Audiobook Review: No Excuses

No Excuses: Existentialism and the Meaning of Life
by Professor Robert C. Solomon

"I could make a career of being blue / I could dress in black and read Camus"

"I Don't Want to Get Over You"
by the Magnetic Fields

Existentialism has a bad and inaccurate reputation as the sort of downer lit that only depressed Frenchmen and Gen Xers played by Ethan Hawke-degger would succumb to embrace. It is by nature a shifty term and does not allow easy, succinct definition, but on a very general level it is the grasping at truth and life's meaning from a first person, subjective viewpoint, valuing individual experience over positivistic or rational objective norms. The philosophy as generally put forth therefore promotes the freedom of the individual, and this is where Solomon gets his title - the individual is free and therefore completely responsible, so there is, as Tom Hanks once said, no crying in post WWII Europe. As an additional bonus, because your life and your actions can only be interpreted vis a vis your experience, it is completely up to you to create (okay, maybe a little too far, let's say "choose among several culturally supplied alternatives") meaning in your world. No one is going to tell you what is important, or rather, lots of people are going to tell you, but the onus is on you to decide and act accordingly.

Existentialism is really an effort at trying to make sense, or at least give something approaching sensible meaning, to a world considered to be de facto indifferent and absurd. And there's the rub, and why it carries its bad rep. Defining your existence in the face of an indifferent world is the big shadow that looms over Existentialism - you have to embrace truth in dealing with the nature of your own existence, and part of embracing this truth involves anxiety and direct confrontation of not only your own death but also the other scary realities that you are able to perceive subjectively - others' deaths, wars, starvation, torture, etc. No excuses means no excuses, and the freedom the existentialists wield is a double-edged sword - it demands an anti-head-in-the sand stance from the individual, and as such, I'm relatively certain, scares the crap out of the average person. Come to think of it, absurd and indifferent universe stands alone in its ability to scare the crap out of average people. I am thoroughly convinced that the fear of a cold desolate world that couldn't care less whether you live, die, get promotions or buckle your safety belt is a truth that many people can't handle, and when they see the ambitious existentialist embracing just those truths, they get off a lot easier by labeling them "weird and depressed" than by trying to understand what the topic is all about. This is not to say that all is doom and gloom - and it's also not to say that there haven't been a fair number of dark-dressed teenagers who have taken up the light-less torch more than the positive aspects of existentialism. This is just to say that if you are going to question the true reality of your own existence from your own perspective, you have to remove any kind of prescreening filter that tries to preserve a tidy, by definition optimistic view of the world - you have to be ready to see bad things, and you certainly cannot pretend they are not there. That is a lot to ask of anyone, and it is not entirely surprising that people tend to keep their comfortable world-views intact by just calling the existentialists names.

It is a lot to ask, and that should be stressed - I think the type of person who undertakes an existential view is demonstrating a large act of bravery at baseline. It's generally, though, a complicit act of bravery - one that stems from an unwilling bent toward knowing, as close as one can, a true truth, and being implicitly dissatisfied with anything less. You must embrace the whole to get at the naked truth - and this necessitates losing that filter of hope, the "I sure hope the truth makes me happy" filter. Not fun.

But, for those who make it through - it entails what Solomon calls "a refreshing sense of empowerment." YOU are in charge - there is no third person meaning to this shebang, so YOU are the one who calls those particular shots. YOU also have to accept responsibility for everything you do and don't do - that is the price of swimming as close to the truth as you can get. SO there is a rather mind-blowing reward to be gained from this delving into the self, even if it does come with a staggering and terrifying experience at its cost. It's frightfully easy to turn this into some kind of Marines recruiting propaganda - do you have what it takes? Can you step up and join the group that not only defines its existence, its meaning, and also embraces rather than running from all that carries with it? Can you run with a life of passion in the rational age, stand outside of the herd and blaze your own trail? Army of one? Or something?!?!

Solomon doesn't turn this into a tent revival - he just presents the different philosophers who have been labeled existentialist, speaks about their works and views and tries to dig through a lot of the entanglement that has occurred one, because of the aforementioned bad rap, and two, because the existentialists themselves were not always entirely clear what they were getting at. Some even disowned their early works in later life, making the entire endeavor very ambiguous. You could give whole courses on the writings of any one of these men, and so the survey course not surprisingly suffers under its own weight of being a survey course - very surface takes on many concepts. That is really the only weakness, though - Solomon chose a great, broad selection of works and eras, tied the philosophers to groups before and after and gave excellent outline style summaries of the novels and works that serve as excellent guides. He is also a great, fluid lecturer, and his style flows excellently - so much so that I often got the impression he was just chatting off the top of his head. Really a great lecture series; for a tap into the world of existentialism, I couldn't recommend it more.

In terms of an experience, though, the lectures are even better than that. For me, it was not just the empowerment aspect - which is great - but the fact that in years of contemplation of my own self and actions and callings and desires and everything else that tears through my brain on a minutely basis, I have all but anticipated all of the arguments put forth here. So not only do I come out empowered, but come out feeling vindicated, that these are very real problems that exist. And pretending they don't, trying to embrace the world in some kind of picket-fence way that does not acknowledge our existential fragility, the horrors that go on as well as the joys, is just the kind of chicken head-in-the-sand take that Existentialism (and I, for that matter) abhor. It is not "weird' or "depressed" to ask more of humans that they appear to be currently giving - it is demanded by some of our best philosophers. So I'm going to keep on that track; even in the face of an absurd, indifferent world, I am going to keep demanding what I want from it. If that is my own personal boulder to roll up the mountain every morning, then, well, that is absolutely how it goes. I wouldn't have it any other way.