Spirit of seriousness

The Spirit of seriousness names an attitude that gives the world and its values an authority independent of human freedom. It makes people understand themselves as objects determined by their place in the world, and treats values as properties already lodged in things. Against play, which begins with human freedom and self-established rules, seriousness presents actions as consequences rather than beginnings. Its apparent certainty is therefore a form of self-concealment: it hides the freedom through which values acquire meaning.

The serious person as an object in the world

Seriousness begins by assigning more reality to the world than to the person. The serious person understands himself through his position in that world, just as possessors understand themselves through what they possess and revolutionaries through the world that oppresses them and that they seek to change. Their opposed aims do not undo this shared structure: each takes the world as the primary measure of human reality. Serious thought thickens around the world, setting aside human freedom in favor of an apparently solid order of things.

This outlook makes the serious person seem rocklike: inert, opaque, and embedded in the world. He no longer imagines getting outside it, because he has adopted the kind of existence he attributes to things. The result is a reversal of agency. Instead of acknowledging himself as the source of a beginning, he presents himself to himself as a consequence. His concern with what follows from his acts follows from this picture: if everything is already a consequence, no genuine beginning need be owned.

The discussion connects this reversal to Marx’s assertion of the priority of object over subject, described as the original dogma of seriousness. To be serious, in this sense, is to take oneself for an object. The issue is not simply that material things matter, but that a person treats the world’s apparent objectivity as a sufficient explanation of who he is and what he must do. By subordinating human reality to the world, the serious attitude disguises a chosen relation to circumstances as an impersonal fact.

Play as a contrast in freedom

Play offers a counterpoint because the player originates the activity and establishes its rules. Its consequences arise according to those posited rules, rather than appearing as commands imposed in advance by the world. In playing, a person can apprehend himself as free and use that freedom, even though freedom may also bring anguish. Play thus releases subjectivity from the serious picture of a person as a mere object among objects.

Sports, pantomime, and games can make this contrast visible. The player’s aim is not simply to acquire a being or possession in the world: the activity becomes a way of attaining himself as a particular kind of being, one whose status is at issue in the act. The world appears to have “little reality” in this play-oriented perspective because it no longer supplies an unquestioned foundation for the activity. The difference is not that play has no rules, but that its rules are established by the freedom participating in it.

This contrast clarifies why seriousness is possessive in a wider sense than material ownership. The serious person accepts the world as the prior source of his identity; the player makes his activity begin from a freedom that can establish its own terms. Seriousness closes off that possibility by making worldly facts and consequences seem final. Play reveals that the person’s relation to the world is not simply given, even when the seriousness of everyday life encourages him to forget it.

Values treated as properties of things

The Spirit of seriousness also treats values as transcendent givens, independent of human subjectivity. It transfers the quality of being desirable from the structure of human existence to the material constitution of objects. Bread, for example, appears desirable because it is nourishing and necessary for life, as though its value were written in an intelligible heaven and guaranteed by the object itself. In this account, the object’s empirical properties seem to explain and authorize the desire directed toward it.

That transfer makes symbolic value disappear into the thing’s material features, as ink disappears into a blotter. The desired object is posited as an opaque, irreducible thing-in-itself, rather than understood in relation to the human project that makes it desirable. Objects consequently appear to issue mute demands, while the person appears to be nothing but passive obedience to them. The attitude is already ethical, because it organizes conduct around values; yet it is also bad faith, because it conceals the freedom that gives those values their significance.

The concealment takes the form of an ethics that does not dare to name itself. By hiding its goals, the serious attitude seeks release from anguish: it lets a person pursue being without facing that pursuit as a free project. Tasks appear to wait along the person’s path, and he can act as though the demands came from the things themselves. Seriousness thereby converts a relation for which the person is responsible into a necessity that seems to precede and command him.

Existential psychoanalysis and the repudiation of seriousness

Existential psychoanalysis makes the hidden aim of human projects legible. Ontology cannot derive ethical commands from descriptions of what is, but it can disclose how value arises: value is a lack in relation to which the for-itself determines itself as lacking. Human activities can therefore be examined as projects that seek a missing synthesis of consciousness and being, the ideal of value or self-cause. Existential psychoanalysis is a moral description in this sense: it reveals the ethical meaning of projects without reducing them to calculations of self-interest, altruism, or disinterestedness.

Its principal result, the argument states, must be a repudiation of the Spirit of seriousness. That repudiation does not mean that bread is no longer nourishing, or that human tasks and worldly circumstances vanish. It means refusing to mistake an object’s material constitution for an independently existing value, or a task’s appearance of necessity for a command that absolves the agent of freedom. Once a person recognizes the project behind his pursuit, the supposed authority of things can no longer conceal how his conduct takes up the world.

The account also marks the limits of any easy escape. People may recognize that their pursuit aims at being and may seek a symbolic appropriation of their own being-in-itself instead of possessing things merely for their own sake. Yet if they still believe that their mission is written into the things of the world, they remain within seriousness. They discover that every human activity tends toward the unattainable synthesis and is, in principle, doomed to fail. Getting drunk alone and leading nations are therefore equivalent with respect to that ultimate goal; precedence belongs not to a supposedly superior material outcome but to the degree of consciousness of the ideal being pursued. The comparison unsettles the world’s usual measures of importance without claiming that the activities have identical circumstances or effects.

The ethical issue finally returns to freedom. The moral agent is the being through whom values exist, and freedom can become conscious of itself as the unique source of value. In anguish, it encounters both the possibility of its choices and the absence of a world-grounded authority that could choose for it. Seriousness tries to evade that encounter by treating value as transcendent and action as obedience. Its repudiation opens the question of whether freedom can will itself as its own value, rather than remain bound to the ideal of a self-causing being. The passage leaves that question open, but its terms are decisive: a freedom that recognizes itself cannot return innocently to the picture of values as ready-made facts in the world.