Essay on Existentialism

Existentialism Essay

Every great work makes the human face more admirable and richer, and this is its whole secret.[1]

The one thing your friends will never forgive you is your happiness. - Albert Camus

It is Europe’s mystery that life is no longer loved. – Albert Camus

 

This essay on existentialism will explore the role it might play in the formation of a theological approach to humanity, clarify the place philosophy and science in relation to any notion of divine revelation, explore the strangeness of the kerygma/gospel to modern ears, gain clarity into the act of faith, and even re-examine my view of Jewish apocalyptic and eschatology and their continuing relevance for theology and church today.

I take Heidegger in Being and Time as providing the pattern of existential philosophy. However, the family of existential philosophers do not all think alike, and I will broaden our understanding of the possibilities within existentialism by consideration of other authors, such as Kierkegaard, Sartre, Jaspers, Merleau-Ponty, and Marcel. I will draw upon Bultmann as a theologian who takes Heidegger seriously. I have found Paul Tillich and John Macquarrie helpful in describing existentialism and incorporating the philosophy into their theological reflections. Albert Camus is an absurdist whose writings overlap with existentialist themes and provide an interesting alternative to some of the emphases one finds in existentialism. 

An understanding of existentialism can lead one to put it in the role that natural theology has in Roman Catholic theology. If one seeks a point of contact between theology and nontheological anthropological studies, existentialism, especially as seen in Heidegger, may be of assistance. Paul Tillich wanted his systematic theology to correlate with philosophy,[2] his primary dialogue being existentialism as the best interpretation of the situation faced by his generation. Existentialism was his way of sharing common ground with the questions his generation were asking. His famous notion of “ultimate concern” as defining this common ground acknowledges the existential character of religious experience. The questions of disruption, conflict, self-destruction, meaninglessness, and despair reveal the situation of his time, to which the New Being appearing in Christ is an answer that overcomes the self-estrangement of human existence, offering reconciliation, creativity, meaning, and hope. These answers contained in revelation are already implied in the questions that arise from human existence.[3] John Macquarrie is explicit about the role of Heidegger in his approach to theology. He refers to it as a contemporary style of natural theology that that begins with the common humanity that each of us knows as those existing in the world. He refers to it as existential rather than rationalistic.[4] Too much of philosophy focuses upon symbolic logic or has a close connection to how we can be certain of any human knowledge. Existentialism is a reminder that people pursue philosophy because of their concern with the art of living. Most of us take for granted the lack of certainty of knowledge. What we want are ways to live a meaningful and happy life.

Existentialism will direct our attention to the phenomenon of human existence. It will want to find ways of describing who we are as human beings in our normal, average, everyday experiences. Husserl inspired such interest as he explored the embedded quality of human beings in the world as inter-subjectivity, the intentional quality of consciousness as always being directed to something in the world, perception is an involuntary act within the perceptual field of our life-world, the spirit of always returning to the beginning, and opposing tradition and valuing experience. He stressed that our perception of reality is through a community of persons. We experience our freedom as we set aside the past. The intentional object of consciousness already discloses that the person values, enjoys, loves, and hopes. He recognized that we direct our attention in numerous ways to our world and proposed the notion of regional ontologies like the physical sciences, psychology, sociology, economics, politics, and philosophy. Husserl was unhappy with the direction Heidegger and other existentialists would take.[5]

Even Husserl recognized that his phenomenology was not meeting the needs of the tensions that arose in Europe in the early 20^th century. It would be his students and those influenced by his writings who would give phenomenology an existential interpretation. The concern of the existentialist was to use phenomenology to describe accurately the everyday experience of human beings in modern culture, which they would view in negative ways, but also provide a way of lifting ourselves out of the ordinary identification of ourselves with the crowd or mass and into some form of illumination that will help us see the potential of our unique lives. 

            One can see in existentialism the influence of both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Both insisted on the primacy of the individual and the struggle involved in a human life. Taking their path seriously means rejection of a philosophy that absorb the individual into a system. It also means rejection of the scientific and mathematical method as providing a model for way of existing in the world as an authentic human being. [6] It suggests that only in extreme situations does humanity disclose itself.[7]

            To be oneself and to remain oneself is a trickier matter than most people think. We are involved in situation within the world and presses upon us from within as well as from without. Our ontological bond with the world precedes our knowledge of it. We are in a unified whole that we might call world or universe. Yet, recognizing that such a notion of the involved self leads to indeterminate notion of self, it may be that anything the philosopher has to say is of little more than subjective value. Science addresses the universally human, but philosophy must address the individual in a way that assists people in their chosen way of existing in the world.[8]

Existentialists will keep pushing us to engage in the tricky journey to know ourselves, believing that such knowledge will yield the meaningful life we seek. 

Openness to the World: Mood, Understanding, Language

Existentialists are aware of the scientific approach to humanity that merges humanity with nature. Humanity is a complex entity within a system of entities that are in relation to each other. Being is simply there. Existentialist will want to distinguish humanity from such generalized Being. If we turn to metaphysics, existentialism will tend to view the human being or consciousness arising out of the stuff that is simply there. If existentialists would have an interest in metaphysics, it would move against the dualism of mind and matter and argue for the close connection that mind/matter have. The appearance of Being has an absurd quality to it. It has no reason to be, it has no meaning, and it has no purpose. It is undifferentiated and meaningless massiveness. Something is simply there. We might think of it as the ontological shock that there is something rather than nothing. Such questions do not arise with the inanimate universe or even with low level biological life. Such questions arise only with the appearance of the human being. The development of consciousness required the pre-existence of Being, so the human being arises out of the generalized stuff that is already there. We are the ones who raise the question of why we are here, of what our destiny might be, and what our role might be in the world. We did not ask to be born. We simply are – and are not. The contingency of human existence is such that our “being” is not determined. We create our unique mode of being in a way no other being in the world can claim to do. We must bear this responsibility that our freedom has been placed upon us.[9] Thus, Being refers to the wholeness of human reality, and therefore the structure, meaning, and aim of human existence.[10]

What is Being? The question implies the possibility of non-being. First, the basic ontological structure is implicit in question, and deals with the relation between self and world. Only the human being is aware of the structure of Being. We are the ones who ask the ontological question and the ones in whose self-awareness the answer can be found. Being a self means separation from everything else while also belonging to that at which it looks. The self-world polarity is the basis for the subject-object structure of reason. Existentialism will resist every attempt to turn a subject into an object. Second, there are three pairs of elements that constitute this structure. 1) Individuality and universality, where in other entities the species is dominant, but with human beings the individual longs for proper recognition by its cultural, political, and economic arrangements. Human beings arrive upon individuation through participation in the natural and social structures into which birth has thrown them. Human beings know as they participate in their world, even if that means indifference or hostility. 2) Dynamics and form are the interation of potentiality for Being and the form that Being. To be is to have form. The dynamic character of Being implies the tendency of everything to transcend itself and to create new forms, making it impossible to think of Being without also thinking of becoming. 3) Freedom and destiny suggest the polarity of spontaneity and law, of indeterminism and determinism, of the possible and the necessary. Destiny recognizes the future orientation of this process of becoming what we shall be. Freedom suggests deliberation, decision, and responsibility. Destiny is that out of which our decisions arise. Freedom participates in shaping destiny. Destiny has an eschatological connotation. Third, the power of Being to exist consists of the polarity between essential and existential, or between potentiality and actuality. The ontological shock that there is something rather than nothing is matched by the ontological shock that contained within Being is the possibility of non-being. Existentialism wants us to face this nothingness and the threat of meaninglessness, which would mean the destruction of the structure of Being. The only way of dealing with the threat lies in the courage of taking it upon oneself. Finitude is unintelligible without nonbeing. Fourth, the category of Being and knowing as they participate in finitude. The limitation of nonbeing upon Being is finitude. To be something is to be finite. We anticipate that end. To be aware of moving toward death, we must look out over our finite being and move beyond it, imagining infinity. The notion of infinite directs the mind to experience its unlimited potential. The fact that we are never satisfied with any stage of our finite development, the fact that nothing finite can hold us, although finitude is our destiny, indicates the indissoluble relation of everything finite to Being. Thus, awareness of finitude is anxiety. Such a mood is ontological. The four main categories are the forms in which the mind grasps and shapes reality. They are ontological and are present in everything. Time is the central category of finitude, negatively suggesting the transitoriness of everything and positively suggesting the creative character of the temporal process. Time unities the anxiety of transitoriness and the courage of a self-affirming present. To be means to have space. To have no space would mean insecurity and anxiety and to secure a space is courage. Causality requires the courage to embrace our contingency. Substance is the union of being and nonbeing in everything finite, pointing to something underlying the flux appearances. Everything finite is anxious that its substance will be lost. Every change reveals the relative nonbeing of that which changes. Such concepts are a priori and present in every experience.[11]

Science presupposes an original and unique perceptual relation to the world that we cannot explain in scientific terms. Our embodied existence is a limit upon our freedom. Lived experience enables us to grasp the significance of language, perception, and the body. We stand in worder in the face of the world. The “inter-world” that is, the forms of transcendence found in body, the natural world, and society, helps us avoid the danger of solipsism. The body ties us to this world. Lived experience occurs within the temporal flux as well as space. We are perpetual beginners. Because of the body, human beings are not just in space, but they are of space. The body is already in the world. Our embodied perception means perception is only within a specific situation. In this sense, the perceiving mind is an incarnated mind. This means that the perceiving subject is always changing and going through a process of rebirth. Consciousness is perceptual. Any certainty we have derives from perception that requires close attention and investigation. Such an understanding of the perceiving subject opens the way for a description of the living present. The world is what we live through. I am open to the world, and I am in communication with it. We exist in unity with a world that simply is. I have tacit knowledge of the world that is part of my phenomenal field. This tacit awareness as we perceive contains the sense of meaning and significance of the world, that is, the connectedness of the field.  Language becomes the living present in speech. To speak and communicate is equivalent to becoming aware that there are only successive living presents. Language raises the question of a relation with the Other, to nature, to time, and to death, in ways that are not describable in mathematical terms. Reality is thick with meaning, so that ideology, politics, religion, economics, psychology, and biography can be true if we accept them within their separate fields. The question of meaning reveals the core weakness of humanity in that we do not know how we fit into the natural or social world. Reflection or reason is how we seek to compensate for this core weakness, giving us the means to learn ways to improve life on this planet. Reflection and reason bring to our consciousness what we tacitly know.  In the process, we gain strength in the world as individuals and as human beings.  We struggle to perceive meaning that is already there.  We are part of that structure of meaning.  We are part of the horizon of meaning and significance that already exists in the world.  Everything that we perceive emerges from the field and is therefore part of the background of the figure that emerged.  Our perception changes, as we perceive the figure from various perspectives of that relatedness to the background. Perception opens a window upon the world.  The tacit thesis of perception is that at every instant we coordinate experience with the previous instant and that of the following.  I also coordinate my perspective with other persons.  Nothing is more difficult than to know precisely what we see.  The phenomenal field is also a transcendental field.  Reflection must arrive at an awareness of itself as well as the results of its reflections.[12]

One difficulty in the journey of self-discovery is that human beings are so open to the world into which they have been thrown by birth that they naturally absorb what they experience. The self of the individual identifies with Others in a way that becomes a prison.[13] The question will become how we gain access to the unique self we are when the dominant forces that determine who we are derive from They/Others. Experience invites us to surpass ourselves and engage a world that transcends us. Being transcends any knowledge we have of it. We are conscious of objects and our desire to know directs us toward the world, while our consciousness of knowing directs us to our act of perceiving the world. The recognition of beauty reveals transcendence. The aesthetic intuition directs us out of self and engage the world. Yet, the beautiful haunts the world as unrealizable. 

One path to the self is that of feeling or mood. All moods have intentionality in that they refer so some state of affairs beyond themselves or situations in which the person participates. A mood attunes us to the environment and is an awareness and response to the situation we face.  Emotional life is shot through with intelligence. It is thought that does not yet have words. A feeling or mood is our receptivity to our experience of the world. They become signs of our welcome or rejection of what we discover in our world. We can try the role of a spectator of the world around us and never participate. However, contemplation is an intimate mode of participation in the world.[14] Contemplation is a form of looking that receives an object into oneself. It transcends inward and external. It arises from anxious self-questioning of the relation between me and my life.[15] Fear is a mood that discloses who we are in a unique way. One experiences fear of something that is out there. Such anxiety is near to awe in that it opens our eyes to the wonder of Being.[16] This mood underlies most of ordinary encounters with the world. Existentialism will want to elevate the experience of a mood into significant place in philosophical reflection. It will disclose the phenomenon of our everydayness. 

            Existentialism is confident that deep down in every person there dwells an anxiety that he or she become alone in the world, forgotten, overlooked among this huge household of millions upon millions. One keeps this anxiety at bay by seeing many people around one who are bound to one as kin and friends. Nevertheless, the anxiety is there all the same. One dare hardly think what it would feel like if one could take away all this anxiety.[17]

We are not now whom we shall be, for we create ourselves with every decision we make. Our anguish or dread over this reality reveals our fragility. Being is everywhere, but our lack of Being, our lack of the fullness we desire, haunts us. This emptiness of the future is our anguish. Our freedom is how this emptiness of the future enters the world. Anguish is my consciousness of this empty future. Consciousness of my freedom also generates this anguish. I may await myself in the future, but my anguish is the fear of not finding myself at that appointment. My anguish is a distraction from my responsibility for my future and an attempt to disarm the past of its threat to imprison me.[18]  

A second path is through our seeking to understand and interpret the world one experiences, thereby using rationality/thinking. The bridge between entities in the world and human beings is knowledge. Knowledge is the presence of Being to the human being.[19] One develops assertions or opinions about the world. The worldview develops for some as they thematize their understanding and interpretation of the world. In these ways, the world becomes an object and they become the subject. They have separated themselves from a world that they inhabit and from a world that is already within them. This subject-object split is the source of the experience of alienation from the world, especially as embodied in other persons. Existentialism rejects the subject-object split of early modernity represented in Descartes and Kant. As Marcel put it, human beings are not in the world alone.  Rather, we are in the world together. Contrary to the Cartesian, "I think, therefore I am," he proposed that "we are” is the fundamental affirmation of contemplation and reflection. He had a particular concern that Sartre had an excessive concern with the self and did not leave room for genuine communion with the other. There is no “we” in Sartre. Existentialism will grant science its vital role in understanding humanity and world, but it refuses to submit to the objectification all science requires as a model for the way human beings ought to exist in the world. The scientific path of objectifying that which it studies, if applied to the way one exists in the world, can only lead to homelessness. It refuses to view the human being as a subject removed from nature, persons, and culture as objects. The person develops the self out of its emergence in the world. We dwell in the world and the world dwells in us. This means ontology is prior to epistemology. 

The development of assertions and opinions based upon our interpretation of the world is an important aspect of rationality. However, we develop opinions regarding that which we have no knowledge. We form opinions at a distance, saying “I maintain that” or “I claim that.” Opinion is a seeming that becomes a claiming. If we saw properly our situation as recognizing that something only “seems” to be the case, we would not make our way to the affirmation. Making unilateral judgments are of the nature of opinion. Less authentic information leads to greater aggression, while authentic information will lead to lessening unilateral judgments. It will lead to deeper appreciation for the journey it would take for one to disagree with your opinion. The militant atheist claims to have a collection of facts that are incompatible with belief in God, most of which center around the presence of evil and suffering. The atheist relies upon an idea of God, which for the believer feels like a false idea of God. Faith is a matter of believing in someone. Believing involves following; I gather myself and rally myself to that in which I believe. If I believe in God, I affirm the existence of God. I may have a set of experiences that lead me to cut me off from my faith. To “lose one’s faith” is to fall away. One may think of this as freeing oneself from error. One may also “lose one’s faith” with regret of something valuable that has been lost. The journey from atheism to an affirmation of faith in God is equally intriguing. In ordinary life, we trust people all the time. Most of the time, they prove themselves trustworthy. People trust us as well, and hopefully, they will find us trustworthy. However, sometimes the trust is misplaced. Such a person enters our life as a tempter. We are undergoing a test of our ability to discern the trustworthiness of the other.[20]

The most common mode of thinking is calculative. We use it in our everyday activities. Such thinking is in the subject-object pattern, for what we think about is an object to us, standing outside us. The direction of such thinking is toward handling, using, and manipulating the object, incorporating it within our instrumental world. Technology is a sophisticated use of such thinking. Theoretical science reduces the elements of utility and concern to the point where the scientist becomes a spectator. The knowledge we gain in such thinking is objective. We transcend or rise above what we know as an object and master it. We gain control over our environment, even if all we can is predict the course of events. We are active and the objects of our thinking passive. We are observing, experimenting, measuring, deducing, demonstrating, and showing connections. Such a view of reason is dominate with the coming of empiricism and the dominance of science. It focuses on the process of reasoning. Technical reason determines the means while accepting the ends from somewhere else. Some forms of logical positivism refuse to understand anything that transcends technical reason, making philosophy irrelevant for questions of existential concern. It can dehumanize humanity when separated from ontology. It becomes impoverished and corrupted if it does not receive nourishment from ontology. An existential or ontological form of thinking is personal. It aims at well-being. Such thinking is also common in everyday life. It is participatory, a thinking into the existence of the other subject, made possible by the bond that exists between two subjects. It can become theoretical, as the reflections by Heidegger and other existentialists have shown. Even then, such thinking proceeds because of participation in existence. Such a view of reason is dominant in the classical tradition from Parmenides to Hegel. Reason is the structure of the mind that enables the mind to grasp and transform reality. It is effective in the cognitive, aesthetic, practical, and technical functions of the mind. Even emotional life is rational.  It determines the ends and only later the means. Both technical and ontological forms of reason assume the rational structure of reality. Life is creative. Only those things can live that embody a rational structure. The interplay of subjective and objective reason has led to realism, idealism, dualism/pluralism, and monism. A special case of existential thinking is repetitive, which implies going into some experience that has been handed down in such a way that it is brought into the present and its insights and possibilities made alive again. It can happen with an historical event, a poem, or a saying, derived from tradition. If we are to understand it, we must think into it, so think again and with the agent or author. Another form of thinking is primordial or essential thinking, which waits and listens. It responds to the call or address of Being, something like what one finds in religion and poetry. The initiative passes to that which transcends us as subjects. This form of thinking is rare.[21] It seems clear that reason has a depth that some forms of philosophy do not acknowledge. Cognitive depth points to truth, aesthetic depth points to beauty, legal depth points to justice, and communal depth points to love. Among the challenges of modern philosophy is to acknowledge that reason has “fallen” from its depth and become superficial. Out of the depths of reason arises various artistic, emotional, and religious symbols.[22] However, under the guidance of technical reason in our time, reason became shallow, empty, and without meaning that often leads to despair. Reconnecting reason with its depth is an urgent need for today. Reason has a static element that appears in the absolutism of tradition and revolution. It also has a relativistic appearance in relativism.[23]Successful cognition fills a need. In addition to fulfillment, it transforms and heals. It bridges the distance between subject and object. A harmful aspect of technical reason occurs in the attempt to use knowledge to control the object of knowledge. We properly understand when we unite the desire to connect with the object and the desire to maintain proper distance or detachment. Most cognitive distortions are the result of disregarding this polarity within reason. Existentialism is among the primary ways of resisting the dehumanizing element in technical reason. Since cognitive reasoning aims at truth, the existential-ontological reason finds verification only in a life-process. Although this approach can lead us to embrace the risk contained in life, it is also threatened by meaninglessness.[24]

A third distinctive path to self-knowledge is our capacity for language. We engage each other in discourse and tell each other stories. Narrative is the unique capacity of language for people to express themselves. Yet, our talk is often nothing more than idle talk.  Talking is the way we significantly articulate our life in the world.  It is important for hearing, listening, and keeping silent to take place.  If we want to discover the passion of the other person, we need stillness and stillness so that we may discover the secret of the other.[25] Our everyday and average life as determined by our interaction with others indicates the alienation of our own human nature.  Idle talk is the everyday disclosure of relationship to others as conversation.   Instead of disclosing one another, it closes us off to each other.  It does not take into one's self the other.  It removes understanding from true relating to the world. Our desire to understand is little more than shallow curiosity. Curiosity is the everyday disclosure of others as sight. This act sees only to see, not understand. It seeks novelty, is restless movement to a variety of entities, and does not dwell anywhere. Our interpretation often yields nothing more than ambiguity. Ambiguity is the everyday disclosure of our relation to others as interpretation.  All action is seen as unimportant. The result is that we have fallen into the crowd and experience our random thrownness into life. The self is lost in the They-self. We lose the self in the babble of the crowd. 

In this way, our sense of alienation belongs to our everyday life.  We have fallen from the true possibility of self. We have fallen to the demands, dreams, and expectation of others.  We live with the temptation of becoming only what others desire, rather than living out of the unique possibility that belongs to us.  In fact, we can deceive ourselves that such a life is true life, rather than alienation.  True life hides itself from us.  Yet, far from being separated from ourselves, we are entangled in ourselves.  Thus, we fall into everyday life.  The possibility of true living blinds our understanding.

Our bodies allow the Other to see us. I have shame of myself before the Other. “Once bitten, twice shy” is a saying that displays the intuition of the power of the Other. Negative appraisals of us carry more weight than positive appraisals. Yet, I am so open to the world, so with the Other, that I need the Other to become my true self. The Other occurs in the gestures, expressions, acts and conducts. The Other is the self that is not me. We depend on the Other in our being. In the look of the Other, we are seen. I am the object at which the Other is looking at and evaluating. I offer myself to the appraisal of the Other. The body symbolizes our defenseless state as objects. Shame, fear, and pride are my original relations to the Other. I exist my body is the first ontological dimension of the body. We are the center of our perceptive field. Here is our orientation toward the world. The second ontological dimension of the body is that the Other utilizes it and knows it. The third ontological dimension of the body is that I exist for myself as a body the Other knows.[26] We have relations with others. The Other reveals to me the being that I am. The Other holds the secret of my being. The look from the Other reveals the Other to me and makes the Other the cent4r of my world. The original relation with the Other is conflict. One attitude to the Other involves love, language, and masochism. Love is the original relation to the Other and organizes my projects. The projects connect me with the freedom of the Other, which turns love into a conflict. The lover wants the beloved to return love freely, but to do so involves me in seduction that will make me fascinating to the beloved. I am language in that I employ language to seduce the beloved. Lover and beloved must remain in this perpetual insecurity because each remains in their subjectivity. This leads to a masochistic attitude. The project must fail. A second attitude toward the beloved is that of indifference, desire, hate, and sadism. Indifference is a refusal to look, which leads to solipsism. Sexual desire is the attempt to get hold of the free subjectivity of the Other. We exist sexually for others. Desire is the mode of my subjectivity. The desiring consciousness is troubled and clogged by sexual desire. The caress expresses desire. Yet, desire will fail. Even when we have pleasure, we experience the death of desire, which leads to sadism. Sadism must fail. The failed projects of inauthenticity lead to guilt before the Other. Yet, such a failed project contains within itself hints as to the authentic relation with the other.[27]

Sexuality has links to our active and cognitive nature.  We experience shame and immodesty through sexuality.  We experience the relationship of master and slave through sexuality.  We know we can explain many areas of human behavior in light of human sexuality.  Sexuality is dramatic because we commit our whole personal life to it.  Our bodies become a mirror of our being.[28]

Speaking of the inauthentic relation with the Other in such negative terms may be disturbing. Yet, the experience of community is not the original experience of the Other. The experience of “us” arises out of a collective situation in which someone, They, has the power to name Us. This look by the Other/They define me as part of a social construct – Us. Thus, we have consciousness of “we” but it has no value as a metaphysical or ontological revelation. This inauthentic experience of “us” may provide some hints as to have authentic community.[29]

If the mood of fear, the desire to understand, and the capacity for narrative are essential ways that human beings exist, then what unites them is that human beings care for the world in which they are and which is within them. This form of care for the world means that epistemology is not the primary question of philosophy. Rather, ontology is the primary issue. That which is true is that which has disclosed itself, created a clearing, and giving space and time for self and others. Truth is not a matter of scientific calculation of objects in the world and truth is not is not a matter of developing propositions that correspond to the world, that are part of a coherent system, or that contain a pragmatic truth. The truth we seek, the meaningful life we seek, is through disclosure. We are the ones who uncover and disclose. 

Light is a helpful metaphor as we think of truth. Truth can dazzle and wound us as a bright light does when we turn our eyes full on it; and in ordinary language, we speak of people making themselves deliberately blind to the truth. We should pause at this point to analyze just what we have in mind when we think of truth as light. Most human beings grope about during their whole lives among these data of their own existence rather as one gropes one’s way between heavy chairs and tables in a darkened room. And what is tragic about their condition is that only because their lives are passed in this shadowy gloom can they bear to live at all. It is just as if their seeing apparatus had become finally adapted to this twilight state. Such persons take some pride in directing their search for truth to something outside themselves. They have developed a protective covering within which their lives continue. Yet, as an understanding self, I cannot shut myself against a light that arises from myself. As ambiguous as the term “self” may be, it is the self that has power to gaze upon our unique existence and our world in a new way. When we link facts and self and recognize a mortifying truth, we see how difficult it can be to affirm the ordinary, everyday statement that we love the truth. We may have shirked a painful truth for a long time, but finally discover consolation in opening our minds to it. By opening our minds to the truth that hurts us, we have put an end to a long and exhausting inner struggle with ourselves. We have struggled against the spirit of truth. In the light of truth, we diminish the permanent temptation that assails to conceive reality and to conceive myself as I would like them to be.[30]

This view of the importance of human decision that leads to an authentic life moves against the notion that human life is absurd. Can a change of life even occur? One life might be as good as another. Although many of us would consider marriage one of the crucial decisions of our lives, the decision to marry a person or not marry them may not marry. Even dying unjustly and waiting for the guillotine symbolizes human life – a series of absurd decisions that culminate in an absurd death.[31] Such a view would be contrary to existentialism.

Our ordinary, everyday, average experience of the world, through which the mood of fear, the rational attempt to understand, interpret, and develop assertions regarding the world, and the use of language with idle talk, express shallow curiosity, and be ambiguous as we can, eventually becomes a source of dissatisfaction. Our need for transcendence will arise out of our dissatisfaction.[32] The temptation to surrender the question asked in our existence is to surrender the answer to someone else, such as a religious sect or a political ideology. Delegating this responsibility discloses our alienation from our Being. It will be tempting to say that our way of life will disclose the answer to the question our lives present. Yet, I cannot tell the story of my life as I have lived it. We can recapture our lives only in fragments that might have luminous moments. Even if we keep a diary and have a stack of notebooks, many moments will leave us cold and others will lead to stimulating thoughts. Could our lives as we lived them be as disconnected and chaotic as that? A professional writer might impose some narrative unity to the story. A creative person could point to works of art as the answer. The judgment of history might be an answer. Everydayness leads to weariness and tediousness that moves toward despair. The more self-interest loads one down, the less intensely one lives a meaningful life. We can think of the self-centered person as incapable of responding to the various calls that will come in life. Such a person is incapable of imagining the needs and desires of the other. One is unavailable to the needs of others. Our lives are ungraspable and elude us. We do not possess our lives. In fact, the call of conscience is to sacrifice or consecrate our lives. Self-sacrifice consists of living for something, of dedicating ourselves. The need for self-dedication arises from the depths of our lives. Our lives transcend any conscious grasp we have in the moment. That which drives a human life is such self-dedication is the living of something other than oneself. Our inner need for transcendence, our need to move beyond our immanent relationships, is disclosed in such self-dedication and self-sacrifice.[33]

In his journal entry for 1840-5, Kierkegaard points to the difficulty of the inward journey.

It is quite true that philosophy says: that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other principle: that it must be lived forwards. Which principle, the more one thinks it through, ends exactly with the thought that temporal life can never properly be understood precisely because I can at no instant find complete rest in which to adopt the position: backwards.

 

The suspicion that we cannot get into a place or position in the flow of life to properly rest and look backward to gain understanding of our lives is a lively one for most existentialists. He may be referring to Hegel, who contemplated the past to show the development of the world process. Such a philosophy mean we gain understanding of our lives too late. We are alive now and must properly live our lives while we live. His point is that Hegel has not considered the ethical dimension of the future. We need to choose to live forward in the direction of our calling or vocation. We will fill our lives with what meaning we can. If we have the Hegelian glance backward, we see for a moment to be an existing individual with an ethical orientation toward the future.[34] In Concept of Anxiety (1844), he says that our anxiety is over the possibility contained in our freedom. We may leap toward authenticity, but most of us leap into the inauthenticity of everydayness, which leads to our guilt and shame. Too many rush headlong into life, continue to rush forward, and yet never find life. The rush of modern life does not give one pause to reflect upon how a religious existence pervades and interweaves the outward existence. He seems to think that denying the Infinite and Eternal is a way of saying “goodnight to all meaning in life.” 

One difficulty of this disclosure for human beings is that the anxiety or dread of our movement toward the nothingness of death underlies the everyday way of existing. Human existence projects itself toward nothingness. The possibility of confronting nothingness arises in our anxiety or anguish. We flee from sincerity by fleeing from anguish or Nothingness. We must continually make ourselves. We are not but must be. Who we are now has meaning only in the future toward which we develop our projects. We are not now whom we want to be or say that we are. The projects we choose for our mode of being in the world presuppose that we are not the fullness of those projects. Ambiguity arises in our journey to be who we are because of this tension. Falsehood hides the truth of our ambiguity and seeks to state what we believe about ourselves. Guilt arises as we do not accept responsibility for what we are from our past or the projects we have for our future. Guilt arises as we blame others for who we have become. Guilt refuses to accept responsibility for the choices one has made. Guilt refuses to face the anguish involve in our freedom. Guilt is lack of authenticity, the primary virtue of existentialism. The only escape is through self-discovery that recognizes the corruption in which one has participated. Authenticity is the path out of this anguish and guilt.[35]

What unifies mood, understanding, and language is our care for the world. The world is not a separate thing from us, but we are intimately related within the world and the world is within us. Dread of our end in death arises because that about which we care so much will no more be with us. Death is the loss of that about which we care. That in which we have invested our lives, such as a cause or people, will continue to feel the influence of our lives. We will still be with them. Our dread is that we will not be with them. Yet, as we come-face-to-face with nothingness as our future, we increase the possibility that we will have the courage to live out of authenticity. 

Some psychologists draw a distinction between acute anxiety and chronic anxiety. Acute anxiety refers to some immediate threat. If you step out of your front door and come face to face with a grizzly bear, you are feeling acute anxiety.  Yet, if you wake up each morning with a sense of free-floating dread but have little idea where those dark forebodings come from -- nor any idea when or how you will break free from them -- then chances are, you are a victim of chronic anxiety.

The word "anxious" relates to a Latin word, angere, which means, "to choke or strangle." Anxiety can have you gasping for breath. Another English word traces its lineage to the same Latin root. The word is angina -- the sharp, piercing pain that precedes a heart attack. Angina arises when arterial plaque chokes off one of the coronary arteries, blocking oxygen from reaching the heart muscle. Anxiety, in other words, can kill you. Another English word that grows out of this Latin root, angere, is "anger." Anxious people are often angry people. They sense the breath of life choking off from their soul, and so they lash out, flailing wildly to remove the threat, whatever they imagine it to be. Anxious. Angina. Anger. That sounds like our time. Alarmist headlines are part of our lives. We have come to believe the world is a fundamentally scary place. 

Anxiety presents a danger to us. Anxiety may arise out of our desperate search for fulfillment and happiness. We want a fulfilled and happy life, but anxiety leads us away from its source. Instead of trust, we anxiously focus upon self and think that if we can just possess the right finite thing, we will be happy. We turn to lust instead of mature love. We turn to getting others to serve us. We might even give up instead of engaging in creative action. We anxiously seek recognition by others, and we want it any price. We are uncertain of the future, and so, we become anxious.  

The temporality of human existence discloses itself as existentialism will look upon an authentic way of existing as an event of anticipatory resoluteness. Anticipatory resoluteness arises because there is a future now. Time is what it means for the human being to be. Anticipatory resoluteness shows itself as being toward one’s possibilities. We can be “toward” anything because there is a future. The future is meaningful to one because one goes toward the future, and therefore the future is meaningful. Awareness and consciousness presuppose the basic attitudes of living toward a future or from a past. The past is meaningful because I am its result, and the future is meaningful because I am coming toward it. The present is meaningful because the present is the place in which something occurs and in which I carry out an action. The present is making present and carrying out an action makes the present significant. Care is aware of its possibilities, it is already in the world, and it is alongside the entities it discovers in friendship with others and concern for things in the world. Such an understanding of care is possible because of its grounding in time. Authentic life anticipates the future and moves toward it as its own possibility. In authentic living, the present becomes the moment of vision. It refers to the resolute rapture with which the person carried away to whatever possibilities and circumstances are encountered in the situation as objects of concern. Resoluteness, in a moment of vision, looks at the situation with equanimity that are possible in the potential for the wholeness of Being as disclosed in anticipation of death. The meaning of our lives becomes the expectation of death. When death occurs, it can only put its seal upon the life we have lived. In this resolute decision, we can make death our own. Our attitude toward death anticipates the final note our lives will play. Facing the present mood of fear, anxiety, anguish, and despair generated by our death with intentionality and courage opens the way for a light to be shed upon the way we choose to exist in the world. The unity of temporality makes humanity possible. Here is a clearing where light shines. Our destiny is nothing other than our resolute moment of vision handing down what our heritage has handed down to us. Authentic Being unto death leads to the appreciation of one’s finite freedom. It leads to recognition of the compelling situation of the actual historical world and to urgent commitment to what is unique about one’s way of being here. Only as a member of a community with a shared heritage does one seek to own up to one’s fate in relation to a wider destiny that we all face. 

Divorcing his consideration of time from eternity creates a problem for Heidegger. Eternity has a positive and embracing relation to time. Eternity is the complete totality of life, from the standpoint of time, is a fullness that one can seek in the future. The future becomes constitutive of the nature of time because only in terms of the future could we even think of the totality. Heidegger was not the first to capture this insight, as we have discovered in the reference to Plotinus. However, he did recover the insight. Unfortunately, he does so by dropping off his considerations of time from the notion of eternity. His concern was with the possibility of attaining wholeness for a finite, individual existence or Dasein. In moving this direction, Heidegger followed Kant, who attempted to derive the unity of time in intuition from the unity of the ego. Pushing back against Heidegger at this point, space and time are specific forms of the primordial intuition of the Infinite. Heidegger replaced eternity with his notion of Dasein. For him, the primacy of the future rests upon the anticipation of the ultimate possibility of Dasein, namely, the death of that individual. The way one positions oneself toward this future discloses the whole of this finitude. The totality of Dasein stems from the finitude of Dasein. He individualizes the authentic future through the anticipation of one’s own death. Yet, death would seem to represent the broken and fragmented nature of individual life, rather than its wholeness. The death of the individual is not constitutive for our experience of time. The possible wholeness of human existence must be participation in eternity. The leading role in our consciousness of time belongs to the future, since only the future can be the source of the possible completion of our lives. The present and past either participate in or fall short of this future.[36]

We need to expand our consideration of death by exploring the primary categories of human reality: having, doing, and being. We act and we exist amid entities in the world without losing our freedom. Freedom is the first condition of action. Consciousness is free because what it is now is not enough, it is insufficient of Being, and is therefore free to set up those relations with Being that it desires. Our action modifies the shape of our world, arranges it in view of an end, produces an organized instrumental complex, and produces an anticipated result. An action is intentional. The act projects the self toward what it is not. In that way, Hegel is right to say that the mind/spirit is negative, driving us forward from that which is and toward that which is not yet. Mind or consciousness is a No to the present and Yes toward a possibility. This negative quality is indispensable when we think of the freedom of human action. We flee a situation by organizing and arranging our world to change the present and embrace a possibility. We must accept responsibility for our world. Although most of us may think of freedom as precious and good thing, there is another sense in which human beings are condemned to be free. We cannot escape it. If human beings simply are their fullness, they are not free. My existence and the foundation of the ends that I attempt to attain by will and passion have their foundation in my freedom. A philosophy of action will understand that we choose the world by choosing ourselves. We have freedom in a situation, and we have a situation because of freedom. My place, body, past, position in relation to the Other, and my fundamental relation to the Other, define the situation. The freedom that escapes the present and moves toward a possibility does not have the freedom to have any past it wants. The past is part of the facticity of our situation. Freedom is defined by the end that it projects. The future is the not-yet-existing state of what is. The meaning of the past depends on my present project. Our past may be living, half-dead, survival, ambiguous, and full of discrepancies. Every free project is also an open project. It contains within it the possibility of its further modification. Our freedom necessarily confronts the freedom of the Other. Wiling oneself wills the passion of freedom. I accept the burden of this alienated being my freedom brings into the world.[37]

We die our own death, of course. Most of us exhibit some anxiety regarding death. We do not like thinking about it or discussing it. We do not bring it up in polite conversation. Death transforms a life into its destiny. One has no more cards to play. We become defenseless before the judgments of the Other. I must be my past and I am responsible for it. The present is such briefly. We are present toward that which we have an internal bond. I project myself toward the future and merge with that which I presently lack. Thus, we are also our possibility. The future is the meaning of my present. I have a future because I am free to develop projects. My anguish arises because I am a being whose meaning is problematic. Behind my freedom and projects is a notion of value that haunts me. What is so valuable to me that I am willing to act to reflect it, to possess in some way, and to express my being?[38]

Human life is full of boundaries, limits, and facticity. We did not ask to be born as we are. We are male or female. We are part of a nationality. Our skin has a color. Our genetic bonds will orient our response to the world. Birth occurs on a date that will make us part of a generation. These are facts. They are random in that out of all the sperm that might have united with that egg that made us, it was that one sperm that gave us the genetic constitution we have. Death is the boundary of my situation. As birth is simply a fact, so death is a fact of a human life. Death has a random quality in that some people are born with the genes that will produce an early death or that will create a long life of suffering and barriers to overcome. Death is random in that an accident or a crime will cut life short. By the time of his death at 46 in 1960, Albert Camus had already won the Nobel Prize for literature, writing several novels and essays that still find a wide readership. He chose to return to Paris in a luxurious Facel Vega HK500 rather than return with his wife on the train. It proved to be a fateful decision that would end his life. The various projects of his life were done. Maurice Merleau-Ponty was preparing for his lecture on Descartes when he had a stroke and died in 1961. Death is random in that some will live a long life in which their end will feel like the completion of a life well-lived. Unless we have received a death penalty for what we have done, or news that we have a terminal illness, we cannot await death. Death is the absurdity of every expectation we have in the projects we develop in our lives. The limit represented by death, but the quality of death varies between one to whom death comes as the completion of the final stage of aging, and for whom death annihilates in the prime of life or even in youth. If we think of our lives as a song, the final note may be cut off absurdly like an unfinished song, or it may have the sense of the resolved chord that gives meaning to the melody. Silence comes after the final note. Death is the final boundary of human life. A bit of wisdom is the philosophy is a long preparation for death. In that sense, so is theology and religion. We seek to give some sense of meaning to the life we have lived. Much of this advice is well intended but difficult to put into practice. Yet, as beautiful as some of these efforts may be, we must not avoid the absurd character of all death. Life is meaningful in that human reality makes know to itself what it is by means of that which it is no. It waits for the confirmation of this future anticipated by our past choices and our present possibilities. 

Human life is a long waiting, although one can hope not as despairingly as one finds in Samuel Becket play, Waiting for Godot. A true reflection on death derives from a consideration of life. A waiting for death would be self-destructive, for it would negate all waiting. Death is the nihilation of my possibilities. It destroys all my projects. It destroys my expectation. Death is the triumph of the Other, with whom I have had conflict throughout life. Death transforms my life into its destiny. My life is. The Other becomes the guardian of the dead. We choose the dead. Death alienates us from ourselves to the advantage of the Other. The dead become the prey for the living. The meaning of our lives is to become the prey of the Other. To die is to exist only through the Other and to owe the meaning of one’s life to the Other. 

To say that death is absurd as the inevitable ending is to say that life is void of meaning, or that if meaning exists humanity is unable to know it. From the perspective of human existence, human beings simply need to embrace its truth. The contingent quality of human life has no external justification. The universe is unintelligent and immoral. The meaning and values that consume so much of human energy have no solid external component. Human beings need meaning, significance, and purpose, a need that confronts the unreasonable silence of the world. Thus, the absurdity of human life is inescapable. Such a view need not lead to nihilism or suicide, for either response is a rejection of human the weighty responsibility our freedom places upon us. The nihilist would say that if the world has no meaning, if human destiny is without meaning, then the only values by which we live are that of nature, such as violence and cunning. Human beings become a negligible matter in the great history of the universe, so all that matters is the adventure of power and the only morality is the realism of conquests. However, another path, maybe that of the stubborn humanist, is to exalt justice to protest the injustice of the world, to create happiness to protest the unhappiness of the world. Such actions would be ways to rediscover the solidarity we have with all human beings as we protest our common absurd destiny. Thus, the destiny of the world may have no meaning, but humanity exists, insisting on having a meaning.[39]

For these reasons, it may well be that we need to remove death from consideration of the ontological structure of the human being. I cannot discover my death or wait for it or arm myself against it or adopt an attitude toward it that will open the way for authenticity. One can adopt many attitudes toward death, some helpful and some not so much. Death and birth are facts. They come to us from outside. Yet, we still have the choice of freely giving to our being a meaning for which we are responsible. Among our considerations are that death and finitude are separate issues. If human beings were immortals, they would still be finite. To be finite is to choose oneself, to make known to oneself what one is by projecting oneself toward one possible to the exclusion of others. The act of freedom is the assumption and creation of finitude. If I make myself, I make myself finite and my life is unique. Yet, death haunts me and is at the heart of every project as the reverse side, about which I rarely think about or discuss. I do not want to imagine the death of my possibilities and projects, so I leave them on the reverse side of all my projects. I do not allow death to penetrate my consideration and implementation of my projects. We discover the meaning of our lives in the living of it. Our freedom makes us carry the weight of the world upon our shoulders. This responsibility is not resignation. It is the logical requirement of the consequences of our freedom. Every event in the world can be revealed to me as an opportunity. We therefore apprehend ourselves in anguish. Our anguish derives from our being those compelled to decide the meaning of being. The one who realizes in anguish this condition as being thrown into a responsibility that extends to the very abandonment has no longer either remorse, regret, or excuse. The underlying anxiety, dread, or anguish of our lives is the weight of freedom that the responsibility we have for the creation of the meaning of our lives. We allow the anguish and dread to overtake us so that most of us live inauthentic lives as we flee the freedom we have to develop of our mode of being in the world and accept responsibility we have for it.

Meaning and authenticity arise only on the foundation of the project of living. This project involves the doing and having involved in life reducing themselves to the desire of the human being to be itself genuinely and authentically. The desire to be ourselves expresses a lack in the present. What we desire is fullness of Being. An example is sexual desire. Love is a fundamental relation. One surpasses the object of desire and moves toward fullness of Being. Unsatisfied desire is empty of the fullness of Being that we desire. This desire for fullness involves the security of fully being oneself while being freely responsible for this fullness of self we have achieved. Of course, this desire is irrational. In this way, desire and love leads to a non-existent ideal that is self-contradictory and irrational. We seek to fulfill this ideal by various modes of being as we decide in fulfilling the project of living. We may see it for ourselves, or we may need some assistance, but deciphering the patterns of behavior as well as insignificant and superficial behavior become revelations of the whole person. The task is hermeneutic. Every act reduces itself to having/possessing, and every having reduces to the desire to be. Thus, reducing psychological reflections to childhood desires is not helpful. We are more helpful if we think of human reality as a choice of being through our acting and possessing. Every human reality is a project toward fullness of being. Human reality is a passion projecting loss of our limits so that we can experience fullness of Being. The passion of humanity becomes a useless one.[40]

As free beings, we cannot count ourselves among the realm of things.  True, our will is often weak, thereby putting doubt upon our genuine freedom.  Further, every act takes place within a background in which freedom is at least difficult to discern, if not entirely absent.  The real choice is that of our whole character and manner of being in the world.  If we are alive, our situation is open.  It implies both that it calls up specially favored modes of resolution, and that it is powerless to bring one into being by itself.  What is freedom?  It is never determinism and never absolute choice.  I am not a thing; I am not pure consciousness.  Nothing determines me from outside because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world.  We are true by the mere fact of belonging to the world; yet not like other things in the world.  We need have no fear that our choices or actions restrict our liberty, for such actions set us free from determinism.  Philosophy has no other purpose than to help us see such choices clearly once more.  What is here required is silence, for only the hero lives out his or her relation to people and the world, and it is not fitting that another speak in the name of the hero.[41]

William James famously outlined his understanding of the mystical experience. They are ineffable in that one can describe them only in the language of metaphor. Strong feelings such as joy or awe or dread or wonder are involved and words cannot contain or express the feeling. They are transient; they are brief and may come and go, so one cannot live in a permanent state of such consciousness. One is passive in that one does not work for them but receives them. They are noetic in that they involve a form of knowledge. They know something they did not know before. What they know is not another bit of knowledge or piece of information, but another reality. Importantly, such experiences are transformative. They transform a person's way of seeing and being. They see the world differently. Rather than seeing the world as "ordinary," they frequently see it as "suchness," as the playful and wondrous dance of the void. Moreover, mystical experiences also transform a person's way of being, leading to freedom from conventional anxieties and inhibitions and to compassion as a way of relating to the world. 

I am focusing upon the event nature of such an experience because that is the focus of Heidegger. Yet, transformative experiences that bring one to an authentic life are not always mystical types of moments. They can occur in the ordinary and everyday experiences of a human life. 

The British writer and humorist, Maximillian Beerbohm (1872-1956), has a story called “The Happy Hypocrite.” It is a sort of parable. The main character is a notoriously self-centered individual, named — appropriately enough — Lord George Hell. After many years of overindulgence in pleasures of the flesh, Lord George is a wreck of a man — as can be seen most clearly in his face, which is bloated and unhealthy looking. Something happens one day that changes George’s life forever. He sees a beautiful young woman and falls in love. It is a singularly pure attraction for such a corrupt and degenerate man. With every good intention, he wants to make her his wife — but he knows she would never accept his offer if she knew what he really was like. There is an element of magic to this story. Lord George Hell puts on the mask of a saint to hide his sinner’s face. As far as anyone knows, he is a kind and virtuous man. He courts the young woman and marries her. They live happily together. That is, until a woman shows up from George’s past. The mask does not fool her. She knows the man underneath it (or thinks she does). One day, in the presence of George’s wife, she confronts him and tears off his mask, expecting to reveal the bloated, pockmarked face of the old degenerate. What she reveals is something quite different. The mask was magical in many ways. Behind the mask of a saint is now the face of a true saint — the saint Lord George Hell has become, by wearing the mask.

The movie Life as a House (2001) is the story of a very dysfunctional family. The movie depicts an amazing process of transformation. The relationship between Sam, the rebellious teen, and George, his father, goes through a change as they tear down a shack and build a house together. As they build the house, Sam rebuilds his self-esteem and sense of identity. In the early stages of this transformation, George tells Sam, “Change can be so constant you don’t even feel the difference until there is one. It can be so slow that you do not know your life is better or worse until it is. Or, it can just blow you away, making you something different in an instant.”

We cannot speak about our lives without considering the direction it is taking. It imagines that our lives have significance or relevance. Who are we? We are raising the question of personal identity. We have an awareness of the various stages through which we have traversed in our lives. We are aware of some continuity, but we are also aware of various changes that have occurred. We might use the metaphor of a human life as participating in a play. I am asking about my role in the play. We might receive cues and a few lines, but we have not read the entire play. I receive the cues, perform my role in the play, and I exit. My life may feel pointless to me, but I assume the producer of the play fits it into the theme of this part of the play. The image breaks down because the producer has not given me the information to fulfill the role. Yet, my existence as a human being precedes my discovery of myself as a living and responsible human being. Our family history narrows our choices. Combined with early childhood experiences, the range of choices we will have is narrowing further. The ego grows in the desire for recognition. Even the shy person has an exaggerated sense of the attention the crowd pays to him or her. At the same time, the intersubjective situation of being human creates various communities of togetherness. Here is the basis for various forms of unions, professional associations, and other groups with which we freely associate. At the same time, we have the shared secret, that which we prefer not to discuss even with our closest friends. The internal struggle is often between the person I recently was the person I long to be tomorrow. To contemplate the pattern of our lives is to become aware of moods that arise from our depths. Past and future clasp hands in the present. Many of us, when we contemplate childhood, develop a feeling of exile. Exiled homesickness as an adult does not mean childhood was unusually happy. Our nostalgia for childhood is a longing for the irrevocable state of wonderful irresponsibility and of being the object of protective care and guidance. The innocence of childhood, the feeling of so much possibility laying ahead, the idea of have an impact in whatever course my life would take, lend themselves such nostalgia. Such awareness of the texture of our lives makes us aware that our lives are more than our projects. We are thrown into the world, but we are also bound to those who have gone before us.[42]

We are thrown into the world, but this makes us aware of the mystery contained within the family bond, which is a further expression of the mystery of Being. The complex arrangements of modern society tend to empty parenting of the richness earlier societies had. A form of nihilism would propose that I never asked to be born. It suggests that life is an imposition and has been thrust upon us. This refusal of the parental bond, of refusing to view the gifted quality of life, leads to a loss of the spirituality of family. Parenting is of technical interest to the biologist but little more than that. Children are renouncing their heritage. Refusing to acknowledge the bond with the parent leads to the interpretation that they are children of nobody. When children deny their parents, their parents will return to the favor. The estrangement between parents and children is masked by customary tolerance and decency. We cannot understand the family from a purely objective level.[43]

Human beings exist in a way that is unique among other entities in the world, for only they are aware that they are in both mood and understanding. Some notion of self is important here. The self is always in the process of forming and is therefore incomplete. Human beings are potentialities that must be responsibly and courageously actualized during the process of living. We can miss an authentic life. Human existence involves living in the tensions or polarities that constitute a human life. We are the facticity of birth, gender, nationality, and death, but we are also possibility in the fulfillment of our projects. We are beings who rationalize, and we are beings of moods like anxiety, despair, and dread. We are individuals and we are communal beings. We are responsible, guided by conscience, but we are also impotent. The polarities lead to an anxiety that expresses a concern for our existence with its potential and its precariousness. Such anxiety is a mode of awareness of nothingness or nullity and thus the precarious dimension of human life. We employ various devices and illusions to tranquilize our anxiety. The tensions and polarities of a human life will end when death overtakes us. The fact that we continued living with the tensions suggests that our lives make sense to us and are meaningful. We experience the disorder of our lives. We can describe it as fallen, alienated, and estranged. An authentic life will have a unity, stability, and structure that have held the polarities of existence in balance and allow the person to reach fulfillment. When one becomes aware of the possibility of living an authentic life, the imbalance implied in tensions and polarities resolve themselves in a temporal balance of commitment to our possibility and acceptance of our facticity. Our care for the world unites the decisions we make, but an ultimate concern or commitment has greater potential to unite the various tensions of a human life. Embracing the call or vocation that arises out of life experience is a leap, a faith commitment that takes us beyond simple rational analysis.[44]

As Heidegger posed the question, what is the meaning of Being? The answer will not arise in metaphysical speculation. The answer will not come from any fanciful appeal to a world beyond the world of human experience. Human beings are the ones who raise the question of meaning. The meaning of our lives arises because we do not naturally live our lives meaningfully. We naturally fall into a life dominated and dictated by the Other/They. Something will need to change if a life of everydayness is to become an authentically lived life. The underlying fear and anxiety of everydayness can lead us to search for something different. One possibility is that meaning arises as we have a mystical encounter in facing the nothingness of death. We courageously accept the project of living by living with the shadow of death in every decision we make. Another possibility is that meaning arises as we live our lives and accepting full responsibility for our decisions. Some truth may reside in both possibilities. 

Disclosure through mood and a proposed expansion

Here is a good place for us to push back against existentialism. Marcel is of some help in doing so, as he disagrees with Kierkegaard and Heidegger that anxiety and dread are the primary motivators toward Being.  He believed there is an aspiration toward Being revealed in love, in addition to the disquieting mood in life. 

Existentialism is right when it identifies mood as an important disclosure of the human being and the possibility of a meaningful and whole life. No one could disagree that our fear of something in the world, our anxious connection to a world from which we will depart, profoundly disclose what it is to be human. Our attempts to tranquilize our experience of the world and flee from all that our death means discloses the inauthenticity with which most of us live.

Phenomenology and psychology alike have verified the basic insight of Schleiermacher. With Heidegger, we can agree that mood discloses our being as a whole, constituting our openness to the world. Feelings are not just a chance state of the moment, but a pointing toward the future, a way I want something to be. Feelings always occur in a personal field, an experience of one's self as personal and an imagining of others even if no one else is literally present. Feeling has a regressive aspect in revealing the past and especially childhood experiences; it also has progressive aspect. Schleiermacher also discovered the significance of religious feeling within the wholeness that marks affective life. In religious feeling, the wholeness of human life, present in all feeling, becomes a theme, although Schleiermacher obscures his insights by reference to self-consciousness. Feeling anticipates the distinction and correlation effected by the intellect, even though because of its vagueness feeling depends on thinking for definition. Thought can never exhaustively transfer to its own sphere what is present in feeling.

            Martin Heidegger gives to the modern discussion of mood its primary impulse. He follows Kierkegaard in regarding the mood of anxiety as key and point of departure in the question of the wholeness of human existence. Unlike Kierkegaard, he relates anxiety only to finitude and not to the relation of finitude to infinitude. For him, freedom is the decision in favor of authenticity. The primacy of anxiety has a methodological basis since anxiety is adapted to show the relation of moods to the whole of life and since it is exposed to the void and is thereby related to freedom. Although this analysis comes across as one-sidedly negative, even for Heidegger joy is the mood in which the freedom of the Dasein finds expression. In his later writings, moods became the working of the Spirit, who elevates human beings above themselves. Plato could speak of the pleasure in wisdom (Republic 582a10f) and then of reprehensible pleasure (Philebus 49d7). The latter work is a discussion of the ambivalence of pleasure that shows why pleasure is not the criterion of the good. The Stoics made all pleasure reprehensible. Clearly, in every happy mood life seems full and complete. Yet, moods change. 

            If truth and meaning are disclosure, I wonder if existentialism has disclosed the phenomena of the human. Its description of everydayness and its inauthenticity runs the risk of moralistically driving too sharp of a distinction with an authentic life. 

Granting that as soon as we are born, we begin dying, we need to take into our thought and life that we received the gift of life. It is a gift because we did nothing to cause it or earn it. While the gift of life is common, no gift like us has ever existed or will ever exist again. In the words of science, no set of genes as we possess has ever existed or will ever exist again. In the words of psychology, while we share much thought and life with family, the community, and the nation, no one will have the set of experiences that will shape our passions and talents. So much about us is like others, but we are unique. Thus, while underlying anxiety as we move toward the nothingness of death may have a deeper influence upon us than we may know, gratitude for the gift of life may also influence us more than we know. Think of the spontaneous joy and laughter of everyday life as an expression of our gratitude. Think of learning a skill so that we go out to earn our way in life as gratitude for the gift of life. Think of committing ourselves in love to another person and giving to others the gift of life as an expression of gratitude for the life we have received. With many persons, such gratitude is buried deep behind fear, anxiety, and anger. However, the intuition that we have some responsibility to give back in the form of making a positive difference in the lives of others is a good one and suggests the gifted quality of the life we have received.

            Is love a mood? Love is an aspect of our average everydayness that I would find constitutive of human life. Freud could write much about sex and the neurotic dimension of love. Granting that love has that dimension, which in this context would be a descent into inauthenticity, I am confident that most of us have experienced other dimension of love that are expressions of authenticity. As corrupted as sexual expression can become, I would hope that many persons have the pleasure of a loving sexual experience.

            Is the aesthetic experience a mood? Our artful approach to the equipment or tools of everyday is an important suggestion of who we are. Things present-to-hand or ready-to-hand are never just tools. They are part of our lives because we have made an aesthetic judgment rather than simply a utilitarian judgment. We are willing to go out of our way to appreciate beauty. Whether it be the attractiveness of nature that stops us in our journey or the beauty of a person that has caught our eye, the aesthetic is constitutive of what it means to be human. 

This leads me to consider the dimension of human life of sheer wonder and awe in the presence of the mystery of life. Descartes could say that because he is thinking, “I am.” Yet, I hope we can make such an affirmation not the result of logic, but with a sense of humility and wonder.[45] Why is there something rather than nothing? We do not know, but we wonder about it. In the vastness of the universe, most of which is dark, with places of heat and light that generate tremendous amounts of energy, why is there even one, planet let alone the possibility of others, that can sustain any life at all. Yet, here we are, animals who live with anxiety, who have enough reason to seek to understand, interpret, and develop judgments about the world, and who live with the complexities of discourse and language. 

I am not sure what to do with this, but I am struck by the laughter, joy, humor, and happiness of which human beings are capable. I mentioned that we often spend a long time resisting the spirit of truth, questioning whether we love it. However, once the disclosure that is truth encounters us, at some point, the spirit of truth gives birth to joy When we think of the struggle involved in finding our place in life, finding the unique reason for which we are here, the serious ethical question of the manner of relating to the natural world and to the world of people, we can still pause for expressive enjoyment, exuberance, pleasure, fun, and amusement. I would imagine sexual pleasure would be part of this discussion. When such moments are genuine and spontaneous, we do so for no deeper reason than the desire to do them. Given the structure of existentialism, one must show how each of these experiences of our average everydayness descends into inauthenticity. I do not think that would be difficult to do, as appreciation of the beautiful becomes obsessive possession, as the sense of wonder descends into unproductive daydreaming, and as enjoyment descends into the shallow pursuits of hedonism. 

Despite sin and its consequences, we repeatedly know the original joy in life, joy in the richness, breadth, and beauty of creation and in each new day, joy in the illuminations of the life of the spirit, power from action within the order of community life, and a turning to others and participation in their joys and sorrows. We have achieved astonishing things and known periods of high cultural blossoming. Yet, even in the best of times, dark forces have been at work through anxiety and desire that have brought death and destruction. 

In his journal entry for 1834-6, Kierkegaard said he no interest in his theological examinations, suspecting he engages them to make his father happy. He desires clarity for “what I am to do.” He wants knowledge, but only because it must precede action. He wants to know his destiny. He wants to know what Deity wants of him. He wants “to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die.” He will find it primarily in becoming an author. He thinks one must know oneself before one will learn the path of life one must choose. He refers to people who, because of “spiritual laziness,” satisfy themselves with the crumbs of the tables of others. He starts seeing himself as different from “ordinary” people and not interested in “practical life.” He commits himself to an inward journey, and thereby to what he knows will be a battle. In one aphorism, he notes, “It is very important in life to know when your cue comes.”

Pondering questions of who we are, what our vocation or role might be in life, the meaning of Being, feel different the more part of our way of life involves welcoming others. The more we focus upon ‘I exist,” the less we actually “exist.” The necessity of the question of Being arises because of our sense that an over-functionalized world is lacking something of vital importance. The pressure from the question of Being arises from deep-rooted urge or appeal. An increasingly functional and technical culture has led to an acute lack, impoverishment, and aridity of the experience people have of their lives.[46]

What does it say about us that, despite the nothingness of the end toward which all of us move, despite our loss of all that about which we care and love, we have the capacity for gratitude for having lived, open ourselves to love and friendship, stop what we are doing to gaze upon beauty, and stand in awe of the mystery that surrounds us and resides within us? It seems obvious to me that each of these further constitutive aspects of human existence unite around Being as care in that each expresses the care each of us has for the world into which we have been thrown. Including such moods as disclosure of who human beings are would lead to a different existential analysis of the human. 

In fact, what if the end toward which we move is not nullity, void, or nothingness? I am thinking only of the phenomenon of the human at this point. We received the gift of life because of togetherness. Not only was sexual desire present, but someone nurtured us through the initial stages of our lives when we were dependent upon the care of others. No one could substitute themselves so that we could receive that gift. Only I can receive the gift. In an analogous way, the end toward which we all move is an end only we can experience. No one can take my place. However, as we received the gift of life, we will surrender our lives as well as the things and people about which we have cared and loved. That is what causes our fear, anxiety, or dread. We have cared and loved our world. Our world has touched us profoundly. We do not want to lose that about which we have cared, but we have experienced such losses throughout our lives. Death is the final surrender not only of our lives, but of that about which we have cared and loved. However, even in death, togetherness is present. What we have given to others will continue in them. We have given money, time, talent, and passion, to causes and people. What we have given will continue in them. We are social beings, we are Beings-in-the-world, in birth, in the living of our lives, and in our deaths. 

What is Being? How can we give to Being a meaning that is intelligible for us? Such questions have behind them a felt need to devote ourselves to understanding our lives and experiences as fully possible. We can embark upon this enquiry only if some fullness of life is our starting point in a way that also assumes relation, togetherness with, and the intersubjective dimension of human life. The underlying reality of human life is the presence of a community. We concern ourselves with questions of Being because we have a consciousness of the underlying unity that ties us others. They are fellow-travelers and fellow-creatures.[47]

Existentialism and modern culture

            The feeling of exile is, the sensation of a void within which never leaves, the irrational longing to hark back to the past or to speed up the march of time, is a mood that might describe many. One has memories that serve no purpose. The past becomes something one savors with regret. One in exile lives with the feeling that something is mission in their lives. They are hostile ot the past, impatient with the present, and cheated of a future. One in exile feels forced to live behind prison bars. One must learn to be content to live only for the day, along under the vast indifference of the sky.[48]

In his journal for 1834-6, Kierkegaard refers negatively to the “petty-bourgeois mentality,” contrasting it with its opposite, the Quaker mentality. In the entry for 1837-8, his negative evaluation of “petty-bourgeois” included “well-raised children” becoming “useful members of the state.”

            Political movements typically are a retrogressive move toward the irrational. The people become obedient to the one they have lifted to prominence, thereby obeying themselves. The political hero gets people to vote for them with noise, torches, and weapons, indifferent as to whether they understand anything. Everything becomes political.[49]

Most existentialists will have a negative view of the busy economic activity of modernity. The focus of activity is on using nature and the things produced as tools, so we tend to look upon ourselves and other people as objects to be used. Participants in modernity tend to view each other as tools that useful for this moment and easily dismissed when no longer useful. A major thread in Marcel was the struggle to protect one's subjectivity from annihilation by modern materialism and a technologically driven society. Marcel argued that scientific egoism replaces the "mystery" of being with a false scenario of human life composed of technical "problems" and "solutions". For Marcel, the human subject cannot exist in the technological world, instead being replaced by a human object. As he points out in Man Against Mass Society and other works, technology has a privileged authority with which it persuades the subject to accept its place as person in the internal dialogue of science; and as a result, humanity is convinced by science to rejoice in his own annihilation.

            For Marcel, human beings also live in a society which is broken. Modernity is the movement toward treating human beings as machines.  The world is under condemnation.  Philosophy itself is part of this devaluing of human life as it moves away from the concerns of daily life.  As philosophy concerns itself with abstractions, it advances the brokenness of the world.  He came to believe, however, in the overabundance of Being.  The deficiency of human life can be lessened to varying degrees by meaningful action.

            Persons in modern society have lost awareness of the sense of the ontological or Being. Persons who participate in complex modern societies become an agglomeration of functions. This treatment leads to an inward life of dread. A functionalized world offers stifling sadness. It creates dullness and intolerable unease. The distinction between full and empty is far more significant than the philosophical issue of the one and the many. Life in a world centered on function is liable to despair because such a world is empty. It rings hollow. To eliminate mystery is to move in that psychological and pseudo-scientific category of the purely natural. It becomes a degraded rationalism. In such a world the ontological need is exhausted and brings the consequent atrophy of the faculty of wonder. Being is necessary. I aspire to participate in this Being, for exhaustive analysis will not reach the fullness of Being. We have an urge towards an affirmation that seems impossible to make. The primary ontological issue is the one who raises the question of Being. How are we qualified to begin such an investigation? To raise the ontological question is to raise the question of Being and of oneself as potential wholeness. We affirm the primacy of Being over epistemology and the pursuit of accurate knowledge, for epistemology must presuppose our participation in Being. The fullness of Being will be a mystery. A mystery may present itself in a problem but will bring us outside ourselves in exploration so that we become aware that we are not dealing with a simple problem. We might think of the mystery of body/soul in the philosophical and religious tradition. The mystery of the problem of evil is degraded when we treat it as a problem we can solve. Evil that is only stated or observed is no longer evil that one suffers or endures. It ceases to be evil to us. We get some sense of its mystery when it touches us. Many people have lost the ability to grasp the tragic factors of human existence. Yet, the will to negation that discloses itself in despair, betrayal, and suicide also disclose the tragic aspect of a human life. Despair is a reaction to the insolvency of life, while hope implies its solvency. Hope asserts that there is something in the heart of Being that affirms my aspiration toward Being. Beyond all date, inventories, and calculations, a mysterious principle cooperates with my aspiration toward Being. Hope is the center of the ontological mystery. Such hope has a prophetic tone. Hope and despair subsist until the end. They are inseparable. While the structure of the world in which we live permits despair, yet it is only such a world that can give rise to an unconquerable hope. Such hope springs from humility, for the fulfillment of hope does not depend upon us. The proud person, drawing strength from oneself, is cut off from genuine communion with others.[50]

For many persons, the world is loathsome due to the depth of suffering, but they learn to feel at one with others who must suffer it with them.[51] One can grant that every ill that happens in human experience has its good side. It can open our eyes and force us to take thought of the pattern our lives are weaving. The presence of an evil helps people rise above themselves. One would have to be insane, a coward, or blind to give in to submit meekly to such evil. The presence of so much suffering can lead people to to think of themselves as fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out. Victories will not last, but that is no reason to give up the struggle. The fight against suffering becomes a never-ending defeat. We may rightly feel profound and deep anger with the presence of such evil and suffering, so that what we have left is a mad revolt.[52] Albert Camus, in The Plague[53] protests the death of an innocent child due to plague. A priest offers the possibility that we should love what we do understand. “No, Father. “I’ve a very different idea of love. And until my dying day I shall refuse to love a scheme of things in which children are put to torture.” In the sermon by the priest, he says that we can understand the judgment of an adult who has done evil, but “we see no reason for a child’s suffering. And, truth to tell, nothing was more important on earth than a child’s suffering, the horror it inspires in us, and the reasons we must find to account for it.” Yet, “religion in a time of plague could not be the religion of every day.” The priest will say that the love of God is a hard love to learn, but only it can reconcile us to suffering in the world. 

It may well be that much of existentialism is trying to find a way to be a saint without God. Granted, one may feel more fellowship with the defeated than the saints. One might feel heroism or sanctity is appealing. Yet, heroism and sanctity, understood as rising above average everydayness, hearing the call that will arise out of our experiences in life, and responding with courage to the possibilities of whom we shall become as we live out of the projects that derive from the call, knowing it is endless defeat, may well describe the authentic life.

            The modern world has created a situation in which the preposition “with” or the noun “togetherness” has lost meaning. The idea of close human relationships as found in large families, old friends, and old neighbors, is becoming increasingly hard to put into practice. The complex and unified social organization of technically oriented society creates this situation. In addition, as agents, behavior ought to contribute toward the progress of “the common good,” which, as nice as it sounds, is something distant, oppressive, and tyrannical. Such soft tyranny by votes can become harsh. It can feel at times that we are ticketed and labelled. The obvious monstrosity of totalitarian nations strips persons naked before the power of the State. Yet, the administrative machine and general bureaucratization of life in free societies can feel similar. It can favor abstract, depersonalized, and uncreative tasks and oppose creative energies. Such a society would achieve equality by levelling down to the level where the creative impulse fails to emerge. Such equality is not compatible with community.[54]

            It has become a common observation that people in our technological society have an incapacity to follow out a long continuous thought. An analogy would be the perseverance required of the long-distance runner. People look for every shortcut and in as little time as possible. Yet, true intelligence is the enemy of the ready-made. At the same time, one needs a distance and aloofness, a refusal to immediately jump in to participate, to engage in such thought. One needs to be willing to live on the borderland, resisting the temptation to merge with the fashionable ideology of the day. Too many people fling themselves blindly into an idea or opinion. Living in the borderland helps one maintain a properly critical spirit. Failure to maintain this critical spirit toward one’s own ideas, opinions, and groups to which one has joined oneself is a calamity that threatens the fabric of free societies.[55]

            The critique of western democracies let some existentialists like Sartre to side with socialism and develop a naïve flirtation with Soviet communism. However, many were able to see the difference and refuse to place life in western democracies to the disadvantage of life in the Soviet Union.

            The existentialist concerns regarding the complex economic, social, and political arrangements of modern, technological, and capitalist societies, are well worth pondering. One may simply learn the rules of the game and participate in the game. One participates by finding an occupation through which one is productive and which might contribute to a meaningful life, by establishing a household, and by practicing respect for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness in self and others. One can also reflect upon the qualities necessaries to participate in such a complex society, such as the willingness to take risks, which will involve faith in oneself and others, to invest in the future, which will involve hope, and to care about the needs of one’s co-workers, employees, and customers, which will involve a form of love. In an economics organized around the market, it will be the the free exchange of goods and services that will determine the economic plan of the nation, and thus will guide millions of people regarding what is produced and what the price is for what is produced. Political freedom will always mean vigorous debate that usually has limits because the majority in one election may be the minority in the next. If one changes one’s stance toward economically and politically free societies from that of oppressed/oppressor, to a stance of appreciating the creativity and responsibility that such a society offers, one can meaningful participate in ways that can lead to a full and authentic life.

            Existentialism was close to the uneasiness that many experienced after WWI and again after WWII. They do not dissociate themselves from that uneasiness. They point to the negative and absurd because that was what their generation encountered and they feel some obligation to consider it seriously. Their world had witnessed unparalleled hatred. People became bureaucrats of hatred and torture. Hearts needed healing. A transformation of hatred into a thirst for justice needed to occur. Not giving in to hatred, not making any concessions to violence, not allowing passions to become blind, are the things one can still do for friendship and against all forms of tyranny. The media can create a climate that makes violence and insult seem like the way the world is, but we must protest becoming like the enemy.[56] In a divided world, the world needs real dialogue between people who remain what they are and speak their minds. Even the atheist can recognize that the world needs Christians who remain Christians, Muslims who remain Muslims, Jews who remain Jews, Hindus who remain who Hindus, and Buddhists who remain Buddhists, for the world to have real dialogue.[57] Within the Leftist movement and under the influence of Marx, freedom was viewed as nothing more than a bourgeois hoax.[58]The accusations can continue between democracies on the one hand and tyrannical or communist or Islamic regimes on the other as to which is the worse in their contribution to human suffering. One thing that does not change is the victim. The only way to break the circle is to revive the value of freedom.[59] While freedom has its privileges, it especially has duties.[60] Freedom does not have many allies.[61] The decrease of genuinely liberal energies and the insane admiration of force needs to find protests from all parts of the political spectrum.[62]

            The critique of western democracies and their histories of imperialism and colonialism was beginning. For some, it was useless to condemn several centuries of European expansion and absurd to include the denunciation of the Italian Christopher Columbus regarding the Americas or Lyautrey in the French administration in Morocco.  The period of colonialism is over. We need to evaluate honestly its positive and negative influence upon the people it touched. That period did something to those who designed it and to those on the receiving end of the design. It was not an absolute evil or good. Like all human acts, it was a mixed bag. We need to acknowledge the past and draw conclusions. A nation demonstrates its strength when it has the courage to point out its mistakes. The same nation must not forget the reasons it has for self-esteem. In a fight for truth, the fight itself must elucidate the values for which one fights. When fighting for your truth, you have to care that you do not destroy it with the very arms used to defend it.[63] Tyrannical forces are always threatening free societies. Every tyranny is a lie, so it is worth fighting a lie for a half-truth. Freedom is a perpetual risk and an exhausting adventure. That is why people avoid the risk and the exacting demands of liberty and accept any bondage that will at least comfort the soul.[64]

            One concern is that of nihilism, which descends to the notion that all that matters is power and force. The prevalence of spitefulness in the public square is an expression of nihilism. Yet, the aim of art and life is to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every person and in the world.[65]

            Existentialists often place themselves on the political left. It may well be that rebellion is a constant in the human condition. In life, we have choice of enduring or not enduring. The decision to live means that our personal existence has a positive value. If we decide to rebel, it is because we have decided that a human society has a positive value. We discover the content of that value within the conditions of living. Among the conditions are the limits of suffering and death. Revolt is an essential dimension of humanity and from it we can discover a principle of existence. The revolt of the slave against the master is rebellion in its classic form. However, modern life has brought a metaphysical revolt against the conditions of life and an aspiration toward order. We see this revolt in Sade, Baudelaire, the Romantics, Nietzsche, and the surrealists. Rejecting the limits of the human condition and its creator, they took responsibility for building an earthly kingdom where their chosen principles predominate. They reconstruct the world in accord with their ideas according to their own concepts. Suffering has no justification. Historical revolt is political. Rebellion is action without plan and can be a spontaneous protest. Revolution implies destruction of the present and the establishment of a new order. We see this in the French Revolution, of regicide and deicide, and from Rousseau to Stalin, the course of revolution moves from loudly proclaiming liberty but always leads to authoritarian dictatorship. Nietzsche in his theory of super-humanity, and Marx with his classless society, replaced the promise of the beyond with the promise of later on. The individual must submit to the central committee that has the responsibility of imposing new order. All revolutions in modernity have led to a reinforcement of the power of the State. The strange and terrifying growth of the modern state is the logical conclusion of inordinate technical and philosophical ambitions that are foreign to the true spirit of rebellion while giving birth to the revolutionary spirit within modernity. The prophetic utopian dream of Marx and the ambitious dream of the “end of history and art” proclaimed by Hegel are destroyed by the State founded upon terror. Rebellion signifies unlimited slavery. The 1917 revolution that gave birth to Soviet Communism fought for universal dominion. Total revolution demands control of the world. The reason is the technological advance of modernity. If we are naturally rebels, we always live in a society that is deficient. From our perspective. We long for recognition and individuality and we long for identification with a group. We long for our uniqueness to find recognition and thus rebel against conformity to the community. Yet, we need the community as well. The revolutionary believes that any amount of suffering and death is worth the implementation of the ideas the revolutionary holds dear. The desire and hope for freedom and justice inevitably leads to the destruction of the present order and the birth of a new order. However, the new order will always, in the context of modernity, bring greater tyranny than the previous order. The technological means to do so are present and the revolutionary will use them to impose the ideas of the revolution. One who loves a friend loves in the present, while the revolutionary loves a person who has not yet appeared. If one is of a revolutionary mindset, one needs to recognize the limits of the human condition and recognize that the suffering death required to implement one’s revolutionary ideas are not worth the price. The revolutionary mind might go the path of establishing organic communities.  Such communities would have deliberate freedom against the rational tyranny of the State, altruistic individualism against the colonization of the masses, which would express the endless opposition of moderation to excess that has animated history. Such life would be in perpetual conflict with the established order. Excess will keep its place in our heart, the place where we find solitude. We carry within us our places of exile. Our task is not to unleash our crimes and ravages upon the world. We must fight them as they exist within us and in others. We may need to see the inborn impulse of revolt inspired by a new spirit of action. Such rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of live. The revolutionary spirit and the rebel within all of us can show that real generosity toward the future lies in giving our all to the present.[66] Although I doubt the revolutionary mind can accept such limits on their dreams and activities, we need to remember that great ideas come into the world as gently as doves.[67]

 

Existentialism and morality

If existentialism is right, the moral life is part of the losing ourselves in the anonymous other, guilt and conscience arising from inauthentic life. The authentic call of conscience is to face one’s life and possibilities. Here is a synoptic awareness of human being in its authentic possibility and its actual disorder.[68] The call is toward leading one’s life apart from fixed moral standards. One thinks through to the end, not for fixed standards, but to find one’s deepest aspirations given the preciousness of time. Since no one has the perspective of God, only I can take responsibility for my life in this time and place. The moral is partial because it does not disclose a way of existing in the world, is evasive because it is motivated by a flight from anxiety, and derivative because the capacity for moral obligation presupposes that one is guilty in one’s very Being. Morality loses its fundamental place in human existence because it is an escape into the universal. 

Most existentialists will question conventional morality as a way of hiding in the Other rather than embracing the full responsibility of the freedom of this moment. Therefore, they will shift the traditional view of moral instruction as guidance that will lead to a full, meaningful, and happy life to a notion of living authentically out of the personal calling and insight one receives, the courage to see anew the inauthentic life one has been leading, and the courage to live our lives in its finitude and movement toward the nullity of death. The traditional view would look upon sin as crossing the line established by accepted and officially recognized codes that could lead to persons to their own prison and self-destruction. Not yet thinking of criticism, we should note that this shift in language is not a denial of moral concern, for authenticity becomes the new moral compass and inauthenticity becomes the new sin from which one needs liberation.

In The Existential Background of Human Dignity, Marcel refers to a play he had written in 1913 entitled Le Palais de Sable, to provide an example of a person who was unable to treat others as subjects. Roger Moirans, the central character of the play, is a politician, a conservative who is dedicated to defending the rights of Catholicism against free thought. He has set himself up as the champion of traditional monarchy and has just achieved a remarkable success in the city council where he has attacked the secularism of public schools. It is natural enough that he should be opposed to the divorce of his daughter Therese, who wants to leave her unfaithful husband and start her life afresh. In this instance he proves himself heartless; all his tenderness goes out to his second daughter, Clarisse, whom he takes to be spiritually very much like himself. But now Clarisse tells him that she has decided to take the veil and become a Carmelite. Moirans is horrified by the idea that this creature, so lovely, intelligent, and full of life, might go and bury herself in a convent and he decides to do his utmost to make her give up her intention... Clarisse is deeply shocked; her father now appears to her as an impostor, virtually as a deliberate fraud... In this case, Moirans is unable to treat either of his daughters as a subject, instead rejecting both because each does not conform to her objectified image in his mind. Marcel notes that such objectification "does no less than denude its object of the one thing which he has which is of value, and so it degrades him effectively."

Such an analysis leaves a dimension of morality unexplored. Authentic life may well arise from the morally conscientious individuality. This moral posture would provide corrective for inauthentic selfhood and losing oneself in the anonymous other. Morally conscientious individuals lift themselves above the prevailing expectations of the group to do justice to the Other by considering a higher standard than what anonymous others find respectable. Morally conscientious individuals do not drift along impelled by the social tides. They subject their prejudices and public opinion alike to critical scrutiny. Authentic life may open the possibility of authentic co-existence. Authentic individuality opens one up to others in a new way and makes liberating solicitude possible. A relation of authentic care in which one can help others become transparent to themselves in their care and to become free for it. Moral conscience separates one from anonymous others. It also enables the individual to treat others as ends in themselves beyond the horizon of their public roles and situations.  Authentic life, understood in this way, does not isolate the individual from others. Crucial to genuine moral conscience is the refusal to lose oneself in the dictates of the anonymous other. It involves willingness to take one’s stand against what is fashionable, to criticize public opinion for the sake of the community, to judge what is right beyond the horizon of the taken for granted. That one thinks for oneself does not guarantee wisdom. However, the habit of critical reflection puts an obstacle in the way of banal evil. The presence of moral conscience attests to authentic individuation and freedom.

Imagine if we lost the theoretical coherence of science. Imagine if we still used scientific words like neutrino and atomic weight but had no overall framework to explain how they fit together. That is the state of our moral discourse today. We still use words describing virtue and vice, but without any overall metaphysics.[69] Further, a discussion of virtue and vice is a recognition of commonly accepted behaviors that respect the other. As C.S. Lewis observed, anyone who thinks the moral codes of humanity are all different should be locked up in a library and be made to read three days’ worth of them. One would be bored silly by the sheer sameness. 

Death, the call of conscience and identity, and guilt - Authenticity

Those of us who participate in modern culture fear loss of meaning. Our individualism is one of the great achievements of the modern social world. We stress individual rights. We have replaced the ancient view of a hierarchy ordered by God and in which everyone had a defined and fixed place, with a social order in which we must find our own place in a constantly changing world. The world has lost its magical, enchanting quality. Our individualism, some fear, leads us to lose our connection to the larger social and universal horizon of human life. We have lost a sense of the heroic, a sense of higher purpose, of something for which we would die. Sometimes we speak of a permissive society, the “me” generation, and prevailing narcissism. Instead, what is at work is a perversion of a genuine moral ideal, that of self-fulfillment. The moral ideal includes a sense of calling toward self-fulfillment, a sense that we wasted our lives if we did not pursue this objective. Each of has an original way of being human. A certain way of being human is my own unique way. I have a sense of calling to live my life in this unique way, rather than imitate others. I must be true to myself. If I am not, I miss the point of my life; I miss what being human is for me. This view requires contact with myself, with my inner nature, which I fear is in danger of being lost, partially through external conformity to society, but also the fear that technology will me of spirit. Only I can articulate and discover that sense of self. Authenticity, self-realization, and self-fulfillment are the social context within which we carry out this quest. Authenticity points us toward a more self-responsible form of life. In an age of authenticity, people potentially become more responsible. It allows us to potentially live a fuller and differentiated life, because we live it as our own. Our freedom also gives us the possibility of sinking lower, as well as rising higher. Nothing ensures certainty as to which direction our society will take. We can fulfill this ideal as we recognize its dialogical character. It has a rational component. Persuasion rather than condemnation has a far greater potential to move more people toward self-fulfillment in the highest and best sense. We become full human agents through our acquisition of expression in art, gesture, as well as words. We conduct such exchanges with others. We do not even have a sense of self through inner monologue, but through dialogue, through interactions with other persons. However, this does not just explain the origin of our sense of self. It explains the continuing and life-long journey of discovering and articulating our sense of self. Persons seeking significance exist in a horizon of important questions. I discover my identity as I negotiate it through dialogue and through tacit dimensions of involvement in the social world. Authenticity involves creation and construction as well as discovery, originality, and opposition to the rules of society and potentially to recognized morality. However, it is also true that it requires openness to horizons of significance and self-definition in dialogue. We cannot prefer one side of the equation to the other. Neither decline nor triviality is inevitable. We need to put behind us our temptation to discern irreversible trends, and see the dialectical struggle here, which makes the outcome continually questionable in a free society. Pessimism about our culture is counter-productive. We can achieve authenticity as our journey connects us to a wider whole, both to the social world and to nature.

We fear a loss of a proper orientation toward our “end,” or purpose in human life. Our rational and technological society is another of the great achievements of the modern social world. It has led to making the world increasingly our home by giving the opportunity for more people to live comfortably in it. Yet, we complain about our social world reducing us to calculate only the economic factors in reason and to focus upon efficiency. Our fear is that we ought to include other factors than economics and efficiency. We fear a loss of resonance, depth and richness of the human spirit. The thought is that we are helpless in the presence of massive technological forces in our society. This thought is wrong.

Some observers view technology as a sign of decline. We have lost the contact with the earth and its rhythms that our ancestors had. We have lost contact with ourselves. An imperative of domination drives us and condemns us to battle against nature within us and around us. This view simplifies too much. Human beings and their societies are more complex that for which any society can account. Technology and economics may push society in a certain direction; yet, many points of resistance exist as well. The drive toward authenticity and self-fulfillment is one such arena of resistance. Further, we give unprecedented importance to the production of the conditions of ordinary life to relieve suffering on an increasingly wide scale. We affirm ordinary life, the life of production and reproduction, work and family, as areas of life that are important to us and make a crucial contribution to our social world. We do not have to live our technology the way critics claim.

A great dislocation of power has taken place in our society.  People often feel at the mercy of life. Power has shifted from individuals and local communities to national and international systems.  People have become distrustful of large bureaucracy of any type, whether in business, government, or church.  For many in the new generation, such systems of government have led to a debt for which they and their children will be paying the price.  The bureaucratic tendency is to expand, making up for their sense that they make meager contributions to the health of society.  This centralization of power has led to a growing sense of powerless ness among individuals.  People dread the entrenched structure that has become lord over them.  This leads to apathy and anonymity, a passive indifference to life, a sense that they no longer matter.  At the same time, people overcompensate by becoming chaotic, destructive, and even deadly. The repeal of personal responsibility has undermined society's ability to call wrongdoers to account for their behavior. Responsibility implies free will.  If our actions are the product of impulses or unconscious causes, free will makes no sense and might discarded as inhumane and barbarous. 

Rediscovering a sense of personal power and independence, of being one’s own self, has become an important part of the cultural climate of our time.  People search for the ability and the authority to shape their own lives and destiny. 

We fear a loss of freedom. A mild and paternalistic government can lead to a soft type of despotism. It will not result in terror and oppression. It will maintain elections and the language of freedom. As the political world becomes centralized and bureaucratic, we feel alienated from it. We feel loss of political control. The formation of meaningful programs around democratic majorities becomes increasingly difficult. This process threatens our dignity as citizens. Fragmentation will grow as people no longer identify with the political life of our social world. Decentralization of power would help here, as the example of Canada might demonstrate.

One trend within modernity often recognized is its individualism. The sense of inwardness, freedom, individuality, all of which arises out of nature, is part of the Western conception of identity. Behind the trend toward individualism and the focus on the self is the moral ideal of self-fulfillment. What may surprise some is that such an emphasis has a rich philosophical tradition in the West. Plato had a strong distinction between inner and outer life, the eternal and the changing, the soul and the body, the immaterial and the material world. Augustine could focus on discovering God within the processes of the soul. We have the capacity to give or withhold assent, which is an act of the will. People today feel they would have wasted their lives if they did not achieve self-fulfillment. However, they can achieve self-involvement only if they engage in the dialogical character of a human life. Granted, self-centered and narcissistic ways of life are a debased form of individualism, but that does not mean they are the predominate experience of the form of individualism in the West. Thus, authenticity, discovering personal identity, and self-fulfillment, are crucial elements of the culture of the West, but we do not work through this issue in isolation. We do so in dialogue. The value of authenticity is a worthy moral ideal in that it points us toward a more self-responsibility form of life. It allows us to live a fuller life. It encourages responsibility for self. Authenticity, being true to oneself, must connect to a wider reality to have its fulfillment.[70]

The prime philosophical text is to know oneself. We do not know ourselves by learning things about ourselves and the world as if both were separate objects for study. We know ourselves through disclosure. Through such disclosure we have meaning. Mood discloses our close connection to the world and leads to our dread of all that death means. Understanding discloses possibilities I have in my freedom to choose my way of existing in the world, interpretation makes clear what I think is available to me in the world, and developing assertions points out what is of use to me, predicates by pointing out characteristics meaningful to me, and communicates to another my relation to what I assert. Discourse, which includes hearing, listening, and keeping silent, discloses to others my mood and understanding. Kierkegaard says that we have two companions for the human journey. One calls us forward. The other calls us back. People keep going further. However, does nothing ever give you pause? Pausing is not a sluggish repose. Pausing is also movement, but an inward movement of the heart. To pause is to deepen oneself in inwardness. If you keep moving, you may go straight toward superficiality.[71] Listening and silence are an impart aspect of the discourse that is a human life. The pause in our everydayness opens the possibility of hearing deeply of our temporality. For existentialism, the possibility of experiencing meaningful and whole lives comes in embracing the nothingness of our end, accepting that our way of existing is always toward this future by resolutely and courageously embracing our finitude. This embrace awakens the call or appeal of conscience to break our self away from They/Other, and move toward the unique possibility we can be. Conscience discloses the inauthentic quality of our way of existing in the world. Conscience discloses our guilt. Guilt is failure to reflect this authenticity of the self. We do so in a moment of vision or illumination in which we see the everydayness in which we have lived and the possibility for a new future. The capacity for action has its ground in the call to authentic selfhood. As Kierkegaard put it, birth symbolizes the uniqueness of our vocation. To be true to ourselves in relation to this vocation is the highest thing we can practice. As Shakespeare in Henry V, Act 2, Scene 4 put it, “Self-love is not so vile a sin as self-neglecting.” We face one potential fault and one offense as to how we chose to live our lives: we have disloyalty to self or the denial of this better self. People can grasp truth, good, and beauty while being faithful to themselves. Truth does not need people, but people need truth. People true to their vocation have the pleasure of dying and losing nothing, for they have given all to their vocation. They take everything with them and they lose nothing at death.[72]

            Guilt has another dimension that existentialism will not see. It arises when we are not true to our potential but included in this potential is the type of person described in the virtue tradition. Ethical questions arise as soon as we encounter others. Coming face-to-face with the other, we face the ethical question of how we are to comport ourselves toward the other. The virtue tradition provides guidelines of behavior as we consider how we are going to relate to the other. Heidegger plays down the consciousness of guilt in the sense of having already violated an obligation and done a wrong that one cannot undo. His analysis fails to penetrate the depth of the nonidentity that makes itself known in awareness of guilt because it fails to see the rupture of communal order by a rending of the ties individuals have to their fellow human beings. Had he done so, he would have seen that the authentic self of an individual is a member of the human order to which it belongs. Had he been aware of this, he might have seen the importance of expiation (extinguishing the guilt incurred for the rupture of community, to put an end to the anger or sorrow that results from this disruption) in overcoming the nonidentity experienced in conscience that one is to accomplish in the life of the injured community. The result is that his analysis of conscience leads to an abstraction of the individual from the human community and its ethos. Heidegger has recognized the subjective form of the judgments of conscience. Yet, it abstracts conscience from all reference to the order of the social world. He has also brought into the coming of consciousness the modern notion of alienation. In fact, the call of conscience locates consciousness in its isolation. It leads into despair. Theologically, the notion of repentance opens the door to overcoming the judgment of conscience and the experience of nonidentity.[73] A different way of putting this objection is that in Bultmann we find the reduction of the Christian ethic to the ethical demand to accept one’s self and take responsibility for the world in general. Such a focus upon the individual at least seems to quit the realm of justice and the social order. It runs the risk of becoming socially irrelevant.[74]

A caution in our consideration of conscience is that Heidegger blurs the connection between conscience and identity. Freud identified conscience with the superego and therefore with the authority of society. Although he was right to see the social connection for the development of conscience, he was wrong to identify them. Individuals are not simply functions of the social world. They preserve independence from the social world.[75] We will build upon the heritage of our past, have courage in this moment, and move into an uncharted future. We experience our freedom to be the uniqueness we always have been but were previously submerged into the crowd. Here is a place to push back on the existential analysis of the human being. The call of conscience is frustrating in that it has little specificity of what it might look like in a human life. The smothering and dominating nature of They is such that one wonders how one can separate oneself from it. Such a choice embraces the anticipatory nature of this courage toward wholeness, for everydayness will always be present and attractive to us. Time has been significant in this process, the self continuing its dialogue with its past, courageously embracing the freedom of this moment, and moving toward the nothingness of the end. Death brings our lives to their fullness, totality, and wholeness. Here is the anxiety of death, that when we achieve the wholeness of our lives our possibilities are done and we are nothing. 

Heidegger will point to the call of conscience toward authenticity as a moment of vision. We see clearly. He is pointing to the significance of an event in our lives that can lead us to an authentic life. Are we responding to a summons? Yes, our circumstances can be challenging, and we can hear the call in them. In Hamlet, the play by Shakespeare, Hamlet experiences hesitation in a challenging call.

The times are out of joint 

oh cursed spite

that ever I was born to put them right.

 

Yet, out of such difficult circumstances, we may well experience a summons. In that case, we are not so much looking deep inside. We listen to the people and circumstances that are part of our lives. We respond to what we hear if we are attentive. Our temptation is to run away because of the challenge and the possibility of failure but running away will have harmful effects in the way we lead our lives. To run away from the call will also mean running away from that which will provide deep satisfaction in life. Some of us need to ponder the witness to our lives that we desire. Such a call is not a job but finds expression through a job and other aspects of our lives. Although the call involves contemplative listening to our world, and is therefore “out there,” it will have resonance with that which is deeply within us. Responding to a call is an obligation that will push us to our limits and beyond. Yet, it will connect so profoundly with us that it brings joy. It will be life-giving to you and to others influenced by you. Connecting this call with the end of our lives is a good place to begin our contemplation, listening, and attentiveness to self and world. Most of us want someone to witness to the uniqueness of our lives. What do we want them to say about us at the close of our lives? 

The question to which we respond in our calling is something like, “What does life want from me? What are my circumstances calling me to do?” We respond to the summons of life. It begins with our embeddedness in a community of people, circumstances, and inter-relations. Frederick Buechner famously put it, “At what points do my talents and deep gladness meet the world’s deep need?” Viktor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), said that it did not matter what we expected from life, but what life expected from us. We need to stop asking about the meaning of life and instead think of ourselves as those of whom life asks questions. He concluded that life had given him a moral and intellectual assignment. Such a calling or vocation feels like the person has no choice in the matter. In reality, of course, any of us can run away. We will usually do so with dire results. If one pursues it, however, one’s life becomes unrecognizable without the calling.

Heidegger was part of the attempt in 1900s philosophy to interpret death as the consummation of human existence. If we exist, we are not the totality. One finds meaning in the preceding awareness of death rather than fulfillment beyond death. In contrast to Heidegger, Sartre said that death breaks off life and robs it of any meaning. The problems we must face are in living remain with our death. Transcending the given nature of death as part of our human situation is a matter of reaching beyond mere existing. Sartre is closer to the biblical view. For the Old Testament, for example, death is separation from God. Awareness of our finitude includes awareness that death is ahead of us. Facing this end, we still have a feeling for life as we pursue the course of a human life to its end. Heidegger describes this process quite well.

The issue in conscience is the identity of the I, especially in the broader context of the social world and reality. It holds a special place of self-feelings, for in it the totality of life is present in either a positive or a repressed form. The I is at the same time the subject even if mainly in the mode of disapproval, which also implies a relation to its possible positive identity. With its negative content the conscience then forms the transition from self-feeling to self-awareness in the narrower sense of explicit self-experience and self-knowledge. From the life of feeling in which conscience is rooted, there develops a nonthematic relation to the totality of life in which subject and other are not yet distinguished. This type of feeling and feelings corresponds to the ecstatic rootage of the early individual development of a child in a symbiotic sphere that in the first weeks of life binds the child to its mother and to the world at large without any conscious distinction from the mother. Cognitive development of the child, experience of the world, and reflection on it, will bring distinguishing world, God, and self. The experience of conscience is the form in which this self-relation becomes a theme. Conflicts between individuals and social forms are the basis of internalized accusations of guilt. Historically, it had a connection with self-consciousness, but it came to refer primarily to the moral sphere. This was the view of Hegel. 

Self-identification occurs as we modify our social identity and integrate it into our projects that will become our identity. Our identity is something we create and define during social interaction. Erik H Erikson suggested the importance of basic trust as something we must carry with us in life, even as it has its source in our relation to the mother. Such basic trust opens us to the world. Self-identification involves us in trustful self-opening to the world. Identifying oneself always requires courage, appealing to Tillich’s notion of the courage to be. We do not decide to have basic trust; basic trust emerges from a process, the opposite of which is mistrust and anxiety that will lead to deformation of identity. In relation to God, however, the element of decision gains in its influence. Basic trust directs itself toward the wholeness of the self. Such wholeness is the goal of our development. The wholeness of the self finds its present manifestation as personality. Person signifies this wholeness. Boethius defined person as rationality, which set the stage for self-consciousness as constituting the person. Personality is the presence of the self in the ego. We need to consider the temporal structure of wholeness. Heidegger would say that we could anticipate wholeness by awareness of death through the call of conscience, even though the actualization of such wholeness remains obscure. For Sartre, human beings surpass the given in the direction of their totality. Each of us is an ego at every moment of our existence. We are still becoming ourselves. Yet, we also are ourselves now. Person establishes a relation between the mystery of the still incomplete individual life history that is on the way to the special destiny of the ego. Freedom is the real possibility of being myself, and thus freedom and personhood belong together. We need to stress the social conditioning of personhood. Personality arises out of the relation to the Thou and to the social world. The relation to the Thou and to the social world determines personality. In a comparable way, the self arises out of the mirror of the appraisals and expectations of others. The reference to God arises out of the theme of the wholeness of the self, as it shifts attention to that which transcends the individual. Because of this relation, persons are free in the face of their social situation. This relation frees us to be critically independent to any given social relation. The self-assertion of the individual against others and society may be the expression of a call to a more perfect fulfillment of the human destination to community. The dignity of the person suggests their divine destiny, a destiny that is the basis for the inviolability of the person. The person is not at the disposition of others.[76]

            The way of existence existentialism will suggest is to refuse the path of looking upon a human life as a problem to solve, for such an approach will lead to dogmatism or a sacrilegious theodicy. The journey along this path is narrow, difficult, and dangerous. One can only hope to proceed in this country by calling out to other travelers. This way of existing is discoverable only through love.[77]

The notion of presence arises when we ponder relationships. An authentic living is a disclosure to the other, while inauthentic living is a refusal to disclose oneself to the other. Some people reveal themselves as present and available to the other when the other is in pain or need. They make room for the other. Such persons listen in a way that gives of themselves. Presence can reveal itself in a look, a smile, an intonation, or a handshake. The unavailable person cannot make room for the other and listens to the other in a way that refuses to give of oneself. Unavailability is as essential as is betrayal, denial, or despair. Unavailability is rooted in some measure of alienation. The transition from inauthentic to authentic living can occur to anyone who has an encounter that breaks down the framework of the egocentric inauthentic life of occupation with one’s own self. To be available to others, to be present to them, is to overcome the meaningless structure of the universe and affirm the meaningfulness of this moment. Such a person has a protection against any form of the negation of life and embraces life with gratitude. Recognizing that we do not belong to ourselves and are therefore intricately interrelated, we also recognize that the most legitimate use we can make of our freedom is in our action and creative fidelity.[78]

            A form of creative fidelity is possible here. Faithfulness is a recognition of something ontologically permanent, a presence that can be maintained within us and in our lives as a presence. If so, one can also ignore, forget, and obliterate it, which would represent the possibility of betrayal that stands as a shadow over our world. Fidelity is the active perpetuation of presence. Fidelity is ontological in that it prolongs the presence of Being and corresponds to the hold Being has upon us. Creative fidelity multiplies and deepens the effect of this presence in our lives. A presence to which we are faithful exceeds the object and opens the vista of death, the ultimate test of presence. It is evident that if I read of the death of Mr. So-an-so, who is for me nothing but a name, this event is for me nothing more than the subject of an announcement. But it is quite another thing in the case of a being who has been granted to me as a presence. In this case, everything depends on me, on my inward attitude of maintaining this presence which could be debased into an effigy. We admit that the object has disappeared, but that there remains a likeness that it is in our power to keep. Fidelity is creative in that sense. Presence is a reality; it is an influx; it depends upon us to be permeable to this influx. Creative fidelity consists in maintaining ourselves actively in a permeable state; and there is a mysterious interchange between this free act and the gift granted in response to it. Such a person is not only physically in my presence but within me as well. Such creative fidelity corresponds to hope.[79]

An ontology of death and nothingness

An ontology of death is an intriguing notion. If death has some kinship with life, it remains hidden from us. Death is a final value that gives to human a life the quality of tragedy. Despair will always present itself to us has having good reasons to be our response to human life. Yet, a cowardly response to life would disclose blindness to important dimensions of our situation.[80] The uniqueness of death makes it an invaluable object for inquiry. The perspective of death helps us to interpret life, in such phrases as “If I were to die today,” or “Before I die…” However, the love of life or the tranquility of self-deception may keep us from realizing what it means to be something that one day we will cease to be. Our awareness that we will cease to be influences what it means to be. Each of us dies our own death. It is not so obvious that we live our own life. When we are aware that we will die alone, we confront our authentic, genuine, true self. One’s awareness of death can focus one’s attention on the self as it belongs to the individual authentic self. Authentic existence is an explicit awareness of what it means to be. Inauthentic existence is that mode of existence in which one has hidden what it means to be, clouded by ambiguity, idle talk, and curiosity. The awareness of death shakes off this veil or cloud by focusing our attention on the question of what it means for us to be. Our self as it absorbs into others clouds our awareness of death. Further, death is that perspective from which one sees the whole or totality of human existence. What can impending death mean to the fullness of our lives? Can we grasp death? If death is out of our grasp, we do not have the ability to see the totality of human existence. How can we realize death as an existential? We can do so as we grasp the not-yet element involved in our existence. How do we interpret this not-yet element? My awareness that I am going to die is sufficient to give me the perspective of totality and to grasp human existence. I do not have to die to see my end. The existential awareness of the possibility of ceasing to be, of my moving toward death, has ontological meaning. The awareness of my death focuses attention upon what it means for me to be. Therefore, it shows my death is my own. I cannot share it with anyone. My projection of the possibility of death represents death to me as something that I cannot avoid. My awareness of death is due to a state of mind or mood, something forced upon us, something part of my fate as a human being. I try to avoid confrontation with the meaning of death for my life through living inauthentically in my other-dominated self. This avoidance usually takes the form of treating death as an actuality and never as my possibility. I fear death as an object, and in doing so avoid fully realizing that the self can cease to be. The awareness of death and its related mood of dread has its foundation in care. Death is the irretrievable loss of that about which we have cared in the projects of our lives and in the relationships we have formed. Dread is full awareness of my own possible dying. The truth the authentic awareness of death could reveal suggests that the truth is still there, within my life, even if hidden.

Heidegger will refer to the nothingness involved with death. Nothing is something in the sense that one must reckon with it as an original factor that precedes our negation and affirmation. “Nothing” is dynamic and active. It obtrudes upon us. It discloses itself to us in dread, which is the nihilating work of “Nothing” as the rejecting, reprimanding, and elusive being. Dread discloses the previously hidden alienation of the other. Here is the path toward self-hood and freedom. Nothing belongs to the essence of being. Existence derives from manifested nothing. One can define existence as a projection into Nothing. the basic mood that reveals Nothing as constitutive for existence is dread. The revelation of Nothing occurs in dread. Dread reveals nothing because we elude ourselves. Dread strikes us dumb. Revelation of Nothing discloses the strangeness of human existence. Heidegger wants to show the potency of Nothing against existence. Nothingness is underived and has a comprehensive dynamism and activity. Openness to Nothing is the virtue of existence. Nothing exhibits the nature and mode of what philosophy would normally refer to as transcendence. Nothingness in Heidegger is really something. Nothing is being that has some dimension of the holy and divine. Peace, serenity, and daring, overcome the revelation of Nothing in dread. Nothingness becomes something fruitful, salutary, and radiant rather than something dreadful and horrible or a dark abyss. [81]

We need to give ourselves time to reflect on the pattern our lives have been weaving. Death and loss are one of those times. Those whom we love keep leaving; keep journeying to "that land from which no traveler has ever returned." Think of death as a limit experience beyond the limits of normal life. We spend much of our lives avoiding, dreading, and defending ourselves against it. We think that beyond the limit is emptiness and loss. Yet, if we give ourselves time to reflect, we will also find creative love and courage that know no limits.^[82]

The sentimental approach denies the harsh quality of life. It assumes that we can achieve good ends without effort, self-discipline, patience, or sacrifice. I am urging a form of realism when it comes to the pain of loss and death. Such experiences are simply facts of a human life. Yes, they can be hard, difficult, and painful facts, but they are facts nonetheless. Life is easy for no one. 

The end yet to come casts its shadow in advance and defines the whole path of life as a being for death in the sense that we cannot integrate our end into our existence. Rather, our end threatens each moment of our living self-affirmation with nothingness. We lead our temporal lives under the shadow of death (Luke 1:79 and Matthew 4:16). Yet, our self-affirmation of life is an antithesis to our end in death. Fear of death pierces deep into life. It motivates us to unrestricted affirmation of ourselves. We grab for everything and everyone we can, clinging to the things around us as if doing so will keep death away from us. Death also robs us of the power to accept life, and thus we can see a close link between sin and death. The fact that we do not accept our finitude makes the inescapable end of our lives a manifestation of the power of death that threatens us with nothingness. The fear of death pushes us more deeply into sin. At the same time, as we live out our lives in time, we realize that our wholeness, fulfillment, and meaning are still ahead of us. We must link the ability to achieve wholeness to God, who is the only one who can bring to its wholeness the existence of our individual lives. Salvation means overcoming death. The wholeness that we seek cannot be our own act, for death is not our own act. We must suffer it. Death comes upon us.

At the core of human experience are the mystery of both the grandeur and the misery of self-conscious mortality. Unlike animals, humans know they will die. Yet, if we have courage, we also learn that our awareness of death gives life its juice and joy. Precisely because our lives are so painfully transient, they can also be so achingly meaningful. Our humanity consists of facing loss. Our lives will never become an easy form of contentment. If death always haunts us, there is the need for character and courage to live with what we know is ineradicable. Too much of what passes for therapy today seeks to remove the need for moral virtue to face the hardships of a human life. 

Is life meaningful?

Let us grant for now that we need to answer the question of meaning without the aid of the Infinite and Eternal. We have only finitude and temporality within which we can consider the question of meaning. 

Let us begin with an act that is horrifying to most of us: voluntarily ending our lives with suicide. The act confesses that life is too much or that you do not understand it. Life is not worth the trouble. Naturally, life is not easy. Suicide implies that the habit of living, the absence of a profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering, suggests the ridiculous quality of life. Although the universe gave birth to beings like us, our unique quality of consciousness enables us to reflect upon life as we experience it that can produce the feeling of being aliens and strangers. One experiences life in exile without the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. We are actors separated from the setting, and thus feel the absurdity of life. Must we leap into hope or into suicide? 

One way of looking upon existentialism is that it acknowledges the lack of meaning the universe has. It acknowledges the randomness of birth and death. Death is disturbing in its annihilation of the projects of a life and of our care for the world. Yet, it takes a leap in affirming that one can choose to live authentically, knowing that the limit or boundary of our choice is our death. To live in this way requires resoluteness and courage. The world is unreasonable. The separation one might feel is between the mind that desires and the world that disappoints. We have emerged out of a universe that cannot provide that which we desire. Simply accepting the absurdity may be all that we have. We do not know whether the world has a meaning. We know that we do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for us to know it. The danger is in my taking my appetite for wholeness and fullness and reduce this world to a rational and reasonable principle. 

Could we live life better if it had no meaning? Living an experience, a fate, is accepting it fully. Living in the absurdity of our fate is an act of revolt. Living is keeping the absurd alive. The only coherent philosophy is one of revolt when confronted with the absurdity of life. We confront our obscurity. It challenges the world anew every second. A revolt devoid of hope acknowledges the crushing nature of our fate. The revolt gives life its vale. By living a permanent revolt of the absurdity of human fate, one restores majesty to that life. Confronted with a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible, but everything is given, and beyond which all is collapse and nothingness, one can decide to accept such a universe and draw form it strength, refusal to hope, and a life without consolation. The absurd quality of a human life can lead to this revolt, my freedom in choosing to accept the calling of my life as a revolt and find my passion for life in the midst of the absurdity of life. 

Greek mythology contains the story of Sisyphus, a man whom the gods judged with the dreadful punishment of futile and hopeless labor. He would for eternity ceaselessly roll a rock to the top of a mountain, and the stone would fall back of its own weight. He lived with disrespect to the gods. He put Death in chains. But the god of war liberated him. Near death, he wanted to test the love of us wife. Obtaining permission to return to the world to chastise his wife. He fell in love with living, no longer wanting to return to the realm of the dead. He lived in defiance of the gods until he was finally captured and received his punishment. Yet could this myth be a symbol of a human life? We are condemned to futile and fruitless labor. If so, we can appreciate him as much for his passion for living and his rebellion as for his grim determination to keep rolling that rock up the mountain and then walking back to do it all over again. The pause in the myth, that moment when the stone rolls down and he must walk down the mountain, may well be the moment of joy for him. He smiles, knowing he once lived with passion and lived in revolt.[83]

Taken subjectively, we might go down the path of embracing the absurdness of life.

However, the universe is a system of relations. Every element in the universe is modified by its participation in the system. Every element contributes to the larger system. Therefore, every element has a meaning beyond itself as it of necessity participates in the system. If one can grant this, then any universe that would have no conscious beings would still have meaning in that it would have a beginning, a system of relations, and movement toward its end. If this makes sense, then human life is meaningful simply because we remain participants in a larger system. 

Theology and Existentialism

The line of thought that arises out of Heidegger may be a way of analyzing human existence that provides the framework of a general view of humanity. The danger of binding theology too closely to the philosophical analysis of human existence provided by existentialism is always a possibility. Yet, its understanding of everydayness and inauthentic existence can stimulate theological reflection on human brokenness. One does not need divine revelation to see the effects of sin in corporate and individual life. The insight of existentialism into anxiety or dread as primary one considers the structure of human existence is valid, which would also mean that Kierkegaard is right in identifying dread as a loss of connection with the Infinite and the possibility of anticipatory wholeness. In this act of self-transcendence and openness to the world, humanity stretches beyond finitude and toward the Infinite. Heidegger will locate dread in the experience individuals have of this world that arises out of the care we have for the world as we project self into the nothingness of death. Such care can become little more than self-love ruling us, with self-preservation and striving for security and control dominating our lives. This explains why personal identity is so difficult for us. We can grant that that the guilt we experience is due to our indebtedness to our destiny and our responsibility toward it. We owe it to ourselves to have our lives correspond to this destiny. He introduces a time factor into the analysis of self-consciousness in that the future is decisive for the present way of existence of the human being. the question of personal selfness is accessible only by anticipating the future of one’s own death. The “extreme” place that death has in a human life becomes revelatory way as we “anticipate” that future in all this nothingness. For Heidegger, self-transcendence is transcendence is toward nothingness. The only way out of the questionable quality of human existence is the anticipatory knowledge of the death of the person. The anticipatory knowledge opens the possibility of the certainty of one’s Being. The certainty comes specifically through the call of conscience. The calling is from oneself. Answering the call is the achieving of identity. This ecstatic being-ahead-of-oneself in the future of the person has a positive understanding of the present as moment. The present is the moment in which human existence returns from its future in repetition to its past.[84]

Our responsibility for ourselves arises out of this sense of obligation. This idea is like that of Paul Ricoeur (Symbolism of Evil, 102), where he said that acceptance of responsibility is the basis of the consciousness of being an agent or author. The concept of action presupposes the concept of responsibility. Both the capacity for action and the sense of responsibility have their ground in the call to an authentic self. The judgment of conscience is a failure concerning achieving one’s self. I become conscious of something I lack and something I need. 

This view of achieving personal identity has several challenges that deserve critical appraisal. One is the material abundance of possibilities of life preceding death apart from knowledge of inescapability of one’s own death. The contingency of events leading up to death argues against Heidegger here. In addition, death does not round out human existence into a whole. Death breaks off life. Even in the best instances, the successful life remains a fragment. We could also say that the intention toward wholeness necessarily reaches beyond death. The intended wholeness transcends the finitude of human life. The web of social life is part of this transcendence. Yet, the reciprocal relation of the social group and the individual suggests a bond that transcends them both that we might call the destiny of humanity. Self-transcendence is toward something rather than nothing. Yet, Heidegger is quite right to point to the importance of anticipation as the means through which humanity experiences its wholeness.[85]

Temporality, the Eternal, and Theology

What I want to do here is push back on the notion that we have a right to dismiss consideration of the Infinite and Eternal, given that these are the philosophical notions that open a discussion of wholeness in distinction from viewing our lives individually and humanity collectively as fragmented. I grant that for some persons, life is full of so much suffering that it may well feel as if one is completely cut off. One can also, in the spirit of Locke, Hume, and Kant, have a philosophical notion of the isolated self that feels the distance between self and world. 

The close connection between Being and time is that Being is an anticipation of its future essence. Heidegger would complete the severing of time and eternity. He based time on a general structure of transcendental subjectivity and on the concrete living out of our developing existence in time.[86] However, to push back against most existentialist writers, the wholeness of human existence is not death, because it isolates in the individual question of existence from its social context.[87]

Granting that the desire to be fully and completely oneself is a desire to be God, embracing divine revelation recognizes the futility of the desire for fullness as established by oneself and opens the door for a discussion of an anticipatory fullness today and the hope for fullness provided by God in the future. Thus, the human passion for fullness is not useless, but its frustration could open one to a possible fullness in the future provided by God.

The fulfillment of our finite life requires participation in the Eternal, and therefore, in life with God. Awareness of our finitude includes awareness that death is ahead of us. Facing this end, we still have a feeling for life as we pursue the course of a human life to its end. Heidegger describes this process quite well. Our sin separates us from God, even as death separates us from God. Death is a natural consequence of our finitude. When we live our lives independently of God, we know our finitude only as we know that death is ahead of us. Sinners deny the finitude of their existence in trying to be as God. The refusal to accept finitude delivers us to death. Life lived in time did have to be broken by the separation of past, present, and future. We have our self and identity only in anticipation of the totality of our lives. The self forms in relation to that which is other than itself. Yet, its self-seeking is such that remains with itself. Our now goes with us through the changes of time. Our sense of time is participation in eternity and awareness of the division and opposition of the moments of time. The end of this tension in a human life is death. Our finitude becomes death for us.

The notion of the Infinite remained an important part of the philosophical tradition through the early 1800s. Descartes could say that as he became aware of the finite, he had intuitive awareness of the Infinite. He could see that his finite life was part of the Infinite totality. Hegel developed a notion of the Infinite embracing the finite. Kierkegaard speak of the anxiety of modernity arising from being cut off from the Infinite. 

            The existentialism of the 20^th century will assume that finitude is the final reality of humanity. Humanity is thrown into living, lives with the anxiety of the nothingness as it moves toward death, and gains wholeness only by courageously choosing our path of existence, knowing that nothingness, nullity, emptiness, and the void is the only outcome. 

Consideration of the philosophical notion of the Infinite through the lens of Hegel can help us in an apologetic way in our modern setting. Locke, Kant, and Heidegger form the modern notion of subjectivity, all of whom divorce their reflection on the human being from the Infinite and Eternal. Our first thought of the Infinite is that it contrasts with the finite. Through Hegel, we learn that if all we do is contrast the Infinite and the finite, we place a limit on the Infinite, which would be a contradiction. The Infinite is truly infinite only when one no longer sees it simply in opposition to the finite, which would seem to turn the Infinite into the finite. The Infinite suggests freedom from limitation. 

Such a notion of the Infinite affects how we approach the traditional attributes of God. 

For example, the central aspect of holiness is that of separation from everything profane. The point of the separation is to protect the profane from the holy. The holiness of God is primarily judgment. The holy threatens the profane because God is not totally other, but manifests deity in the human world. The threat of the holy is that it seeks to incorporate the profane into its world. When God elects a people, exclusive worship leads to the notion of the jealousy of the Lord. Yet, beyond every threat is hope of a new and definitive salvation. The holiness of God opposes and embraces the profane, bringing the profane into fellowship with the holy God. This is just one example of how we can resolve the contradiction in a Hegelian way by understanding that the true Infinite embraces the finite. Such a philosophical shift will replace the notion of first cause derived from Aristotle and replace it with the notion of the unthematic awareness of God based upon an examination of Descartes and Schleiermacher. Gregory of Nyssa based his notion of the incomprehensibility of God on the notion of Infinity, and Duns Scotus followed him in this.

John Wesley (On the Omnipresence of God [Sermon 111] and On the Unity of God [Sermon 114]) draws a close connection between the Infinite and Eternal and the attributes of God. I would especially point out that Wesley connects the holiness of God at this point rather than a reflection of the “moral” attributes of God. One, considering the Infinite as embracing the finite (Hegel), divine holiness is separate from the profane, but also embraces it and brings it into fellowship with the holy God. Two, the eternity of God opposes the frailty of the finite but is more than just endless time; it becomes the basis for our experience of time. The path to the goal is time, suggesting again the primacy of the future in our understanding of time. Boethius describes eternity as the perfect possession of life. Eternity has a positive and embracing relation to time. I would add that John Wesley (On Eternity, Sermon 54) seems to argue in the same vein. He admits that it is not easy to determine what time is, even though we use the word so much. Yet, time is a fragment of eternity, broken off at both ends, measured by the revolution of the sun and planets. Time is between that which was before it and that which is to come. In the “end,” brought by God, time will be no more, for it will sink into the ocean of eternity. Wesley says the Creator has made us partakers in the Eternal, referring to an ancient writer who referred to the human soul as a picture of divine eternity. Of course, Wesley applies such thoughts in a practical way, saying that the natural condition of human beings is to focus on the temporal rather than the eternal. He refers to it as folly and madness to prefer present things to the eternal. Our minds focus only on the portion of space and time that is immediate, rather than recognizing their context as the Infinite and Eternal.

Heidegger and Sartre reflect on time while dropping its connection with the eternal. Yet, we experience life with an anticipation of its wholeness. Hearing a melody, which has a sequence of notes, we hear the whole. Speech is a sequence of syllables, but we hear it as a whole. In an analogous way, duration occurs in our attention to the movement of time and in the movement of every ordered series. The view of duration as the synthesis of what is separated within the flow of time is significant from a psychological perspective as well as its application to non-human creatures. The being of a creature relates to its duration, and therefore, every creature participates in divine eternity.[88]

Plotinus is the origin of the idea of the primacy of the future, a theme that Heidegger explores as the means for attaining the wholeness of individual existence. In Augustine, time becomes the song that allows individual things to participate in eternity. In this way, duration is the synthesis of the flow of time. Finite being has its limited participation in the divine eternity. The problem with Kant is that the horizon of time is the ego, while the problem with Heidegger is that only the future of one’s own death constitutes meaning and time. Yet, meaning and wholeness occurs in the context of eternity, of the possible completion and participation of time in eternity.[89]

Therefore, if we look upon eternity from the insight of Hegel on the Infinite, the Spirit of God opposes the frailty of all things earthly, for the Spirit is the source of all life and has unrestricted life. Eternity does not just mean unlimited time. God is unchanging. All time is before the eyes of God as a whole. The notion of eternity was the reason early Christian theology found Platonism attractive. Plotinus importantly took the step of defining eternity as the presence of the totality of life. Eternity is not opposed to time but is the presupposition and source of time. With Plotinus, the soul lives in expectation of its wholeness and of the wholeness of all that is. Yet, the participation of Mind in the eternal is a fall from eternity because of its desire to control itself. The whole is present in temporal moments only in the sense that it hovers over the parts since the future is the whole. The decay into parts has the consequence that the whole becomes only the future goal of all striving within the realm of the finite. The path to this goal is time. This suggests the primacy of the future in our understanding of time since the orientation is toward the eternal totality.[90]

Let us consider the limited duration we experience in time. Limited duration is self-evident in the phenomena of the world. We can measure time only based on the notion of limited duration. We develop our identity in the course of the time we have. Even self-identity has its root in a notion of limited duration. A notion of limited duration is decisive for the independent existence of creatures. Life is present for us as we sense duration against the background of indefinite totality. Eternity represents unlimited duration. Thus, our experience of limited duration is anticipation of the unlimited duration of eternity. Our experience of time is participation in eternity in the sense that we experience the limited duration that anticipates the unlimited duration of Eternity. We receive hints of the contours of Eternity through recollection and expectation.  Expectation takes precedence as we anticipate a future that completes time. An analogy might help. You hear a song, not simply in its individual notes, but as you think toward an ending the song has not yet reached. Our experience of time separates past from future, while the present bridges time in a way that offers limited duration to the individual. Continued objective individual duration in recollection and expectation corresponds to the duration we find in the Eternal. 

This view of time has an opponent in those who propose the self-constitution of time. Aristotle thought of the subjective soul as the one counting time. Kant replaced the notion of Eternity as the basis of continuity and unity of time with the constant and abiding ego. In Heidegger, time is part of the general structure of transcendental subjectivity and the concrete living out of our developing existence in time. Such disintegration of our experience of time occurs because we cling to the present, extend it, and relate everything to it. The Now wanders through time as a sense of duration. The “I” cannot constitute the duration of our existence. The reason is that in the flux of time, each Now replaces another Now. The “I” makes duration both stretching and disintegration. The “I” is passing and changing in the flow of time.

Within the existential view, then, as we have received the gift of life, we will surrender our lives to the nothingness of death. 

Existentialism as tilling the soil for a discussion of a philosophy of the spirit

            Some forms of existentialism will view the existential analysis of the human situation as preparing the ground for a philosophy of spirit.

            For the Christian existentialist, existentialism is a recognition of how difficult it is to keep in mind the uniqueness and dignity of the individual created in the image of God. Humanity may well find an end that it is not the creature theologians have affirmed.  The less we think of human beings as individuals of sacred worth and dignity, the stronger will be the temptation to treat them as machines that provide a certain output.  Theoretically, the gradual abandonment of belief in the afterlife would lead to greater appreciation for this world. What has happened is the opposite. Life in this world is now without justification and thus a worthless phenomenon. Modernity consigns humanity to having death as its final word.[91]

            Yet, we are supra-personal, intersubjective beings. Sacrifice for the sake of others occurs with the background ontology of intersubjectivity. We have an important metaphysical decision to make regarding immortality. The influence of technique prepares us for the disappearance of intersubjective relations. Death becomes a raw fact, like replacing one mechanistic part for another. Some will say that the belief in immortality is ego-centric. Religion itself must not be tied to something so problematic. However, we need to consider love. Love says that whatever changes may occur between us, you and I will persist as one.  Death does not nullify the promise of eternity. The bond of love implies the inherent need for eternity. This statement relies upon the metaphysical status of hope. Can we separate faith in God, who has formed human beings for intersubjectivity and love, from this intersubjectivity and love persisting into eternity? That which is at stake in considering immortality is this living link. Is this holy and living God capable of ignoring, consider as accidental, consider as insignificant, and decree annihilation of our human bond in intersubjectivity and love?[92]

            The living God can only be spirit. Such a word has reached its fullness as we consider intersubjectivity and love. We often think of immortality as a place “beyond,” but such a beyond consists in unknown dimensions unknown to us in our present structures of existence. We are not a closed system, but one open to this “beyond.” This thought leads us to consider hope. The opposite of hope is dejection, expecting nothing from self, others, or life. Life becomes immobilized, congealed, and frozen for such a person. In Christianity, hope is a virtue, as are faith and love. Hope is akin to courage. Courage faces danger with full recognition of the situation, but reduces that situation to nothingness, treating it as of no account. Yet, it fully appreciates the gravity of the situation. One who has hope for a world of justice and peace has a prophetic stance toward a future that will come, giving one the courage to face the challenges to that hope. Hope faces a world dominated by social technique, where life comes to a standstill and succumbs to boredom. Tragedy is behind hope. No matter how dark things may seem, my present intolerable situation is not final. Hope says there must be a way out. Hope does not close in upon oneself; it radiates toward and embraces others. Hope implies an expansion of time. A closed view of time is a form of despair in which one expects nothing from life. Closed time also shows itself in the boredom of fulfilling daily tasks as the sole task of one’s life. Hope is another name from the exigence of transcendence that becomes the driving force of the human pilgrim. Even weakened life has a sacred quality. Such considerations recognize the ambiguity of life, but also recognize the incomprehensible unity of what we thought might have no connection, such as being and death. As the myth of the phoenix shows, all life may hold within it the promise of resurrection. It may well be sacrilegious and absurd to do all one can to assert the finality of death. He acknowledges that our action must exert itself in another dimension.[93]

            A philosophy of spirit will consider other dimensions of hope. Faith, hope, and love are a unity. The presence of faith gives hope its intelligible frame. We need to see our lives as a gift, and not just a fact. As gift, one has no existence simply in oneself. In appreciating this gift, freedom can grow in a way that coincides with the trials one must face and in which one will need to make a decision and face decisive options.[94]

            Faith is not simply a mental event. However, faith does not require proofs for the existence of God. Such proofs are not convincing. Those who form such proofs can always accuse someone not persuaded of an ill will, for they want life without the limits that God would establish. God simply should not be. Further, the incomprehensibility of the suffering of children can lead people like Albert Camus to say there is no God. The paradox is that proofs are ineffective precisely where they want to succeed, that is, in persuading the unbeliever. While some believers may find their faith strengthened by proofs, one believes in God on other grounds, so they serve little purpose. One has experiences one interprets as of God, and that becomes sufficient. For such persons, the final word is not nothingness, anguish, and death, but love and joy.[95]

            A bond exists between faith and truth. When a gap opens between faith and truth, faith is degenerating into idolatry or opinion, or truth is becoming arid and giving way to limiting reason to its logical, methodical, and exact function. The spirit of truth is a light. Intelligibility is joyful coming together of thoughts. We need to remove the prejudices that block us from faith and thereby make us open to grace. Saints affirm that everything is grace. Many believers could share in this affirmation, even with some reservations. We need to recognize evil as having a reality that identifies it with death. Salvation is deliverance from death. All hope is for salvation. There is no salvation in a world whose structure points toward death. Death may well be the price paid for sin. Thus, technique will not deliver us from death. We are involved in countless structures in which a spirit of faith will perceive the presence of sin. Sin is against the light of truth. Sin is the act of shutting oneself in on oneself or taking oneself as the center. The world of sin is a world in which death is at home. If this world can be conquered, it will only be through a hard and tragic fight, engaging in conditions not of our choosing but also form part of our vocation. Salvation is indistinguishable from peace. Such peace is the living progress in love and truth toward an intelligible city that we might think of as a mystical body.[96]

            Philosophy is a long preparation for death (Plato). To use a musical analogy, we may start as soloist in the spiritual journey, but we graduate to be part of the orchestra in which the dead are closer to God, who is the symphony in its profound and intelligible unity, a unity in which we participate by degrees, through individual trials, the sum of which is not separable from our vocation.[97]

Considering the place of divine revelation

            Such a philosophy of spirit does not yet consider revelation. Yet, such considerations may assist us in approaching revelation. We need to admit that the path of affirming revelation is a difficult road full of obstacles, but by following this pilgrim road, we can hope to see the eternal light that has shown itself in the world, a light without which we would never have started the journey.[98]

            Any discussion of revelation assumes that there are truths concerning us and our world that we cannot learn through the usual methods of human enquiry. They are communicated to us in a unique way.[99] Such an encounter with the divine could be an illusion but gains in credibility when it addresses the human situation. It helps one see the same things in a distinct way. We will find parallels and connections to our mundane experience or in the accounts of human experience in philosophical reflection.[100] For example, the conscience is our awareness of authentic possibility and the disorder that plagues human life, while revelation is authenticated if lit overcomes the disorder.[101] The concept of revelation acknowledges that if we are to know anything about God, it will be because God reveals who God is. The initiative is from God. Revelation is therefore an expression of the grace and love of God for humanity. We hear revelation as a strange or foreign presence. In part, such strangeness arises out of differing cultural and intellectual settings. Yet, its strangeness also arises out of its eschatological and therefore divine nature. The future is primary in our knowledge of God, just as the future is primary in self-knowledge. Its strangeness is a sign of human sin. Therefore, the revelation of God is manifestation of divine love and grace. God revealed who God is in Jesus Christ, especially in his cross and resurrection. The abiding and saving significance of the cross is that it reveals the judgment and deliverance of humanity. Preaching the cross is the event of redemption that challenges all who hear to appropriate this significance for themselves. We experience crucifixion with Christ through this turn to the cross in faith. Authentic existence today depends upon this turn in faith to the cross. The cross becomes part of an eschatological history that originates in the historical event of the cross and continues in the life of the believer. If the crucifixion of Jesus is primary, then our crucifixion with Christ derives its significance from the death of Christ “for us.” The revelation of God in the cross, the one crucified for the godless, makes it possible for us to follow him. [102] Salvation of humanity is possible because of the eschatological nature of the revelation of God. This revelation reveals the future. The historical point of reference is the eschatological preaching of Jesus as opening the door to understanding Jesus himself as the eschatological action of God. Consistent with the existential emphasis on the event nature of the transition to authentic life, one could understand the revelation of God as a matter of human beings coming to themselves and understanding themselves truly. Arriving at our authentic self is salvation. Thus, revelation is the basis of authenticity. One cannot achieve authenticity through individual effort. Divinity discloses itself in authenticity. Revelation addresses us. Preaching is revelation. Faith discloses the object of faith. Faith belongs to revelation. Revelation is the arrival of the future proleptically and in anticipation of the fullness of the future. Faith is openness to the future.

Faith brings the possibility of getting free of the past and therefore of beginning anew in each moment as we hear and fulfill the summons to love. The new age becomes an age of love as I am a lover and directed toward the future. The new age is a present reality in the activity of love, especially in forgiveness that frees one from the past. In Christ, such forgiveness is already present. The believer and the neighbor are in the same situation as sinners who receive grace. The believer needs to look upon the neighbor as the one already forgiven. In the neighbor, the love of Christ meets us. Love, understood as the manifestation of the love of God, is a release from the past. Faith implies understanding and obedience.[103] A genuine human life is one we live out of what is invisible and in which we have surrendered all self-contrived security. Such a life is by the Spirit and in faith. This life becomes possible through faith in the grace of God. We trust the invisible and unfamiliar as it encounters as love and gives us a future that means life. Such grace forgives sin and frees us from the past. The past holds us in bondage. Through the past, we seek to secure ourselves and cling to what is perishing. Such an attitude is sin because it is closure against what is invisible, and the future of the gift God wants to give. Faith means opening ourselves freely to this future. Such faith is obedience as we turn from self, surrender security, renounce any attempt to be acceptable and gain our true life. Such an attitude is freedom.[104]

            Existential analysis of the human beings makes the strangeness of the gospel clearer in that the preaching of Jesus and the early church occur in the context of Jewish apocalyptic. Jewish apocalyptic will feel strange and alien to the person living in the technocratic, scientific, and democratic setting of today. Existentialism will tend to focus upon the contemporary act of faith. It will set aside references to world history, and thus references to Israel, Jewish history, and the divine act of bringing the world to its completion in Christ. The Old Testament and Judaism become background for the eschatological revelation in Christ. To mention an obvious point, the imminent expectation of the rule of God that determined the activity and life of Jesus is no longer a live option for us and is unnecessary. If a divinely appointed end of human history is ahead of us when this completion and fullness of human history and nature is unknown to us. The general position of a theology influenced by existentialism is that the notion of resurrection contained in the kerygma needs to be freed from its apocalyptic content and bring liberation from the bondage of inauthentic existence today. The oppressed sinner can only respond with faith obedience, leading the person to a new self-understanding that comes with an encounter with grace. The significance of Easter is the rise of faith in the hearts and lives of the disciples. This faith means the rise of a new self-understanding they had of themselves as sinners who encounter grace from God in Jesus Christ. The existential understanding of Easter will turn away from the idea of Easter as narrating a significant even in the history of God with humanity. 

A pushing back against existentialism here would say that Easter was a revelatory event within divine life. It reveals the meaning of the future of humanity. The imminent expectation had its fulfillment in the resurrection of Jesus. This fact liberates those who believe today from thinking of when the end will come. Therefore, the theologian might say that we can live and think in continuity with apostolic Christianity and thus with the activity of Jesus if we recognize its proleptic fulfillment in the resurrection of Jesus. Christ rose into the yet undetermined future realm ahead of us. The kerygma points us to that future, giving content to the Christian hope of the redemption of the human story. Kerygma points to the future of Jesus Christ, not just the authenticity of our existence.[105]

            I would like to draw an analogy with a move many of us have been willing to make regarding creation. A narrow segment of Christianity continues adhering to the notion of six days of creation and reject evolution. For many of us, it has been quite comfortable to accept the notion of the big bang as the origin of the universe and evolution as accurately describing the creative energies present in the universe and on the earth. The combination of stable rules that provide the stability of nature with enough indeterminate chaos to allow for the emergence of new forms is an important part of the dialogue theology needs to have science. In an analogous way, the way apocalyptic as found in the New Testament expresses an end to the world does not need to be taken literally. It may point to a hoped-for fullness that is the goal of human and natural history.

            The point is that as good as existentialism might be in illuminating the nature of the event of faith in a believer, it has a weakness in dealing with the event-nature of the history of Christ that precedes proclamation and faith as their foundation. The history of Christ took place without us and for us. Thus, the gospel is more than kerygmatic address. The gospel is also a liberating telling of the history of Christ at the same time. Combined, this allows us to hope for the rule of God. As we broaden and deepen our theological understanding of the act of faith, we see that this hope deepens the solidarity of the person of faith with the unredeemed nature of this world. The person of faith sees the alienation of self and world from their true nature. As we ponder the work of God in creation, reconciliation, and redemption, the person of faith sees clearly the disfigurement, enslavement, and pain of this world. Revelation allows us to wait for the glorification of the new creation.[106] To confront the eschatological possibility, we deprive the previous course of events of determinative force. The course the event took in time is irrelevant to its meaning as an eschatological event of the moment. 

Existentialism cannot elucidate the look back to Jesus Christ. We will need to broaden our philosophical perspective.

The traditional notion may well create a narrative of the eschatological action of God in human history that liberates rather than imprisons. It offers a reliable basis to place trust or faith in this action of God, to see this action as reflective of the grace and love of God for us as sinners and offer hope for a redeemed creation and humanity. Rather than such a notion importing an alien worldview into the kerygma, it may well be that the kerygma invites its hearers to have faith in or trust an alien or strange action. The church may well do a disservice to its mission by removing the apocalyptic nature of the strangeness of the kerygma. It may well feel strange, in part, precisely because of its divine nature, its revelatory purpose, and its address to us as sinners. 

If birth, life, and death have absurd dimensions, then revelation has such a dimension as well. It will be a paradox at an important level. Christianity begins with the absurd, the offense, the paradox. The danger is in making the revelation to which the New Testament testifies too rational and acceptable. If one is not careful, one becomes a second Judas in the process. In this sense, a paradox contradicts the openion of ordinary human experience. It contradicts the empirical and the use of our calculative thinking. It has an offensive character in that sense. The appearance of a new potentiality in an historical moment or event, such as in Jesus, is the paradox of the Christian message. This appearance is the divine answer to the longing of humanity for an authentic existence that resolves the tensions and polarities of a human life. The parasox of the Christian message is that in one personal life essential humanity has appeared under the conditions of alienated and estranged human existence without those conditions conquering him.[107] In its proclamation, the church embraces this paradox and calls people to decide for God in relation to Christ. It does so with the confidence that one can find anticipatory fulfillment of the rule of God in bringing balance to the polarities and tensions of human existence. The possibility of authentic life is found by focusing our faith and hope in Christ as we seek to embody the love of God and others. Jesus Christ becomes the symbol of Being, in whom Being is present and manifest. He focuses Being in the sense that he is the disclosure of the mystery of Being. The historical symbol has an existential dimension in that it lights up for us our own being and our undisclosed possibilities of existence. Christ is the paradigmatic existence in a way that allows us to receive a renewed understanding of ourselves that amounts to a new possibility of existence. He belongs to God, but he also belongs to creation and therefore to humanity. That is the paradox of Jesus as the Christ.[108]

We have discussed the notion of eternity and time. Can the Eternal have an historical point of departure? Christianity will say yes, and that the Eternal has done so in Jesus. Christianity will also say that an historical point of departure that manifests the Eternal will do one no good unless one appropriates it within life. The response of faith rather than offense makes the event of the historical point of departure more than a matter of simple historical interest. Thus, human happiness has its possibility in the event of the manifestation of Eternity, but the personal response of faith and willingness to live one’s life in accord with this event is what provides eternal happiness.[109]

How far does the Truth admit of being learned? Socrates would begin with the notion of recollection. Therefore, he assumes that the individual already has the Truth within. Socrates was a midwife for thought in others. In fact, the highest relation between one person and another is bringing forth thought. For Socrates, each point of departure in time is accidental, an occasion, a vanishing moment. In Socratic thought, self-knowledge is knowledge of God. Each person becomes his or her own center. In one sense, every person becomes a teacher. The teacher who brings forth truth, in which I rest, is incidental. Socratic questioning assumes that I have the truth within myself and can acquire it myself. Now, if things are to be otherwise, the moment in time must have decisive significance. The previous state of the learner must be that of error, and therefore the learner is not even a seeker. The teacher gives the learner the knowledge that the learner is in error. The teacher must bring the truth to the learner and provide the condition necessary for understanding it. Yet, such a teacher is more than a human being. Rather, the teacher is “the God.” The destitute condition of the learner is one we might call sin. What shall we call such a teacher? We should call him Savior and Redeemer. He becomes an atonement that removes the wrath justly directed to the prior condition of the learner. This teacher is more of a judge than a teacher. Such a moment must, in fact, have a distinctive name that we call the fullness of time. As we shift our attention to the learner, we can see that he or she becomes a disciple, a new person. We might call the change conversion. Yet, what precedes conversion is repentance. We might call the transition a new birth. The disciple owes everything to the teacher. He concludes the chapter by imaging someone say that this is a ridiculous project of thought.[110]

If God is a teacher, what would motivate the God to come into finite existence? Love is the motivation. Love motivates God to reveal who God is. God loves the learner and desires to win the learner as a follower. Only in love does the unequal become equal. The love is unhappy due to the great distance between the God and the learner. They cannot understand each other. How can the God and the learner ever understand each other? Well, an erotic form of love might elevate the learner. God might show who God is in a dramatic way, making the learner forget whom he or she was. Alternatively, an agape form of love would cause God to come in the form familiar to the learner. If the moment is to have eternal significance for the learner, the learner will owe everything to the teacher. The union between God and the learner will occur through a descent. God must become a servant. Every other form of “revelation” would be a form of deception. Suffering will be the life of this servant. The cause of this suffering is love.[111]

Since this God is not provable from our reason or nature, we have a paradox, our reasoning colliding with the paradox. When we let go of the need for a proof, we are ready for the leap.[112] If the paradox and reason meet and acknowledge their unlikeness, the meeting is a happy one. However, if reason cannot accept this, and still seeks understanding, we have an offended consciousness. The offense causes reason to stand apart from the paradox.[113] Our continual attempts to understand the Incarnation and Trinity presuppose faith. The Christian may develop an easy relationship with such notions and thus forget the offense the teaching of Christianity is to many people. Christians can develop confidence in what they believe, but they must never forget its offensive nature.

When reason and paradox have a happy meeting, we call it faith. In this sense, the historical makes no difference. Historical knowledge alone is not enough to bring a person to faith. Any knowledge about the teacher is accidental. Since the entire situation is non-Socratic, the learner owes everything to the teacher. Faith is not knowledge, for one cannot have knowledge of the absurd. Since the teacher has provided the condition for the learner, the object of faith is the teacher rather than a body of doctrine. The contemporary may see the teacher, but this does not make the contemporary a disciple. Really, only the believer, the non-immediate contemporary, knows the teacher. Every non-contemporary can become a contemporary disciple.[114] The first disciples have the responsibility of reporting that they have believed and relate the content of the paradox for faith. The contemporary generation only needs to trust the credibility of the report that God has in fact become a human being. In fact, the historical contemporary with the paradox wants no special treatment. God brings the contemporary and all other generations together. Unfortunately, a generation could come that would look at Christian faith as triumphant. Yet, faith that celebrates its triumph would be ridiculous. It would never actually believe. Faith is always militant, in the battle, and therefore, the possibility for defeat is always present. Faith is always moving out into battle to confront the enemy. Faith is never returning home in victory.[115]

For Christianity, the subjective decision that we make in faithful response to grace is critical. Yet, as important as the decision is, it has a content that has a reasonable basis. The history of Jesus, including the witness to the resurrection of Jesus, offers this reasonable basis. The gospel can provide clarity of that future toward which we must open our lives, for the future is fellowship with Jesus. Our act of faith is always letting go of human securities to embrace the possibilities of the future rule of God in our lives today as well as the hope of the future. Our act of faith is also an embrace of the past action of God that transforms the narrative of human history into the divine story of creation, reconciliation, and redemption. It will mean the presence of a new life shaped by the Ten Commandments, by love of God and neighbor, by faith, hope, and love, by developing virtue and avoiding vice, and the transformation of the everyday experiences of family, neighborhood, work, and associations. This new and eschatological life will find support in being part of the global experience of the people of God, as it will always behave in ways contrary to the pressures exerted by cultural, economic, and political institutions. 

Christology needs to find a way to affirm that the eschatological proclamation needs the narrative of Jesus to identify the eschaton that one in fact proclaims. Jesus in his full historical reality of one born, baptized, teaching, healing, proclaiming of the nearness of the rule of God, passion, and resurrection, is the Word of God. The resurrection confirms the life Jesus lived, in all its Jewishness, and opens the way toward making the Jewish eschatological hopes universal. To put it simply and directly, Jesus would not be the Word, he would not rise into the kerygma/gospel, and he would not rise into the church as the Body of Christ, without the historical resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Such a message, far from imprisoning us to the past, liberates us for the future redeeming act of God that has dawned in Christ and participates by faith in the risen Christ as we participate in the Body of Christ and live in the life-giving power of the Spirit. This hope for the redemption of humanity and indeed the redemption of creation is eschatological life in its fullness.

 

 

---

[1] (Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and death 1961) 269

[2] (Tillich 1951), Volume I, Preface.

[3] (Tillich 1951), Volume I, Introduction, 4, 5, 6, 12, 49

[4] (Macquarrie 1966), Chapter II, 50, 51.

[5] (Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology 1977, 1950, 1929, 1931) (Husserl, Experience and Judgment: Investigations in a Geneaology of Logic 1973, 1935) (Husserl, Ideas: A General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology 1913, 1931) (Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy 1970, 1934-7 and first published in 1954)

[6] (Jaspers, Reason and Existenz 1935)

[7] (Jaspers, Philosophy and the World 1963)

[8] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 2001, 1950) Vol I, Introduction

[9] (Sartre 1943, 1956) Introduction

[10] (Tillich 1951), Introduction, 14.

[11] (Tillich 1951) Vol I, 163-203.

[12] (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 1962)

[13] (Heidegger 1962, 1927) Much of what I describe as existentialist is from Heidegger.

[14] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 2001, 1950)Vol I, Chapter VI.

[15] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 2001, 1950)Vol I, Chapter VII

[16] (Macquarrie 1966), Chapter IV, 89.

[17] Journal of Kierkegaard, 1846-7.

[18] (Sartre 1943, 1956), Part One, Chapter One.

[19] (Sartre 1943, 1956) Part Two, Chapter Three.

[20] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 1950, 1951, 1960) Vol II, Chapter V.

[21] (Macquarrie 1966), Chapter IV, 82-3, 85-6, describing aspects of the later Heidegger, mostly in What is called thinking. (Tillich 1951), Vol. I, 71-9.

[22] (Tillich 1951), Vol, I, 79-81.

[23] (Tillich 1951) Vol I, 81-94.

[24] (Tillich 1951), Vol. I, 94-105.

[25] (Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin 1844,, 1980), Section II.

[26] (Sartre 1943, 1956), Part Three, Chapter One and Two.

[27] (Sartre 1943, 1956) Part Three, Chapter 3.

[28] (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 1962) Part One

[29] (Sartre 1943, 1956), Part Three, end of Chapter 3.

[30] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 2001, 1950) Vol I, Chapter IV.

[31] (Camus, The Stranger 1942).

[32] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 2001, 1950)Vol I, Chapter III

[33] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 2001, 1950)Vol I VIII.

[34] (Kierkegaard, On Authority and Revelation: The Book on Adler: or, A Cycle of Ethico-Religious Essays. 1846), Chapter IV

[35] (Sartre 1943, 1956) Part One, Chapter Two.

[36] (Pannenberg, Metaphysics and the Idea of God 1988, 1990), 77-90. 

[37] (Sartre 1943, 1956) Part Four, Chapter One.

[38] (Sartre 1943, 1956) Part Two, Chapter Two.

[39] (Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and death 1961) 27-28, Letters to a German Friend.

[40] (Sartre 1943, 1956) Part Four, Chapter Two.

[41] (Merleau-Ponty 1945, 1962) Part Three

[42] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 2001, 1950) Vol I, Chapter IX.

[43] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 2001, 1950) Vol I, Chapter X.

[44] (Macquarrie 1966) Part One, Chapter III, 54-74, Chapter IV, 77

[45] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 1950, 1951, 1960) Vol II, Chapter II

[46] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 1950, 1951, 1960) Vol II, Chapter III.

[47] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 1950, 1951, 1960), Vol II, Chapter I.

[48] (Camus, The Plague 1947) Chapter 9

[49] (Kierkegaard, On Authority and Revelation: The Book on Adler: or, A Cycle of Ethico-Religious Essays. 1846) “Postscript.”

[50] (Marcel, The Philosophy of Existentialism 1956, 1966), “On the Ontological Mystery,” 1-32.

[51] (Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and death 1961) 83.

[52] (Camus, The Plague 1947) Chapter 15, 21

[53] (Camus, The Plague 1947) Chapter 21. 

[54] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 2001, 1950) Vol I, Chapter II.

[55] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 2001, 1950) Vol I, Chapter VII

[56] (Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and death 1961) 59, 62-3.

[57] (Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and death 1961) 70.

[58] (Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and death 1961) 90.

[59] (Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and death 1961) 92-3.

[60] (Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and death 1961) 96.

[61] (Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and death 1961) 100.

[62] (Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and death 1961) 103.

[63] (Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and death 1961) 120-1.

[64] (Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and death 1961) 248, 268.

[65] (Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and death 1961) 239-40.

[66] (Camus, The Rebel 1951), Foreword by Herbert Read.

[67] (Camus, Resistance, Rebellion, and death 1961) 272

[68] (Macquarrie 1966), Chapter IV, 92.

[69] (MacIntyre, After Virtue 1981, 1984)

[70] (Taylor, The Ethics of Authenticity 1991). 

[71] Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart, Chapter 15.

[72] Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart, Chapter 9.

[73] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective 1985), 301-3, 308-10.

[74] (Moltmann, Theology of Hope 1965, 1967), 314-6, 321.

[75] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective 1985), 295-312.

[76] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective 1985), 224-42.

[77] (Marcel, On the Ontological Mystery 1933) 444-6

[78] (Marcel, On the Ontological Mystery 1933) 40-4.

[79] (Marcel, On the Ontological Mystery 1933) 334-49

[80] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 1950, 1951, 1960) Vol II, Chapter IX.

[81] (Barth 2004, 1932-67) Volume III.3 [50.3] 334-49.

[82] Paul Ricoeur on death as a limit experience.

[83] (Camus, The Myth of Sisypus and Other Essays 1955) for these reflections on embracing the absurdness of life.

[84] (Pannenberg, Anthropology in Theological Perspective 1985), 209-11, 234, 237-9.

[85] (Pannenberg, Systematic Theology 1998, 1991) Volume I, 166-7.

[86] (Critique of Pure Reason, with WP, Metaphysics, p. 82-84)

[87] [See Concept and Anticipation, in Pannenberg, Metaphysics and the Idea of God, 91-109, but especially 104-9.]

[88] (Pannenberg, Metaphysics and the Idea of God 1988, 1990), 79-82.

[89] (Pannenberg, Metaphysics and the Idea of God 1988, 1990), 69-90. 

[90] (Pannenberg, Metaphysics and the Idea of God 1988, 1990), 75-77.

[91] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 1950, 1951, 1960) Vol II, Chapter IX

[92] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 1950, 1951, 1960) Vol II, Chapter IX

[93] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 1950, 1951, 1960) Vol II, Chapter IX

[94] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 1950, 1951, 1960) Vol II, Chapter X

[95] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 1950, 1951, 1960) Vol II, Chapter X

[96] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 1950, 1951, 1960) Vol II, Chapter X

[97] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 1950, 1951, 1960) Vol II, Chapter X

[98] (Marcel, The Mystery of Being 1950, 1951, 1960) Vol II, Chapter X

[99] (Macquarrie 1966) Chapter II, 39.

[100] (Macquarrie 1966), Chapter IV, 79, 80.

[101] (Macquarrie 1966), Chapter IV, 92

[102] (Moltmann, The Crucified God 1973, 1974), 61-2.

[103] (Bultmann, What is Theology 1926-36) kindle edition 1694, 1703, 1829, 1831, 1834, 1985, 1988, 1995.

[104] (Bultmann, New Testament and Mythology and Other Basic Writings 1984) “New Testament and Mythology,” (1941) 282, 283.

[105] (Moltmann, Theology of Hope 1965, 1967), 173, 178, 185-7, 189-90, 212-3.

[106] (Moltmann, The Church in the Power of the Spirit: A Conribution to Messianic Ecclesiology 1975, 1977) 210-3.

[107] (Tillich 1951) Vol II, 90-96.

[108] (Macquarrie 1966) 249-50, 272.

[109] (Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments 1844, 1962)

[110] (Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments 1844, 1962), Chapter I, “A Project of Thought,” under the pseudonym Johannes Climacus.

[111] (Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments 1844, 1962) Chapter II.

[112] (Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments 1844, 1962) Chapter III.

[113] (Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments 1844, 1962) Appendiix: the Paradox and the Offended Consciousness.

[114] (Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments 1844, 1962) Chapter IV

[115] (Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments 1844, 1962) Chapter V