Psychology Familial Worldview Report: First Interview Assignment

The Universe Next Door

James W. Sire

Sire, J. W. (2020).  The Universe Next Door. InterVarsity Press.  https://mbsdirect.vitalsource.com/books/9780830849390

ZERO POINT: NIHILISM CHAPTER 5

If I should cast off this tattered coat,

And go free into the mighty sky;

If I should find nothing there

But a vast blue,

Echoless, ignorant—

What then?

STEPHEN CRANE,

THE BLACK RIDERS AND OTHER LINES

NIHILISM IS MORE a feeling than a philosophy, more a solitary stance before the universe than a worldview. Strictly speaking, nihilism is a denial of any philosophy or worldview—a denial of the possibility of knowledge, a denial that anything is valuable. If it proceeds to the absolute denial of everything, it even denies the reality of existence itself. In other words, nihilism is the negation of everything—knowledge, ethics, beauty, reality. In nihilism no statement has validity; nothing has meaning. Everything is gratuitous, de trop—that is, just there.

Those who have been untouched by the feelings of despair, anxiety, and ennui associated with nihilism may find it hard to imagine that nihilism could be a seriously held orientation of the heart. But it is, and it is well for everyone who wants to understand the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to experience, if only vicariously, something of nihilism as a stance toward human existence.

Modern art galleries are full of its products—if one can speak of something (art objects) coming from nothing (artists who, if they exist, deny the ultimate value of their existence). As we shall see later, no art is ultimately nihilistic, but some art attempts to embody many of nihilism’s characteristics. Marcel Duchamp’s ordinary urinal purchased on the common market, signed with a fictional name, and labeled Fountain will do for a start. Samuel Beckett’s plays, notably End Game and Waiting for Godot, are prime examples in drama. But Beckett’s nihilistic art perhaps reached its climax in Breath, a thirty-five-second play that has no human actors. The props consist of a pile of rubbish on the stage, lit by a light that begins dim, brightens (but never fully), and then recedes to dimness. There are no words, only a “recorded” cry opening the play, an inhaled breath, an exhaled breath, and an identical “recorded” cry closing the play. For Beckett life is such a “breath.”

Douglas Adams’s cosmic science-fiction novels picture the situation for those who seek an answer to human meaning in computer science. In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; The Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Life, the Universe and Everything; and So Long and Thanks for All the Fish Adams tells the story of the universe from the point of view of four time travelers who hitchhike back and forth across intergalactic time and space, from creation in the Big Bang to the final destruction of the universe.1 During the course of this history a race of hyperintelligent, pandimensional beings (mice, actually) build a giant computer (“the size of a small city”) to answer “The Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything.” This computer, which they call Deep Thought, spends seven and a half million years on the calculation.

For seven and a half million years, Deep Thought computed and calculated, and in the end announced that the answer was in fact Forty-two—and so another, even bigger, computer had to be built to find out what the actual question was.

And this computer, which was called the Earth, was so large that it was frequently mistaken for a planet—especially by the strange apelike beings who roamed its surface, totally unaware that they were simply part of a gigantic computer program.

And this is very odd, because without that fairly simple and obvious piece of knowledge, nothing that ever happened on the Earth could possibly make the slightest bit of sense. Sadly, however, just before the critical moment of read-out, the Earth was unexpectedly demolished by the Vogons to make way—so they claimed—for a new hyperspace bypass, and so all hope of discovering a meaning for life was lost for ever. Or so it would seem.3

By the end of the second novel, the time travelers discover that the “question itself” (the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything) is “What is six times nine?”4 So, they discover, both the question and the answer are inane. Not only is forty-two a meaningless answer to the question on a human level (the level of purpose and meaning), it is bad mathematics. The most rational discipline in the university has been reduced to absurdity.

By the end of the third novel, we have an explanation for why the question and the answer do not seem to fit each other. Prak, the character who is supposed to know the ultimate, says this: “I’m afraid . . . that the Question and the Answer are mutually exclusive. Knowledge of one logically precludes knowledge of the other. It is impossible that both can ever be known about the same Universe.”5 (Physics students will detect here a play on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, where the position and momentum of an electron can each be known, but not with precision at the same time.)

So we can know the Answers—like forty-two—which don’t mean anything without the Questions. Or we can have the Questions (which give direction to our quest). But we can’t have both. That is, we cannot satisfy our longing for ultimate meaning. To read Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Eugène Ionesco, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., and more recently, Douglas Adams is to begin to feel—if one does not already in our depressing age—the pangs of human emptiness, of life that is without value, without purpose, without meaning.6

But how does one get from naturalism to nihilism? Wasn’t naturalism the enlightened readout of the assured results of science and open intellectual inquiry? As a worldview, did it not account for human beings, their uniqueness among the things of the cosmos? Did it not show human dignity and value? As the highest of creation, the only self-conscious, self-determined beings in the universe, men and women are rulers of all, free to value what they will, free even to control the future of their own evolution. What more could one wish?

Most naturalists are satisfied to end their inquiry right here. They do in fact wish for no more. For them there is no route to nihilism.7

But for a growing number of people the results of reason are not so assured, the closed universe is confining, the notion of death as extinction is psychologically disturbing, our position as the highest in creation is seen either as an alienation from the universe or as a union with it such that we are no more valuable than a pebble on the beach. In fact, pebbles “live” longer! What bridges led from a naturalism that affirms the value of human life to a naturalism that does not? Just how did nihilism come about?

Nihilism came about not because theists and deists picked away at naturalism from the outside. Nihilism is the natural child of naturalism.

THE FIRST BRIDGE: NECESSITY AND CHANCE

The first and most basic reason for nihilism is found in the direct, logical implications of naturalism’s primary propositions. Notice what happens to the concept of human nature when one takes seriously the notions that (1) matter is all there is and it is eternal, and (2) the cosmos operates with a uniformity of cause and effect in a closed system. These mean that a human being is a part of the system. Though they may not understand the implications for human freedom, naturalists agree, as we saw in proposition 3 of chapter four: Human beings are complex machines whose personality is a function of highly complex chemical and physical properties not yet understood. Nietzsche, however, bites the bullet and recognizes the loss to human dignity: Human beings are simply deluded about having free will.

Still many naturalists try to hold on to human freedom within the closed system. Their argument goes like this. Every event in the universe is caused by a previous state of affairs, including each person’s genetic makeup, environmental situation, and even the person’s wants and desires. But each person is free to express those wants and desires. If I want a sandwich and a deli is around the corner, I can choose to have a sandwich. If I want to steal the sandwich when the owner isn’t looking, I can do that. Nothing constrains my choice. My actions are self-determined.

Thus human beings who are obviously self-conscious and, it would appear, self-determined can act significantly and be held responsible for their actions. I can be arrested for stealing the sandwich and reasonably required to pay the penalty.

But are things so simple? Many think not. The issue of human freedom goes deeper than these naturalists see. To be sure I can do anything I want, but what I want is the result of past states of affairs over which ultimately I had no control. I did not freely select my particular genetic makeup or my original family environment. By the time I asked whether I was free to act freely, I was so molded by nature and nurture that the very fact that the question occurred to me was determined. That is, my self itself was determined by outside forces. I can indeed ask such questions, I can act according to my wants and desires, and I can appear to myself to be free, but it is appearance only. Nietzsche is right: “the acting man’s delusion about himself, his assumption that free will exists, is also part of the calculating mechanism.”

If one were omniscient, one would be able to calculate each individual [human] action in advance, each step in the progress of knowledge, each error, each act of malice. To be sure, the acting man is caught in his illusion of volition; if the wheel of the world were to stand still for a moment and an omniscient calculating mind were there to take advantage of this interruption, he would be able to tell into the farthest future of each being and describe every rut that wheel will roll upon. The acting man’s delusion about himself, his assumption that free will exists, is also part of the calculating mechanism.

Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human

The problem is that if the universe is truly closed, then its activity can be governed only from within. Any force that acts to change the cosmos on whatever level (microcosmic, human, macrocosmic) is a part of the cosmos. There would thus seem to be only one explanation for change: the present state of affairs must govern the future state. In other words, the present must cause the future, which in turn must cause the next future, and so on.

The objection that in an Einsteinian universe of time-relativity simultaneity is impossible to define and causal links are impossible to prove is beside the point. We are not talking here about how the events are linked together, only noting that they are linked. Events occur because other events have occurred. All activity in the universe is connected this way. We cannot, perhaps, know what the links are, but the premise of a closed universe forces us to conclude that they must exist.

Moreover, there is evidence that such links exist, for patterns of events are perceivable, and some events can be predicted from the standpoint of earth time with almost absolute precision, for example, precisely when and where the next eclipse will take place. For every eclipse in the next fifteen centuries the exact shadow can be predicted and tracked in space and time across the earth. Most events cannot be so predicted, but the presumption is that that is because all the variables and their interrelations are not known. Some events are more predictable than others, but none is uncertain. Each event must come to be.

In a closed universe the possibility that some things need not be, that others are possible, is not possible. For the only way change can come is by a force moving to make that change, and the only way that force can come is if it is moved by another force, ad infinitum. There is no break in this chain, from eternity past to eternity future, forever and ever, amen.

To the ordinary person determinism does not appear to be the case. We generally perceive ourselves as free agents. But our perception is an illusion. We just do not know what “caused” us to decide. Something did, of course, but we feel it was our free choice. Such perceived freedom—if one does not think much about its implications—is quite sufficient, at least according to some.8

In a closed universe, in other words, freedom must be a determinacy unrecognized, and for those who work out its implications, this is not enough to allow for self-determinacy or moral responsibility. For if I robbed a bank, that would ultimately be due to inexorable (though unperceived) forces triggering my decisions in such a way that I could no longer consider these decisions mine. If these decisions are not mine, I cannot be held responsible. And such would be the case for every act of every person.

A human being is thus a mere piece of machinery, a toy—complicated, very complicated, but a toy of impersonal cosmic forces. A person’s self-consciousness is only an epiphenomenon; it is just part of the machinery looking at itself. But consciousness is only part of the machinery; there is no “self” apart from the machinery. There is no “ego” that can stand over against the system and manipulate it at its own will. Its “will” is the will of the cosmos. In this picture, by the way, we have a rather good description of human beings as seen by behavioral psychologist B. F. Skinner. To change people, says Skinner, change their environment, the contingencies under which they act, the forces acting on them. A person must respond in kind, for in Skinner’s view every person is only a reactor: “A person does not act on the world, the world acts on him.”9

The nihilists follow this argument, which can now be stated briefly: Human beings are conscious machines without the ability to affect their own destiny or do anything significant; therefore, human beings as valuable beings are dead. Their life is Beckett’s “breath,” not the life God “breathed” into the first person in the Garden (Genesis 2:7).

But perhaps the course of my argument has moved too fast. Have I missed something? Some naturalists would certainly say so. They would say that I went wrong when I said that the only explanation for change is the continuity of cause and effect. Jacques Monod, for example, attributes all basic change—certainly the appearance of anything genuinely new—to chance. And naturalists admit that new things have come into being by the uncountable trillions: every step on the evolutionary scale from hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and so forth in free association to the formation of complex amino acids and other basic building blocks of life. At every turn—and these are beyond count—chance introduced the new thing. Then necessity, or what Monod calls “the machinery of invariance,” took over and duplicated the chance-produced pattern. Slowly over eons of time through the cooperation of chance and necessity, cellular life, multicellular life, the plant and animal kingdoms, and human beings emerged.10 So chance is offered as the trigger for humanity’s emergence.

But what is chance? Either chance is the inexorable proclivity of reality to happen as it does, appearing to be chance because we do not know the reason for what happens (making chance another name for our ignorance of the forces of determinism), or it is absolutely irrational.11 In the first case, chance is just unknown determinism and not freedom at all. In the second case, chance is not an explanation but the absence of an explanation.12 An event occurs. No cause can be assigned. It is a chance event. Not only might such an event have not happened, it could never have been expected to happen. So while chance produces the appearance of freedom, it actually introduces absurdity. Chance is causeless, purposeless, directionless.13 It is sudden givenness—gratuity incarnated in time and space.

But as Monod says, it introduced into time and space a push in a new direction. A chance event is causeless, but it itself is a cause and is now an integral part of the closed universe. Chance opens the universe not to reason, meaning, and purpose but to absurdity. Suddenly we don’t know where we are. We are no longer a flower in the seamless fabric of the universe, but a chance wart on the smooth skin of the impersonal.

Chance, then, does not supply a naturalist with what is necessary for a person to be both self-conscious and free. It only allows one to be self-conscious and subject to caprice. Capricious action is not a free expression of a person with character. It is simply gratuitous, uncaused. Capricious action is by definition not a response to self-determination, and thus we are still left without a basis for morality.14 Such action simply is.

To summarize: The first reason naturalism turns into nihilism is that naturalism does not supply a basis on which a person can act significantly. Rather, it denies the possibility of a self-determining being who can choose on the basis of an innate self-conscious character. We are machines—determined or capricious. We are not persons with self-consciousness and self-determination.

THE SECOND BRIDGE: THE GREAT CLOUD OF UNKNOWING

The metaphysical presupposition that the cosmos is a closed system has implications not only for metaphysics but also for epistemology. The argument in brief is this: if any given person is the result of impersonal forces—whether working haphazardly or by inexorable law—that person has no way of knowing whether what he or she seems to know is illusion or truth. Let us see how that is so.

Naturalism holds that perception and knowledge are either identical with or a byproduct of the brain; they arise from the functioning of matter. Without matter’s functioning there would be no thought. But matter functions by a nature of its own. There is no reason to think that matter has any interest in leading a conscious being to true perception or to logical (that is, correct) conclusions based on accurate observation and true presuppositions.15 The only beings in the universe who care about such matters are humans. But people are bound to their bodies. Their consciousness arises from a complex interrelation of highly “ordered” matter. Why should whatever that matter is conscious of be in any way related to what actually is the case? Is there a test for distinguishing illusion from reality? Naturalists point to the methods of scientific inquiry, pragmatic tests and so forth. But all these utilize the brain they are testing. Each test could well be a futile exercise in spinning out the consistency of an illusion.

For naturalism nothing exists outside the system itself. There is no God— deceiving or nondeceiving, perfect or imperfect, personal or impersonal. There is only the cosmos, and humans are the only conscious beings. But they are latecomers. They “arose,” but how far? Can they trust their mind, their reason?

Charles Darwin himself once said, “The horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust the conviction of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?”16 In other words, if my brain is no more than that of a superior monkey, I cannot even be sure that my own theory of my origin is to be trusted.

Here is a curious case: If Darwin’s naturalism is true, there is no way of even establishing its credibility, let alone proving it. Confidence in logic is ruled out. Darwin’s own theory of human origins must therefore be accepted by an act of faith. One must hold that a brain, a device that came to be through natural selection and chance-sponsored mutations, can actually know a proposition or set of propositions to be true.

C. S. Lewis puts the case this way:

If all that exists is Nature, the great mindless interlocking event, if our own deepest convictions are merely the by-products of an irrational process, then clearly there is not the slightest ground for supposing that our sense of fitness and our consequent faith in uniformity tell us anything about a reality external to ourselves. Our convictions are simply a fact about us—like the colour of our hair. If Naturalism is true we have no reason to trust our conviction that Nature is uniform.17

What we need for such certainty is the existence of some “Rational Spirit” outside both ourselves and nature from which our own rationality could derive. Theism assumes such a ground; naturalism does not.

Not only are we boxed in by the past—our origin in inanimate, unconscious matter—we are also boxed in by our present situation as thinkers. Let us say that I have just completed an argument on the level of “All men are mortal; Aristotle Onassis is a man; Aristotle Onassis is mortal.” That’s a proven conclusion. Right?

Well, how do we know it’s right? Simple. I have obeyed the laws of logic. What laws? How do we know them to be true? They are self-evident. After all, would any thought or communication be possible without them? No. So aren’t they true? Not necessarily.

Any argument we construct implies such laws—the classical ones of identity, noncontradiction, and the excluded middle. But that fact does not guarantee the “truthfulness” of these laws in the sense that anything we think or say that obeys them necessarily relates to what is so in the objective, external universe. Moreover, any argument to check the validity of an argument is itself an argument that might be mistaken. When we begin to think like this, we are not far from an infinite regress; our argument chases its tail down the ever- receding corridors of the mind. Or, to change the image, we lose our bearings in a sea of infinity.

But haven’t we gone astray in arguing against the possibility of knowledge? We do seem to be able to test our knowledge in a way that generally satisfies us. Some things we think we know can be shown to be false or at least highly unlikely—for example, that microbes are spontaneously generated from totally inorganic mud. And all of us know how to boil water, scratch our itches, recognize our friends and distinguish them from others in a crowd.

Almost all our discoveries are due to our violences, to the exacerbation of our instability. Even God insofar as He interests us—it is not in our inmost selves that we discern God, but at the extreme limits of our fever, at the very point where, our rage confronting His, a shock results, an encounter as ruinous for Him as for us. Blasted by the curse attached to acts, the man of violence forces his nature, rises above himself only to relapse, an aggressor, followed by his enterprises, which come to punish him for having instigated them. Every work turns against its author: the poem will crush the poet, the system the philosopher, the event the man of action. Destruction awaits anyone who, answering to his vocation and fulfilling it, exerts himself within history; only the man who sacrifices every gift and talent escapes: released from his humanity, he may lodge himself in Being. If I aspire to a metaphysical career, I cannot, at any price, retain my identity: whatever residue I retain must be liquidated; if, on the contrary, I assume a historical role it is my responsibility to exasperate my faculties until I explode along with them. One always perishes by the self one assumes: to bear a name is to claim an exact mode of collapse.

E. M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist

Virtually no one is a full-fledged epistemological nihilist. Yet naturalism does not allow a person to have any solid reason for confidence in human reason. We thus end in an ironic paradox. Naturalism, born in the Age of Enlightenment, was launched on a firm acceptance of the human ability to know. Now naturalists find that they can place no confidence in their knowing.

The whole point of this argument can be summarized briefly: Naturalism places us as human beings in a box. But for us to have any confidence that our knowledge that we are in a box is true, we need to stand outside the box or to have some other being outside the box provide us with information (theologians call this “revelation”). But there is nothing or no one outside the box to give us revelation, and we cannot ourselves transcend the box. Ergo: epistemological nihilism.

A naturalist who fails to perceive this is like the man in Stephen Crane’s poem:

I saw a man pursuing the horizon;

Round and round they sped.

I was disturbed at this;

I accosted the man.

“It is futile,” I said,

“You can never—”

“You lie,” he cried,

And ran on.18

In the naturalistic framework, people pursue a knowledge that forever recedes before them. We can never know.

One of the worst consequences of taking epistemological nihilism seriously is that it has led some to question the very facticity of the universe.19 To some, nothing is real, not even themselves. People who reach this state are in deep trouble, for they can no longer function as human beings. Or, as we often say, they can’t cope.

We usually do not recognize this situation as metaphysical or epistemological nihilism. Rather, we call it schizophrenia, hallucination, fantasizing, daydreaming, or living in a dream world. And we treat the person as a “case,” the problem as a “disease.” I have no particular quarrel with doing this, for I do believe in the reality of an external world, one I hold in common with others in my space-time frame. Those who cannot recognize this are beyond coping. But while we think of such situations primarily in psychological terms and while we commit such people to institutions where someone will keep them alive and others will help them return from their inner trip and get back to waking reality, we should realize that some of these far-out cases may be perfect examples of what happens when a person no longer knows in the common-sense way of knowing. It is the “proper” state, the logical result, of epistemological nihilism. If I cannot know, then any perception or dream or image or fantasy becomes equally real or unreal. Life in the ordinary world is based on our ability to make distinctions. Ask the man who has just swallowed colorless liquid, which he thought was water but which was actually wood alcohol.

Most of us never see the far-out “cases.” They are quickly committed. But they exist, and I have met some people whose stories are frightening. Most full epistemological nihilists, however, fall in the class described by Robert Farrar Capon, who simply has no time for such nonsense:

The skeptic is never for real. There he stands, cocktail in hand, left arm draped languorously on one end of the mantelpiece, telling you that he can’t be sure of anything, not even of his own existence. I’ll give you my secret method of demolishing universal skepticism in four words. Whisper to him: “Your fly is open.” If he thinks knowledge is so all-fired impossible, why does he always look?20

As noted above, there is just too much evidence that knowledge is possible. What we need is a way to explain why we have it. This naturalism does not do. So the one who remains a consistent naturalist must be a closet nihilist who does not know where he is.

THE THIRD BRIDGE: IS AND OUGHT

Many naturalists—most, so far as I know—are very moral people. They are not thieves; they do not tend to be libertines. Many are faithful husbands and wives. Some are scandalized by the personal and public immorality of our day. The problem is not that moral values are not recognized but that they have no basis. Summing up the position reached by Nietzsche and Max Weber, Allan Bloom remarks, “Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion.”21

Remember that for a naturalist the world is merely there. It does not provide humanity with a sense of oughtness. It only is. Ethics, however, is about what ought to be, whether it is or not.22 Where, then, does one go for a basis for morality? Where is oughtness found?

As I have noted, every person has moral values. There is no tribe without taboos. But these are merely facts of a social nature, and the specific values vary widely. In fact, many of these values conflict with each other. Thus we are forced to ask, Which values are the true values, or the higher values?

Cultural anthropologists, recognizing that this situation prevails, answer clearly: Moral values are relative to one’s culture. What the tribe, nation, social unit says is valuable is valuable. But there is a serious flaw here. It is only another way of saying that is (the fact of a specific value) equals ought (what should be so). Moreover, it does not account for the situation of cultural rebels whose moral values are not those of their neighbors. The cultural rebel’s is is not considered ought. Why? The answer of cultural relativism is that the rebel’s moral values cannot be allowed if they upset social cohesiveness and jeopardize cultural survival. So we discover that is is not ought after all. The cultural relativist has affirmed a value—the preservation of a culture in its current state—as more valuable than its destruction or transformation by one or more rebels within it. Once more, we are forced to ask why.

Cultural relativism, it turns out, is not forever relative. It rests on a primary value affirmed by cultural relativists themselves: that cultures should be preserved. So cultural relativism does not rely only on is but on what its adherents think ought to be the case. The trouble here is that some anthropologists are not cultural relativists. Some think certain values are so important that cultures that do not recognize them should recognize them.23 So cultural relativists must, if they are to convince their colleagues, show why their values are the true values.24 Again we approach the infinite corridor down which we chase our arguments.

But let’s look again. We must be sure we see what is implied by the fact that values do really vary widely. Between neighboring tribes values conflict. One tribe may conduct “religious wars” to spread its values. Such wars are. Ought they to be? Perhaps, but only if there is indeed a nonrelative standard by which to measure the values in conflict. But a naturalist has no way of determining which values among the ones in existence are the basic ones that give meaning to the specific tribal variations. A naturalist can point only to the fact of value, never to an absolute standard.

This situation is not so critical as long as sufficient space separates peoples of radically differing values. But in the global community of the twenty-first century this luxury is no longer ours. We are forced to deal with values in conflict, and naturalists have no standard, no way of knowing when peace is more important than preserving another value. We may give up our property to avoid doing violence to a robber. But what shall we say to white racists who own rental property in the city? Whose values are to govern their actions when a black person attempts to rent their property? Who shall say? How shall we decide?

The argument can again be summarized like that above: Naturalism places us as human beings in an ethically relative box. For us to know what values within that box are true values, we need a measure imposed on us from outside the box; we need a moral plumb line by which we can evaluate the conflicting moral values we observe in ourselves and others. But there is nothing outside the box; there is no moral plumb line, no ultimate, nonchanging standard of value. Ergo: ethical nihilism.25

But nihilism is a feeling, not just a philosophy. And on the level of human perception, Franz Kafka catches in a brief parable the feeling of life in a universe without a moral plumb line.

I ran past the first watchman. Then I was horrified, ran back again and said to the watchman: “I ran through here while you were looking the other way.” The watchman gazed ahead of him and said nothing. “I suppose I really oughtn’t to have done it,” I said. The watchman still said nothing. “Does your silence indicate permission to pass?”26

When people were conscious of a God whose character was moral law, when their consciences were informed by a sense of rightness, their watchmen would shout halt when they trespassed the law. Now their watchmen are silent. They serve no king and protect no kingdom. The wall is a fact without a meaning. One scales it, crosses it, breaches it, and no watchman ever complains. One is left not with the fact but with the feeling of guilt.27

One knows my demand of philosophers that they place themselves beyond good and evil—and that they have the illusion of moral judgement beneath them. This demand follows from an insight formulated by me: that there are no moral facts whatever. Moral judgment has this in common with religious judgment that it believes in realities which do not exist.

Friedrich Nietzsche, “The ‘Improvers’ of Mankind”

In a haunting dream sequence in Ingmar Bergman’s film Wild Strawberries, an old professor is arraigned before the bar of justice. When he asks the charge, the judge replies, “You are guilty of guilt.”

“Is that serious?” the professor asks.

“Very serious,” says the judge.

But that is all that is said on the subject of guilt. In a universe where God is dead, people are not guilty of violating a moral law; they are only guilty of guilt, and that is very serious, for nothing can be done about it. If one had sinned, there might be atonement. If one had broken a law, the lawmaker might forgive the criminal. But if one is only guilty of guilt, there is no way to solve the very personal problem.28

And that states the case for a nihilist, for no one can avoid acting as if moral values exist and as if there is some bar of justice that measures guilt by objective standards. But there is no bar of justice, and we are left not in sin, but in guilt. Very serious, indeed.

THE LOSS OF MEANING

The strands of epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical nihilism weave together to make a rope long enough and strong enough to hang a whole culture. The name of the rope is Loss of Meaning. We end in a total despair of ever seeing ourselves, the world, and others as in any way significant. Nothing has meaning.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr., in a parody of Genesis 1, captures this modern dilemma:

In the beginning God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.

And God said, “Let Us make creatures out of mud, so mud can see what We have done.” And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close as mud as man sat up, looked around and spoke. Man blinked. “What is the purpose of all this?” he asked politely.

“Everything must have a purpose?” asked God.

“Certainly,” said man.

“Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,” said God. And he went away.

his may first appear to be a satire on theism’s notion of the origin of the universe and human beings, but it is quite the contrary. It is a satire on the naturalist’s view, for it shows our human dilemma. We have been thrown up by an impersonal universe. The moment a self-conscious, self-determining being appears on the scene, that person asks the big question: What is the meaning of all this? What is the purpose of the cosmos? But the person’s creator—the impersonal forces of bedrock matter—cannot respond. If the cosmos is to have meaning, we must manufacture it for ourselves.

As Stephen Crane put it in the poem quoted in the opening of the first chapter, the existence of people has not created in the universe “a sense of obligation.” Precisely: We exist. Period. Our maker has no sense of value, no sense of obligation. We alone make values. Are our values valuable? By what standard? Only our own. Whose own? Each person’s own. Each of us is monarch and bishop of our own realm, but our realm is Pointland. For the moment we meet another person, we meet another monarch and bishop. There is no way to arbitrate between two free value makers. There is no monarch to whom both give obeisance. There are values, but no Value. Society is only a bunch of windowless monads, a collection of points, not an organic body obeying a superior, all-encompassing form that arbitrates the values of its separate arms, legs, warts, and wrinkles. Society is not a body at all. It is only a bunch.

Thus does naturalism lead to nihilism. If we take seriously the implications of the death of God, the disappearance of the transcendent, the closedness of the universe, we end right there.

Why, then, aren’t most naturalists nihilists? The obvious answer is the best one: Most naturalists do not take their naturalism seriously. They are inconsistent. They affirm a set of values. They have friends who affirm a similar set. They appear to know and don’t ask how they know they know. They seem to be able to choose and don’t ask themselves whether their apparent freedom is really caprice or determinism. Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living, but for a naturalist he is wrong. For a naturalist it is the examined life that is not worth living.

INNER TENSIONS IN NIHILISM

The trouble is that no one can live the examined life if examination leads to nihilism, for nobody can live a life consistent with nihilism. At every step, at every moment, nihilists think, and think their thinking has substance, and thus they cheat on their philosophy. There are, I believe, at least five reasons that nihilism is unlivable.

First, from meaninglessness nothing at all follows, or rather, anything follows. If the universe is meaningless and a person cannot know and nothing is immoral, any course of action is open. One can respond to meaninglessness by any act whatsoever, for none is more or less appropriate. Suicide is one act, but it does not “follow” as any more appropriate than going to a Walt Disney movie.

Yet whenever we set ourselves on a course of action, putting one foot in front of the other in other than a haphazard way, we are affirming a goal. We are affirming the value of a course of action, even if to no one other than ourselves. Thus we are not living by nihilism. We are creating value by choice. From this type of argument comes Albert Camus’s attempt to go beyond nihilism to existentialism, which we will consider in the following chapter.30

Second, every time nihilists think and trust their thinking, they are inconsistent, for they have denied that thinking is of value or that it can lead to knowledge. But at the heart of a nihilist’s one affirmation lies a self-contradiction. There is no meaning in the universe, nihilists scream. That means that their only affirmation is meaningless, for if it were to mean anything it would be false.31 Nihilists are indeed boxed in. They can get absolutely nowhere. They merely are; they merely think; and none of this has any significance whatsoever. Except for those whose actions place them in institutions, no one seems to act out their nihilism. Those who do we treat as patients.

Third, while a limited sort of practical nihilism is possible for a while, eventually a limit is reached. The comedy of Catch-22 rests on just this premise. Captain Yossarian is having a knock-down theological argument with Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife, and God is coming in for a good deal of hassling. Yossarian is speaking:

[God] is not working at all. He’s playing. Or else He’s forgotten all about us. That’s the kind of God you people talk about—a country bumpkin, a clumsy, bungling, brainless, conceited, uncouth hayseed.

Good God, how much reverence can you have for a Supreme Being who finds it necessary to include such phenomena as phlegm and tooth decay in His system of creation?32

After several unsuccessful attempts to handle Yossarian’s verbal attack, Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife turns to violence.

“Stop it! Stop it!” Lieutenant Scheisskopf’s wife screamed suddenly, and began beating him ineffectually about the head with both fists. “Stop it!” . . .

“What the hell are you getting so upset about?” he asked her bewilderedly in a tone of contrite amusement. “I thought you didn’t believe in God.”

“I don’t,” she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. “But the God I don’t believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He’s not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be.”33

Here is another paradox: In order to deny God one must have a God to deny. In order to be a practicing nihilist, there must be something against which to do battle. Practicing nihilists are parasites on meaning. They run out of energy when there is nothing left to deny. Cynics are out of business when they are the last ones around.

Fourth, nihilism means the death of art. Here, too, we find a paradox, for much modern art—literature, painting, drama, film—has nihilism for its ideological core. And much of this literature is excellent by the traditional canons of art. Ernest Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” Samuel Beckett’s End Game, Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, Francis Bacon’s various heads of popes spring immediately to mind. The twist is this: to the extent that these artworks display the human implication of a nihilistic worldview, they are not nihilistic; to the extent that they themselves are meaningless, they are not artworks.

Art is nothing if not formal, that is, endowed with structure by the artist. But structure itself implies meaning. So to the extent that an artwork has structure, it has meaning and thus is not nihilistic. Even Beckett’s Breath has structure. A junkyard, the garbage in a trash heap, a pile of rocks just blasted from a quarry have no structure. They are not art.

Some contemporary art attempts to be antiart by being random. Much of John Cage’s music is predicated on sheer chance, randomness. But it is both dull and grating, and very few people can listen to it. It’s not art. Then there is Kafka’s “Hunger Artist,” a brilliant though painful story about an artist who tries to make art out of public fasting, that is, out of nothing. But no one looks at him; everyone passes by his display at the circus to see a young leopard pacing in his cage. Even the “nature” of the leopard is more interesting than the “art” of the nihilist. Breath too, as minimal as it is, is structured and means something. Even if it means only that human beings are meaningless, it participates in the paradox I examined above. In short, art implies meaning and is ultimately nonnihilistic, despite the ironic attempt of nihilists to display their wares by means of it.

Fifth, and finally, nihilism poses severe psychological problems for a nihilist. People cannot live with it because it denies what every fiber of their waking being calls for—meaning, value, significance, dignity, worth. “Nietzsche,” Bloom writes, “replaces easygoing or self-satisfied atheism with agonized atheism, suffering its human consequences. Longing to believe, along with intransigent refusal to satisfy that longing, is, according to him, the profound response to our entire spiritual condition.”34

A younger and an older waiter are closing a “clean, well-lighted” bar for the night. When the young waiter leaves, the older lonely waiter thinks to himself:

What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too. It was only that and light was all it needed and a certain cleanness and order. Some lived in it and never felt it but he knew it all was nada y pues nada y nada y pues nada. Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada in nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full of nothing, nothing is with thee. He smiled and stood before a bar with a shining steam pressure coffee machine.

Ernest Hemingway, “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place”

Nietzsche ended his life in an asylum. Ernest Hemingway affirmed a “lifestyle” and eventually committed suicide. Beckett writes black comedy. Vonnegut and Adams revel in whimsy. And Kafka—perhaps the greatest artist of them all—lived an almost impossible life of tedium, writing novels and stories that boil down to a sustained cry: God is dead! God is dead! Isn’t he? I mean, surely he is, isn’t he? God is dead. Oh, I wish, I wish, I wish he weren’t.

It is thus that nihilism forms the hinge for modern people. No one who has not plumbed the despair of the nihilists, heard them out, felt as they felt—if only vicariously through their art—can understand the past century. Nihilism is the foggy bottomland through which we modern people must pass if we are to build a life in Western culture. There are no easy answers to our questions, and none of these answers is worth anything unless it takes seriously the problems raised by the possibility that nothing whatever of value exists.

Beyond nihilism- Existentialism Chapter 6

Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance. I leaned back and closed my eyes. The images, forewarned, immediately leaped up and filled my closed eyes with existences: existence is a fullness which man can never abandon. . . . I knew it was the World, the naked World suddenly revealing itself, and I choked with rage at this gross absurd being.

ROQUENTIN IN JEAN-PAUL SARTRE, NAUSEA

IN AN ESSAY PUBLISHED in 1950, Albert Camus wrote, “A literature of despair is a contradiction in terms. . . . In the darkest depths of our nihilism I have sought only for the means to transcend nihilism.”1 Here the essence of existentialism’s most important goal is summed up in one phrase: to transcend nihilism. In fact, every important worldview that has emerged since the beginning of the twentieth century has had that as a major goal. For nihilism, coming as it does directly from a culturally pervasive worldview, is the problem of our age. A worldview that ignores this fact has little chance of proving relevant to modern thinking people. Existentialism, especially in its secular form, not only takes nihilism seriously, it is an answer to it.

From the outset it is important to recognize that existentialism takes two basic forms, depending on its relation to previous worldviews, because existentialism is not a full-fledged worldview. Atheistic existentialism is a parasite on naturalism; theistic existentialism is a parasite on theism.2

Historically, we have an odd situation. On the one hand, atheistic existentialism developed to solve the problem of a naturalism that led to nihilism, but it did not appear in any fullness till well into the twentieth century, unless we count a major theme in Nietzsche that quickly became distorted.3 On the other hand, theistic existentialism was born in the middle of the nineteenth century as Søren Kierkegaard responded to the dead orthodoxy of Danish Lutheranism. Yet it was not until after World War I that either form of existentialism became culturally significant, for it was only then that nihilism finally gripped the intellectual world and began affecting the lives and attitudes of ordinary men and women.

World War I had not made the world safe for democracy. The generation of flappers and bathtub gin, the rampant violation of an absurd antiliquor law, the quixotic stock market that promised so much—these prefaced in the United States Dust Bowl 1930s. With the rise of National Socialism in Germany and its incredible travesty of human dignity, students and intellectuals the world over were ready to conclude that life is absurd and human beings are meaningless. In the soil of such frustration and cultural discontent, existentialism in its atheistic form sank its cultural roots. It was to flower into a significant worldview by the 1950s.

To some extent all worldviews have subtle variations. Existentialism is no exception. Camus and Sartre, both existentialists and once friends, had a falling-out over important differences, and Martin Heidegger’s existentialism is quite different from Sartre’s. But as with other worldviews, we will focus on major features and general tendencies. The language of most of the propositions listed below derives from either Sartre or Camus. That is quite intentional, because that is the form in which it has been most digested by today’s intelligentsia, and through their literary works even more than their philosophic treatises, Sartre and Camus are still wielding enormous influence. To many modern people the propositions of existentialism appear so obvious that people “do not know what they are assuming because no other way of putting things has ever occurred to them.”5

BASIC ATHEISTIC EXISTENTIALISM

Atheistic existentialism begins by accepting naturalism’s answers to worldview questions 1 (prime reality), 4 (death), 5 (knowledge), 6 (ethics), and 7 (history). In short: Matter exists eternally; God does not exist. Death is extinction of personality and individuality. Through our innate and autonomous human reason, including the methods of science, we can know the universe. The cosmos, including this world, is understood to be in its normal state. Ethics is related only to human beings. History is a linear stream of events linked by cause and effect but without an overarching purpose.

In other words, atheistic existentialism affirms most of the propositions of naturalism except those relating to human nature and our relationship to the cosmos. Indeed, existentialism’s major interest is in our humanity and how we can be significant in an otherwise insignificant world.

The world, it is assumed, existed long before human beings came on the scene. It is structured or chaotic, determined by inexorable law or subject to chance. Whichever it is makes no difference. The world merely is.

Then came a new thing, conscious beings—ones who distinguished he and she from it, ones who seemed determined to determine their own destiny, to ask questions, to ponder, to wonder, to seek meaning, to endow the external world with special value, to create gods. In short, then came human beings. Now we have—for no one knows what reason—two kinds of being in the universe, the one seemingly having kicked the other out of itself and into separate existence.

The first sort of being is the objective world—the world of material, of inexorable law, of cause and effect, of chronological, clock-ticking time, of flux, of mechanism. The machinery of the universe, spinning electrons, whirling galaxies, falling bodies and rising gases and flowing waters—each is doing its thing, forever unconscious, forever just being where it is when it is. Here, say the existentialists, science and logic have their day. People know the external, objective world by virtue of careful observation, recording, hypothesizing, checking hypotheses by experiment, ever-refining theories, and proving guesses about the lay of the cosmos we live in.

The second sort of being is the subjective world—the world of mind, of consciousness, of awareness, of freedom, of stability. Here the inner awareness of the mind is a conscious present, a constant now. Time has no meaning, for the subject is always present to itself, never past, never future. Science and logic do not penetrate this realm; they have nothing to say about subjectivity. Subjectivity is the self’s apprehension of the not-self; subjectivity is making that not-self part of itself. The subject takes in knowledge not as a bottle takes in liquid but as an organism takes in food. Knowledge turns into the knower.

Existence is not something which lets itself be thought of from a distance: it must invade you suddenly, master you, weigh heavily on your heart like a great motionless beast—or else there is nothing more at all.

Roquentin in Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea

Naturalism had emphasized the unity of the two worlds by seeing the objective world as the real and the subjective as its shadow. “The brain secretes thought,” said Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis, “as the liver secretes bile.” The real is the objective. Sartre says, “The effect of all materialism is to treat all men, including the one philosophizing, as objects, that is, as an ensemble of determined reactions in no way distinguished from the ensemble of qualities and phenomena which constitute a table or a chair or a stone.”6 By that route, as we saw, lies nihilism. The existentialists take another path.

Existentialism emphasizes the disunity of the two worlds and opts strongly in favor of the subjective world, what Sartre calls “an ensemble of values distinct from the material realm.”7 For people are the subjective beings. Unless there are extraterrestrial beings, a possibility most existentialists do not even consider, we are the only beings in the universe who are self-conscious and self-determinate. The reason we have become that way is past finding out. But we perceive ourselves to be self-conscious and self-determinate, and so we work from these givens.

Science and logic do not penetrate our subjectivity, but that is all right because value and meaning and significance are not tied to science and logic. We can mean; we can be valuable; or better, we can mean and be valuable. Our significance is not up to the facts of the objective world over which we have no control, but up to the consciousness of the subjective world over which we have complete control.

Atheistic existentialism is at one with naturalism’s basic view of human nature; there is indeed no genuinely transcendent element in human beings, but they do display one important unique feature. To put it in Sartre’s words, “If God does not exist, there is at least one being in whom existence precedes essence, a being who exists before he can be defined by any concept, and . . . this being is man.” This sentence is the most famous definition of the core of existentialism. Sartre continues, “First of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself.”8

Note again the distinction between the objective and subjective worlds. The objective world is a world of essences. Everything comes bearing its nature. Salt is salt; trees are tree; ants are ant. Only human beings are not human before they make themselves so. Each of us makes himself or herself human by what we do with our self-consciousness and our self-determinacy. Back to Sartre: “At first he [any human being] is nothing. Only afterwards will he be something, and he himself will have made him what he will be.”9 The subjective world is completely at the beck and call of every subjective being, that is, of every person.

How does this work out in practice? Let us say that John, a soldier, fears he is a coward. Is he a coward? Only if he acts like a coward, and his action will proceed not from a nature defined beforehand but from the choices he makes when the bullets start to fly. We can call John a coward if and only if he does cowardly deeds, and these will be deeds he chooses to do. So if John fears he is a coward but does not want to be, let him do brave deeds when they are called for.

From proposition 2 it follows that each person is totally free. Each of us is uncoerced, radically capable of doing anything imaginable with our subjectivity. We can think, will, imagine, dream, project visions, consider, ponder, invent. Each of us is monarch of our own subjective world.

We run into just such an understanding of human freedom in John Platt’s existential defense of B. F. Skinner’s naturalistic behaviorism:

The objective world, the world of isolated and controlled experiments, is the world of physics; the subjective world, the world of knowledge, values, decisions, and acts—of purposes which these experiments are in fact designed to serve—is the world of cybernetics, of our own goal-seeking behavior. Determinism or indeterminism lies on that side of the boundary, while the usual idea of “free will” lies on this side of the boundary. They belong to different universes, and no statement about one has any bearing on the other.11

So we are free within. And thus we can create our own value by affirming worth. We are not bound by the objective world of ticking clocks and falling water and spinning electrons. Value is inner, and the inner is each person’s own.

The objective world considered in and of itself is as the naturalist has said: a world of order and law, perhaps triggered into new structures by chance. It is the world of thereness.

To us, however, the facticity, the hard, cold thereness of the world, appears alien. As we make ourselves to be by fashioning our subjectivity, we see the objective world as absurd. It does not fit us. Our dreams and visions, our desires, all our inner world of value runs smack up against a universe that is impervious to our wishes. Think all day that you can step off a ten-story building and float safely to the ground. Then try it.

The objective world is orderly; bodies fall if not supported. The subjective world knows no order. What is present to it, what is here and now, is.

So we are all strangers in a foreign land. And the sooner we learn to accept that, the sooner we transcend our alienation and pass through the despair.

The toughest fact to transcend is the ultimate absurdity—death. We are free so long as we remain subjects. When we die, each of us is just an object among other objects. So, says Camus, we must ever live in the face of the absurd. We must not forget our bent toward nonexistence, but live out the tension between the love of life and the certainty of death.

Here is how an existentialist goes beyond nihilism. Nothing is of value in the objective world in which we become conscious, but while we are conscious we create value. The person who lives an authentic existence is the one who keeps ever aware of the absurdity of the cosmos but who rebels against that absurdity and creates meaning.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “underground man” is a paradigm of the rebel without a seemingly reasonable cause. In the story the underground man is challenged:

Two and two do make four. Nature doesn’t ask your advice. She isn’t interested in your preferences or whether or not you approve of her laws. You must accept nature as she is with all the consequences that that implies. So a wall is a wall, etc., etc.

The walls referred to here are the “laws of nature,” “the conclusions of the natural sciences, of mathematics.” But the underground man is equal to the challenge:

But, Good Lord, what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmetic if I have my reasons for disliking them, including the one about two and two making four! Of course, I won’t be able to breach this wall with my head if I’m not strong enough. But I don’t have to accept a stone wall just because it’s there and I don’t have the strength to breach it.12

It is thus insufficient to pit the objective world against the subjective and point to its ultimate weapon, death. The person who would be authentic is not impressed. Being a cog in the cosmic machinery is much worse than death. As the underground man says, “The meaning of a man’s life consists in proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.”13

Ethics—that is, a system of understanding what is the good—is solved simply for an existentialist. The good action is the consciously chosen action. Sartre writes, “To choose to be this or that is to affirm at the same time the value of what we choose, because we can never choose evil. We always choose the good.”14 So the good is whatever a person chooses; the good is part of subjectivity; it is not measured by a standard outside the individual human dimension.

If I’ve discarded God the Father, there has to be someone to invent values. You’ve got to take things as they are. Moreover, to say that we invent values means nothing else than this: life has no meaning a priori. Before you come alive, life is nothing; it’s up to you to give it meaning, and value is nothing else but the meaning you choose. In that way, you see, there is a possibility of creating human community.

The problem with this position is twofold. First, subjectivity leads to solipsism, the affirmation that each person alone is the determiner of values and that there are thus as many centers of value as there are persons in the cosmos at any one time. Sartre recognizes this objection and counters by insisting that every person in meeting other persons encounters a recognizable center of subjectivity.15 Thus we see that others like us must be involved in making meaning for themselves. We are all in this absurd world together, and our actions affect each other in such a way that “nothing can be good for us without being good for all.”16 Moreover, as I act and think and effect my subjectivity, I am engaged in a social activity: “I am creating a certain image of man of my own choosing. In choosing myself, I choose man.”17 According to Sartre, therefore, people living authentic lives create value not only for themselves but for others too.

The second objection Sartre does not address, and it seems more telling. If, as Sartre says, we create value simply by choosing it and thus “can never choose evil,” does good have any meaning? The first answer is yes, for evil is “not-choosing.” In other words, evil is passivity, living at the direction of others, being blown around by one’s society, not recognizing the absurdity of the universe, that is, not keeping the absurd alive. If the good is in choosing, then choose. Sartre once advised a young man who sought his counsel, “You’re free, choose, that is, invent.”18

Does this definition satisfy our human moral sensitivity? Is the good merely any action passionately chosen? Too many of us can think of actions seemingly chosen with eyes open that were dead wrong. In what frame of mind have the Russian pogroms against the Jews been ordered and executed? And the bombing of Vietnamese villages or the Federal Building in Oklahoma City or the targets of the Unabomber? What about the terrorist leveling of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001? Sartre himself has sided with causes that appear quite moral on grounds many traditional moralists accept. But not every existentialist has acted like Sartre, and the system seems to leave open the possibility for the Unabomber to claim ethical immunity for his murders, or for the perpetrators of the events of 9/11 to glory in the nobility of their cause.

Placing the locus of morality in each individual’s subjectivity leads to the inability to distinguish a moral from an immoral act on grounds that satisfy our innate sense of right, a sense that says others have the same rights as I do. My choice may not be the desired choice of others though in my choosing I choose for others, as Sartre says. Some standard external to the “subjects” involved is necessary to shape truly the proper actions and relationships between “subjects.”

Ordinary naturalists can choose to commit themselves to their families or neighbors, their communities or country, the environment or the world. They need not display overarching egotism or selfishness. But full-blown atheistic existentialists have already committed themselves to themselves. If they are indeed committed to this Sartrean notion of human selves making themselves who they will come to be, they are the monarchs and bishops of their own Pointland. Since they themselves make themselves who they are, they are responsible only to themselves. They admit they are finite beings in an absurd world, subject to death without exception. The authenticity of their value comes solely by virtue of their own conscious choices.

Before we abandon existentialism to the charge of solipsism and a relativism that fails to provide a basis for ethics, we should give more than passing recognition to Albert Camus’s noble attempt to show how a good life can be defined and lived. This, it seems to me, is the task Camus set for himself in The Plague.

A SAINT WITHOUT GOD

In The Brothers Karamazov (1880) Dostoyevsky has Ivan Karamazov say that if God is dead everything is permitted. In other words, if there is no transcendent standard of the good, then there can ultimately be no way to distinguish right from wrong, good from evil, and there can be no saints or sinners, no good or bad people. If God is dead, ethics is impossible.

Albert Camus picks up that challenge in The Plague (1947), which tells the story of Oran, a city in North Africa, in which a deadly strain of infectious disease breaks out. The city closes its gates to traffic and thus becomes a symbol of the closed universe, a universe without God. The disease, on the other hand, comes to symbolize the absurdity of this universe. The plague is arbitrary; one cannot predict who will and who will not contract it. It is not “a thing made to man’s measure.”19 It is terrible in its effects—painful physically and mentally. Its origins are not known, and yet it becomes as familiar as daily bread. There is no way to avoid it. Thus the plague comes to stand for death itself, for like death it is unavoidable and its effects are terminal. The plague helps make everyone in Oran live an authentic existence, because it makes everyone aware of the absurdity of the world they inhabit. It points up the fact that people are born with a love of life but live in the framework of the certainty of death.

The story begins as rats start to come out from their haunts and die in the streets; it ends a year later as the plague lifts and life in the city returns to normal. During the intervening months, life in Oran becomes life in the face of total absurdity. Camus’s genius is to use that as a setting against which to show the reactions of a cast of characters, each of whom represents in some way a philosophic attitude.

M. Michel, for example, is a concierge in an apartment house. He is outraged at the way the rats are coming out of their holes and dying in his apartment building. At first he denies they exist in his building, but eventually he is forced to admit it. Early in the novel he dies cursing the rats. M. Michel represents the man who refuses to acknowledge the absurdity of the universe. When he is forced to admit it, he dies. He cannot live in the face of the absurd. He represents those who are able to live only inauthentic lives.

The old Spaniard has a very different reaction. He had retired at age fifty and gone immediately to bed. Then he measured time, day in and day out, by moving peas from one pan to another. “‘Every fifteen peas,’ he said, ‘it’s feeding time. What could be simpler?’”20 The old Spaniard never leaves his bed, but he takes a sadistic pleasure in the rats, the heat, and the plague, which he calls “life.”21 He is Camus’s nihilist. Nothing in his life—inside or out, objective world or subjective world—has value. So he lives it with a complete absence of meaning.

M. Cottard represents a third stance. Before the plague grips the city, he is nervous, for he is a criminal and is subject to arrest if detected. But as the plague becomes severe, all city employees are committed to alleviating the distress, and Cottard is left free to do as he will. And what he wills to do is live off the plague. The worse conditions get, the richer, happier, and friendlier he becomes. “Getting worse every day isn’t it? Well, anyhow, everyone’s in the same boat,” he says.22 Jean Tarrou, one of the chief characters in the novel, explains Cottard’s happiness this way: “He’s in the same peril of death as everyone else, but that’s just the point; he’s in it with the others.”23

When the plague begins to lift, Cottard loses his feeling of community because he again becomes a wanted man. He loses control of himself, shoots up a street, and is taken by force into custody. Throughout the plague his actions were criminal. Instead of alleviating the suffering of others, he feasted on it. He is Camus’s sinner in a universe without God—proof, if you will, in novelistic form that evil is possible in a closed cosmos.

If evil is possible in a closed cosmos, then perhaps good is too. In two major characters, Jean Tarrou and Dr. Rieux, Camus develops this theme. Jean Tarrou was baptized into the fellowship of nihilists when he visited his father at work, heard him argue as a prosecuting attorney for the death of a criminal, and then saw an execution. This had a profound effect on him. As he puts it, “I learned that I had had an indirect hand in the deaths of thousands of people. . . . We all have the plague.”24 And thus he lost his peace.

From then on, Jean Tarrou has made his whole life a search for some way to become “a saint without God.”25 Camus implies that Tarrou succeeds. His method lies in comprehension and sympathy and ultimately issues in action.26 He is the one who suggests a volunteer corps of workers to fight the plague and comfort its victims. Tarrou works ceaselessly in this capacity. Yet there remains a streak of despair in his lifestyle: “winning the match” for him means living “only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for!” So, writes Dr. Rieux, the narrator of the novel, Tarrou “realized the bleak sterility of a life without illusions.”27

Dr. Rieux himself is another case study of the good man in an absurd world. From the very beginning he sets himself with all his strength to fight the plague—to revolt against the absurd. At first his attitude is passionless, detached, aloof. Later, as his life is deeply touched by the lives and deaths of others, he softens and becomes compassionate. Philosophically, he comes to understand what he is doing. He is totally unable to accept the idea that a good God could be in charge of things. As Baudelaire said, that would make God the devil. Rather, Dr. Rieux takes as his task “fighting against creation as he found it.”28 He says, “Since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn’t it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him and struggle with all our might against death, without raising our eyes toward the heaven where He sits in silence.”29

Dr. Rieux does exactly that: he struggles against death. And the story he tells is a record of “what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.”30

I have dwelt at length on The Plague (though by no means exhausting its riches either as art or as a lesson in life)31 because I know of no novel or work of existential philosophy that makes so appealing a case for the possibility of living a good life in a world where God is dead and values are ungrounded in a moral framework outside the human frame. The Plague is to me almost convincing. Almost, but not quite. For the same questions occur within the intellectual framework of The Plague as within the system of Sartre’s “Existentialism.”

Why should the affirmation of life as Dr. Rieux and Jean Tarrou see it be good and Cottard’s living off the plague be bad? Why should the old Spaniard’s nihilistic response be any less right than Dr. Rieux’s positive action? True, our human sensibility sides with Rieux and Tarrou. But we recognize that the old Spaniard is not alone in his judgment. Who then is right? Those who side with the old Spaniard will not be convinced by Camus or by any reader who sides with Rieux, for without an external moral referent there is no common ground for discussion. There is but one conviction versus another. The Plague is attractive to those whose moral values are traditional, not because Camus offers a base for those values but because he continues to affirm them even though they have no base. Unfortunately, affirmation is not enough. It can be countered by an opposite affirmation.

It may be that in the last two years of his life Camus recognized his failure to go beyond nihilism. Howard Mumma, the summer pastor of the American Church in Paris, recounts private talks with Camus during these two years in which Camus gradually came to feel that the Christian explanation was true. He asked Mumma what it meant to be “born again” and whether Mumma would baptize him. The baptism did not take place, first, because Mumma considered Camus’s childhood baptism valid and, second, because Camus was not yet ready for a public display of his conversion. The issue was not resolved when Mumma left Paris at the end of summer, expecting to see Camus again the following year. Camus died in an automobile accident the following February.32

Since I have been coming to church, I have been thinking a great deal about the idea of a transcendent, something that is other than this world. . . . And since I have been reading the Bible, I sense that there is something—I don’t know if it is personal or if it is a great idea or powerful influence—but there is something that can bring meaning to my life.

Camus, in Howard Mumma, Albert Camus and the Minister

HOW FAR BEYOND NIHILISM?

Does atheistic existentialism transcend nihilism? It certainly tries to—with passion and conviction. Yet it fails to provide a referent for a morality that goes beyond each individual. By grounding human significance in subjectivity, it places it in a realm divorced from reality. The objective world keeps intruding: death, the ever-present possibility and the ultimate certainty, puts a halt to whatever meaning might otherwise be possible. It forces an existentialist forever to affirm and affirm and affirm; when affirmation ceases, so does authentic existence.

Considering precisely this objection to the possibility of human value, H. J. Blackham agrees to the terms of the argument. Death indeed does end all. But every human life is more than itself, for it stems from a past humanity and it affects humanity’s future. Moreover, “there is heaven and there is hell in the economy of every human imagination.”33 That is, says Blackham, “I am the author of my own experience.”34 After all the objections have been raised, Blackham retreats to solipsism. And that seems to me the end of all attempts at ethics from the standpoint of atheistic existentialism.

Atheistic existentialism goes beyond nihilism only to reach solipsism, the lonely self that exists for fourscore and seven (if it doesn’t contract the plague earlier), then ceases to exist. Many would say that that is not to go beyond nihilism at all; it is only to don a mask called value, a mask stripped clean away by death.

BASIC THEISTIC EXISTENTIALISM

As was pointed out above, theistic existentialism arose from philosophic and theological roots quite different from those of its atheistic counterpart. It was Søren Kierkegaard’s answer to the challenge of a theological nihilism—the dead orthodoxy of a dead church. As Kierkegaard’s themes were picked up two generations after his death, they were the response to a Christianity that had lost its theology completely and had settled for a watered-down gospel of morality and good works. God had been reduced to Jesus, who had been reduced to a good man pure and simple. The death of God in liberal theology did not produce among liberals the despair of Kafka but the optimism of one English bishop in 1905 who, when asked what he thought would prevent humankind from achieving a perfect social union, could think of nothing.

Late in the second decade of the twentieth century, however, Karl Barth in Germany saw what ought to happen when theology became anthropology, and he responded by refurbishing Christianity along existential lines. What he and subsequent theologians such as Emil Brunner and Reinhold Niebuhr affirmed came to be called neo-orthodoxy, for while it was significantly different from orthodoxy, it put God very much back in the picture.35 It is not my goal to look specifically at any one form of neo-orthodoxy. Rather, I will seek to identify propositions that are common to the theistic existential stance.

Theistic existentialism begins by accepting theism’s answers to worldview questions 1 (prime reality), 2 (external reality), 3 (human beings), 4 (death), 6 (ethics), and 8 (core commitments). In short: God is infinite and personal (triune), transcendent and immanent, omniscient, sovereign, and good. God created the cosmos ex nihilo to operate with a uniformity of cause and effect in an open system. Human beings are created in the image of God and thus possess personality, self-transcendence, intelligence, morality, gregariousness, and creativity. Human beings were created good, but through the fall the image of God became defaced, though not so ruined as to be incapable of restoration; through the work of Christ, God redeemed humanity and began the process of restoring people to goodness, though any given person may choose to reject that redemption. For each person death is either the gate to life with God and his people or the gate to eternal separation from the only thing that will ultimately fulfill human aspirations. Ethics is transcendent and is based on the character of God as good (holy and loving). As a core commitment Christian theists live to seek first the kingdom of God, that is, to glorify God and enjoy him forever.

This list of propositions, identical to that of theism, suggests that theistic existentialism is just Christian theism. I am tempted to say that is in fact what we have, but this would do an injustice to the special existential variations and emphases. The existential version of theism is much more a particular set of emphases within theism than it is a separate worldview. Still, because of its impact on twentieth-century theology and its confusing relation to atheistic existentialism, it deserves a special treatment. Moreover, some tendencies within the existential version of theism place it at odds with traditional theism. These tendencies will be highlighted as they arise in the discussion.

As with atheistic existentialism, theistic existentialism’s most characteristic elements are concerned not with the nature of the cosmos or God, but with human nature and our relation to the cosmos and God.

Theistic existentialism does not start with God. This is its most important variation from theism. With theism God is assumed certainly to be there and of a given character; then people are defined in relationship to God. Theistic existentialism arrives at the same conclusion, but it starts elsewhere.

Theistic existentialism emphasizes the place in which human beings find themselves when they first come to self-awareness. Self-reflect for a moment. Your certainty of your own existence, your own consciousness, your own self-determinacy—these are your starting points. When you look around, check your desires against the reality you find, look for a meaning to your existence, you are not blessed with certain answers. You find a universe that does not fit you, a social order that scratches where you don’t itch and fails to scratch where you do. And, worse luck, you do not immediately perceive God.

The human situation is ambivalent, for evidence of order in the universe is ambiguous. Some things seem explicable by laws that seem to govern events; other things do not. The fact of human love and compassion gives evidence for a benevolent deity; the fact of hatred and violence and the fact of an impersonal universe point in the other direction.

It is here that Father Paneloux in The Plague images for us an existential Christian stance. Dr. Rieux, you will recall, refused to accept the “created order” because it was “a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.”36 Father Paneloux, on the other hand, says, “But perhaps we should love that which we cannot understand.”37 Father Paneloux has “leaped” to faith in and love for the existence of a good God, even though the immediate evidence is all in the other direction. Rather than accounting for the absurdity of the universe on the basis of the fall, as a Christian theist would do, Father Paneloux assumes God is immediately responsible for this absurd universe; therefore he concludes that he must believe in God in spite of the absurdity.

Camus elsewhere calls such faith “intellectual suicide,” and I am inclined to agree with him. But the point is that while reason may lead us to atheism, we can always refuse to accept reason’s conclusions and take a leap toward faith.

To be sure, if the Judeo-Christian God exists, we had better acknowledge it because in that case our eternal destiny depends on it. But, say the existentialists, the data is not all in and never will be, and so every person who would be a theist must step forth and choose to believe. God will never reveal himself unambiguously. Consequently each person, in the loneliness of his or her own subjectivity, surrounded by a great deal more darkness than light, must choose. And that choice must be a radical act of faith. When a person does choose to believe, a whole panorama opens. Most of the propositions of traditional theism flood in. Yet the subjective, choice-centered basis for the worldview colors the style of each Christian existentialist’s stance within theism.

As in atheistic existentialism, theistic existentialism emphasizes the disjunction between the objective and the subjective worlds. Martin Buber, a Jewish existentialist whose views have greatly influenced Christians, uses the terms I-Thou and I-It to distinguish between the two ways a person relates to reality. In the I-It relationship a human being is an objectifier:

Now with the magnifying glass of peering observation he bends over particulars and objectifies them, or with the field-glass of remote inspection he objectifies them and arranges them as scenery, he isolates them in observation without any feeling of their exclusiveness, or he knits them into a scheme of observation without any feeling of universality.38

This is the realm of science and logic, of space and time, of measurability. As Buber says, “Without It man cannot live. But he who lives by It alone is not man.”39 The Thou is necessary.

In the I-Thou relationship, a subject encounters a subject: “When Thou is spoken [Buber means experienced], the speaker has nothing for his object.”40 Rather, such speakers have a subject like themselves with whom to share a mutual life. In Buber’s words, “All real living is meeting.”41

Buber’s statement about the primacy of I-Thou, person-to-person relationships is now recognized as a classic. No simple summary can do it justice, and I encourage readers to treat themselves to the book itself. Here we must content ourselves with one more quotation about the personal relationship Buber sees possible between God and people:

Men do not find God if they stay in the world. They do not find Him if they leave the world. He who goes out with his whole being to meet his Thou and carries to it all being that is in the world, finds Him who cannot be sought. Of course God is the “wholly Other”; but He is also the wholly Same, the Wholly Present. Of course He is the Mysterium Tremendum that appears and overthrows; but He is also the mystery of the self-evident, nearer to me than my I.42

So theistic existentialists emphasize the personal as of primary value. The impersonal is there; it is important; but it is to be lifted up to God, lifted up to the Thou of all Thous. To do so satisfies the I and serves to eradicate the alienation so strongly felt by people when they concentrate on I-It relations with nature and, sadly, with other people as well.

This discussion may seem rather abstract to Christians whose faith in God is a daily reality that they live out rather than reflect on. Perhaps the chart in table 6.1 comparing two ways of looking at some basic elements of Christianity will make the issues clearer. It is adapted from a lecture given by theologian Harold Englund at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1960s. Think of the column on the left as describing a dead orthodoxy contrasted with the column on the right describing a live theistic existentialism.

When put this way, the existential version is obviously more attractive. Of course, traditional theists may well respond in two ways: first, the second column demands or implies the existence of the first column and, second, theism has always included the second column in its system. Both responses are well founded. The problem has been that theism’s total worldview has not always been well understood and churches have tended to stick with column one. It has taken existentialism to restore many theists to a full recognition of the richness of their own system.

An existentialist’s stress on personality and wholeness leads to an equal emphasis on the subjectivity of genuine human knowledge. Knowledge about objects involves I-It relationships; they are necessary but not sufficient. Full knowledge is intimate interrelatedness; it involves the I-Thou and is linked firmly to the authentic life of the knower. In 1835 when Kierkegaard was faced with deciding what should be his life’s work, he wrote,

What I really need is to become clear in my own mind what I must do, not what I must know—except in so far as a knowing must precede every action. The important thing is to understand what I am destined for, to perceive what the Deity wants me to do; the point is to find the truth for me, to find that idea for which I am ready to live and die. What good would it do me to discover a so-called objective truth, though I were to work my way through the systems of the philosophers and were able, if need be, to pass them in review?43

Some readers of Kierkegaard have understood him to abandon the concept of objective truth altogether; certainly some existentialists have done precisely that, disjoining the objective and subjective so completely that the one has no relation to the other.44 This has been especially true of atheistic existentialists like John Platt. It is not that the facts are unimportant but that they must be facts for someone, facts for me. And that changes their character and makes knowledge become the knower. Truth in its personal dimension is subjectivity; it is truth digested and lived out on the nerve endings of a human life.

When knowledge becomes so closely related to the knower, it has an edge of passion, of sympathy, and it tends to be hard to divide logically from the knower himself. Buber describes the situation of a person standing before God: “Man’s religious situation, his being there in the Presence, is characterized by its essential and indissoluble antinomy.” What is one’s relation to God as regards freedom or necessity? Kant, says Buber, resolved the problem by assigning necessity to the realm of appearances and freedom to the realm of being.

But if I consider necessity and freedom not in worlds of thought but in the reality of standing before God, if I know that “I am given over for disposal” and know at the same time that “It depends on myself,” then I cannot try to escape the paradox that has to be lived by assigning irreconcilable propositions to two separate realms of validity; nor can I be helped to an ideal reconciliation by any theological device: but I am compelled to take both to myself, to be lived together, and in being lived they are one.45

The full truth is in the paradox, not in an assertion of only one side of the issue. Presumably this paradox is resolved in the mind of God, but it is not resolved in the human mind. It is to be lived out: “God, I rely completely on you; do your will. I am stepping out to act.”

The strength of stating our understanding of our stance before God in such a paradox is at least in part a result of the inability most of us have had in stating our stance nonparadoxical. Most nonparadoxical statements end by denying either God’s sovereignty or human significance. That is, they tend either to Pelagianism or to hyper-Calvinism.

The weakness of resting in paradox is the difficulty of knowing where to stop. What sets of seemingly contradictory statements are to be lived out as truth? Surely not every set. “Love your neighbor; hate your neighbor.” “Do good to those who persecute you. Call your friends together and do in your enemies.” “Don’t commit adultery. Have every sexual liaison you can pull off.”

So beyond the paradoxical it would seem that there must be some noncontradictory proposition governing which paradoxes we will try to live out. In the Christian form of existentialism the Bible taken as God’s special revelation sets the bounds. It forbids many paradoxes, and it seems to encourage others. The doctrine of the Trinity, for example, may be an unresolvable paradox, but it does justice to the biblical data Among those who have no external objective authority to set the bounds, paradox tends to run rampant. Marjorie Grene comments about Kierkegaard, “Much of Kierkegaard’s writing seems to be motivated not so much by an insight into the philosophical or religious appropriateness of paradox to a peculiar problem as by the sheer intellectual delight in the absurd for its own sake.”47 Thus, this aspect of theistic existentialism has come in for a great deal of criticism from those holding a traditional theistic worldview. The human mind is made in the image of God’s mind, and thus though our mind is finite and incapable of encompassing the whole of knowledge, it is yet able to discern some truth. As Francis Schaeffer puts it, we can have substantial truth but not exhaustive truth, and we can discern truth from foolishness by the use of the principle of noncontradiction.48

What logic does is to articulate and to make explicit those rules which are in fact embodied in actual discourse and which, being so embodied, enable men both to construct valid arguments and to avoid the penalties of inconsistency. . . . A pupil of Duns Scotus demonstrated that . . . from a contradiction any statement whatsoever can be derived. It follows that to commit ourselves to asserting a contradiction is to commit ourselves to asserting anything whatsoever, to asserting anything whatsoever that it is possible to assert—and of course also to its denial. The man who asserts a contradiction thus succeeds in saying nothing and also in committing himself to everything; both are failures to assert anything determinate, to say that this is the case and not this other. We therefore depend upon our ability to utilize and to accord with the laws of logic in order to speak at all, and a large part of formal logic clarifies for us what we have been doing all along.

Alasdair MacIntyre, Herbert Marcuse: An Exposition and a Polemic

Theistic existentialism took two steps away from traditional theism. The first step was to begin to distrust the accuracy of recorded history. The second step was to lose interest in its facticity and to emphasize its religious implication or meaning.

The first step is associated with the higher criticism of the mid-nineteenth century. Rather than taking the biblical accounts at face value, accepting miracles and all, the higher critics, such as D. F. Strauss (1808–1874) and Ernest Renan (1823–1892), started from the naturalistic assumption that miracles cannot happen. Accounts of them must therefore be false, not necessarily fabricated by writers who wished to deceive but propounded by credulous people of primitive mindset.

This, of course, tended to undermine the authority of the biblical accounts even where they were not riddled with the miraculous. Other higher critics, most notably Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918), also turned their attention to the inner unity of the Old Testament and discovered, so they were sure, that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses at all. In fact, the texts showed that several hands over several centuries had been at work. This undermined what the Bible says about itself and thus called into question the truth of its whole message.49

Rather than change their naturalistic presuppositions to match the data of the Bible, they concluded that the Bible was historically untrustworthy. This could have led to an abandonment of Christian faith in its entirety. Instead it led to a second step—a radical shift in emphasis. The facts the Bible recorded were not important; what was important were its examples of the good life and its timeless truths of morality.

Matthew Arnold wrote in 1875 that Christianity “will live, because it depends upon a true and inexhaustible fruitful idea, the idea of death and resurrection as conceived and worked out by Jesus. . . . The importance of the disciples’ belief in their Master’s resurrection lay in their believing what was true, although they materialized it. Jesus had died and risen again, but in his own sense not theirs.”50 History—that is, space-time events—was not important; belief was important. And the doctrine of death and resurrection came to stand not for the atonement of humankind by the God-man Jesus Christ but for a “new life” of human service and sacrifice for others. The great mystery of God’s entrance into time and space was changed from fact to myth, a powerful myth, of course, one that could transform ordinary people into moral giants.

These steps took place long before the nihilism of Nietzsche or the despair of Kafka. They were responses to the “assured results of scholarship” (which as those who pursue the matter will find are now not so assured). If objective truth could not be found, no matter. Real truth is poetically contained in the “story,” the narrative.

It is interesting to note what soon happened to Matthew Arnold. In 1875 he was saying that we should read the Bible as poetry; if we did it would teach us the good life. In 1880 he had taken the next step and was advocating that we treat poetry in general in the same way we used to treat the Bible: “More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. . . . Most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.”51 For Arnold, poetry in general had become scripture.

In any case, when theistic existentialists (Reinhold Niebuhr, Rudolf Bultmann, and the like) began appearing on the theological scene, they had a ready-made solution to the problem posed for orthodoxy by the higher critics. So the Bible’s history was suspect. What matter? The accounts are “religiously” (that is, poetically) true. So while the doctrine of the neo-orthodox theologians looks more like the orthodoxy of Calvin than like the liberalism of Matthew Arnold, the historical basis for the doctrines was discounted, and the doctrines themselves began to be lifted out of history.

The fall was said not to have taken place back there and then in space and time. Rather, each person reenacts in their own life this story. Each enters the world like Adam, sinless; each one rebels against God. The fall is existential—a here-and-now proposition. Edward John Carnell summarizes the existential view of the fall as “a mythological description of a universal experience of the race.

Likewise the resurrection of Jesus may or may not have occurred in space and time. Barth believes it did; Bultmann, on the other hand, says, “An historical fact that involves a resurrection from the dead is utterly inconceivable!”53 Again, no matter. The reality behind the resurrection is the new life in Christ experienced by the disciples. The “spirit” of Jesus was living in them; their lives were transformed. They were indeed living the “cruciform life style.”54

Other supernatural doctrines are similarly “demythologized,” among them creation, redemption, the resurrection of the body, the second coming, the antichrist. Each is said to be a symbol of “religious” import. Either they are not to be taken literally or, if they are, their meaning is not in their facticity but in what they indicate about human nature and our relationship to God.55

It is here—in the understanding of history and of doctrine—that traditional theists most find fault with their existential counterparts. The charge is twofold. First, theists say that the existentialists start with two false, or certainly highly suspect, presuppositions: (1) that miracles are impossible (Bultmann here, but not Barth) and (2) that the Bible is historically untrustworthy. On the level of presuppositions Bultmann simply buys the naturalist notion of the closed universe; Bultmann, although usually associated with the neo-orthodox theologians, is thus not really a “theistic” existentialist at all. Much recent scholarship has gone a long way toward restoring confidence in the Old Testament as an accurate record of events, but existential theologians ignore this scholarship or discount the importance of its results. And that brings us to the second major theistic critique.

Theists charge the existentialists with building theology on the shifting sand of myth and symbol. As a reviewer said about Lloyd Geering’s Resurrection: A Symbol of Hope, an existential work, “How can a nonevent [a resurrection which did not occur] be regarded as a symbol of hope or indeed of anything else? If something has happened we try to see what it means. If it has not happened the question cannot arise. We are driven back on the need for an Easter event.”56

There must be an event if there is to be meaning. If Jesus arose from the dead in the traditional way of understanding this, then we have an event to mean something. If he stayed in the tomb or if his body was taken elsewhere, we have another event and it must mean something else. So a theist refuses to give up the historical basis for faith and challenges the existentialist to take more seriously the implications of abandoning historical facticity as religiously important. Such abandonment should lead to doubt and loss of faith. Instead it has led to a leap of faith. Meaning is created in the subjective world, but it has no objective referent.

In this area theistic existentialism comes very close to atheistic existentialism. Perhaps when existentialists abandon facticity as a ground of meaning, they should be encouraged to take the next step and abandon meaning altogether. This would place them back in the trackless wastes of nihilism, and they would have to search for another way out.

THE PERSISTENCE OF EXISTENTIALISM

The two forms of existentialism are interesting to study, for they are a pair of worldviews that bear a sibling relationship but are children of two different fathers. Theistic existentialism arose with Kierkegaard as a response to dead theism, dead orthodoxy, and with Karl Barth as a response to the reduction of Christianity to sheer morality. It took a subjectivist turn, lifted religion from history, and focused its attention on inner meaning. Atheistic existentialism came to the fore with Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus as a response to nihilism and the reduction of people to meaningless cogs in the cosmic machinery. It took a subjectivist turn, lifted philosophy from objectivity, and created meaning from human affirmation.

Siblings in style though not in content, these two forms of existentialism are still commanding attention and vying for adherents. So long as those who would be believers in God yearn for a faith that does not demand too much belief in the supernatural or the accuracy of the Bible, theistic existentialism will be a live option. So long as naturalists who cannot (or refuse to) believe in God are searching for a way to find meaning in their lives, atheistic existentialism will be of service. I would predict that both forms—in probably ever-new and changing versions—will be with us for a long time.