2 THE FIRST STEP IN THE LINE OF DESPAIR: Philosophy
HEGEL, THE DOORWAY
It was the German philosopher Hegel (1770-1831) who became the man to open the door into the line of despair. Before his time truth was conceived on the basis of antithesis, not for any adequate reason but because man romantically acted upon it.
This book is not intended to be exhaustive in its treatment of the developments from the time of the Renaissance leading up to Hegel. Escape from Reason gives a more complete resumé of the developments from Aquinas, through the Renaissance, the birth of modern science, and including the place of Immanuel Kant. Kant is most important, and to omit him would leave out one of the key pieces in the development of modern thought.
Truth, in the sense of antithesis, is related to the idea of cause and effect. Cause and effect produces a chain reaction which goes straight on in a horizontal line. With the coming of Hegel this changed.
We must understand the importance of timing. What Hegel taught arrived at just the right moment of history for his thinking to have its maximum effect.
Imagine that Hegel was sitting one day in the local tavern, surrounded by his friends, conversing on the philosophical issues of the day. Suddenly he put down his mug of beer on the table and said, “I have a new idea. From now on let us think in this way: instead of thinking in terms of cause and effect, what we really have is a thesis, and opposite it an antithesis, with the answer to their relationship not a horizontal movement of cause and effect, but a synthesis.” Now suppose also that a hard-headed German businessman had been standing by and had overheard his remark. He might have thought, “How abstruse and impractical!” But he could not have been further from the truth. Because whether Hegel himself or those listening understood it to be the case, when Hegel propounded this idea he changed the world.
It has never been the same since. Among other things, the concept of dialectical thinking was based on this idea, and it was, and is, crucial to Marxism. By our era Hegelian synthesis dominates on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
If one understands the development of philosophy, or morals, or political thought from that day to this, one knows that Hegel and synthesis have won. In other words, Hegel has removed the straight line of previous thought, and in its place he has substituted a triangle. Instead of antithesis we have, as modern man’s approach to truth, synthesis. Hegel did not put it this simply. His thinking and writing are complicated, but the conclusion is that all possible positions are relativized, and leads to the concept that truth is to be sought in synthesis rather than antithesis.
But notice, Hegel was only a door to the line of despair. He himself never went below it. A good case can be made from his writings for classifying him as an idealist in that he tried to solve the problem of unity with his religious language. He thought that in practice synthesis could be arrived at by reason. But this did not prove possible, and so the next man we have to consider went below the line.
KIERKEGAARD, THE FIRST MAN BELOW
It is often said that Søren Kierkegaard, the Dane (1813-1855), is the father of all modern thinking. And so he is. He is the father of modern existential thinking, both secular and theological thinking. Our diagram now looks like the figure below.
Why is it that Kierkegaard can so aptly be thought of as the father of both? What proposition did he add to the flow of thought that made the difference? Kierkegaard led to the conclusion that you could not arrive at synthesis by reason. Instead, you achieve everything of real importance by a leap of faith.
Kierkegaard was a complex man, and his writings, especially his devotional writings, are often very helpful. For example, the Bible-believing Christians in Denmark still use these devotional writings. We can also be totally sympathetic to his outcry about the deadness of much of the Church in his day. However, in his more philosophical writings he did become the father of modern thought. This turns upon his writing of Abraham and the “sacrifice” of Isaac. Kierkegaard said this was an act of faith with nothing rational to base it on or to which to relate it. Out of this came the modern concept of a “leap of faith” and the total separation of the rational and faith.
In this thinking concerning Abraham, Kierkegaard had not read the Bible carefully enough. Before Abraham was asked to move toward the sacrifice of Isaac (which, of course, God did not allow to be consummated), he had much propositional revelation from God, he had seen God, God had fulfilled promises to him. In short, God’s words at this time were in the context of Abraham’s strong reasons for knowing that God both existed and was totally trustworthy.
This does not minimize Abraham’s faith shown in the long march to Mt. Moriah and all the rest, but it certainly was not a “leap of faith” separated from rationality.
I do not think that Kierkegaard would be happy, or would agree, with that which has developed from his thinking in either secular or religious existentialism. But what he wrote gradually led to the absolute separation of the rational and logical from faith.
The reasonable and faith bear no relationship to each other, like this:
It is not our purpose here to discuss all that Kierkegaard taught. There was much more than this. But the important thing about him is that when he put forth the concept of a leap of faith, he became in a real way the father of all modern existential thought, both secular and theological.
As a result of this, from that time on, if rationalistic man wants to deal with the really important things of human life (such as purpose, significance, the validity of love), he must discard rational thought about them and make a gigantic, nonrational leap of faith. The rationalistic framework had failed to produce an answer on the basis of reason, and so all hope of a uniform field of knowledge had to be abandoned. We get the resulting dichotomy like this:
Once we appreciate the development of modern philosophy in this way, we may note that though there appear to be many forms of philosophy today, in reality there are very few. They have a uniform cast about them. For example, if you listened to the defining philosophy as taught in Cambridge, and then turn to the existentialism of, say, Karl Jaspers, you might think there was no unity between them. But this is not so. There is one basic agreement in almost all of the chairs of philosophy today, and that is a radical denial of the possibility of drawing a circle which will encompass all. In this sense the philosophies of today can be called in all seriousness antiphilosophies.
THE EXISTENTIALISM OF JASPERS, SARTRE AND HEIDEGGER
In the two halves of existential thinking which we said flowed from Kierkegaard, we will pick up first that of the secular. Later we will pick up the theological existentialism in considering Karl Barth.
There are three main schools of secular existentialist thinking: the Swiss, the French and the German. Most people do not know the work of Karl Jaspers (1883-1969) in Switzerland as well as that of his French or German contemporaries, but he is an exceedingly important man. He is German, but taught at the University of Basel. He placed a great deal of emphasis on the need to wait for a nonrational “final experience,” which, he said, would give meaning to life. People who follow Jaspers have come to me and said, “I have had a final experience.” They never expect me to ask them what it was. The simple fact is that if I asked such a thing, it would prove that I was among the uninitiated.
To describe it as an existential experience means that it cannot be communicated. It is not possible to communicate content with regard to the experience which they have had. Some of these men have sat down with me and said, “It is obvious from looking at you and talking to you, from noticing your sensitivity and sympathy to others, and the openness of your approach to men, that you too are a man who knows the reality of final experience.” They mean this as a supreme compliment, and I always say, “Thank you very much indeed.” And I mean it, because it is quite remarkable to have one of these men say to an orthodox Christian that they think he understands. But then I go on to say to them, “Yes, I have had a final experience, but it can be verbalized, and it is of a nature that can be rationally discussed.” Then I talk of my personal relationship with the personal God who is there. I try to make them understand that this relationship is based on God’s written, propositional communication to men, and on the finished work of Jesus Christ in space-time history. They reply that this is impossible, that I am trying to do something that cannot be done. The discussion goes on from there.
Try to put yourself for a moment in such a man’s place. He has a deep problem, for he hangs everything to do with his certainty of being and the hope of significance upon some titanic experience he has had at a specific point in the past.
It would be wrong to imagine that these men are not serious. I wish many evangelicals had the integrity these men show in their struggles. I have been told that when Karl Jaspers began his lectures to his best students he warned them that they must not commit suicide, because it cannot be certain that one has a final experience by taking one’s own life. Perhaps we might wish that many Christians who say they believe in Christ had such intensity of commitment.
But in their struggles there is a horror of great darkness. Though they may be people of great sincerity, this does not of itself make them able to communicate to others their experience. Nor can the individual verbalize to himself what has happened. Tomorrow morning they may say, “Yesterday I had an experience.” The day after they still say, “I had an experience.” A month and a year later they are hanging on grimly to their only hope of significance and certainty of being by repeating, “I know I had an experience.” The horror of this situation is due to their putting their hope in a nonrational, nonlogical, noncommunicable experience.
If we move from Switzerland and to French existentialism, we come to Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and Albert Camus (1913-1960). They differ from one another and yet share the same basic concepts. Sartre, perhaps, speaks the more consistently of the two. He says that we live in an absurd universe. The total, he says, is ridiculous. Nevertheless, you try to authenticate yourself by an act of the will. It does not really matter in which direction you act as long as you act.
Let us take the field of morals as a good example of the direction of his thought. You see an old lady, and if you help her safely across the road you have “authenticated yourself.” But if instead you choose to beat her over the head and snatch her handbag, you would equally have “authenticated yourself.” The content is unimportant; you just choose and act. That is it; you have authenticated yourself. This is existentialism in its French form. As I shall show later, neither Sartre nor Camus was able to live this out in practice, but it was their theoretical position.
How is it that these men get to such a strange and desperate position? It is because they have gone below the line of despair. They have given up the hope of a rational circle to give an answer to life, and are left with only the antirational.
Finally we have the German form of existentialism, as it was propounded by Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). The fascinating thing about Heidegger is that there are two distinct periods in his life. The first period takes him up to the age of about seventy, and the second from then on. Some of my students have joked about this and made up a song about how “The old Heidegger is the new Heidegger!” The change came because he could no longer live on the basis of his system. Before the change, which we will consider more closely later, Heidegger was a true existentialist. He came to the same need for authentication as Sartre. How was this to be achieved? Not by an act of the will, but by a vague feeling of dread. Dread is not to be confused with fear. To him fear had an object; dread had not. Authentication comes through feeling the dread, angst, of something that is beyond your comprehension—a foreboding, and that is all.
THE ANTIPHILOSOPHY OF THE ANGLO-SAXON WORLD
Two main types of philosophy have recently held the field in the Anglo-Saxon world. They are logical positivism and defining philosophy. Neither of these is rooted in existentialism; indeed both would claim to differ sharply from existentialism. They would strongly insist that they are logical and rational. While we would concede that they are not related in origin to existentialism, nevertheless they have this in common: in their different ways they are all antiphilosophies.
Logical positivism claims to lay the foundation for each step as it goes along, in a rational way. Yet in reality it puts forth no theoretical universal to validate its very first step. Positivists accept (though they present no logical reason why this should be so) that what reaches them from the “outside” may be called “data”; i.e., it has objective validity.
This dilemma was well illustrated by a young man who had been studying logical positivism at Oxford. He was with us in Switzerland as a student in Farel House, and he said one day, “I’m confused about some of these things. I would like to lead a seminar and see how this whole matter stands.” So he did. When he began he said, “Well, when this data reaches you . . .” At once I said, “How do you know, on the basis of logical positivism, that it is data?”
He started again, and went on for another sentence or two, and then said a second time, “When this data reaches you . . .” I felt very much that I was slapping a child’s hands when it reaches over into the box of chocolates; but I had to say, “No, you must not use the word data. It is loaded with all kinds of meaning; it assumes there is objectivity, and your system has never proved it.”
“What do I say then?” he replied.
So I said, “Just say blip. You don’t know what you mean by data, so substitute blip.”
He began once more, “When blip reaches you . . .” and the discussion was over. On the basis of their form of rationalism, there is just as much logic in calling something “blip” as “data.”
Thus in its own way, though it uses the title of positivism and operates using reason, it is just as much a leap of faith as existentialism—since it has no postulated circle within which to act which validates reason nor gives a certainty that what we think is data is indeed data.
Michael Polanyi’s (1891-1976) work showed the weakness of all forms of “positivism,” and today positivism in theory is dead. However, it must be said that the materialistic, rationalistic scientists have shut their eyes to its demise and continue to build their work upon it as though it were alive and well. They are doing their materialistic science with no epistemological base. In the crucial area of knowing, they are not operating on facts but faith.
However, the defining philosophy is more important in England and the United States today.
The starting-point of those who subscribe to this philosophy is, as the title suggests, definition. They say they will on no account take any first step without rationally and logically defining the terms they use. And they will go no further than can be accurately defined.
This is all very well, but even if we overlook the differences in their own ranks as to whether their categories are accurate or not, they still have other problems. Many of them would agree that all their work is no more than prolegomena—that is, preparation for philosophy. They start off by defining terms in the hope that one day some of the random pieces may be fitted together. Now this is helpful insofar as they have demonstrated that some problems cease to exist when they have carefully defined the terms involved. In providing a tool for careful thinking, their work has also been most helpful. But they are carefully defining terms without dealing with meaning and purpose. Classical philosophy up through Kant consisted of two parts. It dealt, certainly, with details. But the details were to be set within a circle which, it was claimed, could contain all knowledge and life. But defining philosophy deals with the details only. It would not claim to be a system. In this sense, as a contrast to classical philosophy, it is an antiphilosophy. In it language leads to neither values nor facts, but only to language.
Then second, many of these men also have their own personal leap of faith. As defining philosophers, they have a prestige in their own field. At the same time many of them take a strong position for optimistic humanism. That is, many of them would make the same optimistic statements as a man like Sir Julian Huxley. But what they are doing is this: they are using their prestige as instructors in the art of defining philosophy in order to enhance the strength of their humanistic view regarding man. But it should be observed that weight of scholarship in defining words does not make up for weakness of argument in the larger questions. In fact, there is no bridge at all between their limited philosophy, which says nothing about meaning or purpose, and their optimistic statements. They have leaped over the gap between the two by faith. However careful and rational their definitions of words may be, their observation of man, in that it is optimistic humanism, is unadulterated faith.
And the evolutionary humanism as a whole, which is current today, is in the same plight. Anyone can assert with all the persuasion at his command that mankind can expect a rosy future. But this again is a leap of faith if there is no point of observation, either clinically or sociologically, to demonstrate that man will be better tomorrow than he was yesterday or is today.
Sir Julian Huxley has taken such a purely optimistic answer one step further by stating that man will only be improved by accepting a new mystique. Thus he suggests that society will function better if it has a religion, even though no god really exists. For example, he says:
From the specifically religious point of view, the desirable direction of evolution might be defined as the divinisation of existence—but for this to have operative significance we must frame a new definition of “the divine” free from all connotations of external supernatural beings.
Religion today is imprisoned in a theistic frame of ideas, compelled to operate in the unrealities of the dualistic world. In the unitary humanist frame it acquires a new look and new freedom. With the aid of our new vision it has the opportunity of escaping from the theistic impasse and of playing its proper role in the real world of unitary existence.
Now it may be true that it can be shown by observation that society copes better with life through believing that there is a god. But in that case, surely optimistic humanism is essentially unreasonable (and, like the others we have discussed, shows exactly the same irrational leap of faith) if in order to be optimistic, its optimism rests upon the necessity of mankind’s believing and functioning upon a lie.
THE USE OF DRUGS
It is not only the existentialist who has talked about an experience as a means of validating oneself. Right up to the time of his death Aldous Huxley suggested that a way of achieving what he described as a “first-order experience” would be through drugs. This experience would, like the final experience advocated by the existentialists, be above the line of rational validation, in this way:
This overwhelming desire for some nonrational experience was responsible for most of the serious use of the drugs LSD and STP in the 1960s. For the sensitive person, drugs were then not usually used for escape. On the contrary, he hoped that by taking them he would experience the reality of something which would give his life some meaning. Intriguingly enough, Professor Timothy Leary, formerly of Harvard University, linked up the LSD experience with that described in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Thus he shows that the desire for, and the form of, this experience changes very little from West to East. Whether it is the existentialist speaking, or Aldous Huxley, or Eastern mysticism, we find a uniform need for an irrational experience to make some sense of life. Their views have brought them to a wall, and by an unrelated leap of faith they hope to clear the wall. Each of their views may be distinguished in detailed description, but they have come to the same wall and are making the same attempt to clear it. Each case involves a nonrational leap of faith.
The chairs of philosophy in most universities have come under the line of despair. The living philosophical discussions have tended to move into unusual settings—such as philosophic astronomy, modern jazz or among the counterculture. It is in such fields that philosophy is being hammered out. Academic philosophy as such, including Anglo-Saxon philosophy, has tended to be antiphilosophy.
In concluding this section let us note that when we speak of being under the line of despair, we do not mean that these people necessarily sit down and weep, but that they have given up all hope of achieving a rational, unified answer to knowledge and life.
WHAT DOES AND DOES NOT HAPPEN IN THESE EXPERIENCES
It is obvious that often when a man claims to have had an experience, whether under drugs or not, something has certainly happened to him. When he experiences, for example, the “redness” of a red rose, he has really touched something. But what?
Usually only two live options are presented as to what happens in an Eastern religious experience, an existential experience, or a drug experience. One is told either that they have stumbled on “nothing” in their experience, or else that they have met “the reality of god.” This latter is especially true when the Eastern religious experience is under consideration. The guru says, “I have met something.” Usually people describe it as nonsense or say that he has “met God.”
The built-in trouble with all these existential experiences is that the content of such an experience is not open to communication. Only the unknowing would demand, “Please describe to me in normal categories what you have experienced.”
But I believe that there is a third live option when we ask ourselves what these people have touched. It is an alternative explanation Christians are able to give because we see these people as they really are in God’s universe.
God has created a real, external world. It is not an extension of his essence. That real, external world exists. God has also created man as a real, personal being, and he possesses a “mannishness” from which he can never escape. On the basis of their own worldview often these experience-seekers are neither sure the external world is there, nor that man as man is there. But I have come to the conclusion that despite their intellectual doubts, many of them have had a true experience of the reality of the external world that exists, and/or the “mannishness” that exists. They can do this precisely because this is how God has made man, in his own image, able to experience the real world and man’s “mannishness.” Thus they have hit upon something which exists, and it is neither nothing, nor is it God. We might sum up this third alternative by saying that when they experience the “redness” of the rose, they are having the experience of the external world, as is the farmer who plows his field. They are both touching the world that is.
In the same way, lovers on the left bank of the Seine in Paris experience the “mannishness” of man when they fall in love and yet cry because they do not believe love exists. If I met any of these, I would put my hand gently on their shoulders and say, “You are separated from God if you do not accept Christ as your Savior, but at this moment you understand something real about the universe. Though your system may say love does not exist, your own experience shows that it does.” They have not touched the personal God who exists, but for a fleeting moment they have touched the existence of true personality in their love. This is indeed an objective reality, because God has made their personalities in this way. It is true that in these experiences man has touched something, not nothing; but what he has touched is not God, but the objective reality of the external world and the “mannishness” of man that God has created.
Some have wondered why Christians should not use drugs since drugs are said to sharpen perception. But the price paid for increased perception is much too great. A while ago an anonymous poem was published in the Listener based on the 23rd Psalm. It began:
King Heroin is my shepherd, I shall always want,
He maketh me to lie down in the gutters.
He leadeth me beside the troubled waters.
He destroyeth my soul.
With the exception of their use for medical purposes, and therefore under careful control, drugs are destructive. Playing with drugs is foolish, as well as wrong.