When I was young (a long time ago) existentialism was a fashionable philosophy, and Jean-Paul Sartre (a Frenchman and political ultra-leftist) was its most famous practitioner.  Probably the best-known of Sartre’s doctrines was the idea that -- for human beings at least -- existence precedes essence.  He had borrowed this idea from the German (and sometime Nazi) philosopher Martin Heidegger. 

In the case of lower animals (a mouse, for instance, or an elephant), it’s the other way around: essence precedes existence.  Which is to say, an animal lives its life the way its essence or nature dictates.  It is not free to choose from among a wide variety of possible ways of living.  It must do what nature compels it to do.  As the old song puts it: “Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly.”  But if you had asked Sartre or Heidegger to comment on the lyrics of this song, they would have told you the song is mistaken when it continues by saying, “I gotta love one man till I die.”  No, they would say, you are not condemned to do this or that or the other.  You are, in a celebrated Sartrean phrase, “condemned to be free.”

According to Sartre, there is no pre-existing moral code based on human nature that tells us what’s right and what’s wrong.  We have to choose or invent our own moral code.  We cannot justify our conduct by saying, “I did X or Y or Z because it was my nature-given duty to do so.  I was obeying a higher law.”  There is no higher law.  There is only the law that I myself freely chose.

This means that I alone am responsible for my moral behavior.  I cannot shift the blame (or the credit) to human nature or to my parents or to my political leaders or to God (who, Sartre adds by the way, doesn’t exist). 

Now, existentialism was a big deal in France in the 1940s and ‘50s.  It was never really a big deal in the USA, though it used to have a handful of ardent fans in this country among philosophy professors and grad students.  Heidegger is still a big deal among students and professors of philosophy, but mostly for things other than his denial of a human essence.  Sartre’s years of philosophical glory have come and gone.

But ideas created by brilliant intellectuals (and Sartre, despite many imperfections, was certainly brilliant) often live on in a nonintellectual form, a vulgar form, even a laughable form.  And so has it been with Sartre’s idea that there is no human essence; that we humans are radically free to choose; that we are “condemned to freedom.”  Ideas of brilliant intellectuals sometimes “trickle down” to people who are not so brilliant.

A great example of this is the current transgenderism craze among people of the Left -- or perhaps I should call it not a craze but a fashionable lunacy.  If there is no human essence or nature, why can’t I (apparently a male human being) decide that I am a woman?  And why can’t you (a female human being) decide that you’re a man?  And why can’t a certain third person decide that “they” are neither male nor female nor a blend of the two nor even a third gender; rather, they are (let’s say) a sixth gender or a thirty-third?  For that matter, why can’t someone decide that he is a zebra?  And why shouldn’t everybody be free to choose their own pronouns?  And why shouldn’t somebody be free to go about on all fours and announce that this is their ambulatory truth?

Why not?  After all, if there is no such thing as human nature...

Usually philosophers are harmless people giving boring lectures to undergraduates who are looking for three more credits.  (I myself was such a harmless guy for all of my working life.)  But sometimes they can be very dangerous.  Remember, Karl Marx earned his PhD in philosophy.  The philosopher Auguste Comte once said, “Ideas govern the world.”  This is true for good ideas.  It is also true for bad ideas.  In the long course of human history, we have been governed by both.  At the moment in the USA, bad ideas seem to have the upper hand.

Image: Ur Camera