palmquist.tree.34. angst and the paradox of courage

staffweb.hkbu.edu.hk

D1

37 min read • original

34. Angst and the Paradox of Courage

by Stephen Palmquist ([email protected])

The most fundamental question of all ontology is: Why is there something

(or being) rather than nothing (or non-being)? This question is the ultimate

basis of all existential wonder. For the question, Why is the world here?

leads directly to the question, Why am I here? and from there to a host of

questions about the meaning of life. The latter has been among the most

frequent topics addressed in my students' insight papers. This is

particularly true once we recognize that most questions about death are

also, at least indirectly, questions about the meaning of life. For the

awareness of non-being first raises the question of being; and in the same

way the awareness of death first raises the question of the meaning of life.

In Lecture 35we will examine how the inevitability of death affects the

mystery that arises when we search for life's meaning. But first let's focus

on a closely related paradox that arises within us any time we choose life in

the face of death.

According to most existentialists, any time we come face to face with the

possibility of our own non-being (e.g., as when we reflect upon our eventual

death), we have a natural "existential response" involving a very special

kind of fear. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), the German existentialist

philosopher who, with Wittgenstein, is generally regarded as one of the two

most influential twentieth-century philosophers (see Week VI),

distinguished between this special existential fear and ordinary kinds of

fear in the following way. Ordinary fear is a person's empirical response to a

threatening object within the world: it usually requires us either to fight the

object in hopes of overpowering its threat, or to flee from the object in hopes

D1 — staffweb.hkbu.edu.hk https://www.readability.com/articles/lndniaen

1 de 28 15/12/2015 20:38

of escaping from its threat. In both cases we can say the person who is

afraid of something in the world responds by trying to push something out

of the world-either the feared object or one's own self (see Figure XII.1a).

By contrast, existential fear is a response in the depths of a person's being

to the general human situation, especially when that situation reveals

within us the presence of non-being or "nothingness" in some way. The

natural human response is to flee from the threat, since it seems impossible

to fight against "nothing"! But in this case we flee not by seeking to escape

the world, but by immersing ourselves more fully into the empirical objects

of our ordinary experience (see Figure XII.1b). This may be done in many

ways, such as by pursuing hobbies, watching television, becoming an avid

sports fan, or even becoming a scholar and immersing oneself in books.

Heidegger's point is that the usual (unhealthy) way of escaping from the

threat of non-being is merely to pretend it is not there, by immersing

oneself in being.

(a) Ordinary Empirical Fear(b) Existential Fear ("Angst")

Figure XII.1:

Inappropriate Responses to Two Kinds of Fear

Using Heidegger's distinction as an introduction, let us now look back to


2 de 28 15/12/2015 20:38

the ideas of an earlier philosopher, who also had much to say about the

nature and function of existential fear. Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) is

generally recognized as the father of theistic existentialism (as opposed to

the atheistic existentialism fathered by Nietzsche). Kierkegaard

(pronounced "Keerkagore", meaning "churchyard"-i.e., graveyard) was a

lonely Danish philosopher who wrote twenty-one books (as well as 8000

pages of unpublished papers) in twelve short years, andwhose ideas were

never well received during his own lifetime. He expounded his main

philosophical ideas in a series of books written under several different

pseudonyms (some arguing against each other!). But in the last few years of

his life he wrote a number of books using his own name, mainly attacking

the corruptions he perceived in the Christianity of his day. Of his many

interesting ideas, the only one we will have time to investigate here is his

use of the Danish word "angst" to refer to what I have called "existential

fear".

Although angst is sometimes translated as "dread" or "anxiety", neither of

these words captures the full depth of the existential fear of non-being

Kierkegaard intended this word to denote. Dread is too often associated

with extreme displeasure or apprehension at the thought of facing some

empirical threat, as when I say I dread going to the dentist. Likewise,

anxiety is too often associatedwith ordinary "stress", as when students say

they feel anxious about their ability to pass an examination. In order to

guard against the temptation to connect angst too closely with ordinary

empirical types of fear, many scholars have adopted the habit of simply

using the original Danish word-a practice I shall follow today. When I do

refer on several occasions to dread or anxiety, we should, of course, identify

these with angst, not empirical fear.

Kierkegaard's first book, Either-Or (1843), distinguished between two basic

ways of life, the aesthetic and the ethical. The former is based on feelings

and focuses on enjoying the pleasures of life; the latter is based on duty and

focuses on doing what is good. As such, this distinction corresponds to the

distinction we discussed in Lecture 22, between utilitarianism and

deontology. Those who first read the book debated over which of these two

opposing points of view the author actually wished to support. But

Kierkegaard's true intention was to demonstrate that either choice on its


3 de 28 15/12/2015 20:38

own is as absurd or incomplete as the other. For he later published another

book, Stages on Life's Way (1845), wherein he argued


4 de 28 15/12/2015 20:38

that the aesthetic and ethicalstages both point beyondthemselves to a third stage, thereligious, which synthesizes andsurpasses the two earlier stages(see Figure XII.2). He defined thereligious way of life in terms of anattitude of "inwardness" that tran-scends the "outwardness"required for theoretical reasoningand scientific knowledge.In The Concept of

Figure XII.2: Kierkegaard's Three Life Stages and TwoLeaps

Anxiety (1844) Kierkegaard developed his idea of angst by analyzing the

Christian idea of sin. Angst, he claimed, is a psychological state arising

naturally out of the essential, ontological nature of man: our freedom gives

us infinite potential for the future; yet our presence in time makes us finite

and ignorant. In other words, angst arises out of the tension between the

sensuousness of our body (rooted as it is in time) and the freedom of our

soul (rooted as it is in eternity). Our ignorance insures that the choices we

make for our own future will eventually plunge us into sin, so that angst

comes to be experienced as "entangled freedom" (CA 320)-that is, as the

infinite tangled up in the finite. Sin, then, as the normal state of the human

spirit (see Figure XII.3), is the first of two "qualitative leaps" we must make

in order to progress through the stages of life shown in Figure XII.2. After

leaping from innocence to sin (as in the story of Adam and Eve), the second

leap is from sin to faith (as in the story of Abraham). The first leap

corresponds to the change from the aesthetic to the ethical (or vice versa),

while the second corresponds to the change from the aesthetic/ethical

choice to the religious. Paganism is rooted in the aesthetic stage, where the


5 de 28 15/12/2015 20:38

leap of sin is experienced as


6 de 28 15/12/2015 20:38

fate and the leap of faith asprovidence; Judaism, by contrast, isrooted in the ethical stage, where theleap of sin is experienced as guilt andthe leap of faith as atonement.Christianity surpasses both of theseby actually being rooted in theproperly religious stage of absolutefaith in God.Kierkegaard's analysis of angst andsin suggests that the lack of angst isthe worst possible psychologicalstate, since without angst we could

Figure XII.3: The Ontological Origins of Angst and Sin

never progress to the stage of spirit. In the original state of innocence angst

arises as a response to the "nothing" (i.e., the person's ignorance) of the

future: "anxiety is freedom's actuality as the possibility of possibility" (CA

313). To ignore this freedom is actually idolatry when it causes the person

in the aesthetic stage of life to grasp innocence, peace, happiness, beauty,

etc., as if they were good in and of themselves. For to do so is to separate

oneself from the spiritual depths of one's own human nature: "The most

effective means of escaping spiritual trial is to become spiritless" (385). Yet

once this freedom is utilized, an awareness of sin arises, causing a new kind

of angst, in the form of "anxiety about evil" (381-386). This comes in three

forms: (1) the desire to return to a state of innocence; (2) the threat of

falling deeper into sin; and (3) the wish that mere repentance were enough

to atone for sin. Unfortunately, the attempt of many religious people to

overcome such anxiety by means of outward goodness only gives rise to

more angst, in the form of "anxiety about the good" (386-420).


7 de 28 15/12/2015 20:38

The truly religious person turns away from both aesthetic and ethical aims

in order to become inward. "Inwardness" refers to immediate

self-understanding in action (CA 408), requiring a person to be open to the

eternal in one's own self. To turn toward oneself in this way is therefore

identical to turning toward God. As a result, it always begins by heightening

a person's awareness of guilt:

In turning toward himself, [the religious "genius"] eo ipso turns toward

God, and ... when the finite spirit would see God, it must begin as guilty. As

he turns toward himself, he discovers guilt. The greater the genius, the

more profoundly he discovers guilt....

In turning inward he discovers freedom....

To the degree he discovers freedom, to that same degree the anxiety of sin is

upon him in the state of possibility.... (376-377)

Such a person will then recognize that anxiety really points beyond itself to

faith:

The only thing that is truly able to disarm the sophistry of sin is faith,

courage to believe that the state [of sin] itself is a new sin, courage to

renounce anxiety without anxiety, which only faith can do; faith does not

thereby annihilate anxiety, but ... extricates itself from anxiety's moment of

death. (385)

In other words, the proper response to anxiety is to stop being anxious

about anxiety, accepting it in the belief that it exists for a higher purpose.

Whereas pagan anxiety expresses itself most profoundly as fate, and Jewish

anxiety as guilt, the anxiety of the true Christian (whom Kierkegaard

regarded as practicing the most advanced form of religion) is therefore

expressed in the form of suffering (see Figure XII.2)

Kierkegaard argued that the key to solving the problem of angst is to learn

to face it courageously, with the paradoxical feelings of "sympathetic

antipathy" and "antipathetic sympathy" (CA 313). Anyone who "has learned

to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate" (421). For "anxiety

is through faith absolutely educative, because it consumes all finite ends"


8 de 28 15/12/2015 20:38

(422). Despite its apparently negative character, the suffering caused by

angst is therefore essential to our spiritual growth: "the more profoundly he

is in anxiety, the greater is the man" (421). Kierkegaard had numerous other

philosophical insights, not only concerning the human experience of angst,

but also about numerous other topics, such as the paradoxical relationship

between history (the finite) and subjectivity (the infinite), and the true

nature of Christian faith as requiring a subjective willingness to die.

However, we will be unable to pursue these or other interesting topics here.

Instead, I want to point out that, given Kierkegaard's analysis of angst, the

relationship between dread and death is analogous to the relationship

between love and life: just as love is the moving power of life, so also dread

is the moving power of death. Whereas the former is the power of being,

driving us toward the unity of opposites, the latter is the power of

non-being, driving us toward the diversity of opposites. In other words,

dread is the driving power behind the "estrangement" Tillich regarded as

the necessary prerequisite for love (see Figure X.5). The struggle between

these two powers is, in fact, what keeps us alive, while at the same time

giving us a glimpse of our eternality in the midst of our finitude. In other

words, dread, in spite of being a primarily negative experience, reminds us

of our capacity for self-transcendence. Together, the powers of love and

dread remind us that, on the one hand, we are not at home in this world, and

yet on the other hand, we are not entirely strangers either. Recognizing this

paradox can help us respond to real experiences of angst in a way that is

appropriate to the eternal dimension of our lives.

The failure to balance the powers of eternality (love) and temporality

(death) in our lives usually results is some type of psychological

disturbance, and can eventually lead even to insanity. Insanity does not

come from paying too much attention to the paradoxes of human

experiences; rather, it results from the attempt to run away from them to

the security of either the infinite or the finite on its own. As long as the two

powers are engaged in a struggle within us, our mental health will be

preserved. But the loss of either eternality or temporality can drive a person

insane: for the former would limit us to an application of analytic logic,

thereby causing us to see the world as an unbearable diversity of

fragmented and disconnected bits, while the latter would limit us to an


9 de 28 15/12/2015 20:38

application of synthetic logic, thereby causing us to see the world as an

overwhelming unity, without discrete and intelligible parts. The former

describes the form of insanity that stems from an overemphasis on reason

over imagination, as when paranoid schizophrenics interpret their

experience within a narrow set of limits (e.g., "everyone is against me"); the

latter describes the form of insanity that stems from an overemphasis on

imagination over reason, as when the elderly lose themselves in the

limitlessness of senility.

Tillich argued that we are all guilty of losing our eternality to some extent.

The best explanation for the angst we feel when we think honestly about

our own death, he claimed, is that we all knowdeep down inside that we

deserve to die, because of the inauthentic way we have lived. Too often,

people's response to this guilt is merely to flee from it into the safety of

philosophical arguments for immortality or a religious hope for eternal life.

Yet the latter only increases the philosopher's over-dependence on logical

reasoning, while the former only increases the believer's over-dependence

on religious imagination. In other words, these common "solutions", though

not in themselveswrong, can sometimes backfire by intensifying the loss of

eternality that comes from denying one side of the paradox.

The only proper response to the loss of eternality revealed in our experience

of existential dread is, according to Tillich, to face the threat of non-being

with an existential courage to be. In his book, The Courage To Be (1952), he

described this response in the following way:

Courage is the self-affirmation of being in spite of the fact of non-being. It is

the act of the individual self in taking the anxiety of non-being upon itself

by affirming itself ... Courage always includes a risk, it is always threatened

by non-being ... Courage needs the power of being, a power transcending the

non-being which is experienced in the anxiety of fate and death, ... in the

anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness, ... [and] in the anxiety of guilt

and condemnation. The courage which takes this threefold anxiety into

itself must be rooted in a power of being that is greater than the power of

oneself and the power of one's world.... There are no exceptions to this rule;

and this means that every courage to be has openly or covertly a religious

root. For religion is the state of being grasped by the power of being itself.


10 de 28 15/12/2015 20:38

(CB 152-153)

Like Kierkegaard, Tillich therefore saw the threat of non-being as an exis-

tential problem whose only adequate solution is essentially religious. This

word "religious" should not be misunderstood as referring to religious

practices, such as going to church, singing hymns, etc. For as we saw in

Lecture 33, such things can be misused to keep us away from truly religious

courage. Instead, the point here is that to be religious means to be open to

an experience of the Being who, by transcending the distinction between

being and non-being, can alone supply us with the courage to be.

This basic experience of receiving the gift of the courage to be is closely

related, according to Tillich, both to mystical experiences of participation

in God, and to more ordinary experiences of a personal encounter between

man and God. Such experiences are rooted in a recognition that the

presence of non-being within us estranges us from our true nature, and that

this problem can be solved only if we are willing to be "grasped by the power

of being itself" (CB 153). For only when we "participate in something which

transcends the self" (161) will we be prepared to experience the most

profound manifestation of the courage to be, in the form of the "courage to

accept acceptance" (159-166). This courageous self-affirmation is not

merely "the Existentialist courage to be as oneself. It is the paradoxical act

in which one is accepted by that which infinitely transcends one's

individual self." Nor does this ultimate acceptance require us to deny our

guilt, for "it is not the good or the wise or the pious who are entitled to the

courage to accept acceptance but those who are lacking in all these qualities

and are aware of being unacceptable" (160-161).

At the beginning of the process of accepting acceptance, we experience the

courage to be as the bare "courage of despair [angst]" (CB 170):

the acceptance of despair is in itself faith on the boundary line of the

courage to be. In this situation the meaning of life is reduced to despair

about the meaning of life. But as long as this despair is an act of life it is

positive in its negativity.

By living our life in the paradoxical power of the courage to be, we will

eventually be ready to welcome death itself not as a tragic confirmation of


11 de 28 15/12/2015 20:38

angst, but as the final step in this life-long process. Along these lines, Tillich

claimed that Plato's arguments for the immortality of the soul were

"attempts to interpret the courage of Socrates", who had clearly recognized

that "the courage to die is the test of the courage to be" (164). We will look

more fully at the experience of death itself in the following lecture. For now,

however, it will suffice merely to summarize Tillich's theory of courage in

terms of the following map:

Figure XII.4: Courage in the Face of Non-Being

The religious basis of the courageous acceptance of life in the face of death,

of being in spite of the dreadful prospects of non-being, is made explicit in

the biblical notion of the "fear of the Lord". The Old Testament references

to fearing God are too often watered down to the point where they are taken

to mean nothing more than being careful to obey the Law lest we be

punished. But they refer far more profoundly to the fact that the God of the

Old Testament, as the Being who holds all beings in His hand, is the

ultimate source of life and death; as such, anyone who is courageous enough

to approach this Being must do so with the utmost reverence and awe. As

Mitchell put it: "Fear of the Lord is being in awe, aware of the shocking,

silent, presence of God" (IPW 75) -a comment reminiscent of Otto's notion

of awe in the presence of the numinous (see Lecture 31). Throughout the

Bible this fundamental, other-worldly fear is depicted as an existential

response to the human situation which, if we accept it, will give us

otherwise unattainable strength to cope with the fearful situations that


12 de 28 15/12/2015 20:38

arise in the ordinary world. This could indeed be regarded as the basic

message of the Psalms and Proverbs: "The fear of the Lord is the beginning

of wisdom" (e.g., Psalm 111:10; Proverbs 1:7) means we will learn best how to

respond to the threatswithin the world only when we have courageously

responded to the threat outside the world. In other words, angst and

wisdom are best regarded, paradoxically, as two sides of the same coin.

If we do not merely ignore the basic ontological question raised at the

beginning of this lecture, then we seem to have a choice between two

possible answers: either the existence of the world is meaningless and the

courage to be has no basis, or else there is a Godwho is, paradoxically,

beyond the very distinction between something and nothing, andwho

thereby lends meaning to both being and non-being, thus forming the

ultimate basis of faith, and so also of our courage to be. But as Kant,

Kierkegaard, Tillich, and many other religiously-minded philosophers have

pointed out, this God cannot lend meaning merely by being a doctrine

imposed on us by the social pressures of a religious community; rather, we

must experience God as a reality that gives us power to cope with the

paradoxes of life, providing us with faith in the face of doubt, peace in the

face of turmoil, acceptance in the face of guilt, and courage in the face of

dread.

35. Death and the Mystery of Life

One of my students once defined silence as the state of no longer needing to

ask any questions. This suggests an interesting paradox in the claim that

the final goal of philosophy is to experience inner silence, since one of the

philosopher's main tasks is to raise questions whose answers are usually

not immediately apparent. Yet I believe it expresses a deep insight into the

nature and purpose of doing philosophy. If silence is actually a questionless

state, then have we merely been wasting time raising so many difficult

philosophical questions here in Part Four and throughout these lectures?

Not at all! Such questions must be raised, or the deeper levels of silence can

never be enjoyed: for the questions stir up in us the wonder that draws us

out beyond the noise of the world to meet the meaning of the world.

Wittgenstein expressed this basic paradox by saying the meaning of life is

found outside of life, which is why he believedwe cannot speak about that


13 de 28 15/12/2015 20:38

meaning. Our inability to give scientifically verifiable answers to most

philosophical questions does not, however, mean the questions (or our

attempted answers) are meaningless. For their final purpose is not to be

answered in words-this may or may not be possible-but to help us discover

the meaning of life and of the world in the silence that such questions tend

to induce.

In the previous lecture we learned about the paradox of courage in the face

of the dread of non-being. This leads us directly to the ultimate

philosophical question, for the inevitability of our own non-being-that is, of

our own death-raises the question of the meaning of life; and this question

itself directs our attention toward the ultimate silence beyond life. As far as

we can judge by what we observe when a person dies, death marks the end

of our capacity to use words, and thereby ushers in a silence unlike

anything we have experienced during life. The mystery of what, if anything,

happens after we die is one of the primary sources of the "angst" we all feel

from time to time-this being, as we have seen, one of the primary concerns

of existentialist philosophers. This angst has therefore driven ordinary

people-even those who know nothing about philosophy-to propose various

ideas about what happens after death.

Is there a life after death? If so, what is it like? There are four basic ways of

answering such questions, though each type of answer, of course, has many

variations. We can analyze these four ways of envisioning the "after death"

experience as arising out of two questions: (1) Does our consciousness of

our own identity continue after we die? and (2) Will we acquire a new body

after our present body dies? With these questions in mind, we can map the

four traditional answers to the question of life after death onto the 2LAR

cross, as shown in Figure XII.5. This is probably not a "perfect" 2LAR, since

it is highly unlikely that all four possible answers describe what actually

happens after death. Although two or three of these views might be

simultaneously true in different ways, most people feel constrained to

choose only one as the best hypothesis. So let's compare these four

possibilities in a bit more detail.

The theories of extinction and reincarnation both agree that the part of me

that enables me to remember who I am (often called the "mind" or "soul")


14 de 28 15/12/2015 20:38

will not survive my death; but they disagree as to whether or not

Figure XII.5:

Four Basic Ways of Conceiving Life After Death

I will acquire a new body. If not, then I will simply cease to exist (--): my

individuality will discontinue altogether-though in some versions of

extinction, such as the mystical application of Aristotle's "spark of the

divine" (see Lecture 6, especially Figure II.9), something other than my

body and mind continues to exist. If, by contrast, I do acquire a new body,

then I will reappear as another person (-+), whose memory will be

discontinuous with my present memory. People who believe in reincar-

nation often claim we can learn to become conscious of memories from our

"past lives". We have to learn how to regain such memories precisely

because there is normally no conscious continuity between our different

reincarnations, even though there may be some deeper spiritual "core"

connecting the lives of these apparently different persons.

Those who, like Plato, believe in the immortality of the soul are actually

closer to those who believe in extinction than to those who believe in

reincarnation. For, although the immortality theory disagrees with both of

these two theories by claiming that we have a soul (i.e., a capacity for

continuous, conscious memory) that survives our body's death (+-), it


15 de 28 15/12/2015 20:38

actually agrees with the extinction theory's claim that our dead body will

not be replacedwith a new one, as the reincarnation theory believes it will.

This might seem rather surprising, especially to those who view Plato's

belief in the immortality of the soul as the ancient Greek equivalent of the

Christian belief in life after death. The latter, however, is not based on any

logical arguments for the necessity of the soul's immortality, but on a

religious hope that people will be saved from extinction through divine

intervention in the form of resurrection.

The theory of resurrection must be clearly distinguished from each of the

other three theories. As the direct opposite of resurrection, extinction is

properly regarded by those who believe in resurrection as being our natural

fate, should resurrection not occur. By contrast, the other two theories

share with resurrection common factors that sometimes overshadow their

differences. Like immortality, resurrection assumes a person's conscious

powers will continue, more or less uninterrupted, after death. And like

reincarnation, resurrection assumes a person will have a new body after the

present body dies. But in opposition to Plato, resurrection focuses primarily

on the body, assuming like Aristotle that, without a resurrected body, the

soul itself would also die. And in opposition to reincarnation, resurrection

views the new body as a new kind of body, not just another body of the same

kind. The pictures that sometimes appear in religious literature, of bodies

floating out of their graves up into the sky, misrepresent the real meaning of

resurrection. For in the New Testament, a person's earthly body is

described as a mere "seed" in comparison to the fully matured "spiritual

body" to be given after death (see 1 Corinthians 15:35-44). That is, our

conscious life in the present body will somehow be united in a continuous

way with this new spiritual body (++), so that all our unrealized potentials

in this life will blossom and bear fruit in the life to come.

Although we do not actually experience our own death from within our

present life, we do experience other people's death as the ultimate end of

their life as we know it. As a result, none of us can know for certain until

afterwe die which of these four views best describes what lies on the "other

side". Perhaps this is why philosophers are often less interested in the

questions death raises about a possible afterlife than in the questions it

raises about life itself. Plato, for example, insisted that the fear of death is


16 de 28 15/12/2015 20:38

appropriate only for those who are still bound to the "cave" (cf. Figure II.7).

Transcending this fear by "learning how to die" is one of the basic tasks any

good philosopher must perform. Plato was referring here, I believe, to the

lifelong task of learning how to live with the darkness of the unknown, even

before we die; for when we do so, we discover that this absolutely real

mystery paradoxically sheds light on howwe should live. In other words, by

raising the question of the meaning of life, death points us directly toward

the need to live what existentialists call an authentic life.

The psychologist Abraham Maslow referred to the authentic or truly

human life as the life that attains "self-actualization". This now common

term has often been wrongly criticized for promoting a selfish, "do your

own thing" lifestyle that permits a person to ignore the needs of other

people. However, this is a gross misunderstanding. For Maslow and many

others have been careful to point out that the inward focus of

self-actualizing people does not mean they care only about their own

egotistical interests, but that they are self-transcending people, whose

understanding of themselves has led them to reach outward to others in

love and compassion. Interestingly, one source of the misunderstanding of

such terms is that the self-actualizing life is itself essentially paradoxical.

The more he studied self-actualizing people, the more Maslow came to

realize that they are people who can resolve paradoxes within themselves:

instead of being either selfish or unselfish, they are somehow both (see e.g.,

TPB 139). Socrates' famous "know thyself" carries essentially the same

message: we know ourselves not in order to become self-enclosed solipsists,

but in order to become self-giving saints. And the more we know ourselves

(i.e., the more apparently selfish we are), the more we are capable of

knowing others (i.e., the more unselfish we can be).

Learning to transcend ourselves in this way will prepare us to accept death

with open arms as a gift. For we can viewdeath as the ultimate gift only if

we have learned to live with death-that is, to live with our own non-being

through such acts of self-transcendence-while we are still alive. As we saw

in the previous lecture, the importance of recognizing the presence of

non-being in all beings was one of the key insights of the existentialists. The

ancient Chinese philosopher, Lao Tzu, expressed a similar insight when he

claimed non-being is actually more useful than being (TTC 11). For example,


17 de 28 15/12/2015 20:38

a windowwould be useless for seeing through if not for the blank space in

between the edges of the frame. And a cup would be useless for holding

liquids if it were not hollow inside. Such examples show that what iswould

often be unable to fulfill its proper function if it did not make use of what is

not. Likewise, people should view their own death as a natural part of the

life process.

The two ways of describing transcendent reality, as either "being-itself" or

"nothing" (see Figure VI.2), suggest two corresponding ways of viewing the

"natural" relationship between life and death. I would guess nearly all of us

feel more inclined to hold one or the other of these two views. According to

Lao Tzu, a person who treats death as a natural part of life will no longer

need to search for the "infinite", or "eternal life". Viewing death as the

ultimate end of all life, he believed such a search is bound to fail, andwill

only succeed in producing anxiety (see Figure XII.6a). Yet the anxiety we

feel at the prospect of our own death need not cause us to give up the search

for the infinite, providedwe viewdeath as a boundary, with the object or

purpose of our quest lying on the other side (see Figure XII.6b). Only in this

latter sense does it make sense to regard death as a gift that can truly be

affirmed as a natural part of life. If there is nothing after life but death and

extinction, then regarding death as a natural part of life makes no more

sense than regarding the wall as part of the window, or the space outside the

cup as part of the cup. A boundary is part of the thing it defines; but the

space outside the boundary is wholly other.

(a) Anxiety as the Boundary(b) Death as the Boundary

Figure XII.6: Two Views of Life and Death


18 de 28 15/12/2015 20:38

Whichever view of death is correct, the issue raised by Lao Tzu highlights

the central paradox of life itself: an essential part of the human task is to

seek after the infinite, yet this search is bound to fail because death makes

life itself finite. But the search "fails" only if success is judged in terms of

analytic logic. If we affirm the paradox, if we affirm (with Lao Tzu) the

presence of non-being within all being, if we affirm (with the

existentialists) our finitude in the very process of seeking the infinite, then

we have grounds for hope that meaning will break through in the midst of

our struggle. Even if this breakthrough occurs only after our death, it

legitimates the search within this life. Indeed, Lao Tzu's real point is not

that the search itself iswrong, but that we should not expect to discover the

infinite in a form we can grasp within this life.

We must therefore always be careful not to think we can resolve the

paradox of life by making something less than infinite the source of our

life's meaning. For example, I cannot count the number of students who

have written insight papers claiming "happiness", or perhaps "satisfaction",

is the purpose for which people ought to live their lives. Yet the problem

with this view is that, as we learned from Tillich in Lecture 30, once

happiness is reached, it ends. Those who live their lives in order to fulfill

their own desires inevitably endwith a sense of emptiness and

meaninglessness, even if they are lucky enough to have those desires

fulfilled. Satisfaction is not ultimately satisfying. So the paradox is

accentuated to the point of absurdity if we direct our lives toward a finite

end. Lao Tzu's advice, coming from a person whose basic message was that

we must live in the presence of the mysterious (i.e., infinite) "Tao", should

not be taken to imply that there is nothing infinite worth searching for;

rather, it implies that the ultimate goal of the quest for the infinite is to

teach us that it is present now in the midst of our finitude, so that we can

give up the quest in order to rest in that presence.

The lesson we learn by facing the paradox of death, in other words, is that

the search for the infinite must be pursued in the context of a recognition of

the finitude of life as we know it. The need for a recognition of both human

finitude and an eternal context beyond human life is an insight recognized

by most religions. For example, one of the many ways the Bible expresses

this paradox comes in Isaiah 40:6-8:


19 de 28 15/12/2015 20:38

... All flesh is grass, and all its loveliness is like the flower of the field.

The grass withers, the flower fades,

When the breath of the Lord blows upon it;

Surely the people are grass.

The grass withers, the flower fades,

But the word of the Lord stands forever.

This "word" here is the same word John spoke about at the beginning of his

Gospel; and it is, paradoxically, a word that can be heard only in the depths

of silence: "'In the beginning was the Word....' The Word did not come into

being, but it was. It did not break upon the silence, but it was older than the

silence and the silence was made of it" (HMD 90-91).

The latter quotation suggests that life is to death as words are to silence.

Similarly, just as life ends in death yet draws its meaning from the mystery

that death veils, so also, as I mentioned at the beginning of this lecture, the

questions of philosophy end in a silence that no longer has use for

questions. Life is, in fact, full of such mysteries and paradoxes. The fewwe

have touched upon here in the fourth part of this course only represent the

tip of the iceberg. Our dreams, for example, put us in touch with a huge area

full of mystery and paradox. If we had more time we could look in greater

detail into some of these other dark and interesting aspects of our lives.

Indeed, I devote an entirely separate course to the subject of dream

interpretation and the unconscious aspects of self-knowledge (see DW). So

instead of developing that topic any further here, we shall return in the final

lecture to the question this course began with, in order to examine how it

too reveals the paradoxical mystery at the heart of human experience.

36. What is Philosophy?

This course began with a discussion of the question "What is philosophy?"

Some of you offered some interesting suggestions, demonstrating that even

before taking this course you had some good ideas about what philosophy is.


20 de 28 15/12/2015 20:38

Perhaps this is because every thoughtful human being has a philosophy of

one sort or another, though many never bother to work it out very precisely.

The problem is that most people never get beyond the stage of having "my

philosophy". That is, although many, if not most, people have established for

themselves a particular philosophical point of view, very few people

seriously work at expanding that personal point of view in such a way that it

can be regarded as having a legitimate range of application beyond their

own personal opinions. Yet this step is crucial if we are ever to understand

what philosophy really is. My philosophy must go beyond the stage of being

"my philosophy" and must become philosophy before I can rightly say "I am

a philosopher". That crucial step is one I hope you have begun to take while

studying this course.

In Lecture 1 I said I hoped by the end of this course youwould know less

about philosophy that you did at the beginning. Some of you laughed at this

suggestion. Others seemed to be confused. Still others thought Iwas

confused. Most of you probably thought it was just a joke. But in fact, I was

quite serious. At several points during this course I have argued against

naive versions of relativism, on the grounds that certain boundary lines are

absolute. More adequate versions of relativism always recognize that the

very possibility of "relativity" depends on something that is, by comparison,

"absolute". In physics, for example, the theory of relativity was able to

acknowledge the relative character of events in our time-space world only

after physicists agreed to treat the speed of light as a "constant" (i.e., as an

absolute). I nowwant to add that the ultimate purpose of all philosophical

inquiry is to become more and more aware of such absolutes; for the more

we do so, the more fully we can appreciate the beauty of the "mystery" we

have been talking so much about here in Part Four. Indeed, the final

ontological paradox is that this mystery makes itself known first as my

philosophy, but gradually reveals itself to be the source of philosophy itself.

In other words, it is both absolute and yet the source of all relativity.

To explain how this can be so, I like to compare philosophy to a huge

diamondwith many facets carved into it. At first, all I am aware of is that

my own perspective, the facet I can see most clearly, is true. When I take a

step back, I recognize that other facets on the diamond-other legitimate

perspectives-are equally true. This might seem to justify a belief in


21 de 28 15/12/2015 20:38

relativism: your facet is true for you and mine is true for me. However,

when I step back far enough to see the whole diamond,I suddenly recognize

that there is a pattern: each facet is related in such a way that the whole

does, in fact, display an absolute (fixed) design, in spite of the great

diversity of the individual facets. Those who continue to view philosophy as

entirely a matter of subjective opinion, and fail to see its potential for

bringing us to an objective truth, are merely chaining themselves to their

particular facet of the diamond, much as the prisoners in Plato's cave can

see nothing but the shadows on their particular section of the wall. But if

you have begun to take the step from a philosophy that suits you to a

philosophy that can be true for everyone, then I think youwill have learned

at least something of the importance of the principle of recognizing your

ignorance: we can never see all the facets of the diamond at once, no matter

how far back we step! When you have learned to distinguish between "my

philosophy" and "philosophy", andwhen you have begun to transform the

former into the latter, youwill then be prepared to begin constructing a

truly philosophical answer to the question "What is philosophy?"

You may have noticed that this entire course has, to a large extent, been an

attempt to answer this basic question. With that in mind, let me suggest one

last answer. When we consider how philosophy is different from other

academic disciplines, its virtually unending concern with self-definition

stands out, suggesting that philosophy may be defined as "the discipline

whose purpose is to define itself"-or more simply, "philosophy is the

self-defining discipline." For when any other discipline asks the question of

its own nature,it strays into the realm of philosophy. A history teacher is

doing philosophy, not history, when he or she asks students to reflect on the

very nature of history. But throughout this course we have discovered that

the focal point of most (if not all) good philosophers is precisely this

question: what am I doing when I practice philosophy? Of course, defining

philosophy as the self-defining discipline relates only to its form; the

content (i.e., the details of how philosophy actually goes about defining

itself ) has been the topic of this entire course.

Having now finished my attempt to introduce you to philosophy in such a

way that you can begin to participate in its self-definition, I shall take this

opportunity to summarize the entire course by relating the myth of the tree


22 de 28 15/12/2015 20:38

of philosophy to the account of mystery given here in Part Four. We began

this course by treating metaphysics as the roots of the philosophical tree; in

so doing we found in Part One that, in order to study these roots without

killing the tree, we had to recognize our ignorance. Without establishing an

area of necessary ignorance, nothing could be mysterious, since everything

would have to be regarded as a "knowable object". There would be nothing

hidden. No roots. In such a case we might think we understand the words

we use, but we would inevitably commit one of two mistakes: we would

conclude either that all mystery is nonsense (as does the skeptic), or that we

could (or have) actually attain(ed) knowledge of that mystery (as does the

dogmatist).

Both skepticism and dogmatism result from a failure to gain a proper

understanding of the logical trunk and the scientific branches of the

philosophical tree. For as we learned in Part Two, logic teaches us that,

instead of giving up the mystery by treating it as either meaningless or

knowable, the mystery itself has its own kind of logic. Having distinguished

between knowledge and ignorance, we learned how to use analytic logic to

understandwords describing the former and synthetic logic to understand

words describing the latter. In this way we clearly defined the boundary

between knowledge and ignorance. Just as the branches of a tree showus,

as it were, the natural purpose or implications of the trunk, so also logic

remains abstract and meaningless unless we use it to gain knowledge

("science"); in so doing, as we found in Part Three, we can discover some of

the implications the mystery has for what is not mysterious. The latter is

the task of wisdom, and can be fulfilled only if we knowwhere to place the

boundary lines around different kinds of knowledge, andwhen it is

appropriate to break through those boundary lines. In other words, only by

learning to love wisdom can we honor the mystery for what it is, while at the

same time allowing it to enlighten what need not be mysterious.

Finally, by treating our meaning-filled experiences as the leaves of the

philosophical tree, we have learned in Part Four howwe can actually

become personally acquaintedwith this mystery, through opening our-

selves to experiencing the wonder of silence. By allowing the mystery to

invade us rather than trying to take it by storm, by allowing it to grasp and

possess us rather than trying to grasp and possess it, the diversity of our


23 de 28 15/12/2015 20:38

knowledge can be unified by the power of the mystery. The paradoxes of life

then cease to be so troublesome. They are still paradoxes, for the reality of

our ignorance is not diminished but intensified by our experience of the

mystery. The difference is that we now have within us an ultimate concern

enabling us to cope with the fact that there are some things we can never

hope to know. Kant aptly expressed this ability to cope with ignorance when

he wrote (CPrR 148): "the inscrutable wisdom through which we exist is not

less worthy of veneration in respect to what it denies us than in [respect to]

what it has granted."

The capacity to wonder in spite of, or even because of, our ignorance is

actually one of the main characteristics distinguishing a good philosopher

from a bad one. That wonder is childlike may be why some philosophers,

wishing to appear "mature", shun the temptation to wonder. This is also

why children so often make such profoundly philosophical statements. The

difference between a child and a full-grown, childlike philosopher is that

the latter has added self-consciousness to the original instinct to wonder.

The problem is that self-consciousness tends to negate the instinct to

wonder: self-consciousness puts up with ignorance in its search for the

unity of the "I", whereas wonder wants to achieve knowledge in response to

its apprehension of the diversity of the world. Bad philosophers, as we have

seen, limit the philosophical task to only one of these two opposite goals.

Good philosophers, by contrast, will continually seek after the best way of

resolving (or at least coping with) the tension between these two forces.

One of the best ways of doing this, I believe, is to direct our

self-consciousness to the higher goal of self-understanding. For the never-

ending task of coming to "know thyself", rightly recognized by Socrates as

the ultimate goal of doing philosophy, requires us to reach ever-increasing

levels of both self-consciousness andwonder.

With this in mind, I would like us to consider a passage from a book that

encourages us to hear the wonder of silence throughout the busyness of our

everyday life. Anne Morrow Lindbergh's little book, Gift from the Sea, is a

series of meditations on her holidays at an island beach, focusing especially

on the symbolism of the activity of collecting sea shells. In considering the

following summary of her reflections on the prospects of returning home

(GS 113-116,119-120), let's interpret the "island" as a metaphor for studying


24 de 28 15/12/2015 20:38

philosophy, and the "shells" as a metaphor for having insights.

As she packed her bags to leave the island, Lindbergh asked herself what she

had gained from all her meditative efforts: "What answers or solutions have

I found for my life? I have a few shells in my pocket, a few clues, only a few."

She thought back to her first days on the island, and realized how greedily

she had collected the shells at first: "My pockets bulgedwith wet shells ...

The beach was coveredwith beautiful shells and I could not let one go by

unnoticed. I couldn't even walk head up looking out to sea, for fear of

missing something precious at my feet." The problem with this way of

collecting shells (or having insights) is that "the acquisitive instinct is

incompatible with true appreciation of beauty." But after all her pockets

were stretched to the limit with damp shells, she found it necessary to

become less acquisitive: "I began to discard my possessions, to select." She

then realized it would be impossible to collect all the beautiful shells she

saw: "One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are

few." Can we say the same for philosophical insights? Perhaps so. For

Lindbergh herself generalized the lesson she learned by saying "it is only

framed in space that beauty blooms. Only in space are events and objects

and people unique and significant-and therefore beautiful."

This insight, that beauty requires space and selectivity, prompted

Lindbergh to reconsider the reasons why her life at home tended to lack the

qualities of significance and beauty, so characteristic of her time on the

island. Perhaps life seems insignificant not because it is empty, but because

it is too full: "there is so little empty space.... Too many worthy activities,

valuable things, and interesting people.... We can have ... an excess of shells,

where one or two would be significant." Being on the island, by contrast,

had given her the space and time to look at life in a newway-as I hope this

philosophy class has done for you. "Paradoxically, ... space has been forced

upon me.... Here there is time; time to be quiet; time to work without

pressure; time to think ... Time to look at the stars ... Time, even, not to talk."

The problem in going home is that in many ways the island had selected

what was significant for her (as this course of lectures may have done for

you) "better than I do myself at home." She therefore asked herself: "When I

go back will I be submerged again ...? ... Values weighed in quantity, not

quality; in speed, not stillness; in noise, not silence; in words, not thoughts;


25 de 28 15/12/2015 20:38

in acquisitiveness, not beauty. How shall I resist the onslaught?" She

answered by suggesting that, in place of the island's natural selectivity, she

will need to adopt "a conscious selectivity based on another set of values-a

sense of values I have become more aware of here.... Simplicity of living ...

Space for significance and beauty. Time for solitude and sharing.... A few

shells."

In the end Lindbergh discarded most of the shells she had collected on her

island holiday, and took with her only a few of the most special ones. Her

experiences on the island, she explained, now serve as "a lens" that she can

take home with her in order to examine her own life more effectively: "I

must remember to see with island eyes. The shells will remind me; they

must be my island eyes." In the same way, I hope this course has provided

youwith a newway of seeing yourself and the world. For the real reason the

university requires you to take a philosophy course is not to train you to

participate in academic debates on technical issues, but to enlarge your

capacity to experience the unifying beauty of life-that is, to enable you to

"see with island eyes", even when the examination is over and you have

returned home, to the ordinary world of your infinitely diverse personal

concerns.

In Shel Silverstein's story of The Giving Tree, the little boy does not learn

this lesson until the very end of his life. During his life he forgets all about

the carefree days of his childhood, when the tree was almost like part of his

own self. Instead he goes off on his own, in search of happiness and fortune.

The boy simply ignores the silent screams of the tree as she allowed herself

to be torn to pieces by the boy's selfish desires. Only as an old man is the

little boy once again able to sit and rest with the tree, enjoying with her the

wonder of silence. To some extent this process of leaving the tree, venturing

out on our own, and finally returning to it in the end, describes the

paradoxical steps each of us must inevitably pass through in our search for

a suitable philosophy of life. The tragedy of that story is that, unlike the

story of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the main character virtually destroys

the source of his wisdom in the process of looking for a meaningful life,

leaving only a stump in the end. My hope is that this course will have

supplied each of youwith "a few shells" to help you avoid such a fate. With

these in hand, I hope each of you, even those who will never study any more


26 de 28 15/12/2015 20:38

philosophy in a formal way, will be able to live with a continuous, silent

awareness of the mysterious tree of philosophy andwill always respectfully

wait to receive from the endless supply of gifts she has to offer.

QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER THOUGHT/DIALOGUE

1.A. Is it possible to choose both the aesthetic and ethical ways of life?

B. Is it necessary for human beings to sin?

2.A. Does angst actually help us to cope with ordinary, empirical fears?

B. Could resurrection and reincarnation both be true?

3.A. What would a "spiritual body" be like?

B. Could an unhappy person live a meaningful life?

4.A. How is philosophy like a tree?

B. What is philosophy?

RECOMMENDED READINGS

1. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, ?, "The Concept of Anxiety"

(CA 313-316).

2. Paul Tillich, The Courage toBe, Ch. VI, "Courage and Transcendence" (CB

152-183).

3. Abraham H. Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being2, Ch. 10, "Creativity in

Self-Actualizing People" (TPB 135-145).

4. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching.

5. Plato, Phaedo and Book X of Republic (CDP 40-98, 819-844).

6. John Hick, The Fifth Dimension: An exploration of the spiritual realm


27 de 28 15/12/2015 20:38

(Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1999), Ch. 26, "Death and Beyond",

pp.241-252.

7. Shel Silverstein, The Giving Tree (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).

8. Stephen Palmquist, The Tree of Philosophy4 (Hong Kong: Philopsychy

Press, 2000[1992]).

border=0 height=62width=88>

Original URL:

http://staffweb.hkbu.edu.hk/ppp/tp4/top12.html


28 de 28 15/12/2015 20:38

palmquist.tree.34. angst and the paradox of courage

Documents

ordinary fear

meaning of life

special existential

fundamental question

natural existential

persons empirical response

specialkind of fear

existential wonder