faith

I was out of town when the Philosophy Club group discussed the chapter "Faith" from the book "The Existentialist's Survival Guide" a few months ago. Now I've re-read it, my take is as follows:

The chapter started with the author--a non-practicing Catholic--recalling one accidental visit to a church one late afternoon when his original intent was to a bar, and could not work up a single candle at the chapel to light up for his long deceased father. As he left the church, feeling silly with such non-serendipitous event, a question nevertheless popped up in his head: Do we lose our faith or we push it away?

It's easy for a modern man to revolt against a faith whose truths are based on the "indisputable facts" of virgin birth and bodily resurrection. The argument that "God is beyond human understanding" sounds hollow and apologetic. Religion as a category could well be written off as an antiquated invention by humans for humans, their needs for assurance and protection at basic, and meaning and purpose at higher up psycho-emotional-spiritual levels.

For existentialists such as Camus, the conflict between our need for meaning and a meaningless world is the absurd. His prescription is that we accept the futility of our innermost desires and remain faithful to that recognition of the absurd.

Kierkegaard disagrees. In his book "Fear and Trembling" he writes:

"If a human being did not have an eternal consciousness, if underlying everything there were only a wild, fermenting power that writhing in dark passions produced everything, be it significant or insignificant, if a vast, never appeased emptiness hid beneath everything, what would life be then but despair? ... If a generation passed through the world as a ship through the sea, as wind through the desert, an unthinking and unproductive performance, if an eternal oblivion, perpetually hungry, lurked for its prey and there were no power strong enough to wrench that away from it--how empty and devoid of consolation life would be!"

"But precisely for that reason it is not so," Kierkegaard adds. That is, there is a God who watches over us and therefore life is good.

For Kierkegaard, the need for God does not reveal a lack. Just because our belief in God stems from a need for God, it doesn't follow that God does not exist. Or, as C. S. Lewis puts it: “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

Faith then, according to Kierkegaard, is:

A private affair between the individual and God, whose edict may create a "teleological suspension of the ethical," such as the story of Abraham binding his son Isaac on the altar shows.

An offense to the understanding. Jesus was not a sage with a message about teaching us to love one another, but a rebel whose words and acts offended the religious orders of the day.

The right framework for true self-knowledge. True-self is a particular, always in flux, always in becoming. Without God in the picture, it can easily lose hold of itself.

Not standard answers or sure-handed practices. Where there is certainty, there is no risk, and where there is no risk, there is no faith.

In the end, faith is trust. When reality slams the door on our fingers, we either wince and try to sustain trust in God, or we let go of him, as though God were a friend who betrayed us, when in truth it is we who push him away.

love

The Philosophy Club meetup group I've been attending since last year has focused their discussions on topics from the book "The Existentialist's Survival Guide" by Gordon Marino in the past few months. Due to the on-going pandemic, the meetup was canceled this week but we were encouraged to continue sharing our thoughts in alternative ways possible. So I wrote and shared with the group my take on the chapter titled "Love":

As usual, Mr. Marino meanders through thoughts of various existentialist writers, along with his personal episodic moments-of-truth stories to touch on many aspects of the subject: What is love (in layman's terms and in categories: erotic, brotherly, selfless), are we capable of love (or we can only love ourselves), guilt feelings (that seem unresolvable in a world where forgiveness is no longer possible), are we as different as we appear (or really the same deep down), does true love exist (maybe once in a few centuries?), the emotional side of love (the tenderness of “open wound”), etc.

The main idea he then spent the latter third of the chapter, using Dostoyevsky's “Underground Man” story to explain, is that one has to deem oneself lovable before they can accept others' love and be capable of loving others as well.

Two issues on making thyself lovable: how to get rid of those self loathing feelings (guilt, shame, unworthiness, inadequacy, etc.), and how to avoid becoming a narcissist on the way to achieving self-love?

The answer to the first can be theological: a third party (God, religion) that can absolve the guilt/shame/unworthiness complex one has; or rational: by realizing all humans are equal, comparison is unnecessary, none is superior nor inferior to any other, therefore self loathing is unnecessary .

As to how not to become a narcissist while trying to love thyself, the book doesn't give a direct answer, but seems to indicate a non-human reference, an out-of-this-world role model is needed, so one can turn their egotistic eyes away from other human beings who they treat as mirrors of their own reflections anyway, and stop the endless struggle to establish themselves as a subject among others trying to do the same who are as flawed as they are in the first place.

And how can/does one love another person? Again a theological answer coming from Kierkegaard, is through the “command” of God, that asks His believers to "presuppose there is love in others" and do “love works” to uncover it; while a secular, existentialistic, but also Kierkegaardian answer, in my opinion, is treat it as a mystical goal that's unachievable but needs to be pursued anyway, all the way, by faith.