Page 54 - DENG403_BRITISH_DRAMA

British Drama

Notes Facticity is both a limitation and a condition of freedom. It is a limitation in that a large part of
one’s facticity consists of things one couldn’t have chosen (birthplace, etc.), but a condition in
the sense that one’s values most likely will depend on it.

Example: Consider two men, one of whom has no memory of his past and the other
remembers everything. They have both committed many crimes, but the first man, knowing
nothing about this, leads a rather normal life while the second man, feeling trapped by his
own past, continues a life of crime, blaming his own past for “trapping” him in this life. There
is nothing essential about his committing crimes, but he ascribes this meaning to his past.

(7) Authenticity: The theme of authentic existence is common to many existentialist thinkers. It
is often taken to mean that one has to “find oneself” and then live in accordance with this self.
A common misunderstanding is that the self is something one can find if one looks hard
enough, that one’s true self is substantial.
What is meant by authenticity is that in acting, one should act as oneself, not as One acts or as
one’s genes or any other essence require. The authentic act is one that is in accordance with
one’s freedom. Of course, as a condition of freedom is facticity, this includes one’s facticity,
but not to the degree that this facticity can in any way determine one’s choices. The role of
facticity in relation to authenticity involves letting one’s actual values come into play when
one makes a choice, so that one also takes responsibility for the act instead of choosing either-
or without allowing the options to have different values.
(8) Inauthenticity: The inauthentic is the denial to live in accordance with one’s freedom. This
can take many forms, from pretending choices are meaningless or random, through convincing
oneself that some form of determinism is true, to a sort of “mimicry” where one acts as “One
should.” How “One” should act is often determined by an image one has of how one such as
oneself acts. This image usually corresponds to some sort of social norm, but this does not
mean that all acting in accordance with social norms is inauthentic: The main point is the
attitude one takes to one’s own freedom and responsibility, and the extent to which one acts
in accordance with this freedom.

(9) Despair: Commonly defined as a loss of hope, Despair in existentialism is more specifically
related to the reaction to a breakdown in one or more of the defining qualities of one’s self or
identity. If a person is invested in being a particular thing, such as a bus driver or an upstanding
citizen, and then finds their being-thing compromised, they would normally be found in state
of despair—a hopeless state. For example, an athlete who loses his legs in an accident may
despair if he has nothing else to fall back on, nothing on which to rely for his identity. He
finds himself unable to be that which defined his being.
What sets the existentialist notion of despair is that existentialist despair is a state one is in
even when they aren’t overtly in despair. So long as a person’s identity depends on qualities
that can crumble, they are considered to be in perpetual despair. And as there is, in Sartrean
terms, no human essence found in conventional reality on which to constitute the individual’s
sense of identity, despair is a universal human condition. As Kierkegaard defines it in his
Either/Or: “Any life-view with a condition outside it is despair.” In other words, it is possible
to be in despair without despairing.
(10) Reason: Emphasizing action, freedom, and decision as fundamental, existentialists oppose
themselves to rationalism and positivism. That is, they argue against definitions of human
beings as primarily rational. Rather, existentialists look at where people find meaning.
Existentialism asserts that people actually make decisions based on the meaning to them
rather than rationally. The rejection of reason as the source of meaning is a common theme of

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