After a tea and biscuit break we read the following which was on the same theme.
Stevens
was the butler’s butler. At Darlington Hall, where he’d worked
his entire life, he exemplified the butler’s virtues of dignity and
forebearance. Stevens’ self-identity hinged on his dignified
façade. Over the years, he’d become so adept at maintaining this
façade, he’d become it.
Stevens
was the butler’s butler. Nothing less – and nothing more.
Anthony
Hopkins owned the role in the Academy Award-nominated film adaptation
of 1993. The story begins in the 1950s, when Stevens receives a
letter from an old employee, Miss Kenton, who was the housekeeper at
Darlington Hall in the years before the War. The letter rewakens old
feelings in Stevens and stirs a sense of loss. Miss Kenton (played in
the film by Emma Thompson) was an exemplary housekeeper. She and
Stevens had an excellent professional relationship. At a certain
point, Stevens became aware that Miss Kenton would have liked their
relationship to be more than this. Something almost happened between
them. But Stevens couldn’t make it work. He was so caught up in the
business of being a butler, and of maintaining a demenour of dignity
and discipline, that he couldn’t figure out how to integrate love
into his world.
Finally,
Miss Kenton resigned. Even in their parting conversation, Stevens
couldn’t bring himself to speak to her in any other way than as a
butler seeing off an employee.
Now
it is the 1950s and Darlington Hall needs a housekeeper. Mr Farraday,
the new owner of the house, suggests that Stevens take his car and
visit Miss Kenton, to see if she’d be interested in reemployment.
Stevens drives across country, and as he goes, he reflects on his
life in the 1930s. With the benefit of twenty years hindsight, he is
able to see that, at a certain point in his relationship with Miss
Kenton, he almost changed direction. He almost broke out of his
professional role and expressed his true feelings. He almost changed
path in life. And yet he didn’t.
When
Stevens arrives at Miss Kenton’s house, he discovers that she is
now Mrs Benn – happily married and looking forward to her first
grandchildren. Old truths come to light in the course of their
conversation. Mrs Benn admits that, indeed, at one time she had
feelings for Stevens, and she was heartbroken when he failed to
reciprocate them. How different their lives might have if Stevens had
found the courage to tear down his professional façade. Instead of
being a butler and a housekeeper, they might have been meaning
makers. They might have worked together to take their lives in a new
direction and to redefine the meaning of life for both of them.
It
never happened. And now it is too late. At the conclusion of the
novel, Stevens returns alone to Darlington Hall to live out the
remains of his day as a butler.
The
tragedy of Stevens’ tale is not just that he missed an opportunity
for love. It is that he chose to live without any real opportunities
beyond those that were afforded him in his capacity as butler at
Darlington Hall. Stevens allowed his life to be wholly defined by his
professional role. In doing so, he failed to lay claim to his deeper
possibility – the possibility of being an autonomous meaning maker
in life. Often we forget that we can be meaning makers in life. We
get caught up in being this or that kind of professional identity. We
define ourselves through our jobs and roles. While we can and do find
meaning in professional roles, we should never forget that they don’t
define our full scope of possibility. We must be prepared to disrupt
ourselves every now and then in order to see the unexpected
opportunities in daily events and take our lives in new directions.
This
was the view of the French Existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul
Sartre (1905-1980).
Sartre inhabited many roles in the course of his life: writer,
resistance fighter, philosopher, philanderer, Nobel prize-winning
author, amphetamine addict, and national hero. Sartre argued that we
must actively create our life through choices and decisions. We must
not fall into the trap of letting life define us. We must define it.
We must become meaning makers in life, creating sense and purpose
through our decisions.
Sartre
defined his position in opposition to the traditional philosophical
view that each of us is born with an essence that we must discover
and reveal to the world. This point of view is fundamentally
religious in orientation, Sartre argued. It was devised by the
Medieval Scholasatic philosophers, who held that God planned the
world down to each detail and then created it. It is as if the world
were a chess board, and God had dreamed up the essential nature of
each piece – the kings, queens, knights, rooks, bishops, and pawns
– then placed them on the board in one go.
‘Essence
precedes existence’, the Scholastics used to say. The essence of
each thing is defined prior to its existence. Our challenge is to
figure out what kind of essence we’ve been given and live it.
Sartre
turned the Scholastic formulation on its head. Existence
precedes essence,
he insisted. This means: ‘Man first of all exists, encounters
himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards’.
We are born as meaningless entities in a meaningless world. If we
want to make something of our existence, we need to actively create
our sense of who we are and what we amount to. Many of us, like
Stevens, shirk the responsibility of defining the meaning of life.
Instead of autonomously creating ourselves, we let ourselves be
defined by our social and professional roles. We focus on playing out
pre-scripted parts. The better we become at the performance, the more
natural the performance seems to be. Perhaps deep inside, we have the
sense that we are cheating ourselves. We know that the real challenge
in life is to become something unique. Yet this path is hard –
intolerably so. It is much easier to play out a role and let life
pass us by. And so we give up on the task of being meaning makers. We
sit back and watch our meaningful opportunities trickle away down the
cracks of history.
Want
to escape this fate? Take Sartre’s advice and ask yourself:
‘Am
I being true to my potential? Or am I treating myself like a thing?’
Stevens
treated himself like a thing. If you’d asked him: ‘Excuse me!
What are you doing there with your black suit, your bow tie, your
cold and dignified manner?’ Stevens would have replied: ‘Why, I
am being a butler. This is what I am’.
Sartre
would tell Stevens: stop lying to yourself! People are not things. As
human beings, we are more than the social roles we inhabit. We are
our social identities plus the
freedom to transcend them. Sartre distinguished between human
‘facticity’ – the set of facts that describe who and what we
are at any point of time – and human ‘transcendence’ – our
latent capacity or potential, which is never fully actualised at any
point of time. If facticity ties us down, transcendence sets us free.
The trouble is that when we think about who and what we are, we
usually think about our facticity. We draw up a list of facts: we are
of such and such an age; we live on this or that street; we have such
and such an occupation, such and such a position, and so on. We
describe ourselves as if we were things. It takes the ambiguity out
of life. It means that we don’t have to worry about struggling to
create ourselves in a meaningful way.
The
downside is that we sacrifice our existential freedom. Human beings
are not things. We are creatures of potential. As creatures of
potential, we are constantly reaching beyond the facts that define us
in the hope of becoming something more than we are today. Fired by
imagination and desire, we transcend the present in the direction of
the future. This act of imaginatively leaping beyond the present is
existential freedom. We all have it and we all use it. But far too
few of us make it central to life. Too many of us are like Stevens
the butler. Stevens denied his freedom for the greater part of his
life. He experienced it briefly en route to reconnect with Miss
Kenton. He abandoned it again as he turned for home. He was never
destined to be free.
Free
human beings are disruptive by nature. They don’t settle for the
status quo – they resist it. Instead of accepting the range of
social and professional roles that are given to them, they violate,
destabilise, and transform these roles in the process of creating the
future.
The
world is full of drones devoted to the status quo. Rise above them.
Be a meaning maker. Celebrate your existential freedom.
