I had put off reading Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism for quite some time. Perhaps I owe that to the following Google Books review posted by a Timothy Proffitt, which reads, in its entirety:

“Sartre stays in the realm of obscurity, his credence of ‘Existence before Essence’ is just the flip of Camus' metaphysical works. He is blind to the truth of Being.”

Sartre’s book may very well be an inversion of Camus’ principles—my edition of the text contains a seething criticism of Camus’ novel The Stranger. So, Camus and Sartre may have been at odds. I’m nowhere near the capacity to weigh in on any nuances in this debate, nor do I think I can pick a side. After a night of debauchery and the consequential hangover I am grappling with, I say they both may be correct, who am I to make this or that judgement? In moments of tumult, where my intellectual shortcomings make themselves ever so present to a point where I simultaneously believe two ideas, totally at odds, I recall a passage from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s essay The Crack-Up. He writes:

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

Now, I’ve managed to catapult myself from this groveling sense of inaptitude to a feeling that I myself possess a first-rate intelligence given I retain the ability to function. By virtue of comparison, Sartre and Camus are both dead, and therefore are unable to function and therefore must not be intelligent (at least not to the degree that I, a living man in his early twenties, must be). Fitzgerald too for that matter. This is Perhaps not the most sound logic, but I shall take what I can get. As for Timothy Proffitt, be he alive or dead, I shall remark that he so resolutely takes Camus’ side by claiming Sartre is blind to the truth of Being.

This is all to say that I think Sartre’s claim that existence precedes essence is true to an extent. I’ve always had this lingering thought that I only am what I am because I’ve willed it. I reflected on this the other day—my mother complimented my Arabic script, informing me that my English handwriting by comparison was atrocious and unreadable, while the sharpest of grammar school teachers might laud me on my Arabic.

I found this funny. Handwriting is never really an innate or natural thing. One has to will it, because one is presented with the letters as reference prior to learning how to write them. I look at the letter K and I note its shape. Then, I emulate its shape, striving to get as close as possible until I finally achieve K. Given I learned the English alphabet as a mere child, and given that I only started practicing writing Arabic last week, I think my mother makes an unfair comparison.

I think these circumstances would be wildly different if we all held off on learning how to write until adulthood. Then, we’d all have improved capacity to emulate compared to our youthful selves, not to mention an across the board improvement in motor skills. I don’t know this for a fact, but if I had to operate on a patient in dire need of a kidney transplant, and for some reason, my three-year-old self was performing the same exact procedure but in the room directly next to mine, my (adult-self) patient would be more likely to survive. You can’t trust a three-year-old with a scalpel.

Handwriting is fluid, too. My handwriting in high school looked much worse (in my opinion) than it does now. This is due to a process of imitation—I have encountered handwriting-a-plenty and sought to emulate aspects of script that I find interesting or aesthetically desirable. This was not a concern in kindergarten, I simply wanted to spell “apple” correctly.*

This process of imitation, and Sartre’s claim in Existentialism is a Humanism, has made me wonder whether all that we accomplish in life is an act of imitation, and originality is just a synthesis of imitation mixed with randomness (in the example of handwriting, poor motor skills). When I attempt to concoct a five-year plan, it often can only be done when I think about the things that I will imitate, the things that have already been done by someone else somewhere else. The uncertainty is uncertain because we have never seen it before, and therefore cannot necessarily will it to be. This makes me believe that we all simultaneously live very original lives and very derivative lives.

My business partner recently pressed me to boldly claim what it was that I wanted—what I wanted to do, what I wanted out of life. I think this is an unfair question, mostly because I don’t think I’ve found the specific thing I want to be doing yet. There’s nothing for me to imitate in the long term. I think I see a lot of things on the horizon, paths I can take within the week, month, or year, but I have never been able to truly envision myself in 10 years. Yesterday I felt as though I had an epiphany of sorts, a moment of clarity I wasn’t expecting to experience on the 4th of July. Because I could only really think in these short term spans, I should be acting within them, because that’s where I think one finds this easy to swallow act of imitation. For instance, it can be crippling for me to say, think about moving to Los Angeles next month if I envisioned that it would be my entire life. However, thinking about it as just a period of time—a few months, a year—it’s much easier to swallow this way.

This is all to say that I think innate within us, and perhaps to Sartre’s point, is this power of self-determination and/or the self fulfilling prophecy. The thought that everything we do is derivative to an extent can be really frightening. It evokes a feeling of predeterminism, that we don’t really have any control over what we do, how we act, and so forth. Though, this sentiment can be thought of hopefully—existence preceding essence implies that we do exist prior to imitating.

Where does this take me? I think it lowers the stakes a little bit. I think I can just will myself to be whatever I think I wish to be in the short term because essence is fluid. Handwriting changes, who I am and what I do changes. Fluidity means no decision is forever, and that makes deciding easier to do.

*This brings to mind an instance where, as a child, I demanded that my preschool teacher tell me how to spell the letter B. She told me that it was just spelled B. I happened to be a highly dubious and skeptical kid, so I rebuked my teacher after her bold assertion. In my head, she didn’t understand the essence of my question. She told me once again that it was just B. I figured this interaction would be a losing game and instead decided to ask my mother after school. She, in fact, corroborated my teacher’s claim, and so I went on believing that nobody would ever understand the question I was asking and so desperately trying to get to the bottom of, rather than admit defeat and believe that B was, quite simply, spelled B.