Surfing with Sartre Read online

  2

  Freedom

  DIMITRI: I have to admit, Tasso, sometimes I wish I were more like you.

  TASSO: But you can be! Existentially speaking, you are a totally self-originated being! You are who you create!

  DIMITRI: That’s terrific! Because I always wanted to be as tall as you.

  —Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar…*1

  SURFING IS FREEDOM. Or so the surfer will tell you. Sartre would disagree: freedom is a more anxious condition, one of taking control of ourselves and our fortunes in the face of absurdity. Which raises the perennial question: What is it to be free?

  Freedom as Anguish

  For Heidegger, to be, to exist, is to be somewhere, situated, in a concrete place, mixed up in a “life world” of ordinary know-how, an everyday “significance” by which our culture defines our very existence, our very possibilities of meaningful action. I know how to tie my shoes, how to walk a crowded street, how to have a conversation, and how to be or betray a friend. I know how only within a thick cultural matrix, which gives my choices meaning, leaving me with no intelligible possibility of going for something completely different. What Aristotle thought of as the man of practical wisdom, who always does the appropriate thing at the appropriate time in the appropriate way, is but a cultural virtuoso. Even acting against one’s culture is a move within it.*2

  This may explain why Heidegger supported Hitler’s rise to power in 1930s Germany. Hannah Arendt, the twentieth-century political philosopher, a Jewish exile, and his former lover, charitably thought he merely had an “escapade.” He was just being careerist, under some bad influences, and anyway oblivious—which you might expect from someone who believes there’s no seeing beyond one’s life world. And even if he was just an anti-Semite who longed for the old days and blamed the Jews for Germany’s problems, his views don’t entail sympathy for the Nazis. Heidegger, the man, could have simply been worse than his theories, in which case we must ask for ourselves what if anything we might learn from them.*3

  It’s a cramped-sounding existence, if you ask a surfer. Even with the Nazis vanquished, the rebel surfer of 1960s lore couldn’t hack the thick expectations of postwar Southern California, a life of work and marriage and family that doesn’t leave a lot of time for things like surfing. Surfing, and an unconventional life devoted to it, have thus come to symbolize freedom in our culture.

  When Sartre read Heidegger, he must have had that surfer feeling, of wanting to bust out of cultural expectation, to get free. For Sartre, I am free in my very person, whatever my history, however confused my noisy culture, before any “life world” tells me what things mean, or who I must be. I’m free to blow off work and bail for Mexico or Indonesia. Not simply with an “absence of external impediments” on my movements about the planet, as in Thomas Hobbes’s thin definition of freedom. If I were merely free to move, I’d bring my unfreedom with me in my travels, with my baggage. Full freedom comes from within, whatever my location, from the internal structure of my own mind and consciousness.

  An addict gets loaded against her own will, finding herself disgusting. A homeless man roams the city, deranged, with no sense of person and purpose, free to move but going nowhere. Both watch themselves making awful choices, alienated from their own motives, but too knowing to just enjoy the wanton freedom of a wandering dog blissfully rummaging through fresh garbage cans. This poses the basic question of freedom: What are such souls lacking? What would it take for them to be free? What, that is, makes a person the morally responsible author of his or her actions, who can be aptly blamed or thanked for them?*4

  For Sartre, to be a person is to be a minded, conscious being who experiences the world from a distinctive perspective. A person (a “for itself”) is fundamentally different from a mindless object (an “in itself”) such as a stone or a tree. I have thoughts, about all sorts of things, including thoughts of myself and what I myself might be or become in an open future. But I am not simply a passive observer of what might just happen to me. I am the agent of my choices, which, taken all together, make up who I will finally be. Maybe I’ve been cowardly about quitting my job. But I am not yet a coward, because my future has yet to be decided, and it is always still up to me. So maybe I’ll just quit in the coming week, defining my whole self by today deciding my future.

  I wake up in the morning. At some point, I cross a line between drowsy waking and wakeful awareness. Now I must choose. The question is not Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be?” It is, “To lie here, or to get up and going?” I am there in bed, already, in the moment of waking. So shall I lie here, or get going?

  One option I won’t have is to just see what happens, as if I were watching someone else in bed, or as a sleep scientist might observe a test subject’s waking and rising in an experiment. (Gregor Samsa, in Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis, woke to consciousness as a beetle and took just this observational attitude toward his predicament; Kafka’s point was that his was an alienated perspective.) If I get up, because my job expects me to be somewhere, I’ve chosen to get going. But even if I lie there in self-conscious waiting, that will eventually have been my chosen option: then I’m waiting. Either way, I will have chosen. Just in naturally waking into consciousness, I am, as Sartre puts it, “condemned to choose.”

  This is the human’s predicament. A dog, drooling over the sight of pizza, is thinking something like “Fooood.” I, too, see the pizza, but I can back up, asking myself, “Should I really eat the pizza at which I’m leering?” I have a remarkable power to self-consciously ask myself what I ought to do. I can answer by my own powers of reason and then follow through in action, for one reason or another. Simply being so constituted, I count as my own, as responsible for my chosen actions.*5

  My behavior isn’t then a simple reflex reaction, part of the impersonal causal order of scientific study; it’s my behavior, my free action. I’ve chosen my conduct, anew, despite what has come before in my history, whoever I’ve been before this present moment. And for Sartre, I am in this way responsible for myself. “For human reality, to be is to choose oneself.” I choose myself, in the totality of each choice I make. Whatever might come to me “either from outside or from within,” I have to decide what to “receive or accept,” and “without any help whatsoever” I am “entirely abandoned to the intolerable necessity of making [myself] to be—down to the slightest detail.”*6

  It can happen that the surfer finds herself working a crap job (here defined as a job that consistently requires missing good waves). For all her love of waves, in a spell of what Sartre calls “bad faith,” she sees herself as just another object in the world, like a coffee cup on a table, or a flirt being courted, whose hand “rests inert between the warm hands of her companion—neither consenting or resisting,” as though a mere thing.*7 She acts as though her behavior were predictable by the laws of causation, open to control and manipulation, but not fully her own. Maybe she won’t step back and question her circumstances, seeing the job as now for her to choose or reject for her future. It’s only those other, luckier people who take a pay cut, travel, and score perfection in Indonesia or Tahiti. In this case, for Sartre, she is in fact free but not owning up to freedom’s responsibility—its weighty demands for “authenticity.”

  For Heidegger, you haven’t lived until you’ve lived in the shadow of your impending death. To be authentic, I embrace this moment, in this very sip of coffee, because the sips of experience are sooner or later ending. Here Sartre was more upbeat (and more American in optimism than you might expect from a Frenchman). I act authentically, in good faith, when I myself see my present and future as not simply a given fact of the world but up to me—under my control. Such is my “absolute freedom”: nothing else determines my actions. What is simply given, in my history, body, and the present flux of sensory perceptions, never settles my future. Myself and my future are up to me. So in my crap job, I can always step back in reflection, and ask myself, “Who am I, and what shall I do now?” In my simply asking the question of possibility, any constraint I might have felt on my choices (such as my waiterly duty) is “negated” or “nihilated” into “nothingness” a moment later. My future self and doings are open (I see that I can quit).

  In The Graduate, Benjamin Braddock threw off the unsolicited advice to go into “plastics.” Braddock couldn’t go with the cultural flow, despite the glories of conventional postwar prosperity, of washing machines, suburban houses, and lush lawns. Like the generation of Americans that hit the road with Kerouac, he proved to himself his freedom, but anxiously, without any particular direction. For that’s the thing about being on the road, being free to roam: you are constantly condemned to ask, “Now what?” And despite our powers of constant self-creation, Sartre’s depressing answer is still this: nothing of any real meaning or value, or at least nothing that could fully determine what is right for me without my having to simply choose.

  As a free person, one has no “essence” (beyond one’s freedom). The waiter has no duties of service by nature, not by virtue of being either a waiter or a woman. To choose is to choose not from what one already is but from nothing, ex nihilo, with no real reason to do any one thing rather than another. No option really is any better than any other, beyond my choosing it, more or less arbitrarily, even under the guise of one’s abstract values, which still must be determinately lived. And yet we remain fully responsible for what we make of ourselves. We are condemned to choose from nothing, under the weight of authenticity, in the despair that Sartre calls “anguish.”

  —

  All of which leaves us with the question, could anything then justify the surfer’s lightness of being?

  The Ideal Limit of Aquatic Sports

  According to the foremost philosopher of freedom in all of Western history, the free person’s place in the cosmos is expressed in certain sporting activities, in “sliding upon water,” as done in the sliding sports. Much depends on the H2O sliding substrate, the material basis for lateral momentum. Ice-skating, Sartre explains, is “very inferior,” because it “scratches the ice and finds a matter already organized.” It contrasts with snow, for instance, which is “light, insubstantial, and evanescent.” In snow skiing, but not ice-skating, I can imagine that I’m “not making any mark” in the snowpack while I’m barreling down the mountain. With the blanketed expanse running beneath the ski tips, I can imagine myself free from an “already organized” material reality, as though I have no traceable path in my history, no past that limits or could predict my future.

  For if I was determined to take one or another direction—given my history, essential nature, past character, or a divine plan—I would not be free to choose my course and future. For Sartre, any such determinism is simply incompatible with my freedom. But here as I slide along, my trajectory through an impersonal cosmos really does seem up to me. I seem free, free to tell the cosmos how things are going to be, as goes my trajectory. The world shall be thus and so, just by my say-so, in a godlike act of creation, as I throw down a turn. As Sartre puts it, my turning actions come from nothing, ex nihilo, without being determined, except by me.

  How is free sliding possible? Well, speed is crucial. Our bodies are part of our given physical reality (our “facticity,” as Sartre calls it). Gravity pulls us into the snowfield, leaving us less free to move. Yet with a bit of speed, the snow suddenly becomes supportive. I gain new powers, to choose this or that direction, to accelerate, slow up, or carve, according to my style and fancy. As Sartre explains, in snow sliding, “It is I myself then who give form to the field of snow by the free speed which I give myself.”*8 My path in and through an impersonal material reality becomes personal, or my own, because I am choosing self-consciously to go this or that direction while speeding along.

  The skier thus approaches the speeding “continuous creation” of the unique person’s free consciousness. What am I? Not any particular thought of this or that—of the Swiss Alps, of Sartre styling ski boots and a flowing scarf, having made the trek over from Paris. (He writes as though he had himself done some skiing.) I, myself, I am the someone, the person, who is conscious of all such momentary and fleeting mental happenings. I am the singular locus of experience, wherein light, insubstantial, evanescent thoughts, feelings, and experiences flow along together, in the windstorm I speed through in my continuing existence. So flows my consciousness, freely. I act on relatively few of these ideas, thank goodness; any given thought or perception is present and gone an instant later, preserved only in the occasional act of remembering. My flowing minded activity leaves little trace behind, with almost nothing by way of a discernible history. Where did my thoughts from last month disappear to? I search to recall my thinking of two days prior, but most of my experiences have passed out of a temporary existence, once felt and quickly forgotten. As I now remember, I am also refashioning my then experiences into something fresh, leaving my “memory” something that never quite happened.

  But alas, if skiing feels like freedom, for Sartre this is finally an “illusion.” How disappointing it is, Sartre explains, to look back upon the snow tracks left behind. “How much better it would be if the snow re-formed itself as we passed over it!” I suppose not everyone succumbs to existential disappointment while gazing back up the slopes upon one’s snow tracks. Yet the top American skier Dave Rosenbarger gets the point exactly when he praises vertical-drop skiing (as in dropping down a chute or off a cliff): “Marginal conditions call for marginal style. I’m interested in skiing…untracked.”*9

  Freud thought we act from libidinous “drives” for sex and pleasure, as warped by our upbringing, by family birth order and early attachments. For Sartre, our freedom in action means we transcend any such history. If you’re dogged by an old inferiority complex, it is still now chosen in your present action, “as a turning back of the future toward the present.”*10 Your complex will be up for interpretation in a therapy session; what will matter is not your “memories” but what you now choose to make of them, in your present act of retrospection and refashioning.

  This is why Sartre found sliding upon liquefied water more promising than snow sliding as a model of freedom. Liquefied water is “without memory,” for its supple quality of reformation. So sliding along liquid “leaves no trace behind.” The displaced spray droplets settle roughly as they were before, being reabsorbed, with no trace of a history that could tempt one to deny one’s present freedom to turn and carve afresh, whatever one’s personal history.

  Sartre calls motorboating and especially waterskiing the “ideal limit” of aquatic sports. Water sports exemplify freedom, and those styles are in this regard the closest to perfection. Yet surfing involves the same general kind of sliding (glissement was Sartre’s term for the overall category). Though he never encountered it, I’m sure Sartre would have been duly impressed by surfing. Would he have conceded that his radical kind of freedom therefore isn’t necessary? Perhaps not. Yet I submit that surfing does exemplify freedom equally well, or even better, than motorboating or waterskiing. It has the requisite aquamarine properties but also lacks features that make motorboating and even waterskiing relatively unfree.

  For starters, the surfer’s spray flies off the surfboard into the air and then rains into the ocean medium, being reabsorbed completely. In an especially good carve or snap in the wave pocket, the spray will erupt in a fanning plume, with an existence as evanescent as a passing fancy. There’s “no trace left behind” that could predict and limit one’s present turning action or future direction.

  Moreover, speed is crucial, especially for proper carving. As I glide along the wave face, I may have to rush down the wave’s line. With the wave face steepening, and the section running ahead, with a cresting lip hovering, I’ll fly right under it if I go even faster, if I keep trimming along the high line, holding it, and then holding it for longer, waiting, pumping, hanging high and tight, until I know I’m making it and the next section relents. Then with speed to burn in the slowing section, I might celebrate the moment of release, laying down a sweeping cutback, my full weight pressed into the rotation, my body extended and then drawn into a focused center-weighted compression, ideally in a carve that would redefine carving, with a fan of spray punctuating my freedom in attunement.

  And because surfing is adaptive, it exemplifies the free flow of consciousness. Just as my passing rush of thoughts or sensations is soon forgotten, the surfer flows through different wave moments, moving from one moment to another and then to the next, which is quickly coming. And just as each span of a person’s whizzing wind of experience is unique and non-repeatable, each wave is its own complex moment, calling for a fresh adaptation of flowing ability, bodily movements, and stylish self-presentation.

  So far, so good. Surfing is at least on the same footing as motorboating and waterskiing. Weirdly, Sartre also says sliding along a surface is a way of using it, in a kind of “appropriation” for one’s purposes, as though you own the surface, as part of your acts of self-definition. He means not simply that you’re having fun with it, or leaving your personal mark in a skillful movement, as you might in doing a stylish snap in the wave pocket. He means you’re mastering or possessing it, as a slave is mastered or possessed by his or her owner.*11 For the same reasons, he explains, people climb a mountain and claim it, “appropriating” the mountain in triumphant conquest, “being victor over it.”*12

  Such “appropriation” isn’t part of the freedom in surfing. Is surfing less free for that reason? No way! What follows instead, according to the surfer, is that Sartre’s radical freedom is not really necessary. Had Sartre appreciated what is distinctive in surfing, he might have admitted more clearly that one can be free and, in a deep way, bounded in embodied, situated reality, all at the same time.