Christian Existentialism

No Admittance

ean-Paul Sartre (pronounced Sart), writing in the middle of the 20^th century, was the first to call anything existentialism. That alone recommends his work as the basis of this philosophy. It also cannot hurt his case that he is so often recognized as its central figure.

So it seems that I have hit a pothole while pulling out of the driveway. Less than two paragraphs into the trip, It seems that I come up with the clearest reasons why a Christian cannot be an existentialist: Sartre believed that atheism was essential to his school. He wrote that you couldn’t be an existentialist and believe in God. No deus ex machina *(Pronounced dey'-us eks mak'-ee-nuh) ‘god down from the machine’ - a suspect plot device, used in ancient Greecian dramas, in which a god comes down and solves all the problems at the end of the drama" for Man; he’s on the stage until he finds his own resolution.

However, Sartre names the principle that “In Man, existence precedes essence” the core of existentialism (where to me it is a misunderstanding). That pronouncement makes the core of existentialism precede Sartre: Martin Heidegger (pronounced Hie'-deg-gur), first taught this idea, and thus, generated the key to existentialism.

Also, even though there was no existentialism before Sartre, existential thought predates Sartre. “existential issues” and “existential philosophies” abound long before Sartre ever comes on the scene.

The icon of Sartre as the central figure of existentialism usually upstages this picture. In one sense, though, Sartre just stepped into a stream and named it existentialism.

Meanwhile, starting with Sartre, existentialism became primarily a literary movement. Novelist Albert Camus (The Stranger), and the playwrights Eugene Ionesco (Rhinoceros) and Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot) join novelist and playwright Sartre (No Exit) to flesh out the main players in the movement. It also forms a sort of school of psychology, but after Sartre, it pretty much loses steam as a philosophical school.

Existential authors expressed the absurdity of life and the anxiety of facing a world where the character’s lives lack any definable meaning. Anxiety, futility, absurdity, and meaninglessness are all key themes of Sartre’s works. Absurdity, mainly, serves as a key theme in the works of all those authors.

Even though Sartre wrote essays and named the school, he is generally regarded as a writer—and a political one at that for his early support of Marxism. So it could be said that Sartre marks the division between philosophy and literary movement. But I think we would have to give Sartre his due as a remarkable salesman.

It becomes clear that in order to look at existentialism, we must look upstream of Sartre.

The Trip Upstream

lthough, Sartre did not invent the school, or even coin its name, he also did not open the atheistic branch. As we saw, Martin Heidegger penned the central phrase. However much Heidegger shaped Sartre’s philosophical quest, Heidegger is often seen in the shadow of another philosopher, about whom he wrote an entire text.

The 19th-century philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche (pronounced Neetz'-shuh), is typically recognized as one of the springs of existentialism. His works appear in the late 1870s just into the 1890s. But they required 10 or 20 years to work themselves out of obscurity—very much thanks to the Nietzsche Society in the 1890s.

Parallels to what Sartre said about religion and God are found in Nietzsche. Nietzsche stressed the importance of realizing what a lack of God means. He thought that philosophers should bring themselves to a screeching halt, take a breath and think about the difference that an uncreated world implied. Nietzsche saw a thinker’s obligation to refuse to carry about the corpse of God, trying to fit the trappings into a God-lite mold. Nietzsche wanted to break those molds, and move onto the next step. For good or bad, it was the encounter with the future that mattered. Nietzsche also insisted that withod God, purpose and meaning cannot have a basis.

All of these ideas we find in Sartre’s work, some still wearing their overcoats. Sartre echos Nietzsche’s observation that lack of God implied lack of purpose. Also, Nietzsche’s resentiment appears as Sartre’s bad faith. Both are negative reactions to the fog of the future. But whereas bad faith was a self-betrayal, of a person tossing their choices over their shoulder and pretending to lose them, resentiment was a small-minded betrayal of the “Humboldtian potentiality” of Man, where jealousy for the superman drove the common man to beat the superman back into the fold and snuff out the flame of progress.

Both saw a responsibility of people to remain open. Sartre saw that they were responsible to retain their freedom, and, no less, to retain the knowledge that they were free at all times. Nietzsche’s responsibility was toward the race of Man, and remaining open to modern ways of improving our predicament. To Nietzsche, Good and Evil were just buckets that people dumped everything into to keep the world as it was, and to escape thinking.

In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche describes that those two buckets use the simplest labeling schemes for advocacy. Good and Evil are a way of making choices for you. You should want what’s in the Good Bucket and loathe what’s in the Evil one. Nietzsche—when interpreted charitably—suggests that we should remain forever open to the dirty work of dumping out the buckets and going through their contents, and resorting them when it is necessary.

I’ll bring to a close what I want to say about Sartre and Nietzsche as a pair, right here. Mainly, I describe the emphasis of the writers. What I said should not imply that Nietzsche never bemoaned the individual damage of resentiment or that Sartre never discussed the collective impact of bad faith to set about for a victim and to perpetuate itself.

Some of Sartre’s work can be seen as an elaboration on the model set by Nietzsche. How do individuals become open to the superman? By examining their lives, realizing that all their choices were nothing more than an exercise of self-realization (perhaps as the superman himself), by breaking down the categories we put things into. And even though Nietzsche would provide no promises, as it would be propping up the visage of God again, Sartre seems less hopeful that it goes anywhere. The world is absurd, and there is no exit.

Whether Nietzsche can be “properly” called an existentialist, is debatable. He never identified himself that way—not that he probably would have gratefully stepped behind any label. However, there are three reasons to do it. First, is that Nietzsche deals with all the themes. Not only that, but Heidegger, viewed as a student of Nietzsche, can be seen to elaborate upon Nietzsche’s themes.

The second reason we can call Nietzsche an existentialist is that so many writers already do. It forms almost a second definition of existentialism. We have first existentialism per Sartre, that is the themes he works with, and then we have existentialism in general. Lastly, including Nietzsche, provides support for the argument that existentialism is atheist.

So Nietzsche the existentialist stands.

The Theist Stream

egardless of whether Nietzsche is an atheist, he is not usually regarded as the first existentialist, even if we give him that name. If we bestow that name equally on the both identified sources, Søren Kierkegaard (pronounced Kyer'-kuh-gohr) wrote first. It happens so often that he is identified as the Father of Existentialism, that if the school owes to Nietzsche, it owes all the more to Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard, was not only a theist, but he was also very devoted and blatantly Christian. He wrote essays thick with Christian imagery and subject matter. Kierkegaard's wrote about the freedom of Man and the anxiety such a freedom carried with it. And right here, Kierkegaard will hit you smack in the face with his worldview, because he saw anxiety coming straight from a Biblical scenario: the Garden of Eden. Freedom is a gift from God that allows us to pursue our desires and define ourselves but as he holds us responsible with the product of that pursuit, he also charges Man with a responsibility for that freedom.

Additionally, Kierkegaard’s goal was spiritual. He wanted his reader to realize that he or she held an individual responsibility to God. No one could do their work for them, and no one could stand behind membership in an organization. Instead, God demanded individual commitment.

We see the three typically existential themes of anxiety, freedom, and responsibility clearly in Kierkegaard—. Even if it took a form that it wouldn’t see too much afterwards. But in Kierkegaard, we see the responsibility of freedom, the value of the choice, the anxiety at making the wrong choice, and all in the face of ambiguity.

But what ties Kierkegaard more closely to the existentialists is that he saw the world as inexplicable as Sartre or Camus did—or as I do. How that is reconciled to faith will be covered in the next section, but right now, it gives grounds to Kierkegaard fixing the major themes of existentialism.

Religious existentialism was not still-born with Kierkegaard. The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber (pronounced Boo'-bur) and the Christian theologian Paul Tillich (pronounced Till'-ick) followed Kierkegaard on our side of the existentialist path in the 20^th century.

Buber became famous for I and Thou, depicting God as the eternal Thou continually met through our experiences in life. The fullness of God for Buber is never grasped by man, and requires continual encounters with God.

Some question whether Tillich is a valid Christian or not. I call him a Christian, because I could easily use much of what he wrote in his book The New Being without hesitation from a fundamentalist point of view. Regardless of whether he is a “true Christian”—pretty hard to determine anyway—Tillich is far from an atheist or a deist. And as a theist, he still faces the main objection below.

So, I guess what I’m saying is the following: Some existentialists have been theists. Existentialism seems to have begun as a study of an individual coming to terms with the demands of faith. And as uncertain as it is that a theist can be an existentialist, it at least can be. The objection needs to be the second one: despite how many existentialists have called themselves theists or how many theists have called themselves existentialists, do the two work together?

The Wonderful World

nterestingly enough, introducing the philosopher who wrote before all the others mentioned so far will complete my case against the second objection. But let’s leave that for later.

A curious thing happened as I was writing this essay. I wanted to describe the world as complex and elusive to the capture of words. I searched for a simpler word for ineffable or indescribable. My thesaurus kept bringing up the word wonder.

I missed the connection to wonder, because of my focus on words. Both candidate words come out of roots to speak and to write. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the thesaurus is a really useful tool for bringing relationships like this to light.

It showed me the place where theists and atheists part company. Both can find the world complex—even baffling. But, the believer feels wonder while the unbeliever finds dispair, absurdity, futility.

Buber shows how the complexity of the world as a power of God. God, to the Jewish existentialists, is beyond all comprehension. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts,” God tells us. Thus he tells us that he is completely alien to our way of thinking. It takes an eternity of meeting him—walking with him, knowing him—to get anywhere close. We forever have a sense of knowing—but his behavior is never reducible to simple rules.

To Buber, since life is about meeting God, his creation as well takes on this infinite complexity, because God reveals himself through creation. We meet God through creation, And since we never understsand the creator, we never understand all that the creation tells us. At each step we get a sense that we’ve supped with the divine. Even if the creation were totally incomprehensible, I believe Buber would find that characteristic of God. Therefore, by avoiding explanation, the universe tells us that God avoids complete explanation.

In my opinion, this is all biblical. Has it been the way that the Christian tradition has seen things? I doubt it. The early church borrowed too much from Greek rationalism, as it came west. And as it was adopted more and more by the West, ties to Jewish mysticism frayed into dust. As a result our ability to access the not-so-rationalistic elements of the Bible has been hindered by recasting God into the Greek image.

Let me stop here and say, that I’m not saying all that you might infer from above. If you are familiar with a lot of Christian writing on the net, you’ve probably seen an example of what I am not doing above. I am not one of those Christians who sniff for heresy at every turn. When I say that Greek rationalism skewed the western Christian view, I am not saying that Greek concepts introduced an endemic heresy which needs to be purged entirely from your mind. I am saying that it introduced a filter. And that filter blinded Christians to less-than-rationalistic idea of God’s creation. I mean when Aristotle argued that God was evident, why fight the conclusion? Cannonize Plato and Aristotle and hide behind their arguments.

Kierkegaard’s Context

ierkegaard broke with the Christian tradition typified by St. Thomas Aquinas (or at least it can be seen that way), who believed that knowledge of God was thoroughly constructible, building on a logical framework.

Some question how rigid Aquinas’ views were, and some sort of phenomenological inklings can be argued, but the tradition flow from Aquinas’ works shines with certainty of Natural Law regulating all of nature and revealing God to men or Reason. So this is how I’ll take Aquinas in this context.

This is the tradition that Kierkegaard leaves. Kierkegaard stressed the incomprehensible that showed itself in paradoxes and puzzles. Not that he meant we could know nothing about the world.

He could not have written his theory on the three stages of life (Aesthetic, Ethical, and Religious), and pretended that the world was completely incomprehensible. He could not have put forth the idea that individual commitment meant anything unless he perceived some ground of truth and a relationship of individual commitment to that ground.

So those two ideas seem to conflict. He thinks that the world is unknowable, and yet suggests that we can know the three stages of life. He even suggests that they have such features that they can be described in three particular terms.

However, this matches up nicely with Nietzsche. Within his aphorisms, Nietzsche intended to depart some truth that was left untouched by systematic philosophies. However, he never felt that he lacked the ability to know anything. He only talked about the obstacles to knowing. He even frequently depicted himself fighting against the idea that nothing could be known. However in Ecce Homo, among Nietzsche’s case against the various “Errors”of the his opponents, he ponders that perhaps the idea of Error was the biggest Error of all.

We can take a look at the context of Kierkegaard’s irrationality. He reacted to the entrenchment of the popular Hegelian dialectic of his time. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (pronounced Hey'-gul) had composed complex systems of metaphysics that were to eventually explain everything.

The intellectuals of Kierkegaard’s time felt that they could know everything by applying Hegel’s system. In contrast, Kierkegaard did not feel that the world was quite as knowable as Hegel’s students did. And just like Nietzsche would do—and Socrates did, thousands of years before—Kierkegaard deftly exposed some of the puffery of the authoritarians of his age.

Taking the context into view, we might see that Kierkegaard was perhaps not writing about an absolute incomprehensibility, but in comparison the popular view inspired by Enlightenment thinking, he suggested that the world was harder to know than was thought.

Kierkegaard can then be seen as a step away from Enlightenment naivete, toward a more skeptical reservation, more like modern thinking.

This can be the simple meaning behind Kierkegaard’s model of the incomprehensible world. The people of his time understood the world through Hegel’s system. They lead themselves to believe that they had seen more than what had ever been seen before. Kierkegaard, by puncturing many holes in the system, tried to show his readers that the world was a little more obscure than the tinny model they held in their hands. He wrote a number of articles mocking Hegel’s nice, neat categories.

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Rejecting Systems

nother characteristic attributed to existentialism is a rejection of systematic theories. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard both show this tendency.

Existentialists intuit that the world exceeds the grasp of simple systems imagined by men. Knowledge must be related as it is found. We always see what we know centered against the backdrop of the vast majority of things that we do not understand. Thus understanding is relative, things are seen clearly in relation to other things. And we know about things in this field only in their relationships to other things.

Of course, ultimate knowledge is suspect, and we fully accept that the pieces of the puzzle that we do not have invalidate the pieces we think we hold. But this is an understandable consequence of our ignorance of the complete picture. In the meantime it is utterly useless to accept that we know nothing, because we lack the means to be certain of even that. Remember, all the uncertainty comes from the idea that the larger picture might invalidate our position, we have no proof that it does. But, all the same, we must base our conclusion on this principle.

If we reason correctly, our knowledge of the facts before us are jeopardized by ignorance of fundamental reality. We then know something. But of course, this relies on the same principle. But in our model here, we’ve already zoomed out to fundamental reality. We are saying regardless of whether we know we reason correctly or not, that if we do, then we’ve correctly deduced these things.

Next, we can consider, if that is not the case. Again it is not if we know it is not the case—we’re talking about it actually not being the case. Then it flat out is not true that our knowledge of everything is swept away by our ignorance of the whole.

“What about the middle case?” some of you sophists out there may ask. Well, as long as we hold a tenuous thread to truth, we have approximated knowledge. That is, if there is anything in that model which we can say corresponds to reality, then we have found a description of a true circumstance--therefore, it is knowledge as knowledge affords itself. And, again, any part of it being false, suggests that the reasoning that our all our knowledge can be changed by the big picture does not hold for every case we could apply it to. This means that some things, regardless of whether we know of these cases or not, can be known.

This line of reason, therefore, gives me ample confidence to suggest that we can know things in the foreground, even if the background appears hazy. I consider this my demonstration of how things can be known in the foreground, by relationships to other perceptions. I find my perception of this idea, as reliable as my perception that there are acceptable values like Truth and Falsity.

How foolish it would have been to accept ignorance at the mere suggestion that all that we know can be made false by what we do not know. Such a reaction would have confirmed the firmness of that principle, and therefore counteracted itself. If we should drop all pretense of knowing at this mere suggestion, shouldn’t when we—understanding the implications of accepting such a rule—drop all pretense of knowledge being hopeless? This would seem to be the appropriate response, and in line with our first impulse to don the sack clothe and ashes of ignorance.

The idea that there is any proper reaction to a message, is also in doubt. If we must accept ignorance, there is no proper reaction. We either take an action about whose fitness we do not care, or an action that we can never know for sure is fitting. Therefore, the only way we could take it is to ignore any implication of fit actions.

Too often relativists claim that there is a proper reaction to take in view of our complete ignorance. Now, that would belie our complete ignorance, wouldn’t it?

By the way, the idea that ultimate knowledge is suspect falls into the realm of Skepticism, which I address on another page. What I’ve tried to show here is how the existentialist claims about meaninglessness, should be viewed as a rejection of systematic thought. And that ignorance of the whole does not necessarily imply (and should not imply) uselessness of more intimate knowledge.

The rejection of systematic thinking also comes from the idea that we do not understand things from fundamental principles. You do not start from such principles and then reason your way to an understanding of all things. No, we are pretty much thrust forward into the stream of experience, our grasp of the world is piecemeal and incomplete.

Fundamental understandings are not necessary, nor provided, for us to function. We live in a world of appearances, seemingnesses, notions, and we make our way among the trees of the forest, by the simple realization that trees do not allow us to pass, and therefore must be avoided, in favor of the fields in our vision that do allow passage.

Our body functions despite our conscious knowledge of how it works. And we can walk between two trees without knowledge of how they got there, or how the muscles pull at the bones to pick up a foot and put it down. The vague purpose, to check the other side of the tree for a game hen or a quail, to satisfy our hunger, requires no more than that we’ve learned how to urge our body toward our goals.

In the experience, we leap all the gaps. Just as Achilles somehow jumps all the lines that Zeno lays out between him and the finish line. If Achilles was unable to close the distance, he would have been unable to close the gap to the starting line. That Achilles can stand there, and that we are framing the paradox as a race indicates that indeed people—move, that they arrive. Nature does not wait for us to know exactly how.

Just as an expression of the material facts: we are oblivious to the physical gaps as well. We are unable to notice that the tree is mostly gaps. Most of the tree, as we’ve come to know in the scientific age, is empty space. What appears to me to be empty space is actually filled up with gas, gas that I am so used to passing through, that I fail to notice it at all. The perception of the tree forms a uniform field of area that I cannot validly pass through.

Although, I have a theory that I can pass through empty areas. This has nothing to do with the empty areas in the tree. Again, my knowledge of the situation has nothing to do with my ability to navigate it. Only my knowledge of the persistent phenomena matters. I have learned how to move my body to walk around trees.

Just as the man who whose only knowledge of a car is how to steer the wheel and how to shift and brake, we can drive our body forward. We don’t need to know what’s under the hood. No knowledge of how the game bird dies or how eating it replenishes our body is required for us to nourish ourselves.

To suggest that we do not know what we experience is right in one sense, but wrong in another. We do not fully understand everything that took place in an experience, but that is not to say that we do not know it. If a man cannot know anything about his experience, this would hold for the scientist as well. He could never know that a needle shifted on a dial without knowing the entire physics of what was happening there.

Conversations with a Solipsist

hen a solipsist tells us we don’t exist, we examine that idea in light of our awareness of listening to the fool. Seems like there is indeed something on this side doing something. In fact, were I not to exist, nothing that the figment that seems to be me could do would matter. I might as well persist in the delusion that I indeed am listening to a fool.

That experience does not require that we know how air waves change to sound, or how my synapses fire to create the idea of awareness. This just happens’or so this non-entity will maintain in the light that it can no more alter its shape than a shadow on the wall can.

But I judge the likelihood of my existence in relation to my awareness that I’m generating pictures to properly model the words the solipsist mouths. I can’t get over this picture (and anyways I need not worry about it). But in relationship to the only awareness that has gathered anything from the world, I gather that I am thinking, that something is playing the role of me, and that the solipsist is wrong.

I do not need to know what his malady is to know that he’s wrong. This is the appearance of his error. What the spring of his error is, is not as important as that I’m able to scan my foreground for another appearance to relate this one to.

It might sound here that I’ve invoked Descartes’ ‘proof’ “I think, therefore I am.” In fact, no. I have intuited the same thing as Descartes—but that is because I owe this intuition to the observation that Descartes makes essentially an intuition. At the age of 17, I thoroughly dissected this idea, to disabuse myself of any notion that it was anything but an intuition.

Knowing my experiences happens without The Sum Total of All Knowledge. Therefore, details of experience can be thought to be known without believing that the universe can be captured by any sort of systematic knowledge.

Instead the idea of incomprehensibility usually takes its place in relationship to an overly presumptuous system. Again, I want to recall that Kierkegaard put forth actual objections to Hegelianism, and actual descriptions of his stages of life. And he did so as if they were known to him and knowable to his readers.

An interesting thing is that Kierkegaard didn’t deny that Hegel advanced critical thinking. He didn’t object that he had proposed the system. Instead, Kierkegaard reacted to the presumptuousness of the system. He accepted that it had added value, but it wasn’t at all the case that it had no weaknesses.

I concur. Within its bounds, Hegel’s Dialectic is a fascinating description of evolving processes. And within its bounds, more and more, it is a theory that I find value in.

To be continued...