Kierkegaard and the line of despair
3
EARLY MODERN SCIENCE
Science was very much involved in the situation that has been outlined. What we have to realize is that early modern science was started by those who lived in the consensus and setting of Christianity. A man like J. Robert Oppenheimer, for example, who was not a Christian, nevertheless understood this. He has said that Christianity was needed to give birth to modern science.1 Christianity was necessary for the beginning of modern science for the simple reason that Christianity created a climate of thought which put men in a position to investigate the form of the universe.
Jean-Paul Sartre (b. 1905) states that the great philosophic question is that something exists rather than nothing exists. No matter what man thinks, he has to deal with the fact and the problem that there is something there. Christianity gives an explanation of why it is objectively there. In contrast to Eastern thinking, the Hebrew-Christian tradition affirms that God has created a true universe outside of himself. When I use this term “outside of himself,” I do not mean it in a spatial sense; I mean that the universe is not an extension of the essence of God. It is not just a dream of God. There is something there to think about, to deal with and to investigate which has objective reality. Christianity gives a certainty of objective reality and of cause and effect, a certainty that is strong enough to build on. Thus the object, and history, and cause and effect really exist.
Further, many of the early scientists had the same general outlook as that of Francis Bacon (1561-1626), who said, in Novum Organum Scientiarum: “Man by the Fall fell at the same time from his state of innocence and from his dominion over nature. Both of these losses, however, can even in this life be in some part repaired; the former by religion and faith, the latter by the arts and sciences.” Therefore science as science (and art as art) was understood to be, in the best sense, a religious activity. Notice in the quotation the fact that Francis Bacon did not see science as autonomous, for it was placed within the revelation of the Scriptures at the point of the Fall. Yet, within that “form,” science (and art) was free and of intrinsic value before both men and God.
The early scientists also shared the outlook of Christianity in believing that there is a reasonable God, who had created a reasonable universe, and thus man, by use of his reason, could find out the universe’s form.
These tremendous contributions, which we take for granted, launched early modern science. It would be a very real question if the scientists of today, who function without these assurances and motivations, would, or could, have ever begun modern science. Nature had to be freed from the Byzantine mentality and returned to a proper biblical emphasis; and it was the biblical mentality which gave birth to modern science.
Early science was natural science in that it dealt with natural things, but it was not naturalistic, for, though it held to the uniformity of natural causes, it did not conceive of God and man as caught in the machinery. They held the conviction, first, that God gave knowledge to men—knowledge concerning himself and also concerning the universe and history; and, second, that God and man were not a part of the machinery and could affect the working of the machine of cause and effect. So there was not an autonomous situation in the “lower story.”
Science thus developed, a science which dealt with the real, natural world but which had not yet become naturalistic.
KANT AND ROUSSEAU
After the Renaissance-Reformation period the next crucial stage is reached at the time of Kant (1724-1804) and of Rousseau (1712-1778), although there were of course many others in the intervening period who could well be studied. By the time we come to Kant and Rousseau, the sense of the autonomous, which had derived from Aquinas, is fully developed. So we find now that the problem was formulated differently. This shift in the wording of the formulation shows, in itself, the development of the problem. Whereas men had previously spoken of nature and grace, by this time there was no idea of grace—the word did not fit any longer. Rationalism was now well developed and entrenched; and there was no concept of revelation in any area. Consequently the problem was now defined, not in terms of “nature and grace,” but of “nature and freedom”:
FREEDOM
NATURE
This is a titanic change, expressing a secularized situation. Nature has totally devoured grace, and what is left in its place “upstairs” is the word “freedom.”
Kant’s system broke upon the rock of trying to find a way, any way, to bring the phenomenal world of nature into relationship with the noumenal world of universals. The line between the upper and lower stories is now much thicker—and is soon to become thicker still.
At this time we find that nature is now really so totally autonomous that determinism begins to emerge. Previously determinism had almost always been confined to the area of physics, or, in other words, to the machine portion of the universe.
But, though a determinism was involved in the lower story, there was still an intense longing after human freedom. However, now human freedom was seen as autonomous also. In the diagram, freedom and nature are both now autonomous. The individual’s freedom is seen not only as freedom without the need of redemption, but as absolute freedom.
The fight to retain freedom is carried on by Rousseau to a high degree. He and those who follow him, in their literature and art, express a casting aside of civilization as that which is restraining man’s freedom. It is the birth of the Bohemian ideal. They feel the pressure “downstairs” of man as the machine. Naturalistic science becomes a very heavy weight—an enemy. Freedom is beginning to be lost. So men, who are not really modern men as yet and so have not accepted the fact that they are only machines, begin to hate science. They long for freedom even if the freedom makes no sense, and thus autonomous freedom and the autonomous machine stand facing each other.
What is autonomous freedom? It means a freedom in which the individual is the center of the universe. Autonomous freedom is a freedom that is without restraint. Therefore, as man begins to feel the weight of the machine pressing upon him, Rousseau and others swear and curse, as it were, against the science which is threatening their human freedom. The freedom that they advocate is autonomous in that it has nothing to restrain it. It is freedom without limitations. It is freedom that no longer fits into the rational world. It merely hopes and tries to will that the finite individual man will be free—and all that is left is individual self-expression.
To appreciate the significance of this stage of the formation of modern man, we must remember that up until this time the schools of philosophy in the West, from the time of the Greeks onward, had three important principles in common.
The first is that they were rationalistic. By this is meant that man begins absolutely and totally from himself, gathers the information concerning the particulars, and formulates the universals. This is the proper use of the word rationalistic and the way I am using it in this book.
Second, they all believed in the rational. This word has no relationship to the word rationalism. They acted upon the basis that man’s aspiration for the validity of reason was well founded. They thought in terms of antithesis. If a certain thing was true, the opposite was not true. In morals, if a thing was right, the opposite was wrong. This is something that goes as far back as you can go in man’s thinking. There is no historic basis for the later Heidegger’s position that the pre-Socratic Greeks, prior to Aristotle, thought differently. As a matter of fact it is the only way man can think. The sobering fact is that the only way one can reject thinking in terms of an antithesis and the rational is on the basis of the rational and the antithesis. When a man says that thinking in terms of an antithesis is wrong, what he is really doing is using the concept of antithesis to deny antithesis. That is the way God has made us and there is no other way to think. Therefore, the basis of classical logic is that A is not non-A. The understanding of what is involved in this methodology of antithesis, and what is involved in casting it away, is very important in understanding contemporary thought.
The third thing that men had always hoped for in philosophy was that they would be able to construct a unified field of knowledge. At the time of Kant, for example, men were tenaciously hanging on to this hope, despite the pressure against it. They hoped that by means of rationalism plus rationality they would find a complete answer—an answer that would encompass all of thought and all of life. With minor exceptions, this aspiration marked all philosophy up to and including the time of Kant.
MODERN MODERN SCIENCE
Before we move on to Hegel, who marks the next significant stage toward modern man, I want to take brief note of the shift in science that occurred along with this shift in philosophy that we have been discussing. This requires a moment’s recapitulation. The early scientists believed in the uniformity of natural causes. What they did not believe in was the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system. That little phrase makes all the difference in the world. It makes the difference between natural science and a science that is rooted in naturalistic philosophy. It makes all the difference between what I would call modern science and what I would call modern modern science. It is important to notice that this is not a failing of science as science; rather that the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system has become the dominant philosophy among scientists.
Under the influence of the presupposition of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system, the machine does not merely embrace the sphere of physics, it now encompasses everything. Earlier thinkers would have rejected this totally. Leonardo da Vinci understood the way things were going. We saw earlier that he understood that if you begin rationalistically with mathematics, all you have is particulars and therefore you are left with mechanics. Having understood this, he hung on to his pursuit of the universal. But, by the time to which we have now come in our study, the autonomous lower story has eaten up the upstairs completely. The modern modern scientists insist on a total unity of the downstairs and the upstairs, and the upstairs disappears. Neither God nor freedom are there any more—everything is in the machine. In science the significant change came about therefore as a result of a shift in emphasis from the uniformity of natural causes to the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system.
One thing to note carefully about the men who have taken this direction—and we have now come to the present day—is that these men still insist on unity of knowledge. These men still follow the classical ideal of unity. But what is the result of their desire for a unified field? We find that they include in their naturalism no longer physics only; now psychology and social science are also in the machine. They say there must be unity and no division. But the only way unity can be achieved on this basis is by simply ruling out freedom. Thus we are left with a deterministic sea without a shore. The result of seeking for a unity on the basis of the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system is that freedom does not exist. In fact, love no longer exists; significance, in the old sense of man longing for significance, no longer exists. In other words, what has really happened is that the line has been removed and put up above everything—and in the old “upstairs” nothing exists.
NATURE—PHYSICS, SOCIAL SCIENCES AND PSYCHOLOGY—DETERMINISM
Nature, having been made autonomous, has eaten up both grace and freedom. An autonomous lower story will always eat up the upper. The lesson is: whenever you make such a dualism and begin to set up one autonomous section below, the result is that the lower eats up the upper. This has happened time after time in the last few hundred years. If you try artificially to keep the two areas separate and keep the autonomous in one area only, soon the autonomous will embrace the other.
MODERN MODERN MORALITY
This, of course, has repercussions in the sphere of morality. The twentieth-century pornographic writers all trace their origin to the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814). The twentieth century now treats him as a very important man—he is no longer just a dirty writer. Twenty or thirty years or so ago, if anyone was found with one of his books in England he was liable to have difficulties with the law. Today, he has become a great name in drama, in philosophy, in literature. All the “black” (nihilistic) writers, the writers in revolt today, look back to de Sade. Why? Not only because he was a dirty writer, or even that he has taught them how to use sexual writing as a vehicle for philosophic ideas, but also because basically he was a chemical determinist. He understood the direction that things would have to take when man is included in the machinery. The conclusions he drew were these: if man is determined, then what is, is right. If all of life is only mechanism—if that is all there is—then morals really do not count. Morals become only a word for a sociological frame-work. Morals become a means of manipulation by society in the midst of the machine. The word “morals” by this time is only a semantic connotation word for non-morals. What is, is right.
This leads to the second step—man is stronger than woman. Nature has made him so. Therefore, the male has the right to do what he wishes to the female. The action for which they put de Sade in prison, both under the Monarchy and the Republic—taking a prostitute and beating her for his own pleasure—was by nature right. We get our word sadism from this. But it must not be forgotten that it is related to a philosophic concept. Sadism is not only pleasure in hurting somebody. It implies that what is, is right and what nature decrees in strength is totally right. Men like Sir Francis Crick today and even Freud, at his point of psychological determinism, are only saying what the Marquis de Sade has already told us—we are a part of the machine. But, if this is so, the Marquis de Sade’s formula is inescapable—what is, is right. We are watching our culture put into effect the fact that, when you tell men long enough that they are machines, it soon begins to show in their actions. You see it in our whole culture—in the theater of cruelty, in the violence in the streets, in the murders on the moors, in the death of man in art and life. These things, and many more like them, come quite naturally from the historical and philosophic flow which we are tracing.
What is wrong? Again, it goes back to Thomas Aquinas’s insufficient view of the Fall which gives certain things an autonomous structure. When nature is made autonomous it soon ends up by devouring God, grace, freedom and eventually man. You can hang on to freedom for a while, desperately using the word freedom like Rousseau and his followers, but freedom becomes non-freedom.
HEGEL
We come now to the next step of significance following Kant. We have said that there were three points that classical philosophy and thought had held on to—rationalism, rationality and the hope of a unified field of knowledge. Prior to Hegel (1770-1831), all philosophic pursuit had proceeded something like this: Someone had striven to construct a circle which would encompass all of thought and all of life. The next man said that this was not the answer but that he would provide one. The next man said, “You have failed, but I will give you the answer.” The next man said, “Not at all, this is it,” and the next said, “No!” It is hardly surprising that the study of the history of philosophy causes no great joy!
But by Kant’s time the rationalistic rational possibilities are exhausted. Beginning with rationalistic presuppositions, the upper and lower “stories” are by his time in such great tension that they are ready to separate totally. Kant and Hegel are the doorway to modern man.
What did Hegel say? He argued that attempts had been made for thousands of years to find an answer on the basis of antithesis and they had not come to anything. Philosophic humanistic thought had tried to hang on to rationalism, rationality and a unified field, and it has not succeeded. Thus, he said, we must try a new suggestion. The long-term effect of this new approach of Hegel’s has been that Christians today do not understand their children. It may sound strange, but it is true. What Hegel changed was something more profound than merely one philosophic answer for another. He changed the rules of the game in two areas: epistemology, the theory of knowledge and the limits and validity of knowledge; and methodology, the method by which we approach the question of truth and knowing.
What he said was this. Let us no longer think in terms of antithesis. Let us think rather in terms of thesis-antithesis, with the answer always being synthesis. In so doing he changed the world. The reason Christians do not understand their children is because their children do not think any longer in the same framework in which their parents think. It is not merely that they come out with different answers. The methodology has changed.
It is not because rationalistic man wanted to make this change. It was made out of desperation, because for hundreds of years rationalistic thought had failed. A choice was made, and the choice consisted in holding on to rationalism at the expense of rationality.
It is true that Hegel is usually classified as an idealist. He hoped for a synthesis which would have some relationship to reasonableness somehow. Nevertheless he opened the door to that which is characteristic of modern man. Truth as truth is gone, and synthesis (the both-and), with its relativism, reigns.
The basic position of man in rebellion against God is that man is at the center of the universe, that he is autonomous—here lies his rebellion. Man will keep his rationalism and his rebellion, his insistence on total autonomy or partially autonomous areas, even if it means he must give up his rationality.
KIERKEGAARD AND THE LINE OF DESPAIR
The man who follows Hegel, Kierkegaard (1813-1855), is the real modern man because he accepted what Leonardo and all other men had rejected. He put away the hope of a unified field of knowledge.
The formulation had been, first,
GRACE
NATURE
second,
FREEDOM
NATURE
FAITH
RATIONALITY
In the following diagram, the line is a timeline. The higher levels are earlier, the lower levels are later. The steps represent different disciplines.
This new way of thinking spread in three different ways. In the first place it spread geographically, from Germany outward. Consequently Holland and Switzerland knew it before England, and America continued thinking in the old way much longer.
Second, it spread by classes. The intellectual was first affected. Then, through the mass media, it passed down to the workers. What it left was a middle class that was not touched by it and often is still not touched by it. This middle-class group is, in many ways, a product of the Reformation; it is something to be thankful for as a source of stability. But now people in this group often do not understand the basis of its stability. They do not understand why they think in the old way—they are continuing to act out of habit and memory after they have forgotten why the old form was valid. Often they still think in the right way—to them truth is truth, right is right—but they no longer know why. So how could they understand their twentieth-century children who think in the new way, who no longer think that truth is truth nor that right is right?
For the mass of people have received the new way of thinking through the mass media without analyzing it. It is worse for them because they have been smashed in the face by it, because the cinema, television, the books they read, the press, magazines, have been infiltrated by the new thought-forms in an unanalyzed way. In between the intellectuals and the working classes, you find a pocket—the upper-middle class. Undoubtedly, one of our difficulties is that most of our churches are in this upper-middle-class bracket, and the reason then why Christians are not understanding their own children is because the children are being educated into the other way of thinking. It is not merely that they think different things. They think differently. Their thinking has changed in such a way that when you say “Christianity is true” the sentence does not mean to them what it means to you.
The third way this has spread is by disciplines as shown in the preceding diagram: philosophy, then art, then music, then general culture, which could be divided into a number of areas. Theology comes last. In art, for example, you have the great impressionists, Van Gogh (1853-1890), Gauguin (1848-1903) and Cézanne (1839-1906). Then you have the post-impressionists. And here you come into the modern world. In music, Debussy (1862-1918) is the door. In general culture you can think of a man like the early T. S. Eliot. The man who opened the door in theology is Karl Barth.2
I call this line in the diagram the Line of Despair. Not that everybody under the line cries, although some, like the painter Francis Bacon, do cry. Giacometti cried—he died crying.
What is this despair? It arises from the abandonment of the hope of a unified answer for knowledge and life. Modern man continues to hang on to his rationalism and his autonomous revolt even though to do so he has had to abandon any rational hope of a unified answer. Previously, educated men would not give up rationality and the hope of the unified field of knowledge. Modern man has given up his hope of unity and lives in despair—the despair of no longer thinking that what has always been the aspiration of men is at all possible.