B. Faith and Enlightenment

Nietzsche’s statement that “God is Dead” is, today, often interpreted as a diagnosis of a cultural condition that he saw developing in the 19^th Century and that, since then, has become global and near monolithic.

This cultural condition is the loss of a shared core of truths about how to understand ourselves and the universe, how we should choose how to live our lives, what should be the moral principles that govern our lives, and, ultimately, what should be the purpose and meaning of our existence.

Science gives us a mechanistic universe of cause and effect. We are, according to the scientific view of what it is to be a human being, just a particular and peculiar kind of animal. The Protestant Reformation and our globally linked world shows us that, over the course of history and across the diverse cultures of the world, people have believed many things about God and gods and spirits and the Absolute. Who, Nietzsche’s madman would ask us all, has the audacity to say that just because they happened to be born in some specific place, with some specific culture, and some specific religion that they somehow know the truth of God and the universe that billions of others are ignorant of?

Each one of us in but one of almost 8 billion human beings on this planet. There are, it is estimated, somewhere around 100 billion planets in our galaxy, the Milky Way. The Hubble Space Telescope reveals that there are 100 billion galaxies in the currently observable universe. And these numbers do not even begin to do justice to how vast the space that divides these almost innumerable objects is.

Source: https://www.vox.com/2015/7/29/9061333/solar-system-space

(Play this in the background as you read and check in once and a while to see how long it would take a photon traveling at the speed of light just to traverse our solar system.)

The point of all this being that one way to interpret “God is dead” is to say that the Enlightenment has opened our eyes to the utter insignificance of our lives. The problem with the people in the marketplace is that in their shallow disbelief in God they are unable to grasp the significance of this. The madman declares that the death of God changes everything.

Why?

Because, Nietzsche goes on to write, without God we are lost on the infinite sea of being without any sense of where to go and what to do. All of the things that seem most important are utterly trivial.

This is the problem of nihilism. Nihilism is the view that there is no meaning to existence. According to nihilism, all moral, religious, philosophical, and other systems of meaning are, ultimately nonsense.

Shakespeare has Macbeth say:

Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more; it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

Nietzsche is not himself a nihilist. He is diagnosing nihilism as the great problem of the modern era.

The view of the death of god I have just elaborated is framed a little bit differently by the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus (1929–2017).

Dreyfus sees the death of God as the death of what he calls the onto-theo-logical framework.

So as to break this down, the pre-death of God world view is an ontological framework because it is concerned with the ultimate nature of being. The theory of being to which this may refer is Plato’s theory of the Forms. According to the theory of the forms, the ultimate reality is that of the eternal and unchanging realm of the abstract qualities that make all transient and changeable things what they are. In Plato’s view, the form of the Good is what makes all things intelligible.

This view also a theological framework because it is concerned with understanding the universe through the monotheistic god of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition. In this tradition all paths to righteousness lead through that god.

These two frameworks were integrated in early Christianity by the Catholic Church. Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo (“St. Augustine” to Roman Catholics), was the theo-philosopher credited with this.

Dreyfus says the loss of a shared sense of the centrality of this ontotheological framework leaves European humanity without any shared sense of an ultimate or transcendent purpose in life. This loss is the nihilism that is the result of the Death of God. Losing the shared centrality of the ontotheological framework plunges us into the Nietzschean nightmare where we are lost on an infinite sea without any sense of where we might go. While, in calm and balmy times, we may lounge and enjoy the sun and water, when the storm of crisis comes, there is no harbor to seek refuge in.

The question then is, where do I go?

 

We will look first at the two theological ways of coping with the death of god presented to us by Dreyfus. Then, when we turn to Simone de Beauvoir, we will look at atheistic existentialism.

Dreyfus discusses two theological ways of coping with the death of god. One is to rediscover paganism. An example of a post Death of God paganism considered by Dreyfus is a new paganism that worships the demi-gods of mass culture. This is the cult of celebrity and “influencers” were people turn to “stars” to decide how to dress, look, and act. They follow the lives of these celebrities in what Dreyfus considers a kind of worship. It is the lives of these celebrities that are interesting and important and, by following them, by worshipping them, their followers are able to share a tiny bit in the glamor of the lives of the stars. This way of coping with the death of god, however, fails to provide any sort of significance for the follower of the celebrity. Any glamour is second hand. It does not provide meaning to my life.

Other forms of paganism that might be cited as examples of how to cope with the Death of God include Wicca, new age belief systems, a fascination with Westernized versions of Buddhism and other Asian religions, etc.

Often, the limits of paganism as a solution to the death of God are that it puts the Theos, the god, outside of the individual and the individual’s life. Pagan gods have their own lives and, for the most part, the lives of their worshippers are incidental to those lives. In addition, the transcendent deities that are part of such belief systems are not fully transcendent. They are not absolute; they give no ultimate truth.

The other religious approach to the problem of nihilism to rediscover god through the subjective faith of the individual believer.

The great philosopher of this turn to the faith grounded in the subjective is Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). Dreyfus also mentions the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821 – 1881) in this context. We will focus on Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard is also considered by some to be the founder of existentialism. We will look at existentialism through the Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity. Beauvoir’s existentialism is atheistic. Kierkegaard is a theo-logical thinker, but not and onto-theo-logical thinker. His turn to the god is based on existential faith, not on knowable and eternal truths.

Kierkegaard is a great thinker but difficult writer to understand. He was a passionate religious believer as much as he is a philosophical thinker. In his writing he takes on a variety of pseudonyms and his writing is full of humor, irony, metaphor, and veiled allusions to biblical, religious and the popular texts of his time. While, as with Nietzsche, it can be an enormous struggle to understand Kierkegaard comprehension of his thought can be rewarding and illuminating. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard are thinkers who can change the way one views the self, world, and everything. Both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard have transformed my self-understanding and my understanding of the world. (But then so did almost all the philosophers we are discussing. That is why I am introducing them to you.) Due to the complexity of Kierkegaard’s thought, I am going to introduce you to a few key notions in his work that are important for understanding his basic philosophical orientation and will allow you to begin to understand the Christian existentialist tradition that he is often credited with founding.

One key idea for Kierkegaard is the distinction between subjective and objective knowledge. Kierkegaard famously says, “Truth is subjectivity.” At first glance this seems to be advocating some form of subjectivist relativism. It is not.

In Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard writes,

“When the question about truth is asked objectively, truth is reflected upon objectively as an object to which the knower relates himself. What is reflected upon is not the relation but that what he relates himself to is the truth, the true. If only that to which he relates himself is the truth, the true, then the subject is in the truth. When the question about truth is asked subjectively, the individual’s relation is reflected upon subjectively. If only the how of this relation is in truth, the individual is in truth, even if he in this way were to relate himself to untruth.”

What Kierkegaard seems to be saying here is that objective truth is not concerned with the knower, the person who says, “This is true.” Objective truth is concerned with the object that is known and it is the object, not the subject that is important. Objective truth is the concern of scientific knowledge. Science is the attempt to discover truths about the objective world. Thus, for Kierkegaard, objective truth is not about the subject, the individual, who knows. The truth of the object is irrelevant to the knower. The fact that the planet Venus has no water on its surface is, seemingly of no relevance to ones day to day life.

An example is the objective assertion, “It is snowing outside.” The objective truth of this assertion is merely a matter of fact. As such, whether it snows or not does not matter. It is not important. You might respond, “So what?” What is important about it snowing is what the snow means to you. For example, someone might say, “It is snowing outside and it’s October. It’s too early. That’s depressing.” Or, another might say, “It is snowing outside, and I love winter. I am glad it is finally snowing.” For these two individuals the same objective fact means two very different things. For Kierkegaard it is not the fact that matters, it is the individual’s relation to the fact.

One of the puzzling things about Kierkegaard’s statement above is “the individual is in truth, even if he in this way were to relate himself to untruth.” This means that even if my subjective belief is objectively false, it is my individual relation to this belief that matters.

Thus, if on a warm sunny day, I dance around my house with joy because it is snowing, even though the truth I believe in — it is snowing! — is false, there is a subjective truth in my joy.

Why is this?

The individual subject is who creates significance or meaning. According to Kierkegaard, the snow outside is significant only if it is significant for someone. The objective universe is indifferent and without significance. For Kierkegaard, we give significance through passion, through our own subjective enthusiasm. Even if my passion is based on delusion, on a misunderstanding of the external world, it still gives meaning to my life.

“At its highest, inwardness in an existing subject is passion; truth as a paradox corresponds to passion, and that truth becomes a paradox is grounded precisely in its relation to an existing subject. In this way the one corresponds to the other. In forgetting that one is an existing subject, one loses passion…[and] the knowing subject shifts from being human to being a fantastical something….”

The “inwardness” referred to in the quote above refers to who we are in ourselves, in the deepest heart of hearts. The inward is never objective and can never be truly shared. You can say to someone, “I love you” but that person does not truly know how you feel on loving them. This is because to know that love would mean to feel that love as you feel it. To feel that love as your feel it, the person would have to be you. And the example of love is appropriate here because love is a passion. When one is in love, one finds one’s meaning in that love. And when that love is lost one is lost to oneself.

So, for Kierkegaard the way to obtain meaning is through the subjective truth that is found in the inwardness of passion. This passionate truth is a “paradox” (something that goes against common or logical sense) because as a subjective state it is not true in terms of the objectively true. The love that you feel is not, objectively true or false. It is just there, inside you, as what you feel. That is why the question sometimes asked of lovers, “Do you really love me?” is such a paradoxical question. How does one answer it?

How, then, does you fill your life with the inwardness of passionate meaning?

Kierkegaard sees three options. He calls them “existence spheres” because they are the possible worlds where one can genuinely and actively exist as opposed to passively and falsely merely be. Mere being is passive and false because one merely is pulled along by the currents of whatever channels one’s life is directed. If you “just do you job,” if you “just get along,” if you “go with the flow” then you are merely being. This is what Kierkegaard would call the “metaphysical.” One merely is. Kierkegaard strongly condemns this way of being. It is, he says, full of so much despair that it does not know that it is in despair. It is in despair because it is a life full of nothing. You live. You die.

The spheres of existence Kierkegaard describes are the aesthetic, the ethical, the religious.

There are three existence spheres: the aesthetic, the ethical, the religious. The metaphysical is abstraction, and there is no human who exists metaphysically. The metaphysical, the ontological, is, but it does not exist, for when it exists it does so in the aesthetic, in the ethical, in the religious, and when it is, it is the abstraction from a prius [prior thing] to the aesthetic, the ethical, the religious. The ethical sphere is only a transition sphere, and therefore its highest expression is repentance as a negative action. The aesthetic sphere is the sphere of immediacy, the ethical the sphere of requirement (and this requirement is so infinite that the individual always goes bankrupt), the religious the sphere of fulfillment, but, please note, not a fulfillment such as when one fills an alms box or a sack of gold, for repentance has specifically created a boundless space, and as a consequence the religious contradiction: simultaneously to be out on 70,000 fathoms of water and yet be joyful. Just as the ethical sphere is a passageway—which one nevertheless does not pass through once and for all—just as repentance is its expression, so repentance is the most dialectical. (Stages On Life’s Way, p. 476f).

The ethical is the life of duty. One gives meaning to one’s existence by devoting oneself to something beyond and greater than oneself. The ethical life is the live devoted to justice, beauty and goodness. These claims are universal claims. By embracing them the individual subject aligns her subjectivity with universal truth.

The aesthetic sphere, Kierkegaard says, is the sphere of immediacy. The focus of this sphere is self-satisfaction. The esthete lines from moment to moment, always looking for personal fulfillment. Kierkegaard’s Diary of a Seducer is a pseudonymous work that proports to be a day-to-day diary of someone who lives for the pleasures of seduction. The seducer of the work is gratified by the details of the process of seduction as much as by the seduction itself. In the esthetic sphere the individual aspires to become a pure subject.

In the ethical life one devotes oneself to something greater than oneself, to the higher purpose of duty to morality, justice and the good. In the esthetic life one devotes oneself to subjective gratification, without regard to any duties or responsibilities outside one’s own selfishness.

These are opposites of each other and, in the dialectic of the philosopher Hegel who influences Kierkegaard but who Kierkegaard also writes against, they form a “dialectic.” A dialectic is an opposition of two principles, ideas, tendencies, actions, etc. that are then combined into some greater integrated whole.

For Kierkegaard the greater integrated whole that combines the subjectivity of the aesthetic with the universality of the ethical is the religious sphere. Kierkegaard calls this “the sphere of fulfillment.” This is because the truly religious person is full of a passionate subjective relation to the absolute, to God. And God, for Kierkegaard the Christian, the paradoxical God who is both the mortal, fallible, Jesus of Nazareth, and the eternal, unchanging, God the father.

Kierkegaard distinguishes between what he calls religiousness A and B. Religiousness A is the passive relation to the divine that characterizes the mere believer. Religiousness B characterizes someone who is religious through an identification of the self with the divine. These are, again, contradictory perspectives, that need to be integrated into a greater whole.

The greater whole is Faith. The foundation of faith for Kierkegaard is to be found in the Christian paradox of the God-man. In Practice in Christianity, he writes, “The God-man is the paradox, absolutely the paradox. Therefore, it is altogether certain that the understanding must come to a standstill on it.” Because the God-man is a paradox, it is beyond the capacity of the intellect, it is beyond the reach of philosophy to grasp it. The God-man is absurd. It is the non-sense that, in Kierkegaard’s view, gives ultimate sense to our existence. In it our subject lives are redeemed through the establishment of a completely subjective relation to the absolute. “Completely subjective” because it is absurd. Faith cannot be justified by any objective facts. In Kierkegaard’s faith the arguments for the existence of god are, at best, beside the point. One has faith in the face of the absurdity of what one has faith in. We glimpse such faith in everyday life sometimes when people continue to trust someone who can be shown to have lied and deceived them repeatedly. The Faith is the Christian God goes beyond this because it is faith in an idea that is absolutely absurd.

Faith is the objective uncertainty with the repulsion of the absurd, held fast in the passion of inwardness, which is the relation of inwardness intensified to its highest…. Faith must not be satisfied with incomprehensibility, because the very relation to or repulsion from the incomprehensible, the absurd, is the expression for the passion of faith.

(Concluding Unscientific Postscript)

Such faith goes beyond the incomprehensible. It is repulsive to the intellect.

So why have faith?

“1. The subjective existing thinker is aware of the dialectic of communication. Whereas objective thinking is indifferent to the thinking subject and his existence, the subjective thinker as existing is essentially interested in his own thinking, is existing in it. Therefore, his thinking has another kind of reflection, specifically, that of inwardness, of possession, whereby it belongs to the subject and to no one else….”

[In other words, faith gives meaning to existence because in its subjectivity, in its absolute inwardness, faith, is purely meaning giving to the individual subject.]

2. In his existence-relation to the truth, the existing subjective thinker is just as negative as positive, has just as much of the comic as he essentially has of pathos, and is continually in a process of becoming, that is, striving…. In the domain of thinking, the positive can be classed in the following categories: sensate certainty, historical knowledge, speculative result. But this positive is precisely the untrue. Sensate certainty is a delusion (see Greek skepticism…); historical knowledge is an illusion (since it is approximation-knowledge); and the speculative result is a phantom. That is, all of this positive fails to express the state of the knowing subject in existence….

[The person of faith exists in a relation of truth to an object, that which she has faith in, that is absolutely true to the individual. Other form of truth, such as objective truth, are mere speculation. This leads to speculative truth which is always about what might be true. This is skepticism.]

3…. Lessing has said that contingent historical truths can never become a demonstration of eternal truths of reason, also that the transition whereby one will build an eternal truth on historical reports is a leap….

[Reason aspires to an eternal truth. All so called objective truths are only true relative to the historical moment in which one lives. This, at one time it was true that the sun revolved around the earth. At another the earth revolves around the sun.]

4. Lessing has said If God held all truth enclosed in his right hand, and in his left hand the one and only ever-striving drive for truth, even with the corollary of erring forever and ever, and if he were to say to me: Choose!—I would humbly fall down to him at his left hand and say: Father, give! Pure truth is indeed only for you alone!

[An such subjectively significant eternal truth can only be found in the left hand of God. In the ever striving every fallible leap of faith. In our finite subjectivity, none of us can grasp the infinite, we can only constantly try to attain it.]

(Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 72f., 80f., 93, 106)

Thus, Kierkegaard advocates that the solution to the death of God is to return to God though the embracing the absurdity of God in a leap of faith.