Human Statues and Real Experience

   Few philosophical movements have lost their elan as fast as existentialism and few have proved so eternally essential as bourgeois idealism. The philosopher Sartre believed everything happens as an escape from a perfect form of being that does not exist. We are none of us essential. We can never experience perfect being. We are beings arising from nothingness  condemned to be inessential beings. Anything that seems to us essential in our experience, for Sartre, is a bourgeois illusion, bad faith. He wrote of his grandfather,  a nineteenth-century style idealist: “He loved those short instances of eternity where he became his own statue.” Do we ever in 2015 struggle against the thoughts in our minds that make us our own statues? Never! We are perfectly sure of ourselves. We must be who we are because idealized thought tells us we are who we are. We exist essentially. We love being in-itself. We don’t want anything to do with being for-itself. I think therefore I am, said Descartes. Everything real is rational, said Hegel. Thought, either our thought or the thought created for us by others, makes us real. We only want an existence that is essential even though real experience is existential.

   Nothing is more essential than our state governments. They almost never act existentially and they force us to live according to laws that they decide are essential. Any existential deviation from their laws is a crime. It is truly an amazing thing whenever a state acts existentially. The government of Russia between 1941 and 1945 became the most existential government ever. It ordered all its men to forget completely about living essentially and to die existentially. The laws of the German government designed to kill every Russian who resisted and enslave all the rest were not  essential for anyone in Russia. A war to save one essential state government from another essential state government created for a few years a bold and brave belief in the hearts of millions of men about to die that freedom alone was essential and everything else a universal lie designed to turn humans into statues.

Daniel McNeill

The website of The United States of the World is: usoftheworld.com

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