Philosophy, Fear and Man’s Quest for Meaning
To assume that philosophy is carried out
purely objectively in an arena void of fear is to be ignorant of the extent to
which this basic human disposition undermines one’s philosophical authenticity. Practicing philosophy can lead to the
examination of metaphysical views that can strike fear in the heart of many. This fear leads to conflicts with
philosophy’s search for truths of the world, for if the search for truth leads
to something disheartening one may create one’s own idea of the way the world
functions to avoid it. However other
philosophers have chosen not to flee from this threat and instead affirm the
harsh reality of the world. What does
fear take from philosophers? Nothing, if
we grant that the final word in the matter to be the individual’s response to
fear, namely his/her choice between the seemingly natural/ontic instinct of;
‘fight or flight’. Therefore, fear
shouldn’t be seen as an entity that controls us; it instead gives rise to the contingency
of the universe, giving us a choice between affirming truths of the world and
denying them. In this essay I will argue
that, in relation to the question of a meaningful existence, some proponents of
existentialism, namely Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus,
can be seen as embodying the principle of fight (affirmation), while past
philosophers like Renee Descartes and Plato, instead succumb to the need of a
flight from reality (denial).
When faced with a direct threat from
the external world, one will either face the threat or flee. There is a sense in which this dichotomy also
permeates down to our day-to-day choices.
For instance, when fearing the possibility that a significant other is
being unfaithful, one can either take the grounds for doubting the integrity of
the relationship seriously and confront the other or instead reject the
possibility and act as if the relationship remains untouched. If there are are in fact good reasons for
doubting the integrity of the relationship, it is clear that one may not want
to confront the truth of a relationship in shambles and will instead lie to oneself
as a means of escaping the truth. It can be said that everyone wants truth
concerning themselves and the world to a certain degree, although it is clear
that some are more willing to fabricate their own ideas about reality, in the
sense of Sartre’s mauvaise foi, instead
of facing a crude reality. Is it fair to
demand this affirmation of reality from everyone? Absolutely not, for he who kneels at the feet
of reality and affirms its objectivity regardless of one’s own needs and
desires for what it must be should be seen as the exception and not the
rule. However, is it fair to demand this
from philosophers? There is a sense in
which being a philosopher is nothing more than the rigorous application of this
principle to one’s life.
Does service to truth require
sacrifice? Absolutely, affirming truth requires
that one negate the comfortable layers of assumptions which one has of the
world and the self. However, negating sentimental
notions of self and world can be devastating for those caught up in what
Heidegger would coin as a ‘pre-ontological’ framework. The assumptions that
serve as the basis of this framework tend to be intuitive and socially constructed,
yet fail to function as effective foundational axioms in the Cartesian sense. If one exercises a dedicated will-to-truth,
one grows weary of the fanciful assumptions that guided one’s life in an
unreflective past. As Nietzsche says,
"No suffering has ever been able, nor will be able, to tempt me to bear
false witness to life."[1] In terms of metaphysical assumptions
Nietzsche is saying that it may be comforting to assume the existence of a
purpose to life, a logos or even a
transcendent realm, as these beliefs provide one with an illusory understanding
in the context of death, the unknown, yet the level of which answers are
‘comforting’ or ‘practical’ has no bearing on the philosophical value of any of
these propositions.
The ‘dualist’ notion of the self for
instance also has its roots in the inability to overcome fear, for why else
would Descartes have seen, in a world seemingly mechanistic in nature, the
existence of a substance (or exception) free of spatial-temporal limitations,
capable of immortality, other than for the practical reason that it would serve
the socially therapeutic function of giving life meaning? While I do not wish to discard Descartes’s
claim solely on the grounds that it provided him and others a solace, as doing
so would be committing the genetic fallacy, I merely wish to submit that
Descartes’s claim is based on an intuitive and religiously influenced
conception of man and the universe. Notions
like these are infectious; they tend to our fear of death by giving us the
illusion of mortality and sentience, yet bring us nowhere closer to truth. John Searle has argued that the solution to
the mind/body problem is simply that ‘all of our mental phenomena are caused by
lower level neuronal processes in the brain and are themselves realized in the
brain as higher level, or system, features.”[2] In fact, the notion of ‘substance-dualism’ is
incoherent and tends to give rise to non-problems in philosophy. For instance, the question of ‘how is it that
the body, a material substance, and the mind, an immaterial substance,
co-relate?’ is intrinsically meaningless. It is not surprising that Descartes chose
to flee from applying the counter-intuitive mechanistic conception of the universe
to everything within it; the
seemingly appropriate thing to do as society would have been faced with so
ghastly a truth concerning the nature of man. Philosophy in the time of
Descartes did serve a social/religious function: as Franz Rosenzweig, in the opening passage of The Star of Redemption, observes, “Philosophy takes it upon itself
to throw off the fear of things earthly, to rob death of its poisonous sting,
and Hades of its pestilential breath.”[3]
But
what of a world comprised of the earthly, the mortal and the contingent? Does this notion of reality not lead to a void
of meaning? As Soren Kierkegaard
proclaims, “If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom
of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark
passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable,
insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but
despair?”[4] Kierkegaard’s illustration of a world without
meaning may be rejected by some who choose not to believe it on the grounds
that it paints a notion of the world too scary and bleak to be true. Others however choose to affirm this model of
the universe even if it comes at the cost of a sense of meaning in the
world. Sartre’s notion of nausée is essentially the emotional
reaction one has to affirming the world as meaningless; it torments us at the
base of our very existence. There’s a
sense in which the metaphysical truth purported by an absurd universe, stripped
of the dogmas of God and immortality, is precisely what Nietzsche means in
terms of an existential authenticity. To
assume the existentially authentic life, one must confront truth regardless of
how scary it is; “How much truth can the mind bear, how much truth can the mind dare? This is what gives me the veritable measure
of value”[5]
In this context Nietzsche can be seen as anticipating Albert Camus’s notion of
the ‘absurd hero’; a being who affirms the absurdity of the cosmos and his own
existence while not fleeing in terror, but instead shaping his life in the
spirit of championing his disdain for such a universe.
The
notion of an ‘absurd hero’ is crucial in understanding the ‘fight’ aspect of
existentialism. Existentialism, at least
in the spirit of Nietzsche, is critical of past philosophers’ attempts at shying
away from the world by euphemizing into categories, axioms and truths of reason
what Nietzsche labels as ‘hocus-pocus’[6]
and ignoring the significance of existing itself. In ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, Nietzsche scoffs
at the possibility of such ‘dogmatic’ methods as a suitable means of deciphering truths about the
world, “Speaking seriously, there are good reasons why all philosophical
dogmatizing, however solemn and definitive its air used to be, may nevertheless
have been no more than a noble childishness and tyronism.” (8)
In conclusion, at some point life every person
is philosopher. Everyone must at one time analyse the aspects of life one holds
of utmost importance. However, one can
never rid himself or herself entirely of the influence fear of death and
meaninglessness have on his or her quest for meaning. One can choose for instance, to flee from the
absurd nature of the world and live in world of idealistic certainty or instead
fight the absurdity as an absurd hero and place life itself as the meaning of
life. However, there will always be a sense
in which fear will dictate all philosophical progress. If one affirms that life is nothing but
absurdity and lives in opposition to it, what is the sense of granting special
status to an absurd hero? If reality is
nothing but a shadowy representation of a transcendent world, why then take the
time to glorify the fallen world with truths of reason? The truth is that all philosophers are
uncertain about themselves and the world.
Fear of this uncertainty is what gives us the thirst for knowledge.
[5] F. Nietzsche, “The Will to Power”, p.154
Work Cited
Kierkegaard,
Søren. Fear and trembling, and The sickness unto death;. Garden City,
N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954. Print.
Nietzsche,
Friedrich Wilhelm. Letter to Malwida von Meysenbug, from Naumburg, 14th
January, 1880.
Nietzsche,
Friedrich Wilhelm. Human, all too human: a book for free spirits.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. Print.
Nietzsche,
Friedrich Wilhelm, and Walter Arnold Kaufmann. Thus spoke Zarathustra: a
book for all and none. New York: Modern Library, 1995. Print.
Nietzsche,
Friedrich Wilhelm, and Helen Zimmern. Human, all-too-human: parts 1 and 2 ;
Beyond good and evil. London: Wordsworth Editions, 2008. Print.
Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Walter
Arnold Kaufmann, and R. J. Hollingdale. The
will to power . New York: Random House, 1967. Print.
Rosenzweig,
Franz. The Star of Redemption . [1st ed. New York: Holt, Rinehart and
Winston, 1971. Print.
Searle,
John . "Why I am Not a Property Dualist." Consciousness Studies
12.9 (2002): 57-64. Print.
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