The reflections in the previous pages are gathered together under the rubric “survival guide.” Still, this book is not a Baedeker on how to lead a happy or happier life. The assumption underlying these meditations is that, for all the jottings in your gratitude journal, leading an authentic life remains a Sisyphean labor. Author and self-proclaimed boozer Charles Bukowski titled one of his books What Matters Most Is How Well You Walk Through the Fire, not “ . . . how well you walk through summer days romping on the beach with your kids.”
As I mentioned in the introduction, I was attracted to the existentialists because, more than any other assemblage of authors, they recognized and addressed the hard fact that life is not a romantic journey but a daunting trek, or maybe, as Schopenhauer writes, “a task to be worked off.” Still, the writers placed into conversation in this book are by no means in agreement with Schopenhauer’s grievance that “the world is just hell, and in it, human beings are the tortured souls on the one hand and the devils on the other.” Despite all his moans about and trenchant critiques of modernity, Camus tellingly confided, “in the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” From Kierkegaard to Camus, the existentialists are profoundly aware that life is an incomparable gift, albeit a gift that is also a challenge.
When you are determined to take on a challenge, it is reasonable to register the impediments that might obstruct your efforts, whether this new challenge is learning a foreign language or starting a rigorous exercise program. Unblinkered, the existentialists took careful heed of life’s many obstacles. Most of us would agree, for instance, that a loveless life is a lifeless life. But how many of us are similarly able to appreciate Dostoyevsky’s insight that because we need to feel in control, accepting love for who we are (as opposed to wanting to be loved for our accomplishments or looks)is one of the most daunting stumbling blocks to true intimacy? Despite its limitations, this survival guide is designed to help you get over this and other stumbling blocks.
From Kierkegaard to Camus, the existentialists are profoundly aware that life is an incomparable gift, albeit a gift that is also a challenge.
And, yet, in his Seventh Letter, Plato questions if books are even a boon to wisdom. After all, three of history’s greatest sages—Jesus, Buddha, and Socrates—did not leave us with any of their writings. Though he recognizes how the stylus aids memory, Plato seems dubious about the written word’s ability to empower the good and just life. Plato reckoned that committing truths or, for that matter, arguments to memory was not enough. Kierkegaard, an ever-present voice in this book, agreed with Plato. He stood firm on the claim that if ideas are going to impress, they have to be appropriated, passionately, by the individual. Like sparrows in a barn, strings of pithy quotes flit in and out of the psyche. Maybe the same holds for a paraphrase. I am therefore reluctant to condense and repackage some of the existential nostrums that I have attempted to put on the counter in these pages.
Then again, I don’t hesitate to recapitulate ideas in my role as a professor. In the final weeks of my ethics courses, I always work with students in assembling a list of potentially life-impacting insights garnered from the twenty or so thinkers we have been scratching our heads over throughout the semester.
For instance, we devote two full weeks to Aristotle, who contends that life is too complex to come up with a universal moral rule book to cover every situation. When unsure about the right course of action, Plato’s prize pupil teaches, seek out and try to imitate a virtuous individual. Problems, however, immediately arise; how, pray tell, is the person who has not yet achieved moral excellence supposed to identify the virtuous individual? In other words, there are problems with Aristotle’s “virtue ethics,” just as there are with every other ethical theory. Still, Aristotle serves up plenty of moral insights in his work. As previously discussed, it is not enough to know the good; one needs to possess the character to abide by that knowledge, which requires courage and the ability to deal with fear. The psychologist Aristotle avers that cultivating courage requires practicing with fear, which is why I mentioned boxing as a good place to get in some sparring with the jitters.
What is good for class, then, is also likely good for a book. So, despite my hesitance, perhaps there is value in distilling some of the most salient existential prescriptions in our survival guide.
One idea or perhaps presupposition that our reflections orbited around was the notion that we are self-conscious/self-relating creatures, creatures who might not always be conscious of the feelings informing the way we relate to ourselves but who nonetheless have some control over the way we relate to our inner lives. It is a truism to observe that we abide in a world that medicalizes inconvenient thoughts, moods, and emotions. This retrenchment may have helped destigmatize mental illness. Just the same, we tendered the idea in the chapter about anxiety that anxiety is not simply a disrupting affect accompanied by sweaty palms and an increased pulse rate. It is a feeling with a message, one with an important cognitive component.
Some recognize that a certain level of anxiety is helpful in sparking alertness, but our thinking on the previous pages went beyond that. Remember Kierkegaard’s claim that to be anxious in the right way, about the right issues, is to learn the ultimate lesson in life. Though he was remiss in honoring his debt, Heidegger took much guidance from Kierkegaard on the nature and meaning of anxiety. According to the philosopher from the Black Forest, the experience of anxiety yanks us out of the crowd, and only by virtue of our being extricated from the herd (a feeling Heidegger describes as “homesickness”) can we reenter into an authentic relation to our community.
For many of us, throughout our life we are forced to confront depression, a fire-breathing dragon. I enlisted Kierkegaard in our deliberation on the inexplicable sadness to retrieve a distinction between a psychological malady and a spiritual illness, or, in the case at hand, between depression and despair. At one level, which Kierkegaard would describe as “immediacy,” we are swamped by moods and feelings, but if we try, we can still manage to keep a part of ourselves outside those feelings. No matter how hopeless you might feel, Kierkegaard teaches, you still have a responsibility to reach through the pain and to care for and about others even if you find it hard to care about yourself. Failing to make that effort runs up the white flag on your moral responsibilities, the point when we slip from depression, a psychological malady, into the spiritual malady of despair. In the chapter on depression and despair, we also pondered how walking under what Julia Kristeva christened “the black sun” can illuminate our absolute vulnerability in life and expand our capacity for empathy.
Anxiety is not simply a disrupting affect accompanied by sweaty palms and an increased pulse rate. It is a feeling with a message, one with an important cognitive component.
From the chapter about death, we learned that Kierkegaard and Tolstoy underscored the fact that an abstract understanding of your mortality is a distant cry from a personal grasp of what it means that there will come a time when there will be no more time, when “all is over.” Here the Kierkegaardian theme of the “self as a relation that relates itself to itself” again looms. Philosophers—and people in general—are of different minds when it comes to responding to the question of how we should relate ourselves to our impending doom. Many shrug—you have one life to live; don’t waste it morosely mulling over the end of that life. Kierkegaard, the poet-philosopher who essentially gave us the category of “the individual,” maintained that thinking of yourself as dead is good medicine. Earnest reflection on the meaning of our inevitable death, Kierkegaard promises, will allow every moment to become more valuable and endow finite issues with new and more powerful significance. Deeply appropriated, the idea of our death will help us avoid being sloppy in our relationships. If you have a spat, the existentialists implore, clear it up and make amends. Knowing that it is dust to dust will reprioritize our lives. Tolstoy concurs with Kierkegaard that a skull on the desk can reshuffle our deck of values, but as the head of a large family and an infinitely more social creature than his Danish counterpart, Tolstoy also intimated that the ubiquitous denial of death was partially responsible for the inauthentic personal relations of modern society.
In the chapter on depression and despair, we also pondered how walking under what Julia Kristeva christened “the black sun” can illuminate our absolute vulnerability in life and expand our capacity for empathy.
Existentialists are seldom included in ethics courses. Nevertheless, it is not just our relation to ourselves that we concentrated on throughout the text but also our relations with others. This is the very topic of morals. Sartre maintained that there is no objective way of distinguishing right from wrong, asserting that sacred texts and ethical theories could be used for or against almost any course of action. Sartre claims that your so-called gut feelings don’t have any value until you act on them. Without us having a foundation with which to make decisions, our moral lives become fraught with anxiety. Targeting the Freudian notion of the unconscious, Sartre reminds us of the temptation to “bad faith,” to deny our freedom and to treat ourselves as though we were both subjects and objects.
Earnest reflection on the meaning of our inevitable death, Kierkegaard promises, will allow every moment to become more valuable and endow finite issues with new and more powerful significance.
Like Kant, Kierkegaard assumes that anyone aiming to lead a moral life would have to walk through the fire of times when doing the right thing will incinerate their prospects for happiness. If Kierkegaard were to devise one of those “ethics workshops” so trendy today, or perhaps be appointed editor of the New York Times Magazine’s long-running Ethicist section, he would probably counsel that we don’t require more knowledge or new skills of analysis to help us resist lying to get out of a tight spot. Instead, Kierkegaard recommends that we need to be able to cleave to the ethical-religious knowledge that we already possess, and by doing so we can ward off the temptation to talk ourselves into believing that the easy way is the right way. Make no mistake about it, Kierkegaard averred that the tendency to hoodwink ourselves into a willed ignorance is the major barrier to leading a moral life.
If Kierkegaard were to devise one of those “ethics workshops” so trendy today, or perhaps be appointed editor of the New York Times Magazine’s long-running Ethicist section, he would probably counsel that we don’t require more knowledge or new skills of analysis to help us resist lying to get out of a tight spot.
Like Marx and Freud, Nietzsche regularly deconstructed so-called sacred conscience. So far as Nietzsche was concerned, morals and conscience did not come from on high. Nor did they spring out of reason. Ethicists today, such as philosopher Philip Kitcher, believe that ethics, just like everything else, is best understood in evolutionary terms. Given historical and current events, it might seem ironic, but according to Kitcher and his ilk, ethics are evolving toward increased and expanding circles of cooperation. Nietzsche concurred that our moral ideals were rolling stones gathering the moss of different and often antithetical meanings, but stones rolled along by the play of forces like the will to power. Nietzsche’s method of investigation was philological: he tracked changes in values by detailing shifts in the meaning of moral terms. Today “good” has pacific overtones; however, in ancient times it was laden with martial connotations. Nietzsche raises the untimely question: What is the value of value? Like the utilitarians, whom he found utterly repugnant, Nietzsche believed that humans created morals, and our morals could enhance and/or poison culture. Nietzsche was wedded to the belief that over the course of history and through what he deemed the “slave revolt,” the ascetic ideal had been erected as the moral touchstone. Given this criterion, for anything to be termed “good” it had to at least appear to involve an element of self-sacrifice. For example, I can’t just charge forward and insist that I want to be the best; I have to adorn my ambitions in altruistic motives. I can decide to become a doctor or a lawyer, for instance, but I first have to at least present the pretense that I am primarily moved to help people—not because I crave challenges, wealth, and status in my community.
Nietzsche’s rollicking writing gets under the skin and can make us attentive to the subterranean power interests possibly lurking behind our so-called better angels. Ironically enough, Nietzsche battled against the inward-gazing suspicious eye, and yet when you read him, you can’t help but become a detective regarding your own motives. In addition to Nietzsche’s nudging us to be strong enough to let things go beyond forgiveness to forgetting, these uplifting or at least cleansing doubts are moral lessons enough.
For anything to be termed “good” it had to at least appear to involve an element of self-sacrifice.
What, though, can the existentialists teach us about faith?
Kierkegaard agreed with Nietzsche—the self-proclaimed Anti-Christ—that God was dead, or at least faith in God was moribund. After a public fray with a popular newspaper, Kierkegaard, an inveterate walker, would be stalked by Copenhagen street urchins, teasingly yelling at him “Enten/Eller”—Either/Or. Either faith or unbelief. According to Kierkegaard, the choice between the sacred and the profane is not one that reason can make. Put another way, if you put all your faith in reason, you have made your choice. Conversely, where faith is concerned, it involves a terrible clash. This is the proverbial fallen tree on the path Kierkegaard repeatedly stresses. After all, is it any surprise that the groundswells of scientific knowledge have brought with it an ebb tide of faith? Matthew Arnold’s plaintiff poem “Dover Beach” speaks to the aftershocks of the collision between faith and reason. Here is the fourth stanza:
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
For those who still long to be awash in the sea of faith, Kierkegaard’s most profound theological insight is his tethering of the possibility of faith and offense. In Kierkegaard’s time and much more so in our own, there is a tendency to reduce religion to either a gauzy form of spirituality or to something akin to philosophy for dummies—good, uplifting, and yet untenable stories that would be better served by science and argument. Recall that for Kierkegaard faith is a paradoxical movement of giving up the world and expecting it back. To the extent that he talks about the object of faith, the idea that the eternal came into time and died is paradoxical, hardly something rationality can easily get into its head.
According to Kierkegaard, we can react one of two ways to the conflict between faith and reason. We can take offense and dismiss the conclusions rejected by the intellect, or reason can smilingly step aside and grant that faith surpasses understanding. In a late journal entry, Kierkegaard comments:
In every generation, most people . . . live and die in the delusion that things keep on going, and that if it were granted to them to live longer, things would keep going onward in a continuing, straight forward ascent with more and more comprehension. How many experience at all the maturity of discovering that there comes a critical point where things turn around, when what matters from then on is an increasing comprehension that more and more comprehends that there is something that cannot be comprehended?1
Comprehending the importance of the incomprehensible would be reason’s happy relation to the paradox of Christian faith.
Another chunk of wisdom to be extracted from the cavernous mines of Kierkegaard’s writing is the notion that faith is not so much a matter of belief as it is a matter of how you relate to your unbelief. In one of Kierkegaard’s shorter tracts, Johnnas Cimacus, or De Omnibus Dubitandum Est, our author noted that faith and doubt are not opposites because both are expressions of passionate concern. The decisive issue is this—when you find yourself shaking your head incredulously at the mention of an all-loving and all-knowing creator, do you pray to the God you don’t believe in for faith, or wave goodbye, convinced that faith is a feeling that you either have or you don’t? It is common to hear a person say “I lost my faith,” but from a Kierkegaardian frame of reference, faith is not something you lose. It is a possibility that you push away and then, after a time, feel as though it was something you passively lost when in fact it was an essential something that you rejected.
Faith is not so much a matter of belief as it is a matter of how you relate to your unbelief.
The how-to in this book is one of how to lead an authentic life in an inauthentic world. It would be dishonest to pretend we succeeded in defining authenticity in the way that we might be able to define a healthy heart. In his Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling undertakes the Nietzschean labor of providing a genealogy of the terms that comprise the title of his minor classic. According to Trilling, authenticity was a child of the concept of sincerity, which, in addition to honesty, was long understood to be a full-fledged commitment to work, duty, and our station in life. “It was the principle of civilization itself,” Trilling writes, “the principle which guaranteed the trait on which the English most prided themselves, their sincerity, by which they meant their single-minded relations to things, to each other, and to themselves.” Following Trilling, the concept of authenticity went through vicissitudes of meaning, in time being connected with something more organic and hostile to the ever-encroaching world of machines, technology, and the hegemony of the almighty dollar. Authenticity came to be seen as a matter of being as opposed to having.
It is natural to think that being masked was the polar opposite of authenticity. But Trilling reminds us that Nietzsche, the very individual who commanded “Become who you are,” also maintained that “Every profound spirit needs a mask,” for it appears “that all great things bestride the earth in monstrous and frightening masks in order to inscribe themselves in the hearts of humanity with eternal demands.”
Other than Nietzsche, the existentialists associated authenticity with becoming your true self. The line of fracture that we walk in this book is one between thinking of your “true self” as a creation or as a discovery. Is there a deeper self that we were meant to discover and actualize, or is becoming yourself akin to an artistic creation, with the palette consisting of your culture, talents, feelings? Of course, the relation to ourselves that Kierkegaard deems authentic requires a hop, skip, and—in the end, as in all things—a giant leap of faith.