I had a Horrible Dream in which I Watched You Die

 

The philosopher Jean Paul Sartre’s view of freedom and responsibility can initially be difficult to grasp. His claim that we are radically free to choose different options at every given moment can sound like he’s saying there’s a part of us that can weigh up different situations and then make a decision concerning what to do in a space unaffected by some causal chain (as well as sounding just plain exhausting).

But Sartre is not claiming that there is some part of us (some ghost in the machine) that is free to choose at any given moment, but rather that we are free. The claim “existence precedes essence” is the claim that consciousness is itself the direct expression of a radical freedom. This means that everything we do is ours to bear and that the denial of responsibility is an act of bad faith.

A good way of thinking about Sartre’s freedom is via reference to Freud’s work with dreams. For Freud there is a sense in which we are responsible for our dreams. They are ours, yet we can’t really control them. We don’t choose our dreams and we rarely get the chance to influence them in a self-conscious way. They feel foreign to us while actually being a deep part of us. In Zizek’s words, they’re a type of alien from inner space (what Lacan called “extimacy”).

This is why, from a Freudian perspective, even those things we dream of which are disturbing to us are a reflection of some ciphered desire or wish. If I have a dream where I see a good friend drowning, I cannot escape the fact that I dreamed it. In the dream I might feel a horrible sense of panic as I stand by the water and watch him disappear beneath it, but the sense of panic can actually be the defense I employ to protect myself from confronting the desire I have.

The feeling of horror provides a way for me to censor my desire from myself because of the self-disgust I would otherwise feel. The jealousy or hatred that I might harbor against him is effectively masked by my seeming emotional protest.

It is this same logic that we witness in statements such as “I’m not a racist, but…” or “I mean no offense, however…” Here we witness how a person is able to express racism or personal insult while protecting their self-image. When a person writes, “I hate to say this, but…” one thing that is generally clear is that they very much don’t hate saying it, indeed they elicit a certain amount of pleasure from the statement.