Authenticity in Voltaire’s Candide and Henrick Ibsen’s The Wild Duck

The way in which one responds to and interprets the world and their situation therein, can be approached either authentically or inauthentically, with an aim for truth or avoiding truth of the reality of an individual’s situation and the world in general. Within Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck and François Marie Arouet de Voltaire’s Candide, both authors provide characters that are inauthentic, people who want to escape the world which does not match up to their idea and desire of how the reality of the world should be. The characters Dr. Relling in Ibsen’s play and Martin in Voltaire’s novel share a similar conclusion that truth is too difficult to accept and a person’s happiness can be attained only by escaping truth. By presenting these characters perspectives, Ibsen and Voltaire reveal the negative consequences of their conclusions, in order to show that truth can be understood and appropriated, that life can be lived accordingly, and as a consequence, to a better extent.

In The Wild Duck, Ibsen presents a life problem which various characters engage in, giving their personal philosophy concerning the way in which the character who has the problem, Hialmar Ekdal, should deal with it. This rhetorical strategy allows Ibsen the ability to explore and critique the various characters perspectives. The problem that Hialmar faces throughout the book is one that is brought about when Gregers Werle, as a consequence of his self-assigned mission, reveals to Hialmar that his wife Gina was involved in an affair previous to their marriage. What this mission is and what philosophy he holds, another character Dr. Relling reveals: “He went round to all the cotters’ cabins presenting something he called ‘the claim of the ideal,’” to present truth at all costs, believing that after realizing the truth, a person can appropriate their lives in a way that leads to a more authentic, truth driven life (The Wild Duck, 66). When Hialmar discovers his wife’s affair with Gregers’s father, who he believes might be the father of Hedvig, Hialmar’s daughter, he decides that he is going to disown Hedvig as a daughter and leave Gina to Greger’s surprise.

In light of this situation, Ibsen then forces the question as to how one is to respond to the various problems that arise in life which are difficult to acknowledge, which mirrors the human situation in general, namely how one is to deal authentically with the world in conjunction with the desire for, and knowledge of, truth, while not responding in such an exaggerated manner like Hialmar, and how to go about seeking truth unlike Gregers. The character within the play who articulates this problem most clearly is Dr. Relling. It is he who shows the problems inherent in Gregers’s “truth at all costs” philosophy, by showing that his motives are not in the “fearless spirit of sacrifice” as he thought, rather to redeem himself through Hialmar, not Hialmar himself: “you are always in a delirium of hero-worship…” (101). Thus it seems Ibsen presents Relling as a character that has some understanding of reality, as it is truly.

Although he finds problems in Gregers’s philosophy, he too has a problematic view on perceiving truth, which is suggested by his title doctor. His idea of handling truth is one who like a doctor, diagnoses and attempts to rid Hialmar’s problem in such a way that is often mistaken as a cure: to give a medicine which numbs the pain. This then leads him to conclude, “Rob the average man of his life-illusion, and you rob him of his happiness at the same stroke” (103). Relling is in some sense speaking on behalf of the underlying perspective, which he, Hialmar, and Gregers all hold, namely one which indulges in delusion in order for an escape. What separates Dr. Relling from the others is that he is the only one who recognizes the perspective that the three share, that it is better not to know the truth at all but relieve one’s self of dealing with it. By way of Relling’s realization, Ibsen then is able to articulate the quasi romantic escapism he and many people hold, which often appears in different forms, which forces one to acknowledge the problem of escapism, in order to make way for Ibsen’s character Mrs. Sorby. Ibsen presents her as the only one who appropriates her situation authentically, dealing with the personal problems she faces without escaping, with a mind to perceive things honestly, and understanding herself accordingly. As Relling’s philosophy leaves no room for truth, he provides no wisdom towards dealing with life, and as Relling’s antidotes do not help Hailmar’s situation, Ibsen reveals that this is an absurd option.

While Ibsen focuses on individual situations, Voltaire addresses a metaphysical problem, which is more universal, namely the problem of evil. Like Ibsen, Voltaire deals with authenticity and the various ways people often wrongly respond to the reality of evil in the world. At the beginning of the novel, the problem which Voltaire poses surfaces when he leads Candide through various situations which bring out the random evil in the world, from pillages, raping, abuse, and natural evil, in order to test Candide’s metaphysical belief that “all is for the best in this world” (“Candide,” 389).Throughout his journey, Candide meets another philosopher whose opinion is radically different from the other philosopher Pangloss, who is Candide’s teacher. The narrator reveals that like Candide, Martin has experienced a great deal of evil: “he had been robbed by his wife, beaten by his son, and deserted by his daughter” (412). While Candide keeps hoping, Martin did the opposite, assuming a stoical and cynical character, placing no hope in the world. Thus when dealing with the evils of men, he concludes, “What do you expect? That is how these folks are,” and as for the whole problem, “I don’t suppose it’s worth the trouble of discussing” (425). This leads Candide to the conclusion, “You’re a hard man.” Martin reveals why, “I’ve lived.” With this sort of understanding and knowledge which resembles Dr. Relling’s, Martin is able to see through the decadent optimism of Candide’s belief, “as I survey this globe or globule, I think that God has abandoned it to some evil spirit…” (412). Martin shows that regardless of the evidence against Candide’s perspective that all works for the best, he continues to believe it.

As a consequence of Martin’s perspective, he is able to share some legitimate insights, but like Relling, his outlook too has its problem. Voltaire wants to show that while a stoic or cynic might be warranted in some sense for believing that there is no hope for this world and that one should become reserved and careless towards these problems, this view is just as much an escape, or worse, a fatalism. The problem with Martin’s view is that if one believes that things will never change, this alleviates the responsibility of trying to make things better. Martin then finds the philosophy of Eldorado appealing: “[W]hen you are pretty comfortable somewhere, you had better stay there” (408). But like the Turkish farmer at the end, Voltaire concludes that “we must cultivate our garden,” or work in one’s area to enlighten one’s self and others in order to mitigate the evil within the world: “the work keeps us from the three great evils, boredom, vice, and poverty” (437). The problem with Martin and Eldorado is that they neglect the rest of the suffering world by believing this—escaping the problem rather than dealing with it.

Both Ibsen and Voltaire in their writings deal extensively with truth and the problems with the predominant tendency towards any escapist philosophy. As Ibsen and Voltaire demonstrate, dealing with both personal problems and the world’s problems as a whole are never solved through escape. As they see it, it is better to understand truth and the difficulty of living with such, enabling one to live life to a better extent.

Works Cited

Ibsen, Henrik. The Wild Duck; The League of Youth; Rosmersholm. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1918. Print.

Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet. “Candide.” The Norton Anthology of Western Literature. Ed.     Sarah Lawall. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2006. 375-438. Print.

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The Role of Others in the thought of C.S Lewis

The way others perceive us highly influences our own self-perception. The way in which we regulate our lives is often in accordance with others’ perceptions, and what they expect of us. Both Jean-Paul Sartre and C.S Lewis saw that it was necessary to reinterpret the role of others in our lives in order that we might define ourselves authentically. Jean-Paul Sartre famously declared in his play No Exit that “Hell is other people,” and Lewis, in his book The Great Divorce, utilized images of Heaven and Hell to explore the self’s relation to others. Lewis’s analysis, however, will show why people wrongly conclude, as Sartre did, that others necessarily play a negative role in our lives.

One thinker to treat others as an important variable for an individual’s self-recognition was the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. In his book I and Thou, Buber noted that our experience of the world rests on the individuals attitudes towards others: “The attitude of man is twofold, in accordance with the twofold nature of the primary words which he speaks… The one primary word is the combination I-Thou.The other primary word is the combination I-It.”[1]There is no separating others from who we are, for when we say I as a particular individual, we must refer to another individual also. Therefore our being is tied into ‘the other.’ We can see other individuals as things and objects, as an ‘It,’ or we can see people as an undefinable, infinite, ‘Thou.’  Buber stressed that we see others as a thou, because only when we recognize that a person is more than an object of our experience, and that we cannot define who they are, do we experience ourselves and the people who we interact with fully. This is the problem with saying “I-It,” because like an object which has a specific use, people only have meaning insofar as we define them as something.

Jean-Paul Sartre saw that others necessarily see us in the light of the I-It, because the distance between the I and the opposing other is infinite. Because of this, we can never perceive people beyond an It. Since we cannot control how others view us, Sartre noticed that we feel that we are subject either to conform to their definition of who we are and win their approval, or to rebel and attain the freedom to define ourselves at the expense of the approval that we desire. Either way, our identity rests in the other. Sartre communicates this perspective in his play No Exit. The play begins with Garcin, a middle aged journalist from Rio who realizes that he has arrived in Hell. At first, Garcin is surprised to find that Hell is not what he expected it to be, for he meets no flames and finds no torturer. Considering Hell is a place of punishment, the overarching question then becomes “where are the instruments of torture?”[2] While lacking any apparent means for punishment, Garcin notices that Hell has finality to it: the furniture in his room cannot be moved, and he cannot close his eyes, everything is fixed; Hell cannot be changed or escaped: “it’s life without a break.”[3] This is an important detail, for it emphasizes not an aspect of Hell, but the reality of earth that had previously gone unnoticed. Another character named Inez then joins Garcin in his room. Although she finds out that Garcin is not there to torture her, merely his presence is enough to torment her, for he immediately begins to annoy her: “Must you be here all the time, or do you take a stroll outside, now and then?”[4] Inez too torments Garcin in a similar way, but it is her judgment that bothers him, that he cannot change: “do you really think I look like a torturer?”[5] Lastly, another woman named Estelle appears, and the three begin to discuss their situation.

Each of the characters notices that they can see nothing but one another. This leaves them completely exposed to the eyes of the others. Estelle realizes that this is disturbing, for she can see herself only insofar as Garcin and Inez do, “Come, to me, Estelle. You shall be whatever you like… deep down in my eyes you’ll see yourself just as you want to be…” regardless, Estelle does not find this comforting, “I can’t see myself properly… I’m going to smile, and my smile will sink down into your pupils, and Heaven knows that it will become.”[6]  Estelle becomes an object for the other two to define, losing her freedom to define herself as she would like. Although Inez is willing to help her, and recognizes Estelle as the person Estelle desires to be, Garcin does not. For the rest of the play she is set on getting it. Garcin then reveals that Estelle’s situation applies to him and Inez as well: “If you make any movement, if you raise your hand to fan yourself, Estelle and I feel a little tug. Alone, none of us can save himself or herself; we’re linked together inextricably.”[7] When Garcin realizes that Inez and Estelle are aware that he died while running away from the war in his country, he feels their judgment: that he is a coward. Although Estelle assures him that she finds his decision to be legitimate, it is Inez’s recognition that he desires: “You’re a coward, Garcin, because I wish it… And yet, just look at me, see how weak I am, a mere breath on the air, a gaze observing you, a formless thought that thinks you.”[8] And thus, even when the door to his cell opens, he remains, “It’s because of her I’m staying here.”[9]

Sartre reveals that around other people we become a different self that is rooted in another person. Therefore other people necessarily limit our freedom; I become defined in the eyes of another, whereas when our person is an object for ourselves, we are free to choose from an infinite number of possibilities to make ourselves into whatever we should choose. The worst part of Hell lies in its finality, because it brings the possibility of change to a close. Considering all three characters are unsatisfied with how they lived their lives, Hell forces them to recognize the harsh reality that “[a] man is what he wills himself to be” and that “one’s whole life is complete at that moment [death], with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for summing up. You are—your life, and nothing else.”[10] Inez, Estelle, and Garcin are left to suffer the judgments that one another place on each other’s decisions. Thus Sartre, like Garcin, concludes, “There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is—other people!”[11]
Although Sartre’s conclusion seems to be rather pessimistic, he presents us with a problem that our experience can testify to. As it seems that our recognition of the other’s consciousness is essential for consciousness itself, it is reasonable to conclude that the way we perceive ourselves is through the eyes of the other. Hell in Lewis’s novel The Great Divorce bears a significant resemblance to No Exit in that its punishment is others. I will argue that although Lewis recognizes that Hell is other people in some sense, Lewis transcends Sartre’s perspective through a theological interpretation of others. He attributes our dislike of others to a manifestation of our selfish desire for ourselves and not God, and notes that when we recognize that we are nothing without God and relationships, Heaven, not Hell, is other people.

Lewis’s novel, like Sartre’s play, also begins in Hell, with the narrator standing in line for a bus that is to depart to Heaven. Interestingly, the residents of Hell display an immediate dislike for each other. One character reveals that this hatred for others is so intense, that there are innumerable houses in Hell: “As soon as anyone arrives he settles in some street. Before he’s been there twenty-four hours he quarrels with his neighbor. Before the week is over he’s quarreled so badly that he decides to move… You’ve only got to think a house and there it is. That’s how the town keeps growing.”[12] Lewis’s conception of Hell is important, because although Hell is real, its reality is made up by what the residents desire it to be. When the narrator arrives in Heaven, he sees that it is large and expansive; the colors are bright and the grass is hard. The landscape emphasizes the ‘realness’ of Heaven, and the Spirits or the Heavenly residents in comparison are completely visible, and can walk around on the earth of Heaven without any trouble, opposed to the residents of Hell, who are “fully transparent… smudgy and imperfectly opaque when they stood in the shadow of the tree,” and find Heaven, quite literally, too hard to grasp.[13]  Throughout the rest of the story, the Spirits of Heaven and the Ghosts from Hell engage in various dialogues, all of which reflect the moral that Lewis wants to communicate through this story. In the preface to The Great Divorce, Lewis explains that the book is a criticism of the underlying philosophical presupposition behind William Blake’s attempt to marry Heaven with Hell, “that reality never presents us with an absolutely unavoidable ‘either-or,’” and that there is  “some way of embracing both alternatives can always be found.”[14] For Lewis, there is no mean between Heaven and Hell; the good is reality, the bad is created ex nihilo out of our imagination, it proceeds out of nothing. Thus, “The whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly Nothing.”[15] Therefore Lewis’s use of imagery allows him to communicate this unique position, which emphasizes the realness of Heaven in comparison to Hell.

This then is the problem that all of the ghosts (aside from the narrator) share: to have a little bit of Heaven with a piece of Hell. One ghost who is approached by a Spirit instantly finds that the Spirit makes it uncomfortable: “I don’t want help. I want to be left alone.”[16] This is interesting, for the ghost desires solitude not because the Spirit is inhibiting his individual freedom, but fears his illuminating eye. Another interesting parallel between the ghost and the Spirit is that, while the Spirit is openly nude, the ghost is thoroughly concerned with how it looks: “It’s far worse than going out with nothing on would have been on Earth. Have everyone staring through me.”[17] The transparency of the ghost leaves it wide open for the others to see, which it finds horrifying, as it no longer has the ability to hide, to place an imaginary barrier between it and others. Hell, which is manifested in the presence of others, lies not in the other, but in the self. In Heaven, “There are no private affairs,” the ghost is afraid that his being will be revealed.[18] According to Lewis then, our discomfort with others should not lead to a rejection of the other; rather we should embrace the other.
What Lewis is anticipating here, is that God himself is the ‘ultimate other,’ and only in Him do we find our true self.  In the Problem of Pain, Lewis explains,“To be a complete man means to have the passions obedient to the will and the will offered to God: to have been a man—to be an ex-man or ‘damned ghost’—would presumably mean to consist of a will utterly centered in its self and passions utterly uncontrolled by the will.”[19] Interestingly, Lewis utilizes the image of a ghost also in this citation, and explains the reasoning behind its usage: we need God to reveal who we are before our eyes, to bring us out of our self-centered delusion into reality. As Lewis sees it, the other is necessary for any sort of morality. Thomas Watson traces this underlying theological position that Lewis assumes in The Great Divorce to St. Augustine’s idea of the fall of Lucifer: “Satan, who, with a number of apostate angels, chose to lift themselves up in amor, the love of secondary goods, and separate from God and Heavenly communion. In so doing, Satan and his followers lost true being, which is had only by remaining in communion with God.”[20] This idea is central to Lewis’s argument against Blake and to his stylistic approach for writing, because he wants to show that Man’s reality resembles Lucifer’s, because it is in choice were he ends up. Given this, Lewis suggests:

I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that      the doors of Hell are locked on the inside. I do not mean that ghosts may not wish to come out of Hell, in the vague way fashion wherein an envious man ‘wishes to be happy’: but they certainly do not will even the first preliminary stages of that self- abandonment through which alone the soul can reach any good.[21]

Lewis’s italicization of the word inside suggests that the self is Hell: we remain in Hell by locking ourselves inside ourselves. And thus, the one in Hell gets what he wants, “He has his wish—to lie wholly in the self and to make the best of what he finds there. And what he finds there is Hell.” This explains why the ghosts distrust the Spirits so much, even though the Spirits are only there to help them, because trusting another person requires that we admit that we are not completely independent, that we are not above another. For Lewis, to become completely vulnerable, admitting that we are incomplete ‘ghosts,’ is part of the first move we can make towards becoming truly human.

Other people then, are not so much Hell, but are one of the closest things that we have to Heaven on Earth. They, like God, can bring us out of ourselves, help us recognize our faults, and are therefore necessary for our well-being: “The taste for the other, that is, the very capacity for enjoying good, is quenched in him except in so far as his body still draws him into some rudimentary contact with an outer world.”[22] No one, as Lewis suggests, would desire to live in a world that is devoid of others, for our experience makes nothing clearer that other people make up most of our greatest joys. We see this during the last conversation between the Tragedian and the Lady, at the moment she makes him laugh, because for that small time period he goes outside himself, because “No people find each other more absurd than lovers.”[23] Therefore the reason why we, like the ghosts, often have a problem with others is that in the eye of the other we are forced outside of ourselves for a brief moment, and become annoyed that we should have to recognize what we really are. This we see also at the beginning, when the narrator notices that the passengers on the bus are hostile towards the driver, even though he “[c]ould see nothing in the countenance of the Driver to justify all of this.”[24] According to Lewis, it is a symptom of an inflated ego that makes the presences of others so unbearable.

The enjoyment of others, much like Heaven, lies in choosing either ourselves or God. During one conversation, a Spirit tells a mother, “You cannot love a fellow-creature fully till you love God.” This strikes her as absurd, because she feels that she knows what true love is, for she had given all of her life to her son, even after his death. In another conversation, one ghost is recorded criticizing a Spirit because he had been a murderer. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” asks the ghost, to which the Spirit responds “I do not look at myself. I have given up myself… And that was how everything began.”[25] For the mother and the murderer alike, our love for others, either for a son or for a murderer, is only possible if we first love God, recognize him as a thou, not as an It: “For love, by definition, seeks to enjoy its object.”[26] Thus, “the whole treatment consists in learning to want God for His own sake.”[27] The murderer admitted he was nothing and was forgiven, the ghost admits neither, and ends up treating the Spirit as an it. Although the ghost criticizes him, the Spirit is not bothered and does not get mad at his judgments, because he recognizes him as a thou, not because he needs to, but for who he is. The same is true for the mother even though she loved her son, for she still treated him as an it, because her love was driven by her need to love. But if she were to first love God for his own sake, she would be able to love her son a thou, a child meant not only for her, but also for God. This then, is the root of all love, “we shall have no need for one another now: we can begin to love truly.”[28] Throughout the story, this becomes a reoccurring issue that the Spirits address: our desires often begin well, but end up being about us and become a source for pride. This essentially is the punishment that people receive in Hell, “The trouble is they have no Needs. You get everything you want (not very good quality, of course) by just imagining it.” [29]   Enjoying others lies then in our choice to go outside of ourselves, to recognize everyone as thou, not because we need to, but that we should love them truly  for who they are, and thus, recognize their reality apart from us. Lewis points out that otherness is implied in creation, and is necessary for the possibility of love: “He caused things to be other than Himself that, being distinct, they might learn to love Him, and achieve union instead of sameness.” Love is the fullest expression of harmony, as it demands that we recognize that others are equally in importance to us and take their well-being into consideration. In Heaven, “The Glory flows into everyone, and back from everyone: like light and mirrors”[30], for everyone is focused on what is greater than them, “we think only of Christ.”[31]

Although Lewis’s and Sartre’s philosophies differ drastically when it comes to the role of others in our lives, and on other topics such as Hell’s existence itself, there are similarities that exist between No Exit and The Great Divorce. The biggest similarity between the two is the emphasis both place on the finality of Hell, forcing us to focus on our choices: good or bad. As one Spirit notes, “What concerns you is the nature of the choice itself,”[32] and like the Spirit, Garcin acknowledges, “I made my choice. A man is what he wills himself to be.”[33] Because of this, Lewis and Sartre both made a point to express the freedom that the characters had to leave Hell. In this way, Lewis and Sartre utilized the image of Hell to communicate the implications they thought their ideas had on our lives more effectively. In this way, both writers treat Hell as a sort of thought experiment, as it emphasizes the importance for us to choose. Thus Hell represents a reality which had already in some sense existed on Earth. For Lewis, those in Hell get to have only themselves; for Sartre, they get to have others.

While they shared some similarities in their stylistic usage of Hell, it is not hard to see that Sartre’s philosophy is based on the mentality that Lewis criticized. According to Lewis’s understanding, it is no surprise that we find Inez, Garcin, and Estelle in Hell, for “Hell is a state of mind” while “Heaven is reality.”[34] An interesting parallel between Sartre and Lewis is that both use sensorial perception to communicate the realness of their situation, although Lewis emphasizes the realness of Heaven, Sartre emphasized the realness of Hell; and it is why the two emphasized the realness of one and not the other, that we discover where the conflict lies. For Sartre, Hell is in the eyes of others. Therefore, the Hell that we experience in the presence of others is the most real. For Lewis, Hell is an imaginary place created out of the desires of the ego, and thus Heaven is real, because it is where the other exists. As Lewis showed throughout The Great Divorce, though Sartre’s conclusion “Hell is other people”[35] seems legitimate prima facie, it is in the end lacking because others do limit us when we understand the world as an It or a place only for our needs. Of necessity, they would always get in the way. If we are always caught up in our self, others become Hell, because they do not allow us to continue to live in an imaginary, ego-centric world. Yet when we look away towards the good outside of ourselves, who we are and what we do is not founded on us, “the soul is but a hollow which God fills in.”[36]

WORKCITED

Buber, Martin. I And Thou. Great Britian: Hesperides Press, 2008.

Lewis, C. S. “The Great Divorce.” In The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics. roughcut ed. Grand Rapids, MI: HarperOne, 2007.

Lewis, C. S. “The Problem of Pain.” In The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics. roughcut ed.  Grand Rapids, MI: HarperOne, 2007.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. No Exit, and Three Other Plays. Vintage International ed. New York: Vintage,             1989.

Watson, Thomas Ramey. “Enlarging Augustinian systems: C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce and      Till We Have Faces.” Renascence 46, no. 3 (Spring94 1994): 163. Religion and     Philosophy Collection, EBSCOhost (accessed April 22, 2012).

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[1] Martin Buber, I And Thou (Great Britian: Hesperides Press, 2008), 3.

[2] Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit, and Three Other Plays, Vintage International ed. (New York: Vintage, 1989), 4.

[3] Ibid., 5.

 [4] Ibid., 9.

 [5] Ibid., 8.

[6] Ibid., 21.

[7] Ibid., 29.

 [8] Ibid., 44.

 [9] Ibid., 42.

[10] Ibid., 43.

[11] Ibid., 45.

[12] Lewis, C.S., “The Great Divorce,” in The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics [Deckle Edge] Publisher: HarperOne; Roughcut Edition (New York City: HarperCollins, 2007), 471.

[13] Ibid., 477.

 [14] Ibid., 465.

 [15] Ibid., 507.

[16] Ibid., 498.

[17] Ibid., 499.

 [18] Ibid., 481.

 [19] Ibid., 625.

[20] Watson, Thomas Ramey. “Enlarging Augustinian systems: C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce and     Till We Have Faces.” Renascence 46, no. 3 (Spring94 1994): 163.

[21] Lewis, The Problem of Pain, pg. 626.

[22] Ibid., 623.

[23] Lewis, The Great Divorce, pg. 533.

 [24] Ibid., 468.

 [25] Ibid., 480.

 [26] Lewis, The Problem of Pain, pg. 639.

 [27] Lewis, The Great Divorce, pg. 518.

 [28] Ibid., 532.

 [29] Ibid., 473.

[30] Ibid., 523.

[31] Ibid., 488.

 [32] Ibid., 504.

 [33] Sartre, No Exit, pg. 43.

[34] Lewis, The Great Divorce, pg. 504.

[35] Sartre, No Exit, pg. 43.

 [36] Lewis, The Problem of Pain, pg. 635.

Some Ideas Concerning Morality in Andre Gide’s The Immoralist

Andre Gide’s The Immoralist presents us with a picture of the protagonist Michel, and his three year journey through Europe wherein, as the provocative title suggests, he experiences a dramatic change in his moral character. Whether or not the change in Michel’s moral perspective is an improvement, Gide leaves to the reader, writing The Immoralist in a manner similar to Gustave Flaubert, whose book Madame Bovary leaves out the moral commentary of a narrator, letting the actions of the characters speak for themselves.

At the beginning, Michel recounts his experience of tuberculosis which nearly kills him, but survives because of his wife’s care and his strong desire to live. Interestingly, Michel attributes  the strength of his will-power more so as the cure.  As the story progresses Michel becomes more enamored with this idea of the will, believing that living is for the strong and death for the weak. He then appropriates this perspective into his ideas concerning morality, anticipating a moral philosophy reminiscent of Friedrich Nietzsche’s, whose ideas of overcoming and the will to power taught that remedying moral flaws, like a disease, is a challenge that can be fixed if an individual’s will is strong enough; physical health is symptomatic of the bodies strength to overcome it’s sicknesses; moral health reveals the strength of the will to overcome itself and its flaws. And thus, “What does not kill me, makes me stronger.” Once the body overcomes a sickness it is guarded against it, attaining the power to live; and man achieves a moral character by willing through the situations that would overcome him and render him powerless. This dramatic change in Michel’s perspective elicits a desire for Michel to rediscover himself:

“The accumulation of all acquired knowledge in our mind flakes away like a cosmetic and in places lets us see the bare flesh, the authentic being that was hidden… From then on, that was whom I strove to discover: my authentic self… the one rejected by the Gospels… From then on, I despised that secondary acquired self-superimposed by my education. I had to shake off the burdens”

Gide is concerned with our motivation for what and why we do things. As Michel would have it, it is utilizing our freedom that we become something. This sort of thinking that Michel adopts calls into questions the general motivation for our actions, namely the conventional, making him an ‘immoralist’ in this sense, because by choosing and acting in a way outside of society’s ready-made moral prescriptions, he sins against what Nietzsche often referred to as the ‘herd’s morality.’ This idea we see most clearly in Michel’s friend Melanque, who reveals how he self-consciously perceives himself and how this differs from the way in which people generally perceive themselves and others:

“They seem surprised today that a man of reproachable morals can still possess a few virtues. I can’t find in myself the good and bad points they claim to discover; I exist only as a whole. I seek only what is natural, and, for each thing I do, the pleasure it gives me tells me that I was right to do it” (62).

Gide presents us with a problem; for if we create ourselves, we create how we should live, and thus, our own morality, making the reader’s job as spectator difficult for as Melanque points out, who we are is complex; saying ‘you are bad’ or ‘you are good’ is too easy; we might act in a way that others consider ‘bad’ at one point and ‘good’ at another, but in either case the decision is up to us. So are we either? If morality is the outcome of our choice, who is to say that anything is good or bad? Considering our arbitrary choices are forced to agree with an equally arbitrary ‘code’ of morality, why shouldn’t we disagree if we feel that we must? As Melanque would have it, most are afraid of their own freedom, terrified of their ability to become something: “Laws of imitation; I call them laws of fear. People are afraid of finding themselves alone, and they don’t find themselves at all. This moral agoraphobia is hateful to me; it’s the worst kind of cowardice. And yet it is only when alone that people are inventive.” Later on, Michel conveys a similar idea, “I came near viewing decency as nothing but restriction, conventions or fear… our mode of life had turned it into the mutually binding, banal form of a contract” (86). Common morality is the outcome of a fear to authentically choose something; a code by which we can safely, without any thought, live with others and their idea of who we should and should not be.

Although these ideas that Melanque and Michel follow are appealing, and offer much wisdom concerning how we should go about making ourselves, not as blind followers but as leaders, Michel admits an important point at the beginning of the story that enlightens us as to whether his commitment to his philosophy is legitimate: “To be able to free oneself is nothing; the hard part is being able to live with one’s freedom” (9). This becomes the underlying moral question of the book that Gide forces Michel to answer. In order to understand whether Michel handled his freedom correctly, Gide parallels Michel’s rise to health with his wife’s fall into sickness. Forgetting that in the beginning it was his wife’s love and care that truly enabled him to become healthy again, Michel plunges into an intense state of self-centeredness, completely ignoring her when she acquires a fatal illness, instead of reciprocating the love that she showed him. Michel, at least in this way, carries his and Melanque’s philosophy to the wrong conclusions: “sometimes I called upon my willpower protesting against that hold over me, saying to myself: ‘Is that all you’re good for, you would-be great man!’” (88). This is what Michel fails to see: that his choice to love necessarily limits. According to Martin Buber in his famous I and Thou, “In the eyes of him who takes his stand in love, and gazes out of it, men are cut free from their entanglement in bustling activity. Good people and evil, wise and foolish, beautiful and ugly, become successively real to him… Love is responsibility of an I for a Thou” (15). Whether it is love between friends or between spouses, Buber points out that our relations to other human beings entails that we are responsible for one another, for seeing the other not as means to our own ends, but as ends in themselves. The lesson that Michel is forced to learn through the negative consequences of his actions, which is concentrated in his wife and her death, is that by disregarding others when he has chosen to love is not a legitimate choice. Thus, as Melanque reveals, “One must choose. The important thing is knowing what you want” (65). Melanque recognizes that Michel chose his wife and therefore the responsibility of loving her, separating Melanque’s adventurous lifestyle from Michel’s domestic one: “To envy the happiness of others is folly; you wouldn’t know how to make use of it. Happiness shouldn’t come ready made, but should be custom made. I’m leaving tomorrow; I know that I’ve tried to cut this happiness to my own measure. . . . Hold onto your peaceful domestic happiness. . . .” (66). Michel’s envy for Melanque’s lifestyle is not legitimate, for his situation is different; a situation that Michel chose himself.

I would argue that one of Gide’s intentions for The Immoralist is to make a case for both an immoral and moral way of living. As we saw, Gide seems to suggest that being an immoralist, in so far as it means that we approach living consciously, willing and choosing what we think is legitimate, is morally good; for adhering to mere traditions created out of habit is almost intuitively inauthentic, and even dangerous; a commitment that is in itself immoral, although some may see it as moral. It might be the case that Gide wants to revitalize those traditions that become banal through blind choice, and inspire us to choose traditions and conventional standards because they are good; a practice which also weeds out the bad. This leads us to the moral that Gide wants to communicate, namely the importance of choosing correctly, morally, with a heart for others and ourselves; using our freedom in an effective way.