“Life begins on the other side of despair”

It doesn’t matter where you are from, how old you are, what you do or what you entertain yourself with. It almost doesn’t matter how you think. Most likely the word “despair” causes you an automatic rejection. Normal, right? In life there are good sensations, others that are debatable, and there are those that are undesirable no matter how you look at them. Despair, anguish, is part of the latter because no one in their right mind would choose despair over hope.

No?

If we are clear about the above, why the hell in 1943 did the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartreone of the most prestigious minds of the 20th century, had Orestes pronounce the next words in his theater work The flies?

“Human life begins on the other side of despair.”

The question is timely because, unlike what happens in most literary works, here it does not seem that it is the character who speaks to us. If we take into account Sartre’s philosophy, in this case it is not unreasonable to think that it’s himself who moves Orestes’ lips to express his opinion.

Did Sartre really believe that ‘despair’ is the door to life?

Isn’t that a discouraging and gloomy panorama?

Sartre and existentialism

Before talking about how Sartre thought, it is worth knowing who Sartre was, one of the lighthouses of Western philosophy of the 20th century. Thinker, novelist, playwright, critic and political activist, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) is remembered above all for being one of the great exponents of existentialism. Without it it is difficult to understand the intellectual panorama of 20th century Europe and figures of the stature of Soren Kierkegaard, Lev Chestov, Albert Camus either Martin Heidegger.

Although its seams are wide and there are important differences between authors, basically existentialism as conceived by Sartre (atheistic existentialism) is based on a premise: humans are born without a predefined purpose. We are not toasters, cars or TVs, objects created based on a concept and with a specific purpose. Nor are we the work of a superior “craftsman.”

Unlike what happens with what we make as men, objects in which the “essence” is prior to the “existence”, in our case it is the existence that precedes the essence. What does that mean? “That man begins by existing, finds himself, emerges in the world, and then defines himself,” the French thinker clarifies in one of his key works, Existentialism is a humanism.

“Man, as the existentialist conceives him, if he is not definable, it is because he begins by being nothing. He will only be later, and he will be as he has been made. Thus, then, there is no human nature, because there is no God to conceive it,” Sartre continuesand insists: “Man is nothing other than what he makes himself”, a creature “condemned to be free.” We have not chosen to be here. We have not created ourselves. And yet we are responsible for everything we do.

It is not lost on Sartre that this scenario can lead to “anguish”, a feeling of helplessness and despair. He is not the only philosopher who addresses the topic (Heidegger and Kierkegaard also did), although it is true that the Frenchman’s work helps us understand how important sensation is.

for him Anguish is nothing other than “the awareness of being one’s own future in the way of not being one”, an overwhelming feeling in the face of the range of possibilities that are open to man, radical freedom and lack of answers.

This approach leaves behind an idea that is as fascinating as it is overwhelming: man is born with a huge challenge aheadthe challenge of living authentically, assuming your freedom, choosing your course, giving meaning to yourself and making decisions that will have consequences for your entire environment.

There is no destination. There are no excuses. It depends on us. “Man will only be afterwards and will be as he has been made. It is nothing other than what he makes himself. If it precedes the essence, man is responsible for what he is”, warns us.

“(Fyodor) Dostoyevsky writes: ‘If God did not exist, everything would be permitted.’ This is the starting point of existentialism. In fact, everything is permitted if God does not exist and, consequently, man is abandoned, because he finds neither in himself nor outside himself a possibility of clinging.

“First of all, it finds no excuses. If existence precedes essence, the reference to a given and fixed human nature can never be explained. In other words, there is no determinism, man is free, freedom.”

“The first step of existentialism is to put every man in possession of what he is and to place upon him the total responsibility for his existence. And when we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that man is responsible for his strict individuality, but that he is responsible for all men,” Sartre continues. Understanding this enormous responsibility and all its implications generates anxiety, but that has no why be negative.

The reason?

As Orestes proclaims in his dialogue of the The flies This hopelessness does not have to be frustrating or plunge us into inaction. On the contrary. “It is the very condition of their action because this means that they face a plurality of possibilities and, when they choose one, they realize that it only has value because it has been chosen,” illustrates the philosopher, drawing a parallel with the anguish that a general feels when he decides something that will affect the lives of his soldiers.

“existentialism is an optimism, a doctrine of action,” claims Sartre, who ends his essay with a warning: those who use despair to attack it do so by “confusing their own feeling with ours.”

It may sound like an old-fashioned lesson (Sartre died in 1980), but his words resonate strongly in an era in which we live hyperconnected, among related ephemera in which the need to search for meaning, identity and authenticity is especially felt. From the Paris of the 1940s, Sartre gives us the answer: “Before you live, life is nothing. It is up to you to give it meaning and value is nothing other than this meaning that you choose.” On the path to achieving it, despair can be the threshold, the point at which we assume that meanings will not come from outside.

Images | Wikipedia and Majestic Lukas (Unsplash)

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