Pessimistic Existentialism
“Man is a useless passion.” These words penned by the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre provide the model of modern existentialism. In this simple statement are found the most basic elements of a modern theory of man. It is a bottom-line judgment, a grim conclusion to the question, “What's it all about?”
In its most basic definition existentialism is a philosophy about human existence. It views man not so much in terms of his mind or his soul, but of his will, his feelings. Man is a creature of passion. He feels strongly. He cares about life. He cries, he sings, he yearns, he curses. Human life cannot be reduced to elementary structures of biology. Man cannot be understood simply by his intellectual activity. It is his passion that makes him a man.
In former days when we wanted to know a person's views on a particular topic, we would pose the question like this: “What do you think about that?” Now the question is usually stated differently: “What do you feel about that?” The accent has changed from thinking to feeling. Feelings have become the new standard of human “truth.” Even our ethics are decided by the litmus test of passion. Our moral creed is “If it feels good, it is good.” Or, to state it in musical terms that light up our lives, “It can't be wrong when it feels so right.”
To test objective truth by subjective feelings seems at first glance as a rather bizarre way of going about things. But think (or feel) about it for a moment. If man is a passion, then his passion must be his most important standard. A man lives every moment with his feelings. We respond to life from a feeling level. Our guts lead our minds more often than our minds lead our guts.
Sartre was not suggesting that man no longer has a mind or that man never thinks. He knew better than that. Rather, it is a matter of accent. Paul Tillich spoke of God in terms of “Ultimate Concern.” Concern or caring is central to an existential view of the world.
To understand the philosophy of existentialism we must know a little bit of its background and what provoked it. In the past some philosophers were fond of creating massive systems or theories about man and his world. The goal was to achieve an objective view of the essence of humanness. Man sought to stand aloof from his own concerns to reflect on who he is. But there is something terribly dry and dull about the concept of humanness. What is humanness? Are you a humanness?
Even if we consider a more common term such as humanity we are left with the same problem. Humanity is a kind of “man-in-general.” Does anybody want to be a “man-in-general”? We know men, particularly colonels, who want to be generals, but there are few who desire to be general men.
Words like humanness, humanity, or man-in-general are abstractions. They lack life. When we seek to define man in “objective terms” we often overlook the sense in which man is a subject. Even the very term man can provoke an allergic reaction. The reaction comes not only from women who are angry about being subsumed under the broader category of “man,” but also from males who are existentialists. The protest of the existentialist is this: There is no such thing as man, only men and women.
The words man and mankind are what philosophers call “universals.” Again, they are abstract concepts about a group or a class. When societies place the stress on groups or classes usually the individual person gets lost or eclipsed. In our society we speak, for example, of corporations as if they were living creatures. We say that corporations pay taxes. We sometimes forget that corporations are people. The personal element is obscured by abstract universals.
An abstract universal is an attempt to get at what we call the essence of a thing. We know that there are men. But why do we call men, “men”? There are only individuals, and each individual person is different from every other individual person. Yet there are similarities among individuals. Most of us have two arms and two legs, a nose, a mouth, and ears. But so do baboons. What happens if we lose a leg? Do we stop being men?
When we try to define a human being, we try to isolate the unique factors that make us human rather than baboons or daffodils. We are looking for the “essence” that makes us human rather than something else. What is this common essence that we share as human beings?
Plato wrestled with this problem in the ancient world. He sought for a definition of man that would set him apart from all other creatures. He thought he had discovered an acceptable definition when he called man a “featherless biped.” The definition worked fine until one of Plato's enterprising students threw a plucked chicken over the wall with a sign attached to it that read, “Plato's man.”
Existential philosophers are not satisfied with defining man as a plucked chicken. They are not fond of any definition of man that leaves us in the realm of abstract “essences.” The axiom set forth by Sartre was that existence precedes essence. It is the existence of man (or more properly, “men”) that matters, not some abstract essence.
Of course existential philosophers still speak of man-in-general. It is difficult to escape it altogether. Our opening quotation from Sartre bears witness to that. Remember the quote? “Man is a useless passion.” Sartre did not say, “Men are useless passions.” In this quotation Sartre began with essence rather than existence. But again, the accent, the point of concern is with concrete existence rather than with abstract essence.
There are different types of existential philosophers. We will examine later those who have tried to combine existential philosophy with Christianity in an optimistic way. Our concern for the moment, however, is with the pessimistic variety. Sartre does not rest with saying that man is a passion. He stresses the morbid conclusion that he is a useless passion. Here is the crux of pessimistic existentialism.
The term useless is ominous. It rivals its synonym futile for being one of the most terrifying words in the English language. That my passions should be useless or futile is to force me to despair. It is not by accident that the word despair is a much used term in existential literature.
Useless passions are passions that are futile. They have no meaning. Sartre's grim conclusion is that all of our caring, our concerns, our deepest aspirations are empty of significance. Human life is meaningless. It is a cosmic joke and the cold, impersonal, indifferent universe is the comedian. It would be better for us if the universe were hostile. At least we could be involved with an enemy that might possibly be vanquished or persuaded to be more friendly. But an indifferent universe is a universe that doesn't care. It doesn't care, because it cannot care; it is impersonal.
Is There Anyone Who Can Help?
Our dilemma is this: We are caring persons living in a world that doesn‘t care. We cannot look above the universe or outside the universe to find someone who cares. There is nobody out there; there is nobody home in heaven. Dr. James Montgomery Boice tells the story of an amateur mountain climber who fell over the side of a steep precipice which dropped off to a cavern thousands of feet below. One lone scraggly bush clung to the face of the cliff and the climber desperately grasped it to keep from plunging into the abyss. But the bush was not strong enough to bear his weight and began slowly to work lose from its roots. In sheer terror the climber screamed to heaven, “Is there anyone up there who can help me?” Suddenly a sonorous bass voice was heard from the clouds. “Yes, I can help you. But you must trust me. Let go of the bush.” The climber stole a glance downward and then looked again toward heaven. He exclaimed, “Is there anyone else up there who can help?!”
The father of pessimistic existentialism was Friedrich Nietzsche, who was famous for penning the slogan “God is dead.” Nietzsche took the philosophy of secularism to its logical conclusion. He understood that if this time is the only time, and this world is the only world, then there is no God. If there is no God, then life is meaningless. If all of human existence is shut up in the here and now, then all human values are arbitrary. If there is no exit to the eternal, then values and truth and ethics are a matter of pure decision. Right and wrong are simply what we have the courage to decide they are for ourselves.
Nietzsche made a distinction between what he called “herd morality” and “master morality.” Herd morality is the morality practiced by the masses. It is based on the conventions of a society. People obey these societal rules and taboos like unthinking cattle. They go along with the herd, never asking penetrating questions about the rules of the game. They are like Americans who accept without criticism cultural contradictions. They never dare to tell the emperor that he has no clothes. They allow themselves to be ruled by the whims of the rulers. (Who, for example, dares to question the consistency of a graduated income tax in a society committed to the principle of justice for all? It is like affirming an equitable inequity.)
For Nietzsche the true existential man, the authentic man, creates his own morality. He refuses to follow the herd. He is his own master, a “Superman.” He is the heroic sort who sails his ship into uncharted waters and builds his house on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. He is defiant toward conventions. He dares the lava to flow down on his roof.
The Nietzschean hero is like a character in a Hemingway novel. He is the old man who challenges the sea, the soldier who ignores the tolling bell, the matador who grabs the bull by the horns, the man not intimidated by the slopes of Kilimanjaro. He is like Jimmy Cagney in The White Cliffs of Dover, who when his fighter plane was crippled by enemy gunfire, found he was headed directly toward the chalky cliffs. At the last second before impact Cagney spit at the cliff through the shattered windshield. The screen faded to black and the house lights came on while the audience was screaming wildly for their defiant hero.
There is a small problem here. After the theater emptied somebody began to think that on the morrow the sun would come up on the white cliffs of Dover. They would remain undaunted by the blemish left by the puny plane. The plane, meanwhile, was a twisted wreck at the bottom of the sea, a metal coffin for its dead pilot.
Nietzsche understood all that. Even his “master,” his heroic Superman was destined to meaninglessness. Nietzsche‘s brand of existential philosophy is called nihilism, which literally means “nothingness.” If there is “nothing” out there, then nothing really matters. Life is the tale of the idiot, full of sound and fury, full of passion, signifying nothing. It is a useless passion; it is a futile fury.
Why Has Existentialism Spread So Rapidly?
Philosophical concepts usually take many years to “trickle down” from the scholars to the layman. It is usually a long and slow journey from the ivory tower to Main Street. A philosophical perspective set forth in abstract, academic writings will normally not attract popular attention or have much influence in a society until long after the originator is dead. In our lifetime, however, there has been a notable exception.
The rapid spread and enormous impact of existential philosophy upon our culture has been uncanny. I doubt if there has been any philosophical system that has had as much influence on American culture in the twentieth century as this school of thought. We encounter the influence of existentialism virtually every day of our lives and in virtually every sphere of our culture. Few people can define it or articulate its theory, but we are living under its influence every day.
Why has existentialism moved so rapidly from the theoretical level to the grass roots of our culture? First, it is because the chief advocates of existentialism have not only been brilliant technical philosophers, but they have also included some extraordinarily gifted men who have been able to translate their ideas into a more popular medium.
Notable among these was Sartre who, on the one hand, could produce a thick volume of weighty philosophy called Being and Nothingness and yet take those same heavy ideas and disperse them into the culture through the media of plays and novels.
Albert Camus, another Frenchman, was able to communicate his existential views through his essays and novels. He was concerned with individual freedom and responsibility, with the alienation of the individual from society, and with the difficulty of facing life without belief in God or moral absolutes. He expressed his concerns in novels such as The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall, and in his play Caligula.
A second reason existentialism has made its influence felt is that the philosophy is itself, by definition, hostile to systems. It is an antisystem. It thrives not so much on an interconnected, coherent, well-related world view, as much as it builds upon singular flashes of insight, brilliant vignettes drawn from the close regions of daily life.
Ultimately existentialism has made its powerful presence felt by abstract questions because it speaks directly to the human predicament. Its emphasis, as the name implies, is on human existence, on real, passionate life. Here we have a philosophy that touches us where we live.
Existentialism made its impact felt most heavily in America after World War II. Sartre and Camus had been deeply involved in the war in Europe, working with the underground resistance movement in France. When the atrocities that were associated with the holocaust in Western Europe were exposed, a mood of despair enveloped the continent. The philosophers looked at the atrocities of Buchenwald, of Auschwitz, and elsewhere and said, “This is what man is capable of doing.” The spirit of optimism that had characterized the nineteenth century was suddenly plunged into despair.
Sartre‘s plays did much to communicate the motif and mood of despair. He wrote one novel that bears the simple title, Nausea. This was his evaluation of modern man. Sartre argued that religious faith is irrational. It involves accepting what is “absurd.”
Existential philosophy took root in artists‘ colonies, crossed the Atlantic and took up residence in the United States. One notable home was Greenwich Village, New York, with its “beatnik” movement and the “beat generation.” The “beat generation” communicated some of the basic ideas of existentialism through art, poetry, literature, film, and theater. The arts have been major vehicles to communicate the ideas of existentialism to American society.
Theater of the Absurd
European films, such as those of Ingmar Bergman, Antonini, and Fellini have communicated some of the motifs of existentialism. The "theater of the absurd," a phenomenon that began in France in the 1950s and came to Broadway in the 1960s, was another vehicle of existentialism.
The theater of the absurd gained prominence with Samuel Beckett's play, Waiting for Godot. In this play, two vagrants pass the time while waiting for the unidentified Godot. But Godot never arrives. Godot is a thinly veiled characterization of God. The idea is that modern man lives in the absence of God. He waits for God, but God never shows up.
Beckett began writing in the early 1930s. His works portray man as an absurd and pathetic creature who lives in a meaningless, unintelligible universe. His best known novels include Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable.
The theater of the absurd went to such extremes that in some of the later productions, the actors would come out on the stage and utter unintelligible sounds over and over. They were saying (or more precisely, "babbling") that man has reached such a degree of irrationality that even human speech is no longer intelligible. There is no meaning to life. Meaning traditionally is communicated by words or by pictures that are easy to understand. The new message was: Life is meaningless. It is not a symphony; it's a cacophony. There is nothing that brings the universe together in a coherent fashion. Our universe is speeding away from rationality towards irrationality.
Religious movements also sprang up that embraced existential principles. Zen Buddhism was one such movement. It was the first significant penetration into Western culture from oriental religions. Zen is not pure Buddhism but an existential variety. In Zen, a person is to discipline his mind so that he can come into touch with his inner self. The person is to seek intuitive understanding of a larger "awareness." Yet this awareness yields the conclusion that life is irrational. It cannot be found in orderly systems. God is one hand clapping.
William Barrett has written an important study on existentialism which is one of the best introductions that I know of for the layman. It is not light reading nor is it simple, but it avoids the technical. It is titled Irrational Man, and I commend it to you. In it, Barrett makes this statement: "When mankind no longer lives spontaneously turned toward God or the super-sensible world—when, to echo the words of Yeats, The ladder is gone by which we would climb to a higher reality—the artist too must stand face to face with a flat and inexplicable world. This shows itself even in the formal structures of modern art. Where the movement of the spirit is no longer vertical but only horizontal, the climactic elements in art are in general leveled out, flattened."
What Barrett is saying is that the connection between earth and heaven has vanished. The vertical sphere, the upward dimension, is no longer the concern of the artist. Man is trapped in this horizontal dimension. (Does this sound familiar from our earlier discussion of secularism?)
One may see what appear to be bizarre forms of modern art. Consider cubism, for example. Look at Picasso's guitars with their strange shapes. See a face with three noses or three eyes. We may respond to such distortions by exclaiming, "That doesn't make sense to me." The artist would respond by saying, "That's because I'm compressing life and flattening it so that we understand that all of life must be understood on the horizontal level."
In the film industry the existentialist viewpoint brought a noticeable shift in plots and storylines. It used to be that the drama and the pathos of pain and death were followed by a happy ending. When I was a boy the Saturday afternoon matinees featured the likes of Roy Rogers or Gene Autry. I could always tell who the good guy was because he wore a white hat and he won in the end. He was noble, virtuous, and idealistic.
Hollywood picked up on the existentialist theme and began producing films of despair. The heroes began to wear black hats. A new era of realism was ushered in on Marlon Brando's motorcycle. The hero became an antihero. War was no longer glamorized. Vietnam had no place for John Wayne or Van Johnson. The Green Berets were no longer "Fighting Leathernecks." War was viewed in terms of Catch-22and MASH. The ultimate meaninglessness of life was communicated by Antonini's *Blow Up* and the Jane Fonda feature*They Shoot Horses, Don't They?*
The most obvious change in films came with respect to sex and violence. Here the passions of man were deromanticized. It was a long way from the "scandalous" suggested rape in Duel in the Sun, and the beach scene in From Here to Eternity to Deep Throat and The Devil and Miss Jones. Sex changed from an integral part of love to a base animal drive. Graphic violence made an obvious transition from The House of Frankenstein to Scarface.
The film Rocky seemed like an anachronism. For a moment audiences breathed a sigh of relief as some good news came down. The old American dream was rekindled by the Italian Stallion whose dreams and aspirations did not end in despair. Adrianne's admonition, "Win, Rocky!" was a throwback to earlier days. The nostalgia went on with*Chariots of Fire*, a study in contrast to the normal Hollywood fare.
Another theme that appears frequently in existentialism is captured by the German word Angst (anxiety). Modern philosophers have done extensive investigation into the human feelings of anxiety. These are not specific anxieties such as a fear of flying or a fear of heights or of closed-in spaces. Those are traditional fears that have specifications attached to them. The Angst about which the philosopher speaks is an undefined, faceless, amorphous type of anxiety which hangs over us and eats away at us. We can't really put our finger on what it is that is unsettling us inside.
The most important philosopher who has dealt with this anxiety is the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. In 1927 Heidegger wrote one of the most important books of our century, titled Sein und Zeit (Being and Time). We traditionally use the word for being to describe the life of a person; he's a human being. The German word for "being" is sein. Heidegger does not talk about sein. Instead, he talks about dasein. In German the prefix da means "presence." It can be used to mean "here to there." Heidegger doesn't speak simply about human beings; he talks about human beings here or human beings there—here a being, there a being, everywhere a being. The idea that he stresses is that the life of every human being is defined by its finite boundaries, where he is. He lives his life not in the theater of eternity; he lives it in Philadelphia, Paris, Berlin, or wherever he is. We use statements like, "Here's where it's at." Our life is defined by where we are. In the big picture, Heidegger uses another German word that is very graphic. He said that the reason man experiences anxiety and dread is that man lives in his finite boundaries as a result of what Heidegger calls the experience of "throwness."
Modern man experiences being thrown into existence. We can go to our family Bibles and discover that we were born on a particular day at a particular time in a particular place. We try to convince ourselves that we came into being by an orderly process. But our experience suggests that the process was not really orderly. We feel like we were hurled into the world, just thrown into it. We had no choice about where we were born or who our parents would be. Our existence may be compared to a baby who is thrown into a turbulent sea and told to "sink or swim."
Man has been hurled into an impersonal universe where nobody is at home. We are expected to carve out our own existence and live between twin poles of nothingness. We come from nothing and we are destined for annihilation. We understand this intuitively. It eats away at us; we're afraid to talk about it. It produces Angst, a nagging anxiety about who we are and why we're here. We are concerned about it, but we see no solution to it.
A final theme found in existentialism is that of freedom in an absolute sense. As Nietzsche's Superman creates a master morality so the existential person must carve out his own destiny by being morally autonomous. He must learn to be a law unto himself. He need not submit to norms because there are no norms. He must have the courage to "do his own thing." He is not only free to do his own thing; he is responsible to do his own thing.
"Authentic man" looks into the pit of despair, into the black void of nothingness, and sees that life is hopeless and meaningless. Nevertheless, he chooses not to succumb to it or surrender to it by seeking the safety of the group and its conventional values and institutions. Instead, he has the courage to exercise his own absolute freedom. He takes sole responsibility for his actions.
The courage for such decisions is a strange sort of courage. The existentialist calls it "dialectical courage." A dialectic involves a severe tension, a tension provoked by an irreconcilable contradiction. Dialectical courage, then, means "contradictory courage." It is contradictory because it follows a bizarre sort of syllogism:
Life is meaningless.
We must face life with courage.
Our courage is meaningless.
We are called to heroic acts of courage with the full knowledge that such acts of courage are themselves meaningless.
”Be of Good Cheer—The World Has Overcome Us!”
Here we see the vivid contrast between pessimistic existentialism and Christianity. Christianity also features a ringing call to courage. The most frequent negative prohibition found in the New Testament comes from the lips of Jesus—“Fear not!” This command is given so often by Christ that it almost seems like a greeting. One gets the impression that virtually every time Jesus appears to His disciples, He begins the conversation by saying, “Fear not.”
Here is the difference between the message of Jesus and that of existentialism. Jesus said, “Be of good cheer, for I have overcome the world.” The existentialist declares, “Be of good cheer, the world has overcome us.”
Jesus gives a reason for good cheer. He was not a first-century Good Humor Man spreading sweetness and light with saccharin frivolity, singing, “Pack up your troubles in an old kit bag and smile, smile, smile.” His exhortation to joy was based on a real triumph, an ultimate victory He achieved over the threatening forces of chaos.
By contrast the existential cry to courage is based on nothing. It recognizes an ultimate triumph of chaos and clings to an irrational courage. Albert Camus understood this tension when he said that the only serious question left for philosophers to discuss was the question of suicide.
The contradictory character of existentialism was mirrored in the protest movement of the youth counterculture in the sixties. Two slogans became popular: “Do your own thing!” and “Tell it like it is!” On the one hand there was a massive revolt against traditional values and a call to radical subjectivism. The subject does his own thing. There are no objective norms to obey.
On the other hand the summons to the older generation was to objective truth telling. “Tell it like it is!” The slogan suggests that there is such a thing as objective reality, what Francis Schaeffer called “true truth.” The youth were angry with their elders for being hypocrites, for living contradictory lives. At the same time the young people were exalting the “virtue” of living contradictory lives.
The contradiction appeared at another level. At the same time the students were denying classical personal ethics by embracing the sexual revolution and the drug culture, they were screaming for a lofty social ethic with respect to civil rights, world peace, and ecological balance. They wanted a world with love including “free love” with no private responsibility; a world without killing, except for unborn babies, and a world where the environment was pure of toxic substances, except for the ones they used on themselves.
With the impact of existentialism on American culture a serious attempt was made to achieve a synthesis between Christianity and existentialism. Instead of looking to the pessimistic heroes of the movement, the nineteenth-century philosopher Soren Kierkegaard became the focal point of interest. Kierkegaard was seen as the father of Christian existentialism. Kierkegaard‘s emphasis on personal passion struck a chord in the hearts of Christians. He differentiated among levels or stages of life. The level where most people live is either at a moralistic one or what he called an “aesthetic” level. The aesthetic level is the stage of the observer or the “spectator.” The spectator looks at life but stays on the sidelines. He avoids passionate involvement in life.
Kierkegaard understood profoundly that Christianity is not a spectator sport. It demands passionate commitment. Christianity can never be reduced to cold, abstract creeds, or rational systems of doctrine. Truth is not always found in neat packages. It is often paradoxical, according to Kierkegaard.
He spawned on the one hand a renewal of personal commitment to Christ, of Christians plunging into the work of Christ with passion. He also spawned a movement in theology that exalted the irrational. The contradiction became not only acceptable to theologians, but desirable. “Systematic” theology suddenly became suspect because it sought a kind of consistency and coherency that left no room for contradictions.
This new orthodoxy was fashioned along dialectical lines. I once listened to a debate between an orthodox theologian and a dialectical theologian. The latter was blatantly speaking in contradictions to the former‘s utter consternation. Finally in a spirit of frustration the orthodox man said, “Please, sir, tell me theology once without the dialectic so I can understand what you are saying.”
The orthodox man was aware that contradictions are unintelligible. No one can understand them, not even dialectical theologians. When we use them we are revealing our confusion, not our brilliance.
A final element that grew out of religious existentialism was a new stress on human personal relationships. Martin Buber, a Jewish philosopher, stressed the importance of what he called, “I-Thou” relationships. People are not things. They are not impersonal objects to be studied dispassionately. They are not numbers. We use things. People are not to be used. When I relate to another person I am not relating to an “it.” Human relationships are to be subject-subject, not subject-object.
The I-Thou concept helped awaken a new consciousness to people as people. Jews are not cattle to be exterminated by a “final solution.” Blacks are not “niggers” to be treated as chattel. Women are not playthings to be used as toys. There must be no such thing as a “Playmate of the Month.”
Here was a solid protest against the widespread depersonalization of culture. The theologians who sought to combine existentialism and Christianity gave us a mixed blessing. They were correct in seeing that Christian faith demands personal passion. They were correct in stressing the personal element of human relationships. They were correct in seeing that the Christian faith is more than rationality. Sadly, however, too often they threw out the baby with the bathwater. Their protest against rationality became too severe. Their antisystem perspective began to wallow in contradiction.
Surely Christianity is more than rationality. But it is not less.
