Post-Modern Existentialism

Mark Musser

Thielicke’s book provides a biographical sketch of some of the most important thinkers of western thought. He begins with Rene Descartes (1596-1650) and ends with a very romantic portrayal of Paul Tillich (1886-1965), his personal friend, in a "long winding” existential "road” which the Beatles could not have sung any better. In between Descartes and Tillich is seen Reimarus, Lessing, Kant, Humboldt, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Strauss, Kierkegaard, Hoffmann, Ritschl, Feuerbach, Marx, Herrmann, Rothe, Bierdemann, Troeltsch, Heim, Kahler, Freud, Bloch, Satre, Barth, and Bultmann. Yet for the sake of existential correctness, Thielicke is careful to point out his book should not be considered a historical survey of such men and their intellect, but rather be understood as personal, existentialist dialogues with each of them to help everyone understand how to have an adult conversation with people greatly influenced by such rock stars of the western world over the last few centuries. Thanks to them, people no longer accept truth uncritically from the outside or the top down in any kind of heteronomous medieval manner, but rather are autonomously enlightened.

Thielicke thus believes the road from the Enlightenment to Existentialism - from the worship of reason, to the holistic celebration of all existential life including the whole personality, will, and emotions – is a relatively good one in spite of some problems, misnomers, and needed corrections against certain extremist positions throughout his biographical sketch. The worship of reason in the Enlightenment only needs to be corrected and rounded out by existentialist thought, particularly of the theological variety, with doses of Kant and Hegel to limit, historicize, relativize, and synthesize along the way. He even suggests that Kant was existential to a large degree since the German master defined the Enlightenment as the "courage” to use one’s own reason. The Enlightenment in Germany was thus not about increasing knowledge, but about inspiring courage.

Yet, such an existentialist approach artificially divides history between reason, mind, empiricism, and what so many call "being,” all of which lies at the very heart as to what is so wrong with any and all forms of existentialism. A history existentially presented is a contradiction of terms. Existentialism refuses to acknowledge the full facticity of existential personages of the historical past since it improperly divides their reasoning minds from their wills, passions, and emotions.

Existence always trumps thought in every existentialist worldview. The cult of personality, will and emotions are always supreme in every existentialist approach to life so that it invariably downplays intellectual history as anything worthy of study. While the worship of reason is bad enough. The worship of personality, will, passion, and emotion, are actually far worse. Neither should it be understood as a form of progressivism as so many presume, including Thielicke. It is, in fact, a retrogression into personal destruction as it willfully emotes against God-given reason, wisdom, and common sense that is actually part and parcel of the very structures of the created existential world surrounding humanity from all sides, not to mention the image of God by which man was physically and existentially fashioned.

While existentialism everywhere extolls holism and holistic values of the whole man, it invariably denigrates the rational mind in the process. Reason becomes dominated by raw experience alone so that it invariably devolves into various forms of sullied existentialism where will, passions, emotions, politics, and society surround, limit, and greatly downplay the critical importance of the rational mind. Holism cuts the mind out so that the holistic existential self becomes a veritable headless horseman who, since Kant, has become the primary educator of the western modernist/ postmodernist world now steeped in relativism and nihilism. Existentialism took the worship of reason in the Enlightenment, and converted it into the cult of nihilism, all the while extolling the great values of the holistic, existential, autonomous self who is now so adultlike he answers to no one and nothing – and it took the removal of the mind to get there. In so doing, holistic existentialism displays its own hypocritical bankruptcy since it must remove the transcendental mind in order to become true to one’s existential self – which is a complete inversion of the Cartesian Enlightenment.

Yet, hypocritically, at the same time they still extoll the values of the Enlightenment as long as it is used to attacked the historicity of the Scriptures and promote evolutionary theory. The Enlightenment only needs correction if it happens to begin critiquing the existential self who is, in fact, above all criticism – all masked-up behind a mindless, irrational fantasy world of mystical religion untouched by the empirical realities and criticisms of the real, experiential world everyone lives in. Worse, too many theological existentialists , Thielicke included, all in various ways and in varying degrees, want to place Christianity in the same mindless or mystical existential plan allegedly far and away and safe from the attacks of reason and rationality against the presumed outdated Scriptures of both the Old and New Testaments. Rather than question the Enlightenment’s critical historiography against the Bible, they accepted it, but then pushed back against the Enlightenment from the presumed higher ground of holistic values when it impinged upon their own existentialist views. Christians thus need to learn to do likewise.

Not only does such an approach invariably lead to mindless nihilism that is not worth the time to study or defend since it becomes an exercise in futility and meaninglessness , but it also creates many barriers to the full truth of the historical past, particularly of the biblical past, since the intellect is considered to be so against the existence of existentialism. In short, existentialism invariably obfuscates the authentic truth of what really happened in all of its full existential reality as demanded by any true assessment of all the facts which transpired historically speaking precisely because the mind is just as factually important as the will and emotions are, if not even moreso. To value existence over mind is itself a process of thought. A true existentialism must face the full thrust of all the facts of history, personal, intellectual, emotional and otherwise – but modern/ postmodern existentialism refuses to do just that. They thus contradict their own approach to the existential world they live in. Thielicke is no different, and commits all the same academic sins so characteristic of so many existentialists . In many ways, Modern Faith and Thought, existentially understood, is a contradiction of terms, an oxymoron of postmodernist proportions.

Sadly, but thanks to his own irrationalism, Thielicke is unable to truly understand the great problem of postmodern nihilism. The nihilistic belief in nothing has captivated the entire western world these days thanks to the same rock stars Thielicke sympathizes with throughout his entire book. Contradictorily , he writes his book to try and help those drowning in postmodernism. Yet such was a nihilism he himself participated in since he refuses to seriously rebuke those who promoted it all along. He instead existentially sympathizes with them too much and is thus unable to counter the madness of our postmodern times in any serious, substantive way. This is shown particularly in his criticism of Marx since he is all too quiet with regard to Nietzsche, Heidegger, and the pathological rise of National Socialism. Such a blind spot leaves a huge Germanic hole as deep as the abyss that was the holocaust which still haunts the entire edifice of western thought. While Thielicke virtually suggests Marxism was an early form of economic existentialism rather than true social science, he is completely oblivious to the Nietzschean triumph of the existentialist will the Nazis themselves had imbibed deeply from that he was forced to live through.

Like so many today, Thielicke was/is unable to understand the very existentialist road blocks he suffered through during the Nazi era, were all brought to him through the same philosophy he himself uncritically supports. Completely contrary to his own personalized philosophy, existentialism is just another religious abstraction.

My sympathies with theological existentialism these days are pretty much zero. In days gone by when I did not really understand the movement, I tolerated it to some extant and gave it a pass of sorts - even though I knew there was some ugly stuff lurking beneath the surface of its existential flesh. Theological existentialism has done much damage to the western world, particularly in bibliology and theology. Not only did it capitulate to the false rationalism and historical criticism against the Bible, but has paved the way to modern and postmodern nihilism that has become a virtual cult these days. At the end of the day, theological existentialism is perhaps the most subtle form of Docetism ever taught as it tries to recover the personality of God's Person from the Bible, but in denying the historicity of the text, takes a flying leap into the irrational beyond with no controls on meaning so that Christianity becomes yet another religious dreams of sorts unwed to the real world in which we live in. All strange stuff with lots of mental gymnastics in the process as with Emil Brunner, Karl Barth, and of course, the father of it all, Soren Kierkegaard.

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