The Flies

Sartre is not a pacifist. He clearly believes both that freedom is something worth fighting for and that freedom provides us with the means to fight. Weapons are the tools of those who dominate, but they are also the tools of those who liberate. The two differ only in their motivations for acting. The former use violence because they lust for power. They do not believe that their violent actions are right only because they do not believe that the results of their actions are right. When Aegistheus kills Agamemnon with an axe, he does not do this because he dislikes Agamemnon or because he feels that there is some positive value to killing him. He acts out of a desire for power. The result is that Aegistheus cannot justify his murder either to himself or to the Argives. Instead of justification, he insists that he has sinned and that all those who did not stop him are also sinners: since he has no way to escape his guilt by himself, he transfers that guilt onto others. The use of weapons here serves a dishonorable purpose: its result is only to oppress.

The liberators, on the other hand, realize their freedom in their actions. Electra speaks of Orestes cutting Jupiter in half with his sword, and later Orestes does use a sword to kill Aegistheus and Clytemnestra. He is willing to use violence because violence is only wrong when it is not used for the right reasons. When Orestes fantasizes about becoming an axe to cut open the city of Argos, he suggests that violence can be used to establish meaning. He wants to destroy the repressive moral system in order to help the Argives create their own values. Weapons are also important in Freudian psychoanalysis. As hard, pointed objects, they are phallic symbols. In a subtle manner, Sartre uses the sexual imagery of weapons in Orestes's self-motivated speech in order to contradict Freud's claim that sexual instincts—and not consciousness—drive our actions. Sartre suggests that the actions we take and the imagery we use, whether sexual or not, is a product of our freedom.

Neither Aegistheus nor his subjects can realize their freedom under his repressive reign. His subjects are afraid to act and afraid to speak out because they have been taught that everyone is always judging their actions. The people remain quiet in their repentance, always wondering what Aegistheus would do if he knew they had committed a sin. By creating the idea that the dead come back for one day a year to torture the living, Aegistheus has enforced complete surrender from his subjects through fear. Yet Aegistheus himself is not freed by his use of power. He creates values only for his subjects and has nothing left for himself. The result is that Aegistheus is trapped in the false creations he has invented for the sake of others. At one point he fears that the ghost of Agamemnon is watching him, even though he himself came up with the idea of the dead returning. When Aegistheus attempts to understand who he is, he sees himself only as his subjects see him. So long as he continues to rule, Aegistheus can never live for himself but must always live for others, both in the sense that he devotes his existence to his subjects and gains nothing for himself and in the sense that his existence is defined entirely through others.

Human consciousness is capable of interpreting the world freely. Nothing we see requires us to attach any definite meaning to it. While stones and stars move according to fixed and unchangeable laws, human beings act according to their freedom. We can predict the next eclipse, but we cannot predict how any person will react to that eclipse. Some may decide that it is the end of the world and kill themselves. Others may decide to take a nap while it's dark outside. Their freedom makes human beings fundamentally different from the objects around them, and as a result they become strangers to the world.

Those who recognize that they are free are also strangers to human society. Societies are governed by moral laws, which attempt to force simple cause and effect actions onto human beings. Such laws narrow the possible range of human reactions to particular events, since only a limited number of possible actions and thoughts are considered acceptable. Those who, like Orestes, recognize their own freedom, then, also become foreign to the moral communities in which they reside, since they realize that they are not bound by the laws that everyone else follows.

Finally, through freedom human beings become foreign to themselves. Most human beings, like the Argives, define themselves through their past. The Argives select sins from their past and spend their lives atoning for them. Their lives have no meaning other than the meaning of those sins. Orestes, having recognized his freedom, is not bound by his past. He can act as he chooses and he can act for the purpose of transforming the future. Orestes is also free to interpret his past however he wishes in the same way that he can interpret nature. Electra, realizing that Orestes was not a warrior, decides that he cannot kill Aegistheus and Clytemnestra. Orestes, on the other hand, believes that he can do what he feels to be right regardless of whether his past has prepared him for it in any way. This means, however, that nothing about him can ever be set in his own mind. He may take any fact about himself and interpret it freely. As a result, Orestes is a stranger to himself: neither his present state of being nor his past can determine what he will become in the next moment.