One can come to see the essential principles of Existential thinking, as in other philosophies, by reading their sayings, their little maxims that sum up their beliefs, their tidbits of wisdom. So, with that in mind let us examine some of those statements of Existential belief. In "The sayings of Existentialists" (See here) we find these summary statements or examples along with some of my observations:
"It is vital to have an approach that emphasizes the existence of the individual self as a free and responsible agent and outlook is what determines the development through the mere act of the will."
“If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it’s your duty to be reduced to ashes by it. Any other form of existence will be yet another dull book in the library of life” as quoted by Charles Bukowski, purpose and will are essential aspects of a person’s existence; otherwise, it is tedious to watch paint dry."
"Existentialism empowers a different and a singular sense of self-appreciation and gives a weight to our imagination and how we may decide to live, which is highly liberating. Hence, you must undertake efforts to master the concepts of existentialism. Master existentialism through these Albert Camus quotes, Samuel Beckett quotes, and more about the ethics of ambiguity."
If you want to be a male, though born female, it is your choice and no one can condemn you, according to Existentialist thinking. If you are a homosexual, who is to say that is not a person's right? It is the result of having free will and the right to be whoever you want to be. Or if not justified on the basis of free will, then it is justified because they are born that way, and is natural, and whatever is natural cannot be condemned. This is the kind of thinking we see predominate today, where all moral codes are reduced to subjectivity or else excused because it is judged to be "natural."
“Life has no meaning the moment you lose the illusion of being eternal.” - Jean-Paul Sartre.
But, all men are eternal. They will never cease to exist. They will spend eternity somewhere, in heaven or in hell. The afterlife and the immortality of the soul are not illusions. To assume that they are illusions is truly consequential if they are in fact real.
“There is scarcely any passion without struggle.” - Albert Camus.
So what? If there are no morals, no higher values, then why value passion? Why devalue struggle? Why exalt free will and self determination? How can one who believes in nothing or meaninglessness believe in, and highly value, free will? Is this not a contradiction in Existentialism? Oh, I forgot, there is no such thing as contradiction in Existentialism.
“Let us do something, while we have the chance!...Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for one the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us!” - Samuel Beckett.
You will find in Existentialism a conflict in how they speak on one hand of free will and then on the other speak of what is "fate," or what is "determined" by biology, psychology, nature, and environment, etc. Another case of irony in Existentialism is that they can speak highly of free will, independence, and self determination, and then decry the awful consequences of liberty. Man is, as it were, cursed with free will, cursed with responsibility.
“We do not know what we want and yet we are responsible for what we are - that is the fact.” - Jean-Paul Sartre.
But, this is not believed by all Existentialists. How are we responsible for being born who we are? Am I responsible for what nature made me? This is where Existentialists will talk about the difference between "existence," bare existence without meaning, while "essence" is the meaning a person gives to that existence. Existence is the result of fate and what prior causes, or nature, has produced. Not so the essence of that existence. Many Existentialists claim to be guided by their souls, by their reason, by science, by their intuition, by sense (or phenomenology, the way in which they make sense of their world), by their inner selves. It is up to the individual to imagine and then create his or her own existence in life and the shock of this responsibility creates man's chief "existential crisis."
“I took a test in Existentialism. I left all the answers blank and got 100.” - Woody Allen.
We see this same attitude among the liberal elite in America today. The "new math" does not tell a student that he has a "wrong" answer. It may be wrong to you, but it is not really wrong. There is no absolute right and wrong, but only what is in accordance with the will of the individual. The right answer is to say there are no right answers.
“We fear death, we shudder at life’s instability, we grieve to see the flowers wilt again and again, and the leaves fall, and in our hearts, we know that we, too, are transitory and will soon disappear. When artists create pictures and thinkers search for laws and formulate thoughts, it is in order to salvage something from the great dance of death, to make something last longer than we do.” - Hermann Hesse.
Of course, humankind in its present state, is one of suffering and evil, where humans are doomed to die. The scriptures acknowledge this. "Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward." (Job 5: 7) There are trials that are "common to man" said the apostle. (I Cor. 10: 13) And the same apostle Paul said that since Adam death has reigned over humankind (Rom. 5), saying "in Adam all die." (I Cor. 15: 22) Or as John Milton began his verse in "Paradise Lost" who wrote:
"OF Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste Brought Death into the World, and all our woe, With loss of Eden, till one greater Man Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat..."
All human suffering, every evil he experiences, is the result of the fall of Adam. It is not because we are human that we suffer and die, as the Pelagians of old, and the Existentialists today, affirm. This is taught clearly in scripture, especially in Romans chapter five. There was no suffering, nor fear of death, in Eden before our parents rebelled against the command of the Lord. There is none now among the angels of heaven, nor any with believers who are now there with the Lord. There will be none in the ages to come when believers are living life as immortal beings. These facts are disallowed, however, in most Existential thinking. They can envision a time when science will bring all to the point of living a very long life, yet still die. We see this in Science Fiction movies about the future, such as we see in the many Star Trek movies. In fact, there are lots of Existentialist ideas manifested in those movies.
Consider the fact that the idea of "alien" worlds, beings other than mankind (some of whom are human like and some not), is depicted in those movies. Some are pictured as immortal and all powerful such as "Q," and his kind. Each alien world has inhabitants who are a unique race, often having its own moral code. The Klingon moral code, which glorified war and violence (being a wolf people as envisioned by Nietzche), who lusted for dominance and power, has a far different moral code and ethical values than other more peaceful worlds. It is wrong, according to the world of humans (which has become a part of a "federation" of other worlds), to the Federation, to impose its moral code on other worlds. What is forbidden in one world and community is promoted in another. So, humans must be true to themselves, i.e., be human, and Klingons must be true to themselves, be who they have chosen to be, but also to the tradition and social entity into which they were born. We also see in such movies where inhabitants of the various worlds intermarry and produce hybrids, such as we see in "Spock." The Existentialists, in like manner to the writers of the Star Trek script, view our human world as composed of various alien communities, or kinds of humans. The "gay community" therefore should have its own moral code to govern them, the "evangelical community" its own moral code, the "Muslim community" its own code, etc. It may also be applied to the criminal community in today's Existential thinking.
Though "the natural man," the man guided by his psyche, by his senses, by his thoughts, feelings, by his logic and reason, does not like this divine arrangement, i.e. God blaming all Adam's descendants for the sin of father Adam, yet is is scriptural and just for God so to order and arrange. There might be some weight to this objection to the divine arrangement if God had not, on the same order, arranged it so that one not only can be condemned for the sin of Adam but can also be justified and saved by the righteousness of another, that of Christ the second Adam.
The burden that comes with knowing that we shall die, that we are mortal, is frightening indeed, and does produce thoughts and feelings within humans that are often very troubling. The bible addresses these, and in a far more superior way than does Existentialism. God's answers to the question of man's existence, and of the why of evil and suffering, the why of death, are the truth while the answers given by Existentialists are simply plain lies. They are "forgers of lies" and "physicians of no value."
“The rightful claim to dissent is an existential right of the individual.” - Friedrich Durrenmatt.
Though God has given man the liberty to dissent from him, yet man has no "right" to do so. With the liberty came the threatened consequences for choosing the evil over the good.
“He was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine, free to accept, free to refuse, free to equivocate; to marry, to give up the game, to drag this death weight about with him for years to come. He could do what he liked, no one had the right to advise him, there would be for him no Good or Evil unless he thought them into being.” - Jean-Paul Sartre.
For Martin Luther, who said "free will is a myth," in his great work "Bondage of the Will," the above would be seen as foolishness, a myth. So too do I. As previously stated, Existentialists seem to speak out of both sides of their mouths concerning the nature and extent of the freedom of will possessed by humans. Humans are not "free in every way." His freedom is very limited, and acts of will are not made without forces acting upon the will. The bible in its tenor tell us that men are not so free as they imagine, certainly not as the Existentialists have imagined, certainly not as the Nazis imagined.
Good and evil, right and wrong, are not mere individual constructs. One cannot say that murder and rape are judged good by one and not good by another and that is okay. The Existentialism that predominates today does not allow for God to be in the paradigm of moral codes. Well, if we presume that God does not exist, then who can say that what is right and wrong for me must be forced on another?
Existentialists do have a moral code though they decry them all except the ones a person judges to be appropriate for himself. Their moral code is that there is no moral code.
Another web source lists these quotes. (See here)
"There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it." ― Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion
By this statement any believer in God is "infantile," for he believes that God is responsible for giving life purpose and meaning, for giving his creatures a moral code. To ascribe all our good to ourselves, to the power of our own intellect and right choices, is to ascribe to the creature far too much. The bible credits God for all the good that men receive and for all the good they do. Apart from God a man can do no good and be no good.
"What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die."― Søren Kierkegaard
Though there are some things about Kierkegaard's theology of the will and of providence that is to me unbiblical, yet his version of Existentialism is better than that of the atheists. He seems to make truth wholly subjective rather than absolute. Of course, if he is speaking of "truth" as what is right for me, in things like what job or career should I pursue, then it is to a good degree subjective. The problem is that we do not generally know what is best for us and we therefore often turn right when we should have turned left. But, God knows which choices we should make. To help us in these choices he has given us his word to guide us, and which, in most cases, is successful in aiding a person to make the correct choice. Sometimes however there are cases where this is not sufficient and prayer becomes another means to aid in making decisions. We pray for God to give us signs or ways to point us in the right direction.
"You are free and that is why you are lost."― Franz Kafka
Well, that is true in some sense, yes. It can be said it was true of Satan in his fall and Adam and Eve in theirs. But, in another sense this is not so. What about the angels that did not sin and fall?
"The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion." - Camus
That was no doubt the thinking of Satan, yet he was not in an "unfree world," but in heaven. Also, what is meant by becoming "absolutely free"? Did not Satan promise such a freedom to Eve when he tempted her to rebel against her Maker? Criminals today have this thinking. They view their acts of rebellion as being acts of liberation from imposed moral codes.
"You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life." - Camus
The bible gives a different message, however. Only God can define and give happiness. A society which suffers each man to do his own thing without consequences, is doomed. Only God can give meaning to life for he is the Creator of life. Of old it was written that a time existed when "every man did what was right in his own eyes" (Judges 21: 25). That is a violent chaotic state of lawlessness.
"I had only a little time left and I didn’t want to waste it on God." - Camus
This is, sadly, the thinking of billions in our world today. We are reaping the consequences of it.
"Since we’re all going to die, it’s obvious that when and how don’t matter." - Camus
So, by this thinking, if I want to die killing others, as we see happening often, that is okay for it doesn't matter how you die. If I want to commit suicide, at least I show that I have control of death's time and place.
"I cannot make you understand. I cannot make anyone understand what is happening inside me. I cannot even explain it to myself."- Franz Kafka
Well, if that is the case, how does that move us towards desiring to make ourselves our own interpreters of life? How can we rely only upon ourselves, listening only to ourselves? The truth is, no one understands us better than the God who made us.
In the next posting we will look further into the Existentialist mind and worldview.
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