Many people think that existentialism
is devoid of faith, because of the anti-clerical writings of Nietzsche and
atheistic writings of Jean-Paul Sartre.
However, most existentialists were theists. I see the same false dichotomy
between Christianity– love for God-- and humanism—love
for man. Jacques Maritain,
the Catholic philosopher, wrote a book defining and defending “Christian
humanism.” Such belief are not in
opposition to each other, and nor is existentialism necessarily in opposition
to Christianity. Of theists who
influenced existentialism, we must include Hegel, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Kafka,
Dostoevsky, and others. Unlike much of
religious and modern thought that minimizes or suppresses the idea of man’s
free will, in existentialism man’s free will provides the axiomatic backdrop
that asks us to choose in a morally ambiguous world. Man defines himself by the sum of his
choices, according to Sartre. “Man is
free. The coward makes him
cowardly. The hero makes him
heroic.” Because God doesn’t exist, Sartre
says, man defines his essence though his actions. But I don’t think this follows. Why should the non-existence of God have any
bearing whatever on our actions? Why
should it matter if our death results in nothingness, heaven, or reincarnation,
so long as we act morally and authentically today? It makes as much sense to say: Because God
exists man defines his essence through his actions. Bad faith emerges when we attribute to God
consequences to our actions, or when we allow a creed to dictate our life
rather than our conscience. As
Dostoyevsky says: “Thou shalt love life more than the meaning of life”
The architects of the Cambodian
genocide studied the existentialism of Sartre in the Paris of the early 1950s. Were “Stare's children” correct to make the
leap from “life is meaningless” to “humans are worthless”? To me, that makes as much sense as blaming Hiroshima on Thomas Jefferson. All that they heard was that life is absurd,
reality nauseating, and that man was free of commandments and obligations,
while entirely forgetting the dimension of hard moral choice and courage. While Sartre was a Stalinist fellow traveler, he certainly wasn’t
advocating the abdication of morality that would result in pyramids of skulls
under an Asian sun. The syllogism is
not that since all is absurd, every act we take is absurd, including the claim
that all is absurd. Rather, these are starting
points to allow us to find meaning in the face of meaninglessness and absurdity. I cannot deny that in existentialism we find
nihilism and violence for its own sake.
E. M. Cioran defined the case for total
pessimism: “Life is a passionate
emptiness, and intriguing nothingness.”
He writes that “I cling to the world no better than a ring on a
skeleton’s finger” but also says that “I fall back on God if only out of a
desire to trample my doubts underfoot. Since all life is futility, the decision
to exist must be the most irrational of all.”
But what the existentialists generally emphasize about man is that is a
decision-making creature blessed or cursed with the freedom to choose among a
number of possibilities in a mysterious.
Dostoyevsky asserted the eternal necessity for the soul to be free, but
discerned that the moment man indulged this freedom,
it led him into tragedy and evil. To be
truly human, must man must accept this freedom by a commitment to
authenticity. That authenticity can
translate into either acts of immorality or acts of morality, but the act rests
entirely with in our hands. This message
can be become bracing in the religious version of existentialism in which
choice is directed at a transcending spiritual goal.
