Excerpt from B4: In the Twilight of Western Thought

(pp.119-124)

The question, "What is man?" occupies a central place in contemporary European thinking. This question is certainly not new. After every period in the history of Western thought, wherein all interest was concentrated upon the knowledge of the outer world, the immense universe, man began to feel unsatisfied. In this situation human reflection always turns again to the central riddle of man's own existence. As soon as this riddle begins to puzzle human thought, it seems as if the external world recedes from the focus of interest. In one of his splendid dialogues. Plato pictures his master, Socrates, as a man obsessed with but one aim in his search for wisdom, namely, to know himself. As long as I have not succeeded in learning to know myself, said Socrates, I have no time for meddling with other questions that seem to me trifles when compared with this.

In contemporary European thinking, however, the question, "What is man)," is no longer asked from a theoretical viewpoint merely. Much rather it has become a crucial issue for many thinkers because of the spiritual distress of Western society and the fundamental crisis of our culture. It may be that in America this crisis does not occupy the same central place in the reflection of the leading thinkers, as it does in Europe. Nevertheless, America, too, is concerned wit the same problem, since it belongs to the sphere of Western civilization.

What, then, is the character of this crisis? And why does the question, "What is man?," today sound like a cry of distress? The crisis of Western civilization is depicted as a complete decline of human personality, as the rise of the mass-man. This is imputed, by different leading thinkers, to the increasing supremacy of technology, and to the over-organization of modern society. The result, supposedly, is a process of depersonalizing of contemporary life. The modem mass-man has lost all personal traits. His pattern of behavior is prescribed by what is done in general. He shifts the responsibility for his behavior upon an impersonal society. And this society, in turn, seems to be ruled by the robot, the electronic brain, by bureaucracy fashion, organization and other impersonal powers. As a result, our contemporary society has no room for human personality, and for a real spiritual communion of person with person. Even the family and the church often can no longer guarantee a sphere of personal intercourse. Family life is, to a large degree, dislocated by increasing industrialization. The church itself is confronted with the danger of the depersonalization of congregational life, especially in the big cities.

In addition, the average, secularized man nowadays has lost any and all true interest in religion. He has fallen prey to a state of spiritual nihilism, i. e., he negates all spiritual values. He has lost all his faith, and denies any higher ideals than the satisfaction of his appetites. Even the Humanistic faith in mankind, and in the power of human reason to rule the world and to elevate man to a higher level of freedom and morality, has no longer any appeal to the mind of the present day mass-man. To him God is dead, and the two worlds wars have destroyed the Humanistic ideal of man. This modern man has lost himself, and considers himself cast into a world that is meaningless, that offers no hope for a better future.

Western civilization, which displays these terrible symptoms of spiritual decline, finds itself confronted with the totalitarian ideology of Communism. It tries to oppose the latter with the old ideas of democracy, freedom, and of inalienable human rights. But these ideas, too, have been involved in the spiritual crisis, which has sapped their very fundamentals. In earlier rimes, it is argued, they were rooted both in the Christian faith and in the Humanists's faith in reason. But the increasing relativism, which has affected our Western civilization, has left no room for a strong faith, since it has destroyed the belief in an absolute truth. The traditional faith, which gave man his inspiration, has to great extent been replaced by technical methods and organization. And in general it is due to such impersonal means that the traditional Christian and the Humanistic traits of our culture are outwardly maintained.

But Western civilization cannot be saved by technical and organizational means alone. The communistic world-power, whose ideology is still rooted in a strong faith, also has these means at its disposal and has used them very well. Besides, the atom bomb, which terminated the second world war, is no longer an American monopoly. This terrible invention of Western technology can only increase the fear of the impending ruin of our culture. The amazing technical development of Western society, which has produced the modern mass-man, will also destroy our civilization unless a way is found to restore human personality.

Existentialist philosophy as a response to the crisis

It is against this background of spiritual distress that the question: "What is man)" has become truly existential in contemporary European philosophy. It is no longer merely a question of theoretical interest. It has become, rather, a question concerning the whole existence of man in his spiritual anxiety. It is a question of to be or not to he. This also explains the powerful influence of contemporary personalistic and existentialistic philosophical trends upon European literature and upon the youth. Here it is no longer an abstract idealistic image of man as a rational and moral being, which is at issue. Rather, the new philosophical view of man is concerned with man in his concrete situation in the world, with his state of decay as tire contemporary mass-man, and with his possibilities of rediscovering himself as a responsible personality.

This philosophy no longer considers the intellect as the real center of human nature. It ha tried to penetrate rather to what is conceived to be the deepest root of human self-hood and the deepest cause of man's spiritual distress. Man is thrown into the world involuntarily. To sustain his life he is obliged to turn to the things that are at hand in his world. The struggle for existence characterizes man's life. But, in this situation of concern, man is in danger of losing himself as a free personality so that he delivers himself to the world. For the human selfhood surpasses all existing things. The human ego is free, it is not at hand as a concrete object. It is able to project its own future, and to say to its past, "I am no longer what I was yesterday. My future is still in my own hand. I can change myself. I can create my future by my own power." But when man reflects on this creative freedom of his selfhood, he is confronted with the deepest cause of his distress, namely, the anxiety and fear of death. Death is here not understood in the merely biological sense, in which it also applies to the animal, but much rather in the sense of the dark nothingness, the night without dawn, which puts an end to all human projects and makes them meaningless. This anxiety, this fear of death is usually suppressed, for such is the mass-man's depersonalized manner of existence. To arrive at a proper, personal existence, man should frankly, and by anticipation, confront himself with death as the nothingness which limits his freedom. He should realize that his freedom is a freedom unto death, ending in the dark nothingness. Thus this first existentialistic approach to human self-knowledge revealed a profoundly pessimistic view more hopeful possibility of rediscovering man's true personality. In accordance with the personalistic philosophy of Martin Buber, they pointed to the essential communal relation in our personal life. You and I are correlates, which presuppose each other. I cannot know myself without taking into account that my ego is related to the ego of my fellow-man. And I cannot really have a personal meeting with another ego without love. It is only by such a meeting in love that I can arrive at true self-knowledge and knowledge of my fellow-man.

In this way this philosophy, then, seemed to offer various perspectives for a more profound knowledge of man's selfhood. And there are also many theologians who are of the opinion that this existentialistic approach to the central problem of man's nature and destiny, is of a more biblical character than the traditional theological view of human nature, oriented to ancient Greek philosophy. I fear that this theological opinion testifies to a lack of self-knowledge in its radical biblical sense. It will presently appear why I think so.

However, let us first establish that the whole preceding diagnosis of the spiritual crisis of Western civilization fails today bare the root of the evil. For the symptoms of the spiritual decadence of this civilization, manifesting themselves in an increasing expansion of the nihilistic mind, cannot be explained by external causes. They are only the ultimate result of a religious process of apostasy, which started with the belief in the absolute self-sufficiency of the rational human personality and was doomed to end with the breaking down of this idol.

The meaning of the self

a) The transcendence of the self

How, then, can we arrive at real self-knowledge! The question: "Who is man?" contains a mystery that cannot be explained by man himself.

In the last century, when the belief in the so-called objective science was still predominant in the leading circles, it was supposed that by continued empirical research science would succeed in solving all the problems of human existence. Now there is, doubtless, a scientific way of acquiring knowledge about human existence. There are many special sciences which are concerned with the study of man. But each of them considers human life only from a particular viewpoint or aspect. Physics and chemistry, biology, psychology, historiopraphy, sociology, jurisprudence, ethics, and so forth, they all can furnish interesting information about man. But when one asks them: "What is man himself, in the central unity of his existence, in his selfhood?" then these sciences have no answer. The reason is that they are bound to the temporal order of our experience. Within this temporal order human existence presents a great diversity of aspects, just like the whole temporal world, in which man finds himself placed. Physics and chemistry inform us about the material constellation of the human body, and the electro-magnetic forces operating in it; biology lays bare the functions of our organic life; psychology gives us an insight into the emotional life of feeling and will, and has even penetrated to the unconscious sphere of our mind. History informs us about the development of human culture, linguistics about the human faculty of expressing thoughts and feelings by means of words and other symbolical signs; economics and jurisprudence study the economic and juridical aspects of human social life, and so forth. Thus every special science studies temporal human existence in one of its different aspects.

But all these aspects of our experience and existence within the order of time are related to the central unity of our consciousness, which we call our I, our ego. I experience, and I exist, and this I surpasses the diversity of aspects, which human life displays within the temporal order. The ego is not to be determined by any aspect of our temporal experience, since it is the central reference point of all of them. If man would lack this central I, he could not have any experience at all.

b) A critique of existentialism

Consequently, contemporary existentialistic philosophy rightly posited that it is not possible to acquire real self-knowledge by means of scientific research. But it pretended that its own philosophical approach to human existence does lead us to this self-knowledge. Science, so it says, is restricted to the investigation of what is given, to concrete objects at hand. But the human ego is not a given object. It has the freedom to create itself by contriving its own future. Existentialistic philosophy pretends that it is exactly directed upon the discovery of this freedom of the human I, in contrast to all the data at hand in the world.

But is it true that we can arrive at real self-knowledge in this way? Can this philosophy actually penetrate to the real center and root of our existence, as many contemporary theologians think) I am of the opinion that it is a vain illusion to think so.