1. Existentialism as presupposing the death of God

MANY MAY STILL WONDER how the foregoing rather academic defense of the Aristotelian principle of the good can serve as a means of raising God from the dead, in Nietzsche’s phrase. Nietzsche’s rather flamboyant language might lead one to think that in the modern age something more has died than merely the objectivity of value.

We have been primarily concerned with showing how morals and ethics can, after all, be based on the facts of nature and on a due regard for the nature of things, particularly the nature of man. Now we must turn our attention to a challenge to this contention which emanates not from contemporary English thinkers, but from thinkers who, curiously enough, seem to be utter strangers to the English—their colleagues on the Continent. For want of a better term, we shall refer to them all loosely as “existentialists,” however imprecise this term may be in any given case. Our discussion of “existentialism” will be neither complete nor exhaustive. We shall arbitrarily select certain current existentialist themes in order to bring out the contrast, and also certain points of comparison, between an Aristotelian ethics of rational man and an existentialist ethics of irrational man.

The ethics of rational man involves as its basic imperative the simple injunction to be rational, to live intelligently, to exercise the intellectual and moral virtues. The absolute presupposition of this ethics of rationality and the examined life is the possibility that a human being can actually come to know what the good life is and what it is incumbent upon him as a human being to do. But such knowledge is possible only if there are certain objective values in nature—if God, in fact, is not dead but alive.

From the existentialist point of view, as we are rather arbitrarily construing it, there is no value or good in things whatever. Existence is essentially ugly, meaningless, and absurd. Mr. Barrett has skillfully brought this out by an apt contrast between the medieval religious attitude and the current existentialist attitude:

The waning of religion is a much more concrete and complex fact than a mere change in conscious outlook; it penetrates the deepest strata of man’s total psychic life. . . . The loss of the Church was the loss of a whole system of symbols, images, dogmas, and rites which had the psychological validity of immediate experience, and within which hitherto the whole psychic life of Western man had been safely contained. In losing religion, man lost the concrete connection with a transcendent realm of being; he was set free to deal with this world in all its brute objectivity. But he was bound to feel homeless in such a world, which no longer answered the needs of his spirit. A home is the accepted framework which habitually contains our life. To lose one’s psychic container is to be cast adrift, to become a wanderer upon the face of the earth. Henceforth, in seeking his own human completeness man would have to do for himself what he once had done for him, unconsciously, by the Church, through the medium of its sacramental life.¹

Again, in connection with a discussion of Faulkner, Barrett remarks:

The brute, irrational, given quality of the world comes through so strongly in Faulkner’s peculiar technique that he actually shows, and does not merely state, the meaning of the quotation from which his title is derived:

‘[Life] is a tale,

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.’

Shakespeare places these lines in the context of a fairly well-made tragedy in which evil is destroyed and good triumphs; but Faulkner shows us the world of which Shakespeare’s statement would be true; a world opaque, dense, and irrational, that could not have existed for Shakespeare, close as he was still to medieval Christianity.²

The issue need not be posed, as Barrett poses it, in religious terms. It can be understood as a purely philosophical or ethical one: on the one side, there is what we have chosen to call the ethics of rational man; on the other, an ethics in which there can be no meaning whatever to the injunction that a man be rational. Why, on the latter alternative, is such an injunction meaningless? Not because man is not a rational animal, but because reason cannot tell man anything about how to live or what to live for. Human intelligence is powerless and useless in an ethical context because no ethical truth can be found anywhere in the universe. Study nature as you will and you will find nothing of an ethical or moral import: there is no objective moral order; hence existence is meaningless and absurd.

Nevertheless, among the existentialists the supposed death of God has not led to a complete skepticism in regard to ethics, as it seems to have done among contemporary British thinkers; instead, on the Continent the consequence seems to have been the emergence of a new and different ethics, an ethics of irrational man. As Sartre puts it very movingly:

The existentialist, on the contrary, finds it extremely embarrassing that God does not exist, for there disappears with Him all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. There can no longer be any good a priori, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. It is nowhere written that ‘the good’ exists, that one must be honest or must not lie, since we are now upon the plane where there are only men. Dostoevsky once wrote ‘If God did not exist, everything would be permitted’; and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn, for he cannot find anything to depend upon either within or outside himself. He discovers forthwith, that he is without excuse. For if indeed existence precedes essence, one will never be able to explain one’s action by reference to a given and specific human nature; in other words, there is no determinism—man is free, man is freedom. Nor, on the other hand, if God does not exist, are we provided with any values or commands that could legitimize our behavior. Thus we have neither behind us, nor before us in a luminous realm of values, any means of justification or excuse. We are left alone, without excuse. That is what I mean when I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into this world he is responsible for everything he does. The existentialist does not believe in the power of passion. He will never regard a grand passion as a destructive torrent upon which a man is swept into certain actions as by fate, and which, therefore, is an excuse for them. He thinks that man is responsible for his passion. Neither will an existentialist think that a man can find help through some sign being vouchsafed upon earth for his orientation: for he thinks that the man himself interprets the sign as he chooses. He thinks that every man, without any support or help whatever, is condemned at every instant to invent man. As Ponge has written in a very fine article, ‘Man is the future of man.’. . . If [this] means that, whatever man may now appear to be, there is a future to be fashioned, a virgin future that awaits him—then it is a true saying. But in the present one is forsaken.³

On the fundamental issue of whether or not God does exist, whether there is an objective basis for ethics in the nature of things—on this issue we have perhaps already had enough to say. Rather than broach this question again, it might be more interesting to consider certain other aspects of the existentialist critique of the ethics of rational man. For there is a sense in which one might almost say that for the existentialist, even if God or an objective moral order did exist, still, if a human being were to act on such knowledge, the result would be a human personality that would be, in existentialist eyes, far from admirable and far from authentic.

2. The supposed antithesis between rationality and commitment

In the passage quoted above Sartre hinted at an interesting point. Having shown how a human being longs for a real moral order which he can “depend upon,” whether it be “within or without himself,” how he wishes for “some sign to be vouchsafed upon earth for his orientation,” Sartre then goes on to remark that even if there were such a sign, it would be “man himself who would be obliged to interpret the sign as he chooses.”

At least part of what Sartre means by this is that even if there were an objective moral order, it would still be up to the individual human being to choose it, to take it upon himself, to commit himself to it. Indeed, without such an act of choice or of will, obedience to moral law would be no more meritorious than obedience to the law of gravity. In both cases he might know what the law is, but his observance of it would not be a matter of choice, and hence certainly not a matter of merit. But if human worth and merit arise, not from knowing what we need to do, but from choosing to do it, then what counts morally and ethically is not so much rational intelligence as responsibility and freedom, in Sartre’s sense.

As a criticism of an Aristotelian type of ethics, this involves a rather serious oversimplification. As we have insisted in our earlier chapters, the Aristotelian goal for man is not so much to have knowledge as to choose in accordance with such knowledge—not intelligence, but intelligent action. The moral virtues involved in choice are at least as important as the intellectual virtues, if not more so. The ethics of the rational man is an ethics of the man who chooses freely, though he has the responsibility of choosing intelligently. Hence the ethical position that we have been defending seems to have much in common with certain existentialist themes.

A similar misunderstanding often leads existentialist thinkers to distinguish their ethics from what they take to be the ethics of rational man. No sooner does one emphasize the importance of reason and intelligence in human life and the existence of some sort of objective order or values than one is likely to be accused of sacrificing what Kierkegaard would call subjectivity for objectivity.

The objective tendency, which proposes to make everyone an observer, and in its maximum to transform him into so objective an observer that he becomes almost a ghost, scarcely to be distinguished from the tremendous spirit of the historical past—this tendency naturally refuses to know or listen to anything except what stands in relation to itself. If one is so fortunate as to be of service within the given presupposition, by contributing one or another item of information concerning a tribe perhaps hitherto unknown, which is to be provided with a flag and given a place in the paragraph parade; if one is competent within the given presupposition to assign China a place different from the one it has hitherto occupied in the systematic procession,—in that case one is made welcome. But everything else is divinity-school prattle. For it is regarded as a settled thing, that the objective tendency in direction of intellectual contemplation, is, in the newer linguistic usage, the ‘ethical’ answer to the question of what I ‘ethically’ have to do. . . . The question I would ask is this: What conclusion would inevitably force itself upon Ethics, if the becoming a subject were not the highest task confronting a human being?⁴ . . .

The only reality to which an existing individual may have a relation that is more than cognitive, is his own reality, the fact that he exists; this reality constitutes his absolute interest. Abstract thought requires him to become disinterested in order to acquire knowledge; the ethical demand is that he become infinitely interested in existing.

The only reality that exists for an existing individual is his own ethical reality. To every other reality he stands in a cognitive relation.⁵ . . .

To assert the supremacy of thought is Gnosticism; to make the ethical reality of the subject the only reality might seem to be acosmism. The circumstance that it will seem so to a busy thinker who explains everything, a nimble mind that quickly surveys the entire universe, merely proves that such a thinker has a very humble notion of what the ethical means to the subject. If Ethics were to take away the entire world from such a thinker, letting him keep his own self, he would probably regard such a trifle as not worth keeping, and would let it go with the rest—and so it becomes acosmism. But why does he think so slightingly of his own self? If it were our meaning that he should give up the whole world in order to content himself with another person’s ethical reality, he would be justified in regarding the exchange as a dead loss. But his own ethical reality, on the other hand, ought to mean more to him than ‘heaven and earth and all that therein is,’ more than the six thousand years of human history, more than both astrology and the veterinary sciences or whatever it is that the age demands, all of which is aesthetically and intellectually a huge vulgarity.⁶

Consider for a minute these specimens of Kierkegaardian eloquence and satire: is there any radical incompatibility between what Kierkegaard is here preaching and Aristotle’s ethical teaching, as we have interpreted it? In our very first chapter we were quite as concerned as Kierkegaard with depreciating and even poking fun at contemporary academic knowledge, which always seems to do so little for the knower himself. We set our sights upon a higher kind of knowledge that could be likened to Socrates’ “Know thyself”: a knowledge that could show us “the way,” a “saving” knowledge for the human subject himself.

3. But why not a rational commitment?

There seems to be no incompatibility between knowledge of this sort and what Kierkegaard calls “an infinite interest in existing,” “an absolute interest in one’s own ethical reality.” We would go even further and say that the very man who, to borrow Sartre’s words, is intent to “find values in an intelligible heaven,” who is determined to find something “to depend upon, either within or outside himself,” whose concern is to find “values or commands that could legitimize our behavior”—such a one, we suggest, is perfectly capable of being aware that “the becoming a subject” is “the highest task confronting a human being.”

Perhaps Kierkegaard himself would not wholly disagree. Remember that in a passage quoted earlier, speaking of Socrates and Socratic knowledge, he said: “This type of knowledge bears a relation to the existing subject who is infinitely interested in existing.”⁷

Suppose now that we stand this statement on end, and assert that only through knowledge of an objective moral order of values can “an existing subject” properly fulfill the task of “becoming a subject” or go about satisfying his “infinite interest in existing.” With this Kierkegaard would most certainly disagree, and so would any existentialist. Here is the real issue between existentialism and Aristotelian ethics. The issue is not, as existentialists often pretend, between disinterested, impersonal objectivity on the one hand and a committed subjectivity on the other. Nor is it an issue between knowing and doing, or between a mere detached understanding and an actual choosing. The issue is whether one can ever choose rightly without knowledge—whether there can ever be a properly human commitment to what is not justified in the light of knowledge and understanding. For as we found Aristotle insisting in the first book of the Ethics, a distinctively and truly human life can only be an intelligent life.

But this means that the Aristotelian type of the rational man is none other than what some existentialists would depreciatively call “the serious man.” As one recent writer on Sartre has put it, what Sartre calls “the spirit of seriousness”

consists in pretending that moral values do not depend on a human choice but that they are dictated by a ‘natural law,’ by hazard, or by divine commands. Something would be morally good or bad as it were white or black. The man who takes refuge in the spirit of seriousness tries to hide from himself that it is human freedom which decides on moral values. He tries to ignore that if man is not the creator of being, he is at least the inventor of moral values. The man who takes refuge in the spirit of seriousness tries to evade moral responsibility.⁸

Even better is Kierkegaard’s own account of “the serious man”:

The serious man continues: If he were able to obtain certainty with respect to such a good, so as to know that it is really there, he would venture everything for its sake. The serious man speaks like a wag; it is clear enough that he wishes to make fools of us, like the raw recruit who takes a run in preparation for jumping into the water, and actually takes the run,—but gives the leap a go-by. When the certainty is there he will venture all. But what then does it mean to venture? A venture is the precise correlative of an uncertainty; when the certainty is there the venture becomes impossible. If our serious man acquires the definite certainty that he seeks, he will be unable to venture all; for even if he gives up everything, he will under such circumstances venture nothing—and if he does not get certainty, our serious man says in all earnest that he refuses to risk anything, since that would be madness. In this way the venture of our serious man becomes merely a false alarm. If what I hope to gain by venturing is itself certain, I do not risk or venture, but make an exchange. Thus in giving an apple for a pear, I run no risk if I hold the pear in my hand while making the exchange.⁹

In the light of such passages, we can offer a rather bald formulation of the contrast between an Aristotelian ethics of rational man and an existentialist ethics of irrational man:

Aristotle: to be human (i.e., to become subjective) is to act and to choose, but always in the light of knowledge and understanding.

The existentialists: to become subjective (i.e., to be truly human) is to act and to choose, but in the absence of knowledge and understanding.

On the latter view the gravamen of ethics falls not on the intelligence, but on what in the older terminology would have been called the will. Since existentialists assume that God is dead, the authentic exercise of will must be in the very face of this fact, in the consciousness that there is no God,^* no objective order of values, no ground or basis of ethics in the older sense at all. Indeed, to make choices and decisions as if there were a God and as if one’s choices could therefore be intelligent and rational—this could only be evidence of bad faith, because there is no God and accordingly there can be no such thing as a rational man or an examined life.

What may be said to all this? Perhaps the less said the better. Yet we do want to say at least one thing more. We propose to recall a point made in our earlier refutation of relativism, in order to show that perhaps the existentialists fall into a like inconsistency.

To become a “subject” in Kierkegaard’s sense, or to be free in Sartre’s sense, must one not face up to the realities of the human situation; must one not put aside all temptation to bad faith and resolutely acknowledge the fact that God is dead? Yet this must surely involve a certain understanding, a knowledge of what the score is. The knowledge and understanding involved will be a morally relevant knowledge, a knowledge that indicates what we should do and what our responsibilities are in the light of the facts. Such knowledge will disclose to us what our true human values are, even if there is no moral order in nature. In short, must not the very dialectic of their own position catch the existentialists up into the logic of “Know thyself” and of the examined life, and ultimately into the ethics of rational man?

4. Conclusion: on “doing what comes naturally”

Still, it is not by any such dialectical arguments that the existentialists are going to be answered effectively. Supposing that the hidden logic of their position does commit them to a sort of inverted and covert theory of human nature, that will scarcely suffice to reinstate at one stroke the entire traditional ethics of rational man. The trouble is that the very notion of human nature, and of nature generally, has apparently turned sour for most modern ethical thinkers, not just for the existentialists, but for the utilitarians, for the relativists, for those bewitched by the naturalistic fallacy, for just about everyone, in fact. For this reason, no one thinks any more of turning to nature and of trying to discover in nature such ways of life as are demanded by our nature as men.

But what if the good man is simply the man who has sense enough to be natural, who has succeeded in achieving a knowledge of himself, as Socrates would put it, and who is willing just to be himself? Such a man would not be afflicted with the current disease of feeling that he must always be striking a pose or acting a part. He would not be haunted by any conviction of his own nothingness, furiously driving himself to be forever creating himself anew, or going beyond himself or authenticating himself in the manner of some fancied Nietzschean Übermensch. Nor must it be supposed that the only alternative to this kind of desperate freedom, springing from the fiction of one’s own nothingness, is the life of complacency, lethargy, and conformity. This would be to turn the injunction to be yourself into a perverted counsel to forget yourself and to escape from yourself by getting lost in the crowd or by seeking the protective coloration of mere conformity. Rather than anything of this sort, the natural life for a human being can be none other than the examined life, the life in which one comes to know oneself as a human being and, in and through such knowledge, comes to be oneself.

All the same, such words as these will doubtless seem only baffling to the so-called educated man of today. “How can all this talk of the examined life deck itself out in appeals to nature and to the natural?” he will say. “By what possible stretch of the imagination can one pretend that the life of a Socrates is any more natural than that of a Nightingale, and what possible meaning can be given to the recommendation that we turn to nature to find out what the good life and the natural life for us is?”

Once again, protests of this sort spring from that most ingrained of modern prejudices, that of identifying nature with the scientific universe, and the investigation of nature with the procedures of modern science. To rebut such a prejudice, one can only reiterate that while in their capacity as scientists men can attain a knowledge of nature that is literally limitless in its own dimension, yet in respect to other dimensions such a scientific knowledge of nature is both narrowly defined and rigorously restricted, not merely in fact, but in principle. Is it not obvious that men merely as human beings can, by exercising their intelligence, achieve a kind of common-sense understanding of their own nature and of the nature of the world they live in which is different from scientific knowledge, and for which scientific knowledge is no substitute?

Let’s take an illustration. Some eight years ago there appeared in a popular college textbook series a short paper by a contemporary psychologist entitled The Natural Man.¹⁰ When the reader turns back the cover and looks to see just who or what the natural man is, from the standpoint of scientific psychology, one discovers that the author is hard put to it to find any examples of so seemingly rare a creature. But finally after some hemming and hawing and with no little apology for the fact that the examples are far from perfect, the author suggests that the best examples of natural men are so-called feral men—the wild boy of Aveyron, or the Nuremburg boy, or the wolf-children of India.

Now to the poor moral philosopher who is trying to hold up the natural life of man as being the model of the good life, such a scientific version of the natural may well come as a rude shock. But on further consideration we can see that the psychologist-author is simply excluding from his concept of man’s nature all those traits and qualities which human beings come to have as a result of social or cultural influences. Similarly he is excluding anything that human beings may have come to be as a result of the exercise of their intelligence and in virtue of their own plans and purposes and designs. Such things are thought to represent artificial¹¹ accretions to the native and natural endowments of men, and hence must be abstracted from or thought away, if one is ever to come to understand the natural in man as such.

Undoubtedly such a way of conceiving what is natural to man is not only meaningful, but altogether appropriate to the special scientific concerns of the author. And yet from another point of view is it not equally obvious that the mode of existence of the wolf-children of India is not what we would ordinarily call the natural way of life for a human being, any more than we would consider idiocy or paralysis or insanity to be the natural condition of man? On the contrary, man being a rational or intelligent animal by nature, it may be presumed that the natural life for a human being will be some sort of rational or intelligent life, just as man being by nature a political animal,¹² it may be presumed that the natural life for him will be life in some sort of political and cultural milieu. And just as we would certainly recognize that the way of life of the wild boy of Aveyron was unmistakably an unnatural and even bestial existence for a human being, so also, by extension and mutatis mutandis, we would surely say that the life of a Nightingale or a Shaftesbury or a Sir Walter Elliott was a foolish, or miserable, or wasted human existence. Moreover, the standard of our judgment in these latter cases is not unlike our standard in the former: it is a regard for the potentialities of man’s nature as man that leads us to say of a Nightingale no less than of a feral man that he somehow falls short of his natural human capacities, that he fails to be fully and truly human.

Seen in this light, “doing what comes naturally” must needs take on a very different meaning. Rather than an Annie with her gun being the obvious tutor for us in such matters, it might better be a Plato or an Aristotle. And rather than that characters like Uncle Jed and Grandpa Bill should serve as exemplars in the business of doing what comes naturally, why not look to a Socrates?

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* At this point it should be only too obvious that our earlier adoption of the slogan “God is dead,” as being the badge of existentialism, would appear quite unjustified in the case of Kierkegaard. For Kierkegaard is not just a religious, but a Christian, existentialist. Nevertheless, the slogan may be seen to be appropriate even with respect to Kierkegaard, as soon as one recalls that in the slogan the death of God is interpreted as being equivalent to the denial of any sort of objective moral order in nature. And Kierkegaard would have been the first to second the denial of any such order, however much he might have disliked labeling it “the death of God.”