Are we willing to embrace life wholly, unconditionally. Or are we playing it safe, living a kind of half-life, doing what everyone else does, shutting off any awareness of what is really at stake?
While gathering material for a new book, I came across a work that I had read some years ago, but hadn’t looked at for some time. It was by the German Lutheran existential theologian and philosopher, Paul Tillich (1886-1965). Tillich is perhaps not as well known these days as he was in the mid-twentieth century. His most famous work, Systematic Theology (1951-1963), a monumental response to an existential critique of Christianity, was enormously influential, not only among theologians, but also philosophers, psychologists, and historians of religion. In 1933, Tillich was among the first to feel the effect of Hitler’s rise to power when with other academic critics of National Socialism, he was summarily dismissed from his position at the University of Frankfurt. Hearing of his dismissal, the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr offered Tillich a lifeline, urging him to leave Germany and join the faculty at the Union Theological Seminary in New York. Tillich took Niebuhr’s advice, and following his time in New York, he taught at Harvard Divinity School and later at the University of Chicago.
Yet Tillich was anything but the sequestered academic. Along with his student, the existential psychologist Rollo May – who incorporated some of Tillich’s ideas in his own work – Tillich was a familiar figure during the early years of the Esalen Institute, the “hot tub think-tank” on California’s Big Sur coast, whose other visiting teachers included Alan Watts, Fritz Perls and the humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow. Closer to home, people who attended his sermons found Tillich a warm, charismatic speaker, with the good pastor’s ability to reach out and touch his audience.
Existing – an Act of Courage
Tillich was the author of some very widely read popular books, written for the non-academic, and it was one of these that I had come across. In The Courage To Be (1952), originally a series of lectures given at Yale University, Tillich explores the notion that existence itself, our sheer being, not only requires but is itself an act of courage. This may strike some of us as an odd idea. Someone of a literal turn of mind might even think the book’s title is incomplete. They may ask “The courage to be what?” But this is to misunderstand Tillich’s use of “to be.” We might think that it takes courage “to be a fireman” or “ to be a soldier” or, as Tillich was, “to be critical” of National Socialism at a time and place when doing so would soon result in more than losing a job. And we would be right; being all these things does require courage. But simply to be? Why would we need courage for that?
In fact, simply “being” seems something with which we have little to do. As long as we are alive, we just are, whether we want to “be” or not. We don’t make an effort at it and seem not to have much choice in the matter. But there is being and there is being.
Why do I exist?
I’ve used the word “existential” a few times. Along with the Frenchman Gabriel Marcel and the Russian Nicolai Berdyaev, Tillich was what we would call a Christian existentialist. Existentialism is a philosophical movement that has its roots in the nineteenth century, with figures like Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Fyodor Dostoevsky – although as an “attitude” it can be found in figures as far afield as Plato and the seventeen century logician and religious thinker Blaise Pascal. Fundamentally existentialism is concerned with some rather basic questions, such as “Why do I exist?” and “What am I supposed to do now that I do?” – that is, questions about the meaning and purpose of human life. Traditionally these concerns were addressed by religion, but in modern times, religion seems less able to answer them, at least that seems the case for many of us.
As a specific philosophical school existentialism arose in the early 1930s, mostly through the work of Martin Heidegger, whose gigantic fragment Being and Time (1927)–only its first part was completed – raised the “question of being,” which Heidegger believed had been ignored since Plato. But the popular image of existentialism appeared after WWII and was decidedly French. Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and, to a lesser extent, Simone de Beauvoir, were its most notorious figures, famously carousing in the nightspots of St-Germain-des-Prés, while giving impromptu lectures on the essence of freedom. While for Heidegger and the Christian existentialists, there is some mystery at the heart of being – which makes possible some notion of “transcendence” – for Sartre and Co there is no mystery, although there is much that is “absurd.” We find ourselves in an alien, meaningless world, without God or purpose, and must carry the burden of our being, our freedom, without appeal to any authority beside our own. We are, as Sartre says in his response to Heidegger, Being and Nothingness (1943), “condemned to be free.” Free, that is, in a world in which, at least for Sartre, such freedom is really a kind of emptiness we seek in vain to fill.
Hamlet’s Question
It is against this notion of “nothingness”, or “non-being,” that Tillich addresses the question of the courage to be. Cliched as it sounds, when Hamlet raised his famous query, “To be, or not to be?”, he hit the matter right on the head.
There are, Tillich tells us, three central ways in which Hamlet’s question becomes more than a line from a play. The first is the most obvious and is the one Hamlet himself is most concerned with. Non-being, nothingness, threatens us in the knowledge that at some point we will die. At that point we will cease to be. Putting aside any ideas of an afterlife, at death the life we have known in the way we have known it, ends. We say we know this; of course, everyone dies. But we aren’t talking about “everyone,” which is an abstraction, or the fact that people die. You are going to die – and so am I. Heidegger believed that the one surefire means of waking us from he called our “forgetfulness of being” is the vivid grasp of the reality of our death, an insight he shared with the esoteric teacher Gurdjieff.
Our Life – a Kind of Half-life?
Most of us at some point have felt the reality of our mortality; but as a culture, we tend to avoid or obscure this and do what we can to keep the truth at bay. As Tillich says, we avoid the reality of non-being by avoiding the reality of being: in order to mute the shock of our death, we live less. Not in the sense of doing less, being less busy. But in the sense of being less open to life, less willing to embrace it wholly, unconditionally. We play it safe. This is what Heidegger called living “inauthentically,” a kind of half-life, doing what everyone else does, shutting off any awareness of what is really at stake, filling our lives with distractions and possessions (as Gabriel Marcel knew, we much prefer “having” to “being”). Yet some crisis, perhaps a close call with death, can shake us out of this “forgetfulness”, and the life we are afraid of living becomes intensely real. Paradoxically, if we have the courage to face the reality of non-being, our being increases.
Another way in which we can feel the struggle with nothingness and the need for a courage to be, is through what Tillich calls guilt. Not guilt over any particular act – although we may indeed feel this – but guilt from an awareness that we have evaded our responsibility to ourselves, our obligation to be fully who we are. This is to know that we have settled for second best when, had we made the effort and took the risk, we could have achieved more. Abraham Maslow, mentioned earlier, spoke of what he called the “fear of success,” something rather different from the more well-known “fear of failure.” The fear of success is the fear arising from what we suspect would be the social consequences of “being all we can be.” There is the fear of standing out, of attracting the envy and resentment of our friends, of being different and the ostracizing this often entails.
The Flight from one’s Own Greatness
Maslow speaks of what he calls the Jonah complex, based on the biblical figure who wanted to avoid the high fate God had in store for him. Jonah did not want to be a prophet. He wanted a normal, everyday life like everybody else. He did all he could to avoid his vocation, but to no avail. The moral of the story, Maslow tells us, is that if you do not actualise your potentials, they will sour and fester and become liabilities. Maslow tells the story of asking his students which of them expected to be outstanding in his field. When no one replied, Maslow asked “If not you, then who?” We habitually expect someone else, not ourselves, to be exceptional. According to Maslow, this is dangerous. “What you can become,” he tells us, “you must become.” It is, he tells us, a necessity of our being.
The same message comes through in this quotation from the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, which was a favourite of C. G. Jung: “If you bring forth what is within you, what is within you will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what is within you will destroy you.” We are charged with the obligation to, as Nietzsche said, “become who we are.” Failure to do this leads to living in what Sartre called “bad faith,” a practice of self-deception. The courage to be in this instance becomes the courage to be who you are.
The Courage to Primal Trust
The third way in which Tillich understands the courage to be encompasses the other two. We may have the courage to face the reality of our death, to embrace our unavoidable non-being. And we may have the courage to actualise our potentials, to bring forth what is uniquely ours and to affirm it against an environment that is uncongenial to it. Yet the question of the meaning of this remains. Meaninglessness, purposelessness, the absurd indifferent world of the existentialists – which tallies in many ways with the current scientific assessment of our universe – seems to deny whatever ground we may gain through embracing our inevitable non-being and affirming our unique self. If in the end existence has been nothing more than a kind of cosmic joke – a conclusion more than one brilliant mind has arrived at – what is the point? To borrow from Shakespeare again, if life truly is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”, then why go to the trouble of mustering the courage to be? Isn’t it wiser to eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow – or perhaps the day after – we die?
To be sure, many have come to that conclusion. And in recent times, with the social, political, and ecological turbulence taking place around the globe, the question what it all means becomes more pressing, just as the sense of there being any meaning to it all seems more difficult to grasp. We seem, as the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski expressed it, subject to “the feeling of an all-encompassing crisis without being able to identify its causes…”, in the sense that what may seem a cause could really be a symptom. The world, for many of us, has gone topsy-turvy and the rapidity of events induces a kind of dizziness, what we might call “accelerated rate of change sickness,” a sort of nausea brought on by the increasing speed of developments. In this case, the courage to be seems to me to be the courage to have faith in a meaning of which we may not be immediately aware, to trust that our efforts are not pointless and that it is nobler to accept the risk of belief rather than the safer, less strenuous path of despair. This is the “primal trust” that the philosopher Jean Gebser spoke of, and which I wrote about in an earlier article for Logon.[1] When we have such trust, it strikes me that the question “To be, or not to be?” seems already answered.
[1] Primal Trust or Primal Fear? in: LOGON, July 5, 2024
