Currently, it feels as though half the world is burning up. Places in Europe have hit record-breaking sweltering temperatures, and the goths in Britain are suffering hard. As Independence Day nears in the United States, sweat promises to puddle more profusely than the fireworks.

It’s hotter than Hell. 

Why do we compare a dreadful summer to the place “down there”? In the popular imagination, Hell, where those who lived despicable lives on Earth are sent for punishment in the afterlife, remains an eternal (no pun intended) fascination for the living and the long-dead. Often seen as a place of fire where bad souls are punished forever, Hell lends itself to the phrases, “Hotter than Hell,” “a snowball’s chance in Hell,” and “when Hell freezes over,” the last of which is definitely a phrase to use for a Smiths reunion. How soon is now?

Whether religious or not, people in Western society have theorized on Hell and its trappings, whether for spiritual reasons, to create self-insert (divine) comedy, or to graphically detail what that torture is gonna look like. From Dante to Terry Pratchett, the idea of an afterlife and its connection to justice and humanity remains intriguing.

Enter Jean-Paul Sartre. Of the French existentialist school, Sartre did more than write indecipherable books of philosophy. Like many of his contemporaries, some of Sartre’s best philosophy arrived from the literature he wrote, such as his play, No Exit (Huis clos, 1944). 

A Play from Hell: No Exit and Its Summary

No Exit arrives in that very mundane way that many 20th century plays do. The set is simple, the characters a few. Garcin, Inez, and Estelle enter a room bedecked with fancy (but tasteless) furniture. Garcin, a somewhat respectable looking man, arrives first, querying a valet about his situation and the room. He seems to know, at first, more than we do. 

Inez, a severe woman of a strong build, arrives next. It is through her conversation with Garcin that we truly realize these two characters are no longer among the living. Scornful of Garcin, Inez perks up a bit when ingenue Estelle enters the scene.

The interplay between the three begins innocently enough, but soon turns into confessions of lives made of bad decisions and casual evil, and attempted but failed seductions. Inez, a lesbian, attempts to seduce Estelle, who attempts to seduce Garcin, who in turn attempts to seduce her.

Conversations are both trivial and intense, as each character can watch the lives of those nearest them move on without them after their deaths. Garcin comes to the conclusion that, while he thought there were going to be devils with pitchforks torturing them in an official way, that Big Guy had really just outsourced the work. They were there to torture themselves.

“Hell is--other people!” he exclaims near the end, tormented by the two of them after such a small span of time.

Philosophy Inferno: Seeing Hell in Other People

Due to the mundane beginnings of No Exit, as the play progresses, we watch a different sort of horror unfold, a horror as tedious as the classy outdated furniture in this eternal sitting room. The horror lies in knowing that other human beings’ company can be the source of torment, even in a conventional setting. You don’t have to do anything too out of the way to become someone’s tormenter.

This is the irony for each of the three condemned. Upon entering the scene, each person questions, basically, “Where is the torment I was promised?” They expect pitchforks and flames, as anyone with popular ideas of Hell might. But the truth, while subtle, is startling and even worse.

The torture lies in tiny annoyances but also in the fact that these three people, at first presenting as more or less ordinary folk: the wartime journalist, the postal worker, the bourgeois socialite. Many of us have encountered people with the personalities of Garcin, Inez and Estelle, though perhaps in less exaggerated forms.

The torment does not lie simply in being annoyed by each other. If that were it, it would be enough. It lies in the shedding of masks. We find out that Inez is a narcissist who manipulates people and drives them to unaliving themselves. Garcin is a philanderer who delightedly takes women to bed to have his wife serve them breakfast the next day. Estelle is a vain doll of a woman, who murders her baby because the thought of one is unbearable to her.

It takes some doing to get these confessions, and to get these three to drop the masks they’ve donned throughout their lives and are taking to Hell. When this does happen, it’s a free for all. While the characters no longer play a part, they show their worst (and perhaps essential) selves. And this is the rub, in a way.

A detail from Hieronymous Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, c. 1510, courtesy of Wikipedia

Freedom, Authenticity and an Existentialist Ideal

Sartre wrote No Exit a year after his powerhouse of a philosophical book, Being and Nothingness (1943), one of those mid-century facemeltingly intellectual yet essential works. Being and Nothingness lays the groundwork for a philosophy that would hit the 20th century hard: a philosophy of choice in the wake of a world that is meaningless outside that we ascribe to it. Human experience and freedom become essential.

In Sartre’s philosophy, what makes human beings interesting is not only their “facticity,” their history, their actions, their way of acting in the world, but also that they can reflect on this facticity and change their thoughts on it, molding their own experience through a radical freedom, that is, what Sartre calls transcendence. Though constrained by our own limitations, it is up to us to determine to what extent.

It is this reflection that can empower a different sort of ethics. We are the ones who imbue our lives with meaning, through our reflections about ourselves and the world around us. We can take the facticity of an experience and interpret it through our own lens, allowing ourselves to not only find meaning in our experiences, but also to determine how important and impactful our experiences are to our lives and personal facticity.

We determine the level of difficulty in our lives. As with certain video games, we set things to Easy or Hard Mode, by the way we perceive and interpret the world around us. In this way, we use a specific sort of radical freedom, creating and manipulating a world within our constraints, through choice. To live through our own choices and to own it is to live authentically.

For the trio of torment, each immediately demures when confronted with their own individual freedom. Garcin paints a picture of himself as a pacifistic journalist who happened to have been murdered in the fray. Inez, less enthusiastic to play this game, nonetheless pretends to be sweet on Estelle in order to manipulate her. Estelle denies everything, assuming the role of the innocent. It is this denial of self and choice in the creation of the self that condemns each to this torment, where Hell is other people.

Freedom and Nothingness: A Shaky Foundation

Sartre was working from an atheistic stance when he worked as a philosopher. Like Camus, whom we discussed before, he recognized an emptiness, even an absurdity in existence. There is nothing, nothing. What do we do in the wake of nothing? We have to give it our own meaning. In this sense, we have far more responsibility in our actions and reflections than we might otherwise, even if we were unaware of our constraints.

With this authenticity and freedom can come certain hypocrisies. If we are to live authentically and determine how much something affects us or how much we affect our lives, even within our personal constraints, shouldn’t we be able to transcend certain baseline factors? Shouldn’t we be able to rid ourselves, through reflection, of things that plague us like addiction, behaviors that hold us back, or other deeply unpleasant situations in our lives?

It only takes a little bit of self reflection to see that this doesn’t happen very often, if it ever does. While we might see Being and Nothingness as one of the hardest to read self-help books, the author himself was questionably following his own philosophy. From an early age, Sartre struggled with what we might call sex addiction. As we wrote elsewhere, Sartre claimed he just couldn’t help himself, when it came to wanting to seduce any woman in the room. 

This questions Sartre’s own use of his freedom. In saying he can’t control himself, he seems to be unable to transcend his facticity, that is, perhaps, the childhood trauma that may have helped develop him into having an issue throughout his life. If he could simply self-reflect and consider how limiting (and even harmful to self and others) his urges are, he would surely not act upon them, or learn to tame them.

This philosophy of a feigned freedom can be misconstrued as a cop out. Because, we are either free or we are not free. We are either doomed to our phenomenological circumstances or something outside of us exists, perhaps. The artificial addition of a freedom after we’ve agreed that there is no meaning seems to be kind of lame.

Additionally, if we could just get it together, as some of our most toxic relatives and friends might say, wouldn’t we have all done so? Wouldn’t we be unstoppable if we could defeat our facticity of early childhood trauma, where we live, our genetic conditions, our psychological issues? This can lend itself to a Nietzschean and even Randian way of thinking: there are certain people who will become the Ubermensches, but not everyone gets that. 

The hypocrisy in Sartre is the assertion of freedom in a worldview in which freedom cannot exist. If we make our own freedom, yet can’t think ourselves out of our own circumstances, are we truly free? And further, how do we not feel awful about our constant failings in doing so?

That is not to say that this is not a worthy question to pursue. If we are constrained by what we get when we are born, by our biology, our traumas, if there is nothing outside of us, how can  we have any freedom, and how can we do better for ourselves and those around us? How can we not end up narcissists with predetermination? That is honestly the scariest thought.