Linguistic analysis and the leap
4
THE LEAP
This step has brought us to Kierkegaard and the leap. With Kant we noticed that the line between nature and universals had widened considerably. What Kierkegaard’s leap did was to put away the hope of any unity. After Kierkegaard we are left with this:
OPTIMISM MUST BE NON-RATIONAL
ALL RATIONALITY = PESSIMISM
The hope of a connecting link between the two spheres has disappeared. There is no permeation or interchange—there is a complete dichotomy between the upper and lower stories. The line between the upper and lower stories has become a concrete horizontal, ten thousand feet thick, with highly charged barbed wire fixed in the concrete.
What we are left with now runs something like this. Below the line there is rationality and logic. The upper story becomes the non-logical and the non-rational. There is no relationship between them. In other words, in the lower story, on the basis of all reason, man as man is dead. You have simply mathematics, particulars, mechanics. Man has no meaning, no purpose, no significance. There is only pessimism concerning man as man. But up above, on the basis of a non-rational, non-reasonable leap, there is a non-reasonable faith which gives optimism. This is modern man’s total dichotomy.
The trouble with those of us who come out of a Christian background, or an upper-middle-class background, is that we cannot easily feel the thickness of this line in the way that it would be immediately understood by the twentieth-century man on the left bank in Paris—or at London University. We, coming out of our background, think there must be some interchange, but the answer of our age is, “No, there never has been and there never will be.” When man thought there was an interchange it was just an illusion. On the basis of all reason, man is meaningless. He has always been dead as far as rationality and logic are concerned. It was a vain hope that man thought he was not dead.
This is what it means to say man is dead. It does not mean he was alive and died. He was always dead but did not know enough to know that he was dead.1
SECULAR EXISTENTIALISM
From Kierkegaard there are two extensions—secular existentialism and religious existentialism.
Secular existentialism divides into three main streams: Jean-Paul Sartre (b. 1905) and Camus (1913-1960) in France, Jaspers (b. 1883) in Switzerland, Heidegger (b. 1889) in Germany. First, Jean-Paul Sartre. Rationally the universe is absurd, and you must try to authenticate yourself. How? By authenticating yourself by an act of the will. So if you are driving along the street and see someone in the pouring rain, you stop your car, pick him up and give him a lift. It is absurd. What does it matter? He is nothing, the situation is nothing, but you have authenticated yourself by an act of the will. But the difficulty is that authentication has no rational or logical content—all directions of an act of the will are equal. Therefore, similarly, if you are driving along and see the man in the rain, speed up your car and knock him down, you have in an equal measure authenticated your will. Do you understand? If you do, cry for modern man in such a hopeless situation.
Second, Jaspers. He is basically a psychologist and speaks of a “final experience”: that is, an experience so big that it gives you a certainty you are there and a hope of meaning—even though, rationally, you could not have such hope. The problem with this “final experience” is that, because it is totally separated from the rational, there is no way to communicate its content either to someone else or to yourself. A student from the Free University in Amsterdam had been trying to hang on to such an experience. He had gone to Green Pastures one night and felt such an experience that he thought there must be some sense to life. I met him some two years after this had happened. He was close to suicide. Think about it—hanging on to some meaning to life only on the basis of such an experience, an experience which you cannot communicate even to yourself except on the basis of repeating that it had occurred. The morning after, it might be strong, but—two weeks later—two months—two years? How hopeless is hope based only on this final experience.
In addition, the final experience cannot be prepared for. Jaspers has therefore to tell his best students that they cannot be sure of having a final experience by committing suicide—for these people are serious enough to go out and do just that. There is no way to prepare for the final experience. The final experience is in the upper category—it just comes.
Third, you have what Heidegger called Angst. Angst is not just fear, for fear has an object. Angst is a vague feeling of dread—the uncomfortable feeling you have when you go into a house that might be haunted. Heidegger hung everything on this kind of basic anxiety. So the terms in which you express the upper story make no difference at all. The basis of this system lies in the leap. Hope is separated from the rational “downstairs.”
Today there are almost no philosophies in the classical sense of philosophy—there are anti-philosophies. Men no longer think they can get rational answers to the big questions. The Anglo-Saxon linguistic philosophers have shut themselves away from the great questions by limiting philosophy to a smaller area. They are concerned with the definition of words and have confined their operations to the lower story. The existentialists have hung on more to a classical concept of philosophy in that they are dealing with the big questions, but they do this by accepting completely the dichotomy between rationality and hope.
What makes man a modern man is the existence of this dichotomy and not the manifold things he places, as a leap, in the upper story. No matter what expression he places there, secular or religious, it still amounts to the same thing if it is rooted in this dichotomy. It is this that separates modern man from, on the one hand, Renaissance man, who had hope of a humanistic unity; and, on the other hand, from Reformation man, who actually possessed a rational unity above and below the line on the basis of the content of the biblical revelation.
RELIGIOUS EXISTENTIALISM
The same general picture that emerges from secular existentialism is present in Karl Barth’s system and the new theologies which have extended his system. There is no rational interchange above and below the line. He held, and holds, the higher critical theories, so the Bible contains mistakes, but we are to believe it anyway. “Religious truth” is separated from the historical truth of the Scriptures. Thus there is no place for reason and there is no point of verification. This constitutes the leap in religious terms. Aquinas opened the door to an independent man downstairs, a natural theology and a philosophy which were both autonomous from the Scriptures. This has led, in secular thinking, to the necessity of finally placing all hope in a non-rational upstairs. Similarly, in neo-orthodox theology, man is left with the need to leap because, as the whole man, he cannot do anything in the area of the rational to search for God. Man, in neo-orthodox theology, is less than biblical fallen man. The Reformation and the Scriptures say that man cannot do anything to save himself, but he can, with his reason, search the Scriptures which touch not only “religious truth” but also history and the cosmos. He not only is able to search the Scriptures as the whole man, including his reason, but he has the responsibility to do so.
The kind of words which are put in the upper story do not change the basic system. As far as the system is concerned, the use of religious or secular terms makes no difference to it. What is particularly important to notice in this system is the constant appearance in one form or another of the Kierkegaardian emphasis on the necessity of the leap. Because the rational and logical are totally separated from the non-rational and the non-logical, the leap is total. Faith, whether expressed in secular or religious terms, becomes a leap without any verification because it is totally separated from the logical and the reasonable. We can now see, on this basis, how the new theologians can say that though the Bible, in the area of nature and history, is full of mistakes, this does not matter.
It does not matter what terms we adopt. The leap is common to every sphere of modern man’s thought. Man is forced to the despair of such a leap because he cannot live merely as a machine. This, then, is modern man. It is modern man, whether expressed in his painting, his music, his novel, his drama or his religion.
THE NEW THEOLOGY
In the New Theology the defined words are below the line:
NON-RATIONAL—CONNOTATION WORDS
RATIONAL—DEFINED WORDS
Above the line the new theologian has undefined words. The “leap theology” centers everything in the undefined word. Tillich, for example, speaks of the “God behind God”—with the first word “God” totally undefined. The defined words in the area of science and history are below the line; up above, there are only connotation words. Their value to him lies precisely in the fact that they are undefined.
The New Theology seems to have an advantage over secular existentialism because it uses words that have strong connotations as they are rooted in the memory of the race; words like “resurrection,” “crucifixion,” “Christ,” “Jesus.” These words give an illusion of communication. The importance of these words to the new theologians lies in the illusion of communication, plus the highly motivated reaction men have on the basis of the connotation of the words. That is the advantage of the New Theology over secular existentialism and the modern secular mysticisms. One hears the word “Jesus,” one acts upon it, but it is never defined. The use of such words is always in the area of the irrational, the non-logical. Being separated from history and the cosmos, they are divorced from possible verification by reason downstairs, and there is no certainty that there is anything upstairs. We need to understand, therefore, that it is an act of desperation to make this separation, in which all hope is removed from the realm of rationality. It is a real act of despair, which is not changed merely by using religious words.
UPPER STORY EXPERIENCES
Man made in the image of God cannot live as though he is nothing, and thus he places in the upper story all sorts of desperate things. In order to illustrate that it does not matter what one places in the upper story, I shall try to show how manifold these things are. We have had examples of Sartre’s “existential experience,” Jasper’s “final experience” and Heidegger’s “Angst.” In each case man is dead, as far as rationality and logic are concerned.
Aldous Huxley made a titanic addition to this way of thinking. We find him using the term “a first-order experience.” In order to have such a first-order experience he advocated the use of drugs. I have worked with many intelligent people taking LSD and have found hardly any of them who did not realize what they were doing was related to Aldous Huxley’s teaching in regard to a “first-order experience.” The point is that in the lower story—nature—life makes no sense; it is meaningless. You take a drug in order to try to have a direct mystical experience that has no relation to the world of the rational. Jaspers, as we saw earlier, says you cannot prepare for this experience. Huxley, however, clung to the hope that you can prepare for it by taking drugs. So, as people are deciding that our culture is, in the words of Timothy Leary, a “fake-prop-set society,” they too are turning to drugs.
The basic reason that drugs are seriously taken today is not for escape or kicks but because man is desperate. On the basis of rationality and logic man has no meaning, and culture is becoming meaningless. Man is therefore trying to find an answer in “first-order experiences.” This is what lies behind the modern drug mania. It is related to a thousand years of pantheism, for Eastern mystics have taken hashish for centuries to achieve religious experience. So it is nothing new, even though it is new to us. In The Humanist Frame,2 in which Aldous Huxley wrote the last chapter, he was still, right before his death, pleading for the use of drugs by “healthy people” for the “first-order experience.” This was his hope.
Optimistic Evolutionary Humanism is yet another illustration of the fact that, once one accepts a dichotomy of the upper and lower stories, what one then places in the upper story makes no difference. Julian Huxley has propagated this idea. Optimistic Evolutionary Humanism has no rational foundation. Its hope is always rooted in the leap of “mañana.” In looking for proof one is always diverted to tomorrow. This optimism is a leap, and we are foolish in our universities to be intimidated into thinking that the humanists have a rational basis for the “optimistic” part of their slogan. They have not—they are irrational. Julian Huxley himself has, in practice, accepted this, for he has put down the basic proposition that men function better if they think that there is a god. There is no god, according to Huxley, but we will say there is a god. In other words, as Aldous Huxley is looking to drugs, so Julian Huxley is looking to a religious leap, even though to him it is a lie—that there is no god. This is why it is not out of line for Julian Huxley to write the introduction to Teilhard de Chardin’s Phenomenon of Man.3 They are both involved in the leap. The mere use of religious words in contrast to non-religious words changes nothing after the dichotomy and leap are accepted. Some positions seem further away from us and more shocking. Some seem closer—but there is no essential difference.
In a BBC Third Programme broadcast, Anthony Flew addressed himself to the question “Must Morality Pay?”4 He used the broadcast to show that, on the basis of his own presuppositions, morality does not pay. And yet he cannot stand this. At the very end he brings in out of thin air the concept that, in spite of the fact that morality does not pay, a man is not a fool to be scrupulous. This is a titanic leap without a basis as to why a man is not a fool to be scrupulous, nor any category as to what the word “scrupulous” would mean.
The significant thing is that rationalistic, humanistic man began by saying that Christianity was not rational enough. Now he has come around in a wide circle and ended as a mystic—though a mystic of a special kind. He is a mystic with nobody there. The old mystics always said that there was somebody there, but the new mystic says that that does not matter, because faith is the important thing. It is faith in faith, whether expressed in secular or religious terms. The leap is the thing and not the terms in which the leap is expressed. The verbalization, i.e., the symbol systems, can change; whether the systems are religious or non-religious; whether they use one word or another is incidental. Modern man is committed to finding his answer upstairs, by a leap, away from rationality and away from reason.
LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS AND THE LEAP
A short while ago I was leading a discussion in a particular British university where the linguistic philosophers are militant in their attack against the Christians. Some of them attended the discussion. As it went on it became obvious what they were doing. They were building their prestige in the area below the line in the reasonable definition of words. Suddenly, they leapt to an Optimistic Evolutionary Humanism above the line and attacked Christianity on the basis of the prestige which they had established in their own sphere. Some of them have quite properly established a reputation for rationality in the definition of words, but they then make a leap, changing their mask by attacking Christianity on the basis of a Humanism which has no relationship whatsoever to the downstairs area of linguistic analysis. As we have said, linguistic analysis is an antiphilosophy in the sense that these men have limited themselves in their concept of philosophy. They no longer ask the big questions classical philosophy has always asked. Therefore, anything they say in the area of these questions has no relationship to their discipline and the prestige it entails.
The interesting thing today is that as existentialism and, in a different way, “defining philosophy” have become anti-philosophies, the real philosophic expressions have tended to pass over to those who do not occupy the chairs of philosophy—the novelist, the film producer, the jazz musician, the hippies and even the teenage gangs in their violence. These are the people who are asking and struggling with the big questions in our day.