I have found that existentialism is often conceived popularly as a bleak, cynical philosophy: the dying embers of a lit cigarette, the furrowed brow of a scowling figure in black. A type of hip nihilism, in fact, entirely preoccupied (in a flippant, dry manner) with the notion of mortality. A type of wiser-than-thou smirk that offers the response "we're all going to die anyway!" to every attempt to bring them to consider any other mode of being.

This is all the more worrisome in light of the fact that--for me at least--existentialism is ultimately about how to live, instead of deferring life, shrugging it off with the resigned sigh of a man who is constantly ready to drop into a coffin with nary a care. Existentialism is not about making life valueless because it will eventually come to an end: for is it not about hanging onto life at all costs precisely BECAUSE it will one day be terminated? The word for this idea, I have come to learn, is natality.

Natality emphasizes the opposite end of the process of life. It considers the meaning of being born into the world, instead of focusing on meaning of what it means to die. It does have a slightly old-fashioned flavor--of being born into this world for some purpose (namely: to live) is an idea that we have since become detached from, but it certainly became the crux of the father & son's existence. It enchants the desolate landscape in a singularly powerful way; "living for the sake of life" makes their journey down the road possible, when there is nothing else to live for.

This realization helped greatly to elucidate my reading of the book; as opposed to interpreting their journey as a suicide mission, I could now see The Road as something other than an exercise in pathos, an elegy to the last father on planet earth.

I have here just a small question (which may reveal the sad possibility of my having learned nothing from the book): would it be legitimate for a man to take his own life, given that he believes that he is the last person on earth and thus any possibility of natality (taken in the context of its communality, of interpersonality) was extinct? Would we forgive the last man's decision to extinct the species from earth?

Also, a final thought that I had about The Road was the way it puts into question the idea of "natural law". So many moral arguments are based upon a naturalistic conception of human nature, of how we would and therefore should behave if we were left to our own devices. As far as I understand, naturalistic theses attempt to spark the intuition that good and evil are intrinsic to the human make-up. Does McCarthy then question this naturalism by populating his world with perverse cannibals and mystifying characters like the old man (who is opaque to us as a character--one cannot fathom his motivations, cannot identify with him at all) or does he affirm it by way of introducing the young boy who is a model of ethical conduct despite his having only his father assurance of their "being the good guys" by way of moral education?


More on The Revisionists and politics later. I'm suddenly having to reconsider a lot of things.