In human society, and in human beings, we never stop trying to suppress contingency by endlessly imposing meaning and purpose on this world. We name things, we classify them. Through the act of naming something, we believe we have eliminated the defenseless contingency of that nameless existence.
… The truth, as the existentialist philosopher tells it, goes like this: beings hold meaning and purpose only for other beings. And this entire world holds only the relative meaning and purpose that our ultimately meaningless actions give it.
… Sartre thought that we don’t always need to agonize over contingency, but in order to touch authenticity at all and not live in bad faith, we do need to recognize contingency sometimes — or at least know of it as a kind of background knowledge.
… The fundamental “project” (project: the existential mode of being, a concept in Sartre and Heidegger meaning the mode of being that ceaselessly creates itself in the real world and unfolds its possibilities) of people who, having glimpsed life’s contingency, get scared and flee — is to hide themselves in bad faith and escape their own contingency and the world’s. … In order to assert their absolute right to be respected by others, and to maintain the illusion of their own necessity through the respect of others, what these people do is dutifully perform the role society has assigned them and identify themselves completely with that role.
… The existential philosopher Kierkegaard wrote about people who suffer from a disease he called “objective madness.” A person caught in objective madness does not truly “exist.” That is because they have filled themselves with facts and given themselves over entirely to objectivity. They even come to regard themselves as just another fact. Kierkegaard contrasts objective madness with “subjective madness.” Here, subjective madness refers to what is commonly known as mental illness. Kierkegaard considered a person caught in objective madness to fall short of a person caught in subjective madness — and short in soul too. The person caught in subjective madness is all too human. Their madness reveals their living soul.
A classic example of subjective madness is Don Quixote. A classic example of objective madness is the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. … We hesitate to look into the eyes of a mad person (subjective madness). We’re afraid to measure the depth of their delirium. On the other hand, we don’t even dare look into the eyes of the other kind of mad person (objective madness). We’re afraid we’ll see that their eyes are glass marbles and their hair is made of carpet rags. In a word, we’re afraid we’ll realize they are an artifact.
… The person who grows a mustache cannot see his own mustache nearly as much as others do. Therefore the mustache exists for others, and the man who grows a mustache is someone who has chosen to exist for others rather than for himself.
… Let me emphasize again: what matters to being an existentialist isn’t so much what you do as the attitude with which you do it. As always, the “choice” is ours.
