“Man was born free yet he is everywhere in chains.” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762)
Part One of this essay endeavored to sketch a framework, rooted in Natural Law, around which individuals may pursue ultimate meaning. Part Two addresses questions of existence, of God, of personal identity, and of meaning.
Personal Identity
Ever since their primordial exile from the Garden of Eden, humans have endeavored to bring a sense of order and comprehension to the vagaries of life; to re-establish a personal identity, albeit one of their own imagination, and re-establish a meaningful existence in compensation for loss of their idyllic life in the serene Edenic garden.
Inextricably made in the metaphysical character of the Creator, yet rejecting the constraints of that condition, humans have perpetually sought answers to their confusing predicament. Created for communion, but separated from their Creator through misguided lifechoices, all that they do is to be positioned towards restoration of an authentic relationship. But unaware of the basis for this need, and unaware how to find succour, they indulge in futile new adventures and spiritual explorations to fill the gnawing emotional crevasse in their souls.
Hoping, serendipitously, to discover the answers they need, humans rebel against tradition; against the timeless principles and definitive ethical tenets characteristic of their civilization. Not for them the mundanity of a secure but traditional ordered existence; their souls perpetually striving for authenticity against the relentless kineticism of finite time. But, as individuals became further disillusioned by organized religion, fashionable situational ethics, relativist virtue and social injustice, they regress to a stygian nihilism devoid of hope in their search for an authentic life. These effects are perpetuated in the postmodern culture – evident in a populist emphasis on the therapeutic-self in search of understanding.
Existentialism
Searching to assuage the innate restlessness of the “untamed spirit” through an idiosyncratic grasp of the inextricably related triad of purpose, identity, and meaning is the common theme of 20th-century existentialist writer-philosophers. Existentialist theory is predicated upon a purposed dismissal of God’s existence.
Despite asserting that “He who has a why to live for, can bear almost any how,” Friedrich Nietzsche gleefully declared, “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.” His apparent satisfaction with God’s demise allows Nietzsche, and fellow existentialists, to negate the true source of meaning and purpose and, instead, replace it with freedom to create their own solipsistic structures. In a similar vein, playwright Samuel Beckett of the Absurdist Theatre movement, in his work Endgame, wrote of God, “The bastard. He doesn’t exist.” Allied to a resolute rejection of external ethical paradigms, especially those values emanating from natural law, is the default emphasis on humanist concocted morality and meaning.
The negation of absolutist authority creates a serious conundrum for the individual. Fyodor Dostoyevsky explained through his character Mitya in The Brothers Karamazov that, “If God doesn’t exist then man is the chief of the earth, of the universe. Only how is he going to be good without God? That’s the question.” Being “good,” being moral, decent and genuine, means embracing the ethical guidelines of a natural law construal, in the hope of restoration or redemption for sins or misadventure; and the hope of attaining wisdom despite the transience and seeming absurdity of life.
In 1946, Viktor Frankl, having survived Nazi death camps, stressed this truth in his book, Man’s Search for Meaning: “The search for meaning, not pleasure or power, is mankind’s central motivating force.” Even so, meaning, identity, and purpose – those essential elements of truth itself – cannot be found from introspection despite what intellectuals such as Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, members of the Eranos group, and prominent psycho-therapists believe with their concentration on the repressed inner-self for enlightenment.
Typically exposed to religion of one kind or another from childhood, many of these highly influential pursuers of truth were fully aware of the faith of their forebearers. In rejecting their historic faith, they generally embraced either atheism or Hellenist paganism. In the case of Sartre, however, it later came to light that faced with imminent death he, at last, privately conceded:
I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to God.
This pivotal revelation occurred at the very end of Sartre’s life, after a long and torturous ideological journey through substituted compilations of his own solipsistic fantasy.
As with Sartre, Camus and his circle rejected the relevance of absolutist tenets particularly those of a theistic origin. Samuel Mace perceived in his essay, The Promise of Realism, that Camus’ rejection of guiding principles “comes not from not having them, but from a willingness to abandon them to defeat or seek revenge on those who frustrate the attempt to live out a vision of a more perfect world.”
And that is the root of the matter: in the belief system of these intellectuals, the centrality of the ego, of the autonomous-self, supersedes all objective considerations of realism. Hence Camus’ preoccupation with Sisyphus and his rock, continually laboring in a vain hope of achieving insight into his confusing predicament; and Sartre with his nuanced, situational, ethics designed to circumvent natural law rubrics. In this way, existentialists of the time created a parallel reality, a matrix of their own fabrication, one which Mace described as a “will to reject the actual for the imaginable.”
This endeavour is seen, too, in the work of Basque writer, Miguel de Unamundo, whose Tragic Sense of Life (1912) is among the most significant existentialist novels of the early 20th century. De Unamundo rejected a life based on reason and reality in favour of an emotive, dualist, individualism powered by intense emotions. This is evident in his recount of the absurd-hero Don Quixote with his tragic-comic battle against windmills, reminiscent of Camus’ Sisyphus and his assiduous struggle with the rock. Don Quixote’s struggles exemplify the passionate warrior striving to reconcile the dichotomy between external cosmic irrationality and internal idealism through a confused alternate reality of his own concoction. Like most existentialists, De Unamundo avoids realism, preferring his own world of ideas. In a sound comment, T. S. Eliot affirms in ‘Burnt Norton’ – the first of his Four Quartets – that “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.”
Death and Life
Camus’ concept of the absurd was designed as a counter to Nietzsche’s dark diagnosis that ‘God is dead’ and therefore no absolute meaning, no transition through life with a satisfactory telos, is possible. Yet the result is not much different, as both concepts inevitably result in a nihilistic endgame of extinction. Robert Royal described Camus’ position as a choice between “God and nothing.” Camus chose the latter.
In contrast, English Renaissance poet-priest, John Donne (1572 – 1631) expresses his amazement at life: “It is an astonishment to be alive and life calls on you to be astonished.” Unlike Camus, Donne rejoiced in life, enjoying its surprising beauty and opportunity for love and fulfilment. Donne embraced the authenticity of his purpose on earth, resulting from a deep connection to his Redeemer. Donne’s values, his faith, love, and hope were realized within the beneficent parameters of his faith.
Unable to form a lucid alternative reality free of ethical absolutes, Camus and his circle are forced to explore critical issues such as suicide. In Camus’ texts, ‘The Rebel’ and ‘Myth of Sisyphus,’ these issues are made plausible due to absence of moral guidelines and opportunity for an eternal transition. Camus argued, in his preface to Myth of Sisyphus, that “without the aid of eternal values” meaning is absurd. Therefore, in an environment of cosmic uncertainty nihilist outcomes like suicide become justified. Camus’ nominalist theory of the absurd is that there is no meaning to life, either in a personal or universal sense, for life is absurd, incomprehensible. Camus ignores the truism that the definitive moral and eternal precepts of theistically-derived primary natural law tenets, which he summarily rejects, impart the meaning he so anxiously desires.
Sartre’s Meaninglessness
Sartre’s theories captivated intellectual life after the Second World War. His Nobel Prize citation, of 1964, reads: “For his work which, rich in ideas and filled with the spirit of freedom and the quest for truth, has exerted a far-reaching influence on our age.” Sartre, initially influenced by a range of philosophical predecessors such as Georg Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger and others, went on to crystalise the concept of the absurd in his book, Being and Nothingness.
There, Sartre explained the “Absurd” as “That which is meaningless. Thus man’s existence is absurd because his contingency finds no external justification.” Quite ironic, considering he rejects all objective values. Sartre elaborates that man’s “projects are absurd because they are directed towards an unobtainable goal – the desire to become God or to be simultaneously the free For-itself and the absolute In-itself.”
Still, in Existentialism and Human Emotions, Sartre incongruously believes that “the fundamental project of human reality is to say that man is the being whose project is to be God. To be man means to reach toward being God.” Sartre then adds, “Or, if you prefer, man fundamentally is the desire to be God.” He therefore endorses the primeval heresy of eritus sicut Deus (‘to be like God’), while earlier arguing the impossibility of attaining such divinity. This oxymoron results in existential ‘nausea’ – the absurdity of life in cosmic meaningless. In Sartre’s view, asserting the autotheistic-self, inescapably leads to an untenable situation due to absence of an external authority providing clear meaning.
Sartre’s deduction imitates Adam and Eve’s realization that their declaration of independence, their freedom from absolute moral paradigms – those first principles of human existence divinely imparted to them, and later redacted in the Mosaic codes – was untenable, resulted in anxiety, in angst. Hence their experiment with fig leaves in a futile effort to re-establish their sacred position.
It was Sir Roger Scruton who, in 2023 scathingly regarded Sartre’s contribution to modernity as an “undermining of structures of bourgeois society, the scoffing at manners and morals and ruining the institutions upon which he depends for his exalted status.” Earlier, in 2018, Scruton described this approach as a “culture of repudiation,” indicating Sartre’s negative attitude towards life, towards traditional ethics and culture, and the search for transcendence.
Alternative Truth
The repudiation of theistic primary truths is what compelled existentialists to fabricate alternative paradigms of meaning. Their objective, as it is of all secular humanists, is to purge the literal-historical character of Judeo-Christian precepts from the public arena. In this manner, they likewise reject, in favour of their own ideological theories, the moral components of natural law inherent in every human heart.
Rejection of exterior moral principles inescapably results in the default position of a subjectively derived morality. As Pope Benedict XVI points out, “the natural law – traditional morality – is the sole source of all value judgements.” In his view, the moral problem results from the fact that society has “separated itself from its primeval testimony,” by which he implies the ethical natural law as later redacted.
Paul Johnson, in his work Intellectuals, cautions his readers to “beware of intellectuals,” explaining that “intellectuals habitually forget that people matter more than concepts and must come first. The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas.” The intellectuals referred to are those influencers, philosophers, and visionaries of the age who reject the traditional religious foundations of the culture in favor of their own solipsistic and nominalist philosophical fabrications of virtue.
The upshot is seen in a growing cohort of confused individuals vainly seeking authenticity through a compote of irrational tribalist identity ideologies, captivating hedonistic traps, and assorted paganist, New Age, beliefs. A 2024 memoir by New Yorker, Emily Witt, presents a contemporary example. She explains her intense and frantic drug-fuelled raves in sordid clubs are efforts to “find community, to feel authentic, and to encounter transcendence.” She also reveals her hedonist actions are attempts to conceal a fraught “expression of nihilism.” Camus’ Sisyphus, and the futility of struggling with his infernal rock to attain meaning, find concordance in Witt’s distressing worldview – a too-prevalent mindset in the postmodern era.
Conclusion
For Witt, and like-minded contemporaries, once Judeo-Christian pathways to primary truths are rejected, they inexorably find themselves caught in the nihilistic trap of Camus’ absurd universe, offering a lonely life without meaningful purpose, devoid of hope, and true freedom. This is the sad consequence of striving for a life free of theistic natural law tenets, free of definitive moral guidance, and free of a meaningful relationship with their Creator.
Finally, John Milton’s words, in 1667, illuminate the perilous predicament of a human spirit untethered to natural law considerations and disconnected from the source of meaning: “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.”
