Disobedience Succeeds Essence

by Steve Neumann

There is much that life esteems more highly than life itself... — Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Jean-Paul Sartre distilled his existentialism into the maxim “existence precedes essence.” He meant that the human being has no predetermined nature, divinely-ordained or otherwise, and that each human being is solely responsible for defining herself. Sartre said that the first principle of (his) existentialism is that “man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.”

University of Washington psychology professor David Barash recently published a nice meditation on the notes of consonance between evolution and existentialism in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Barash ultimately concludes that a 

...philosophy of “human meaning’ can coexist quite well with a science of “genetic influence.” 

Happily, Barash’s notion of human meaning includes the idea that, even though we are completely natural creatures shaped by evolutionary processes, we still retain a unique human freedom. I say happily because Barash doesn’t conclude that humans have contra-causal free will, nor does he jump to the opposite, fatalistic conclusion that no matter what we do, the outcome will be the predetermined same, so why bother. His idea of human agency is roughly the same as mine. As he says:

Within a remarkable range, our evolutionary bequeathal is wildly permissive.

I like Barash’s word choice of “wildly” here. Ironically, though much of my free time is spent thinking about how to persuade people that the difference between us and other animals — even dogs — is a difference of degree and not of kind, I often worry about us forgetting how dissimilar we are to all other animals, at least in one significant regard: that is, freedom. And what I like most about Barash’s article is the notion of freedom as the freedom to disobey. As Agent Smith puts it to Neo in the second Matrix film:

Smith: I killed you, Mister Anderson, I watched you die — with a certain satisfaction, I might add. And then something happened; something that I knew was impossible, but it happened anyway: you destroyed me, Mister Anderson. Afterward, I knew the rules, I understood what I was supposed to do but I didn’t. I couldn’t. I was compelled to stay, compelled to disobey. And now here I stand because of you, Mister Anderson, because of you I’m no longer an agent of the system, because of you I’ve changed — I’m unplugged — a new man, so to speak, like you, apparently free.

Neo: Congratulations.

Agent Smith disobeyed his programmed nature and found out what he really wanted: in his case, the destruction of the Matrix (and of all life, unfortunately). Barash also specifically argues for a type of contra-natural disobedience:

On the basis of evolutionary existentialism, I would therefore like to suggest the heretical and admittedly paradoxical notion that, in fact, we need to teach more disobedience. Not only disobedience to political and social authority but especially disobedience to some of our troublesome genetic inclinations.

Disobedience has a long history in the human species. Even the ancient Hebrews, it can be argued, intuited the need for disobedience by sneaking the wily, skeptical serpent into their creation story. They had their god include the serpent in that paradisal garden, where his new and naive human creations were within arm’s reach of the fruit of both god-like knowledge and immortality. Now, the common Christian response is that God wanted his creations to have the possibility of disobedience — that is, free will — to freely love Him or reject Him, and which would presumably have more authenticity thereby. But I don’t think having the freedom of disobedience need be interpreted in terms of love, in a religious context or not. Disobedience, in my opinion, is first and foremost a route to knowledge, particularly self-knowledge. And it’s self-knowledge the existentialists have traditionally been most concerned with, seeing how it leads to one’s having the ability to define oneself. But Sartre (and existentialists in general) countenances an extreme freedom of the will as the driver behind the quest for self-knowledge, so much so that he assigns ultimate responsibility — and blame. As he says:

If people throw up to us our works of fiction in which we write about people who are soft, weak, cowardly, and sometimes even downright bad, it’s not because these people are soft, weak, cowardly, or bad; because if we were to say... that they are that way because of heredity, the workings of the environment, society, because of biological or psychological determinism, people would be assured.

As a quick aside, I think it’s interesting to note here that Sartre brings up this particular objection back in the cultural backdrop of 1946. It sounds more like the pejorative Twinkie Defenses of the late 1970’s and onward. But I digress. Sartre goes on to say that

...when the existentialist writes about a coward, he says that this coward is responsible for his cowardice... he’s like that because he has made himself a coward by his acts.

From a certain perspective, this is undeniably true: a human being can’t become anything without acting in some sense; but the real crux of the issue is how responsible the individual is, if at all, for who she has become. Like Barash, I think existentialism of a certain strain is compatible with our condition as evolved biological animals. And it’s the idea of disobeying our nature that gives us both the opportunity and the freedom to become what we want. As Nietzsche put it in an early fragment (1872), “Homer’s Contest”:

When one speaks of humanity, the idea is fundamental that this is something that separates and distinguishes man from nature. In reality, however, there is no such separation: “natural” qualities and those properly called “human” are indivisibly grown together. Man, in his highest and most noble capacities, is wholly nature... Those of his abilities which are awesome and considered inhuman are perhaps the fertile soil out of which alone all humanity... can grow.

Here, as I see it, the concept of “humanity” is the result of the exploitation of the “wildly permissive” freedom bequeathed us by our evolutionary history, as Barash notes. The individual human being needn’t be metaphysically free in the existentialist’s sense in order to cultivate her animal nature. And while it may be prudent to assign a certain degree of responsibility for the way people “create” themselves, I don’t agree that the coward, for instance, has made himself into a coward on purpose, so to speak. So, for me, something like cowardice isn’t necessarily a fault of the individual so much as the result of a weak will. And I think one’s will can be educated and strengthened, because even the weak-willed individual has, thanks to the evolutionary bequeathal, the freedom to disobey his essence. Of course, the question is exactly how does that happen — how does the weak-willed person educate and strengthen his will? Traditionally, various modes of asceticism have been employed. But there is also a good amount of simple luck involved: one may or may not be exposed to an array of interpersonal and environmental experiences that likewise may or may not sway one’s motivation to do or not do something conducive to educating or strengthening one’s will. 

In a note from 1887 Nietzsche had this to say about asceticism:

I also want to make asceticism natural again: in place of the aim of denial, the aim of strengthening...

To make asceticism natural again is to expropriate it away from its religious roots, where the goal was to tame the human animal and make it obedient to both celestial and terrestrial authority, and now to use it to educate one’s will by imposing restraints on one’s genetically-influenced impulses. So, in a sense, making asceticism natural again involves paradoxically making one’s nature obedient in some ways in order to disobey that nature in other ways. And these other ways relate to the existential quest for human meaning and self-creation. I suppose you could also look at it as a more refined type of asceticism: instead of bludgeoning one’s entire natural endowment into submission, one can pick and choose which impulses to quash and which ones to amplify. And even if one’s life circumstances are stifled or constricted, one still possesses the capacity for disobedience, or what we might call “revolt” in Albert Camus’ parlance. 

In Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus, we see that the absurd Greek hero is  condemned to “ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight”; and Camus explicitly ties Sisyphus’ plight to that of the proletarian worker of his day. Revolt or “scorn” at circumstances is still possible even if one has no hope for a different future. And while Camus seems to believe that even freedom from creating meaning in one’s life is a good thing when seen in a certain light, I think you could also argue that the hour where Sisyphus contemplates his fate, which is what Camus says interests him most, is the timeless moment in which meaning can be created. Our own Sisyphean disposition can allow us to contemplate all kinds of strategies and “games” while toiling at moving one’s rock to the top of the mountain. In fact, in a way we could play with the existentialist’s own phrasing and say that one is condemned to be creative. Consider this: the human brain is a veritable whim-generating machine; we can’t stop thoughts from occurring to us, nor can we stop thinking altogether. When Camus says that “the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart” and that therefore we must “imagine Sisyphus happy,” I would say that it is precisely the brain’s propensity for spontaneous activity that is the source of the human — and even animal — impulse to play. 

What is play? The essence of play is, to my mind, the compulsion to experiment and explore; or, in other words, to revolt and discover. Not only does play merely pass the time, but the imagination can create worlds within worlds. Consider what the human imagination has produced thus far: philosophies, religions, artistic vistas, staggering technologies, etc. As William Blake noted: “what is now proved was once only imagined.” The act of imagining something new does a certain violence to what already exists: it destroys, betrays or at least dispenses with what has already been established. In a sense, the imagination disobeys the essence of what already exists, the accumulated and codified mores that are generally accepted. Combining the imagination and a revised asceticism involves a great deal of courage: the courage to disobey interpersonal, cultural, and biologically-determined patterns of thought and behavior, thereby incurring or inviting the wrath and opprobrium of one’s milieu — and possibly even of Nature herself.

And psychological harm is not the only danger: just as Nietzsche said that life oftentimes values more than existence itself, one may very well lose one’s life through stratagems of disobedience. But isn’t the value of one’s life, the meaning of one’s life, more important than the mere duration of it? Essence doesn’t precede existence, and neither does existence precede essence; they’re contemporaneous and they grow or perish together. But disobedience, properly executed, succeeds both essence and existence. 

I’ll leave you with our modern-day, popular culture Sisyphus, Neo, near the end of the final installment of The Matrix Trilogy:

Smith: Why, Mr. Anderson, why? Why do you do it? Why get up? Why keep fighting? Do you believe you’re fighting for something, for more than your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom, or truth — perhaps peace? Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson, vagaries of perception, temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose — and all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself. Although, only a human mind can invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson, you must know it by now. You can’t win, it’s pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson, why — why you persist??

Neo: Because I choose to.