What is an Existentialist?

in Beyond Good and Evil: ‘“I do not like it.” – Why? – “I am not up to
it.” – Has anyone ever answered like this?’ (Beyond Good and Evil, 185,
p. 107). As will be seen, understanding existentialism requires far more
intellectual honesty and courage than cleverness and academic ability.
3. A person has to strive with some success to live and act in accord-
ance with the findings and recommendations of existentialism. A person
can know about existentialism and be convinced of its truth, but they
are not a true existentialist if they make no effort to live the life.
It is quite possible for a person to know about existentialism, recog-
nize the truth of it on an intellectual level, yet most or all of the time fail
to live accordingly. To fail to live accordingly is to live in what existential-
ist philosophers call bad faith. Bad faith is a certain kind of bad attitude
and I’ll explain it in due course. For now, let it suffice to say that bad
faith can be very difficult to avoid. We live in a human world built on bad
faith. Bad faith offers convenient excuses, cop-outs and coping strate-
gies, various distractions that seem to make everyday life more
bearable.
So, the true existentialist knows about existentialism, believes in
existentialism and continually strives to live according to existentialism.
He or she continually strives to overcome bad faith and to achieve what
existentialist philosophers call authenticity. Authenticity is the holy grail
of existentialism, the great existentialist goal or ideal. More about
authenticity later.
Interestingly, it seems it is quite possible for a person to be authentic
without ever having heard of existentialism. Otherwise, we would be
claiming that authenticity can only be achieved as the ultimate result of
an intellectual exercise – as though you have to be able to read and
study and have lots of time to swat to stand any chance of becoming
authentic. Some people seem to hit on being authentic through their
direct experience of life or because they choose to be particularly brave
or genuinely philanthropic. Bugs Bunny is such a one, although who
would be surprised to discover he reads Nietzsche when he is not busy
exercising his will to power over Elma?

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 10 How to Be an Existentialist

We might call such people, such admirable rabbits, true existential-

ists, but really they are not existentialists at all, they are simply what
academics who have studied existentialism describe as authentic. They
don’t describe themselves as authentic because they don’t think of
themselves in that way, they just get on with throwing themselves into
whatever they do without self-consciousness, misgivings or regret. It is
not actually at all authentic for a person to think he is authentic. The
person who declares ‘I am authentic’ thinks he is something, a fixed
entity, an authentic-thing. For reasons that will become clear, a person
who thinks like this or has this attitude is in fact in bad faith.
So, it is possible to be authentic without being an existentialist, but
it is not possible to be a true existentialist without striving hard to be
authentic. For the reader of this book who hopes to achieve authentic-
ity, however, the key point is that the journey towards authenticity can
begin with learning about existentialism. Many people have been
inspired to pursue authenticity as a direct result of studying existential-
ism. Studying existentialism highlights the basic, inescapable, existen-
tial truths of the human condition, it exposes bad faith and emphasizes
the necessity of freedom and responsibility. Studying existentialism can,
therefore, be a process of profound personal enlightenment that influ-
ences the very nature of a person’s way of existing in the world.
Philosophy is often seen simply as an ivory tower intellectual subject
with no bearing on real life, one of many subjects a person can do a
course in at college or university, and so the claim that profound per-
sonal enlightenment can result from the study of it sounds totally pre-
tentious. For the Ancient founders of Western philosophy, however,
achieving enlightenment is the ultimate aim of studying philosophy. For
Plato, for example, the goal of studying philosophy is to gain knowl-
edge of the highest truths. Armed with these truths a person has the
power to recognise the difference between reality and mere appear-
ance. Plato firmly believes that the person who is truly able to distin-
guish reality from appearance will live accordingly, will cease to live
a lie. Like Platonism, although its view of reality is radically different,

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 What is an Existentialist? 11

existentialism also offers enlightenment and a way out of the deep,

dark cave of ignorance, a way of seeing what is so rather than what
only appears to be so.

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