DE Weekly: Consciousness, Faith, & Free Will
Below is an archived email originally sent on August 18, 2025.
Consciousness, Faith, & Free Will
The major question the existentialists sought to answer was, “What is the meaning of life?” Complementary to that question is another: does life even have meaning? Of course, they weren’t the first philosophers to ask this question. People had been thinking about this for thousands of years before them.
There are a lot of different ways to approach the potentiality of a grand, overarching meaning to life itself. Existentialism attempted to ground meaning in what we can actually see; it placed our perception above all else and used it to explain what might give each of our lives meaning.
This emphasis placed on perception was, simply put, a product of the secularism employed by most of the existentialists themselves.
Most of them believed that there is no inherent meaning to life, thus we must create meaning in our own lives. To do this, we should look not to God nor to any other creator, but within ourselves and to the world around us.
What’s interesting is that their secularism was juxtaposed with their belief in Free Will, albeit with one marked difference: this Free Will was not imbued by a creator, but is simply a physical aspect of our consciousness, which is a physical aspect of our brain.
For the existentialists, everything could be explained by physical interactions of the matter we are made out of. In this way, their line of thinking was akin to the New Atheists of this century whose aim it was to reduce everything to scientific explanations.
But for all their reasoning of things such as consciousness, Free Will, and our minds themselves, I find the purely scientific explanation wanting. The Materialism employed by them in this regard, I think, left certain aspects of existentialism incomplete.
One of the biggest themes explored across all existentialist literature is consciousness. What is it, what does it mean, what happens to it after we die? Why does it make us even think about our own death, or about purpose and meaning?
If the existentialists had discovered the answers to these questions, there would be no need to revisit them today. But they didn’t (not entirely), and that’s because there is an immaterial aspect of consciousness which they were not willing to explore.
I believe that the immaterial is a dimension of existence that could be considered a blindspot for the existentialists.
Because they were fixated on only what could be proven and reasoned within a secular framework, some possibilities went entirely unexplored and ignored. Like consciousness, Free Will is another one of those things I think they couldn’t fully explore.
Perhaps I’m being unfair by grouping all of them together. In essence, I’m really writing about Jean-Paul Sartre.
On Free Will, Sartre concluded something like, “If God exists, then I am not free. But I am free, therefore God does not exist.”
Punchy, to be sure, but evocative of the same reductionist philosophy which restricted him in some ways.
What I wish Sartre considered here is that the “Good Faith” he theorized as being key to living an authentic, meaningful life, included some level of Faith Faith; faith in the unknown.
As I wrote before, I believe there are some aspects of consciousness and Free Will which we simply cannot know or understand. There is an immaterial aspect to these things that make them irreducible to simple sense experience or memory. Irreducible to perception.
For example: how do we come to have judgment? How, when I am presented with two options, do I come to have a preference of which choice to make and then make that choice?
In simple terms, I think of what to do and I do it. This is all based on thought––my thought––within my mind and in my conscience.
Whether I made the right choice is something I came to believe myself through Free Will.
In order that I might not go insane, I must trust my own thinking to be true. Coincidentally, this is what Sartre’s good faith advocated.
This will to live authentically, in good faith, is Free Will. And this will is greater than emotion or perception. It’s a natural exercise of my humanity, an orientation to the Good, to the natural moral order, to God.
You have a will, just as I do. You have to believe what your will is orienting you toward; your will is your nature. It is your humanity.
Despite the emphasis placed on perception by the existentialists, perception is not the whole story. Relying only on perception––only on material, physical, provable scientific aspects of the world––is rejecting our will and our nature.
We must go beyond what is familiar, we must go into the darkness. This is Faith.
With Faith, there is always some level of darkness, for it goes beyond bodily perception into what we do not and cannot understand.
There is something beyond our material, physical self: the immaterial consciousness and will. These cannot be accessed through perception. Believe me, the existentialists tried.
What cannot be accessed through perception can only be accessed through faith.
Whether this is faith in God, faith in the Good, faith in meaning, faith in purpose, or any other faith, it is our only hope of understanding the immaterial world.
“Faith is to believe what you do not see; the reward of this faith is to see what you believe.” –– St. Augustine
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
Closing in on one year of the newsletter. I attribute my animated spirit in this edition to feeling like I have my own philosophy to add to the discussion.
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