery, the slavery of the mind.
I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet,
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.
…
– William Blake, London
As noted by the 20th century psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm, the authentic person does not necessarily need to resemble some kind of freak outsider. If a person engages in a frank and thorough appraisal of the universal and personal implications of the prevailing social norms and then decides to adopt some or most of them en toute connaissance de cause, then he cannot be taxed with inauthenticity. Conversely, it should not be assumed that every eccentric is an authentic. Genuine authenticity lies in the method and not in the madness.
As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become. – Sartre
The 20th century philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre called it ‘bad faith’ (mauvaise foi), the habit that people have of deceiving themselves into thinking that they do not have the freedom to make choices for fear of the potential consequences of making a choice. By sticking with the safe, easy, default ‘choice’ and failing to recognise the multitude of other choices that are available to him, a person places himself at the mercy of the circumstances in which he happens to find himself. Thus, the person is more akin to an object than to a conscious human being, or, in Sartrean terminology, more akin to a ‘being–in–itself’ than to a ‘being–for–itself’. People may pretend to themselves that they do not have the freedom to make choices by pursuing pragmatic concerns and adopting social roles and value systems that are alien to their nature as conscious human beings. However, to do so is in itself to make a choice, and thereby to acknowledge their freedom as conscious human beings.
Examples
One example of bad faith that Sartre gives is that of a waiter who does his best to conform to everything that a waiter should be. For Sartre, the waiter’s exaggerated behaviour is evidence that he is play-acting at being a waiter, an automaton whose essence is to be a waiter. However, in order to play-act at being a waiter, the waiter must at some level be aware that he is not in fact a waiter, but a conscious human being who is deceiving himself that he is a waiter. Another example of bad faith that Sartre gives is that of a young woman on a first date. The young woman’s date compliments her on her physical appearance, but she ignores the obvious sexual connotations of his compliment and chooses instead to direct the compliment at herself as a conscious human being. He then takes her hand, but she neither takes it nor rejects it. Instead, she lets her hand rest indifferently in his so as to buy time and delay having to make a choice about accepting or rejecting his advances. Whereas she chooses to treat his compliment as being unrelated to her body, she chooses to treat her hand (which is a part of her body) as an object, thereby acknowledging her freedom to make choices.
Implications
For Sartre, people may pretend to themselves that they do not have the freedom to make choices, but they cannot pretend to themselves that they are not themselves, that is, conscious human beings who actually have little or nothing to do with their pragmatic concerns, social roles, and value systems. In pursuing such and such pragmatic concerns or adopting such and such social roles and such and such value systems, a person may pretend to himself that he does not have the freedom to make choices, but to do so is in itself to make a choice, namely, the choice of pretending to himself that he does not have the freedom to make choices. Man, Sartre concludes, is condemned to be free.
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