Jean-Paul Sartre – The Modern Frame

Happiness: A Brief Critique

I have said before that the implicit yet common understanding of happiness today is preference satisfaction.¹ It is the view that sees the standards of happiness to be internal to the agent, existing solely within the purview of the individual. “To each, his own.” This is closely associated with what I have described as cultural existentialism.² The increasing pluralism of Western society has birthed a state of affairs in which there is no longer a common understanding of the good.³ What remains is the individual’s assessment, protected by law–insofar as he or she does not impinge on the rights of others. But if this view of happiness is pushed to its limits, as it were, the ramifications are unsettling, to say the least.⁴

Cultural Existentialism: The Absurdity of American Individualism

In the previous essay I hoped to make clear the connection between the phenomenon of cultural existentialism with that of its formal counterpart–the philosophy of Existentialism. Again, I believe the connection between them is one of similarity rather than direct causality, and that the primary difference between the two is merely the extent to which they are articulated. Still, the average person is not a philosopher–let alone Sartre–so in many ways the accusation that cultural existentialism is widely embodied but not articulated is unfair. For a more common view of cultural existentialism, I would like to turn to the excellent work of the sociologist Robert Bellah, and some of his colleagues, such as Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swindler, and Steven M. Tipton.¹ Much of their research, findings, and collaboration on American culture from the early 1980s will help color the outline I have sketched thus far.

Introduction to Cultural Existentialism

At the close of my essay The Individual and The Human World, I spoke briefly about the contemporary West–and America in particular–as a place where “individuals determine and create themselves in their own image–rooted in the satisfaction of their own preferences–the sole authors of their lives.”¹ This phenomenon, which is admittedly broad and multifaceted, has become hegemonic in the contemporary West. Here I will attempt to explore some of its contours, though certain details will have to be postponed for the time being. As a kind of umbrella term, I will refer to this state of affairs as cultural existentialism.²

Human Action

Human action takes place within the space of the human world. But while the human world is the stage upon which human actions are performed, it also provides the context which renders our actions intelligible to others as well as ourselves. There is no such thing as an abstracted human action, existing apart and independently from its context–such a thing is unintelligible. Human actions, therefore, must possess the property of intelligibility.¹ In order to avoid potential misunderstandings, it is important to remember that I am talking about those actions which are distinctively and characteristically human. Breathing could be construed as an action: the taking in of oxygen and expulsion of carbon dioxide by the lungs. But breathing is not a human action because it does not properly take place within the human world.² Speech, however, is an example of human action, since to speak a language is to communicate within a given context of a shared social understanding. We must begin with considerations of human action if we wish to sufficiently understand not only the notions of virtue and practical rationality (ethics), and the narrative character of human life, but also to place ourselves in a position to evaluate competing views in ethics, personal identity, and others.

The Individual and The Human World

Up to this point, I have used the word “world” without disclosing what is meant by it.¹ Yet this should have gone more or less unnoticed, since it is part of the nature of our existence to be embedded within our world, and thus its context provides us with many underlying assumptions which we take for granted. The world I am speaking of is what I will call the human world, which makes up “a world within the world”, so to speak. It is a world which–though metaphysically inseparable from the physical and especially biological aspects of our existence–nonetheless transcends them. An understanding of the depth and complexity of this will be necessary if we are to make certain concepts and observations sufficiently intelligible, and its articulation will help us better understand our situation, placing us in a better position to evaluate the phenomena we are considering. In this initial exposition, I am drawing heavily upon the work of Hannah Arendt and Raymond Tallis.²

A General Overview

The modern contemporary world has its own characteristic understandings, paradigms,¹ and circumstances. We think in terms of the ideas that modernity has thrust upon us, and most of us have no choice in the matter because we do so without knowing it. The ideas and ways of understanding the world and ourselves that are unique to our time in the West is what I call “the modern frame”.