Transcript: The Age of Non-Reason (Episode 7, How Should We Then Live?)

PHI 230 Ethics

Transcript: The Age of Non-Reason

Episode 7, How Should We Then Live?

The history of the non-Christian philosophers up until the 18th century went like this. Here is a circle which stands for what the unified and true knowledge of the universe is then the next man would say no and cross out the circle, but he then would say here is the circle and the next man would say no and cross out that circle then he would make his circle and the next man would cross it out and make his circle this continued through the centuries. They never found the circle, but they optimistically believe someone would beginning only for man himself and on the basis of man's reasoning alone. Then the endless row circles through the centuries and the crossing out were broken and a drastic shift came because the humanistic ideal had failed. Humanistic man gave up his optimism for pessimism he gave up the hope of a unified answer and this makes modern man who he is. Jean Jacques Rousseau, philosopher from Geneva, he lived in the 18th century he thought primitive man the Noble Savage to be superior to civilized men. He felt that the Enlightenment with its emphasis on reason, the arts and the Sciences cause men to lose more than they gained. Rousseau saw the constraints of civilization as evils. “L'homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers.” “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” He demanded not just freedom from God or the Bible but freedom from any kind of restraint, freedom from culture, freedom from authority, absolute freedom for the individual with the individual at the center of the universe. When applied to the individual his concept led to the bohemian ideal where the hero was the man who fought all standards and all values and all restraints of society. When Rousseau applied his concept of autonomous freedom to society his concept would not function. “Whosoever refuses to abate the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body,” Rousseau wrote this in 1762 this means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free in other words tyranny a tyranny that carried his position to its logical conclusion in the reign of terror of the French Revolution.

Robespierre the King of that era genuinely saw himself putting Rousseau's ideas into practice. Paul Gauguin was a follower of Jean Jacques Rousseau in his hunt for total freedom he deserted his family he went to Tahiti hoping to find there the Noble Savage. There he found the ideal of the Noble Savage to be an illusion as he worked on this painting, he also wrote about it he called it a philosophical work comparable to the gospel but what a gospel. Gauguin himself said, “Close to the death of an old woman a strange stupid bird concludes whence, what, wither, oh sorrow thou art my master. Straight out cruel thou art and always vanquished I agree Volt.” What he found in Tahiti was death and cruelled. The man is good by nature as Rousseau claimed is no more true of primitive man than a civilized man when Gauguin finished this painting, he tried to commit suicide but he did not succeed.

There was one man who well understood the logical conclusion of the deification of nature the Marquis de Sade. If nature is all then what is, is right nothing more can be said. As nature has made us, the man, the strongest we can do with her, the woman, whatever we please. The inevitable result was his cruelty to women thus there was no basis for either morals or law.

Let me dwell for a moment on the Dutch reformation painters who so rejoicingly painted the simple things of life. They knew that nature was created by a personal and a good God, but they also knew because of the fall man's revolt against God the nature as it is now is abnormal that is a very different thing than taking nature as it is now and making it the measure of goodness because when this is done there is no difference between cruelty and non-cruelty. Even at the time of Rousseau and his followers the two concepts of total freedom and of everything including men being part of one big machine could no longer be kept together. Russo's position of man's total freedom collides with the position that on the basis of man's reason alone everything including man is part of one big machine. The two positions just couldn't be kept united. Later the German philosophers Immanuel Kant and George Wilhelm Hegel and the Danish Soren Kirkegaard wrestled with the problem of a unity of reason on one hand and on the other hand meaning in values, but they did not solve the problem.

Humanistic man beginning only from himself has concluded that he is only a machine. Humanistic man has no place for a personal God but there is also no place for man significance as man no place for love no place for freedom. Man is only a machine but the men who hold this position could not and cannot live like machines. If they could modern man would not have his tensions either in his intellectual position or in his life but he can't so they must leap away from reason to try to find something which gives meaning to their lives to life itself even though to do so they deny their reason. Once this is done any type of thing could be put there because in the area of non-reason reason gives no basis for a choice. This is the hallmark modern man. How did it happen? It happened because proud humanistic man though he was finite insisted in beginning only from himself and from what he could learn without other knowledge he did not succeed. Perhaps the best known of the existential philosophers was John Paul Sarte he used to spend much time here in Paris at Les Deux Magot. His position is that in the area of reason everything is observed but that one can authenticate himself that is give validity to his existence by an act of the will. With such position one can equally help an old woman across the street or run her down. Reason was not involved and there was nothing to show the direction that this authentication by enacted the will should take but sort himself could not live consistently with his own position. At a certain point he signed the Algerian manifesto which declared the Algerian war was a dirty war this action meant man could use his reason to decide some things were right and some things were wrong and so he destroyed his own system.

1126 Karl Jaspers, German existentialist, tended to have the greatest impact on the thought and life form which followed existential thought. According to him we may have some huge experience which gives us the hope that perhaps there is a meaning to life even though our reason tells us that life is absurd he calls this a final experience. Martin Heidegger was another existential philosopher who said that the answer was in the area of non-reason. The German philosopher said there is something he called angst, a general feeling of anxiety one feels in the universe, this feeling this mood of anxiety revealed existence, and this imposes owners a call for decision out of this mood comes meaning to life into choice even against one's reason meaning which rests are nothing more than this vague feeling of anxiety so nebulous it doesn't even have a specific object. As Martin Heidegger grew older his view became too weak for him, so he changed his position. Existentialism is a form of philosophy has all but disappeared but more and more people are thinking this way even if they do not know the name existentialism so then reason leads to pessimism and so they try to find an answer in something totally separated from reason.

Aldous Huxley, French Philosopher and Writer, proposed drugs as a solution. According to him we should give drugs to healthy people by means of the drug experience they could then find truth inside their own heads anytime they wished. What was left for Huxley and his followers was truth inside man's own head to them objective truth was gone. The drug culture and the mentality that went with it had his own vehicle which crossed the frontiers the world which were otherwise almost impassable by other means of communication. This record became the rallying cry many of the young people throughout the whole world it expressed the essence of their lives, their thoughts and their feelings. Later came psychedelic rock an attempt to find this experience without drugs. The younger people and the older ones tried drug taking but then turned to the eastern religions both drugs and the eastern religions seek truth inside one's own head in negation of reason. The central reason for the popularity of eastern religions in the West is a hope for non-rational meaning to life and values. The reason young people turn to these two religions and so on is, is simply the fact as we have said and that is that man having moved into the area of non-reason you can put anything up there and the heart of the eastern religion is a denial of reason just exactly as the idealistic drug taking was and so the turning to the eastern religions today fits exactly into the modern existential methodology. The existential thinking of modern man of trying to find some optimistic hope in the area of non-reason when he's given up hope on a humanistic basis of finding any kind of unifying answer to life any meaning to life in the answer of reason.

Though demons do not fit into modern man's conclusions on the basis of his reason many modern people feel that even demons are better than everything in the universe being only one big machine. People put the occult in the area of non-reason in the hope of some kind of meaning even if it is a horrendous kind of meaning. One must feel as a Christian or real sorrow for these people but as far as the blame is concerned, we must understand these people have turned to this or not to blame they must bear their own kind of blame of individual choices but basically, they're not to blame the church is to blame because the church with its liberal theology has left a vacuum. Man beginning from himself alone was now expressed and taught in theology and theological language in the Renaissance Men had attempted to mix Aristotle and Plato with Christianity. This new theology was an attempt to combine the rationalism of the Enlightenment with Christianity it is often called religious liberalism. It was embarrassed by the supernatural and often denied it entirely for example the resurrection of Christ from the dead and it tried to hold on to an Historical Jesus by sifting out from the New Testament all those supernatural elements the New Testament taught about Jesus. This attempt came to a climax with Albert Sweitzer's famous book Quest of the Historical Jesus. It failed, it failed to rid the New Testament account of the supernatural and still keep an historic Christ. The historic Jesus could not be separated from the supernatural events connected with him in the New Testament. History and the supernatural are too interwoven in the New Testament if one kept any of the historical Jesus one had to keep some of the supernatural if one got rid of all the supernatural one had no historical Jesus. We should remember Sweitzer's humanitarianism in Africa his genius is an organist and his expertise concerning Bach but unhappily we must remember his place in the theological stream as well.

After the failure of the older theological liberalism Karl Barth stepped into the vacuum, he held the higher critical views concerning the Bible that is that the Bible has many mistakes but he taught that a religious word could breakthrough from it this was the theological form of existentialism after existentialism had been accepted in a secular form thus one more thing was added to the area of non-reason along with the all of the other things that had been put there. In another way we must have admiration for the Swiss Karl Barth because while he was teaching in Germany, he spoke out clearly against Nazism in his Barmen Declaration of 1934. The teaching of Barth led to those theologians who said that the Bible isn't true in the areas of science and history, but they nevertheless looked for a religious experience from it and for many adherents of this theology the Bible does not give absolutes in regard to what is right or wrong either. Before you even come to the Bible begin to read it one must realize there are two ways to read the Bible one is a just one more religious things among thousands of other religious things which really are nothing more than another form of trip not very very different actually from a drug trip the other way is to understand that the Bible is truth and as such what we're listening to is something that is completely contrary to what we hear about us on every side. Namely merely statistical averages relativity relativistic things now having said this then I'd have to guard myself for the simple reason that it doesn't mean a person has to believe all this before he can begin to read the Bible and find truth in the Bible. I would just say in passing I was not raised in a Christian family, and I was reading much philosophy when I was a young man, and I didn't read the Bible because I believed it was true. I read it to simply have intellectual honesty, but I did do one thing. I read it exactly the way it was written beginning with Genesis 11 and going right on. I read it the same way I read another book expecting that what was being given was a straightforward statement of what was meant and that it wasn't to be read in a in a different level then I would read in the area of another kind of book and as I read it, it answered the questions which already by that time I realized the humanistic philosophy couldn't answer and over a six months period I came to conclude that it was truth but nevertheless we must keep in the back of our mind how are we reading the Bible just as another religious truth or am I really wrestling with the question of what is given in all the areas of which it speaks is this truth and compared to merely relativism. The new liberal theologian has no answer for the existence of evil and thus they are left with the same problem as the Hindu philosophers everything that is, is a part of God. This is Kali, the eastern Hindu feminine representation of God. Why the fangs and the skulls? In eastern religious thought cruelly is ultimately the same as non-cruelty because everything that now is, is part of that which is always been, a part of what they call God. Modern humanistic man has come to the same awful place a place in which it is not possible to know what is right and what is wrong nor why we should choose non-cruelty rather than cruelty.

Professor Paul Tillich of Harvard was one of the outstanding neo-Orthodox liberal theologians. A student who was present told me that when Professor Tillich was lecturing in Santa Barbara just before his death someone said to him Sir do you pray, and he said no but I meditate. He was left only with the word God with no certainty that there was anything more than just a word. The God is dead theologians which followed Tillich concluded logically that if they are only left with the word God they might as well cross out the word but for these theologians even if they do not say God is dead for them certain things are dead. All content about God is dead and all assurance of knowledge about a personal God is dead because for them God has not given to people truth about himself in the Bible and in the revelation Christ that is truth about himself which may be expressed in propositions in normal language. All they’re left with is religious words without content but with that emotion that certain religious words still brings with them and that is all and here is what comes next these highly motivational religious words out of our religious past but separated from the content which the Bible originally gave them are now used for manipulation, manipulation in such areas as a change in sexual ethic but also legal and political manipulation. If God is dead, if content about God is dead, if the knowledge of a personal God who has not been silent but has given his truth is dead then everything for which God gives an answer and meaning is dead as well and yet people no matter who they say they are cry out for meaning and values and this place of tension is where modern man has come upon his humanist base, and this is where he is. When we think of Christ of course we think of his substitutionary death upon the cross. When he who claimed to be God died in a substitutionary way and as such his death had infinite value and as we accept that gift raising the empty hands of faith and accepting it with no humanistic elements we have that which is real life and that isn't being in relationship to the infinite personal God who is there and being in a personal relationship to him but Christ brings life in another way that often is not as clearly thought about perhaps and that is that he connects himself with what the Bible teaches in his teaching and as such he is a Prophet, as well as a savior and it's up on the basis of what he taught and the Bible teaches because he himself wraps these together that we have life instead of death in the sense of having some knowledge that is more than man can have from himself, beginning from himself alone. Both of these elements are the place where Christ gives us life.