Nothingness, Metanarrative, and Possibility

By William E. Marsh

What is the solution to human angst and nothingness, the gnawing emptiness and frustration with the lim-its and fragility of this present existence? After reviewing the work of Sren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jean Paul Sartre on this question, this work argues that the proper re-sponse must be metaphysical metanarrative, a transcendent metaphysical metanarrative that is the ground of all that is, yet a metaphysical metanarrative that makes the fullness of meaning available and apprehen-sible in physical experience. This metanarrative, this work asserts, is the logos, the ultimate referent prin-ciple of the ancient Greeks and, according to Christianity, the God-man Jesus Christ, the eternal become present in present experience. Because the logos constitutes transcendence in human form, it recognizes the beauty of existential experience even as it underscores the necessity of transcendence for temporal meaning. The logos as metaphysical metanarrative brings the worlds of time and eternity together, link-ing earth and the beyond in a seamless whole. It is the ultimate existential experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Aug 14, 2009
• ISBN: 9781467876568

William E. Marsh

William E. Marsh has been a writer and teacher for over thirty-five years. Do You Believe? is his sixth book.

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© 2009 William E. Marsh. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 8/11/2009

ISBN: 978-1-4389-9721-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4678-7656-8 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

"The one: that it is and it is impossible for it not to be."

— Parmenides

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Enlightenment &

The Emergence Of Angst

Søren Kierkegaard

Friedrich Nietzsche

Martin Heidegger

Jean-Paul Sartre

Nothingness

Meaning

Metaphysical Meaning

Narrative

Metanarrative

The Metaphysical & Communicability

The Logos

The Logos and the Philosophers

Conclusion

Notes*

Bibliography

Introduction 

Meaning is the central issue of human existence. It has shaped civilizations, manipulated powers, and manufactured ecclesial polity, and driven people insane. Whatever else they may crave, humans desire meaning. Underlying humanity’s desire for meaning, however, is the reality of existential angst, that tangle of present alienation and eschatological dread that impels every human being to seek some way, indeed, almost any way, to balance the vagaries of finitude with their felt and perceived longing for a greater existential vision. This angst has fueled every human effort to locate meaning in this temporal reality: all humans, whether they know it or not, constantly battle the angst of explaining, in the grip of materiality, the precise parameters of their present and seemingly unknowable evanescent experience.

Implicit in this angst is the idea of nothingness. Only in nothingness, the conscious voiding of all that is assumed or true from the corridors of experience, have humans come to believe that they can fully rid themselves of angst. In this view, only by removing what is perceived to be real, the felt conundrum of alienation and dread, from their active consciousness, can humans find the true real. People must let go of everything, divest themselves of all that is impeding their perceptions of what is most true, before they can begin to find something. In many ways, nothingness has therefore become the ground of human possibility.¹

Although angst and nothingness have been with humanity since its inception, they have surfaced most prominently in modern times, the epistemologically volatile centuries following the Enlightenment. When the Enlightenment severed the metaphysical from the immanent, or, put another way, the noumenal from the phenomenal, it also removed the idea that the metaphysical could have any value or meaning in the human experience. As a result, humanity began to seek its meaning solely in temporal reality, propelling itself forward to explore the fullest and deepest contours of the present material existence in its quest for a meaningful existence. The metaphysical was no longer an option. With this, although humans continued to believe in the value of a narrative in their lives, they dismissed the notion of a metanarrative, the idea that a larger and synoptic story of existential explanation could be useful in their lives. The net effect was the emergence of a worldview centered solely in the physical moment, a worldview that came to make not just nothingness, but the angst of nothingness, the absence of all sensibility and meaning, as the fount of possibility. In a world shorn of supernatural moorings, there was really nowhere else to look.

Yet humanity’s angst remains, constantly running through its continuing efforts to find meaning, that is, meaning beholden to nothingness and its possibilities, in its existential experience. Moreover, given the fact of finitude and the continued rejection of the metaphysical, it will likely continue to plague humanity until it disappears from this planet. With this in mind, the question is whether there is an alternate way of looking at meaning. Should the metaphysical, expressed in metanarrative, be reincorporated into the immanent in the epistemological quest? Is the nothingness of angst the only ground of possibility?

Nothingness, Metanarrative, and Possibility argues that, yes, the metaphysical is entirely useful, indeed, essential to the epistemological quest. It also argues that although nothingness can be valuable as a source of the possibilities of meaning, its inherent finitude limits its effectiveness. Therefore, nothingness avers that the metaphysical, presented as the ground of nothingness, should be made the basis of any quest for meaning. Moreover, it argues that this metaphysical is best apprehended as metanarrative, and that this metanarrative should be viewed as the ultimate possibility in human nothingness. In addition, it asserts that this metanarrative will only have epistemological relevance if it is expressed in a form apprehensible to human beings: it must be the metaphysical in physical reality.

To this end, Nothingness does the following. One, using the writings and thoughts of Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Jean Paul Sartre, it explores the content and contours of modern existential angst. Two, it connects this notion of angst with study of various concepts of meaning, attempting to establish first, that meaning is indeed possible, as well as necessary, at least in a temporal sense; and second, that meaningfulness is therefore potentially possible as well.

Three, given the fact of narrative as a fundamental dimension of human communication and experience, Nothingness discusses and justifies the idea that narrative, expressed in literature and art, is one point by which meaning and meaningfulness may be, at least temporarily, obtained. Four, building upon this notion of the seminality of narrative, it explains and validates the concept of metanarrative, the transcendent and supernal narrative, as an essential repository and source of meaning in human experience. It also necessarily affirms the possibility of metaphysics.

Five, assuming the utility of metanarrative in the process of meaning, Nothingness then presents what it considers to be the ultimate metanarrative, the incarnation of the metaphysical, defined here as the λογος, the ancient Greek integrating principle of reality, and lucidly expressed in the person of Jesus Christ, as the essential response to the problem of angst and nothingness. In this metanarrative, the metaphysical is fused with the physical in a way that enables both to be available and accessible to human beings in their existential experience. The physical thus perceives and experiences the metaphysical and, as a result, permanent meaning is born.

As a result, Nothingness concludes, this metanarrative of the incarnation overcomes the angst and nothingness of temporality. In its metaphysicality it resolves angst, and in its physicality it divests nothingness. Synoptic meaning is now present and available to all human beings.

The Enlightenment &

The Emergence Of Angst 

In many ways, the modern notion of angst (existential anxiety) originated in the worldview of the Enlightenment, a period of human endeavor, situated largely in eighteenth century Europe, which historians are virtually unanimous in pinpointing as a watershed in human practice and thought. Under the spell of the Enlightenment’s steadfast reworking of the scope of human thought and imagination, Europe emerged from it a very different place. ²

Foremost in this shift was a new perspective on the notion of reason. Writing in his Encylopédie, Denis Diderot (1713-1784), the astute chronicler of the cultural and philosophical content of the French Enlightenment, observed, Reason is to the philosopher what grace is to the Christian, the only true and competent judge. In light of the centuries old primacy and centrality of grace, that is, grace as the name given to the idea, embedded in the orthodox Christian worldview, that God is continuously favorably disposed towards his human creation, this view of reason, in effect, granted it the same absolute, dogmatic status as religion.³ Henceforth, as Diderot and his fellow philosophes would have it, reason, not God nor the church, was to be the light and path (the modus operandi) by which all things and, most significantly, truth, would be evaluated and judged.

Conversely, if reason was the way to truth, then, Diderot concluded, religion was no longer necessary as a final source of or road to what was most true. On the contrary, it was to be distrusted and rejected, abandoned as a crutch of the poor and ignorant, and now considered useful only for the myopic clergy (and the supposedly ignorant laity) who remained loyal to the established ecclesiastical traditions. Indeed, as this French philosophe saw it, by not investing itself and its energies in religion, society could actually improve itself. Revelation, he asserted, although possible to an assenting mind, can neither validate nor confirm judgments based upon reason (reason, of course, being the primary means of determining truth).⁴

Implicit in this view was that revelation, that is, heretofore unknown communications from the divine (God), was no longer credible as a method of learning and understanding reality. Indeed, Diderot noted, humans are men before they are Christians: human reason, not any religious experience, must always be the existential as well as epistemological grounding of a human being and, therefore, be foremost and foundational in any intellectual deliberation in which the human engages.⁵

In this conclusion, captured in Diderot’s bold observations above, although it may have appeared to some (namely, the ecclesiastical authorities) as a perniciously simplistic view of the world, one that blithely overlooked or dismissed what these personages argued were the dangers in omitting revelation as a reasonable basis for truth, the Enlightenment instigated a titanic shift in how people saw their existence. Despite the persistence of popular belief in a personal and benevolent deity,⁶ a God who cared and worked steadfastly in the present reality, the Enlightenment definitively toppled the political power of organized religion in Europe. The view of God that had held sway on the continent for nearly fifteen hundred years, the view that, in spite of internal fractiousness and dissent, had guided monarch and peasant alike in their daily deliberations and meditations, lost its grip, never, as subsequent history would demonstrate, to return. In a word, metaphysics had been deflated.⁷

Hence, from this point, God, in large part, became not the object, but the subject of human imagination. Henceforth, it was not a matter of Buber’s I and Thou, but rather the Romantics’ (see below) I to Thou.⁸ In a significant shift from the Christian empowered cultural and religious perspectives that had dominated Europe for centuries past, the Homeric worldview, honed in Greco-Roman texts given new life in the Renaissance,⁹ now held sway in the corporate imagination. Going forward, humanity would make God in its image, and not the other way around. The notion of a divinely ordered humanity, along with the long held conviction that individual teleology could only be the work of a guiding metaphysical presence,¹⁰ ebbed inexorably, and uncontrollably, from the confines of the human mind.¹¹

On the other hand, if religion was unnecessary, then all that people had to make sense of their reality was themselves.¹² But this was a fate the intellectuals happily embraced. Shorn of their religious moorings, liberated from the strictures of ecclesiastical oversight and perceived craven orthodoxy, humans could now bravely set sail into a new world, unfurling their sails on a sea of uncharted ideas and unlimited possibilities of truth and imagination. By subsuming the mythologies and longings of the world into a single point, that of unadulterated reason, the Enlightenment, paradoxically, handed humanity a world without boundaries, a world without limits, a world which they could manipulate in way they chose. Even time and space were now solely within their own imaginings.¹³ Yet this world was a world that, more than ever, they could never hope to fully understand. It was at once the greatest hope and, eventually, the greatest despair, a terrible yet exciting angst of adventure and discovery burdened, ironically, with an intractable existential emptiness.¹⁴

The other hallmark effect of the Enlightenment was an active (and perhaps, on occasion, unintentional) encouragement of the undermining or disavowal of authority. Fueled in part by the jettisoning of the hold of organized religion on popular culture, this assertion of autonomy opined that people should have absolute freedom—no boundaries whatsoever—to follow and pursue one’s personal will. As Diderot put it,

Liberty is a gift from heaven, and each individual of the same species [it is unclear as to which species he is referring, but surely humanity is one of them] has the right to enjoy it as he enjoys the use of reason.¹⁵

To this, we might add the words of Immanuel Kant, penned in his essay, What is the Enlightenment? that,

Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the ability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance … This enlightenment requires nothing but freedom: freedom to make public use of one’s reason in all matters.¹⁶

As Voltaire (1694-1778) observed in his Philosophical Dictionary that although it is evident to me that there is a necessary, eternal, supreme being, believing in such a thing is not a matter of faith, but of reason. Authority, particularly that of the divine presence, was no longer reasonable or valid: even God, the terrifying and unknowable divine that had been constructed by distant structures of church and the politics of an incipient Holy Roman Empire,¹⁷ was not beyond the freedom of human reason. As a result, humans no longer needed or required external authority, of any type, to create, instill, or hold belief in God (however they chose to define him¹) or, for that matter, anything else. Human liberty, uncreated and self-constructed individual liberty, would now determine the worldview and destiny of each individual.¹⁸

(Mention should be made here of the work of the British statesman Edmund Burke who, as Gertrude Himmelfarb has observed, dissented from the prevailing continental view of liberty. Burke argued that rights and reason should be subservient to virtue and freedom. Put another way, the object of discussion or vision, he urged, should not be stripped of every relation and made a metaphysical abstraction. It rather should be held and implemented with care and in full view of the historical circumstances through which it is moving. To wit, not all truth is true.

(Clearly, Burke understood the virtue of human reason, but he also understood, along with Thomas Hobbes¹⁹ (and the French Revolution would confirm this insight for Burke in brutal form²⁰), that liberty without order results in anarchy.²¹ Epistemological freedom, it soon became apparent, does not assure metaphysical meaning.)

Under the Enlightenment’s influence and, in a very real sense, tutelage, a new way of seeing therefore emerged in the peoples populating the nation and would-be nation states scattered across the rivers, valleys, and mountains on which the history of the Anglo-Saxon race had occurred to that point. Brimming with belief in the power of unfettered liberty and reason, people, initially the intellectual class and later the masses, felt freer than they ever had before. Foisting off the perceived constraints of biblical revelation and ecclesiastical authority, and liberating themselves from forced (and felt) dependency upon monarchs and their proud and all too frequently arrogant underlings, Europeans came to construct a radically new painting of the world and their place in it.²² Of particular significance for this study, in this painting lay the foundations of modernity (and, as noted above, its angst), the initial inklings of a studied rejection of what had heretofore been considered to be the necessary idea of God.²³

As the Enlightenment reached its intellectual climax in the writings of Immanuel Kant in the late eighteenth century and, in the sometimes visceral and supremely passionate eruptions of the American and French Revolutions, its political apex as well, not many more years had passed before these spirited socio-cultural expressions of the new world order began to disclose and unfold their moral and epistemological limitations.²⁴

Initially, all seemed well. In the Americas, the leaders of the North American colonial rebellions, with their philosophical roots planted securely in the writings of the British empiricist and political theorist John Locke²⁵ and the influential pen of the Frenchman Charles Louis de Secondat, better known as Baron de Montesquieu,²⁶ waged a relatively calm, and largely successful, dispute with their mother country Britain. The rest of Europe stood by as Britain saw its largest holdings in North America loosed from its imperial grip.²⁷

Moreover, after the revolution ended, the newly birthed Americans appreciatively enjoyed the fruits of immediate economic freedom which their burgeoning political liberation had enabled and secured for seemingly all posterity. In the relatively soothing light of the subsequent growth of the American republic,²⁸ the world saw Enlightenment political theory, all things considered, that is, if one regarded the wresting of the control of a monarchy (and not all, as we observed above, were convinced of this) as a positive development in the life of a people, expression of reason and dismissal of authority at its best.²⁹

Across the Atlantic, however, degeneracy emerged. Although he was not concerned directly with politics, the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), in a series of lurid (and oddly upbeat) ruminations on pain and suffering (one of his most famous being 120 Days of Sodom, published in 1784, five years before revolution broke out in France), demonstrated that, in contrast to the American implementation of harmonious non-religious civil government, in other circumstances the absence of the aegis of divine and, perhaps monarchical, authority as well, made all manner of behavior brutally and, for him, delightfully, permissible.³⁰

Under the spell of the age (as well as his personal predilections), De Sade correctly grasped that if humans have freedom to engage in total rebellion, then the only logical outcome is total destruction. Drawing words from Seneca (true freedom is to fear neither men nor gods), de Sade explored the outer limits of what people could do if the pursuit of happiness, stripped of any religious proscription, is made the most important object of existence. As he put it in Justine,

What will become of your laws your morality, your religion, your power, the your paradise, your gods and your hell, once it has been shown that this or that current of fluid, or a certain grain, or a degree of acidity in the blood or the juices will suffice to subjugate man to your torments of vengeance?³¹

In the end, it is a matter of human anatomy. If people are the only gods, then people are only victims (and promoters) of themselves and their unrestrained desires. Ironically, as subsequent discussion will show, de Sade’s assertions would become the ultimate human angst: unbridled freedom without metaphysical foundation. The Enlightenment’s epistemology of the individual had reached its final destiny.

On the other hand, in the work of the deist Maximilien Robespierre, principal architect (and eventual victim) of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, the continent saw the frightful, and final teleology of, outcome of the political implications of the Enlightenment. Pursued apart from any divine and authoritarian constraint (and of course the diminishing of such restraint lay at the heart of Enlightenment philosophy), politics became a tool of uncontrolled desire.³²

Virtue, without [which] terror is fatal, but that terror, without [which] virtue is powerless, ³³ Robespierre observed, as he, bolstered by easy access to the massively efficient form of execution occasioned by the guillotine, murdered thousands in his efforts to create a new civil religion, one without the perceived boundaries of a personal God.³⁴ While some, including Tom Paine, author of the influential and incendiary pamphlet Common Sense, may have believed that the new America would never fall into such political and ethical disarray,³⁵ subsequent commentators were to note that once the boundaries spawned by belief in divine (or state) authority are removed from a worldview, the potential for moral destruction is unpredictable and virtually limitless.³⁶

Yet underlying these personal, social, and political machinations of the new Europe were philosophical conclusions of far greater import, conclusions which drove all other aspects of the Enlightenment’s thought and legacy. As history played itself out in the remainder of the eighteenth century, these conclusions, much more than the personal and political aberrations of the era, would prove to be singularly seminal in readying the world for the birth of its modern day angst. In them, the idea of God and its relationship to truth was thrust into an entirely different light. Hence, it is to these thoughts that we therefore must turn.

The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), whose essay What is the Enlightenment? has already been mentioned as a definitive statement of the essential worldview of the Enlightenment, may not have set out to reshape the religious epistemology of the world.³⁷ He brilliantly synthesized intuition, mental structure, and sense experience in his Critique of Pure Reason, published in 1781 and, in so doing, turned back Cartesian dualism and Humeian skepticism and set the processes of human thought on a more sensible trajectory and foundation. In addition, however, after exploring metaphysics and morality in two groundbreaking works, Ground of the Metaphysic of Morals and Reason within the Limits of Reason Alone, he, whether intentionally or not, also presented some highly influential (and controversial) conclusions about the role of God in morality and the moral quest.³⁸

Writing in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (published in 1793), Kant carefully and thoughtfully obviated any remaining moral and epistemological rationale for a personal God. It concerns us not so much to know what God is in Himself (His nature), he wrote, as what He is for us as moral beings. People do not need to know who God is; they need only know his moral function. If this is so, Kant then asked, what role does (or can) God—whatever and whoever he may be—play in the human moral system?

Kant’s conclusion was that God was a postulate, a necessary (for morality must have a judgment and end³⁹) but non-physical (and, as a result, for all practical purposes, non-existent) point of moral dimension. The moral person, the person devoted to pursuing moral duty through cultivation and imbibing of the good will (summum bonum⁴⁰), must therefore view God as an epistemological, but not empirical basis for a moral framework. As a personal being, a personal narrative of purpose or meaning, he means nothing. He’s merely a moral scarecrow. ⁴¹

In addition, Kant observed, because feelings are not knowledge (and barely fifty years would pass before the rise of angst would challenge this conclusion), and morality’s cause remains unknown to us, morality’s ground [read God] is therefore not given to us as an object of knowledge. In other words, people cannot know God as an object, but only as a subjective moral paradigm. Although Kant believed in divine judgment and the kingdom of God,⁴² he was reluctant to make these the controlling bases for moral action. Morality was grounded in the notion of the free and unencumbered individual who, by the exercise of his rational powers, pursued the good will and the universal law.⁴³

With this, Kant laid to rest any notion that humans should look to God for moral authority. It was their own reason, their own inculcation and pursuit of the categorical imperative,⁴⁴ fueled as it was by duty and the motivation of the good will, he argued, which were to be the guiding principle of moral behavior and judgment. From a moral standpoint, there was nothing empirically beyond the starry universe of humanity’s night time vision. Although God remained, in some sense, there, he was not moral truth; rather such truth was now the duty and creation of the individual.⁴⁵

With this, although he had been raised in the Moravian pietist tradition and remained a devout and pious individual to the day of his death, Kant effectively demolished any basis for understanding God as an empirical, much less personal, moral object or being. God was merely an integration point, a good and ordering thought, but surely not physically real. There would be no transcendent narrative, for it was no longer necessary: humans need only pursue their moral duty, mindful of the idea of God, yet not needing to believe in him as immanent and personal. Even though he had long been in the grave by this time, Voltaire, the barbed satirist, adamant deist, and revered herald of the Enlightenment, would have been delighted: humanity had been definitively freed (as he saw it) from God. Its intellectual denizens had rendered the personal divine no longer necessary as a means of making sense of reality, epistemological or moral: the noumenal and phenomenal had been separated, never to be brought together again. From this point forward, humanity, at least those of it outside the Christian church, would seek epistemological sustenance and foundation, that is, personal and corporate truth, apart from the idea of a personal God. ⁴⁶

Compounding Kant’s conclusions were those of David Hume (1711-1776). Writing earlier in the same century, Hume opined that although causation occurred, its precise character and content could not be detected. Humans could not know the nature of causation, and could therefore have no way to explain how anything happened, only that it happened. Moreover, it was custom and habit alone which enabled humans to decide whether an event could or would happen. Prediction was not possible. In short, humans had no way to discern how or why anything happened. All they could do was to observe it happening. Consequently, they could not discover and certainly did not need to know the true nature of reality, that is, the normative flow of cause and effect, much less any alleged reality or causation (that is, God or what he may create) beyond it. For Hume, the present material reality was all that mattered. God was not necessary, not even as a moral postulate. Indeed, God was of no value at all.⁴⁷

Therefore, by the turn of the new (nineteenth) century, though some have argued otherwise, pushing for an earlier provenance,⁴⁸ modernity had therefore begun: God had been effectively expunged from everyday existence, never to return. As a result, truth was now considerably less than completely certain.⁴⁹ The fullness of angst, however, although its seeds had certainly been sown by this point, was still roughly forty years away.

To summarize to this point, we have sought to explain, briefly, the thinking with which humanity jettisoned God and the epistemologically knowable transcendent from its immediate purview, and some of the political and cultural outfall that ensued. In addition, we saw how in the rejection of God as a source of truth and in the consequent embrace of human reason as the means to same, the outlines of the epistemological framework from which angst would eventually emerge. As the century continued, however, other developments in philosophical and cultural thought occurred which were to exercise equally significant influence on how angst (part and parcel, as we will see, with modernity) came to be in the modern world.

For our discussion, the most important of these developments was Romanticism. Romanticism developed as a response to what some perceived as the rationalistic excesses of Kantian philosophy, asserting that in upholding, against all dissent, the primacy of reason in any effort to attain and understand truth, humanity (its intellectuals, anyway) had suppressed, unfairly, the part that human emotions could play in comprehending the nature of existence and reality. Humanity, the Romantics argued, was more than raw reason.⁵⁰

In addition, the Romantics felt that the technological bent of the rapidly expanding Industrial Revolution and the factories, inventions, and impersonal human relations that resulted from it dehumanized, even rejected and alienated feelings and emotions. This new industrial age seemed to make no room for human personality and aesthetic expression.⁵¹

In contrast, as Alfred de Musset put it,

Romanticism is the star that weeps, the wind that wails, the night that shivers, the flower that flies, and the bird that exudes perfume. Romanticism is the unhoped-for ray of light, the languorous rapture, the oasis beneath the palm trees, ruby hope with its thousand loves.⁵²

Romanticism, then, is the outlet for human emotion. In contrast to the Enlightenment’s effort to establish the uniformity of man as a rational being, Romanticism diversified humanity, extolling the multiplicity of senses, feelings, and emotions that fueled its experience. However liberating it may be, the Romantics contended, reason is not enough. It doesn’t speak to the whole person. People therefore ought to have freedom to express themselves in total self-assertion, to move beyond reason and realize the highest attainments (the emotive, imaginative, and even spiritual) of which they are capable. Everybody is unique, and should be allowed to express themselves in ways, however unconventional they may be, beyond the confines of reason.⁵³

While the Enlightenment liberated people from the church and ecclesiastical polity, substituting human reason for religion, Romanticism set them free from themselves. As Arthur Lovejoy points out in his Chain of Being, the shift from the uniformitarian to the diversitarian preconception of the human being represented the distinctive feature of the Romantic revolution. In addition to making God one who manifests himself through change and becoming, it made the destiny of the individual a form of continual self-transcendence. People were now, and forevermore, insatiably creative beings, bound and free to live out the fullest extent of their emotions and imaginations."⁵⁴

Uncomfortable with the Enlightenment’s monism, that is, its view that all the great questions must of necessity agree with one another; for they must correspond with reality, and reality is a harmonious whole, the Romantics opined that, instead, discord, conflict, and experimentation must be the hallmarks of the human adventure. Harmony could not be achieved by corporate conformity to an abiding ideal that had no basis in experience. Idealism was little match for the raw entanglement of ego with the world.⁵⁵

For this reason, according to Frederick Schiller, every kind of perfection must attain existence in the fullness of the world. No activity can be omitted, no striving can be discounted; indeed, form, that is, the strictures and boundaries of the present moment, must never be allowed to overcome content. In addition, the individual creative or, better, the aesthetic, impulse is supreme, for individuality, wrote Friedrich Schlegel, is the original and eternal thing in human beings. Life and its glories, as people take hold of them, are inexhaustible.⁵⁶

Accordingly, amidst the continued forward movement of technological innovation, political experimentation (The Communist Manifesto was published in 1848, the year that, coming off a Napoleonic and subsequent Metternich reworking of the map and monarchical structure of the continent, various revolutions swept across Europe),⁵⁷ and scientific discovery (Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species appeared in 1859), a number of artists and other aesthetics continued to pursue alternate lives, looking inward, stepping into their senses (though not in the manner of the earlier empiricists) and imaginations in an effort to make sense of their lives in the world. Although the detached observer may have concluded the Romantics were steadily losing influence, the events that followed the often tragic and generally premature deaths of their major protagonists (William Blake, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Shelley, and William Wordsworth) were to demonstrate otherwise. In many ways, the Romantic view of the world proved to be the most influential of its time.

Significantly, however, bereft as they were of a personal divine, and overwhelmed by a seemingly insouciant technological juggernaut, these individuals developed a way of looking at themselves that, although bringing them much internal meaningfulness, also brought them, in several notable instances, to the brink of existential oblivion. Though most were optimistic, full of desires to explore the outer limits of themselves and their potential, some came to recognize that, apart from continued pursuit of will and emotion, they had nothing epistemologically substantive but the perduring emptiness of personal and philosophic despair.⁵⁸

As a result, subjectivism and imaginative passion, the centerpieces of the Romantic ethos, became a freedom of inflexible necessity, one that, although present and available, emerged as the only option available. There was no room to turn. Though reason had been abrogated, its replacement was not appreciably better, for it posited a bottomless ethos of creative longing from which there was no exit except more formless longing. Although they were no longer victims of excessively structured minds, humans were now hopelessly lost in their passions. There was still no clear road to meaning.⁵⁹

Preliminary to, and in part connected and formative to Romanticism, particularly in Germany, was Pietism. A religious movement which began in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), Pietism sought to return Christianity to what it considered to be a more deeply devotionally oriented experience. Loyal to emotion and feeling, and focused on the inward experience of Jesus (in contrast to the perceived Calvinist emphasis on rigid doctrine and cold dogma) in the human heart, Pietism swept through eighteenth century Germany. Writers such as Philipp Jakob Spener (1635-1705), August Hermann Francke (1663-1727), and Count von Zinzendorf (1700-1760) fueled and inspired the movement, and ensured that its influence, rooted in part in a return to the essence of Lutheranism, would endure long after they departed the living scene.⁶⁰ In the fin de siècle discomfort with the rationalism of the Enlightenment, the supernal stresses spawned by the Industrial Revolution, and the nascent rise of Romanticism, Pietism steadfastly shaped Christian theology, reaching its climax in the emotionally laden and dogmatically erudite work of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834).⁶¹

Schleiermacher painted a very different picture of the Christian experience than what had been considered acceptable for hundreds of years previously. Instead of using dry orthodoxy, couched in the words of the Bible, to understand the individual’s relationship with God, he centered it in emotion. To wit, Schleiermacher described the human’s relationship with the divine as one in which the individual experiences a God-consciousness, a felt feeling of connectedness with the divine. In this consciousness, this feeling of absolute dependency, lay the essence of religious experience. Feelings were prime.⁶²

Schleiermacher was determined to forge a middle ground between revealed orthodoxy and natural theology. In his On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, he sought to define religion as an affection, a revelation of the Infinite in the finite.⁶³ This is reminiscent of Blake’s famous exhortation to hold infinity in the palm of your hand, a call to think about God as a product of feeling and imagination, a presence that could be obtained through the senses. Perhaps intended as a potential apologetic to a world gripped in post-Enlightenment angst, these observations in many ways paved the way for the free form theology (the mode, as we shall see of Søren Kierkegaard) that would emerge later in the nineteenth century. Not reason, but emotion, individualized and unaffected emotion, constituted the path to the divine.⁶⁴

Significantly, however, Schleiermacher’s theology was heavily laden with Romantic overtones. In his Monologen, he writes that every person should exemplify humanity in his own way, and that uniformity in thought and character was evil. Indeed, although Christianity was for Schleiermacher the highest of the positive religions, its superiority lay only in its freedom from exclusiveness. Humans were made to be unique, to explore all things, to seek out their special place in history. With this, whether he intended to do so or not, Schleiermacher would become the Christian counterpart to the Romantics, and laid the groundwork for the eventual fusion of religious and existential angst, alluded to the previous paragraph, in the middle of the nineteenth century. A critic of modernity, yet a theologian who was very much concerned to make religion meaningful to an alternately rigidly scientific and excessively emotional age, Schleiermacher set the stage for all manner of existential exploration and longing.⁶⁵

At the same time, in the writings of the Lutheran clergyman Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), Pietism shaped political visions as well, impelling Herder’s vision of nationalism and his view (like that of Schleiermacher) that religion could be constructed on the basis of feeling alone. Reason was no longer needed, nor wanted. In contrast to the agnostic/atheistic rationalism of Voltaire’s Enlightenment, life, even the spirit of the nations (the Volkgeist), therefore became not merely a reasoned and reasonable enterprise, but a lived and shared experience, one worthy of all the feeling and emotion—and heart—that one could put into it.⁶⁶

Although with the seminal influence of the Enlightenment’s liberation of humanity from the strictures of divine reason, the Romantic mediations on the glory and fullness (and ultimate futility) of imagination and the Pietist emphasis on devotion and emotion contributed mightily to the religious and philosophical environment out of which modern angst emerged, the worldview that compelled angst’s progenitor most saliently was that of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). One of philosophy’s grand unifiers and synthesizers, Hegel, a thoroughgoing idealist, developed a grand picture of history in which the Weltgeist (world spirit), guided and aided by Reason, makes itself known in the final manifestation of world history, the nation-state.⁶⁷ In his view, history had come to an end, and only God could reconcile history with reality. The future was unfathomable, and humanity didn’t need for it to be otherwise: it was in the hands of the Absolute,⁶⁸ for whom reality is ultimately and solely spirituality.⁶⁹

Underlying this approach was Hegel’s assumption that existence was essentially phenomenological, meaning that experience is prime, and that the Absolute—the ultimate truth and unity which humans need (and which they are capable of attaining)—is by human beings. In living phenomenologically, that is, as self-conscious beings (phrenologically⁷⁰), humans uncover the truth and gain a vision, albeit corporate, of the Absolute.⁷¹ Although the sensory, the immediate knowledge,⁷² is important, the ground of imbibing and interpreting experience, self-consciousness, that which exists in itself and for itself, is the foundation of meaning.⁷³

Hegel rejected Kant’s divorce of the phenomenal and noumenal, and sought to demonstrate that the noumenal was necessary and within immanent grasp, expressed in the outworking of Reason in the evolution of the Weltgeist in history. Although he had little personal use for religion (despite lauding Christianity as an ideal religion⁷⁴), Hegel recognized that the material and rational were not enough to satisfy the human quest for truth. People needed more to make sense of the world and their place in it. In addition, they needed to know that the Absolute could be embodied in their present reality.⁷⁵

Nonetheless, Hegel’s idealism, his focus on the reality and superiority of a greater vision, a synoptic picture of reality that supercedes the finite and material, coupled with his notion of the politically and historically terminating effects of the modern nation-state, left him unable to make room for the individual. Despite his intricate philosophical system and the useful and clever openendedness of his dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, Hegel ultimately set the individual in the nebulous grip of the final corporate state. The inevitability of the Weltgeist’s evolution and the unshakable guidance of Reason and the way that it subsumed God, substance, and the individual into itself and Spirit, removed the possibility of choice in the human experience.

As Rüdiger Safranski observed, after Hegel, an intervening world of society and history was inserted between man and being. The old metaphysics of the whole (God, being, and man) was abandoned, and the individual became pointless because the individual is now determined by society and history. There was nothing beyond history but nature, of which humanity was only an exemplar. The greatest victory would not be that of the individual’s growth and progress, but of social and historical necessity. The metaphysics of spirit that had created an expanse for humans was gone; in its place was, simply, spirit.⁷⁶

And this was right, for order, the inevitable orderly flow of history, as Hegel saw it, is rooted in right. The structure of the evolving historical movement promised it. Existence was a product of its beginnings, and could not go beyond them.⁷⁷

On the other hand, although this ensured that the world is defined and linked to its ground, a ground in turn embedded in or at least physically (or spiritually) connected to the metaphysical, it left the individual behind, crushed beneath the steamroller of the Spirit. There was no room for individual imagination, and certainly no room for independent religious emotion and expression.⁷⁸

Though highly influential, Hegel’s worldview, embodied in his aphorism that, what is real is rational and what is rational is real, left the Romantics with few options. While the Romantics appreciated his emphasis on the Absolute and fusion of phenomenal and noumenal, they could not abide Hegel’s rejection of the individual as a significant state of existence. They themselves believed fervently that it was the individual who was the beginning and end of human existence, and that it was accordingly the individual from whom all meaning (and angst) would come. If humans were emotional and imaginative beings, then they were sentient and significant beings as well. Eradicating the individual meant eliminating the fundamental expression and form of existence. Pietism and Romanticism, the nineteenth century’s only reasonable (at least as the Romantics saw it) responses to Enlightenment rationalism, depended on individual experience to be meaningful. The individual must be prime.

In addition, the Romantic progeny of the mid-nineteenth century could not accept Hegel’s contention that history had come to an end. What else can existence be for if it is not lived in a continuing outworking of the historical imagination? History is to be lived and experienced as a constant temporalizing of the individual in felt connectedness with the forces of existence and imagination. If it ends, the individual does, too.

Conversely, if the individual is the sum and locus of a reality once wrapped in God but now fatally punctured and sundered by the knives of reason and emotion, then where, precisely is he? More importantly, for even if Descartes knew where he was, what does the human, in light of this crumbling semblance of truth evolving rapidly into an abyss of seemingly insuperable existential angst, mean?⁷⁹

Søren Kierkegaard 

It was into this world, this world of emotion and imagination; existential revolt and phenomenological theology; searching for the location of the individual in an inevitable and unyielding Absolute; and subjective emptiness and longing, that the father of modern angst was born. The circumstances of Søren Kierkegaard’s (1813-1855) life are well known, and will be described here only as they explain, to the extent that life circumstances can, how he came to develop his radically individualistic, and psychologically and religiously fragile, yet singularly brave, perspective on choice, angst, and existence. Also, to the point that they are relevant to this study, the effects of Hegel’s philosophy on Kierkegaard will be noted as well.

By any measure, Kierkegaard was born to engender angst. At the age of eleven, on the hills of Danish Jutland in 1767, his father, Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, cursed God for allowing hopelessness, poverty, and loneliness into his life.⁸⁰ Overwhelmed with what he perceived to be the wretchedness of his existence, Mr. Kierkegaard chose to assign all the blame to God. Yet afterwards he came to believe that he had committed the unforgivable sin. Consequently, never again would he find equanimity in living: to the day he died, he was gripped by a solemn and unshakable sense of cursedness and dread.⁸¹

His father’s sense of divinely induced privation and hopelessness and the existential adversities it seemed to spawn, were not lost on young Søren. Although thanks to an inheritance, the elder Kierkegaard eventually grew wealthy and materially prosperous, Søren continually noted that his father’s life was marked by steadfast and unremitting tragedy. By the time Søren was barely twenty years old, he realized that he was one of only two, out of seven, children still left to his father. The others had all died before the age of thirty-three, unfortunate (and, to Søren’s father, innately and divinely afflicted) victims of accident and disease.⁸² As a