While the previous essays1 laid the foundation and began exploring some of the architecture of what I have called cultural existentialism, at this point the following can be offered as a working definition: Cultural existentialism is the phenomenon that views the individual as entirely free and unencumbered–by history, family, community, tradition, inherited ideas, et al.–and, therefore, free to live and define themselves as they see fit; the sole author of their life.2 In this essay, I want to explore some of the more outward forms of cultural existentialism, as well as its relation to what I have called the instrumental stance. In so doing, I hope to shed some light on the question of the more recent origins of this phenomenon. Again, my focus will remain on America.
Part of the origin story of cultural existentialism seems to be connected to the increasing compartmentalization of life. In my essay, The Good, Liberalism, and the Role of Preferences, I referred to this as “a range of compartmentalized spheres,” within which we find the “spheres of the personal, familial, political, economic, artistic, athletic, scientific, among others–each existing independently of the others, each with its own goods (per individual preferences) internal to it.”3 The primary source I was drawing upon at that time was Alasdair MacIntyre, and it is in many ways unsurprising that MacIntyre is sourced in the work of Robert Bellah and his colleagues. In Habits of the Heart, Bellah writes, “[I]n the course of history, the self has become ever more detached from the social and cultural contexts that embody the traditions [of the past]”.4 “The most distinctive aspect of twentieth-century American society is the division of life into a number of separate functional sectors: home and workplace, work and leisure, white collar and blue collar, public and private. This division suited the needs of the bureaucratic industrial corporations that provided the model for our preferred means of organizing society by the balancing and linking of sectors as ‘departments’ in a functional whole, as in a great business enterprise.”5
The growing partition of the personal as a distinct and separate realm from the common, what I called in my previous essay “the expansion of the Private sphere at the expense of the Public”, has led to a greater emphasis on the individual. “For a long time, private life and its leisure and consumption patterns were expressions of social status, in turn linked to social class, as in more traditional [premodern] societies. […] But as social status and social class came to depend more and more on a national occupational system and less and less on local communities, a degree of freedom became possible in private life that would not have been conceivable in the small town or even for older urban elites.”6 This “degree of freedom” provided an arena in which the exercise of personal preferences came to play an increasingly powerful role for individuals, ultimately to the extent that the self comes to be understood in terms of its own preferences. Again, in the past, the individual existed within a kind of social and cultural “whole”, in which “family and civic life” were closely intertwined; narratives were more easily understood, and roles were more clearly expressed. Thus, the “structure of possibility”7 for individuals was more restricted, yet at the same time individuals were not burdened by the immense pressure to “make one’s own way” in the world, or discover what they “really want”. “A century and a half ago, when most Americans still lived in small towns and worked in small businesses or on family-owned farms, the requirements of economic success were perhaps more easily reconciled with understandings of success in family and civic life.”8 That is, economic success existed within a wider context of social and cultural tradition. As time passes, this wider context narrows, sectors of life are increasingly compartmentalized, and the goods associated with each of them become more and more independent of each other. That is, the satisfaction of individual preferences comes to be the criterion upon which goods are based. “Under such conditions, it is not surprising that the major problems of life appear to be essentially individual matters, a question of negotiating a reliable and harmonious balance among the various sectors of life to which an individual has access.”9
The workaday world, what Josef Pieper has called the world of “total work”,10 provides one example of cultural existentialism today. Among the most pressing questions young Americans must face is, “What do you want to do?” Regardless of the actual choice, the answer–or lack of an answer–plays a powerful role in forming the trajectories of one’s life. “The demand to ‘make something of yourself’ through work is one that Americans coming of age hear as often from themselves as from others. It encompasses several different notions of work and of how it bears on who we are. In the sense of a ‘job,’ work is a way of making money and making a living. It supports a self defined by economic success, security, and all that money can buy. In the sense of a ‘career,’ work traces one’s progress through life by achievement and advancement in an occupation. It yields a self defined by a broader sort of success, which takes in social standing and prestige, and by a sense of expanding power and competency that renders work itself a source of self-esteem.”11 Work–whether we want it to or not–comes to define a large, if not the largest, portion of our lives. This is particularly true in the case of a career, that self-chosen occupation in which one becomes a specialist and/or professional, and engages in throughout the working years of one’s life, and sometimes beyond.12
What I am getting at here is that work has become viewed as an extension of one’s self. “[H]owever we define work, it is very close to our sense of self. What we ‘do’ often translates to what we ‘are.'”13 To be engaged in a form of work over a period of years is to somehow come to be identified by it. “What do you do?” is often among the first questions we ask people we meet. It tells us something about them and vice versa. The person not actively engaged in a form of work is almost unintelligible to us. Here, as above, the concept of career plays a stronger role than the person simply working a job, since the latter seems to lack the same kind of commitment involved in a career choice.14 The concept of a career shares a connection of sorts with the Protestant work ethic, and its corresponding concept of a vocation or calling. But, as I noted before, at this point the end-goal of glorifying God has been shed, replaced by the secular concept of success.15 My recent explorations on what I have called the “culture of achievement” are a further instance of what I am trying to describe here.16 The culture of achievement views the self as a wellspring of unlimited potential; self-creation and self-definition through achievement. “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe it can achieve.”17
Another concept I want to draw upon from Bellah’s work is the “lifestyle enclave”. “Though the term ‘community’ is widely and loosely used by Americans, and often in connection with lifestyle, we would like to reserve it for a more specific meaning. Whereas a community attempts to be an inclusive whole, celebrating the interdependence of public and private life […], lifestyle is fundamentally segmental and celebrates the narcissism of similarity. It usually explicitily involves a contrast with others who ‘do not share one’s lifestyle.’ For this reason, we speak not of lifestyle communities, though they are often called such in contemporary usage, but of lifestyle enclaves.”18 “A lifestyle enclave is formed by people who share some feature of private life. Members of lifestyle enclaves express their identity through shared patterns of appearance, consumption, and leisure activities, which often serve to differentiate them sharply from those with other lifestyles. They are not interdependent, do not act together politically, and do not share a history.”19 “Such enclaves are segmental in two senses. They involve only a segment of each individual, for they concern only private life, especially leisure and consumption. And they are segmental socially in that they include only those with a common lifestyle. The different, those with other lifestyles, are not necessarily despised. They may be willingly tolerated. But they are irrelevant or even invisible in terms of one’s own lifestyle enclave.”20 Put differently, a lifestyle enclave is a private group of people who share some set of preferences, or “common interests”. They represent a demarcated area of life in which the private interests (via expression of preferences) of people can be shared in a common way. Bellah sees this as a further result of compartmentalization, “[t]he lifestyle enclave is in important respects an outgrowth of the sectorial organization of American life […] resulting from the emergence of industrialization and the national market.”21
Examples of lifestyle enclaves are almost endless, ranging from isolated groups of gamers, sports fans, athletes, collectors, bibliophiles, adrenaline junkies, outdoor enthusiasts (e.g., hiking, hunting, fishing, mountain climbing, et al.), hobbyists, recreational drug users, followers of alternative medicine, and on and on. Almost anything you can think of that brings people together privately. Such private groups or enclaves are segmental in that those comprising a given group share a common interest, but otherwise may have nothing else in common. “The contemporary lifestyle enclave is based on a degree of individual choice that largely frees it from traditional ethnic and religious boundaries.”22 Political, social, religious worldviews are basically irrelevant–what matters is a given shared activity or subject of interest. This is closely bound up with the (implicit) modern understanding of happiness as preference satisfaction, which has also come to bear upon our self-understanding. Lifestyle enclaves are merely gatherings of those who happen to share a common preference–a preference which partially defines their sense of self. This is yet another area in which what we do has largely come to define who we are.
If we back up a bit, and consider the individual as an individual, apart from a given lifestyle enclave, we find a set of preferences existing in isolation, internal to the self. Such preferences are expressed in various ways, which reveals our sense of who we are–not only to others, but also perhaps to ourselves.23 Some of the more obvious examples include fashion–self-expression relating to appearance, clothing, footwear, makeup, hairstyle, physical fitness, and so forth; consumerism–especially in such a way that outwardly expresses oneself in terms of income, such as vacation homes, sports cars, RV’s, large boats–but also in terms of things like food preferences, tastes in literature, art, or music; sexual orientation and gender identity; internet identities–portraying oneself online or via social media in a certain way; legal name changes due to lack of identification with one’s given name, and so forth. If people are (abstractly) grouped together by common preferences, various dimensions of society, such as high-, middle-, and working-class culture come into view, as do the various identified subcultures, such as athletes, hippies, goths, gamers, punks, hipsters, hookup culture, and many more.24
I want to close with some considerations of instrumentality. Here we can begin to see the immense interconnectedness of the phenomena in question. The workaday world is, par excellence, the sphere of life most characterized by the instrumental stance.25 In it, our daily activities are largely structured by those involved in securing or maintaining an income. Activities which, over time, come to connote and bear upon our sense of who we are–whether in the weak sense of maintaining a job or in the much stronger sense of career. The economic security afforded by the workaday world, in turn, opens the world of private consumption, itself characterized by preference satisfaction. Here, the end-goal of satisfaction provides the logical structure through which preferences come to act as means. Preferences become means not only to self-expression and self-identity, but also to the satisfaction of the self, self-actualization. Patterns or routines of self-expression and consumption become enveloped within the sphere of instrumentality. Something is good or valued to the extent it satisfies one’s expressive preferences. Nearly everything we do comes to be understood under the criterion of self-satisfaction and self-actualization. In this way, to some extent both the Private and the Public spheres of one’s life become instances of preference expression and satisfaction.26 And, as we have seen, this is deeply connected to cultural existentialism.
Notes:
1. See my previous essays, Introduction to Cultural Existentialism, and Cultural Existentialism: The Absurdity of American Individualism.
2. I use the word “author” as a point of great significance since an author by is definition the source of their narrative work. Here I am thinking of self-definition and self-creation, amongst and across a wide variety of areas, some of which I will explore in this essay. For the record, I believe this viewpoint to be false. In my view, whatever plausibility such viewpoints offer depends on a specified and delimited context. The idea of removing the context–which I see as required to provide intelligibility–is a cultural fiction, or perhaps what Charles Taylor has called a “social imaginary”. I would argue that cultural existentialism itself constitutes a social imaginary–another topic for the future.
3. See my essay, The Good, Liberalism, and the Role of Preferences.
4. See Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart, Individualism and Commitment in American Life.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. By “structure of possibility” I refer to the aggregate set of options available for a given person (in a given place, at a given time) in terms of life choices.
8. Ibid. Wendell Berry draws upon similar ideas when criticizing the state of agriculture in the United States. See Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America.
9. Ibid.
10. See, for example, my previous essay, A Sketch of the Workaday World.
11. See Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart, Individualism and Commitment in American Life.
12. Consider that some doctors, lawyers, and politicians (for example), commonly work well into old age.
13. See Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart, Individualism and Commitment in American Life.
14. What I mean by this is that many people become employed in a sort of haphazard way. For instance, I may take the first job offered to me which provides the income I need to maintain my lifestyle–irrespective of what that job actually is or entails, or such considerations may be an afterthought. This differs from a career in the sense that I have not deliberately planned or chosen the occupation before it is actually available to me. It should be added, however, that a given haphazard choice in employment could lead to a career, provided one stick with it long enough.
15. See, for example, my previous essay, Achievement Culture: Some Considerations in Context.
16. The as-yet complete set of essays in which the culture of achievement is explored include The Origins of the Modern Culture of Achievement, Part I, Part II, and Part III; Achievement Culture: Some Considerations in Context, and The Modern Culture of Achievement.
17. See Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich.
18. See Robert Bellah, et al., Habits of the Heart, Individualism and Commitment in American Life. Emphasis added.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. There may be some objection to my understanding of cultural existentialism as self-creating. Since one could say that people do not “create themselves”, but rather, “discover themselves”. This objection bears little on what I have said. What I want to highlight with notions of self-creation or self-determination is the simple fact that the criterion of the self is internal to the agent, rather than external. Someone who claims to “discover” oneself, rather than “create” oneself, is still adopting a criterion rooted in their own preferences.
24. The difference between considering groups as an abstraction and considering groups in particular is what seems to determine the difference between a lifestyle enclave and that of a subculture. Where a lifestyle enclave is restricted to a particular group of actual people with whom we may associate at various times, a subculture is defined by the preferences of people who may not know each other, and may, in fact, never meet.
25. See my previous essays, A Sketch of the Workaday World, and Introduction to the Instrumental Stance.
26. This closely relates to the modern notion of happiness.