part0024

Existentialism and atheism have become almost synonymous terms. This is because the best known existentialist thinkers of the twentieth century, Heidegger, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus and Beckett, are all declared atheists who insist that mankind is abandoned in a meaningless, godless universe. Contrary to popular belief, however, atheism is not compulsory for existentialists and not all existentialists are atheists, even if most of them are. Interestingly, the philosophy of existentialism is as much rooted in the Christianity of Kierkegaard, as in the ‘God is dead’ atheism of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

Kierkegaard was only forty-two years old when he died. He dedicated his short, troubled life to the creation of a huge body of philosophical and theological writing that inspired both existentialism and modern Protestant philosophy. As all later existentialists readily acknowledge, many of the central themes and concepts of existentialism – freedom, choice, responsibility, authenticity, anxiety, despair and absurdity – originate in the writings of Kierkegaard.

Although a Christian, Kierkegaard was far from being an obedient, unquestioning sheep-like member of the Christian flock. He was very much an eccentric maverick who found himself continually at odds with orthodox Christian views generally and the Danish State Church in particular. It is Kierkegaard’s radical approach to Christianity, his views on faith and religious commitment and his rejection of a rationalist approach towards the religious life, that make him a true existentialist.

In many ways Kierkegaard’s philosophy is a reaction to the rationalism of the German idealist, George W. F. Hegel. Hegel argues that human reason is an historical development and that history itself is the progressive development of human reason towards perfect rationality. History is the process of Absolute Mind or God coming to know itself through the perfection of human reason. In coming to understand the nature of Absolute Mind or God perfected human reason reveals Absolute Mind or God and brings it to full reality. In other words, the mind of God as Absolute Mind becomes actual when particular human minds collectively achieve perfection.

Kierkegaard finds Hegel’s idealism disturbing. He argues that in making human thought, and ultimately humankind’s relationship with God, the product of an historical process, Hegel disregards the human individual. For Kierkegaard, the individual does not experience herself primarily, if at all, as a part of history, but rather as a free, anxious, despairing being troubled by concrete, existential moral concerns and existing without any purpose that reason can discover.

For Kierkegaard, Hegel’s obsession with reason and rationality in his theorising about mankind’s relationship to God reflects an obsession with reason and rationality that has dominated and misled Christian theology for centuries. Hegel’s philosophy is the most rationally refined and therefore the most extreme expression of this obsession.

Kierkegaard is critical of traditional Christian theology for claiming that God’s existence and nature can be established objectively and that religious and moral beliefs are, therefore, a matter of reason. For Kierkegaard, God’s existence cannot be proven or even shown to be probable, as no amount of finite reasoning can establish anything at all about the infinite. Religious faith is not a matter of objective reasoning, or a matter of going along with the reasoning of others through the complacent acceptance of Church doctrine, but rather a matter of a highly personal, subjective, passionate and freely chosen commitment to believe.

Kierkegaard’s philosophy has inspired, and continues to inspire, generations of religious existentialists, among them Karl Jaspers, Paul Tillich, Martin Buber, Karl Barth and Gabriel Marcel. According to de Beauvoir, it was Marcel who first coined the word ‘existentialist’ (The Prime of Life , p. 548). Echoing Kierkegaard, these philosophers and theologians criticise the dominant role that reason has come to play in religion, stressing instead the importance of a highly personal and passionate commitment to live according to a set of religious values that cannot be rationally justified.

For religious existentialists, genuine religious faith is not about passively adopting certain communal beliefs by assenting to questionable propositions, it is about one’s moment by moment attitude to life, death and the infinite. Faith is not an established viewpoint but an ongoing act of will maintained in the face of doubts, misgivings, challenges and difficulties. A person never simply has faith, her faith is something she must continually create. The person who believes she possess faith, as one can posses a car, is inauthentic; her faith is not genuine.

Religious existentialism adheres to the general existentialist maxim that to be is to do, and certainly for religious existentialists the true measure of faith is action. Kierkegaard wrote a highly influential book, Fear and Trembling , under the pseudonym of Johannes de Silentio, in which he explores the faith of Abraham.

In the Bible (Genesis 22:1–19), God tells Abraham to travel to the land of Moriah and sacrifice his only son Isaac. The biblical account does not explore Abraham’s thoughts but we can imagine, as Kierkegaard does, that Abraham is horrified by God’s command. Nonetheless, by his actions, Abraham places his faith in God higher than anything else of value in his life and does as God orders. At the last moment, when Abraham has demonstrated the power of his faith, the power of his will, God allows him to sacrifice a ram instead of Isaac.

Religious existentialists argue that authentic religious faith must be like the faith of Abraham – a man who has come to be known as The Father of Faith. It must be suffered, realised through action, highly subjective and personal and sustained by a freely chosen will to believe that may well go against reason, the advice of other people and even ordinary moral considerations. Religious existentialists urge each individual to have the kind of authentic relationship with God exemplified by Abraham rather than just ‘go through the motions’ of so-called belief in an anonymous, conformist, passive, dispassionate, sheep-like way. For Kierkegaard, to exist, and therefore to have a relationship with the infinite, is comparable to riding a wild stallion. Unfortunately, most people ‘exist’ as though they had fallen asleep in a hay wagon.

For the atheistic existentialists, all faith is bad faith. In their view, the position of the religious existentialists regarding religious faith and the existence of God indicates a primitive project of bad faith in which people choose to believe what suits them. The kind of bad faith that, as Sartre argues, ‘stands forth in the firm resolution not to demand too much , to count itself satisfied when it is barely persuaded, to force itself in decisions to adhere to uncertain truths’ (Being and Nothingness , p. 91).

The atheistic existentialists certainly question the spiritual direction of the philosophy of the religious existentialists, but not their view that every person is an indeterminate and necessarily free being anxiously striving to fulfil herself and to give her absurd existence meaning. All existentialists share Kierkegaard’s view of the self as indeterminate and ambiguous, his view that a person is nothing other than what she chooses to be.

A person is free and cannot cease to be free. She cannot become a fixed, determinate being so as to be rid of herself as a being that must strive in vain to be fixed and determinate. Kierkegaard notes throughout The Sickness unto Death that the self despairs, unto death, of achieving oneness with itself, just as it despairs of being rid of itself as a self that despairs of achieving oneness with itself. Kierkegaard’s notion of the self, despairing both of being itself and of escaping itself, continues to have a huge influence on both theistic and atheistic existentialism.

The atheistic existentialists look to Nietzsche for inspiration as much as to Kierkegaard. Nietzsche followed Schopenhauer in arguing that for intelligent people the idea of God is obsolete as an explanation of the way things are. A position he summed up in his famous maxim, ‘God is dead’. The atheistic existentialists certainly see the idea of God as obsolete as an explanation of the way things are. In their view, to believe in God is to refuse to confront reality for what it is, to believe in a fairy tale as a means of obscuring the hard existential truths of human reality. Sartre, approaching old age, wrote these chilling words:

My retrospective illusions are in pieces. Martyrdom, salvation, immortality: all are crumbling, the building is falling in ruins. I have caught the Holy Ghost in the cellars and flung him out of them. Atheism is a cruel, long-term business: I believe I have gone through it to the end. (Words , p. 157)

The atheistic existentialists do not actually go to great lengths to prove God does not exist. The indifference of nature to human suffering and the horrors and injustices that occur every day in the world are for them strong evidence for the non-existence of an all-powerful, benevolent God. They tend to see the burden of proof as lying with those who believe in such a peculiar entity as a moral Supreme Being who created the universe, and they take as read the standard objections to the ontological, cosmological and teleological arguments for God’s existence.

Most if not all arguments for God’s existence can be classified as a version of one or other of these three theistic arguments. Very basically, ontological arguments assert that the idea of God implies the existence of God, cosmological arguments assert that God is the uncaused cause of everything and teleological arguments assert that the universe shows evidence of intelligent design.

The standard objections to the theistic arguments, objections made by philosophers such as Hume and Kant, are well documented elsewhere, so I won’t explore them in any detail, suffice to say that logically the idea of a thing cannot imply the existence of that thing, the notion of an uncaused cause is nonsensical and there are scientific theories, primarily the theory of evolution, that explain nature without appealing to the notion of intelligent design. For detailed consideration of the theistic arguments and the various refutations of them see Philosophy of Religion by John H. Hick.

As well as endorsing the standard objections to the theistic arguments, the atheistic existentialists offer various arguments of their own against God’s existence. One of their main arguments is that God cannot exist as He is supposed to exist – as an omnipresent, transcendent, disembodied consciousness – because every consciousness must be embodied .

To be conscious is to be conscious of a world from a particular point of view, the point of view of the physical body. As we have seen, consciousness is not something that happens to be attached to the body, as though it could exist independently of the body. Consciousness is necessarily embodied in that it exists only as the transcendence of the facticity of its immediate bodily situation and not as a transcendent being in its own right. The body is always the immediate and inescapable situation of any consciousness. For the atheistic existentialists, this argument also demolishes the claim that there is an afterlife beyond the death of the physical body.

Another argument that the atheistic existentialists put forward is the argument against the possibility of being-for-itself-in-itself . This argument was explored in Chapter 3 on nothingness but it is worth considering again specifically as an argument for the impossibility of a divine consciousness.

Essentially, theists conceive God to be a being-for-itself; a conscious, knowing being. God’s consciousness, however, is held to exist fundamentally rather than as a relation or a negation in the manner of ordinary consciousness. That is, God’s existence and essence are held to be one, or, in existentialist terms, God’s being-for-itself is held to exist in itself. In short, God is held to be the ultimate being-for-itself-in-itself. The above mentioned ontological argument for the existence of God assumes this unity of existence and essence. For the medieval philosopher, St Anselm, for example, the most perfect conceivable entity must have the attribute of existence. So, for Anselm, God’s essence implies his existence.

As said, every being-for-itself, every consciousness, desires to be God because every being-for-itself strives to be a being-for-itself-in-itself that has completely fulfilled itself and achieved identity with itself. In other words, every being-for-itself strives to be a non-being that is its own non-being so as to escape being a non-being that has to be its own non-being as the negation of being-in-itself. Crucially, the desired unity of being-for-itself and being-in-itself is impossible to achieve because being-for-itself must always be the negation or denial of being-in-itself. Negation or non-being can never coincide with or achieve unity with the being it negates. The logical and ontological impossibility of this unity is the impossibility of the existence of God.

The atheistic existentialists also argue against creationism. If the being of the universe was conceived and created in the divine mind or subjectivity of God ex nihilo (out of nothing) it remains only a mode of God’s subjectivity. It cannot even have a semblance of objectivity. It cannot exist in its own right as a genuine creation that is independent of God.

Moreover, if the being of the universe is perpetually created by God, as some creationist theories suppose, then the being of the universe would have no substantiality of its own, its being would be perpetually derived from the being of God. Once more, it would remain a mode of God’s subjectivity lacking any real objectivity.

The atheistic existentialists conclude that even if being was created it is inexplicable as a creation. Being must be absolutely independent of God in order to be that which is, and must be, its own foundation. Such absolute independence means not only that God, if He exists, does not intervene in the universe, but that He absolutely cannot intervene. Interestingly, this view is akin to the theological standpoint of deism .

For the atheistic existentialists, to look honestly at the world and at human existence is to see that, as they say, existence precedes essence . To suppose that there is a God is to suppose the opposite, to suppose that essence precedes existence . It is to assert that human beings are conceived in the mind of God and therefore have a nature that is fixed for all time. Such idealism is fundamentally opposed to the central view of atheistic existentialism that human beings are essentially free and self-defining. As Nietzsche says, ‘… what would there be to create if gods – existed!’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra , p. 111). For his part, Sartre says:

Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares … that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man or, as Heidegger has it, the human reality. What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards. (Existentialism and Humanism , pp. 27–28)

According to Schopenhauer, the death of God, the loss of the idea of God as a credible explanation of the universe and humankind’s place in it, plunges people into nihilism and despair. Life, the universe and everything can have no meaning, purpose or value if there is no God to give it meaning, purpose or value. It is often thought that because of its rejection of God, atheistic existentialism is utterly nihilistic and despairing in the Schopenhauerian sense. This, however, is not the case. Atheistic existentialism takes its cue from Nietzsche’s anti-nihilism rather than Schopenhauer’s nihilism and is, despite its interest in anxiety, absurdity and death, an ultimately upbeat and optimistic philosophy.

Reacting to Schopenhauer, who influenced him greatly, Nietzsche attempts to push Schopenhauer’s nihilism to its ultimate conclusion, to demolish faith in religious based values to such an extent that the way is made clear for a ‘re-evaluation of all values’ including moral values. For Nietzsche, nihilism carried to its conclusion annihilates itself as a value and becomes anti-nihilism. To overcome nihilism people must overcome the guilt and despair of having killed God, having killed the idea of God. To achieve this, people must aspire to become gods themselves by becoming the source of their own values and by always taking responsibility for who they are and what they do.

The atheistic existentialists strongly endorse Nietzsche’s rejection of metaphysics and idealism; his rejection of the illusion of worlds-behind-the-scene. They agree with Nietzsche that reality does not lurk behind appearances in some other-worldly realm. What appears is reality. As there is nothing beyond appearances, the primary task of philosophy is to honestly describe the world and human existence as they are without resorting to speculative metaphysical and religious explanations that aim primarily at providing false comfort. ‘The existentialist’, Sartre insists, ‘finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven’ (Existentialism and Humanism , p. 33).

Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus and the rest of the atheistic existentialists are not the kind of atheists who simply dismiss God’s existence and think no more about it, but atheists who are moved by the profound implications of God’s non-existence for human reality and morality. They recognise that the non-existence of God implies that all existence, including human existence, is without ultimate meaning, purpose or value. But they do not rest there.

In a move that fundamentally defines their brand of existentialism, they strive to forge an ultimately anti-nihilistic philosophy from a starkly nihilistic initial position. They each argue in their own way that to reach their full potential people must overcome the inauthenticity and cowardice involved in clinging to the age old comfort-blanket of improbable religious beliefs. People must stop mistakenly assuming that a moralising celestial authority has preordained the nature and scope of their existence, and instead recognise that life has only the meaning, purpose and value that each individual person chooses to give it.