Existentialism

WOODY ALLEN: That's quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn't it?

GIRL IN MUSEUM: Yes it is.

WOODY ALLEN: What does it say to you?

GIRL IN MUSEUM: It restates the negativeness of the universe, the hideous

lonely emptiness of existence, nothingness, the predicament of man forced to live
in a barren, godless eternity, like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void,
with nothing but waste, horror, and degradation, forming a useless bleak
straightjacket in a black absurd cosmos.

WOODY ALLEN: What are you doing Saturday night?

GIRL IN MUSEUM: Committing suicide.

WOODY ALLEN: What about Friday night?

GIRL IN MUSEUM: [leaves silently]

"Play It Again, Sam", Paramount Pictures, 1972;

image of "The Scream," 1893, by Edvard Munch

Mma Ramotswe had listened to a [BBC] World Service broadcast on her radio one
day which had simply taken her breath away. It was about philosophers who called
themselves existentialists and who, as far as Mma Ramotswe could ascertain, lived
in France. These French people said that you should live in a way which made you
feel real, and that the real thing to do was the right thing too. Mma Ramotswe had
listened in astonishment. You did not have to go to France to meet existentialists,
she reflected; there were many existentialists right here in Botswana. Note Mokoti,
for example. She had been married to an existentialist herself, without even
knowing it. Note, that selfish man who never once put himself out for another --
not even for his wife -- would have approved of existentialists, and they of him.
It was very existentialist, perhaps, to go out to bars every night while your
pregnant wife stayed at home, and even more existentialist to go off with girls --
young existentialist girls -- you met in bars. It was a good life being an
existentialist, although not too good for all the other, nonexistentialist people
around one.

Alexander McCall Smith, Morality for Beautiful Girls, Volume 3 of "The No. 1
Ladies' Detective Agency" series [Anchor Books, 2001, p.78]

In the 1988 movie Beetlejuice, we meet a young couple (Geena Davis and Alec
Baldwin) who have met an untimely death and find themselves involuntarily haunting
their own home. They eventually discover that they have access to a kind of
administrative center for the afterlife. As they enter the waiting room for the
center, through a one-way turnstyle, we notice that a sign over the door says:

NO EXIT

This is an allusion to another story about the afterlife, a play by Jean Paul
Sartre (1905-1980) called, indeed, No Exit (1944). The allusion is apt since
neither version of the afterlife is very appealing. In Sartre's play, a man and two
women find themselves trapped in a hotel room. They have been escorted into the
room without knowing how or why they are even in the hotel or what they are
supposed to be doing in the room together. Once they are in the room, however, they
discover that they cannot get out and that all their efforts to summon help are
fruitless. They also discover a rather unpleasant dynamic among themselves. The man
is attracted to one of the women, but she happens to be a lesbian and is only
attracted to the other woman. The other woman, however, is not a lesbian and is
rather attracted to the man -- who, of course, does not find her attractive. Soon
they realize that they have died and that this is the afterlife, the wrong kind of
afterlife. They are in hell, and the lesson of the play is nicely summed up as,
"Hell is other people."

Now why is it that "hell is other people"? Well, Jean Paul Sartre was an
Existentialist, this is an Existentialist play, and hell being other people is a
consequence of Existentialist principles, as we shall see. Existentialism proper is
a movement of the 1940's and 1950's, literary and artistic as well as
philosophical, with Sartre himself as probably the most famous representative.
Sartre is also a convenient representative because for a time he actually
acknowledged being an Existentialist and offered a definition for the word. It was
unusual for Existentialists to identify themselves as such, much less define what
it was all about, so Sartre is a convenient place to begin.

What Sartre did was to contrast a divine viewpoint on the world and on human nature
with a human viewpoint where there is no divine element. Thus, when God thought
about creating the world, he conceived it first -- he had in mind what the world
was going to be and what human nature was going to be. These were the "essences" of
the world and of humanity, the things that will make them what they are. Then God
created everything and gave existence to the essences. Thus, to God, "essence
precedes existence." Now, Sartre did not believe in God, so there was no place for
the essence of humanity to be before human existence. To us, existence comes first.
The essence comes later. Indeed, the essence is whatever we decide it is going to
be. So, from our point of view things are just the opposite of what they would be
for people who believed in God. Now it is "existence precedes essence." Hence,
"Existentialism."

The most important thing there for Sartre is not so much the distinction between
essence and existence but the absence of God. For Existentialists like Sartre, the
absence of God has a much larger significance than the metaphysics of creation:
Without God there is no purpose, no value, and no meaning in the world. That is the
foundational proposition for Existentialism. A world without purpose, value, or
meaning is literally senseless, worthless, meaningless, empty, and hopeless. It is,
to use a favorite Existentialist term, absurd.

To be without value and meaning is also to be without standards for behavior. A

favorite quote in that respect is from Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881), a novelist
who himself was a Christian but who has characters that often display what later
will seem to be Existentialist attitudes and ideas. One of those characters (in The
Brothers Karamazov, 1879-1880) says (in effect), "Without God, all is permitted."
Indeed, if the loss of God means the loss of all meaning and value, then actions
are without meaning or value either, and one cannot say that it matters whether
actions are "right" or "wrong," since those words, or the corresponding actions,
don't mean anything more than anything else.

Now, when Existentialism was popular, it struck many people as liberating and
enjoyable to think of the world as absurd and behavior without limitations. But the
real value of Existentialism as a philosophical thought experiment was to
understand the true consequences of such a world. It would be a nightmare. An
absurd world, and everything else in it, is actually empty and pointless. There is
no reason to do anything, even to continue living. Thus, in Woody Allen's 1972
movie Play It Again Sam, in one scene he is trying to pick up a girl in a museum
and asks her about the dark abstract painting that she is looking at. She answers
with an Existentialist catalogue -- "void," "emptiness," "horror," etc. When he
then asks her out, she answers, "I am committing suicide." That, indeed, would seem
to be the obvious response to such a world.

The starkness and hopelessness of this problem is portrayed in an essay, "The Myth
of Sisyphus" (1942), by another great French Existentialist, Albert Camus (1913-
1960). In Greek mythology, Sisyphus, who had once deceived the gods and cheated
death, was condemned for eternity to roll a stone up a hill. Every time he was
about to complete his task, the stone would roll free back down to the bottom of
the hill. Sisyphus would then have to start over again, even though the same thing
would just happen again. Thus, the punishment of Sisyphus is a punishment just
because it is an endless exercise in futility. Sisyphus is stuck in an eternally
pointless task. Now, if the world and everything in it are also pointless, the
lesson is that the task of Sisyphus is identical to every thing that we will ever
be doing in life. We are no different from Sisyphus; and if his punishment makes
the afterlife a hell for him, we are already living in that hell.

Presumably, Sisyphus is unable to escape his condition through suicide. So if we

can, why not? Arguably, there is no reason why not. But suicide is not the typical
Existentialist answer. What can Sisyphus do to make his life endurable? Well, he
can just decide that it is meaningful. The value and purpose that objectively don't
exist in the world can be restored by an act of will. Again, this is what has
struck people as liberating about Existentialism. To live one's life, one must
exercise the freedom to create a life. Just going along with conventional values
and forgetting about the absurdity of the world is not authentic. Authenticity is
to exercise one's free will and to choose the activities and goals that will be
meaningful for one's self. With this approach, even Sisyphus can be engaged and
satisfied with what he is doing.

Now we can answer the question why "hell is other people." If we live our lives
just because of the completely free and autonomous decisions that we make, this
creates nothing that is common with others. If we adopt something that comes from
someone else, which could give us a common basis to make a connection with them,
this is inauthentic. If it just happens, by chance, that our own decisions produce
something that matches those of someone else, well then we have a connection, but
it is likely to be volatile. As we make new decisions, the probability of our
connection with others continuing is going to decline. We are isolated by our own
autonomy. The values and decision of others, whether authentic or inauthentic, will
be foreign and irritating.

This sense of estrangement from others is found in another classic of

Existentialism, the novel The Stranger (1942), by Camus. Like many of Camus'
stories, this one is set in Algeria. It is about a fellow whose mother dies but who
can't stand sitting up at her wake. He leaves, and offends the community by his
evident disrespect. Later, he kills a local Arab. This is not something that the
French colonial judicial system would ordinarily take very seriously, but local
French opinion is so unsympathetic with our "stranger," just because he left his
mother's wake, that he is condemned for the killing of the Arab. The absurdity of
all this is the point of the story. An Existentialist is always a stranger to
others and is certainly going to have no patience with conventions like wakes for
the dead or, for that matter, laws about murder.

The isolation produced by Existentialist value decisions also explains why few
Existentialists are self-identified as such. Calling someone an "Existentialist"
imposes an essence on them, telling them what they are. This violates their
absolute autonomy and freedom and makes it sound like they actually have something
important in common with some other people, other Existentialists. This is
intolerable.

Sartre himself felt the moral loss involved in all this. Traditional ideas about
moral responsibility disappeared when there was nothing meaningful to be
responsible about. Sartre consequently tried to compensate for this by introducing
a new, strengthened sense of responsibility. His view was that one is "responsible"
for all the consequences of one's action, whether it is possible to know about them
or not. He illustrated this in a short story about the Spanish Civil War. A young
Republican partisan is captured by the Fascists. He is told that he will be
executed unless he betrays some other Republicans who are considered more
important. Not knowing, in fact, where they are, he makes up a story that they are
hiding in a cemetery on the edge of town. He is then put in a cell. Later, the
Fascists return and release him. What happened? Well, it turned out, just by
chance, that the Republicans he pretended to betray actually were hiding in the
cemetery, and were captured. So it's his fault.

Now, what is the point of this story? The man is, after a fashion, "responsible"
for the capture, and probably execution, of the other Republicans; but the problem
with this notion of responsibility is that one cannot govern or alter one's
behavior on the basis of things that one cannot know about. You may be
"responsible" for all the consequences of your actions, but if you don't know what
they all are, then it really doesn't make any difference. This is why traditional
morality and law have the category of "negligence," that one is responsible for
things that one could know about but didn't bother to find out. Things that one
cannot know about cannot impose any obligation.

The lesson of the story might be that one should never lie, or that even if it is
OK to lie to the wicked, one should not make up stories that might be true and
might make something bad happen. This, however, makes it sound like Sartre is
looking for general moral principles, and that hardly can be the case. "Never lie"
would be just the kind of rule that Existentialists are rebelling against, and
Sartre certainly wouldn't like "never lie to Fascists." And once we start worrying
about what "might" be true or what "might" happen, things are much too vague and
problematic to have any clear guidance.

More important is what Sartre's new sense of "responsibility" leaves out. It leaves
out, indeed, the original meaning of "responsibility," which was "accountability."
It doesn't really matter that you cannot alter your behavior on the basis of
consequences that you cannot know, because you are not accountable for your
behavior anyway. The man in the story is not going to be brought to trial before
either God or man, much less punished. Being "responsible" for the deaths of the
other Republicans just means he will feel bad about what he has made happen. That's
it.

This is just a version of what the ordinary meaning of "responsible" has come to
be, namely "conscientious." A responsible person is a conscientious person, which
means someone who is trying to do the right thing. Now, in Existentialism there is
no "right" thing, so what can "conscientious" possibily mean? It just means that
one meant to do something and accepts it. One accepts and acknowledges the
consequences of one's action, and "accepts responsibility," because one really
intended to do the action. The opposite, not accepting one's own actions or just
doing something because it is expected, is "bad faith," the only real sin in
Existentialism. But this just means that any action is OK, as long as one "accepts"
it, not that one should be called to account or punished for it because, after all,
"all is permitted."

This morally empty meaning of responsibility has entered deep into popular art and
public discourse. A humorous example of it is in the 1978 movie The Big Fix, with
Richard Dreyfuss, Susan Anspach, John Lithgow, Bonnie Bedelia, and F. Murray
Abraham (quite a cast). Dreyfuss is a divorced detective whose ex (Bedelia) has
taken up with a psychobabble guru, whose training program, BEST, is clearly based
on the popular EST therapy of the 1970's. Every time Dreyfuss has to meet his wife,
over their children or his child support payments, this guru pronounces some absurd
chestnut from his therapy program. Dreyfuss starts counting them. Meanwhile,
murders have occurred (Anspach), and Dreyfuss has to track down the bad guy, whom
he thinks is the former campus radical (Abraham) but seems more likely to be the
spoiled rich kid (Lithgow). At one point, an attempt is made on his life by mafia
hit men from Nevada. He realizes that they might go after his (ex-) family also, so
he goes to warn his ex-wife to go into hiding with their kids. Unfortunately, she
has entered the BEST training seminar with her boyfriend, and, like EST, no one is
allowed to enter or leave after it has begun. Dreyfuss bursts in anyway, and is
indignantly told by the guru that no one has interrupted his program before.
Dreyfuss explains that hit men are possibily trying to murder his ex and their
children, to which the guru says, "Then they will just have to take responsibility
for that." At that, Dreyfuss says he has allowed him enough such sayings and
punches him out.

The implication of the guru's saying is that the problem with murder is just that
you might not "take responsibility" for it. That one might want to avoid murderers,
or that they are evil and the action wrongful, is beside the point. "Taking
responsibility" is all that counts and ends the matter. Just such uses of the
expression we can see more recently in real world affairs. When a car bomb blew up
a U.S. Marine billet in Beirut early in the Reagan administration, there was some
discussion about who was responsible for the lapse in security. This ended when
President Reagan himself said he would "take responsibility" for it. This did not
mean he would resign in disgrace. It simply meant that was the end of the matter
and everyone should forget about it, which they did. Then years later, when the
attempt to "rescue" the children in the compound of the Branch Davidians at Waco
ended in their all being suffocated or burned to death, there was also discussion
about who was responsible for ordering a raid that was so thoroughly misconceived.
Attorney General Janet Reno immediately said that she would "take full
responsibility," and the next day President Clinton offered that he instead would
"take responsibility." Again, what this all meant was that no one would actually be
accountable for all this supposed "responsibility." Neither Reno nor Clinton
resigned and, when pressed, they really blamed David Koresh for everything. He was
already dead and so could not dispute the blame. A pliant federal judge was then
allowed to lower the boom on the few survivors by using a legal trick to impose
long jail sentences for the only minor offenses that a jury found them guilty of.

"Taking responsibilty" has thus become a way of denying accountability, deflecting

true responsibility, and diverting blame to others. Sartre thus can be said to have
altered the meaning of "responsible" in just the way that he wanted, which is to
create a lot of moral sounding talk while actually eliminating morality. This may
be been convenient for Sartre himself, whose own actions may not have been above
moral reproach. Although Sartre is commonly said to be have been in the French
Resistance during World War II, he staged plays, which had to be submitted to the
German censors, in Paris. Camus suspected, consequently, that Sartre was more
involved in collaboration than in resistance. Again, although Sartre had a famous
relationship with the feminist Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), stories persist that
he actually treated her very badly, and that the later years of their relationship
consisted of her acting as a procuress for him -- then he left his estate to his
most recent lover, not to de Beauvoir.

Camus was also estranged by Sartre's lack of concern for the French colonials in
Algeria, a third of the population, who stood to lose their homes and livelihood
with the coming of Algerian independence. Sartre's attitude, indeed, owed nothing
to Existentialism but to the extremely doctrinaire Marxism that he eventually
adopted. Fixing up "responsibility," evidently, was not good enough. The
Existential Void of value had to be filled by Dialectical Materialism. How blind
and arrogant this became was evident in Sartre's remark on hearing of Khrushchev's
"Secret Speech" denouncing Stalin in 1956. Sartre said that it should indeed be
kept secret because it might discourage the "working class." The egotism and
paternalism of this is typical of leftist intellectuals, but it hardly seems like
the kind of thing that would allow the "working class" to "take responsbility" for
their own actions. Grafting Marxism onto Existentialism thus simply rendered
Sartre's thought incoherent.

Would Existentialism consistently dictate a certain political attitude? One would

hardly think so if "all is permitted," but one need not appeal to logic, only to
another conspicuous Existentialist figure, the philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-
1976). Both Sartre and Heidegger were disciples of the founder of Phenomenology,
Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), and Sartre himself, somewhat younger, was then
influenced by Heidegger. The enduring, embarrassing detail about Heidegger,
however, is that he enthusiastically joined the Nazi Party and somehow never got
around to explaining just why he had made that mistake or why, for that matter, the
Nazi Party was really unworthy of his attention. Indeed, until the end of his life,
it always sounded like he was unable to distinguish what it was about the Nazis
that was bad, and in fact Naziism followed much more coherently from Heidegger's
thought than Marxism ever did from Sartre's. That is because, as a true
Existentialist, Heidegger did not impose any timeless moral judgments, let alone
liberal or democratic ones, on history. Instead, events were supposed to disclose,
violently, a new "uncovering" of Being, which would overthrow previous views about
justice and order. This is no less than what Hitler was doing. Heidegger was such
an enthusiastic Nazi that he stiffed his graduate students who were Jews, refusing
to sign their dissertations, and excised the dedication of Being and Time (1927),
which had been to the inconveniently Jewish Edmund Husserl.

Although one might think this all would have discredited Heidegger in the post-War
world, we have already seen how philosophers like Sartre had been busy undermining
the forms of traditional moral judgment. Thus, Heidegger's influence actually grew
after the War, even in France, where a celebrated philosopher like Jacques Derrida
(1930-2004) said that there is nothing in his thought that was not already in
Heidegger. Although no secret, Heidegger's politics did not begin to embarrass his
followers until the 1980's. The response to this has not been to alter any of the
essentials, but to change terminology to conceal the continuity, i.e. Derrida's
"deconstruction" has become, otherwise unaltered, "post-modernism." Although this
now tends to be associated with leftist causes, following Sartre, we should not be
surprised to find it hostile to liberal principles and promoting totalitarian rules
(e.g. "speech codes" at universities) that would not be unfamiliar to Heidegger.

The Marxism of Sartre and the Naziism of Heidegger are sufficient to prove that
Existentialism, which already denies any reality to moral principles, can randomly
be associated with any sort of politics. Oddly, what it seems less conspicuously to
be associated with is liberal and free market politics, which were despised, not
just by Sartre and Heidegger, but by most other Existentialist figures and their
spiritual descendants. One might think that this is because intellectuals find
private life and hard work boring; but then, after the "Myth of Sisyphus," one
might think that any mundane task could be valorized into the most important thing
ever. The truth seems to be that Existentialists never really believed that life
was as meaningless as the task of Sisyphus. They actually demanded a real world of
meaning vast beyond the confines of ordinary life. Thus, Marxism probably appealed
to Sartre because of its pretence that it was scientific and about facts, and, as
it happens, Heidegger did not really have the classical Existentialist belief in
the meaninglessness of the world. The "uncoverings" of Being made for real value,
however "terrible," which means that Adolf Hitler gave real meaning to the world.

Although the classic forms of Existentialism are characteristic of post-World War

II philosophy, literature, and art, we have aleady seen, with Dostoevsky, that
Existentialist-like ideas were anticipated long before then. Dostoevsky, although
articulating the ideas, did not believe them; but there were real Existentialists-
before-their-time. The most important was certainly Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-
1900). There are at least three ways in which Nietzsche qualifies as a classic
Existentialist, all of which we can see in what may have been his magnum opus, Thus
Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885).

The title itself is a bit of a puzzle. "Zarathustra" is a German rendering of

Zarathushtra, the name in the language of the Avesta (Avestan), the sacred
scripture of Zoroastrianism, of the founder of that religion, the Prophet Zoroaster
(his name in Greek). Since Zoroaster preached a great cosmic conflict between Good
and Evil, this is perplexing: Nietzsche denies the reality of good and evil. But
that may be the point. What Zoroaster started, he has now been brought back to end.

1. Sartre's thought was founded on the non-existence of God as implying the non-
existence of all value. Nietzsche expressed precisely this same thing in one of the
most famous sayings in the history of philosophy, "God is dead" (a popular bumper-
sticker back in the '60's said, "'God is Dead,' Nietzsche; 'Nietzsche is dead,'
God") Since Nietzsche did not believe that there ever was a God, this expresses his
view that the effective belief in God was dead, but he has a bit of fun with the
metaphor of dying, decay, smell, etc. Unlike Sartre, he is a bit clearer that this
is a catastrophe, since it leaves nothing; it leaves, indeed, Nihilism (Latin
nihil="nothing"), which is the condition of not believing anything and having
nothing to live for. Life cannot be lived like this and it is intolerable. Thus, if
Existentialism in general is more profound than the thoughtless souls who think
that an absurd world is fun, Nietzsche is a more profound thinker than the
Existentialists who think that we can do without a God. Nietzsche's replacement for
God is the �bermensch. This was originally translated "Superman" since the Latin
super means "over," as does German �ber. In the 30's, however, a comic strip was
started about "Superman," who could leap tall buildings in a single bound, etc.
This made the philosophers and intellectuals uncomfortable, so later translators of
Nietzsche, like the Existentialist Karl Jaspers (1883-1969), started translating
�bermensch as "Overman." This does not, however, have nearly the same punch or ring
to it. The Superman, indeed, is supposed to be the next evolutionary step beyond
mere man -- where we really must say "man," and not "humanity" or any of the
politically correct alternatives, since Nietzsche was not very interested in women
and clearly despised the sort of liberal culture where equality for women was
coming to hand. When Nietzche says "man" (Mensch), he means it -- someone
egotistical, brawling, aggressive, arrogant, insensitive. The Superman is not
vulnerable to taming and domesticity. He has broken free of it entirely.

2. The Superman is free because all his own values flow from his own will. This
is the second thing that makes Nietzsche an Existentialist-before-his-time. Value
is a matter of decision, a matter of will. Because the Superman is free, he takes
what he wants and does what he likes. He is authentic. And since what everyone
really wants, if they could have their way, is power, the Superman will seize power
without remorse, regret, or apology. The Superman, indeed, is like the Sophist
Thrasymachus in Plato's Republic: Justice is what he wants, and he will take it.
The "slave morality" of altruism and self-denial, which the weak, miserable,
crippled, envious, and resentful have formulated into Judeo-Christian ethics, in an
attempt to deceive the strong into being weak like themselves, is contemptuously
rejected and ignored by the Superman, in whom we find the triumphant "will to
power."

It is astonishing that this nasty and contemptuous philosophy has become the
darling of the Left, who actually want a society very precisely of the "slave
morality" of altruism and self-denial. Perhaps it is because (1) leftist
intellectuals know that ordinary people don't actually read Nietzsche, and (2) that
they see everyone else as slaves to them, where the masters' duty, noblesse oblige,
is to arrange everyone else's lives in the proper way. This is certainly the most
common use of Nietzsche, from Adolf Hitler to Garry Wills (cf. his recent
authoritarian paean, A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of
Government, saying that the Constitutional principle of limited government "...is a
tradition that belittles America, that asks us to love our country by hating our
government"), to imagine one's self as the Superman, floating above others,
dispensing justice, or wrathful punishment, to them. Nietzsche's own critique of
Christianity, that the doctrine of love of others actually translates into
resentful hatred of others, applies with full force to his most ardent devotees,
whose talk about freedom and creativity translates into constant assaults on the
freedom and preferences of others, and deep resentment for those, the industralists
and inventors (as Ayn Rand understood), who have created the modern world and a
better life for all.

What Nietzsche's Superman gets is a little more durable than the decisions of
Sisyphus, since Nietzsche always saw systems of value, like traditional religions,
as persistent and living, endowing things with real value, if only for a time. The
Superman thus need not suffer from the nausea and dread that are characteristic of
later Existentialists, who are always poised on the edge of oblivion. But this is
really less honest than the later fears. Making up values doesn't make them so, and
Nietzsche himself made it possible for this to be felt so intensely later. After
the Superman has "transvalued" his own values a few times, he may begin to detect
an arbitrariness and emptiness in them. As Nietzsche himself said, you stare into
the Void long enough and the Void begins to stare back. Thus, by the time we get to
Camus, we get the Stranger, not the Superman.

3. The third point, which is advanced as the greatest teaching of the

Zarathustra, does the same job as Sartre's redefinition of "responsibility." This
is the "Eternal Recurrence." The doctrine is based on a kind of metaphysical
parable, that in an eternity of time, all possible things will have happened, which
means that in the present, with an eternity of time behind us, everything has
already happened, including what is happening now. Since every point where a time
like the present has happened, or will happen, itself also has an eternity of time
before it, then what is happening now has already happened an infinite number of
times and will happen an infinite number of times again. How seriously Nietzsche
takes the actual metaphysics of this is a good question, since it implies a
fatalism that is otherwise contrary to Nietzsche's view of will. But the
metaphysics is secondary. Since actions to Nietzsche are no longer good or evil, he
feels the same loss of weight as does Sartre and wants some way to make actions
seem more serious than they would be for your ordinary Nihilist. With the Eternal
Recurrence, actions become weightier because one must be perpared to do them over
and over again for eternity (like, indeed, Sisyphus). This still doesn't, after
all, mean that they are right or wrong; it simply means that before you do
something, you must determine that you really want to do it. Woody Allen jokes
about this in Hannah and Her Sisters [1986], that Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence
means that he will have to see the Ice-Capades over and over again. Unfortunately,
it is not hard to imagine that the greatest criminals of history, from Jack the
Ripper to Adolf Hitler, would be perfectly happy to repeat their crimes endlessly.
So, as with Sartre again, Nietzsche's doctrine does little to make up for the loss
of real morality, and the Eternal Recurrence has never been as sexy or popular a
doctrine as the Superman or the Will to Power.

So far I have been considering atheistic Existentialists, like Sartre and

Nietzsche; and the way they formulate their doctrines, it might seem that atheism
would be intrinsic to Existentialist ideas. The absence of God implies the loss of
value. However, that is not quite right, and as we continue into Existentialists-
before-their-time, we cannot avoid encountering such a one, one of the earliest,
who also happens to be a theistic Existentialist. Thus, in a sense Existentialism
begins as a form of theism and only later appears in atheistic form.

Our theistic Existentialist is S�ren Kierkegaard (1813-1855). Kierkegaard is an

Existentialist because he accepts, as fully as Sartre or Camus, the absurdity of
the world. But he does not begin with the postulate of the non-existence of God,
but with the principle that nothing in the world, nothing available to sense or
reason, provides any knowledge or reason to believe in God. While traditional
Christian theologians, like St. Thomas Aquinas, saw the world as providing evidence
of God's existence, and also thought that rational arguments a priori could
establish the existence of God, Kierkegaard does not think that this is the case.
But Kierkegaard's conclusion about this could just as easily be derived from
Sartre's premises. After all, if the world is absurd, and everything we do is
absurd anyway, why not do the most absurd thing imaginable? And what could be more
absurd than to believe in God? So why not? The atheists don't have any reason to
believe in anything else, or really even to disbelieve in that, so we may as well
go for it!

This is sometimes compared to Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), who said, "The heart has
reasons that the mind cannot understand"; but really, if the heart has reasons,
then, indeed, there are reasons, and the world is not an absurd place. Pascal is a
mystic (like some other mathematicians), not an Existentialist. The precedent for
Kierkegaard is really more like the Latin Church Father Tertullian (c.160-220),
who, when taunted about the absurdity of Christian doctrine, retorted that he
believed it because it was absurd. Without reasons of heart or mind, Kierkegaard
can only get to God by a "leap of faith." This is the equivalent of the acts of
will in the classic Existentialists, and equally fragile. A leap of faith attains
no reasons it did not have before, and so the position of faith remains irrational.
But it does achieve something a little different. A position of faith, however it
is attained, does bring with it certain responsibilities. Belief in a real God is
going to bring with it the Law, as the moral teachings of one's religion, whichever
it is, cannot then just be ignored. This returns one to the complications of
traditional morality, the kind of thing that Nietzsche or Sartre or Heidegger would
just as soon ignore. In retrospect, however, the three of them should have taken
traditional morality a bit, or a lot, more seriously than they did. The project of
dumping the whole business did not have edifying results, either personally or
politically.

Kierkegaard's moral and religious seriousness offered a more promising basis for
the development of Existentialist themes than the basically nihilistic, egocentric,
and hopeless approach of Nietzsche, Sartre, and the others. Philosophers who make
their own leap of faith to Marxism or Naziism have really discredited their own
source of inspiration. Thus, while Sartre achieved for a time a higher profile in
the fashionable literary world, theistic Existentialists, like Nikolay Berdyayev
(1874-1948), Paul Tillich (1886-1965), and Martin Buber (1878-1965) continued
Kierkegaard's work with updated approaches to traditional religions. Atheistic
Existentialism really exhausted itself: The effort of will required for Sisyphus
to maintain his enthusiasm is really beyond most human capacity, and better the
solace of traditional religion than the vicious pseudo-religions of communism or
fascism.

The personal failures of Sartre or Heidegger, however, do demonstrate their

seriousness, and the fact that the absurdity of the world for them was not a joke,
was not fun, but a terror. Their failure was in the direction of the solution they
sought, a solution that could not be bound by some fairly simple and fundamental
moral considerations. It wasn't just that they couldn't bring themselves to believe
in God. They couldn't bring themselves to believe in right and wrong. But the
principle of Dostoevsky's nihilist, that "without God, all is permitted," really
represents an impoverished reading of the history of philosophy, and of religion
also. Plato's Forms did not depend on God, nor Schopenhauer's sense of justice and
compassion (of which Nietzsche cannot have been unaware), while the Buddha Dharma
is the moral teaching of a religion that explictly rejects the existence of a God.
Thus, Nietzsche and Sartre base their thought on a false inference. It simply does
not follow that if there is no God, then all is permitted. It doesn't even follow
that there is no religion. Nor does it follow that everything is without meaning.
When Beethoven faced his own growing deafness, he knew that he could still create
music, create beauty, even if completely deaf. That is what happened. But Plato
already pointed out that beauty is a tangible kind of value, something we can see
and touch (or hear), and a clue to the reality of all value, even the kind that we
cannot see. The Existentialists, even the theistic ones, seem to have overlooked
that.

Existentialism has often been expressed, as we have seen, in art. Probably the
supreme Existentialist movie was the 1958 film The Seventh Seal, by the Swedish
director Ingmar Bergman. At the beginning, we have a Knight and a Squire returning
from the Crusades. They find that the Plague is raging. This is anachronistic,
since the Crusades ended for most practical purposes in 1270 (Acre itself was lost
in 1291, the latest a Crusader would actually have been in the Holy Land), while
the Black Death began in Europe in 1346, arriving in Sweden in 1350. Be that as it
may, after landing on the beach, the Knight is confronted by Death himself, who
informs him that his time is up. Since the Knight does not want to die because he
feels he has not found the meaning or purpose of life, he challenges Death to a
game of chess. Death accepts, and through most of the rest of the movie, as the
Knight and Squire travel back to the Knight's castle, the chess game continues in
the evenings, with Death invisible to all others. There is an exception to that,
however. The Knight and Squire begin to collect a group of travelers, and among
them is a family of Players, a husband and wife (interestingly named Joseph and
Mary) and their child. The husband plays the Fool in the performance we see. When
we meet them, the Fool has a vision of the Virgin Mary -- as visible to us as to
him. This ends up being an important factor in the meaning of the movie. Later, as
the group approaches the Knight's castle, the Fool sees Death playing chess with
the Knight. He tells his wife that they better get out of there, and they do.
Meanwhile, we have been learning about the mentality of the Knight and the Squire.
The Knight wants what, in Existentialist terms, he cannot have: A rational
understanding of the meaning and purpose of life. The Squire has no such illusions.
He is the type of the atheistic Existentialist, who knows that life is meaningless
and the universe empty, with little but horror for us to expect. The very night
that the Fool sees Death, the Knight loses the chess game. Death tells him that the
next time they meet, he will take the Knight and everyone with him. The next day
they arrive at the Knight's castle, where his wife has been waiting for him many
years. At dinner that night, there is a knock on the door. No one is there, and
everyone now knows that it will be Death. The Knight again prays for knowlege, and
the Squire tells him, in some detail, there is none to have. The Knight's wife
tells him to be quiet. The Squire will be quiet, but he says he protests. Again,
this is the type of the atheistic Existentialist, who recognizes but doesn't have
to like the absurdity of the world