SIEII: Existentialism: Kierkegaard, Faith, and Alan Watts

In the last episode, we talked about existentialism and the idea that “existence precedes essence.” In this way of looking at the world, we are born prior to having an essential character: there is no purpose necessarily assigned to our lives, no meaning, no fundamental part to our being or soul at all, except for that which we give to them ourselves.

It seems like a rather bold anti-religious attitude to take. Friedrich Nietzsche certainly took that direction, as we discussed, in his conflict with the church. Nietzsche believed we should focus on matters of fact of what we know to be reality rather than the religious teachings and promises of other men in the supernatural. His concept of the Ubermensch is someone who has risen beyond the search for meaning in the afterlife and has instead chosen to find meaning in the world.

However, though it may contradict the teachings of religious institutions, the Danish existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard thought the attitude of existentialism to be in fact the beginning of faith.

Now Kierkegaard was something of a tragic hero, though he probably would have laughed if you called him that. He was born to a rich family, but he grew up in the shadow of the deaths of his brothers and sisters. Kierkegaard’s life was doomed to suffering up to and probably including the day he died fairly young at 42. But, as Kierkegaard undoubtedly understood, it is through his own, and by extension our own, suffering that we become who we are. Kierkegaard travelled dark and terrifying avenues of thought in his own mind, exploring the possibilities opened up by the existentialist idea, and finding a world of freedom outside the imagination of practically anyone growing up in the Western Abrahamic religious tradition. What he found there he called angst, a word which has become synonymous with existentialism itself, and describes the state of not knowing why you feel anxious but feeling anxious regardless when faced with the possibilities of life. And existentialism may be the ultimate expression of angst: in his work The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard used the metaphor of a man standing on a cliff to represent the feeling of angst. I like to imagine the painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich. It’s a beautiful painting, of a man with his back turned to the viewer, gazing out into an obscure and hidden world. You have two choices when standing on the precipice of the wanderer: either back away, or throw yourself into the abyss. Now imagine an infinite sea of possibility awaiting your departure from the cliffs of everything you’ve ever known. That’s angst. There are no correct answers here, no one to tell you what to do. Because once you’ve reached the existentialist cliff, you are utterly and completely alone. It’s a journey, much like death, that must be taken with your sole consciousness in tow.

The picture Kierkegaard painted of absolute and utterly personal freedom is an existential threat to the dominance of the institution over thought itself. Kierkegaard challenged the contemporary Christian church of his time on many grounds, but what struck to the very core of Christendom was his concept of the “leap of faith”. If you’ll remember, in embracing the attitude that life has no inherent meaning, we set ourselves up for the first time in our lives to experience true, terrifying freedom. When we’re on the edge, meaning can be whatever we want it to be. What if we then choose to give meaning to faith? What if, in spite of the universe’s indifference, we choose to embrace God, in whatever form, not because of the traditions of the past, but because it is what we have decided, in our limitless freedom, that we want to do?

 One must have no objective reason for choosing faith in an apparently absurd and meaningless world, and yet choose it anyway. That is Kierkegaard’s leap of faith in a nutshell.

To relate this to the typical religious institution even of today, let me digress for a moment into my personal life experience. Despite my coming from an overwhelmingly Christian upbringing, faith has never entered into my thinking as a subject or mode of being for philosophical inquiry. I have never reached a connection to a deeper truth through the use of prayer, though I have prayed many, many times. I have observed such strange and interesting behavior arising from prayer that I don’t know if the secret truth of the universe just missed me, or that the power of psychology to create these otherworldly and incredible experiences people report is not something I possess. I have seen others “speak in tongues”, report miraculous healings, and generally enter into what I can only describe as a completely different way of being in the world. I was told that these things are real, that if I pray God will hear me, and that I must believe in God, or else.

However, I now question as Kierkegaard did whether one can truly express faith without doubt. If faith has never been challenged, can it still even be called faith? If one is raised to believe in something their whole life as I was then it can’t really be said that there was any alternative to that belief. And as the late great philosopher Alan Watts loved to explain, one cannot have black without white. One cannot have self without other. It is death that implies life. So in this way, perhaps it is doubt that implies faith. 

In my own life, I as well as many others have challenged those beliefs we once followed unquestioningly. I even called myself an atheist for a time, though I have since moved past that. I still don’t believe in the “fire and brimstone” God of the old-time Bible Belt Christians. I think my generation is far too connected with others of completely different backgrounds to believe that many of the people we know will eventually die and suffer unending misery for all eternity. Highly unlikely, that. And furthermore, that an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving God would create a temporary being that will eventually die, and then suffer for all eternity is just one of many contradictions I cannot stomach with the teachings of the churches I knew as a child. I think that’s what drew me to philosophy, and my fixation on faith naturally drew me to Kierkegaard.

But even in my strictly academic career, faith came up in my studies quite a bit. Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, for example, used the idea of God in order to justify that the external world exists. Backing up for a moment, Descartes was a famous French philosopher (and mathematician) who formulated a central tenet in what would become the philosophy of mind: “Je pense, donc, je suis”, in the original French, or “I think, therefore, I am”. Cogito ergo sum. Descartes began his Meditations with doubt, of everything. He imagined an evil demon that was trying to deceive him at every turn. I suppose a modern day example is something like the Matrix. How can you know that you’re not living in a simulation? Well, you can’t. At least I’m pretty sure you can’t. Descartes painted that picture and nearly gave himself a heart attack. What then could we know for certain? And that’s where cogito ergo sum changed philosophy. What can we know for certain? Well, that we exist. And we know that we exist because we are thinking, right now, at this very moment. The very thing that cannot be doubted is the “I”. I am. And, presumably, you are, dear listener, though I can’t know that for certain!

So what does this have to do with faith? Well, after doubting almost the entirety of known existence, Descartes then used scripture to bring the world back. He had the thought that a loving God would not allow a deception of such magnitude to occur. Essentially, that’s Descartes’ Meditations, though I highly recommend reading them yourself.

Now that I’ve told you about Descartes, let me explain why I did so. I think arguments like Descartes’ that use faith as an axiom are interesting in their own right. But though some disciplines take God for granted as in much of theology, in the discipline of philosophy as such nothing can be assumed. All things, even very basic assumptions like “murder is wrong” must be argued for and defended against from critics, and in this way the discipline of philosophy moves forward. As crazy it may seem to an outsider, the idea of God itself must be proved. However, modern philosophy is not intended to be sacrilegious. I personally think that a God that created us would be flattered that their creation is capable of the discipline of introspection at all. It’s a remarkable accomplishment, A+ for the human project.

For example, a well-known argument for God comes from Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Aristotle is...a legend. He was known as “The Philosopher” in Western tradition. It was my absolute pleasure to study Aristotle and others under Professor Paula Gottlieb at the University of Wisconsin, one of the foremost scholars on Aristotle in the world. My only regret is that I didn’t have more time to spend learning from her. This won’t be the last I speak of Aristotle, I promise.

Aristotle’s “prime mover” argument for the existence of God starts with the observation that in our physical world everything must have a cause, because our universe works according to the laws of cause and effect that we can observe. 

We observe that one thing causes another causes another. But how did it start? a system cannot logically cause itself; a self-causing system would have a circular justification insofar that the end causes the beginning and vice versa. Practitioners of formal logic reject circular reasoning because it’s not useful. If you’ve ever heard this exchange, it might help you relate: 

“The Bible is the Holy Word of God, and cannot be wrong!”

“Why?”

“Because it says so in the Bible.”

That is just one of many examples you can find if you pay attention. It’s more than silly: it’s a logical contradiction - there is something intuitively wrong with circular reasoning.

And if there cannot be circular reasoning , and if there cannot be no cause, there must therefore be a first cause, an unmoved mover. This is taken to mean God must exist as the first cause. 

That argument may seem familiar if you’ve ever debated faith with an evangelical. It’s one of many “proofs” offered to devotees to use as tools against the doubters. 

However, I object to Aristotle’s argument. Even with our modern physics it’s not clear at all that time must move linearly forward from beginning to end, and that cause and effect always go cause to effect. Certainly, we experience time linearly forward. Although, thinking about it now, we can actually only ever experience the present moment. Off topic. The point is, strange concepts in science fiction like stable time loops where the end causes the beginning and neither one came first are at least plausible, and the fact that they are plausible may either mean something or nothing depending on who is doing the philosophizing. 

If you followed all that, you may yet be unconvinced that God exists, even though there must be a first cause if the argument is sound. Most arguments for God are in some way unsatisfactory like Aristotle’s first cause argument. I would think that an argument for God that is actually compelling would be one that is absolutely incontrovertible.

As for using faith, the idea of God, or some other hat trick when it hasn’t been previously used in the argument, I think it’s entertaining, but ultimately not the philosophy I am trying to access. Despite the attempts of previous arguments, the existence of God has never been logically proven. I want to make it clear though that a proof of God’s existence would be a wonderful thing to have. Certainty in the afterlife would probably forever eliminate pessimism and nihilism from the earth. But I am not nearly wise enough to tackle that seemingly impossible challenge; and because it hasn’t been done, any arguments involving God as a premise are predicated on unproven assumptions. These are of course undesirable in philosophy. They are axiomatic weak points, and if one wants to poke you in the axioms one need only find such a weak point.

And despite everyone’s efforts to prove God, if such a proof were to succeed then the concept of faith in God would have to be taken out back and shot dead. One cannot have faith in something that they also know to be true. It would make every suburban mom’s aesthetic “faith” decorations utterly pointless, and for anyone that thinks faith is the ticket to heaven, congratulations on the eternal damnation of your soul.

To sort through all the confusion I’ve just thrown at you, let me explain a useful distinction by Alan Watts between faith and belief. In my experience, the two have been used interchangeably in sermons and everyday interactions. But belief for Alan was a positive account of what you think will happen. I believe that X. I believe that I will go to heaven when I die. I believe that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen atoms. It’s a hypothesis, a scientific endeavor. Everyone engaged in that endeavor has a belief, which they one day may know to be true. Contrast with Alan’s faith: the thought that, no matter what happens, everything is going to be okay. Come what may, I have faith. I don’t need to believe anything anyone tells me. I certainly don’t need to know what will happen, or even entertain thoughts of what will happen. Faith like that may be the most respectable and covetous attitude anyone could ever possess. Though Alan and Kierkegaard differed in what exactly they had faith in, I find a great deal of similarity in their end-state of being. They knew something: they had embraced the universe and all its chaos, and they had confidence, and self-assuredness in the strangest way.

But belief as an argument is a nonstarter. The Ken Hams of the world trying to prove that heaven is for real do not seem to have an idea of what true faith is. If they did, they wouldn’t be arguing about having faith while trying to prove the very thing that faith requires not be proved. Most importantly, if you find yourself searching for something to affirm your faith, then you never had faith in the first place. You may have had belief, and searching for evidence of that belief is the great human endeavor. It takes a remarkable man to take Kierkegaard’s leap of faith.

And it’s okay to not have faith, to not take the leap. I myself haven’t been able to convince myself to take that leap. I don’t yet have blind trust in the universe. I search for the truth instead, and doubt without reservation. But I also respect Alan Watts, and Soren Kierkegaard, and the zenlike attitude of faith. Maybe, some day, I’ll find it.

This has been Tony Talks Back. Thanks for listening.