The serious attitude makes a person a passive consequence of the world

Evidence

There remains one type of activity which we willingly admit is entirely gratuitous; the activity of play and the “drives” which relate back to it. Can we discover an appropriative drive in sport? To be sure, it must be noted first that play as contrasted with the spirit of seriousness appears to be the least possessive attitude; it strips the real of its reality. The serious attitude involves starting from the world and attributing more reality to the world than to oneself; at the very least the serious man confers reality on himself to the degree to which he belongs to the world. It is not by chance that materialism is serious; it is not by chance that it is found at all times and places as the favorite doctrine of the revolutionary. This is because revolutionaries are serious. They come to know themselves first in terms of the world which oppresses them, and they wish to change this world. In this one respect they are in agreement with their ancient adversaries, the possessors, who also come to know themselves and appreciate themselves in terms of their position in the world. Thus all serious thought is thickened by the world; it coagulates; it is a dismissal of human reality in favor of the world. The serious man is “of the world” and has no resource in himself. He does not even imagine any longer the possibility of getting out of the world, for he has given to himself the type of existence of the rock, the consistency, the inertia, the opacity of being-in-the-midst-of-the-world. It is obvious that the serious man at bottom is hiding from himself the consciousness of his freedom; he is in bad faith and his bad faith aims at presenting himself to his own eyes as a consequence; everything is a consequence for him, and there is never any beginning. That is why he is so concerned with the consequences of his acts. Marx proposed the original dogma of the serious when he asserted the priority of object over subject. Man is serious when he takes himself for an object. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1355

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘spirit of seriousness’ as grounding self in the world and fleeing freedom — a key trait of bad faith.
• XREF: Connects to Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity, which explicitly develops the serious man as a figure to overcome; exactly the backdrop the reader wants. — connects to: Serious-mindedness naturally makes one a tyrant who sacrifices others to the idol — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 47; The spirit of seriousness treats values as absolute rather than made by human freedom — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1520
• BMF: The ‘serious man’ taking himself for an object with the ‘consistency, inertia, opacity’ of a rock evokes Obierika and Okonkwo’s clan elders in Things Fall Apart, who root identity in their position within tradition and the world rather than in inner freedom.

Broader Connections

• Serious-mindedness naturally makes one a tyrant who sacrifices others to the idol #expands (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, 47
• The spirit of seriousness treats values as absolute rather than made by human freedom #complicates (0.70) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1520