Does radical subjectivity lead to freedom or imprisonment?
Although it is difficult to interpret precisely expressions of enthusiasm for certain ideas or to measure and record the motions of opinion felt in an intellectual community, no one familiar with the secular college campus today can deny that forms of existentialism have enormous appeal for students and younger faculty. This was dramatized recently on the campus where I teach by the enthusiastic response given to a featured lecturer who advanced the existential doctrine that life is absurd, and who curiously rested his case on an intemperate attack against Christianity. The sympathetic reception of this lecture clearly suggested that the speaker and the audience shared a common ground.
Existential absurdity is a dynamic rather than static idea-complex. Nevertheless, the essential proposition is simple: on the testimony and evidence of existence, life is patently chaotic, incoherent, meaningless, and hence absurd; consequently, the only responsible and honest intellectual and emotional response is to turn to the imperatives of the human spirit, to assert the freedom and autonomy of the self in order to impose meaningful form on the chaotic flux of existence. The widespread acceptance of such postulates, even by people who do not consciously use existential terms with reference to themselves, seems to be a characteristic of our age, related no doubt to the fin-de-siècle state of mind we are experiencing as we approach the year 2000.
Anyone who tries to trace these ideas to their origins will discover that existential and nihilistic tendencies are ingrained in our cultural consciousness. For example, three major nineteenth-century writers—Emerson, Melville, and Twain—dramatized in different ways the repudiation of any absolutes external to the sovereignty of the self. Emerson proclaimed the deity of the self and declared, “The only right is what is after my constitution; the only wrong what is against it.” In God-defiant Ahab, Melville pictures the ennobling yet destructive consequences of a self-imprisoned solipsism; and Twain’s Huck Finn relies on self-divined moral impulses at the crucial moment to triumph over his deformed conscience. Twain later recognized the incipient nihilism of his moral universe, however, and Theodor, protagonist of The Mysterious Stranger, is tutored by Satan to confront the absurdity of existence by insisting that life is only a dream, an illusion having no substance apart from the subjective structures of consciousness. All three authors couched their existential postures in a framework of anti-Christianity.
Among the forces that have accelerated the trend toward sovereignty of the self are the impact of philosophical naturalism, the widespread influence of Friedrich Nietzsche, the popularization of Freudian doctrine in the form of psychological primitivism, and the transformation of Einstein’s quantum physics into an ethical dogma that declares there are no absolutes except those of expediency. It is not hard to explain why such forceful ideas become assimilated into the cultural texture of moral and ethical beliefs.
Only in the last decade or so has “existentialism” become part of our everyday vocabulary. It was inevitable, of course, that it should become faddish, now that it has the apparent support of intellectual authority. Many people probably play the popular game of “imaginary authors” when the topic of existentialism is broached: that is, not everybody who talks about Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard and Sartre and Kafka and Camus and Jaspers and so on has read them. The point is not that if they read them they would change their minds about the ultimate validity of existentialism; the point is that existentialism in its varied expressions is in. In fact, it has been in so long that it is respectable—even academically respectable, which, to a genuine existentialist, is the kiss of death. That most of the talked-about exponents of this view of life are European lends considerable glamour to it. It has a world-weary, Continental air about it; it is certainly opposed to everything provincial and insular.
At this point it would be well to clarify “classic” existentialism, whose formulations have become so loose that they are applied with equanimity both to Christianity and to its antitheses. Walter Kaufmann has noted in his Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre that existentialism is not a philosophical system as such; it is an attitude, a state of mind. All the different exponents of this ism agree on these points: they refuse to belong to any school of thought, they repudiate the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and they distrust any traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and remote from life. The essential characteristics are the strained protest, the total commitment to principle, and the obsession with the self. It can be called the drama of the mind that is sufficient unto itself. At the same time, the mind, even as it declares its total self-sufficiency and autonomy, cannot shake itself loose from an anxious self-pity and sense of cosmic outcastness. Existentialism is, in short, a symptom of acute spiritual exhaustion. The doctrine of absurdity is only one of the most recent expressions of this exhaustion.
One must admit, however, that a number of forces operative in our culture and in the present world situation would make the existential doctrine of absurdity seem relevant if not rational. To cite a Quaker expression, “it speaks to our condition.” Many labels have been given to our age, but perhaps W. H. Auden’s “The Age of Anxiety” comes closest to defining it. The crass materialism of a pragmatic society whose religions have been secularized has helped form a modern America with a number of obvious deficiencies. Pressures seem to conspire against the development of self-identity. The social mask of accommodation never comes off, and it becomes increasingly difficult to be honest with oneself and with others. Forms of hypocrisy are the inevitable outcome; it becomes more difficult to spot the phony because we’re never quite sure we might not be one ourselves.
If this portrait seems too harsh, I can only say that it is the portrait of modern man appearing in much contemporary literature. It is the portrait of Holden Caulfield in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye: Holden’s loneliness and disillusionment in a world of phonies is an expression of a cultural state of mind. Somehow anonymity is safer than exposing one’s essential self to misunderstanding. T. S. Eliot intuitively realized this in his portrait of J. Alfred Prufrock—inhibited, indecisive, uncommitted, afraid of exposing his inner self to ridicule, but most of all, emotionally sterile. The shock of recognition comes when we realize that Prufrock’s emotional sterility is really a verbal equivalent for the spiritual sterility of our times. Eliot’s metaphor of modern society as a wasteland of hollow men has not lost its power to compel belief.
It is in the context of such cultural forces as these that young people, filled with a vague sense of self-estrangement and non-commitment, find the existential road to “freedom” so attractive. Hemingway’s cynical assertion that whatever feels good is moral and whatever feels bad is immoral suddenly makes sense to a generation looking for an “authentic” norm to preserve them from the clichés of tradition or the false rhetoric of convention. Although modern existentialism has become modish, still much of its appeal derives from an intuitive need to rescue the individual and the meaning of personal experience from the depersonalizing and dehumanizing forces that conspire against them. The existentialist protests these forces and affirms the need for total commitment to principle. Thus existentialism, even as expressed in the radical doctrine of absurdity, cannot be dismissed as irrelevant. Unfortunately, existentialists, who have correctly assessed some of the major problems of our times, are handicapped in their search for real authority to provide a basis for total commitment by their fear of any authority that might circumscribe the autonomy of their being, the all-sufficiency of the self.
A tragedy of our times is that the search for ultimate meaning has been complicated by the failure of the institutional church. Existentialists—or those who conceal their confusions under that panoply—are right when they accuse institutional Christianity of failing to solve their problems. Frankly, the repudiation of institutionalized Christianity is a serious indictment of churchdom’s “having a form of godliness but denying the power thereof” (2 Tim. 3:5).
The blind have become leaders of the blind and, as in one of the parables Jesus gave, all have fallen into the ditch. One huge segment of institutional Christianity has entrenched itself in the traditions of men and the pontifical authority of the ecclesiologists. Fear and superstition still stalk the heels of those fiercely religious communicants who adhere to the precepts of men but who cannot distinguish the voice of the Spirit. Another huge segment of institutionalized Christianity has demythologized the supernatural and has thereby reduced the revelation of Jesus Christ and his Church to nothing but an existential “encounter” with a folklore God. The voice of this organization is appealing because it has come to use the existentialists’ terms; but it is a spiritually lifeless voice. Still another large segment of institutionalized Christianity stubbornly clings to orthodox forms but fails to translate doctrines into spiritual realities.
The remoteness and detachment of institutionalized Christianity—qualities against which existentialists rightfully react—have caused it to reach an impasse, as one part of Christendom nervously fingers its beads in the dark, a second part tries to out-existential the existentialists, and the third part mindlessly recites its creeds, being careful not to choke on dry communion crackers or to attract undue notice by demonstrating spiritual enthusiasm. The fact that all segments are now chatting amiably over the backyard fence has been no cause to rejoice, for snatches of their conversation suggest that the best to be expected from this turn of events is an amalgamation of institutionalism.
No wonder, then, that confusion exists. But God is not the author of confusion. If life with its apparent ambiguities and spiritual voids seems meaningless and absurd, the chief reason is that man has willed it to be so. An Eastern sage made a point in his maxim, “It is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.” Yet something in man prefers darkness to light, and he often wills to remain there. It has always been true; the Apostle John described this predisposition in human nature when he recorded the response of man to the revelation of Jesus Christ: “In him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not” (John 1:4, 5). The present darkness is one of choice, but it is a choice that issues in condemnation: “And this is the condemnation, that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19).
Much of what man sees and accomplishes in this world is confessedly absurd. This has been so because man in his natural state, preferring the autonomy of the self, is condemned to all the confusions inherent in that condition. The inner spiritual disorder of unregenerate man is inevitably reflected in his social structures, for society is the macrocosm of the individual, and the inner darkness of individual man is directly communicated to collective man. But the tendency of the existentialist—particularly the devotee of the absurd—is to transfer his own confusion and meaninglessness to the order of the universe. The absurdity of inner chaos is externalized and attributed to that which is outside the boundaries of the self; but the entrenched existentialist, like the Pharisee of old, cannot admit his need for help outside himself.
There is, however, an alternative to the confusion and despair voiced so plaintively by modern man, though the increasing lawlessness of human hearts makes this alternative unattractive. It is the direct, transforming, and experiential relationship man can have with God by faith in the efficacious sacrifice and atonement of Jesus Christ. The condition of partaking of divine nature requires the surrender of the self by personal faith in the redemptive efficacy of the blood of Jesus Christ. Only through this means can fragmented human nature be made spiritually whole again in reconciliation with God (Col. 1:20–23).
One who has entered into this dynamic saving relationship with the Source of all authority, the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, will no longer be able to find the existential doctrine of absurdity tenable. Of course, this redemptive plan—authenticated by fulfilled prophecy, historical confirmation, and the personal, experiential revelation of the Holy Spirit—will strike many as foolish and arbitrary, itself an example of absurdity. But no man who has “tasted of the good things” of God can deny the transforming power of the Spirit of Christ. A man with a direct personal relationship with Jesus Christ is never at the mercy of a man who argues that life is absurd. It is a spiritual experience, and as Paul declared, “the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14).
The modern existentialist temper has at least shown that many recognize the hopelessness of the human condition in its present state. The existentialists have brought home the fact that in a thousand ineluctable and obscure ways, modem man is enslaved and entrapped—even by the very institutions to which he looks for aid. But the Gospel of Jesus Christ will probably not be found appealing by those who have brewed and tasted the heady wine of the total sovereignty of the self. Genuine repentance, a condition of entering into the possession of eternal life, is difficult for one who has devoted his best energies to asserting the primacy of the self as the absolute authority. Like Emerson, many have made a commitment to this vision, even if it means being in a perversely courageous way a “child of the Devil.”
The pyrite of dynamic fictions has always been more glittering than the gold of truth, and it is not strange that modern man has come to the impasse of spiritual sterility. Indeed, those in the academic world who are dedicated to the quests of the mind are as likely as any to be blinded to the truth. The Epicurean and Stoic philosophers who graciously gave Paul an audience in his famous discourse on Mars Hill were religiously devoted to intellectual novelty, and although a few believed the Gospel of the resurrection, the majority dismissed it as an absurd notion worthy only of scorn (Acts 17:18–21). In his letter to Timothy, Paul later described the characteristics of men who will repudiate the word of Christ; prominent on the list is their being “lovers of self,” who are “ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Tim. 3:1–9).
It is a sad commentary on human intelligence when a seeker after the truth finds his quest for meaning in a “meaningless” universe more exciting than the discovery of truth itself. Enticed by the ancient delusion of freedom that the sovereignty of the self seems to promise, those who partake of the existential temper are oblivious to the fact that the greatest prison of all is the charnel house of the self. The way out of self-bondage is the Christ who said, “If the Son therefore shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed” (John 8:36). Essentially, this release from self-enclosure begins when one is willing to receive that which is his by faith. There is no more exciting revelation of the meaning of existence than to become a partaker of the divine nature, to be “born, not of blood … nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12, 13). As simple as this promise is, few will claim it. The reason is not hard to discover. Jesus said, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me” (Matt. 16:24). Many will find the cost absurd!
