Running with the Pack (22 page)

Think of Sartre as supplying a challenge: try to point to consciousness — try to point to something that is in consciousness. As you say, ‘Here it is!' — mentally pointing to a thought, experience, feeling or sensation, for example — this becomes an object of your consciousness and so is, if Sartre is correct, precisely not a part of your consciousness; it is not part of you. The entire world is outside you — for the world is simply a collection of things of which you are aware; or, at least, of which you can be aware if your attention is suitably engaged. Therefore, consciousness can be nothing at all. Therefore, Sartre concludes, consciousness is simply a pure directedness towards the world — a ‘wind blowing toward the world' as he once put it. Consciousness is a directedness towards things that it is not and it is nothing more than this. From this perspective, the error of Descartes was to think of consciousness as a thing — albeit a thing of a special sort, a non-physical thing, a spiritual substance. Consciousness, in reality, is no-thing. It is nothing. The error of Hume was to suppose that the thoughts, feelings and other mental states of which I am aware are parts of me. They are not: they are outside me, irreducibly alien to me.

 

All the reasons I have to stop running have no authority over me because they are not part of me. They are not part of me because I am aware of them. Because I am aware of them, they are not intrinsically about anything; their meaning is not intrinsic to them. Whatever meaning they have is something I must assign to them. And this assignation is my choice. This is the core of the argument of Sartre's monumental early — and best — work,
Being and Nothingness
. Everything else in those six hundred pages is merely an attempt to work out the implications of this idea that consciousness is empty: there is nothing in it; it has no content. I have never before understood Sartre as well as I do today, in these anxious, vicious minutes as I scan the distance for the fifteen-mile marker.

A reason is something I am aware of. If I am not aware of it, then it is not a reason, but something else — a cause. But if I am aware of a reason, then it is not a part of my consciousness. As something I am aware of, a reason can mean anything at all. In order for it to mean one thing rather than another, I must interpret it. And this means that no reason can ever compel me to do one thing rather than another. Whatever implications the reason has for my action is a matter of what that reason means. And, since the reason is something I am aware of, its meaning must come from me. Therefore there will always be a gap between reasons I have and the things I do, and there is nothing in the reasons themselves that can bridge this gap. Freedom lies in this gap. I am free to the extent that my reasons cannot compel me. And so today, somewhere past the fourteen-mile marker, I come to properly understand, for the first time, the gap between reasons and actions. The gap is always there — between every reason I have and every action I perform — but perhaps it is
only on this long and difficult run that this abstruse logical point receives vivid experiential confirmation.

Every step I am going to take on the remainder of this run is a choice. Choices can be made on the basis of reasons, but I now understand that no reason can ever compel a choice. There is always a gap between the reason and the subsequent choice. At every step I take in the long run, I have a choice to make: to take another step or to stop. The only thing I cannot choose is whether or not to make this choice, and there is no reason that can compel me to choose one way or the other. At the 12.8-mile mark, I decided I was going to go on and try to run a marathon, and I have very good reasons for wanting to complete this race. But each new step requires a reaffirmation of my decision. Each new step requires a reiteration of my desire. At each new step I take in this long run, my desires and decisions can mean different things. Perhaps I shall regard them as utterly binding, or perhaps I shall see them as merely the caprices of a previous hour that should now be discarded. What they are, how they should be interpreted, that is my choice. And nothing can ever make me choose one way rather than another. An old memory briefly flashes through my mind, of Alan Sillitoe's novella,
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
, whose anti-hero Colin Smith walks away a few yards from the finish line, even though he is winning and the consequences of this action will, for him, be grim. But fuelled by this Sartrean realization, I'm in far too upbeat a mood to be detained by this sort of negativity. Smith chose to stop, because there was no reason that could compel him to continue. My concerns point firmly in the other direction: there is no reason that can make me stop. No reason at all. If I stop, it will be because I have chosen to. If I stop, this
will be because I have allowed a reason to deceive me — to convince me that it is more powerful than it really is.

Out of the corner of my eye I see it: the fifteen-mile marker. Hah! Not fifteen: sixteen! Apparently, I had missed the fifteen-mile marker — that's what happens when you become overly preoccupied with neo-Sartrean ruminations. Sixteen: just ten miles to go — less than two hours. I can do that. Sartre used the term ‘anguish' to describe one's experience of one's own freedom. When I realize that no reason I have can ever determine what I do, then, Sartre says, I experience
angoisse
: anguish. I wouldn't call it that at all. Even before I saw the sixteen-mile marker, I wouldn't have called it that. When I understood that no reason could ever make me stop, what I experienced was joy. Joy — the most reliable symptom of what is intrinsically valuable making its presence felt in life. To run on in freedom — to run in the freedom of the gap between reasons and actions — is one of the intrinsically valuable ways of being in this world. To run in this freedom is to run in joy.

I am now beginning to suspect that Sartre's view of freedom is widely misunderstood. Some people think he is claiming less than he, in fact, is. All Sartre is doing, they say, is describing the experience of freedom — what it feels like to be free. Others think he is claiming more than he, in fact, is. They interpret Sartre as claiming that there are no limits to our freedom — that we are free in some absolute sense. No external factors or circumstances can ever shackle us or constrain what we do. That is a silly view, and I am now pretty sure Sartre did not hold it. According to Sartre we are free in this sense and to this extent: no reason can ever compel us. For us, reasons decide nothing. This is not simply a matter of feeling free: I actually am free in this sense and to this
extent. But this does not, of course, mean that nothing can make me stop running. There are not only reasons there are also causes. Reasons may decide nothing; but causes certainly can.

The difference between a reason and a cause is easy to understand in principle, but sometimes difficult to pin down with any precision. The basic idea is that reasons are things we have, whereas causes are things that happen to us. I am running today because, apparently, I want to try to run a marathon — this want or desire is part of my reason. I also need to have associated pertinent beliefs. I have to believe, for example, that today is marathon day and that I am currently on the marathon course — if I didn't believe these things, then my simple desire to run the marathon would not explain why I am now running here, in this place. A standard way of thinking of reasons is as desire-belief combinations of this general sort. Together, the combination explains why I am running. Contrast this with a very different explanation. I am running because someone has tied me behind their car, and is driving the marathon course, on marathon day, at roughly five and a half miles an hour, with me in tow. This would be a cause of my running — and this cause is not something that I have; it is something that has happened to me. It is common to think of reasons as a species of cause — causes that we have rather than causes that merely happen to us. I am free, Sartre argued, to the extent that my reasons cannot compel me. But this is, of course, compatible with the idea that causes — the causes that happen to me, not the ones I have — can compel me. And obviously they can: indeed, not merely compel me, they can crush me.

There is nothing in consciousness; it is empty, a wind blowing towards the world. Consciousness is akin to a hole
in being. But holes can't exist by themselves. A hole is defined by its edges, and these are not part of the hole. So a hole can exist only if there is something that is not a hole. The same is true of consciousness. Consciousness can only exist if there is something that is not consciousness. Indeed, for Sartre, consciousness is defined by its relation to things that it is not. Sartre often put this by saying — perhaps a little unhelpfully, but he was, after all, Parisian — that I am what I am not and I am not what I am. Suppose I am conscious of the things that I am, or the things I could be said to be. I am a 48-year-old man, a husband and a father of two; I am a professor of philosophy; I am from Wales, but am now a resident of Miami; I am a mediocre runner; I am severely under-trained. All these things are true of me; all these things I think I am. However, Sartre argued, I am really not any of these things. I am aware of being these things, and therefore am not any of these things. Rather, I am that which decides the significance of these things, what these things mean. Sartre argued that what I really am must escape these sorts of characterizations and any other ones that I might put in their place. What I really am always slips away from, and so cannot be captured by, the ways in which I think of myself. This is what Sartre means when he says I am not what I am. But there is also a clear sense in which if I am not a 48-year-old, running, philosophy-professing father of two who was born in Wales and is a resident of Miami, then I am not these things in a very different sense than the one in which I am not a blind blues guitarist, or the female CEO of a multinational company. I am defined as not being a 48-year-old, running, philosophy-teaching father of two, born in Wales now living in Miami. But I am not defined by my failure to be any of these other things. For Sartre, I am defined by not
being what is true of me. I am not defined by not being what is false of me. This is what Sartre meant when he said that I am what I am not.

I am defined by not being what is true of me. As consciousness, I am nothing. But nothing can only exist as a relation to something. And the something that I am not is what Sartre called my ‘facticity'. Facticity is equivalent to the edge of the hole — the thing that is not a hole but without which the hole cannot exist. I am not my facticity, but can exist only in relation to it. Facticity changes from moment to moment. My current facticity is, roughly, the situation in which I now, at this time, find myself. My current situation is that I am running, or at least trying to run, a marathon. I have no natural aptitude for this, quite the contrary in fact. I haven't been able to train very much; in fact training has gone very badly indeed. Then there is my specifically bodily facticity — the bodily baggage I bring to this situation. This body is forty-eight years old. It's been around the block. It has history. There are certain criminal elements of it that have what we might call ‘form'. I am a tissue of injuries, scars and weaknesses sown together in the mere semblance of a man. If I hadn't been so focused on my calf issue, there would have been plenty of other things for me to worry about.

There are, for example, my arthritic knees. There's my failing back, which will occasionally go into spasm during the course of a long run (one reason I always carry a mobile phone with me these days). There is my almost constantly complaining Achilles tendon — which, I am pretty sure, is a ticking time bomb. There is my recently torn calf, and my resulting lack of anything remotely approaching marathon fitness. It is my facticity that explains why I am not going to breeze through today's 26.2 miles. Maybe I am not my facticity; but it
is my facticity — rather than someone else's facticity — that therefore defines me. I am not Mark Rowlands: forty-eight, untalented, under-trained, overweight, with questionable calves, knees, Achilles and back. My facticity is a ridiculously undercooked facticity. I'd much rather I had the facticity of someone younger, lighter, or who had four months of unblemished training behind them. But that is not the way things turned out.

When you are working with this sort of facticity, then pain during the long run is entirely normal and is something I generally try to ignore rather than address. Some think of pain as a warning sign. But pain is part of my facticity. If I stopped running every time I felt a little pain, I'd never get any running done at all. Now, closing in on the nineteen-mile mark, I've been cramping up for the past two miles. My right, uninjured, calf has been the most vociferous in its complaints, and I suspect I must have been unconsciously favouring my left leg. Fantastic — rather than running a marathon, I must have been limping my way through it. Strangely, I'm not too worried about this calf, although that might simply be because I am too tired to realistically assess its condition. I tell myself that a cramp in a smaller muscle like the calf can be stretched away — and, indeed, a vigorous calf stretch every mile or so has done the trick so far. And even if it goes, I further tell myself, goes like my left one did a couple of months ago, I can limp the last seven miles to the finish line — although given that I've never limped seven miles anywhere in my life, I can hardly be certain of this.

Shortly after the nineteen-mile mark, my hamstrings start to tighten noticeably. But again I am able to effectively stretch them out. Around this time also, I am buoyed by the appearance of the five-hour pace runners. I haven't seen them since
I continued on to the full marathon. They pass me when I'm closing in on the twenty-mile mark, and I shove my tightening, hurting muscles into the little box of what does not matter, and dig in behind them. Two months ago, I would have been devastated by a time of five hours. Today, I would regard it as a result.