An Existential Breakthrough
A better title for this post would be "A Breakthrough on Existentialism" but both titles really are appropriate. I’ve been listening to a lecture series by the late Robert C. Solomon on existentialism. The series is excellent but one lecture in particular opened up existentialism for me in ways that haven’t been before.
I’ve always had a caricature of existentialism that it is anti-rational and espouses an epistemology that is entirely capricious and arbitrary. While I’m not convinced a thoroughgoing existentialism avoids this, I do see now how the view, the "attitude" as it is probably better called, is not completely irrational. The lecture that opened things up was on Danish existentialist Soren Kierkegaard.
Solomon was clear that Kierkegaard was not against the idea of objective truth as a general concept. I found that curious since I always thought of him as not allowing for objective truth in any context. Solomon said that for Kierkegaard subjective truth came into play when objective truth could not be discovered and there was no way of discovering truth objectively in a specific area (notably religion).
When it comes to religion, Kierkegaard held that getting at truth in religion rationally is impossible. This is something I’ve always understood in him but I was getting a better feel for why it was so important. Because truth in religion is impenetrable logically, we have to come at religion by using "subjective truth" which involves the passions. According to Solomon, Kierkegaard said that religion involves a decision to commit oneself to it precisely because reason cannot help us decide. We commit in the absence of full knowledge and because of the apparent absurdities in the religion. For Kierkegaard, committing to a religion wasn’t a single leap but a series of leaps; a series of commitments that one has to make. The absurdities force us to either fall more in love with the religion or to abandon it depending on how one’s passions go when one studies the religious text.
Here’s where the breakthrough came. Solomon said that Kierkegaard likened the commitment to religion to that of a human love relationship. When two people choose to love each other, they have no rational idea (1) what they’re getting into, and (2) what the other person is like or what they’ll find when they get to know him or her. BUT people choose to commit themselves to the other person in the absence of (perhaps because of the absence of) this rational knowledge. As they learn about the other person and the truths about them that are in a lot of ways absurd from a rational point of view, they either fall more and more in love and make deeper and deeper commitments to that person or they decide that the person is not for them and choose to fall in love with someone else.
Further, the complexities and apparent absurdities of the other person drives them to get to know him or her more deeply and to become more passionate about the other person. The complexities and what appears to be irrational on the surface actually creates the desire to learn more and to discover more. If the one being loved were exactly like the lover or were completely simple and everything to understand was on the surface, this would actually discourage love and commitment, not encourage it. The same is true, said Kierkegaard, of the Bible and religion. It is the apparent contradictions, absurdities, and irrationalities that drive us to deeper study and longing for a deeper understanding.
He also said that from the outside, a person looking at love making or courtship that has never been involved in that type of relationship finds it absurd. They have no understanding of it AND COULD NEVER UNDERSTAND IT FROM OUTSIDE THE RELATIONSHIP purely rationally! The relationship is purely subjective and only “makes sense” from inside the relationship. If the analogy works, the same is true of religion. This explained two things for me. 1. Why the atheist may never “get it” even though theists “prove” the truth of religion rationally and 2. Why rational rational proofs sometimes appear powerless to convince regardless of how strong the arguments might be I think it works for atheism in this way as well).
Finally, this explains why existentialists can never really tell a person that he ought to believe or ought not to believe. It would be like one person telling another which person to fall in love with. The idea is nonsense. Now I do think there is a role for reason here but I can see where the existentialist is coming from.
Solomon also articulated Kierkegaard’s critique of what he called “herd religion” which was the idea that a person would think they were a Christian (atheist) because of the family into which they were born or because they associate with some group or some set of doctrines or meet for a Bible study and the like. Those who have not entered that love relationship are not in the relationship at all.
My goal here has been to try to understand the view. There is a lot to consider and while my rationalist tendencies are still strong, I do think this view provides some very important things to consider when attempting to come up with a broad and thorough epistemology.
