One Beat More. Kevin Aho
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But what exactly are these questions? It is difficult to answer because the word “existentialism” does not refer to a unified movement or school of thought. There are philosophical and literary existentialists; there are existentialists who believe in God and others, like Nietzsche, who espouse the idea of God’s death; and there are some who believe in the existence of free will and others who think that this idea is a moral fiction. Indeed, the term wasn’t coined until 1943, long after the nineteenth-century Danish pioneer Søren Kierkegaard laid the conceptual groundwork for it. And of all the major twentieth-century players, only Beauvoir and her compatriot and partner Jean-Paul Sartre self-identified as existentialists. Other like-minded contemporaries disavowed the label for various reasons. Yet for all these disjointed views, there is nonetheless a common set of core principles that binds this diverse group of philosophers and writers together.
The first principle of existentialism is perhaps best captured by Sartre’s maxim that “existence precedes essence.” This pithy adage suggests that humans are distinct from other creatures in the sense that there is no fixed or pre-given “essence” that ultimately determines or makes us who we are. Humans are self-creating or self-making beings. Unlike my cat, I am not wholly determined by my instincts. I have the capacity to configure my existence through my own situated choices and actions. There is, for this reason, no definitive or complete account of who I am. No matter how old I am, I can always remake or reinterpret myself right up until the moment of death. Existence, then, is not a static thing; it is a dynamic process of becoming, of realizing who we are as we move through the stages of our lives. The existentialist, of course, isn’t denying that our inherited compulsions, our physical bodies, and our environmental circumstances limit and constrain us in certain ways. He or she is suggesting, rather, that we are not trapped or determined by these constraints and that what distinguishes us as self-conscious beings is our ability to care for, to reflect on, and to worry about our compulsions, our bodies, and our circumstances, to relate to them and give them meaning. This is why humans are, as Kierkegaard puts it, “a relation that relates to itself.”5 Our ability to relate to ourselves manifests itself in how we choose to interpret and make sense of the limitations and opportunities brought forth by the situation we’ve been thrown into. The fact that we are free to choose and create our existence in this way is what the existentialist means by “transcendence.”
But, insofar as I am self-conscious, I am also painfully aware that I did not choose to be born and that my being is always threatened by the possibility of non-being, by death. This leads to the second principle of existentialism, that the truth of our condition is revealed to us not by means of reason or philosophical reflection but by our emotions and our capacity to feel. When existentialists refer to feelings of “nausea,” “anxiety,” and “dread,” they are trying to capture the gnawing and inchoate sense we have that there is something wrong with us, that there is nothing that ultimately grounds or secures our lives, that there is no reason for us to be at all. Of course, the existentialist also understands that we spend much of our lives fleeing from this painful awareness. We cling to our comfortable routines and social roles; we distract ourselves with gossip and we numb ourselves with intoxicants, soft addictions, and fantasies of an afterlife, all in an effort to escape the feeling of our own groundlessness. But the existentialist makes it clear that the anguish we feel is not something we should recoil from, because it teaches us basic truths about who we are: it teaches us that we are temporal creatures, that our existence is in fact precarious, ambiguous, and uncertain. Understood this way, these unsettling feelings present opportunities for personal growth and transformation; they have the power to shake us out of self-deception and complacency, reminding us of what is truly at stake in our brief and precious lives.
And this leads to the third principle of existentialism, that the primary aim of existence is not to experience pleasure or material success. It isn’t even to be happy or to be a good person. The aim, rather, is to be authentic, to be true to oneself. This means that I should not just conform, or try to fit in with the socially prescribed roles and values of the day. I should commit to the values that give my life meaning and that matter to me as the unique individual that I am. But one of the keys to being true to oneself is to first recognize that there is no stable self or “I” to begin with, that the very idea, in Nietzsche’s words, of an enduring self “is a fiction”: one’s self “does not exist at all.”6 The first step on the path toward authenticity, then, is to be open and honest with ourselves about our own protean nature and the ambiguity of our condition.
In this book I put forth the idea that it is often easier to be inauthentic and to live in a state of self-deception when we’re young and healthy. Brimming with strength and vitality and facing a future wide open to possibilities, we feel secure and invulnerable, as if death wouldn’t apply to us. But, as we move into old age, it becomes increasingly difficult to live in denial. The reality of finitude presses in on us every day as our bodies weaken, as illness overtakes us, as friends and family members die. For the older person, as Beauvoir reminds us, “death is no longer a general, abstract fate: it is a personal event, an event that is near at hand.”7 I want to suggest that growing old may actually push us in the direction of authenticity, of facing and accepting the frailty of our existence, and in this way makes it possible to live with a renewed sense of urgency and purpose.
Of course, it is also important not to romanticize the aging process. It is filled with meaningless suffering and loss; it can leave us feeling abandoned, crippled by depression and filled with anger. But the point of this book is to unsettle the common view in our society that old age is some sort of wasting malady or affliction. As American psychologist James Hillman points out, the original meaning of the word “old” has nothing to do with deterioration and decline; it is formed on an Indo-European root that meant “to nourish” and “to be mature”—the same root we find in the Latin alere (“to feed, rear, nourish, nurse”) and alimentum (“nourishment”). To be old, in this light, is to be “fully nourished, grown up, and mature.”8 This may be why the elderly patients in my cardiac rehab appeared to be so different from me. Whereas I was panicked at the thought of coming face to face with death, they were more composed and mature. Nourished by their vast life experience, they seemed better prepared to integrate and accept death into their lives and cherish the limited time they had left.
In the following chapters I try to shed light on a simple idea: that our life is not diminished but enhanced when we are honest and accepting of ourselves as aging and dying. When Rilke refers to the “masterpiece of a long-ripened death,” he is pointing out the ways in which growing old can nourish us by releasing us from habituated patterns of self-deception and from the anxieties of denial and can help us come to an awareness of what genuinely matters in our lives. Aging, understood this way, is a long and slow instruction that teaches us the most important lesson: “to learn how to die,” how to recognize that the future is an illusion and that all that exists is the beauty and mystery of the present moment, a moment we all too often take for granted in the harried rush of youth and middle age.9 The autumn of life, then, can be viewed not just as a time of physical decline and infirmity but as one of existential renewal and awakening, a time that allows us to experience what Rilke calls “the ripe fruit of the here and now that has been seized and bitten into and will spread its indescribable taste to us.”10
Notes
1 1. John Leland, Happiness Is a Choice you Make: Lessons from a Year among the Oldest Old (New York: Sarah Crichton books, 2018), p. 29.
2 2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, translated by R. Polt. In C. Guignon and D. Pereboom (eds.), Existentialism: Basic Writings (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2001), aphorisms 276 and 382.
3 3. Albert Camus, The Rebel, translated by A. Bower (New York: Vintage Books, 1956), p. 72.
4 4. Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet, translated by R. Snell (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1962), p. 12.
5 5. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, translated by A. Hannay (New York: Penguin Books,