The hypothesis is that the absence of meaning in life presents problems of motivation, daily function, and overall maintenance of mood. To an extent, the concept of existential psychoanalysis is a response to this phenomenon, an avant-garde recognition that the pervasive anomie of modern times (I use this term in the classic sense of a collapse of social structures governing life in a given society, with full credit to Emile Durkheim; I mean, mais non) has not been credited to the source where credit is due. An expanding chasm divides our philosophical thinking from the demands of modern life; our belated recognition of the origin of the ensuing crisis is perhaps attributable to Hot Trends in Absurdist Thinking: it was only recently that Meaninglessness went Mainstream.
Two reactionary impulses have been excited by this societal movement. The first is the deplorable resurgence of Old Time Religion, a desperate attempt to subdue nihilism and moral anarchy through the Faith of Our Fathers. This will not work; the genie is too far out of the bottle now and atheism has achieved a general currency which defies easy relapse into mythology. There is no going back to belief systems primarily based on a preexisting ignorance about life origins. The other is the Soothing Wall approach of the motivational industry. The italicized term is borrowed from Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and is Fyodor’s admittedly derisive term for “men of action,” those misguided fools who are forever mistaking intermediate causes for ultimate ends, who do not realize that in their vain attempts to wrest some meaning for life, or some compensation for their pain, they are beating their heads against the wall.
The late-stage and decadent manifestation, or modern prototype, of the Soothing Wall was the New Age Movement, which borrowed many of the trappings and assumptions of old style religion (souls, spirits, karmic principles) while slyly avoiding contextual questions. It was the context of Old Time Religion which was vaguely embarrassing to New Age adherents, namely, the belief systems described in the Bible, Torah, or Koran, Sunday services, the quasi-psychotic practice of talking out loud to an unseen presence (prayer), but also including the huge capital investment in the mythology industry, running a varied gamut from the Vatican to the cathedral at Chartres to the simplest whitewashed and steepled Baptist Church in Pascagoula. Then, too, the sheer malevolent power of irrational, mythological thinking is deeply troubling to those who want to carry on religion under a different disguise and for gentler, pro-human purposes, who seek to dissociate themselves from the Crusades, or crucifixions, or large office buildings collapsing in a cloud of dust in lower Manhattan. New Age religion allowed the soul to live on; it allowed the spirit a kind of reincarnation as a feel-good ghost seeking to go with the flow.
I’m trying to imagine what would happen if Jean-Paul Sartre had looked up from his demi-tasse one fine morning in late spring, the Parisian heat held in abeyance for the moment by the dewy coolness along the Boulevard St. Germain, there at Le Maître’s favorite table at Café Flor, and saw the beetle-browed mass of Dr. Phil McGraw leaning toward him from the adjacent bentwood chair. Dr. Phil, with his perpetual look of bemused superiority, would first cast a few disapproving looks at the spiraling gray smoke from Sartre’s Galois, then wonder (still silently) at the Frenchman’s persistent need for caffeine stimulation, evidenced by the litter of drained cups on the round table. What’s worse: sweetened with sugar.
Who, I wonder, has the superior philosophical context? Granted, Sartre came around to the idea of something soul-like in his construction of the Engaged Man, although that always struck me as a disappointing, if understandable, cop-out. You know you’re right, Jean-Paul, I wanted to tell him. Don’t dress things up with this life-purpose bullshit. Still, Existentialism can seem a little sterile after a while without it (the essential problem with all philosophies constructed on Absurdity), and your philosophical arch-enemy Camus dealt with the first problem, the silent indifference of the Universe to Man’s quest for meaning, in the lapidary The Myth of Sisyphus. And you had to go him one better because otherwise that pushy little Algerian with the clumsy writing style wins out.
But now, through the vagaries of time travel, Simone is across the river in the Marais, and you’ve got this hulking American fixing you with his penetrating stare, declining, with a dismissive wave of his big paw, your ridiculous offer to purchase him a café-au-lait et brioche. He doesn’t need the first because he’s already “excited about his life,” and the second is contrary to his dietary principles regarding refined sugar and saturated fat. Sartre wants to mention that, nevertheless, the treats taste and feel good, as does the buzz from the stinky cigarette, and since we’re all on an express train to oblivion, why not enjoy them?
Thus the encounter between the Existentialist and New Age is fully joined. Dr. Phil has made a fortune by pathologizing the commonplace and pretending that life can be elevated to a plain it can never achieve, and where it doesn’t actually belong. Jean-Paul scratched out a basic living writing the truth about life, which is that it doesn’t actually mean anything and is little more than a string of incidents occurring on a more or less aleatory basis, upon which we impose a narrative we call our “life story,” but it’s essentially the same story as the rhododendron in the backyard or the banana slug crawling through the forest primeval. No doubt Fyodor would find Dr. Phil his ultimate Action Figure, a personality so tedious he would find himself missing the wet snows of St. Petersburg.
I conclude that Dr. Phil would fail in his earnest, or at least smug, efforts to get Jean-Paul “excited about votre vie,” and that the motivational mandarin’s aphoristic metaphors, such as “you don’t need a whisk broom to clean the sawdust from the Persian cat,” would be even more incomprehensible when translated into French. At Dr. Phil’s insistence that Jean-Paul “be honest with him,” Le Maître would assure the Texas huckster that there is nothing contrived or “defensive” about the Yawning Void of Meaningless in life, and that all of McGraw’s interim measures for debt relief, for getting damaged relationships up out of the ditch and on the road again, for going from a size 24 to a size 6 in twelve months, nevertheless meet the same inevitable fate as Beckett’s two gentlemen waiting interminably by the side of the road: nothing really leads anywhere.
Then turning the small café table on Dr. Phil, Sartre might, in this strange revenge fantasy, point out, dialectically and with great penetration, that Dr. Phil’s manic desire to get everyone to live like one Texas cornball possessed by narcissistic certainties was itself an extraordinarily elaborate defense mechanism against deep-seated feelings of inadequacy and pending mortality, but that it ultimately would not work, neither against Death nor against the virtually certain cancellation of McGraw’s syndicated talk show. With this, Sartre, with an elaborate formality thinly disguising the hauteur and arrogance just beneath the surface, would have resumed reading Le Monde.
