Book Review: The Existentialist’s Guide to Death, the Universe and Nothingness

Readers familiar with Cox's earlier How to Be an Existentialist or How to Get Real, Get a Grip and Stop Making Excuses (reviewed in EA 22.1) will know what to expect with this book. Written in a similar style, this book casts its net wider than before. The book jacket describes it as a self-help book and if the definition of a self-help book is a book that makes you think about your life then it's true. There are 20 chapters in 160 pages all of which are headed with an epigram by someone different, except for Sartre, Beauvoir and Wittgenstein who have two apiece. Due to space constraints not all the chapters will be referred to here.

In the Introduction Cox acknowledges his debt to Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which he says was an influence in leading him to study philosophy. His debt is also in the way philosophy can be presented to make it both entertaining, accurate and also thought provoking. As a way to make philosophy about living but also alive. Cox notes the answer 'forty-two', given to Adams's question 'What is the meaning of life, the universe and everything?' is about as good as any. The problem he says, is in the question.

As in his previous book, Cox's primary influences are Sartre and Beauvoir although other philosophers are used here as well as other sources like The Doors, Lewis Carroll, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Lieutenant-Colonel Kilgore of Apocalypse Now, and the now infamous episode of the woman caught binning the cat on YouTube.

Other theories of the person assert their universality while actually being narrow and culture bound and in Chapter 2, The Universe, he reminds us why existentialism is indeed about universals. He says:

Neither are existentialists particularly concerned about whether or not there is intelligent life on other planets. Yes, it would be interesting even to an existentialist to discover that aliens exist – more 'other people' to feel threatened and anxious about – but it would not fundamentally change anything. The aliens would be equally lost and abandoned in a meaningless universe, equally condemned to be free, equally confused and perplexed by the series of cosmic accidents that brought them into existence on their speck of space debris

(p11)

Having got The Universe out of the way he gets down in Chapter 3, Nothingness, to what he considers (p18) to be the 'all important role existentialists ascribe to nothingness or non-being […] We constantly encounter the world and make sense of it in terms of what is not there, in terms of various nothingnesses or negativities'. Nothingness is illustrated by an example from Lewis Carroll, surely a writer in the same tradition as Douglas Adams.

One of the writers that Cox is subtextually influenced by is Bob Dylan. Not only is there a quote from 'Mr Tambourine Man' woven so well into the text in Chapter 1, Existentialists and Existentialism, that if you didn't recognise it you would think it was one of Cox's own, but in Chapter 6, Freedom and Choice, he picks out Beauvoirs quote (p40) 'The resistance of the thing sustains the action of man as air sustains the flight of the dove'. Not only does this quote underline the contextual nature of Being but it is also very close to the final verse of Dylan's 'Ballad in Plain D'

Ah, my friends from the prison, they ask unto me,
"How good, how good does it feel to be free?"
And I answer them most mysteriously,
"Are birds free from the chains of the skyway?"

Did Bob Dylan read Simone de Beauvoir? We don't know. Possibly. What this is all leading up to is the 'necessity of freedom' (p40). Consciousness can never surrender its freedom, it can never render itself an object casually determined by the physical world. To quote Sartre, (p41) 'Freedom is the freedom of choosing but not the freedom of not choosing. Not to choose is, in fact to choose not to choose'. Freedom is not a capacity of consciousness, it is the very nature of consciousness. Freedom is not a potential that exists prior to being exercised – freedom is its exercise. As Cox says (p42) 'Understanding action and choice, therefore, is the key to understanding the existentialist view of freedom' This chapter goes on to consider disability, cowardice and addiction all as examples of ways people define themselves and hence reduce their freedom. Which leads us into Chapter 8, Bad Faith, in which Cox refers (p59) to the now well-known example of the waiter from p82-83 of Being and Nothingness. A common reading of this example is that the waiter is in bad faith 'for striving through his performance, to deny his transcendence and become his facticity. He overacts his role as a waiter in order to convince himself and others that he is a waiter-thing'.

Cox's reading of this, and one that I find more convincing, is that although the waiter does indeed strive to be a 'waiter-thing', he is not in bad faith because his purpose as waiter is not to escape from his freedom. He is no more in bad faith that an actor is in bad faith for playing Macbeth. Now, if the actor were to carry on playing Macbeth after the end of the play in his everyday life, this would be a different matter. This got me thinking of the nature of our 'performance' as therapists. To what extent are we in bad faith when we 'act' the role of therapists. What indeed does it mean to 'be' a therapist? Worth thinking about.

Existentialism's attitude to 'Children and Childhood' (Ch11) has been ambiguous to say the least. As Cox says, (p81) 'It is no mere coincidence that none of the great existentialists, as far as I know, had children'. And also rejected monogamy. Which could explain quite a lot. His statement is not quite true, but never mind, the point is well made. Heidegger is an exception but unfortunately he never said anything about the existential meaning of parenthood so we have to wonder what he made of it. The view of Sartre, Beauvoir and Kierkegaard was that it would constrain their freedom. Some would call them commitment-phobic. While it is true that life does indeed change with having children – how could it not – it is not true that it necessarily changes for the worse. It changes, but life is change. There is clearly a gap here in the literature about the existential meaning of parenthood to parents. Parenthood is in an ambiguous position of being neither solely something we are thrown into nor something we fall into. If existentialists have been critical of, blind to, or even avoidant of parenthood they have only said a bit more about human development – which is how a person moves from a position when the paradoxes of existence are not understood, to one when they are understood. While Sartre has said more than most, most notably in his life of Flaubert (1981) there are still huge gaps. Existentially, human development can be understood through an analysis of a thick narrative that when 'guided by the existentialist's insights into the nature of consciousness, choice, freedom, anxiety, bad faith and so on, will reveal what […] makes [human beings] feel, value, act and react as they do' (p87). Aside from fiction, talked about by Kate Thompson in this issue, autobiographical examples are Sartre's (2000) many layered Words, Hazel Barnes' (1997) The Story I Tell Myself: Venture in Existentialist Autobiography and Jeannette Winterson's (2012) Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? But there are many more just waiting to be examined.

Cox's Chapters (14 and 15) on Love and Hate, and Sexual Desire are particularly worth reading. Existentially, love is not a thing but an action, a desire for unity with another. And for as long as we see it as a thing that we can accumulate we will be disappointed. Falling in love is always temporary. People are both attracted and repelled by other people's freedom. What makes someone attractive and exciting is that the other is both free and different. One wants to be close to the others freedom and to possess it, because to be around it without owning it will lead to feeling owned by it. But when one has it, it loses its attractiveness and excitement because it is not free anymore. When one possesses the other, their freedom disappears like that of an animal in a zoo, and they become instantly unattractive, dull. They stop being bright and shiny. They have none of their previously exciting freedom. No wonder so many people have such trouble with close relationships. Unrequited, unconsummated affairs are the only ones that last forever. The longing is not for the other person but for the persistence, innocence and resilience of hope, of what may be, and of what may have been, if only…. Affairs that are over are the ones where we know for certain that it wasn't to be. But to do this we have to give up hope. The task of life then is to find a way to live with the existential reality of gaining and losing hope and also of managing other people's freedom.

So what are we to make of the woman who binned the cat? Why did she put the cat in the bin? Obvious really – because she could. But what she didn't realise was that her supposedly private act of freedom was potentially the possession of the whole world. Sartre's keyhole. She imagined it was a private act when it was in fact public. And then she had to take responsibility for the consequence of her action. We live our lives in public, whether we like it or not. If Sartre were alive now, he would surely be on Facebook and Twitter.

On many occasions Cox provokes the reader into outrage or bafflement. But this is always followed by the realisation that he is obviously on to something, and that that something may be something the reader did not want to acknowledge. This kind of book can only be written by someone who knows his material inside out, and while being simultaneously funny as well as critical about all his subjects he makes a strong case for an astringent existentialism to replace our tepid modern-day notions of happiness. And it is an excellent companion to his earlier book.

Martin Adams