The Faith of a Heretic

Commitment

Until recently, “being committed” meant being insane and having been found out. But today it is widely felt that something must be wrong with you if you are not committed to an institution. Indeed, you are not supposed to wait for others to commit you; you are expected to commit yourself.

One used to “commit” murder and armed robbery, adultery and suicide, which were considered heinous crimes; one did not “commit” good deeds and scarcely misdemeanors. “Commit” was a vicious word until it was emancipated by Jean-Paul Sartre. To be more precise, “commitment” was rescued by those who sought an English equivalent for Sartre’s engagement. First they tried “engaging oneself” and “engagement”; then they switched to “committing oneself” and “commitment.” Immediately, the theologians, preachers, and evangelists took over. Always on the lookout for the newest wine to replenish their dry old skins, they took enthusiastically to existentialism and commitment.

In their eminently understandable concern lest what they have to offer us might be considered dated and anachronistic, those who grace our pulpits often try to balance the imposing archaism of most of their utterances with some of the latest jargon. The holy tone of many sermons, with its air of omniscience, conveys a mixture of ancient and modern notions, some wise and some foolish; and most preachers lack the scholarship and thoughtfulness required for a real grasp of either the new or the old.

The reasons for this lack of scholarship and thoughtfulness are manifold. Some of them are plainly connected with the kind of training offered in theological seminaries, which will be considered in the next chapter. Others are peculiar to the United States, where a genuine reading knowledge of foreign languages has become a rarity, and the seminaries, like even the best graduate schools, are unable to remedy defects which should have been taken care of early in the student’s education.

As it is, “most clergymen … undertake to expound or defend the scriptures without understanding the languages in which they are written”—to cite a profoundly thoughtful and scholarly clergyman, Frederick C. Grant, whose Ancient Judaism and the New Testament represents an admirable effort to fight the ignorance, the “prejudices,” and the “misinterpretations” that are shared by “the vast majority of the clergy in most churches”—and, of course, by their flocks.

“Unable to read their own sacred books,” they are even less able to keep up with the latest scholarship in history, philology, philosophy, and other subjects that are relevant to their sermons. Many, no doubt, lack the scholar’s conscience; but even those who keenly suffer from their lack of knowledge are generally in no position to do much about it: the pressures of their office leave them little time for study, and their income is for the most part inadequate for buying many books. But unfortunately scholarship is not irrelevant to the majority of sermons.

Even so, it is widely supposed that those who spurn the pablum of the pulpits are of necessity an uncommitted lot. Surely, there are many forms of commitment, and men of the cloth have no monopoly on a term that they have appropriated from an avowedly atheistic philosopher. Since “commitment” owes its current vogue to a philosopher, it seems reasonable for a philosopher to take a critical look at it and to call attention to some common errors.

This is doubly appropriate, considering that the previous chapter dealt critically with analytic philosophy and ended with an eloquent quotation from Sartre. It was suggested that too many English-speaking philosophers were too exclusively academic. The idea of commitment is close to the heart of existentialism; but it is surrounded by confusions, not all of which are contributed by theologians. It will not do to spurn the academicians and espouse commitment. A detailed consideration of commitment is needed. I propose to take up several important pitfalls, one by one.

The first can be summed up in any one of three epigrams. With apologies to Socrates, it might be phrased thus: the uncommitted life is not worth living. Worse, it has been said that the only sin is indifference—a claim that indicates a staggering innocence of the imagination. Most of us can think of other sins. Third, and worst of all, any commitment is better than none.

All three formulations call attention to the shortcomings of lukewarmness, timidity, and ceaseless hesitation. We are reminded of the joys of courage and intensity. We recall Elijah risking his life to say to his people, defying the king and his queen: “How long will you go on limping on both legs? If the Lord is God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him.” And the New Testament: “You are neither cold nor hot. Would that you were cold or hot! So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew you out of my mouth.” And Nietzsche: “The secret of the greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence is: to live dangerously!”

Among the finest writers of the twentieth century some have used their best persuasive powers to make us feel the poverty of any uncommitted life. Martin Buber tells of a Hasidic rabbi who said—and Buber agrees: “Everybody should see which way his heart draws him, and then he should choose this way with all his heart.” And Hermann Hesse, in his Journey to the East (Morgenlandfahrt), created a short novel in which a number of people who are dissatisfied with the emptiness of modern life—men, as it happens, who come out of his previous novels—decide to go on a curious crusade. They are not at all clear about the aim and object of their journey: what matters to them is the break with their futile, prosy lives and the commitment—not to anything specific. We are led to feel that the hero of the story, who loses faith, questions the journey, and withdraws, has sinned; that unquestioning and blind obedience is a price that must be paid for an intense commitment; and that, apart from this, life cannot be worthwhile.

Hesse left Germany before the First World War and then did not return because he strongly disapproved of all those tendencies that not long after culminated in the horrors of the Nazi regime. Like Buber, he is deeply sensitive. It is from men like these that the rest of us learn, if we ever do, the meaning of humanity. Their personalities qualify their ideas. But if the same ideas are considered apart from the men proposing them and accepted by men of a different character, we realize that these ideas badly need qualification and without it are untenable.

Hesse’s novel appeared just before the Nazis came to power and in retrospect helps to explain Hitler’s success. To be sure, Hesse did not influence events: he was not an author cherished by the brown shirts—on the contrary. But Hesse’s Journey to the East reflects a state of mind, a mood, a yearning that was widespread at that time; and millions of young men who shared it, without also sharing Hesse’s other qualities, found the commitment they required by becoming Nazis.

When a man like Buber stops to “see which way his heart draws him” before he decides to “choose this way with all his heart,” the question is presumably whether to write this book or that, whether he should continue work on his German version of the Hebrew Bible or give some lectures. But another man might find that his heart draws him to the Nazi party and might choose that way with all his heart, becoming a fanatical Elite Guard. The rabbi whom Buber quotes was thinking of different ways of serving God, but many a heart has been drawn to serve God in strange ways.

In Europe and the Jews, Malcolm Hay, a Catholic historian, reminds us that “the First Crusade (1096) … began and ended with a massacre. ‘The men who took the cross, wrote [Lord] Acton [another great Catholic historian], ‘after receiving communion, heartily devoted the day to the extermination of the Jews.’ They killed about ten thousand of them. When Godfrey of Bouillon, in the summer of 1099, succeeded after a heroic assault in capturing Jerusalem, he spent the first week slaughtering the inhabitants. The Jews were shut up in their synagogue, which was then set on fire. ‘If you want to know what has been done with the enemy found in Jerusalem,’ wrote Godfrey to the Pope, ‘learn that in the Porch and in the Temple of Solomon, our people had the vile blood of the Saracens up to the knees of their horses’” (37).

Clearly, the Crusaders were a committed lot and followed the way toward which their hearts had drawn them with uncompromising and devout intensity. Hay’s book shows that the Crusaders were emphatically no exception any more than the Inquisitors. In this profound lack of humanity, some of the greatest saints, Luther, and Calvin were at one.

The generation born just before and during the Second World War has been called unsilent and beat; but on reflection these labels do not fit, or at least do not set these young men apart. It is more illuminating to speak of an uncommitted generation. Few indeed are beat, and the young people after the Second World War are not more vocal than the young men after the first. What distinguishes them is that they are not committed to any cause. This may possibly be regrettable, but one would have to be blind indeed to claim that any commitment is better than none: blind to the atrocities committed by committed Christians, Communists, Nazis, and other fanatics.

If it should be held that “bad” commitments are not really commitments, we should still need criteria for telling the good from the bad, or the commitment that is a commitment from one that is not. What is untenable is the indiscriminate claim that any commitment is better than none. With the qualified assertion that a good commitment is better than none, one need not quarrel; but it raises the question how we are to tell a good commitment from a bad one, regardless of the name we reserve for the latter.

The second great pitfall is to pit commitment against reason. If, again, we want a representative who deserves our respect and in many ways our admiration, too, the best man to consider may well be Kierkegaard. In his Journals he confided: “The point is to find the truth which is truth for me, to find that idea for which I am ready to live and die” (§ 22). With single-minded passion and sincerity he looked for a commitment and found that neither reason nor philosophy could furnish him with the idea that he needed. He concluded that at least reason and philosophy should “take nothing away and least of all should fool people out of something as if it were nothing” (Fear and Trembling, 44). Yet precisely this is the function of a training in philosophy: to fool people out of something as if it were nothing.

Most teachers of philosophy, to be sure, do not have any list of notions that they want to fool their students out of; nor are they insidious. But any training in philosophy will fool people out of many of their childhood beliefs—incidentally, by training their critical powers and by leading them to think more carefully and more conscientiously. Beliefs common in the child’s environment and never questioned previously fall victim to a newly learned demand for clarity, consistency, and evidence. Racial and other prejudices, superstitions, and the parents’ firm religious and political convictions are often outgrown.

There are many who simply ignore this. Others, who are alarmed, may take heart from the fact that the average college graduate does not require more than ten or twenty years to revert to many of the notions of his childhood. Having accomplished this feat, he is likely to condemn all that reminds him of his brief, faint-hearted glimmerings of wisdom as an adolescent folly. He mistakes his own adolescent intimations of the outlook of the Buddha, Socrates, or Nietzsche for the views of these men; his own short-lived and shallow atheism for the one alternative to Christian faith as he now understands it; and the notions of his immaturity for the quintessence of philosophy, liberalism, rationalism, radicalism, or whatever else he now disdains and thinks he knows firsthand.

Though the majority of those who during their student days have been exposed briefly to philosophy have never felt its bite and therefore do not take it very seriously, Kierkegaard was not one of those. To him, philosophy appeared as a great threat, critical thinking as insubordination, and reason as the enemy. Objections to Christianity, he says, do not issue from doubt, as many people think. “Objections against Christianity come from insubordination, unwillingness to obey, rebellion against all authority” (Journals, § 630). What is wanted is blind obedience, acceptance of what seems absurd to our reason, and belief without any chance of comprehension. “The misfortune of our age—in the political as well as in the religious sphere, and in all things—is disobedience, unwillingness to obey. And one deceives oneself and others by wishing to make us imagine that it is doubt. No, it is insubordination.”

These sentences, written shortly before the revolutions of 1848, Kierkegaard reaffirms a year later in another preface for the same book, On Authority and Revelation. And in that book he argues quite specifically that it is blasphemy to base obedience to words that are presented to us as the words of God on their profundity or beauty, or even to base our belief that they are truly words of God on an examination of their contents. Whether the words are the words of Scripture, the words of a contemporary apostle, or words that are directly revealed to us, those who say, “Let us see whether the content of the doctrine is divine, for in that case we will accept it along with the claim that it was revealed,” are mocking God. Nor should a son obey his father because the father has greater wisdom and experience than the boy, “which is entirely beside the point.” He should obey simply because his father is his father; and the words of God should be obeyed because they are presented to us as the words of God. Those who doubt whether they truly come from God are guilty of insubordination.

Kierkegaard was not blind to the dangers of his doctrine, and with that wholehearted radicalism which distinguished him he faced these dangers squarely in a little book which he himself esteemed one of the very best of all the more than twenty books he published in a dozen years—not counting several he did not himself publish and the many volumes of his Journals. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard confronts the possibility that God’s word might be absurd not merely by coming into conflict with our reason but by contradicting morals. And instead of pussyfooting by considering white lies or some really not very serious matters, Kierkegaard has us reflect on murder—not assassination of a tyrant but premeditated murder of one’s own son. We have no right whatever to admire Abraham as the great paragon of faith, as Christians have done ever since St. Paul and as Kierkegaard himself does plainly with awe-struck enthusiasm, unless we are prepared, he says, to look up with an equal reverence to a man who in our time is prepared to murder because God commands him to—or rather because he believes that God commands this sacrifice.

Out of the complacency of the Victorian Era, irritated beyond measure by the stuffy smugness of the little capital of Denmark, Copenhagen, Kierkegaard longed for the strong faith of those distant ages when men did not shrink from translating religion into action and did things that would have shocked Victorian Denmark. Sadly, he described himself as a mere “knight of resignation” whom his critical intelligence had rendered quite incapable of ever acting with the confident assurance of the “knight of faith” who never doubts that all the suffering he must inflict on others will be for the best.

When Johannes Hus, the Bohemian reformer and forerunner of Luther, was burned as a heretic at the Council of Constance in 1415, he described the qualities Kierkegaard so wistfully extolled in just two words. Tied to the stake, with the flames already licking at his body, Hus beheld an ardent peasant stepping forward to contribute a small piece of wood to the burning pile; and Hus expired with the exclamation: sancta simplicitas—holy simplicity!

After the Second World War, it is obvious that the world is beset by not a lack but a frightening excess of such simplicity. There are only too many who are quite prepared to kill for their faith’s sake, quite confident that all the suffering they spread will prove somehow to be worthwhile, even if at the moment that should seem absurd.

Kierkegaard, of course, was thinking of a sacrifice that was at least as painful for the agent as it might be for the victim. In fact, he improved on the motto “it hurts me more than it hurts you” by refusing altogether to consider any suffering but the agent’s. Neither the feelings of the boy about to be sacrificed nor the probable reaction of his mother when she hears of what has happened are considered relevant. The agent simply does what, but for the express command, he never should have done and even now should hate to do, were it not for his utter confidence that all will somehow turn out well. He does not question how; he has no doubts; he is not insubordinate. Little does Kierkegaard realize that of such are the kingdoms of darkness!

What Kierkegaard sanctions in effect is fanaticism: the attitude of those who willingly suffer everything for their unquestioned faith, and who obediently commit atrocities for it, too. What he had in mind, however, is not the fanatic as the popular mind pictures him, brandishing fire and sword. In ordinary life, says Kierkegaard, we could not tell the knight of faith from any simple tax collector. A frightening insight! It applies not only to the peasant who evoked Hus’s final words, or to the businesslike, unsentimental, unsadistic men whom Rubens pictured driving nails through St. Peter’s hands and feet, completely unaware of what the man might feel whom they are crucifying upside down; it also applies to millions in Hitler’s Germany, Soviet Russia, and elsewhere. As Oscar Wilde said: “Ordinary cruelty is simply stupidity. It is the entire want of imagination.”

Kierkegaard saw that reason and philosophy were unable to tell him what idea he should choose to live and die by. Hence, he despised philosophy and reason. What he, like millions of others, overlooked is a very simple but important point: reason and philosophy may well safeguard a man against ideas for which he might better not live or die. Indeed, if reason and philosophy had no other function whatsoever, this alone would make them overwhelmingly important. But Kierkegaard, and by no means only he, defiantly abandons reason in his eager search for a commitment, and sanctions atrocities beyond his own imagination.

“What our age lacks is not reflection but passion,” says the author of Fear and Trembling. By reminding ourselves of his Victorian setting and recalling that the issue for himself was at the moment nothing more than breaking his engagement in the firm belief that marriage would not be compatible with his true calling, we can sympathize. For all that, it is clear that he was wrong in 1843; and a hundred years later, if not before that, his sentence reads like a poor joke. There is no longer any excuse for this pitfall.

Kierkegaard and the later existentialists and theologians who have followed in his steps direct our attention to the limits of reason. But they overlook the crucial difference between responsible and irresponsible decisions. There are situations in our lives when all the reasoning of the world cannot tell us what to do. We reason one way and another, and we weigh the interests of all the people who are likely to be affected by this decision or that, and we still do not know what to do. Should we conclude then that all deliberation is a waste of time, and always beside the point, and that it would be just as well to throw a coin, to count our buttons, or to act on impulse? The person who does that acts irresponsibly, even if by sheer luck he should do something that turns out well. The person, on the other hand, who does reflect on the probable effects of his decisions on the people who are likely to be affected, who relies on reason and on evidence, if only to eliminate some choices, acts responsibly even if he later finds that he has done the wrong thing. (Cf. §§ 22 and 85.)

The whole point of an education, and not only of philosophy, is to make people more responsible. One cannot teach one’s students, nor even oneself, always to do what is best; but one can try to teach oneself and others to become a little less impulsive and irrational and more conscientious and responsible. Nobody favors always acting with an utter disregard for evidence and reason; but some people admonish us to throw both to the winds when it comes to the most important choices—which is rather like being very careful when walking, but shutting both eyes firmly when one drives at high speeds; or like choosing one’s dinner guests carefully, while picking the name of one’s bride-to-be out of a hat; or like playing cards with great care but also being addicted to playing Chinese roulette—a new game that consists of pointing a revolver now in this direction and now in that, spinning the chamber and pulling the trigger, knowing that there is one dud in the chamber and hoping for the best.

The idea that a man must crucify his reason before he commits himself is not original with Kierkegaard. There is a long Christian tradition behind it, and Luther expressed it even more powerfully than Kierkegaard. He called reason “the devil’s bride,” a “beautiful whore,” and “God’s worst enemy,” and said: “There is on earth among all dangers no more dangerous thing than a richly endowed and adroit reason.” Again: “Reason must be deluded, blinded, and destroyed,” and “faith must trample under foot all reason, sense, and understanding” (XII, 1530; VIII, 2048; V, 1312; and III, 215).

If we discard our reason, mortify our understanding, and take leave of our senses, how can we be sure that what we accept is the word of God? The mere fact that something is presented to us as the word of God is clearly insufficient. One has only to write an article on matters of religion in a popular magazine to be swamped with letters, little pamphlets, and big books that claim to offer nothing less than God’s own truth; but, alas, they are far from agreeing with each other. Which one, then, should we accept? Perhaps one of those that claim to have been written by celestial beings? Pray, some people counsel, and God will reveal himself to you. The Crusaders, after praying and receiving communion, “heartily devoted the day to the extermination of the Jews.” Luther, who prayed with uncommon passion and intensity, counseled the Germans to “set fire to their synagogues,” to “break down and destroy their houses,” and to “drive them out of the country” (XX, 2478 ff.). But perhaps it is a mistake to pray to the God of Christendom; perhaps we should rather pray to Allah, or to Shiva, or possibly to some Australian god, or to some idol? How are we to choose if evidence and reason are thrown out of court?

This, then, is the second pitfall concerning commitment: to pit commitment against reason and to claim that reason, because it has its limitations, must be trampled underfoot.

The third common error about commitment is less radical and dangerous than either of the first two: it does not consider just any commitment better than none, nor does it oppose reason altogether; but it pits commitment against philosophy, scholarship, and the academic life.

This, too, may be illustrated from the writings of a man who deserves respect and admiration: the Jewish existentialist, Franz Rosenzweig. On the basis of his two-volume study of Hegel und der Staat, the great German historian, Friedrich Meinecke, offered him a university lectureship, which Rosenzweig declined. Explaining his decision in an interesting letter (August 30, 1920), Rosenzweig refers to his more recent religious book, Der Stern der Erlösung (The Star of Redemption), which had ended with the words “into life,” and to his work as the founder of an institute of Jewish studies in Frankfurt:

My new book is only—a book…. The … demands of the day which are made on me in my position … I mean, the nerve-wracking, picayune, and at the same time very necessary struggles with people and conditions, have now become the real core of my existence…. The search for knowledge no longer seems to me an end in itself…. It is here that my heresy against the unwritten law of the university originates. Not every question seems to me worth asking…. Now I only inquire when I find myself inquired of. Inquired of, that is, by men rather than by scholars…. You will now be able to understand what keeps me away from the university and forces me to follow the path I have chosen….

As a personal statement, explaining his own decision, Rosenzweig’s letter is hardly debatable, though one may note that most professors, too, do not consider every question worth asking, and that it does not follow from that alone that one should inquire only when presented with questions by other people. To arrive at that conclusion, one requires an additional presupposition: that no problems at all are left that bother us ourselves—or, to approximate Rosenzweig’s formulation, that no question whatsoever seems to me worth asking as long as I am left to myself. Having finished his book, Rosenzweig appears to have reached a state of intellectual satiety—a state most other people reach without writing a book first.

This analysis is borne out by another letter, written eight years later (September 2, 1928), not long before his death: “With my philosophic writings my experience resembles Schopenhauer’s: after the ‘main work’ everything else turns into parerga, paralipomena, and a Second Part that is a commentary on the first. Or rather—since Schopenhauer’s pompous and bombastic self-importance isn’t at all my style … everything that still comes in my case comes as verse for special occasions.”

There are personal circumstances that are not relevant to the issue here but still worth mentioning. Shortly after the first letter, Rosenzweig was attacked by a very rare disease and gradually became paralyzed. Soon he could neither speak nor write. A special device was constructed for him, so he could look at one letter at a time, and his wife, following his eyes, as nobody else was able to, would take dictation. In this state he undertook a new translation of the Hebrew Bible, together with his close friend, Martin Buber, and kept writing ceaselessly, essays as well as letters, without ever letting the enormous pains involved in every single word keep him from sprinkling everything he wrote—and his conversation, too—with his abundant wit. Never satisfied with mere approximations and all but incapable of compromise in matters of this sort, he considered every word and every phrase an issue of conscience in translating the Bible, and he retained enough vitality in conversation and dictation to refuse, to the very last day, to deny himself a jocular remark or a nice phrase. The epic of his illness is one of the really imposing tales of heroism in the modern world.

What is germane in the present context, however, is Rosenzweig’s implication that those who lecture at a university and write are necessarily uncommitted, unlike politicians and administrators, preachers and journalists. This is a popular and false idea.

If committing oneself means not being noncommittal; if it means taking a stand, sticking one’s neck out, and refusing to remain aloof and lukewarm; then many a writer, scholar, and teacher commits himself far more courageously and unmistakably than most theologians and administrators.

There is a wonderful sentence in Simone de Beauvoir’s Les Mandarins: “He contemplated the world from the height of an unwritten book.” To publish any book at all involves some commitment, doubly so if the volume is, as it were, a piece of the writer and not a piece of history or sure of the acclaim of some group.

A philosopher or playwright need not renounce his vocation and become a journalist or politician to commit himself; and if he has it in him to write an outstanding play or essay he would be a fool to bury his talent, or to exchange it for what Nietzsche once called “the wretched ephemeral babble of politics” and the papers. Conversely, one may hazard the guess that the man who does give up philosophy, plays, or the novel to commit himself to journalism or administration is in all probability unsure that he can write another good book.

Those committed to an institution generally claim that all those who prefer fresh air and freedom lack the courage to commit themselves. In fact, the shoe is on the other foot. More often than not, commitment to an institution issues from a want of courage to stand up alone. Typically, it is an escape, a search for togetherness, for safety in numbers. Whether one joins the Communist party or the Catholic church, the Nazis or one of the Protestant denominations, the point may be, though it need not be, that one avoids the risk henceforth of sticking out one’s neck, except in company; one no longer needs to take a stand from day to day, from issue to issue, from question to question. From now on, answers need no longer be sought; they can be looked up in the catechism or sidestepped with a firm reminder of one’s institutional identity.

Of course, there are institutions to which one can commit oneself without compromising freedom, integrity, and honesty. And one can compromise all three without joining any institution.

Commitment to a doctrinaire position is usually a form of escape. The classical analysis of this was furnished by Sartre in his “Portrait of the Anti-Semite.” This essay does not by any means deal with racial prejudice only.

The rational man seeks the truth gropingly, he knows that his reasoning is only probable, that other considerations will arise to make it doubtful; … he is “open,” he may even appear hesitant. But there are people who are attracted by the durability of stone. They want to be massive and impenetrable, they do not want to change: where would change lead them? This is an original fear of oneself and a fear of truth. And what frightens them is not the content of truth which they do not even suspect, but the very form of the true—that thing of indefinite approximation…. They want to exist all at once and right away. They do not want acquired opinions, they want them to be innate; since they are afraid of reasoning, they want to adopt a mode of life in which reasoning and research play but a subordinate role, in which one never seeks but that which one has already found…. Only passion can produce this. Nothing but a strong emotional bias can give instant certitude, it alone can hold reasoning within limits, it alone can remain impervious to experience…. If out of courtesy he consents momentarily to defend his point of view, he lends himself without giving himself; he simply tries to project his intuitive certainty onto the field of speech…. If you insist too much they close up, they point out with one superb word that the time to argue has passed…. This man is afraid of any kind of solitude…. If he has become an anti-Semite, it is because one cannot be anti-Semitic alone. This sentence: “I hate the Jews,” is a sentence which is said in chorus; by saying it one connects oneself with a tradition and a community…. (274 ff.)

This is one of the most striking instances of those peculiar linguistic habits that George Orwell ridiculed in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Just as most of Sartre’s readers assume thoughtlessly that he is criticizing anti-Semites only, Orwell’s think for the most part that he is writing only about communism or, at most, about totalitarianism. Few realize how similar the conclusion of Orwell’s novel is to ever so much preaching. In the end the hero is converted and renounces heresy:

He was back in the Ministry of Love, with everything forgiven, his soul white as snow. He was in the public dock, confessing everything, implicating everybody…. He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

Some who love Big Brother claim that, deep down, everybody loves Big Brother; only some of us fail to realize it. To be more precise: some modern theologians argue that everybody is committed, whether he knows it or not. Some put the point this way: the question is merely who our gods are, for everybody has some gods. Others claim that all men have some ultimate concern or something that is holy to them, and the question is only whether the object of this concern is really ultimate or rather idolatrous. Some admit that most men have many ultimate concerns and are really “polytheists”; others insist that true ultimacy involves monotheism, and that as long as we are dealing with many concerns none can be really ultimate.

All these ways of speaking are metaphorical, evocative, and exceedingly unclear. Not only frivolous people lack any ultimate concern and are in an important sense uncommitted but the same is true of millions of very serious college students who wonder what they should do with themselves after graduation. There is nothing to which they greatly desire to give themselves, nothing that matters deeply to them. They are not shallow; they are not playboys; they enjoyed many of their courses and appreciate the opportunity to discuss their problems with sympathetic professors. They do not say: nothing matters to me. What they do say is: no one or two things matter more to me than anything else. These young men and women constitute the uncommitted generation; and it seems better to recognize this difference than to gloss it over by claiming that everybody has his own ultimate concern.

In any case, what is an “ultimate concern”? What is mine? What is my “God”—if these theologians are right and everybody ultimately has his “God”? I am not non-committal, not adrift, not hard put to find some project to devote myself to. I feel no inclination to pose as a cynic, saying: nothing is holy to me. But what, specifically, is holy to me?

The fashionable assumption that what is holy to a man is what he is ultimately concerned with is extremely dubious. When we say that something is holy to a person, we often mean that he won’t stand for any humorous remarks about it, that the object is taboo for him in some sense. But such a taboo does not necessarily indicate any ultimate concern, perhaps only an underdeveloped sense of humor.

The dedications of at least some of my books, including this one, point to deep concerns, but hardly to “gods” or to any one “ultimate” concern. Some sense of responsibility to the six million Jews killed in my lifetime, especially to some whom I loved and who loved me, and to millions of others, Jew and Gentile, killed in our time and in past centuries, is certainly among my deepest feelings. Still, that is hardly my ultimate concern. Neither is this book, though I am deeply involved in that. Nor is it at all plausible to say that these are symbols for something more ultimate.

Perhaps I come closest to discovering my ultimate concerns when I ask what I consider the cardinal virtues. I shall try to answer that question in the “Morality” chapter of this book. But here, too, it is exceedingly difficult to know just what virtues one considers most important. And if one selects several, does that make one a polytheist?

The point at stake here is not autobiographical. I merely want to bring out how unhelpful and misleading many fashionable statements about commitment are. And instead of confining myself to semantic considerations, I have tried to take these statements as seriously as possible, seeing what they might mean if one applied them to oneself.

Much of the talk in this vein that one hears from theologians can hardly be taken seriously. It is said that man must have a god, or that man always worships either God or an idol, and that man cannot find true existence in the worship of an idol. One asks oneself whether Shakespeare, Goethe, or van Gogh worshiped God or—hateful thought—unlike our theologians, never did find “true existence.” Surely, some great artists are believers, and some are not; there is no party line among great artists in this matter; and it is futile to argue who did and who did not, achieve “true existence.”

One question, however, is worth pressing. Who really has a single ultimate concern? If that phrase has any definite meaning, it would seem to imply a willingness to sacrifice all other concerns to one’s sole ultimate concern. Having only one ultimate concern might well be the recipe for fanaticism. It is the mark of a humane person that he has several ultimate concerns that check and balance each other.

To have many commitments might seem to be the formula of an arid and scattered life, spread thin, lacking depth; but it is hard to generalize about that. Goethe had a staggering number of commitments—and a singularly rich and fruitful life, with no lack of passion or profundity. But one can safely generalize that those who, spurning more than one concern, insist on a single commitment either abandon humanity for fanaticism or, more often, engage in loose talk.

Others confound commitment with faith, trust, and loyalty, as if, of these terms, the first two and the last two were the same. Faith and commitment are not the same. I can have faith in a person without feeling committed to that person; and I can feel committed to a person without expecting much of him. Similarly, one can be loyal to a man although one does not trust him entirely; and one can trust him but not be loyal to him.

Faith, including faith in a person, always involves belief that some propositions are true; for example, that he will do this and not that. Faith in God, too, cannot be wholly divorced from beliefs. That everybody has beliefs is surely true; but the difference that matters is not, as some theologians suppose, between belief in and belief that, but between beliefs held rationally and responsibly, and beliefs held irrationally and irresponsibly.

The distinction between responsible and irresponsible decisions has already been explained earlier in this chapter, in connection with Kierkegaard. Nor would it matter greatly if someone insisted that all beliefs are irrational to some extent: as was pointed out in the course of our contrast of honesty and sincerity (§ 7), one does not speak of perfect courage or humility, and it is not necessary to speak of perfect honesty or rationality either to make sense of all-important differences of degree. Some beliefs are far more irrational than others.

Commitments do not necessarily involve beliefs that anything is the case; but they can still be more or less rational and responsible. They are more so, if we have conscientiously considered any relevant evidence and what can be said against them. They are irrational and irresponsible if they are made blindly and maintained with closed minds.

It is widely supposed that one simply has to have firm beliefs and close one’s mind to be able to act, at least in matters of importance. This is surely false.

As children, many of us had doctors who seemed omniscient, though in retrospect it turns out that some of our physicians knew very little. They made a great show of taking our temperature once or twice a day when we had chicken pox or measles, and they wisely predicted that after so many days we should probably be well again. We gained the impression that they had cured us. A little later in life we began to encounter doctors who frequently admitted that they did not know what was the matter, doctors who frankly conceded their ignorance and acted without the benefit of firm beliefs—and sometimes, though not always, did effect cures. They might say something like this:

There are several possibilities. I should like to run a series of tests which will probably not be conclusive, but which should eliminate some possibilities. Then we can try such and such a treatment; and if that does not work, another.

In a more drastic case, a doctor might say: the chances are that you do not have a malignancy; but if I wait till I can be sure of that, it might be too late if I discovered after a while that there was a cancer, so I suggest an operation.

It may be more comforting to have a doctor who pretends to know what in fact he does not know; but it is part of growing up to realize that, lacking knowledge, men must constantly act on uncertainties. The doctor who operates need not believe firmly that he is removing a cancer. If he is responsible he will try to act on the best guess that the time and circumstances permit, remembering all the while that his best guess might prove to be wrong. And when evidence turns up to show that he was wrong, or even that his guess was not the best one possible under the circumstances, he will face the facts. Remembering that one might be wrong, and being willing to admit one’s errors even in important matters, may be difficult; it is certainly not impossible. It constitutes a large part of honesty and rationality.

Some commitments may have to be honored even if one comes to see in time that it was a mistake to undertake them in the first place. Even in such cases, it does not follow that, being committed, one has to believe firmly that one did the right thing. One can do what is honorable, and be honest, too.

It is hazardous to generalize about existentialism because the denotation of this label is a matter of debate. But it seems safe to say that most of the so-called existentialists, as well as most, if not all, of the theologians who like to call themselves existentialist, have occupied themselves with commitment without ever seeing or saying clearly what distinguishes a responsible commitment from an irresponsible one. (In Sartre’s case, I hope to show this at the end of the “Morality” chapter, at least as far as his celebrated lecture “Existentialism Is a Humanism” is concerned.) While most analytic philosophers do not philosophically examine life’s most important decisions because they think that philosophers have no special competence for that, the spokesmen of commitment generally refrain from such scrutiny because they commit one or more of the errors analyzed here.

Let us look back once more at the pitfalls considered in this chapter: if committing oneself means taking a stand instead of being non-committal, few indeed will say after reflection, though many have said thoughtlessly, sometimes in understandable exasperation, that any commitment at all, no matter how horrible, is still better than none. And if committing oneself is taken more narrowly to mean joining a group of people dedicated to some cause, it is doubtful whether anybody would maintain that joining any group, however horrible, is to be preferred to going it alone.

Those who pit commitment against reason and advise us to blind and destroy our reason before making the most crucial choice of our life are apologists for one specific set of doctrines which, to use Paul’s word, are “foolishness” to those who have not taken leave of reason. They say their doctrine is infallible and true, but ignore the fact that there is no dearth whatsoever of pretenders to infallibility and truth. They may think they chose their doctrine because it is offered to us as infallible and true, but this is plainly no sufficient reason: scores of other doctrines, scriptures, and apostles, sects and parties, cranks and sages make the same claim. Those who claim to know which of the lot is justified in making such a bold claim, those who tell us that this faith or that is really infallible and true are presupposing in effect, whether they realize this or not, that they themselves happen to be infallible. Those who have no such exalted notion of themselves have no way of deciding between dozens of pretenders if reason is proscribed. Those who are asking us to spurn reason are in effect counseling us to trust to luck. But luck in such cases is unusual.

Those who pit commitment against writing and philosophy, as if only politicians and administrators ever took a stand or stuck their necks out, are plainly wrong about the facts. Indeed, joining an organization often, though not always, serves the function of escaping from the threat of ever again having to make up one’s own mind about matters of importance. What is most often spoken of as commitment par excellence is really a studied refuge from commitments.

Those who say that everybody is committed, or that everybody has some ultimate concern, or that man must have a god, engage in needlessly vague and elusive talk that blurs significant distinctions. The fashionable juxtaposition of belief in and belief that generally overlooks that belief in involves beliefs that; and it, too, distracts attention from the crucial difference between responsible and irresponsible commitments.

The point of this chapter is not to attack commitment, but to attack some widespread confusions that surround the concept of commitment and vitiate not only most discussions of the subject but also the commitments which some people actually make. I am far from opposing all forms of commitment: this book invites the reader to commit himself to the quest for honesty. It does not follow that the philosopher and the theologian are two birds of a feather, and that one commitment is as good as another; nor even that all commitments have the same structure and, at least basically, the same effects. Far from it. To show this clearly, we must consider theology at some length.