Essay on Freedom (Existentialism)

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Theme 5 - Ethics
‘All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly. It is ready to pay up. In other words, there may be responsible people, but there are no guilty ones.’’
-Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)

Whenever I think of Camus, I wonder what stops us all from committing suicide. After all, according to the existentialism, life has no meaning.
Life is always an intense battle between becoming someone you want to be and coming to consensus with whom you were in the past.
Thrown into the world without an essence and forced to use the world to your advantage as disadvantage to become who you want to be.
This paradox of existence is something that only a human has to undertake, because we have the fortune as misfortune of being able to reflect on who we were, who we are and who we want to be.
With this grand task that has to be carried out throughout our whole life, what exactly is this paradox I am speaking of?
The paradox I am speaking of is the paradox of freedom in our existence.
Every single one of us, no exceptions made, has been thrown into this world without our consent or our disagreement. We never had the choice to reflect on the world we are thrown in. Namely, for such a thing to take place it is necessary for us to be able to have a consciousness, that makes us take every step we are going to take in consideration and then ask itself the question: Do I or do I not want to be a part of this world, as this person in this environment?
And this isn’t the case. Consciousness and self-reflection can only take place the moment it can even out events to one another that take place in the subjective and physical world and to then take the conclusion whether its actions and the consequences of these actions appeal to it or not.
Which simply means, there was no I before the existence.

I can now state that we have been born completely freely, without any strings attached to us that swing us towards the path of life we are obligated to follow.
The paradox of existence is this: with every decision we take, we become less and less free.
With every observation and thought we encounter, we are filling ourselves with information and becoming less free. Less free in the sense, that it is difficult for us to begin from a total point zero and then work towards an alternative style of thinking and living.
The unfortunate part is, that we can’t blame the invisible strings for what we have become. We can’t blame our environment either.
After all, weren’t we thrown freely into the world to make any choice we want?
Sartre would be nodding yes, because you always had the choice to do something else; now that you made your current choice, it is necessary for you to take the consequences and live with it.
With that said, with every step we are taking we have become less and less free. We have become a slave to our own existence, because there is no escape and there is no one else to blame except for you.

This raises the next question: why don’t we all just commit suicide?
Life sounds difficult, it seems pointless and I have just shown you that we have no one else to blame except ourselves.
The answer I am going to give you is very simple.
Although many claim that suicide is an act of freedom, it is in my eyes an act of imprisoning yourself forever.
By committing suicide, you are not freeing yourself from this world.
No, you are taking away any possible chance of becoming another you. You are taking away your freedom of choice, how limited those choices may seem; because by being dead there is no chance that a person can realize and manifest himself in this world anymore.
This shows us that we have no choice but to exist.
And this is the grand paradox of being human and the freedom of choice.

Camus states: ‘’A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly. It is ready to pay up.’’
-The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)
With that said, he has made a select group of people who have this special mindset and they are willing to take any consequences that come out of their actions.
Suddenly though, he draws the line from this select group of people, to all the people that exist.
‘’There may be responsible people, but there are no guilty ones.’’
What does this say about his statement? I can only conclude that Camus assumes that every person on this planet thinks about every action he makes and is willing to accept the consequences that it brings.
That is not the case and I will explain why.
The moment we have been thrown into this world, we had nothing to work with. With that I mean, we had no moral structures, we didn’t even have the ability to speak. Is it possible to accept of a baby to take full responsibility of his actions, when there was nothing before his existence and almost no information after his existence?
Now let me extend that a bit more.
In our life, we never are able to predict all possible outcomes of every possible action in whole the world. Instead we merely narrow down, by past experience, the best possible action we can take at that moment without being one hundred percent sure of the outcome. We only assume the most plausible outcome possible.
That is why I used the baby as an example. We have nothing to work with at the beginning, but the more we live the more narrow our choice of actions become; this doesn’t mean that we can be more certain about the outcome with every year we age.
With that said, what Camus assumes is not something that is, but how it should be.
It is very important to make this distinction between something that is the case and something we think should be the case.
And unfortunately what is the case is the fact that we can’t take full responsibility of our actions.
However, as I have stated before, we can use the world to our advantage and make ourselves into something we want to be, with the unfortunate side effect of always being in risk of being guilty of immoral behavior.
Fortunately though we can narrow down this risk by learning the system of morality and using it to our advantage.
After a large period of time we have learned more and more and we will never be finished with learning, because there are always unpredictable situations that urge us to learn more about our morality and ourselves - although having learned enough to function properly in our society.

With that said, we have learned that behind every action lie consequences that we are responsible for.
However, I can’t make the claim that we aren’t guilty, because we are.
This merely means that with every immoral action that goes against the systems of morality, we learn where we can line the borders of our freedom.
And everyone that crosses that border has never understood the long and hard road that took us towards the border of the systems of morality.