Page 40 - Ruminations

38. Existentialism: the enemies within

Existentialism had a strong following among college students,
political activists and religious rebels in the middle of the twentieth
century. It provided a good grounding for accepting ontological
monism and personal responsibility, achieved in practice by rigorous
self-analysis to eliminate falsehood and delusion. Yet it is gone,
sinking into history with a large crop of “-isms.” Why?
Owing to their entanglement with physics, psychology and
theology, all philosophies, ancient to modern, fail. Without a complete
divorce from those other three fields of thought, existentialism
ultimately fared no better than its predecessors. A cautionary tale may
thus be told about strange intellectual bedfellows.
First, the emotional reaction to this deicidal rejection of dualism,
driven by advances in empiricism and the proof that reality is a four-
dimensional continuum, is by many people to reserve a kernel of
denial as buffer against the dread arising from existential
meaninglessness. It is not easy to retain belief in one’s essence as mere
inauthentic reification of arbitrary and contingent values.
And that unease blends with psychological abandonment, a fear of
lost protective authority. Unavoidable relativism places the burden of
perceived choice and subjective justification back on the individual,
potentially a scary and unending trip through a hall of mirrors into the
unconscious. And that comes with accepting logic as a useless tool in
creating meaning within one’s life.
Finally, the origin of existentialism in the rejection of belief by
formerly religious thinkers is a clue to its character as an austere and
absolute substitute for a theology of complete enchantment and
commitment to unquestioned systems of belief. In the end, fidelity to
existentialism’s strictures resembled monkish discipline and self-
mortification—unnecessarily, as G. K. Chesterton pointed out.
As a replacement for ideology, existentialism asked too much of
human beings barely beginning to emerge from superstition. It was
particularly unfit for political struggles requiring faith in a cause (other
than anarchism), a hallmark of its heyday. More tragically, it may have
contributed to a rejection or misunderstanding of the implications of
some real advances in scientific knowledge—once called natural
philosophy.