Unamuno, Berdyaev, Marcel: A Comparative Study in Christian Existentialism [1st ed. 2021] 3030819981, 9783030819989

Table of contents :
Preface
Acknowledgements
Contents
Acronyms
1: Introduction: Existentialism, Religious and Non-Religious
2: Reason and the Philosopher
2.1 Unamuno: Philosophizing beyond Reason
2.2 Berdyaev: Philosophizing through Intuition
2.3 Marcel: Philosophizing from Experience
2.4 Conclusions
3: Abstract Man and Concrete Man
3.1 Unamuno: The Split Self
3.2 Berdyaev: The Creative Self
3.3 Marcel: The Incarnate Self
3.4 Conclusions
4: Freedom and Contingency
4.1 Unamuno: Freedom as Ideal
4.2 Berdyaev: Freedom as Spirit
4.3 Marcel: Freedom as Value
4.4 Conclusions
5: Faith and Intellection
5.1 Unamuno: Faith as Projection
5.2 Berdyaev: Faith as Self-Revelation
5.3 Marcel: Faith as Fidelity
5.4 Conclusions
6: Hope and Anxiety
6.1 Unamuno: The Search for Ontological Security
6.2 Berdyaev: Redemption from Nothingness
6.3 Marcel: Overcoming the Human Predicament
6.4 Conclusions
7: Love and Egotism
7.1 Unamuno: From Self-Love to Universal Love
7.2 Berdyaev: Love as Transfiguration
7.3 Marcel: From Possessive Love to Oblative Love
7.4 Conclusions
8: Individual and Community
8.1 Unamuno: Reconciling the Irreconcilable
8.2 Berdyaev: Towards a City of God
8.3 Marcel: Degradation and Its Antidote
8.4 Conclusions
9: Evil and Suffering
9.1 Unamuno: Suffering as the Discovery of Self and Other
9.2 Berdyaev: Sourcing Evil, Defying Suffering
9.3 Marcel: Evil as Experience
9.4 Conclusions
10: Immortality and God
10.1 Unamuno: Answering the Mortal Question
10.2 Berdyaev: The Noumenon in Eternity
10.3 Marcel: Thou Shalt Not Die
10.4 Conclusions
11: Conclusion: Existentialism and Christianity
Bibliography
A. Primary Works
1. Works by Unamuno
2. Works by Berdyaev
3. Works by Marcel
4. Works by Other Existentialist Thinkers (Including Anthologies of Existentialism)
5. Works by Other Philosophers and Writers
B. Secondary Works
Name Index
Subject Index

Citation preview

Unamuno, Berdyaev, Marcel A Comparative Study in Christian Existentialism

C.A. Longhurst

Unamuno, Berdyaev, Marcel

C. A. Longhurst

Unamuno, Berdyaev, Marcel A Comparative Study in Christian Existentialism

C. A. Longhurst London, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-81998-9    ISBN 978-3-030-81999-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81999-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and ­transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

Ever since existentialism made its first impact between the two World Wars it has attracted the attention of scholars and readers in a continuous way. Whether the assessments have been favourable or unfavourable— and reactions to this mode of approaching the human situation have veered from the impulsively enthusiastic to the viscerally hostile—its repercussion on western thought and letters cannot be disputed. Even to-day, three-quarters of a century after its heyday, the existentialists’ attempt to re-think mankind’s peculiar place in the cosmos still intrigues and produces regular revisions and re-assessments. The current book is not so much about existentialism in general as about one of its modes, the Christian mode, that existed alongside various other modes, Jewish, agnostic, atheistic, and of course literary existentialism which straddled all other modes. As the major religion of the West, Christianity has exerted a far-reaching influence on western civilization. How did it affect the new philosophy and vice-versa? This book studies existentialism as seen through the work of three existentialist writers, a Spaniard, a Russian, and a Frenchman, for all of whom Christianity was personally important. They were philosophers, enquirers into the human condition, not theologians, and their reflections should not be confused with those of existential theology. Nevertheless their Christian outlook, as distinct from Christian dogma, made a difference, and it is largely with this difference that this book is concerned. Was there a v

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distinct Christian existentialism, as the atheist Jean-Paul Sartre suggested, or were there only existentialists some of whom just happened, coincidentally, to be members of a Christian Church? There are many books on existentialism and some on what is usually called religious existentialism. They are typically galleries of thinkers studied separately, with a chapter on each. The strategy adopted here is different: the three chosen thinkers are studied under specific themes and their contributions compared with one another’s and to some extent with the ideas of leading non-Christian or non-religious existentialists. These three thinkers have been chosen for two main reasons. Firstly, for their undoubted commitment to a Christian vision. And secondly, because they figure far less frequently and prominently in collective studies than their counterparts in agnostic and atheistic existentialism, Jaspers, Heidegger, and Sartre, considered the doyens of existentialist thought. The introductory first chapter explains my approach in the context of other approaches to existentialism, especially religious existentialism. Each of Chaps. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and 10 is given over to a theme. In each case, after a brief introduction to the particular theme, Sections 1, 2, and 3 are devoted to Unamuno, Berdyaev, and Marcel respectively. Section 4 is summative and comparative. Chapter 11 is a more general conclusion that considers the stance and special contribution of these three Christian thinkers in the light of existentialism as a whole. I have chosen a comparative approach in the belief that comparison aids understanding both of individual approaches and of the general phenomenon. Precisely because I deal with three existentialist thinkers to whom Christianity was important, the book covers certain areas not covered by books on existentialism in general. My overall aim is to throw further light on the interplay between existentialism and Christianity. It should also, I hope, offer something of a corrective to the widespread view of existentialism that sees it in predominantly Sartrian terms. The many works considered here were originally written by their respective authors in Spanish, Russian, and French. It would have been wholly impractical to quote in these three languages. Fortunately in the cases of Berdyaev and Marcel there are English translations available of virtually their entire production, and in the case of the latter mostly produced during the author’s lifetime and approved by him. Not having

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Russian myself, I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the translations of Berdyaev, and I have noticed discrepancies in the few cases where there is more than one translation of the same work. In general I have chosen the later translation where there are two, especially those that have been done for a particular series. The case of Unamuno is more complicated. He was such a prolific writer that only his major works have been translated and this has been done by many different translators. For the sake of consistency, and because so many of the works here quoted are only available in Spanish, (chiefly press articles and innumerable shorter essays), I have opted to offer my own translations and, for the benefit of those who prefer to check, have added the original in square brackets. The Tragic Sense of Life [Del sentimiento trágico de la vida] is sufficiently well known for the English title to be used throughout, but the titles of all other works by Unamuno are the original Spanish ones. Quotations from works by Unamuno, Berdyaev, and Marcel are followed by a three-letter acronym referring to the source, with the appropriate page number. Details of the editions appear in the bibliography. In all other cases the author-date system is used throughout for the sake of conciseness, with full details in the bibliography. Works that are paradigmatic of European existentialism, and thus familiar, are mentioned by their English titles, but in other cases the original title is used (with the English version if appropriate). A word about style. I value grammatical correctness above political correctness. The telephone company’s recorded message to the effect that ‘the caller did not leave their number’ where ‘a number’ would be just as intelligible seems to me a misguided concession to fashionable ‘gender’ consciousness. No matter how many historical precedents there have been to try to counter the gender inadequacies of the English language, I find that the use of ‘they’ and its derivatives ‘them’ and ‘their’ where the antecedent noun is in the singular grates upon the philological ear. ‘He/ she’ and ‘his/her’ seem acceptable on occasion but become tiresome and self-consciously artificial when used repeatedly. In my use of the word ‘man’ I am simply following the example of the writers I am studying. Simone de Beauvoir, author of no less a feminist vindication than The Second Sex, has no qualms about using ‘man’ and ‘men’ in her existentialist text The Ethics of Ambiguity. The word has no sexual connotations whatsoever: it stands for the genus homo, which encompasses both vir

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and mulier. ‘He’ and ‘his’ apply more conventionally and less conspicuously to this general use of ‘man’ than ‘she’, ‘hers’, ‘they’ or ‘their’, as indeed ‘he’ applies to a sexless God, who in Christianity has a mother but no spouse of either sex. The closure of libraries for much of 2020 has made life difficult for the researcher, and I am aware that there are some omissions in my bibliography. I hope nevertheless that I have consulted nearly all of the most relevant material. I should like to express my gratitude to staff at Senate House Library, University of London, for setting up a secure collection point and making it possible to borrow books during the long period of enforced closure of the library itself. To the anonymous external reader of my manuscript goes my gratitude for constructive and helpful comments. I should also like to offer my warmest thanks to Mr Brendan George, Commissioning Editor at Palgrave Macmillan, for his enormous patience and understanding attitude in his dealings with a pernickety author. London, UK

C. A. Longhurst December 2020

Acknowledgements

I should like to thank the editors of the Bulletin of Spanish Studies for permission to re-use (mostly in Chap. 5) some material which first appeared in ‘¿Qué es eso de creer? Religious Belief in Miguel de Unamuno and Gabriel Marcel’ BSS, XCII:4 (2015), 527–548.

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Contents

1 Introduction: Existentialism, Religious and Non-Religious  1 2 Reason and the Philosopher 43 2.1 Unamuno: Philosophizing beyond Reason  46 2.2 Berdyaev: Philosophizing through Intuition  54 2.3 Marcel: Philosophizing from Experience  61 2.4 Conclusions  67 3 Abstract Man and Concrete Man 71 3.1 Unamuno: The Split Self  75 3.2 Berdyaev: The Creative Self  85 3.3 Marcel: The Incarnate Self  94 3.4 Conclusions 101 4 Freedom and Contingency107 4.1 Unamuno: Freedom as Ideal 110 4.2 Berdyaev: Freedom as Spirit 123 4.3 Marcel: Freedom as Value 133 4.4 Conclusions 141

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5 Faith and Intellection145 5.1 Unamuno: Faith as Projection 152 5.2 Berdyaev: Faith as Self-Revelation 165 5.3 Marcel: Faith as Fidelity 170 5.4 Conclusions 178 6 Hope and Anxiety183 6.1 Unamuno: The Search for Ontological Security 189 6.2 Berdyaev: Redemption from Nothingness 196 6.3 Marcel: Overcoming the Human Predicament 204 6.4 Conclusions 211 7 Love and Egotism217 7.1 Unamuno: From Self-Love to Universal Love 219 7.2 Berdyaev: Love as Transfiguration 229 7.3 Marcel: From Possessive Love to Oblative Love 237 7.4 Conclusions 250 8 Individual and Community255 8.1 Unamuno: Reconciling the Irreconcilable 259 8.2 Berdyaev: Towards a City of God 269 8.3 Marcel: Degradation and Its Antidote 278 8.4 Conclusions 284 9 Evil and Suffering291 9.1 Unamuno: Suffering as the Discovery of Self and Other 296 9.2 Berdyaev: Sourcing Evil, Defying Suffering 304 9.3 Marcel: Evil as Experience 311 9.4 Conclusions 316 10 Immortality and God323 10.1 Unamuno: Answering the Mortal Question 329 10.2 Berdyaev: The Noumenon in Eternity 339 10.3 Marcel: Thou Shalt Not Die 347 10.4 Conclusions 355

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11 Conclusion: Existentialism and Christianity365 Bibliography403 Name Index415 Subject Index421

Acronyms

For the sake of conciseness, the following acronyms are used in the text to refer to works by Unamuno, Berdyaev, and Marcel. Full details of the source are given in the bibliography. In the case of Unamuno the editon of the Obras completasused is that edited by Ricardo Senabre (Unamuno, Obras completas. Edición de Ricardo Senabre. 10 vols. Madrid: Biblioteca Castro, 1995), unless otherwise indicated. Unamuno ABS Abel Sánchez ADC La agonía del cristianismo ADE Alrededor del estilo ADJ ‘Almas de jóvenes’ ADN ‘¡Adentro!’ AYD ‘Aforismos y definiciones’ CEP ‘Contra el purismo’ CIF ‘Cientificismo’ CYC ‘Civilización y cultura’ DIN Diario íntimo DST The Tragic Sense of Life [Del sentimiento trágico de la vida] EIE ‘El individualismo español’ ERM ‘El resorte moral’ ESF ‘Escepticismo fanático’ ESV ‘El secreto de la vida’ xv

xvi Acronyms

ETC En torno al casticismo EUR ‘Sobre la europeización’ IYE ‘Intelectualidad y espiritualidad’ LDH ‘La dignidad humana’ LID ‘La ideocracia’ LSF ‘La selección de los Fulánez’ MAP ‘Materialismo popular’ MIR ‘Mi religión’ NIE Niebla NMU ‘Nuestras mujeres’ NYE ‘Los naturales y los espirituales’ PPP ‘¡Plenitud de plenitudes y todo plenitud!’ PYE ‘La patria y el ejército’ QEV ‘¿Qué es verdad?’ RAM ‘¡Ramplonería! SCS ‘Sobre la consecuencia la sinceridad’ SFE ‘Sobre la filosofía española’ SFU ‘Sobre el fulanismo’ SLL ‘Sobre la lujuria’ SLS ‘Sobre la soberbia’ SMB San Manuel Bueno, mártir SOL ‘La soledad’ UAE ‘A una aspirante a escritora’ VDQ Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho VYV ‘Verdad y vida’ Berdyaev BAE DAH DAR DOM DOS FAS FMW MCA MOH RSC SAF

The Beginning and the End The Divine and the Human Dream and Reality The Destiny of Man Dostoyevsky: An Interpretation Freedom and the Spirit The Fate of Man in the Modern World The Meaning of the Creative Act The Meaning of History The Realm of the Spirit and the Realm of Caesar Slavery and Freedom

 Acronyms 

SAR SAS TAR

Spirit and Reality Solitude and Society Truth and Revelation

Marcel BAH CRF DOW EBH HMV MMS MOB MOL MPJ PAI POE PRM SEA TBW TPL TSN TWB

Being and Having Creative Fidelity The Decline of Wisdom The Existential Background of Human Dignity Homo Viator. Introduction to the Metaphysic of Hope Man Against Mass Society The Mystery of Being A Mystery of Love Metaphysical Journal (1914–1923) Presence and Immortality The Philosophy of Existentialism Problematic Man Searchings The Broken World Three Plays Thou Shalt Not Die Tragic Wisdom and Beyond

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1 Introduction: Existentialism, Religious and Non-Religious

In the belief that comparison aids understanding, this book offers a comparative study of three existentialist thinkers who have for the most part been kept at the margins of that distinct manner of philosophizing which had such an enormous impact on European writing for close on half a century, between World War One and the 1960s. This marginalization is especially true in the case of the Spaniard Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) and the Russian Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948), but is to a lesser extent also applicable to the Frenchman Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973), who has not received the degree of scholarly attention afforded to his compatriot Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) or the Germans Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), the three emblematic figures of European existentialism. The concerns typical of existentialist philosophizing also had a wide impact on imaginative literature, with Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1996), Albert Camus (1913–1960), and Samuel Beckett (1906–1989) being the names most frequently associated with existentialist literature. Sartre of course cultivated literary genres (narrative fiction and drama) as well as the philosophical essay, Unamuno was a polymath who cultivated every genre, and Marcel wrote as much drama as philosophy. I shall here be concerned principally with © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. A. Longhurst, Unamuno, Berdyaev, Marcel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81999-6_1

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the philosophical essay, but will not hesitate to bring in literary works where they are directly relevant to the topic under discussion. Beyond the comparative study of these three existentialist thinkers there lies the broader question of whether existentialism and Christianity are truly compatible. Each after all offers its own view of the human situation. How these three thinkers managed to reconcile both should throw some light on the question. But why these particular three? While any choice will to a degree reflect personal preference, I would justify the choice of Unamuno, Berdyaev and Marcel by (a) their date of birth, earlier than most; (b) their early contributions to existentialist thinking; (c) their clear desire to bring to bear a Christian outlook on their existentialist philosophizing; (d) the fact that they are philosophers rather than theologians; (e) the relative, though by no means total, neglect of their writings in studies of existentialism. I would wish to emphasize their existentialist credentials, and not simply refer to their thought as ‘existential philosophy’. This latter definition can be made to apply to a substantial number of thinkers going back to the Middle Ages and even Graeco-Roman times. ‘Existentialist philosophy’ on the other hand is much more narrowly circumscribed—it belongs to the first half of the twentieth century—although its origins are a matter of debate. My aim, therefore, is to bring out the contribution that my three chosen writers have made to existentialist philosophy rather than to the broader and rather more timeless existential philosophy. There are of course affinities, but existentialism has much clearer historical delimitations, even if a precise definition of its philosophy is hard to come by. It can be described by its interests and its approach, but not by any particular position or outcome. The thematic approach adopted here is unusual but by no means unique. Another, and in many ways excellent, example is David Cooper’s Existentialism:A Reconstruction. We have some topics in common, such as freedom and anxiety; but I have to cover various other aspects that are important for the Christian existentialist and not necessarily so for the agnostic or atheistic existentialist. Moreover Cooper’s book makes use of an abstraction (the Existentialist with a capital E), which would have been anathema to most existentialists, for such an entity can have no personal experience, the ineluctable starting point for existentialist

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philosophizing. ‘The Existentialist’ is a fiction, and potentially worse, a straitjacket; but it has, admittedly, the strong advantage of furnishing a common denominator for existentialism and facilitating a general appraisal. Nevertheless Cooper’s book is, perhaps unconsciously, a move towards system-building, something which existentialists abhorred, and is overwhelmingly driven by just two names, Heidegger and Sartre, central though they are. It hardly takes the Christian variant of existentialism into account at all (his six added pages in the second edition to make up for this absence are perfunctory and contribute nothing to the first edition). The single reference in the book to Unamuno is dismissive: ‘Unamuno has departed the existentialist fold’ (Cooper 1990: 150). As I hope to show, Unamuno had in fact already covered all the major themes of existentialism well before Jaspers, Heidegger, and others came on the scene, and deserves to be recognized as the first existentialist of the twentieth century. I will not offer a survey of existentialist thought since this has been done often enough before by scholars who are more knowledgeable and competent in the field. There are of course differing views of what European existentialism was, of its nature, extent, and importance. It might therefore be appropriate, before starting on the study of the three thinkers on whom I am focusing in this book, to declare my own position however imprecise it might seem. I do not regard existentialism as a movement, much less as a school, but rather as a way of approaching the ever-present desire to apprehend and describe the core problems of human existence. This approach has as its starting point the position in which we find ourselves as individuals. I see existentialism as a reaction to the scientific pretensions of positivism in much the same way that literary modernism was a reaction to the scientific pretensions of naturalism. Here I would signal my agreement with Kurt F. Reinhardt, who, in a book first published in 1952, wrote: ‘Positivism and neopositivism made philosophy the handmaid of natural science, while idealism relegated it to an abstract sphere of pure thought apart from the universe of material realities’ (Reinhardt 1960: 2). This is the philosophical world against which the existentialists rebelled. Essentially this helps to circumscribe existentialism temporally to the first half of the twentieth century, but on the other hand it offers rather broad parameters as to what counts as

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existentialist thought, although there are easily identifiable recurrent preoccupations, as Reinhardt indicates. My own position is about as distant as one could get from that of Jonathan Webber in what is one of the latest books on existentialism, Rethinking Existentialism (2018). Webber insists throughout his book that the central tenet of existentialism is the Sartrian slogan ‘existence precedes essence’ and that the ‘canonical works of existentialism are therefore Beauvoir’s works up to the early 1950s, Sartre’s position in Saint Genet, and Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks’, as he writes in his opening chapter (Webber 2018:14) and reiterates in his closing one: ‘We should classify the version of the idea that existence precedes essence articulated most fully in Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, and Sartre’s Saint Genet as the canonical form of existentialism’ (Webber 2018: 188). I would beg to disagree. Webber’s premise is Sartre’s ‘existence precedes essence’, upon which he builds a moral structure by steering a complicated course through his chosen texts and their authors’ mutual influences. It is a dubious enterprise. ‘Existence precedes essence’ may be a slick slogan, but it is semantically unstable, for it depends on how we view essence. If one’s essence is simply what one is aiming for in life one has to accept Sartre’s dictum as a truism. But if essence is seen as ‘the idea or conception’ of some thing or some being, then clearly an architect has grasped the essence of the house he has designed long before the house exists. And even a child’s essence will exist in the parents’ vision and genes even before his or her existence. As for the striving for knowledge that so deeply characterizes the human being, this essential quality too may be said to precede our existence: we are born with it, just as we are born with other qualities that characterize our humanness. The separation of essence from existence is an artificial abstraction. It served Sartre to justify his concept of absolute freedom and consequent self-autonomy. But it would be truer to say that human existence already carries its own essence, and all we can do as we live out our lives is to adapt by using both our innate and our willed capacities. We act in accordance with our essence, our being. The strength of Webber’s study lies in bringing out the interconnections, especially ethical and psychological, between Sartre, Beauvoir, and Fanon, and he is also right, I believe, in rejecting the charge of nihilism that one sometimes comes across in critiques of existentialist thought,

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but on the other hand the reductionist approach, rather than ‘a sharper and more fruitful understanding of existentialism’ (Webber 2018: 1), leads to an emasculated version of existentialism, not so much a ‘rethinking’ as a subtracting. It may make existentialism more philosophically distilled, but also much less stimulating. For me, rather than consisting of a three-work canon or a three-author line-up, existentialism offers one of the richest, most extensive, and suggestive philosophical-cum-literary manifestations of modern times, one that acted upon many writers of different persuasions across the whole of Europe, and one that resists easy codifications and clear-cut demarcations. Its variations are part of its sway and appeal, and its ramifications part of its protean complexion, no matter how distastefully mutable British academic philosophers have found it. In this respect I find the latest book on existentialism known to me, Robert L. Wicks, Introduction to Existentialism. From Kierkegaard to the Seventh Seal (2020), rather more appealing. This is at the opposite pole from Webber. Rather than reductionism Wicks might be charged with undue dilution of existentialism, or perhaps of using the denomination as an umbrella-term, so broad is his remit. But his book serves to demontrate just how far one can stretch the boundaries of existentialism. At any rate it is a timely reminder of the extent to which the existentialist mind penetrated into European culture. Steven Earnshaw, in his lucid Existentialism. A Guide for the Perplexed, also opts for a broad definition: existentialism ‘is sometimes not classed as a philosophy at all, but something more akin to an association of shared concerns’ (Earnshaw 2006: 1). I agree. Unfortunately, to my way of thinking, Earnshaw then blots his copybook by stating that only Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus ‘contributed substantially and originally to the Existentialist canon’ (25), which is why he only studies these three (after the precursors Kierkegaard and Nietzsche). Why is their contribution more substantial, or even more original, than that of Unamuno, or Jaspers, or Marcel? It seems a rather arbitrary verdict. Existentialism, then, may be regarded as a modern approach to philosophy or style of philosophizing, but it should not be limited to philosophy as an academic discipline. Nor is it some kind of abstract universal of which we could construct a precise model. Existentialism is in the existentialists themselves, writers who in the first fifty-odd years of the

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twentieth century were many and varied and manifested a common interest or outlook in a variety of genres. The existentialists are such not because they conformed a movement or school but because they shared some basic ideas about the human condition: contingency, freedom and responsibility, relationship to self and others, disquietude, and temporality. The Wittgensteinian notion of ‘family resemblance’ applies to the existentialists rather better than movement, or school, or even branch of philosophy. There is no doubting the fact that the three writers signalled by Webber as providing the key to existentialism, Sartre, Beauvoir, and Fanon, made their own important contributions, but they did so in the twilight of what had been a resplendent day in the revitalization of European thought and culture. The chronology of existentialism needs to be reconsidered, and indeed I believe this to have some bearing on the work of the three Christian writers I have myself chosen for comparative study. The conventional chronology has seen existentialism as a philosophical fashion that affected European thought from the late 1920s to the late 1950s or early 1960s, when its pre-eminence under the leadership of Sartre was dislodged first by structuralism and then by the scramble of post-modernism, post-structuralism, deconstructionism and all the intense but ultimately unrewarding theory wars of the late twentieth century as academics and pseudo-academics tried desperately to vie for attention and preferment. In the typical treatment of existentialism due recognition has usually been paid to the ‘precursors’, chiefly Kierkegaard, but also Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and occasionally the much closer Henri Bergson. Of these four precursors only Bergson, who is a contemporary of Unamuno, seems to have been a normal sort of person. Of the other three Nietzsche ended up insane, Kierkegaard would probably have done so had he lived beyond the early forties, and Dostoyevsky was an epileptic who suffered severe mood swings. Despite their talents and their brilliance, all three are, to a degree, disturbed individuals, highly volatile, impulsive, and sometimes extreme. This does not, of course, detract from their enormous achievement, both philosophical and creative. But it is probably the case that their perceived ‘existentialism’ comes from their rebellious temperament and hostility to accepted or ‘objective’ ways of thinking of their own day. They were at variance with the prevailing

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attitudes of their time, and it is this disconformity that appealed to twentieth-­century existentialists, who were also at loggerheads with the philosophical outlook inherited from the nineteenth century. In the case of Dostoyevsky, there can be little doubt that it was his ‘psychologism’ or depiction of unusual and perplexing human types that played an important role in arousing the modernists’ interest in the theme of personality. All the same, despite the ubiquity of these precursors in books on existentialism, the general idea of existentialism, both in academia and more generally in the cultural media, has been dominated by two names, Heidegger and Sartre, notwithstanding the fact that in his early and well-­ known book on existentialism, Irrational Man, William Barrett made it clear that the existentialist ‘movement’ was far broader than the emphasis on these two thinkers might lead one to believe. Existentialism cut across atheism and religious beliefs of different kinds, as well as across a number of European cultures from Russia to Spain. Nevertheless, despite its spread, Heidegger has come to be regarded as the architect of existentialism with his Being and Time (1927), and Sartre as the pinnacle of existentialist expression with his Being and Nothingness (1943) and as its supreme promoter with his 1945 lecture ‘Is Existentialism a Humanism?’. These two thinkers have become the mainstays of existentialism, even though Heidegger rather disingenuously came to reject the label in order to distance himself from Sartre. There is another way of considering the chronology of existentialism. I would agree with those who see existentialism as having its roots deep in the nineteenth century, although to look upon Kierkegaard, who died in 1855, as the first example of this new mode of philosophizing is perhaps to stretch the chronological boundaries to breaking point. After all, positivism, with its fellow-traveller scientism, against which existentialism rebelled, was only just getting under way and was to last well into the twentieth century, with the logical positivism of the Vienna School being its last philosophical fruit. But of course science itself was by then taking a radical turn with first Einstein and almost immediately afterwards quantum mechanics and its revolutionary postulates. Nevertheless the rediscovery of Kierkegaard exercised a major influence on emergent writers in the early years of the twentieth century, and the same can be said of

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the much later Nietzsche (d. 1900), who is chronologically very much closer to the earliest existentialist writers. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are clear precursors and their influence is easily traceable. Dostoyevsky is a much more difficult case. He is an obvious influence on the Russian existentialists Nikolai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov, as has been shown by George Pattison (Pattison 1999), but in the West Dostoyevsky’s influence is much harder to pin down. He became known after Eugène de Vogüé’s essay on ‘Dostoyevsky and the Religion of Suffering’ in his 1886 book Le Roman russe, which was read not just in France but all over Europe. Dostoyevsky was subsequently ‘discovered’ and translated in Western Europe in the 1890s and early twentieth century. His impact on some twentieth-century novelists (e.g. Pío Baroja, Franz Kafka, Albert Camus) is considerable, but his thought is too Russia-centred and his anti-West bias too prominent to re-appear with any distinctness in Western existentialism. Only his view of man as a contradictory, unpredictable, and anxiety-­ridden individual is an obvious precedent. It would be fairer to say that Dostoyevsky is a clear forerunner of the literary modernism that begins to take shape around 1900, hence his ambiguous paternity vis-à-­ vis existentialism, given the connection between the two. If we are going to narrow down existentialism to a particular way of thinking about man, Dostoyevsky’s position in its emergence is marginal. Nietzsche, on the other hand, is easily accorded the precursor label, but only provided we rather selectively pick on relevant themes in such a volatile and contrarian thinker. These themes have to do with his scepticism of rational philosophy and scientific positivism; his proposition that man is the creator of his own moral codes and values; that these values are contingent and changeable, and now in urgent need of a thorough overhaul; that a human being is not constituted simply by an independent subjectivity or self, which is a myth, but by what that individual absorbs through his interaction with what surrounds him; and that life, though in itself meaningless, is the only thing that counts and thus what each one makes of it through his own effort, including the effort to change things. These themes are very recognizably ones that existentialism will explore. Kierkegaard is, with the benefit of hindsight, not only the easiest to place in the precursor category but also the most important of the proto-­ existentialists, even though he was essentially an obsessive religious writer

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concerned above all with the nature and role of faith, and whose endless self-torture is unlikely to have been assuaged by the proliferation of pseudonyms he employed. His legacy to the existentialist thinkers who followed half a century after his death is more specific than that of Nietzsche and derives mostly from a relatively small proportion of his total output, Fear and Trembling (1843), The Concept of Anxiety (1844), and The Sickness unto Death (1849). He points out that abstract philosophy (of which Hegel’s was for him the prime example) is completely unreal because people do not live their lives in accordance with those abstruse principles. They are forced to take decisions in a state of uncertainty, with little or no guidance from objective or general laws of nature or history. Making a choice involves creating ‘reasons’ for the choice, that is to say, creating one’s truth about one’s life, what is true or compelling about one’s disposition. This confronts the individual with his own freedom, which is not tied to anything except himself. If that individual has a transcendent belief in a law-giving God it is he himself who is responsible for his faith, not God. Freedom confers responsibility and responsibility begets anxiety, which is a profoundly human characteristic, though in Kierkegaard a positive one. It is arguably the concept of anxiety, the sense of potential guilt or of wondering whether we are ‘doing the right thing’, that was the existentialists’ prime borrowing from Kierkegaard, though by and large stripped of the mainly religious connotations it has in the latter. For Kierkegaard the religious question, ‘what does God require of me?’, was very much the chief source of anxiety, but the variation ‘what do I require of myself ’, whether morally, socially, politically, even professionally, is every bit as relevant for the existentialists. Kierkegaard began to be known in Germany not long before the First World War, when a German translation of his works became available, but by then Unamuno had read several of his works in the original Danish (in the 1901–1906 edition of Kierkegaard’s collected works which he acquired for his personal library). Unamuno appears, then, to have been the first existentialist to feel the impact of Kierkegaard, easily traceable in his novel Niebla (1914, but written in 1907) and in The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and in Nations (1912–1913). Unamuno’s early discovery of Kierkegaard and the use to which he put the latter’s key ideas suggests that the conventional chronology of

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European existentialism, which places Sartre at the apex, could well be reformulated approximately as follows: PRECURSORS In philosophy: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Bergson; and in literature: Dostoyevsky. EARLY BIRDS In philosophy, Unamuno, Shestov, Berdyaev, Buber; and in literature, as well as Unamuno: Pirandello, Kafka, Rilke, Proust. CENTRAL FIGURES In philosophy: Jaspers, Marcel, Heidegger; and in literature, as well as Marcel: Gide, Hesse, Malraux, Greene. LATECOMERS In philosophy: Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Beauvoir, Mounier, Levinas; and in literature, as well as Sartre and Beauvoir: Camus, Beckett, Murdoch. In relegating Sartre to a tardy position I do not mean to belittle his contribution: Being and Nothingness must remain one of the key texts of European existentialism. And of course various other thinkers who had preceded Sartre were still publishing important work after Sartre’s chef d’oeuvre of 1943, notably Gabriel Marcel. Nevertheless Being and Nothingness is a late contribution to a way of approaching philosophy that had taken off thirty years earlier in a rather different climate. As James Collins realized as early as 1952 in his The Existentialists. A Critical Study, placing Sartre at the centre of existentialist philosophizing has distorting consequences. Not only are Marcel and Jaspers relegated in importance, but in addition Kierkegaard and Heidegger are subjected to a slanted view so as to bring them more in line with Sartrian philosophy. If anything, it is Sartre who departs from some of the central tenets of

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existentialist thinking, such as freedom and transcendence, by transforming their significance. After World War Two existentialism soon degenerated from being a style of philosophizing to being a style of bohemian life in the Parisian cafés of the Left Bank, not far short of a hippie culture, with its own dress code and pseudo-existentialist jargon, a popular and populist brand of existentialism, brilliantly captured by Sarah Bakewell in her well-informed and sharp appraisal At the Existentialist Café. Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails. It was this pop-philosophy and its decadent and Americanized culture that horrified Marcel and made him resist his obvious connection with existentialism, now so closely associated with the militantly atheistic Sartre. Such a populist development among the Parisian youth and even members of a pretentious sector of the well-heeled, with its hedonism and trivialization of issues of profound importance for the future of mankind, could not have endeared itself to a philosopher like Marcel, with his concern for spiritual values and his deep preoccupation with the social, political and even physical consequences (atmospheric contamination) of a rampantly materialistic outlook. Even Sartre himself appears to have tired eventually of this philosophical vaudeville and turned his attention increasingly to Marxism and his relations with the Communist Party. But the antics of the Left Bank pseudo-intelligentsia did the reputation of philosophical existentialism no good at all and by 1960 or thereabouts its dominance had been severely eroded. I do not hold with those who employ a reductionist technique in order to make existentialism into a neater and more definable package. I favour the opinion of William Barrett, who in his early Irrational Man of 1958 saw existentialism as ‘a total European creation’ (Barrett 1990: 14) to which contributions were made by writers of many different nationalities from the Atlantic to the Urals. We must remember too that existentialism is constituted by existentialist works, not persons. Many writers entertain an existentialist outlook in some works but not in others. Heidegger, for example, wrote one of the emblematic texts of existentialism, but virtually none of his many works after Being and Time can be considered existentialist in any sustained way. The chronological list offered above contains, I believe, the most significant figures, but it is not exhaustive by any means. One could make a good case for including, let us say, the

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Frenchman Louis Lavalle and the Spaniard José Ortega y Gasset. In literature particularly the picture is complicated by the connections between existentialism and modernism, the latter being a broader and more diffuse approach to literary creation, but one that shares with existentialism a number of key themes: the limits of reason; the problematics of personality; the nature of time; the connection (or disconnection) between individual and community; and the debate over language as either a cognitive and social tool or an expressive and creative medium. Existentialism and modernism constantly criss-cross, that is to say, the philosophical notions of one and the aesthetics of the other cannot be permanently kept apart, indeed Marcel often refers to his plays when trying to explain his philosophical ideas, and Sartre’s novels and plays are imbued with philosophical notions. The distinction between those who are primarily thinkers and those who are creative writers breaks down, and there are plenty of examples of those who are both, not to mention the mutual influence between the two forms, the discursive and the artistic, so suggestively studied by Roberta Johnson in the case of Spain (Johnson 1993). Proust’s À la Recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past) or Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man Without Qualities), for example, have been subjected to philosophical, not just literary, analysis. The central issues of existentialist writing and of modernist literature overlap, not least because they are both reactions to much the same phenomenon: positivism in philosophy, with its pretension to scientific status, and pseudo-scientism in literature, that is, naturalism. No longer is it a case of reason for philosophy and imagination for literature; philosophers and poets are men and women of flesh and blood and subject to complex motivation, including reason, imagination, passion, ambition, anxiety, and desire for perdurance. Existentialism was not a philosophical movement, much less a unified one. Indeed there was a certain amount of bickering and even mutual rejection between some of those whom we call existentialists. The fact that the label ‘existentialist’ was attached a posteriori is immaterial; that’s the way with most labels. What is important is what existentialism stands for; and what it stands for is an appraisal of the human situation from the starting point of experience in the world and not from the perspective of abstract or inherited philosophical notions. That is why Henri Bergson is

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an undoubted precursor at the very least, if not a fully-fledged existentialist: he was the philosopher who most clearly turned away from abstract thought and towards the non-rational nature of human experience. We can say that existentialism was a style of thinking about man and man’s position in the universe, and that it was moreover an approach that lent itself not just to philosophical writing but to writing as a whole. That is why the existentialist style invaded other genres like the novel, the theatre, poetry. We could venture to say that existentialism was first and foremost a phenomenon of language, and indeed Heidegger thought that language was an existential phenomenon, a form of being-in-the-world. There is more existentialist-style literature of the imaginative kind than of the discursive kind, though it is, unsurprisingly, given its generic spread, more amorphous than the discursive kind. Those academic philosophers that belittle the contribution of authors, or works, of imaginative literature (David Cooper is a case in point) are doing existentialism a disservice. Being and Time and Being and Nothingness do not have anything like a joint monopoly of existentialism, and the contribution of many writers who were not philosophers of the academic type is both more widely appealing and less jargon-ridden. They deal with the same problems, but through vivid, engaging, even compelling, situations. It can even be argued that existentialism is the spiritual identity of literary modernism; that while modernism represents the aesthetic dimension of modern man, existentialism represents the spiritual and ethical concerns. Both originated from a reaction to the same situation: the nineteenth-century subordination of man to impersonal historical and biological forces which governed his destiny and circumscribed his freedom of action. Modernism was the protest of the artist; existentialism the protest of the spiritualist. It was a renewed and more sophisticated version of the Romantics’ protest against mechanism; more sophisticated because modernists and existentialists did not reject the claims of science and were much more conscious of the critical role of language in statements about man. Spiritual or religious existentialists were fully aware of the devastating inroads that rationalism and scientism had made into religious belief. Unlike Church authorities (especially the Roman Church with its repeated papal encyclicals denouncing ‘modernist’ heresies), they realized the futility of negating both scientific rationalism and the

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rationalist historicism of nineteenth-century biblical scholars who raised severe doubts about the authority and reliability of the Old and New Testaments, and sought instead to place spiritual beliefs and longings on a new footing. While the Catholic hierarchy thought it could stem the tide by condemning and proscribing the new scholarship and its impact, other Christians, notably Unamuno, Berdyaev, and those who followed in the footsteps of critical churchmen like Lamennais and Döllinger, struck out on their own in an attempt to save Christian spirituality from the spurious rationality claimed by traditionalists in the Church. For these ‘modernists’, as they were pejoratively labelled by Rome, religious belief was existential, that is to say, not based on allegedly rational proofs or biblical revelation, but rather on an inner need, on a projection of one’s longings and personal convictions; in a word, it was subjective, not objective, but with the potential for an intersubjective participation. This new subjectivism stemming from personal experience, shared by religious and non-religious existentialists alike, as well as by literary modernists (and often derided by postmodernists and deconstructionists) has nothing to do with the Romantic ego or the establishing of purely individualistic meanings. It has everything to do with responsibility in the taking of decisions, whether artistic, moral, political, or religious. In existentialism the individual is responsible for choosing his philosophy, and there can be no ‘objective’ philosophy that exists unchangeably for everyone. Traditional or analytical philosophies are criticized for what is seen as a fiction: the objective thought standing apart from the thinking subject. Man may be a thinking subject, but human beingness consists in much more than that. For a start, man is, as a physical body, not just a subject but also an object, both for himself and for others. He does not just think, he experiences. His environment dominates his life precisely because it provides what he has experience of. One has to find one’s way in a given world and among other beings who are similarly trying to cope. Embodiment, emplacement, and experience are, for the existentialist, the three closely-related stipulations for any worthwhile enquiry into what it is to be human. Having recognized these inescapable conditions, most existentialists will usually move on to consider the contingent and temporal nature of one’s existence, the total freedom of action that appears to lie in one’s control, the consequential dilemma of choice, and

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the need for a code of conduct, given the presence of others. These generalities apply across the board and re-appear, though with varying solutions, in existentialists of different nationalities and religious affiliations. It may have been noticed that a number of acknowledged religious existentialists do not figure in the chronological schema offered above, notably, Jacques Maritain, Rudolf Bultmann, Karl Barth, Franz Rosenzweig, and Paul Tillich. That they are a remarkable generation (all born in the 1880s) of religious thinkers is not in doubt; nor that there are important coincidences in their work with existentialist thought. But Maritain, though a prolific writer, was first and foremost a neo-Thomist whose principal aim was to reinstate Thomism at the heart of a modern theory of knowledge that would be in accordance with Catholic theology (and in this he was followed by the Catholic priest and theologian Karl Rahner). Rosenzweig was a Jewish scholar who was primarily concerned with arguing the modern-day relevance of the Jewish faith (whereas his friend and collaborator Martin Buber had wider interests that extended into social theory). Bultmann, Barth, and Tillich were professional theologians rather than philosophers and thus less amenable to a sustained comparison with non-theologians like Unamuno, Berdyaev, and Marcel. In his indispensable survey of religious existentialism, Anxious Angels, George Pattison does devote considerable space to four of the above religious thinkers (not Maritain, on whose exclusion he does not comment) alongside others, including Unamuno, Berdyaev, Shestov, Marcel, and Buber. I on the contrary see clear water between the two groups, the religious thinkers proper (Bultmann, Barth, Rosenzweig, Tillich) and the rest of those whom Pattison includes in his ‘gallery’. I certainly do not consider Unamuno and Marcel as primarily religious thinkers for the very simple reason that it is not religion per se that is of primary interest to them; indeed most of their work has nothing to do with religion sensu stricto, and in those parts that have (as in Unamuno’s La agonía del cristianismo), the topic is not approached theologically. The idea of God, when it is there, is there as a human projection: it is not the existence of God that makes us believe in him but the other way round. Berdyaev’s case is a trifle more complicated because he does appear to stray into theological territory on occasion. But taking his work as a whole we can see that it is about the problems encountered by man: how we ‘read’ the

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world, that is, create knowledge and meaning, how we see ourselves and our destiny, how we try to create an intelligible order, in a word, how we react or can react creatively to the brute fact of existence. Even in a book like Truth and Revelation, which has a religious theme, Berdyaev begins by saying that despite regarding the classification of knowledge into different spheres as something purely relative and conventional, ‘nevertheless I must definitely assign this book of mine to the realm of philosophy rather than to the sphere of theology’ (TAR: 11). Indeed Truth and Revelation is a frontal attack on some standard notions one finds in Christianity, namely divine providence, God as the ultimate cause, revelation, biblical authority, redemption as reparation, divine retribution, predestination, hell, all of which are for Berdyaev unacceptable theological distortions of a true Christianity. In his autobiography he declares that, despite his doctorate of divinity from Cambridge University, he is ‘no theologian, but a religious philosopher’ (DAR: 325). Religion is part of human culture and should be treated as such, that is, looked at from the point of view of human experience and sensitivity, and in this Berdyaev is at one with Unamuno. Their approach to what are after all metaphysical questions is far, far wider than the religious label might imply, and in this respect they are closer to their existentialist but non-religious cousins than to their religious counterparts. Marcel’s case is even clearer. Marcel has no wish to allow his private religious beliefs to dictate his conclusions when arguing a philosophical case. Before discussing Camus’ concept of absurdity he interpolates the following comment: ‘We must not bring in here the religious beliefs which a philosopher might privately hold, if, as well as being a philosopher, he were also, for instance, a Roman Catholic. The problem that we are discussing has no meaning at all unless we consider the philosopher either as a non-believer or as a man who, when he sets himself to philosophizing, puts his private religious beliefs aside’ (MMS: 88). That Marcel is referring to himself is obvious. But can one really put one’s beliefs wholly aside or are we simply talking here of being aware of the dangers? In the concluding chapter, ‘La vie chrétienne’, of his massive work on Marcel, De l’Existence à l’être. La Philosophie de Gabriel Marcel (1968), the Belgian Jesuit Roger Troisfontaines notes that Marcel hardly ever mentions things like the Trinity, the liturgy, respect for the sacraments, devotion to the Virgin Mary and to the saints, etc. He

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ascribes this reserve to Marcel wishing to maintain a halfway position between unbelief and an integral Christianity because he is addressing unbelievers as well as believers. This may well be so, but another explanation is that Marcel is none-too-keen on these theological appurtenances so dear to traditionalists in the Roman Church. Robert L. Wicks puts it rather more clearly when he compares Marcel and Paul Tillich: ‘Gabriel Marcel’s version of Christian existentialism does not depend as heavily [as Tillich’s version] upon accepting scriptural details or any particular version of Christianity such as Protestantism or Roman Catholicism’ (Wicks 2020: 138). I fully endorse this view. In any case, since, as we shall see, existentialists believe that philosophy involves more of oneself than just discursive logic, some juggling between one’s beliefs and one’s analytical intentions is inevitable. The important point, nevertheless, is that Marcel has no wish to deal with theological issues. This, then is not meant as a book about theological questions; not even, except perhaps tangentially, about Christianity’s theological underpinnings. It is primarily about the contribution made by three thinkers of the early to mid-twentieth century to the thought that dominated their time and place. It is about the way that their thinking was affected by their own, highly personal, adaptation of the Christian solution to the human situation, about the problems of reconciling their philosophical thought with their spiritual leanings, about where they coincide and where they differ, and above all about their attempt to explain and thereby to regain the spiritual orientation of mankind as an antidote to the sense of absurdity that was threatening to overwhelm it (so strikingly captured by Albert Camus in his novels). In my revised chronology I have placed Unamuno in the category of an early existentialist rather than precursor, despite the fact that he is fully contemporary with Bergson. His year of birth (1864) might seem to preclude him from being a fully-fledged existentialist: ten years older than Berdyaev, the closest to him in age, and some twenty years older than others who can be firmly labelled as existentialists (Jaspers 1883; Marcel and Heidegger, both 1889). But Unamuno is not a precursor in the sense in which Kierkegaard is a precursor; indeed he builds on Kierkegaard’s ideas and clearly formulates notions that will re-appear and be further developed over the next thirty-odd years, both by Christian and

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non-­Christian existentialists. This is especially true of the notion of the self. Many of the ideas that we find right up to Sartre, including that of the self as a ‘no-thing’ and the consequential anxiety, are already clearly formulated by Unamuno. Since he died at the end of 1936, six months into the Spanish Civil War, he could not have participated fully in the post-­Heideggerian mode of philosophizing. Chronologically he appears to fall between two stools, neither a precursor nor a first-wave existentialist, which probably helps to explain why he has not generally been included in either category. Yet there can be little doubt that much of his work between 1900 and 1936, both in discursive and imaginative form, reveals a very close rapport with the interests and subject matter of existentialists both religious and non-religious. This close proximity is perfectly evident in his novel Niebla (1914, but written in 1907), which is a sort of allegory of existential man and which already betrays the influence of Kierkegaard. In this work we meet many of the themes that re-appear in existentialism from the 1920s onwards. The protagonist, as he steps out into the world in the opening lines of the novel after the death of an over-protective mother who had taken all decisions for him, sets out on a voyage of discovery about himself and his environment. This quest for identity and relationship involves the following: self-creation (he feels the need to find a role and construct a personality); contingency (certain things just happen to him by accident); making choices, with consequential indecision and anxiety (he has to choose between two women); freedom (he continually wonders whether he is free or determined by some unknown power); responsibility, with the accompanying temptation to succumb to the herd way of thinking (he continually resorts to seeking others’ views on his problems); concern with one’s relations with the world at large (he feels at the mercy of others’ attitudes to him); disorientation or estrangement (he comes to feel ‘alienated’ from the world and seeks to end his own life; death (he discovers that his planned action is futile because he has been condemned in advance). Niebla is an existentialist tract in fictional form, and there is a very strong case for considering it the first existentialist novel of the twentieth century. It is also, as it happens, far more amusingly intelligent than La Nausée or L’Étranger.

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Unamuno’s philosophical position mirrors that of his age. He went from an early positivism, uncompromising, derivative, and ill-informed, as is demonstrably proven by his Filosofía lógica, written at the age of twenty-one, to a far more personal engagement with the real nature of mankind, its passions, aspirations, and frustrations, in a word with its existential roots. In between he discovered, was heavily influenced by, and then repudiated the philosophies of Herbert Spencer and Hippolyte Taine. In some ways Unamuno’s mature philosophy (from about 1900 onwards and especially in The Tragic Sense of Life), rather than a development of his earlier stance, as some Spanish commentators would have it, is a strong reaction against it.1 To his great credit Unamuno changed his mind, abandoned facile and half-baked positivistic commonplaces, and confronted the mysteries and challenges of human existence with singular determination both in his essays and in his imaginative literature. One can argue about when the turn came (probably sometime in the late 1890s), but come it did. The only significant continuity is to be found in the realm of ideas about language (by formation and profession Unamuno was a philologist), but in the realm of philosophical and literary ideas there is a before and an after. Whether it was the suffering and death of his hydrocephalic son, his mental crisis of 1897, his chronic cardiac arrhythmia, or his discovery of first Schopenhauer and then Kierkegaard that brought about the change of direction we cannot be sure, but the change is marked and apparent in a series of essays published from 1900 onwards, notably in the three essays of Tres ensayos (1900), in ‘Intelectualidad y espiritualidad’ (1904), in ‘¡Plenitud de plenitudes y todo plenitud!’ (1904), and in ‘El secreto de la vida’ (1906). The ‘Tratado del amor de Dios’, an early version of what was to become The Tragic  In the 2016 edition of the hitherto unpublished Filosofía lógica, the editors justify the publication of a manuscript whose merit Unamuno himself must have doubted, since he left it forgotten in a drawer all his life, by claiming that it is an early example of Unamuno’s mature philosophy and vital attitudes. Far from anticipating his later philosophy, the only aspect worthy of note that I can detect in this youthful work is Unamuno’s recognition of the importance that language plays in all philosophical speculation, something he learned from Wilhelm von Humboldt whilst researching in his early twenties for his doctorate on the Basque language. For the rest, Filosofía lógica is typical of the kind of manual much used in Spanish oposiciones or competitive examinations for state jobs, based on second-hand information and written in the cold, impersonal, logical style of pretentious philosophizing which Unamuno was later to deplore. 1

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Sense of Life, was begun in 1905, and already employs the central argument of the latter, namely the importance of man’s drive towards self-­ perpetuation which he had come across in Spinoza but far more importantly in Schopenhauer, easily the philosopher that made the biggest impact on Unamuno. It is clear that Unamuno’s existentialist phase begins circa 1900, reaches its philosophical acme in The Tragic Sense of Life, and continues until La agonía del cristianismo (1925 and 1931) and San Manuel Bueno, mártir (1931 and 1933) and even beyond, as revealed in some of his late poems which remained unpublished in his lifetime. Unamuno’s existentialist phase therefore stretches for over thirty years until death. He is unassailably the first existentialist thinker of the twentieth century. I said earlier that, unlike Unamuno and Marcel, Nikolai Berdyaev has something of the theologian in him. This needs to be qualified. On the many occasions when he invades theological territory he does so critically, precisely because he considers the theologians’ arguments unsatisfactory, for example over the question of God, on which, exactly like Unamuno, he berates the traditional position as an untenable objectification. To talk of an objective spirit is to separate the experience from the experiencer. For much the same reason he also berates scientific atheism: the arguments for and against God are equally worthless. God is relevant to an ontology of man, not simply because he has made us in his likeness but rather because we have made him in ours and yet go on blithely to assume that we are an object for him, whereas the key question is ‘what does God mean for me?’. Berdyaev often invokes the mystics, but he makes it very clear that mysticism and theology speak different languages. Theology is a spurious objectivization, but mysticism is not simply its inverse, an authentic subjectivization; it is an experience in which the mystic sees reality, but from an altered perspective which does not accord with the standard dichotomy subject-object. Instead Berdyaev proposes that the human mind has two faculties: one recognizes and constructs the empirical world; the other recognizes and constructs the spiritual world. Virtually the entire oeuvre of Berdyaev is a quest to recover what he sees as the lost spiritual world, and the key to this rediscovery lies in what he calls creativity. Existence, or beingness, cannot be the object of

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knowledge. We do not come to existence, we are existence, and so ‘metaphysics is the expression of being’ (DAH, vi). On existentialism and his own position as an existentialist Berdyaev is somewhat contradictory. By the time he writes Solitude and Society in the early 1930s he is already using the terms ‘existential subject’ and ‘existential philosophy’ taken from ‘a current philosophy of knowledge’ (SAS: 51) which he sees as a ‘personalist philosophy’ pointing the way to a further understanding of the true subject, which is the human personality. Not long afterwards, in Slavery and Freedom, he declares that ‘my thought has always belonged to the existentialist type of philosophy’ (SAF: 8). Yet in his late works he first of all distances himself from Heidegger and Jaspers, declares that theirs is not an existential philosophy in his understanding of the term, and hence that ‘I do not regard them as existential philosophers’ (BAE: 33–34). In the posthumously published Truth and Revelation, written in 1947, not long before his death, he denies that Heidegger and Sartre are true existentialists because they follow traditional philosophy and hence ‘are in the grip of objectifying knowledge’, because they ‘live in the realm of an objectified world’ (TAR: 12, 13). In the contemporaneous Dream and Reality he saves Jaspers from this general put-down because ‘Jaspers is richer and more sensitive as a thinker than Heidegger’ and because he has remained more faithful ‘to the original Kierkegaardian inspiration’ (DAR: 103), that is to his subjectivism. Objectivity is a dirty word for Berdyaev: in ‘the existential sphere [...] there is no objectivity whatever’ (TAR: 13). This is a leitmotif in Berdyaev’s work, on which he doggedly insists. In effect he tries to drive a wedge between experience, which is for him the only reality, and knowledge, which is for him an objectification, whereas of course experience is our main source of knowledge. Objectified knowledge he deems an abstraction, what he (or his translator) calls objectivization, which he repeatedly denounces. Granted that experience is subjective, without some kind of objectification communication would be impossible, not just in the sciences (through, say, the objective language of mathematics), but even in ordinary life through the language of words, the vast majority of which have an objective meaning which is the same for everyone because that is how we have learnt to use them. Our cognition does not exist simply in the raw but also in a processed state, and it is this

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processing that makes it sufficiently objective for it to be recognized by others. Indeed whether he realizes it or not, Berdyaev is constantly struggling to explain, that is to ‘objectivize’ his creative and even mystical intuitions of what it is to be human. As we shall see, Berdyaev associates human personality with creativity, but for all that ‘the human personality is the real subject of knowledge’ (SAS: 51), yet knowledge only acquires valid or useful status when it is rendered communicable. What may be knowledge for me hardly deserves the name if it cannot be knowledge for others. This is exactly the problem with the mystics: that they struggle but often fail to make their claimed knowledge accessible to others. If, for Berdyaev, Jaspers emerges as a truer existentialist than either Heidegger or Sartre, on the whole Marcel’s approach, too, merits Berdyaev’s general approval, especially for the quality and openness of the philosophical meetings which he sponsored at his home and which were not matched anywhere else in France, although Berdyaev draws the line at Marcel’s ‘giving the impression of knowing exactly where he wanted to arrive, namely in the Catholic Church’ (DAR: 275–76). About himself he claims to have been an existentialist all along, yet not to identify himself with contemporary existentialism but instead with ‘that true existentialist philosophy [which] is represented by St Augustine, Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche rather than by Heidegger, Jaspers, or Sartre’ (DAR: 93). He insists on this in another late work in which he states that while he has good reason to consider himself an existentialist, ‘I differ radically from the existentialists of today’ (RSC: 27). Indeed he was an existentialist from the beginning, he says, well before reading Kierkegaard and entirely as a result of reading Dostoyevsky. The reason why Berdyaev identifies with the emerging existentialism of the late 1920s and the 1930s, only to dissociate himself from it in the late 1940s is almost certainly the same as Marcel’s, namely that ‘since the appearance of the works of Heidegger, Jaspers and, especially, those of Sartre in France, existentialism has become something of a fashion’ (DAR: 102). That ‘especially Sartre’ is a giveaway. Clearly what we have here is a perception that Being and Nothingness, or the consecration of Sartre that followed, has marked the nadir of existentialism. A fashion is no longer a philosophy but a travesty of one.

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Like Berdyaev, Gabriel Marcel was a strong supporter of ecumenism, and although he seldom criticized the theologians he sometimes expressed strong reservations about the wisdom of taking up uncompromising positions over doctrinal matters, which he saw as obstructing understanding and co-operation among the Christian Churches. But time and again he made it clear that he had no wish to trespass on the theologians’ territory and that his was a secular philosophy. At the same time he was a secular philosopher with a difference. On more than one occasion he referred to himself as a philosopher of the threshold, in other words that as a thinker he operated in an area of human experience that moved from the ordinary to the extraordinary, from the normal to the paranormal, from common feelings and attitudes that could be explained psychologically to feelings and sensibilities on which philosophy and psychology had had little to say. Chief among these was the human feeling of incompleteness, of pleromatic longing (for which he coined the phrase ‘ontological exigence’), which had made mankind turn to a supernatural being and the possibility of a more fulfilling existence. Marcel’s was clearly a philosophy of existence, and indeed he is credited in some quarters with having introduced the term into France from German philosophy. Towards the end of his life he wrote that ‘existence [...] has been the core of my research since 1921’ (Schilpp and Hahn 1984: 121). In any case his position as one of the earliest existentialist philosophers, and certainly the first in France, is incontestable, given that the date of his Metaphysical Journal coincides with that of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), and that two years earlier he had published a highly pertinent essay on ‘Existence and Objectivity’ which rehearsed some of the themes to be developed by later existentialists. There soon followed a key essay, ‘On the Ontological Mystery’ (1933). Why then did he come to reject the label existentialist? In fact we find Marcel still using the word ‘existentialism’ in his 1946 essay ‘Testimony and Existentialism’; and in the Introduction which he later wrote for the collection in which this particular essay appears he states that it ‘seeks to define the “existentialist” doctrine which I personally hold, while making certain reservations in regard to a vocabulary which has become fashionable but which is in many ways open to criticism’ (POE: 5). It is this ‘fashionableness’ that deters Marcel. In his

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preface to Tragic Wisdom and Beyond (first published in French in 1968), he says that he has ‘consistently rejected’ the label ‘Christian existentialist’, attached to him by Sartre, on the grounds that, unlike Sartre, he is not prepared to subordinate essence to existence. This may be seen as a quasi-religious explanation, since for a believer our essence comes from God, whereas for Sartre our essence comes from ourselves, from what we make of our existence. That same year (1968), in conversation with Paul Ricoeur, he explains that twenty years earlier he had reluctantly agreed to the term ‘Christian existentialism’ in the title of a forthcoming volume that was being dedicated to him. ‘But very soon, when I became aware of the inanities the word “existentialism” led to, and especially among society women, I was sorry to have been so accommodating. Since 1949 I’ve said on every occasion that I reject this tag, and more generally that I’m repelled by labels and isms’ (TWB: 238). All this is repeated in the autobiography that he wrote in 1969 for the volume devoted to his philosophy in the series The Library of Living Philosophers, which in fact only appeared eleven years after his death (Schilpp and Hahn 1984: 48–49). Here he wrote that ‘my fears had been well founded and [...] the term existentialism engendered the most unfortunate associations of ideas in the mind of the average reader’. Since existentialism had been popularized by Sartre, it is clear that what horrified the serious and sensitive Marcel was the possibility of being linked to the Sartrian brand of existentialism and its populist associations. This is still so as late as 1971—by which time the popularity of existentialism was well and truly on the wane—the year in which Marcel replied to John D. Glenn’s essay ‘Marcel and Sartre: The Philosophy of Communion and the Philosophy of Alienation’ in The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel (Schilpp and Hahn 1984: 525–50). This essay is a carefully executed piece of work in which Glenn draws attention to the fact that, despite their often common starting points in their respective assessments of human beingness, Marcel and Sartre reach very different endpoints. Marcel’s response to Glenn’s scrupulous comparison is uncharacteristically dismissive and overbearing, not to say ungracious. Among other negative comments he declares that ‘our respective points of view [his and Sartre’s] concerning consciousness and freedom [...] and being itself are so completely different that it does not even make sense to

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say they are opposed. As far as being is concerned, every one today knows or should know that on the whole I am infinitely closer to Heidegger than to Sartre’ (Schilpp and Hahn 1984: 551). This is despite earlier having referred to ‘the extravagantly dogmatic negativism which is common to Sartre, to Heidegger, and even to Jaspers. It is true that Sartre has criticized with some force the notion of being-for-­death which dominates the thought of Heidegger; but it is all too clear that there is little to choose between that view and his own, which is equally opaque’ (POE: 88–89). Despite equating the two for their ‘negativism’ (or nihilism as so many religious critics have termed it), Marcel in the end appears to have had no qualms about his ‘philosophy of existence’ or ‘existential philosophy’ (he uses both phrases) being compared to that of Heidegger; and this is so because what they have ‘most fundamentally in common is the sacred sense of being, the conviction that being is a sacral reality’ (TWB: 243), a comparison he also defends in his 1969 autobiography. This provides the clue as to why Heidegger’s philosophy was ultimately acceptable to Marcel and Sartre’s was not acceptable, even though both were allegedly atheistic (an imputation later rejected by Heidegger, who distanced himself from Sartre). But there was also another late factor at play which Marcel, the diplomat as ever, does not mention: Pope Pius XII’s encyclical Humani generis, of 1950. This encyclical deplored new theological tendencies, stated that reason by itself is perfectly capable of establishing the certainty of God (which Marcel had denied), and considered existentialism to be seriously misguided. Unlike the combative Unamuno, always prepared to fight his corner come what may, Marcel had no wish to pick a quarrel with Rome. When his play Croissez et multipliez was performed in Vienna in 1952, the Holy Office intervened through the Archbishop of Paris and asked him to withdraw it. Marcel acquiesced, though purely, he says, ‘as a matter of form’ (Schilpp and Hahn 1984: 59). We must remember that Marcel was brought up as an agnostic and eventually embraced Catholic Christianity as a way of fulfilling his sense of a deeper reality beyond the material world. Christianity provided an account of that reality which, after his reception into the Catholic Church in 1929, he felt it was his duty to explore and explain ‘as a philosopher’ (TWB: 238). Martin Heidegger, the same age as Marcel, was brought up in a traditional Catholic family with very close ties to the local church in

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Messkirch. He received his education from Catholic priests, was destined for the priesthood, spent a brief time as a novitiate in a Jesuit seminary, and went on to study theology and religious philosophy at university. The definite break with the Catholic Church came in 1919, by which time he was already married. We have here, in Marcel and Heidegger, a mirror image of a religious phenomenon: whereas Marcel moved from agnosticism to Catholicism, Heidegger moved from Catholicism to agnosticism. We can, I believe, understand why Paul Ricoeur suggested that Marcel was closer to Heidegger than any other existentialist, including Jaspers, which at first sight might seem odd given Jasper’s ‘transcendence’ as a supernatural dimension of human reality. That Marcel assented to Ricoeur’s suggestion and finally distanced himself from Jaspers is not really a surprising development; what is more surprising is that he did not do so earlier, and this may tell us something of Marcel’s delicately steered course between philosophy and religious belief, without subordinating one to the other. As James Collins points out, ‘Religion is tolerated by Jaspers only on condition of accepting a subordinate role, as far as intelligible content is concerned’ (Collins 1977: 112). What is important for Jaspers is to return to philosophy, as the parent discipline, what for him is only a substratum with no independent validity: as a mere tradition, religion is not self-standing, as is philosophy. For a Christian who upholds the truth of God and the Incarnation such a view is unlikely to be acceptable, since it reduces God and Christ to a social or academic convention, as well as putting faith in philosophy above faith in God. By contrast to Jasper’s, Heidegger’s philosophy is only superficially profane or atheistic. In Being and Time Heidegger has chosen to bracket the God question. But underneath the deliberately new terminology and the echoes of Greek classicism there lies the whole Judeo-Christian tradition of the Old and New Testaments which Heidegger had absorbed in his childhood, adolescence, and university training. The jargon disguises this truth, so well indeed that it fooled the Nazis and even Sartre, who labelled Heidegger’s existentialism atheist. But several of his notions are recognizably biblical: our ‘thrownness’ or emergence into an alien world; our temporal passage; our anxiety derived from a sense of exile or homelessness (‘das Nicht-zuhause-sein’, ‘not-being-at-home’); our hankering for fulfilment (the promised land); our communal disposition or group

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identity; our concern with (‘Besorgen’) or awareness of engagement with the world; our powers of decision and mode of conducting our lives (authentically or in a state of forgetfulness); our fallenness or inability to live up to our ideals; our possession of conscience and its summon to authenticity from forgetfulness, with the consequent sense of guilt; the notion of truth as illumination or unveiling and of falsehood as a darkening or covering over; the notion of man as the originator of significance, as having the power to give meaning (cf. Genesis 2, 15–20). All these ideas, which are developed at length in Being and Time can be traced back to the Bible and the teachings derived therefrom. Moreover, in his Introduction to Being and Time, Heidegger says that he is engaged in ‘a hermeneutic in the primordial signification of the term’, that it is hermeneutic ‘as an interpretation of Dasein’s Being’ (Being and Time, 62). The word had gained in circulation when Schleiermacher, a theologian, and his followers in the early and mid-nineteenth century felt the need to codify the method of biblical exegesis which was becoming increasingly widespread as a discipline. What we see here is another connection between the hermeneutic of Dasein and biblical scholarship. Even Heidegger’s notion of anxiety, as Paul Ricoeur pointed out, is not the same as Sartre’s notion of anxiety, the result of having to make choices in an utterly contingent world. In Heidegger it is rather the result of self-­ alienation, of what he calls ‘homelessness’ and Marcel calls disengagement. In his essay on Sartre, Marcel had written that ‘disengagement’ is not what Sartre says it is, ‘denial’; it is rather a detachment from, or a lack of attention to, central truths about human existence which we carry within us (POE: 81). Anxiety in Heidegger is thus interpreted as coming from unresponsiveness, from Dasein’s forgetfulness of Being, which is of course another way of saying forgetfulness of God or of godliness. When Marcel, who dislikes Heidegger’s jargon, suggests ‘light’ as a substitute for the latter’s Being, the association with Judeo-Christian mythology becomes patent. The ‘let there be light’ of the Old Testament becomes in Heidegger’s secular version ‘let there be Being’ or ‘letting beings be’ (Heidegger 2011: 77 and passim) and leads to the subsequent existential question of why there should be Being rather than nothing at all, which Marcel objects to on the grounds of grammatical logic as an improper question because it presupposes its answer, whereas ‘why is there light?’

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would not. But of course Marcel’s re-formulation of the question, with its implied answer, is the biblical one that Heidegger cannot give because he is avoiding anything that smacks of theology or Judaic tradition; he is forced to stop at the stage of the question. What Marcel wants is to bring Heidegger back to the Judeo-Christian tradition that on the surface he appears to have abandoned: ‘why is there Being?’, or ‘why is there God?’, is a pointless question because God is his own answer, but ‘why is there light?’ is acceptable because light has a source. Heidegger has eliminated the Judeo-Christian or biblical vestments but struggles to create a new philosophical language for what, essentially, are old ideas about the human condition. Marcel on the other hand has opted to embrace that very biblical account that Heidegger has sought to abandon and seeks to give it philosophical compatibility. The Judeo-Christian tradition is therefore present in both, masked, concealed, in one, evoked, upheld, in the other. Is it any wonder that Paul Ricoeur was struck by the similarities between them? Some other commentators too have noticed the curious coincidence between religious notions and Heideggerian ideas. For example David Roberts, in his Existentialism and Religious Belief, writes that ‘Heidegger takes categories congenial to Christian theology and uses them in a non-theological way’ (Roberts 1959: 171), and the ever-­reliable John Macquarrie, himself a Heidegger scholar, refers to ‘the mystical, religious dimension of Heidegger’s philosophy’ (Macquarrie 1966: 92). One cannot say to what extent the Heideggerian and Marcellian reconstruction of what had been there all along was conscious or unconscious, but that the work of Marcel, and more intriguingly that of Heidegger, is underpinned by a religiosity derived from a Judeo-Christian world-view seems incontrovertible. In this connection it is worth recording that Nikolai Berdyaev noted that what Heidegger had done was to recast the Kierkegaardian insights ‘into a rigid and almost scholastic system’ (DAR: 103). Scholasticism was of course what Heidegger had absorbed under the guidance of his religious mentors right through to his university studies, during which he had written a thesis on Duns Scotus. Berdyaev goes on to say that Heidegger employs inherited rational categories, but clothing them in ‘almost unbearable and incomprehensible terminology, the only virtue of which is its undoubted originality. The terminology, however, is more original than the thought’ (DAR: 103). The idea of one of

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modern existentialism’s prime movers being a scholastic at heart is quite delightful.2 What all this goes to show is that if Heidegger’s is an existentialist philosophy, then so is Marcel’s, whatever his post-Sartrian protestations, which, as it happens, merely duplicate Heidegger’s own dismissive rejection, in his 1947 Letter on Humanism, of Sartre’s existentialism as explained in the latter’s notorious 1945 lecture ‘Is Existentialism a Humanism?’ and the subsequent best-seller which it gave rise to and which provided the basis for the populist form of existentialism. Heidegger and Marcel repudiate Sartre for much the same reason: his uncompromising stance over man’s absolute independence and autonomy. But if we ignore their distaste for Sartre and consequent rejection of a label popularized by him, the case for seeing both Marcel and Heidegger as fully-­ fledged existentialists, and moreover with a religious or religious-substitute streak in them, seems incontrovertible. At any rate we can see that of the Jaspers-Heidegger-Marcel-Sartre quartet, it is undoubtedly Sartre who is out of tune because he has no time for any dimension beyond the human experience of a material world. But his attachment of the label ‘Christian existentialist’ to Marcel is in one sense wholly justified, for Marcel is indeed both, and the existentialist mode of his philosophy is even supported by various references he himself makes to his own work. Towards the end of his 1946 essay on Sartre, ‘Existence and Human Freedom’, Marcel raises the question of where existentialism goes from here. The choice is either to pursue a materialist route (as he predicts Sartre will do, a wholly accurate prediction as it turned out) or to transcend itself by ‘open[ing] itself out to the experience of the supra-human’ (POE: 88). This latter option of course was the one adopted by Marcel, who continued on the existentialist path despite his aversion to the trendy Left-Bank, populist philosophy led by Sartre. Immediately after this essay he wrote another one in which he sets out ‘not so much to define existentialism as to try to throw some light on what seems to me its essence by bringing out its key notions—that is, the notions which give the clue to it from my standpoint, which, I need hardly add, is very different from  A few years after Berdyaev, Marcel said much the same thing, namely that with Heidegger we are ‘in the presence of a secularized form of certain traditional theological themes’ (PRM: 114). 2

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that of Sartre’ (POE: 91). He goes on to add that Sartre’s identification of ‘a Christian version of existentialism which is not to be confused with his own’ is not satisfactory ‘because I believe that many people are liable to adhere to it [Marcel’s own version] who do not regard themselves as Christian’ (POE: 91). He was to insist on this in his 1971 autobiography: ‘Since 1947, the period when my thought began to be widely discussed, I have been careful to react against any strictly denominational interpretation of it’ (Schilpp and Hahn 1984: 200). He goes on to add that the term ‘Christian existentialism’ has disturbed him because it appears to shut off his philosophy from non-Christians who might well share his repudiation of contemporary technocratic thinking. Yet of course it was Sartre’s 1947 mention of Marcel as the exemplar of an alternative kind of existentialism that had virtually catapulted him to philosophical fame, as Marcel implicitly acknowledges despite his dislike of the label. Marcel does not refuse to entertain the noun ‘existentialism’ or the adjective ‘Christian’. What he objects to is a label which would deter potential adherents that found Sartre’s ‘infra-dialectical materialism’ unattractive. This stance confirms Marcel’s description of himself as a philosopher of the threshold. He may be writing as a Christian, but he is not setting out to write either specifically for Christians or about Christianity. His philosophy is first and foremost about human beingness, as of course is Heidegger’s. James Collins put it this way: ‘Marcel does not identify his concrete philosophy of being with a Christian existentialism. One can accept this philosophy without being a Christian and without being under a logical necessity to become one’ (Collins 1977: 149). This is undoubtedly correct. Yet on the other hand Marcel would also hold that those concrete human experiences on which he bases his philosophy are both affected by the Christian heritage of the Western world and brought to fruition by a Christian way of life. Both Unamuno and Berdyaev would certainly have said that one’s inherent inclinations cannot be kept out of one’s philosophy. The contribution to existentialist philosophy made by these three thinkers, Unamuno, Berdyaev, and Marcel from their Christian—but never dogmatic—position is, I believe, considerable, and it is one that is relevant both philosophically and religiously, even if unusual on both counts. In their diagnoses of the malaise of modern man they turn out to

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be rather more adventurous than Protestant existentialist theologians from Kierkegaard through Bultmann, Tillich, and Barth, obsessed as the latter are with untangling the Lutheran legacy over the question of faith, something which tends to dominate their thinking. It is refreshing to come across the Spaniard, the Russian, and the Frenchman, who, while never questioning the crucial importance of faith, have a more relaxed view of its nature and never reduce mankind’s problem to that single quandary, but rather accept its kaleidoscopic hues. Is it their Catholicism or Russian Orthodoxy, or is it their liberal-mindedness and detachment from doctrinal authority that explains their willingness to broaden the picture? Unamuno was a Catholic often at war with the Catholic hierarchy on questions of belief. Marcel was an existentialist before conversion to Catholicism and at one point seriously considered joining the Protestant Church in France. Berdyaev always retained his fondness for Russian Orthodoxy—it was a way of maintaining a link with his beloved motherland from his Parisian exile—but he constantly criticized his own Church as well as other Churches for what he called ‘objectivization’ (a one-size-fits-all approach) and lack of the creativity that comes with human freedom, the higher element that lifts man through his own effort above the ordinary world. Unamuno and Berdyaev were full of contradictions in their passionate and headstrong pronouncements, unlike the more cautious and prodding Frenchman who preferred to advance by asking questions at every stage. But they had a common aim. Unamuno, Berdyaev, and Marcel all make the point that human life has become despiritualized as a result of the overwhelming impact of scientism: the world, that is, everything in it, including the human individual, is objectified and the value of each human life thereby reduced. Inner life has been replaced by external function.The challenge is to reinstate or reinvigorate spiritual values. To do this via the re-assertion of religious authority (as the Catholic Church tried to do in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under Popes Leo XIII and Pius X) is counterproductive: people are no longer prepared to believe in dogma just because they are instructed to. Spirituality on the other hand is not dogma-dependent. It is rather an openness towards the non-material aspects of existence. All three were sensitive to the predicament of modern man after the collapse of the stable notions that had helped to guide

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humanity in the past, a dangerous disorientation so well diagnosed by Friedrich Nietzsche. Before closing this Introduction I should like finally to follow convention by referring to other toilers in the vineyard in order to acknowledge my indebtedness, or indeed my disagreement, the point being to place my own effort in context. Given the immense bibliography on existentialism, I can only include those who have studied the same connection that I study, namely that between existentialism and Christianity, or what is often referred to as Christian existentialism. I shall mention, in chronological order, a certain number of books (or parts of books) with which I am familiar, leaving aside an unmanageable number of articles which have appeared in journals of diverse description. The Christian ‘brand’ of existentialism is sometimes included as a separate category in some books dealing with existentialism in general or with a reduced selection of existentialist thinkers. Hazel E. Barnes centres her The Literature of Possibility (1961) on Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus, but ventures briefly into the territory of what she calls religious existentialism, about which she makes three statements: (1) Religious existentialism ‘leaps illogically from the recognition that the world is not rational to the idea that in this very irrationality man will find his salvation’. (2) ‘While its proponents speak of God as wholly transcendent and as having no common measure with man, they generally go on to discuss the myths of a particular religion as if they were in some way a revelation of God’s nature.’ (3) ‘Religious existentialists almost without exception hold that the Leap in faith must be accompanied by a willingness to renounce the claims of one’s individual personality. If we are to become one with All, we must be ready to be nothing in ourselves.’ All of these statements are either misleading or plain wrong; certainly they are inapplicable to three existentialists that concern us here. Firstly, while indeed acknowledging, like all existentialists, that unaided human reason is incapable of explaining the world’s ultimate provenance or its purpose, they do not go on to say that man can find his salvation ‘in this very irrationality’ but rather in recognizing the limits of reason and going on to employ other faculties, such as man’s creativity, sentiment, or will, which lie outside the compass of the rational. Secondly, while accepting that God’s nature is ultimately unknowable, they do not say that he has no common measure with man.

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What they recognize is that there is a natural tendency in man towards the representation of God which they may choose to examine in order to see what man has made of the notion of a transcendent being or presence. Myths do not tell us anything about God, but they do tell us something about us and about how we see our relation to God. Thirdly, far from abandoning one’s individual personality, all three of our existentialists insist that personality is a crucial pointer to a higher aspect of our dimension as existents. An animal has the same individuality that we have but not the same personality, because the latter is based on our exceptional sense of self. Whether personality (i.e. self-consciousness) is lost upon death cannot be known, but a Christian who accepts the resurrection of Jesus may of course entertain that hope. The Blackwell Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism (ed. Dreyfus and Wrathall 2006) carries a chapter by Clancy Martin on ‘Religious Existentialism’ which refers to Unamuno, Shestov, Barth, and Buber, an eclectic mix that demonstrates how problematical it is to arrive at a coherent interpretation of the phenomenon. It concludes that for Unamuno, life is insatiable desire for what we lack: self-knowledge, spiritual communication, a sense of plenitude; whereas for Shestov life is a kind of illusory experience because our human prejudices prevent us from getting at the truth about ourselves and the world, and all philosophy is self-defeating. Barth for his part terrifies us with his judgemental God, whereas Buber sees God in terms of a precious lover. The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism (ed. Steven Crowell 2012) offers a chapter by Merold Westphal on ‘Existentialism and Religion’ which concentrates on the differences between Sartrian existentialism and religious existentialism: the necessary rejection in the latter of the Sartrian ‘existence precedes essence’ since our essence is regarded as God-­ given; the difference over the source and universality of values and truth; and the highlighting of dimensions—especially love and the I-You relationship—which Sartre is seen as belittling or distorting. All these points are well made. In Situating Existentialism. Key Texts in Context (ed. Judaken and Bernasconi 2012) George Pattison contributes a chapter on ‘Fear and Trembling and the Paradox of Christian Existentialism’. His approach is broadly theological, but one that admits of interesting variations within

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Christian existentialism just as there are variations within the parameters of existentialism as a whole. In this essay such existentialisms are exemplified by Tillich and Berdyaev, after recognition of the three precursors, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche. But the real question, as Pattison expresses it, is ‘whether—and how—a theological existentialism could be lived’ (Pattison 2012: 232). Pattison puts his finger on a fundamental issue: given that existentialism sets out to appraise man in the here and now, what difference can a Christian version make? The wide-ranging book by Robert L. Wicks, Introduction to Existentialism: From Kierkegaard to the Seventh Seal (2020), merits one chapter on the Christian variant of existentialism, essentially a comparison between the philosophies of Tillich and Marcel ‘as representative of Christian existentialism’ (Wicks 2020: 133). Marcel’s views are found to be closer to the characteristic existentialist position than Tillich’s. Since God’s existence cannot be conclusively proved by logical discourse, Marcel is prepared to accept that ‘our belief in God could amount to mere anthropomorphism’ (143), and that it is this uncertainty or ambiguity of the human situation (in Beauvoir’s sense) that truly represents our existential condition. We are in no position to make dogmatic assertions one way or the other. Though much remains to be said on Marcel’s Christian existentialism, this assessment seems to me wholly correct. Those are some examples of brief treatments of the topic in longer books. But there are a number of books devoted in their entirety to Christian or religious existentialism, of which I proceed to mention the main ones known to me. One of the very first such books was Existentialism and Christian Thought, 1950 (original French version 1946), by the Jesuit Roger Troisfontaines. This enlightened and succinct study applauds existentialism’s emphasis on human freedom of choice and its placing of responsibility for finding the truth squarely on each person. Troisfontaines considers that from a Christian point of view existentialism is a positive development. ‘Christianity and existentialism are no more opposed to each other in their fundamental doctrine than in their method: the doctrine that each man must freely determine his being’, he declared (Troisfontaines 1950: 43), and welcomed the new philosophy for offering scholastic theologians and philosophers the chance to reappraise their

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thought and make it coincide more fully with reality by living it as deeply and genuinely as possible. It is therefore utterly disconcerting to find that Troisfontaines also wrote, some years later, What is existentialism?, a thoroughly biased book which holds up Marcel as the true exemplar of existentialism and brands Sartre’s philosophy as ‘nauseous and selfish’ in support of Mauriac’s notorious definition of Sartre’s work as ‘excrementalism’. It is hard to believe that these two books came from the pen of the same author. Why the new and extraordinary hostility towards existentialism and the very obvious attempt to distance Marcel from all other existentialists? The explanation for the liberal and sympathetic approach of the first book and the illiberal and prejudiced account of the second is almost certainly to be found in Pope Pius XII’s 1950 encyclical ‘Humani generis’, in which existentialism is condemned and which helps to account for the Belgian Jesuit’s undignified and craven volte face. As mentioned earlier, Troisfontaines also wrote the two-volume De l’Existence à l’être: la philosophie de Gabriel Marcel, which carries a preface by Marcel himself. There is in this book an obvious attempt at systematization of Marcel’s thought in conformity with the neo-Thomism of the Catholic Church. Marcel was too diplomatic to dissent from this no doubt well-­ meaning but misguided attempt at sterilizing his open and liberal ‘philosophy of the threshold’. E. L. Allen’s Existentialism from Within (1953) is not primarily about Christian existentialism, but nevertheless merits a mention here because it demonstrates how a Christian stance need not obviate an understanding and sympathetic treatment of any existentialist, whether atheistic, agnostic, or religious. Concentrationg on Heidegger, Sartre, Jaspers, and Marcel, each voice is given its proper space and the reader is invited to choose. ‘“Man is a useless passion” or “Man is a being who exists in relation to God”. The choice is finally between these two’ (Allen 1953: 182). It is to Allen’s great credit that he does not clobber the atheist Sartre in order to defend the theist Marcel, and indeed mounts a strong defence of Sartre’s ethical stance. By contrast J.  M. Spier’s contemporaneous book Christianity and Existentialism (1953) demonstrates unbounded antipathy to all existentialists and is an even worse case of prejudice than Troisfontaine’s What is Existentialism? This time it is not Vatican autocracy but Dutch

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Presbyterianism or neo-Calvinism that completely pre-empts a fair hearing of any of the recognized existentialists, who are branded as apostates and destroyers of life, irrespective of whether they are theists or atheists. ‘Existentialism openly or in a disguised manner denies Christianity’ (Spier 1953: 135), is the stark verdict. Marcel, for example, is rejected because he does not recognize Revelation. This is an unthinking return to the radical Protestant claim of sola scriptura which refuses to entertain the key question of interpretative authority. Spier’s book, which purports to be Christian, is a regrettably crude misrepresentation of existentialism based on decontextualized half-truths and outright falsehoods. Existentialism is seen simplistically as the foe of Christianity, its hidden aim being to draw people away from the truth. There can hardly be a more prejudiced and deliberate distortion of existentialism than this deplorable book, which is worthless as philosophy and thoroughly off-­ putting as religious advocacy. It is with enormous relief that one turns to another early study, Christianity and the Existentialists (1956), edited by Carl Michalson, a collection of seven essays each by a different author (preceded by the editor’s introduction) which includes one on modern art and one on the religious themes of the German poets Hölderlin and Rilke. Among the five existentialists chosen for individual study we find Unamuno, Berdyaev, and Marcel. The essay on Unamuno, written by an admirer who knew him personally, points to his distinction as a writer and as a Spaniard, and sums up Unamuno’s philosophical-cum-religious position as vocation plus struggle. Vocation entails commitment to a cause and consequent action. Rendering the idea of God and immortality meaningful entails an agonic struggle to the very end (Mackay 1956). Neither of these propositions is objectionable, but they do not get us far. The essay on Berdyaev offers a wider coverage, bringing out several key concepts in Berdyaev’s writings, namely the source of freedom, the spiritual nature of human personality, the appearance of evil, the different varieties of time (Spinka 1956). It is one of the best short pieces on Berdyaev and there is some overlap with my own findings. The essay on Marcel underlines ‘persistent elements in his thought whose relationship to Christian doctrine and experience is particularly clear and significant’ (Langmead Casserly 1956: 93) and concludes that ‘Marcel may thus be described as a Pauline

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philosopher of faith, hope and charity: faith in Christ, hope in God, and charity in the Church’ (Langmead Casserly 1956: 96). This pious thought bends Marcel’s philosophy to make it look as if he is defending Catholicism. As a philosopher Marcel was much too independent to be doing any such thing. The book, sympathetic throughout to the thinkers studied and useful though it is, was the work of well-meaning liberal theologians rather than philosophers. Their brief seems to have been to claim these various thinkers (including Heidegger) for Christianity as far as possible. That is a legitimate undertaking; but I believe it oversimplifies the situation. While in principle I see no necessary antagonism between adopting an existentialist stance and accepting Christianity as a way of life, one cannot reduce either set of beliefs to a convenient all-­encompassing definition, hence we must expect to find important issues of compatibility and consequential adaptations on both sides of the equation. Adopting a similar stance, but even better than the preceding work, is Existentialism and Religious Belief (1957) by David E.  Roberts, a book written by a philosopher of religion from a perspective that is both moderately sympathetic to Christianity and knowledgeably unprejudiced towards existentialism. Roberts is perceptibly closer to Marcel than to Heidegger, Jaspers, or Sartre, but he is fair to all. Because three of the seven chapters in the book are given over to Pascal and Kierkegaard, there is space for only four existentialists proper, Heidegger, Sartre, Jaspers, and Marcel, but the comparison between an existentialist attitude and a purely religious attitude is exemplary. Existentialism can mediate in the quarrel between faith and reason. It has insisted on the limits of rational thought and logical discourse, and has opened the way to a much broader conception of what knowledge is and how it comes to man. A Christian philosophy is made much more possible by an existentialist-style thinking than by blinkered logical positivism and sense-data empiricism. Existentialism also debunks the spurious arguments of a spent and doctrinaire theology, which should help the Christian believer to search for a more authentic faith. The freedom of choice offered by existentialism makes the Christian free to find meaning in God. For Roberts, therefore, Christianity and existentialism are perfectly compatible. While I would not go quite so far, this is arguably the book that comes closest to mine in its general outlook, but of course its compass is rather different and

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includes only one of the three Christian thinkers to whom the present book is devoted. Nor of course does it set out to be comparative in the way that mine is. F. Temple Kingston, French Existentialism. A Christian Critique (1961) revolves around Marcel and Sartre, with passing attention paid to Beauvoir, Camus, and Merleau-Ponty, but of course non-French thinkers are not covered. The general approach is heavily influenced by the neo-­ Thomists Gilson, Maritain, and Mascal, towards all of whom Kingston is unduly deferential. The point of view is palpably religious rather than secular or impartial, and as a result Sartre’s stance is persistently found wanting vis-a-vis Marcel’s. What we have here is a pious and at times simple-minded book that perhaps has some merit in attempting to make Christian existentialism credible, but it is seriously biased over the God-­ question and does scant justice to Sartre and Camus, going so far as to question the honesty of Sartre’s atheism and declaring that Sartre’s attempt to be God himself ‘leads him not to contentment but to solitude and anguish’ (Kingston 1961: 142), a view wholly different from that of E. L. Allen mentioned earlier. The conclusion Kingston comes to is that ‘the inherent weakness in the writings of Sartre and his followers is the failure to develop any healthy approach to existence and being’ (Kingston 1961: 195). Marcel by comparison appears to be a model of healthy living, and that is about as far as we get. Far more useful and perceptive is Christianity and Existentialism (1963), a collection of six essays by William Earle, James Edie, and John Wild which evinces an eclectic approach that ranges widely and knowledgeably, and one that points to many valid parallels between modern existentialism and Christian thought going back to Tertullian. In one sense it is too wide, including as it does French neo-Thomists as existentialists on the basis of Étienne Gilson’s anachronistic claim that St Thomas Aquinas was an existentialist, which is to stretch the application of the label ‘existentialism’ beyond sensible parameters. The only twentieth-­ century existentialists covered in the book are Heidegger and Sartre (and the theologian Tillich), so if this very readable book can be faulted it is only on the grounds that its distended focus waters down the meaning of existentialism in claiming that Christianity throughout the ages covers much of its ground.

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John Macquarrie’s Studies in Christian Existentialism (1965) is a collection of seventeen essays by the author of An Existentialist Theology: A Comparison of Heidegger and Bultmann (1955) and Existentialism (1972), this latter work being a standard textbook and one of the best thematic introductions to the subject. Macquarrie was a theologian, and one noted for his lucid, commonsensical approach. Of the seventeen essays in Studies, half-a-dozen may be said to be highly relevant to the topic of existentialism’s influence on Christianity, and indeed not just relevant but illuminating, though it is really Heidegger’s philosophy that is considered as representative of existentialism, unsurprising in itself since Macquarrie was a notable and exceptionally lucid Heidegger scholar. The three thinkers I am concerned with do not figure in this book, although they certainly do figure, if not prominently, in his Existentialism, which is an excellent introduction to the whole subject but not a comparative study. Francis J. Lescoe’s Existentialism with or without God (1974) promises to compare theistic with atheistic existentialism, which right at the start are said to be ‘absolutely contradictory and diametrically opposed to each other’ (Lescoe 1974: 3). This book follows Troisfontaine’s What is Existentialism? in setting out to counter every shade of existentialism by misrepresentation and distortion. Heidegger stands condemned for refusing to accept that even as a lapsed Catholic he still had the moral duty to be a theistic thinker. The fact that Heidegger held that philosophy should be God-neutral earns no respect. Even the Catholic Marcel fares badly. Taking his cue from the Italian philosopher Michele Sciacca, Lescoe writes that Marcel is not competent to counter Sartre’s atheism because according to him ‘everything becomes insoluble and wrapped up in doubt if it slips to the level of objective thought, and this is true of everything (the problem of the relationship between body and soul, of the existent and the others, of the existent and God, and so on)’, and therefore ‘we cannot tell him [J.-P. Sartre] that he is wrong or in error because we would have to demonstrate it, that is, we would have to objectivate, to “discourse” and to mediate the original immediateness [...]. This is possible only through objectivation itself, through reason and not through condemnation of reason” (Lescoe 1974: 130). This is a good example of the pseudo-rationalism adopted by Catholic apologists, and it gives a seriously warped account of Marcel’s position for at least three reasons:

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(1) Marcel does not abandon reason; what he says is that people’s choices are often made outside the confines of rational discourse, and hence rational discourse may not persuade them of their error; (2) to choose to believe in God is neither rational nor anti-rational; for Marcel it is a matter of feeling the need for him beforehand and then going on to justify one’s choice; (3) we are in no position to condemn others for their choices made on purely rational grounds; if Marcel combats Sartre it is only because Sartre makes a point of insisting very publicly that to live authentically modern man must slam the door on God because God is a delusion. Marcel did not attack Camus, an atheist who did not take up Sartre’s implacably militant position. Lescau extols Troisfontaine’s modified and critical approach to existentialism on the grounds that ‘he gives us a very penetrating résumé of the shortcomings of a phenomenology as a basis for metaphysics’ (Lescoe 1974: 131). In fact what Troisfontaines argues in What is Existentialism? is that existentialism is subjectivism rather than authentic subjectivity, contrary to what he had argued in his first and favourable book, and that it is thus incapable of reaching a universal decision on anything, for this can only be reached by objective criteria. The upholder of such ‘objective’ criteria is of course the Catholic Church! Lescau’s book is regrettably no more than an apologia for conservative and dogmatic Catholicism. As a study of existentialist thought and its relation to Christianity it is virtually worthless because of its prejudices. Its constant reliance on others of the same persuasion (notably Michele Sciacca) renders it superfluous. George Pattison’s Anxious Angels (1999) is by contrast the best available introduction to religious existentialism by far, both in its breadth of coverage and in its judicious appraisals. It is a knowledgeable and hugely readable account, but its very breadth renders it a little sparse in some areas. The few pages devoted to Unamuno barely scratch the surface of this paradoxical and passionate Christian thinker. The section on Marcel on the other hand is much more thorough and Pattison’s conclusion wholly admirable: Marcel’s philosophy is said to be ‘humanly coherent’, a philosophy ‘that seeks to ground the possibility of religious values of faith, hope and love in such a way as to make them once more accessible to those living in the heart of what Marcel himself had experienced as the desert universe of modern secularism’ (Pattison 1999: 220). Pattison, an

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outstanding Kierkegaard specialist, in my estimation overplays the influence of the Danish thinker as well as that of Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche. Unamuno was certainly influenced by Kierkegaard, but hardly at all by Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche; Berdyaev was influenced by Dostoyevsky, rather less by Kierkegaard and hardly at all by Nietzsche (although he clearly admired the latter’s visionary and prophetic-like stance); and Marcel was influenced by none of them. Existentialism is not a twentieth-­ century sequel to Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche. It is a twentieth-­ century phenomenon that might well not have happened without the arrogant over-reaching and excesses of nineteenth-century positivism and scientism, to which it was an evident reaction. The major difference between Pattison’s book and mine—apart from the obvious one of coverage: some fifteen writers covered in his, only three in mine— is that Pattison’s book, written after all by a very distinguished theologian, is driven by an interest in theological questions and the impact which an existentialist-style philosophizing had on theology. His point that this impact was highly significant is certainly well taken, but that is not my theme. My theme is rather the mutual interplay between an existentialist philosophical stance and a committed Christianity in three chosen thinkers. How did they reconcile their existentialism with their Christianity, not theologically, for they were not theologians, but philosophically and affectively?

2 Reason and the Philosopher

The advent of existentialism is often seen as marking the nadir and reversal of almost three centuries of the rationalist approach to philosophical meditation initiated by Descartes. Certainly the Cartesian brand of rationalism has been looked askance by most existentialists and many others since the heyday of existentialism, often with an anachronistic disregard of what Descartes was aiming to achieve in the first half of the seventeenth century. But the real reason for the appearance of what William Barrett, in his 1958 book, termed ‘irrational man’ is much closer in time: the degeneration of scientific thinking into a pretentious scientism that affected many humanistic disciplines in the second half of the nineteenth century and which produced endless numbers of works that posed as scientific when they were often little better than charlatanism. While the serious scientific community remained relatively unaffected by this amateurish, pseudo-scientific encroachment, the backlash against scientism was widely felt and produced a generalized loss of faith in scientific thinking in the early years of the twentieth century extending to the inter-war period. Within philosophy itself there were two opposing reactions: one was to emphasize the scientific credentials of philosophy by narrowing its scope to what could be meaningfully debated using deductive reasoning © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. A. Longhurst, Unamuno, Berdyaev, Marcel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81999-6_2

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and thereby banishing many issues as meaningless and not worthy of debate;1 the other was to move philosophy away from the purely logical and analytical and into the realm of intuition, sentiment, and affect.2 The latter approach, of which the existentialist style of philosophizing is a major part, does not entail the wholesale abandonment of rationalism, as William Barrett’s title unfortunately implied, but does entail placing the rationalist mind in the much broader context of man’s existential situation, that is, his worldly circumstances, fears, hopes, uncertainties, relations, and limitations. In our ordinary lives we seldom use logical deduction; we mostly use practical judgement based on experience. This may not amount to deductive reasoning; but it is not irrational either (in the sense of anti-rational). It is rather a different kind of reasoning whose basis is not as immediately clear as that used in deductive logic. The claim to logic is no defence of what Heidegger sees as mere conventional thinking; indeed the word itself has fallen into misuse: ‘By continually appealing to the logical one conjures up the illusion that one is entering straightforwardly into thinking when in fact one has disavowed it’ (Heidegger 2011: 170). The allegedly logical is for Heidegger merely a lazy form of presenting arguments that has placed philosophy in a rut. Existentialist philosophizing extends well beyond the realm of conventional logic and ventures into the world of sentiment and reaction in a way not previously done, that is to say, by allowing a greater margin to intuitive and heuristic thought, to the way we apprehend the world rather than to the way we reduce it to abstraction. Rather than a descent into the irrational, what we encounter in existentialism is a much broader conception of what rationality is. This applies both to secular and religiously-­minded existentialist thinkers, but in the case of the latter it poses the additional challenge of accounting for spiritual attitudes and persuasions. How do these thinkers justify their new philosophical approach, that is, their aim of explaining man in a spiritual, and not simply a natural, context?  In Britain the clearest example of this tendency is probably A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth and Logic (1936) and on the Continent of Europe the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle. 2  The clearest case of this shift away from analytical philosophy is probably Henri Bergson (1859–1941), who argued that abstract reasoning was an inadequate tool to explain the complexities of the way humans experience the world. This was repeated by Jaspers and many others. 1

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It is as well to begin with the obvious caveat: there is no agreed definition of what rational argument entails precisely; or, to put it another way, the dividing line between the rational and the irrational is blurred. When the rationalists claim that reason is their guide, what they have in mind of course is their kind of reason. In one of the early books on existentialism, F. H. Heinemann deems it a failure because it does not respect logic, and ‘logic is and remains the science of the rules of correct reasoning’ (Heinemann 1958: 77). This implies that there is another kind of reasoning which is ‘incorrect’. If so, who decides that it is incorrect? The ‘correct’ reasoners? The problem with some of the earliest studies of existentialism, especially those in English, is that they were written by academics brought up in a wholly different philosophical tradition. They were affected by theoretical attitudes. Another, and somewhat later example, is provided by Mary Warnock. She thinks it is possible ‘to distinguish philosophical from non-philosophical Existentialism’ (Warnock 1970: 3). Well of course it is: a philosophical treatise is not a poem, a play, or a novel. But what one cannot do is to distinguish between the themes that are given philosophical treatment and the themes that are given poetic, dramatic, or fictional treatment. The themes and the interests are the same, as is obvious from the case of those existentialists who cultivated both the philosophical treatise and one or more literary genres. Warnock’s pretext is that philosophical existentialism must be judged by its method, and the method prescribed is Husserl’s phenomenology, so that ‘I do not count as an Existentialist philosopher anyone who cannot prove this particular parentage’ (Warnock 1970: 3). The impoverishment resulting from Warnock’s reductionism is patent: we are left with Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. No Jaspers, no Marcel, no Beauvoir, to mention but another three. She also makes the mistake of characterizing existentialism as hostile to science, instead of hostile to scientism, and seeks to separate it from ‘real’ philosophy because ‘philosophy without arguments is not possible in the long run’ (Warnock 1970:139). That is why, despite the attractiveness of its doctrines of individual freedom, she pronounces it dead. What she really means of course is not philosophy without arguments but philosophy without the kind of discourse used in the analytic tradition of British and American philosophy departments.

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In practice the modern separation of the analytical or Anglo-American school of philosophy from the Continental school is at best a very rough approximation to the real situation and at worst a fiction. What has separated these so-called schools is their interests rather than their methods, despite their mutual antipathy. Arguing in favour of a particular position does not simply involve using rational arguments; it involves judgement in knowing just how far one can go in making a case. We will find that in the three Continental thinkers here chosen for study each one’s idea of rationality varies somewhat and may even be inconsistent, driven by the context within which they are arguing. On the face of it Unamuno may appear to be the least given to rational argument in the strict sense, and was famously denounced by Ortega y Gasset for his ‘irrational’ outbursts. Yet despite his frequent repudiations of rationalist philosophy, Unamuno’s own philosophy may turn out to be not quite as irrational as he himself sometimes makes out. In particular it is worth distinguishing between content and form, between the non-rational compulsions in which Unamuno is interested and the way in which these themes are expounded. Berdyaev, too, is scarcely fond of rationalist philosophy, and this may be a reflection of his own style of philosophizing, which gives preference to imagination over step-by-step reasoning. By contrast Marcel is fastidiously self-questioning, but may in the end transcend the boundaries of logical discourse as much as the other two. Personal style can never be wholly ignored.

2.1 Unamuno: Philosophizing beyond Reason ‘Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point.’ Blaise Pascal’s famous comment sums up very smartly Unamuno’s perennial struggle between reason and passion, between intellect and will. Indeed Pascal— unlike his contemporary, the rationalist Descartes—became one of a mere handful of French writers whom Unamuno admired, one to whom he devoted an entire chapter of La agonía del cristianismo (written during exile in France in the 1920s). The clash between reason and emotion, between the dictates of our rational mind and those of our aspirational personality, has been a persistent theme in Unamunian studies, and rightly so since Unamuno himself made the conflict and

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contradiction within himself the foundation of his enormously creative endeavours. He did not seek to reconcile, much less deny, two opposed tendencies, but chose rather to live a life of internal warfare in as resolute a manner as humanly possible, a head-versus-heart divide which was magnificently studied by Victor Ouimette in one of the earliest studies of Unamuno’s personal philosophy as revealed in his imaginative literature (Ouimette 1974). Unamuno’s irrationalism may have been exaggerated. Unamuno himself uses the adjective irracional or the substantivized form lo irracional with some frequency, but he also uses the word antirracional, as in the following example: ‘For living is one thing and knowing is something else, and as we shall see, they may be in such opposition that we can say that everything that is vital is anti-rational, not just irrational, and that everything that is rational is anti-vital’ [‘Porque vivir es una cosa y conocer otra, y como veremos, acaso hay entre ellas una tal oposición que podamos decir que todo lo vital es antirracional, no ya sólo irracional, y todo lo racional, anti-vital’ (DST: X, 302)]. It is clear that irrational here is what lies outside reason, and anti-rational what is opposed to reason. This should be borne in mind before accusations of illogicality or unreasonableness are levelled at Unamuno. While it is perfectly true that he values the ‘querer ser’, or will to be, over the rational but passive acceptance of the world as it is, it is equally true that he both recognizes the power of rational thought and makes use of discursive argument in his philosophical explorations. What Unamuno deplores is subjecting all life to purely rational criteria, thereby banishing as irrelevant or illusory aspects of human life on which deductive reason has nothing to say. Science is based on reason, and in its search deserves respect and ‘the yielding of the spirit in the face of a truth objectively demonstrated’ [‘la sumisión del espíritu ante la verdad objetivamente demostrada’ (VYV: IX, 59)]. On the other hand, cientificismo, scientism, earns Unamuno’s contempt: it is branded as fetishistic, arrogant, and even damaging to society. It is seen as a disease which can even affect genuine men of science, but which is at its worst in an intellectual middle class which, lacking a rounded scientific training and proper philosophical formation, displays an attitude of mind that is no better than unthinking scientific populism. At best scientism is a semi-science, which is a semi-ignorance:

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Semi-science, which is but semi-ignorance, is what has produced scientism. Pseudo-scientists—who, I’ll say it again, must not be confused with genuine scientists—scarcely suspect the hidden sea that extends in all directions around the small island of science, nor suspect that as we ascend the mountain top that crowns the island, that sea grows and widens before our eyes, that for each problem we solve there arise twenty others to be solved. [La semiciencia, que no es sino una semiignorancia, es la que ha producido el cientificismo. Los cientificistas—no hay que confundirlos con los científicos, repito una vez más—apenas sospechan el mar desconocido que se extiende por todas partes en torno al islote de la ciencia, ni sospecha que a medida que ascendemos por la montaña que corona al islote, ese mar crece y se ensancha a nuestros ojos, que por cada problema resuelto surgen veinte problemas por resolver]. (CIF: IX, 175]

Unamuno, then, had a healthy respect for serious science, a view confirmed by Alison Sinclair in a notable book (Sinclair 2001: 63–69). Serious science must be part of the picture, but it is not the whole. The intolerance of the individual who professes to be guided only by scientific reasoning is manifest: it demonstrates ‘an incapacity to put oneself in another’s place and see things as he sees them’ [incapacidad de ponerse en el caso de otro y de ver las cosas como él las ve’ (ESF: IX, 180)]. Nor is science to be seen as the be-all and end-all of human endeavour. For it must not be forgotten that human intelligence, on which science is dependent, has arisen from the human need to confront the complexities of living and reproducing, and not from the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake: ‘under the formula “science for science’s sake” there often lurks an anti-human notion’ [‘bajo la fórmula “la ciencia por la ciencia” suele ocultarse, no pocas veces, una concepción antihumana’ (LDH: VIII, 351)]. One aspect of human intellection that Unamuno repeatedly emphasizes is that reasoning is not the result of formal logic. No philosophical system produces ideas; an idea is created by an effort of the will, and it exists to begin with only in the mind that entertains it (SFV: VIII, 546–48). Fecund ideas are those that find an echo in a given community (LSF: VIII, 576). And it is only then that they achieve a degree of objectivity that disguises their wholly personal origin. Our intellect is merely part of our being, and not even the dominant part. ‘Man is a rational

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animal, they say. I don’t see why they don’t say he is an affective or sentimental animal’ [‘El hombre, dicen, es un animal racional. No sé por qué no se haya dicho que es un animal afectivo o sentimental’ (DST: X, 276)]. Unamuno’s point is that rational explanations follow rather than dictate our attitudes. The starting point of The Tragic Sense of Life is explicit on this key aspect: Philosophy arises from our need to form a unified and complete idea of the world and of life, and, as a result of that idea, a sentiment that will generate a personal attitude and even a conduct. But this sentiment, instead of being a consequence of that idea, turns out to be its cause. Our philosophy, that is, our way of understanding or of failing to understand the world and life, springs from our sentiment with respect to life itself. And the latter, like everything touching on the affects, has subconscious, perhaps even unconscious, roots. [La filosofía responde a la necesidad de formarnos una concepción unitaria y total del mundo y de la vida, y como consecuencia de esa concepción, un sentimiento que engendre una actitud íntima y hasta una acción. Pero resulta que ese sentimiento, en vez de ser consecuencia de aquella concepción, es causa de ella. Nuestra filosofía, esto es, nuestro modo de comprender o de no comprender el mundo y la vida, brota de nuestro sentimiento respecto a la vida misma. Y esta, como todo lo afectivo, tiene raíces subconscientes, inconscientes tal vez. (DST: X, 276)]

Authentic philosophizing arises then from inner conviction; ideas should be led by the heart, so to speak: they are a condensation of the holder’s sentiments, or as Unamuno says, they have to be experienced, not just traded like paper money (LID: VIII, 324). It follows from this that of any philosophical system we can say that ‘the more it reveals the personality of its proposer the greater its value’ [‘un sistema filosófico vale tanto más cuanto más revele la personalidad de quien lo formuló’ (SFU: VIII, 542)]. Our reasoning, far from being the neutral, dispassionate, wholly objective process which we may be tempted to see it as, is instead the reflection, however well-pondered or elaborate, of a life-situation. For Unamuno ‘philosophy cannot be an abstract, intellectual game only, it must be subjectively true, it must be experienced, it must be the expression of the man’s experience of the world and of life’ (Huertas-Jourda

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1963: 29). What is undeniably true in our lives is our experience, hence for Unamuno ‘to live a truth is more profound than to be right’ [‘vivir verdad es más hondo que tener razón’ (LID: VIII, 328)], by which he means that to argue from authentic feeling is more honest than to argue from cold and impersonal logic. The person should come before the system, the experience that gives rise to the ideas before the papel-idea of so much inert philosophical discussion. One consequence of this attitude is anthropomorphism, a consequence of which Unamuno is both aware and unafraid. Although many scientists still look askance at the anthropomorphic standpoint and see it as comporting the risk of distorting nature, many latter-day cosmologists have used the controversial anthropic principle as a way of getting to grips with mystifying aspects of the cosmos. Unamuno would have wholeheartedly agreed with their approach. For him anthropomorphism is inevitable: we cannot jump out of our skins and see the world from outside ourselves. If we accept Kant’s contention that we impose our mental structures on the world around us, then even the most composed and disinterested scientists will necessarily be subject to a form of cognition governed by the structure of the human mind. Unamuno goes further in declaring that ‘an exclusively rational person is no more than an aberration’ [‘aberración y no otra cosa es el hombre mera y exclusivamente racional’ (DST: X, 356)]. For Unamuno it is not just our mental constitution that cannot be circumvented and which imposes its view on the world; it is our affective reactions too that govern our assessments and our explanations. Afraid as we are of disorder and the unknown, we create systems to reassure ourselves, whether scientific, social, or religious. We rely on knowledge, more accurately on thinking that we know, in order to conduct ourselves with the necessary confidence, but below the surface we are disturbed by the insecurity of ignorance, not only of life and the cosmos, but even of ourselves: Unamuno sees fit to remind us of St Augustine’s nec ego ipse capio totum quod sum, ‘not even I can capture all that I am’ (SFV: VIII, 549). For Unamuno, philosophical abstraction is a chimera in the sense that it pretends to be what it is not: a system of independent truths. The real basis of philosophy lies in our sentiments, and therefore its task should be to confront the contradictions in man and attempt to reconcile our

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intellect, our affects, and our will. It should not be restricted to logical discourse because this is only a limited facet of mankind, and philosophy should aspire to see man in the round. Verifiable or scientific knowledge is to be respected, since it helps to keep us alive, but knowledge is no more than a means to an end and is in any case subject to change, as scientific developments demonstrate: scientists simply discard ideas which cease to be useful. Unamuno asks more of philosophy than he does of science, since he expects it to go beyond the boundaries of science and pronounce itself on matters over which science has no jurisdiction. It is evident that science alone does not satisfy Unamuno, and hence neither does the kind of philosophy that emulates science in its attempt to establish natural laws. Philosophy must strike out in another direction. Unamuno, however, is forced to juggle with a problem concerning the pursuit of scientific knowledge, namely that it evidently seeks to satisfy natural human curiosity about our world and not just improve our lot. It is what Unamuno terms ‘knowing for the sake of knowing’ [‘conocer por conocer’], which he calls ‘a veritable and tragic disease’ [‘una verdadera enfermedad, y trágica’ (DST: X, 292)]. Animals are content with the knowledge that will enable them to satisfy their needs for survival, but man has left this necessary knowledge far behind and has turned to the biblical tree of knowledge in pursuit of an absolute kind of knowledge which, unlike the practical kind of knowledge, is not life-sustaining. Unamuno is doggedly insistent on this point (notably in chapter 2 of The Tragic Sense of Life). Science has over-reached itself in trying to go beyond what we need to survive; it has created in man the impossible aspiration to understand the beginning, evolution, and destiny of the cosmos and its living things. But all it has succeeded in doing is undermining our most cherished beliefs. Reason has thereby subverted life: ‘strictly speaking, reason is the enemy of life’ [‘en rigor, la razón es enemiga de la vida’ (DST: X, 346)]. Here Unamuno is caught in something of a cleft stick, for if he denies science the legitimacy to play God and attain an absolute understanding, he should by the same token deny the same aspiration to philosophy. This he is reluctant to do, since it would mean aborting his aim of unravelling the hunger for immortality which he sees as accounting for human striving and for the invention of a spiritual world of dramatic proportions,

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equal in every way to the material world of scientific exploration. His justification for pursuing his quest may strike some as sleight of hand. He divides human endeavour into two kinds: one led by the ‘survival instinct’ [‘instinto de conservación’]; and the other led by the ‘reproductive instinct’ [‘instinto de perpetuación’], symbolized by ‘hunger’ [‘el hambre’] and ‘love’ ‘[el amor’ (DST: X, 295)]. The survival instinct is the realm of science, since scientific knowledge has always played a key role in the human race’s ability to exploit its environment and prosper. The reproductive or self-perpetuating instinct is the realm of philosophy because it is so closely bound to our emotional, non-rational compulsion to eternalize ourselves, to reject death as complete closure, and such a desire has nothing to do with the material world and is refractory to scientific analysis. Why do we want to live on? It is our imagination, not our knowledge, that we call upon to satisfy our longing to break through the barrier of our finitude, and it is this extraordinary creativity, the prerogative solely of mankind, that philosophy needs to address. Unamuno makes a great deal of the fact that a philosopher does not proceed like a mathematician obliged to follow a precise set of rules for his discipline. A philosopher will make use of logical reason as needed, but he follows not pre-laid rules but rather his instinct, his will, and his whole personality, or as he says, ‘it is the individual that philosophizes’ [‘Filosofa el hombre’ (DST: X, 297)]. Unamuno is not really referring to the uniqueness of the philosopher as such; he is referring rather to the philosopher as an ordinary human being full of preoccupations, prejudices, anxieties, and aspirations, sentiments that come through despite all endeavour to achieve a serene objectivity, as he says of Spinoza’s ‘geometric’ approach in his Ethics.3 What Unamuno is getting at is that the kind of philosopher he favours is not the academic thinker engaged in abstract debates, but the one who thinks of the ‘big’ questions that concern humanity as a whole:  Unamuno (DST: X, 300) says that when the mathematically-minded Spinoza wrote that ‘a free man thinks of no thing less than of death, and his wisdom is a meditation on life, not on death’ (Spinoza 1996: 151 [Ethics, Part IV, Proposition 67]) he unwittingly showed himself to be a slave to the thought of death and came up with his proposition to free himself from his morbid thought. He went against human nature in order to try to persuade himself that things are so, but he was deceiving himself, for our finitude is an ever-present preoccupation even when we push it to the back of our mind. Heidegger was to make much of this Unamunian insight. 3

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Whence do I come and whence comes the world in which I live and which provides my sustenance? Whither am I going and whither goes everything that surrounds me? What does all this mean? Such are the questions asked by man no sooner has he freed himself from the brutalising need to find material sustenance. And if we look with care we shall see that beneath those questions lies less the desire to know why than the desire to know what for, not the cause but the purpose. [¿De dónde vengo yo y de dónde viene el mundo donde vivo y del cual vivo? ¿Adónde voy y adónde va cuanto me rodea? ¿Qué significa esto? Tales son las preguntas del hombre así que se liberta de la embrutecedora necesidad de tener que sustentarse materialmente. Y si miramos bien, veremos que debajo de estas preguntas no hay tanto el deseo de conocer un por qué como el de conocer el para qué; no de la causa, sino de la finalidad. (DST: X, 300)]

Scientific thinking concerns itself with identifying causes; philosophical thinking with exploring finalities. Science may yet explain what caused the world to be; it will have nothing to say about its purpose. Only philosophy, with its basis in human creativity and imagination, will be able to confront the purposive, para qué, question. This dramatic question—what am I doing here?—arises, according to Unamuno, because I cannot reconcile myself to my death. The question of annihilation/survival will remain with us even if we push it out of our minds, so fundamental is it to our being. Unamuno disdains Descartes’ cogito, the purely thinking self, because such an entity is unreal, a mere abstraction. The real, living person does not think himself alive; he feels himself alive; and he feels himself thinking. ‘To feel oneself: is that not tantamount to feeling oneself imperishable?’ [‘Y sentirse, ¿no es acaso sentirse imperecedero?’ (DST: X, 303)]. Here Unamuno recalls Spinoza’s conatus (ironically enough, since Spinoza is said to be a quasi-mathematical philosopher)4 in order to persuade us that the desire to perdure indefinitely is the source of all human striving for knowledge, part of our very  ‘Each thing, as far as it can by its own power, strives to persevere in its being’ (Spinoza 1996: 75 [Ethics, Part III, Proposition 6]); and ‘The striving by which each thing strives to persevere in its being is nothing but the actual essence of the thing’ (Spinoza 1996: 75 [Ethics, Part III, Proposition 7]). 4

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essence. If so, that too must be the starting point for all philosophy worthy of the name. Like most of the existentialists after him, Unamuno reduces epistemology to ontology.

2.2 Berdyaev: Philosophizing through Intuition In one of his later works, Slavery and Freedom (1939), Nikolai Berdyaev looks back over his writing career and confesses that ‘I have never been a philosopher of the academic type and it has never been my wish that philosophy should be abstract and remote from life’ (SAF, 7–8). He goes on to add that authentic philosophy is always drawn from the conflicts and contradictions that ‘lie at the very heart of existence itself and are not to be disguised by a façade of logical unity’ (SAF: 8). Truly integrated thought is bound up with personality, and personality is an existential unity, not a logical one. Here we have the typical existentialist (and thoroughly Unamunian) claim that purely logical thinking does not capture the way humans approach the world but rather distorts it. Philosophy, if it is to be loyal to its credentials as upholder of wisdom, must open itself out to a much broader range of human experience than simply discursive thought. This is indeed one of Berdyaev’s persistent themes throughout his writing. In one of his earliest works, The Meaning of the Creative Act (1916), written before the First World War, Berdyaev starts his quest for unveiling the divine in man by arguing that rationalism, positivism, and scientism have not resulted in an enlightened view of the human situation, but on the contrary have created an indirect artificial light from below that has failed to illuminate our condition. In the contemporary world the search for scientific explanations in all walks of life has ended up by provoking a thirst for the irrational; in other words, the new and profound dissatisfaction with an excessive rationalism has resulted in a tendency to unleash the irrational. This reaction against rationalism has taken the form of ‘hostility to form and word’, and it is incumbent on us to ‘liberate ourselves from this reaction’ so that we can find meaning once again (MCA: 15). Berdyaev is undoubtedly right about the vogue for the

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irrational in the early years of the twentieth century, for such esoteric systems as theosophy, occultism, astrology, mesmerism, and psychomancy in general developed a large following. But what he is really claiming is that thought and word have a transcendent reach, one that has been forgotten in the pursuit of scientific and pseudo-scientific explanations. Philosophy, he goes on to say, needs to shed its well-worn scientific pretensions. The scientific criterion works for science itself, but it enslaves philosophy. The scientific approach presupposes a single method for everything which only works in its own sphere, the material world. It offers knowledge out of necessity, but is not free to be creative, for it is subservient to natural laws. It discovers truths, but does not know Truth. Like Unamuno, Berdyaev does not criticize the work of those he calls true scientists, those who separate out a limited sphere of the world to discover how it functions. What he criticizes is philosophers who have dreamed of a universal science, of the scientific. ‘Philosophy is in no sense at all a science and in no way should it be scientific’(MCA: 23. Author’s italics). Philosophy, unlike science, is not driven by necessity but by a love of truth. It is a creative act in its own right, different from poetry, music, or painting, and requiring a special gift, but like these other arts it carries the imprint of its creator. It creates, not images, but existential ideas through engagement with the essence of the world. Unlike science, philosophy is not necessary for the preservation of life; it is concerned with meaning rather than function. Nor can it be materialistic, for materialism is obedience to natural laws, to necessity, and hence lacks freedom and creativity. For Berdyaev, where philosophy can score over materialist science is in its ability to free itself from the rigidities of discursive thought. Discursive thought is inflexible, formal, subject to methods imposed on it. It is valid as an instrument adopted for operating in the given world of data, but it must remain silent on matters which do not pertain to the world of objective facts. Philosophical thought by contrast is not limited to discursive thought. It substitutes empathy for logic, communion for calculation, ecumenicity of consciousness for methodological narrowness. Philosophy must strive to venture beyond the visible borders of the world. In all this it seems clear that Berdyaev is trying to position philosophy closer to religious instinct and away from the kind of discourse typical of nineteenth-century Comtian positivism and its stricter early

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twentieth-­century offspring logical positivism. To reduce the validity of human thought by the implementation of the verification principle was simply to put it in a straitjacket, as he makes very clear: There may be a logic of science—but there neither could nor should be a logic of philosophy. Philosophy may concern itself with categories of scientific knowledge, but categories of scientific knowledge may not concern themselves with philosophy. In philosophy intuition is the ultimate—logic is the penultimate. (MCA: 38)

What Berdyaev is claiming for philosophy is that it has its own legitimate area of activity which is different from that of science. In order to operate effectively, philosophy has to turn to an instrument that lies beyond logic and discursive thought, and this of course is intuition. Berdyaev makes strong claims for philosophical intuition, which he regards as primeval and anterior to logic. While logic is not discarded, it remains subservient to philosophical thinking because ‘logic is incapable of explaining philosophy’ (MCA: 38); it is there to be used as ‘a ladder by which intuitive philosophy descends to the given world’ (MCA: 38). What philosophy is concerned with—meaning and value—lies outside scientific perception. Berdyaev applauds Bergson for moving philosophy away from a rationalistic endeavour and towards a more creative one, yet he deplores what he calls Bergson’s slavish dependence on biology (in his L’Évolution créatrice), which for Berdyaev is a ‘scandal in philosophy’ because it makes ‘metaphysics fall into dependence upon a special science’ (MCA: 40). So Bergson’s philosophy is still in some way bound to science, not yet fully free from the shackles of a deterministic way of thinking. The problem faced by Berdyaev’s philosophy of intuition is not its creative appeal but precisely its intuitive basis. There appears to be no common or shared procedure for intuitive thinking as there is for scientific thought, and no verification processes. If then you cannot prove a philosophical insight, you can try to downplay proof, which is exactly what Berdyaev does: ‘Proof is obedience and not creativity’ (MCA: 47). Real philosophy does not need proofs to create meaningful structures any more than does literature or any other art. Needless to say the meaning of

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a work of art is not the same as the meaning of a mathematical formula or a scientific law, but Berdyaev’s attitude to meaning is sufficiently relaxed to equate it with the truth ‘of the knower within being; Truth is meaning and may not deny meaning’ (MCA: 43). A creative philosophical insight, one that is not in thrall to scientific thinking, is meaningful because it is felt as passionate emotion (for Berdyaev akin to the emotion of love: ‘the pathos of philosophy is an erotic pathos’ [MCA: 47]), and emotions cannot be untrue. On the other hand emotions are true only to the person experiencing them, and this takes philosophy from the scientific bind to the personal and potentially solipsistic one. Berdyaev is not unaware of this, and counters this obvious weakness by appealing to the strength of personal conviction: ‘The creative act of knowledge which overcomes all boundaries and all obstacles can be achieved only by one firmly convinced of his own power of knowing, only by one who is integral and not divided against himself ’ (MCA: 45). Even reasonableness, in the sense of moderation and compromise, has no place in this new creative philosophy advocated by Berdyaev: to be reasonable is to give up the challenge to go beyond our material circumstances and inquire into the purpose of being. You cannot achieve a creative understanding by remaining obedient to the observed laws of nature. Philosophy can recognize no authority save that of ‘the intuition of being’ (MCA: 52). It should not be system-dependent. This requires accepting that philosophical knowledge is necessarily a mythological construct, since it cannot be expressed via logical discourse in the strict sense. It should not, however, be confused with religion or theology. Scholasticism, which subjected philosophy to theology, is not philosophy in Berdyaev’s terms. The truth of religion is ‘revealed’ to man by God, that is to say, it is a creative response on the part of man. The truth of philosophy is revealed to the philosopher by the creative intuition that stems from his own life. Philosophy must recognize that it is man that philosophizes and ‘that man philosophizes for man’ (MCA: 49). This is a sentiment that Berdyaev confirms over thirty years later in his autobiography: Philosophy cannot ever be divorced from the totality of man’s spiritual experience, from his struggles, his insights, his ecstasies, his religious faith

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and mystical vision. It is the concrete person, not the epistemological subject or the abstract universal mind, who takes cognizance of and meditates on the object of knowledge, philosophical or otherwise. Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant and Hegel were all concrete, living people, and into their philosophy went all their ‘existential’ humanity, even if they did not admit this. (DAR: 104)

Here we are back with Unamuno’s ‘filosofa el hombre’, which is to say that individual man precedes philosophy, that he is a prerequisite for all philosophizing, that philosophy cannot philosophize by itself. One could retort that the same applies to science—you need someone to do it. But the point that Unamuno and Berdyaev appear to be making is that we cannot separate philosophical insights from the very particular circumstances of those who provide them, and such individuals are not constrained by external or universal laws. They are constrained only by their personalities, by their own creative powers, by the strength of their impulse to aspire to another world. What lies behind such endeavours is man’s self-awareness: ‘Philosophy is the inner perception of the world through man’ (MCA: 60). In his more mature work Berdyaev moderates his earlier views but does not significantly alter them. In Solitude and Society (1934) he continues to argue powerfully for the role of intuition in philosophy, indeed he claims that reason is itself fashioned by intuition; it is not immutable but adaptive, as well as dependent on the thinker’s whole life, loves and hates, and criteria of value. Reason ‘adapts itself to the philosopher’s belief or scepticism; it varies with his belief as the consciousness expands or contracts’ (SAS: 13). He regrets the persistence of scientism, that is the spurious encroachment or importation of science into other areas, due to an attitude which regards science as the sole claimant to the truth of man and the universe. This attitude sees science as the only possible source of truth, and relegates philosophical and religious accounts of man to at best useless speculation and at worst pernicious wishful thinking. In The Destiny of Man (1931) he starts by comparing science and philosophy, and stakes his claim for philosophy on the grounds that ‘the world is revealed to philosophy in a different way than it is to science’ (DOM: 5). Both are nevertheless subject to cognitive processes, but these do not exist

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in a rarified form distant from our affects. To pitch reason against emotion is to create a false dichotomy. There are no grounds for regarding one as objective and the other as subjective. ‘It is a prejudice to believe that knowledge is always rational […]. Actually, we apprehend a great deal more through feeling than by intellection’ (SAS: 11). Emotions can be both social and individual. Even the drive to knowledge is emotional. The significance of science itself is based on a criterion of value, not on one of fact: the value of science is extra-scientific. In its pursuit of knowledge, science (and ‘scientific’ philosophy) is forced to employ a subject-­ object approach; and the problem with such an approach is that the subject is abstracted from the real world and becomes an unreal entity: ‘the knower is not a self, not a concrete particular person, but an epistemological subject which is not human and does not exist but is outside existence and stands over against it’ (DOM: 9). Berdyaev is ready to concede that in science such a procedure—the elimination of the particular or the knower—can be justified on the grounds that scientific objectification does not destroy the object of knowledge since observed nature is itself the result of objectification. But in philosophy and the humanities objectification destroys the reality we seek to know because that reality is not an object outside: we ourselves are very much a part of that reality, we are both creating and experiencing it.5 Here we have reached the point which becomes the sine qua non of all existentialists: the insistence on our concrete circumstances as the only genuine point of departure, our ‘being-in-the-world’. In his books from 1930 onwards Berdyaev is fully cognizant of the tendency to philosophize ex concreto which Unamuno had strongly adumbrated, indeed emphasized, in The Tragic Sense of Life. In the case of the former the spur which drives him towards a recognition of the concrete may have come not from Unamuno but from Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) (or conceivably from Marcel’s Metaphysical Journal of 1927), but in any case it shows Berdyaev’s sensitivity to the new philosophical climate. Modern  The idea that science is wholly objective was to change radically (and in the process divide the scientific community) with the advent of quantum theory, according to which the observer or experimenter in some undetermined way affects the measurement or result of the experiment at the quantum level (i.e. the behaviour of the sub-atomic particles), which in turn raises questions, so far unresolved, about observations at the macro level. 5

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philosophy of the analytical style, being overwhelmingly rationalistic, has shown little patience for the spiritual dimension of man that constitutes Berdyaev’s primary interest. At best it has reduced it to the transmission of psycho-cultural forms (as in Herder and Humboldt or in Unamuno’s early work on the spirit of Castile, En torno al casticismo (1895)—the spirit is that of a people, a nation, a language, a literature); or it has turned it into an Idea (in the Platonic sense) and seen it as the relationship of mankind to history (as in Hegel); or else it has turned it into a communion with nature (as in the pantheism of Swedenborg). What was needed was a concrete philosophy that recognized the personal dimension of spiritual experience. And this is essentially what we get in Berdyaev’s philosophy when he talks of the concrete. For him spiritual reality has to be ‘the image of a concrete inner humanity, of an experience of human destiny, of human love and death, of human tragedy’ (SAR: 18). It is nonetheless easy to exaggerate or misconstrue this emphasis on the concrete since we are not dealing here with upbringing, education, social provenance and suchlike psycho-social influences. Berdyaev’s approach, like Unamuno’s and indeed that of existentialism in general, is overwhelmingly ontological: ‘The philosopher’s immersion in the depths of existence, his Being, precedes, and also comprehends, his cognitive activity. The philosopher […] can only deduce knowledge from Being’ (SAS: 7). Epistemology, which has dominated Western philosophy, is deemed to be of no help in understanding the phenomenon of man. We must therefore turn to reality as we experience it rather than abstract from it, and to see knowledge as simply a part of life, as occurring in a real setting: as Berdyaev puts it, ‘the act of knowing is an existential act’ (DOM: 2). Modern knowers have tended to place themselves outside reality in order to study it; they are left only with abstract ideas about the real. Yet even the most abstract and impersonal philosophies, such as Spinoza’s quasi-­ geometrical speculations, betray each philosopher’s speculations on his own destiny. When he writes that ‘every true philosophy bears the stamp of its author’s personality’ (SAS: 19), Berdyaev is of course repeating Unamuno’s reading of the great philosophers, a reading in turn inspired in Kierkegaard, whose philosophy, as Berdyaev acknowledges, arose from his own anguished experience. Philosophical insight depends on the range of the particular philosopher’s experience added to his intrinsic

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personality. The notion that thought can be separated from sentiment is erroneous, adds Berdyaev, echoing Unamuno’s contention that philosophizing involves the will, the affections, the body, and the soul.

2.3 Marcel: Philosophizing from Experience The distinction between content and form made earlier in the case of Unamuno is especially applicable when we come to Gabriel Marcel. Marcel stands out for his balanced and judicious, even cautious, approach to slippery and intractable aspects of the human situation, yet aspects that are undeniably part of our experience. These aspects—feelings, sensations, aspirations—stand apart from what is often considered rational, but are no less real for that, and therefore call for study and explication. For Marcel such aspects, broadly ontological, more narrowly psychological or spiritual, fall within the remit of the philosopher, despite the lack of attention they have traditionally received. Marcel calls his approach ‘reconstructive reflection’, as distinct from analytical or reductive reflection, but he insists that the process is still reflective, not simply intuitive as it is in Berdyaev (TWB: 15). As he told Paul Ricoeur in an interview, ‘it has been my aim to bring about this [reflective] reconstruction, but to bring it about in an intelligent and intelligible way, and not by some kind of appeal to purely subjective intuitions’ (TWB: 229). Marcel, then, does not reject a rational approach to the study of the human condition. What he does say is that rationalism has become degraded and reduces everything to a cause-and-effect explanation. The problem with the latter approach, he adds, is that many causes are unknown, and there is therefore a temptation to argue back from a known effect to an unknown cause. This determination to reduce the world to the purely natural ignores our sense of wonder. Rationalistic explanations run the risk of depriving our experience of any intrinsic value since everything is considered to have a natural and explicable cause (POE: 13–14). The rational-­ materialist approach impoverishes our range of experiences rather than explains it. Nonetheless Marcel does not denigrate scientific pursuit; indeed he states that the authentic scientist mistrusts the naive simplifications of

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scientism and is aware of the dangers of facile explanations based on fashionable theories. In scientific research the problem of method cannot be circumvented. Experimental data are seldom absolute; they are at best approximations because scientific experiments cannot be reduplicated with complete exactitude. Impurities, irrelevancies, or interferences cannot always be filtered out. In research the problem of methodological imprecisions can seldom be vanquished. Nor can research itself be hypostatized: it cannot be wholly separated from the individuals doing it (SEA: 31, 36). Marcel does not decry the technological progress made possible by advances in science. Unamuno’s notorious ‘leave others to invent’ [‘que inventen ellos’] (by which he really meant that Spaniards would still know how to benefit from scientific discoveries even if they did no science themselves) finds no echo in Marcel. What Marcel does regret all the same is the overwhelming technological dominance of the modern age, the denial that there is any other real or worthwhile dimension in man; for this denial ‘amounts to the claim that everything that does not lend itself to understanding in terms of technological thought, and thus in terms of observable changes in the material world, must be regarded as illusory’ (TWB: 195). Not only is this attitude arrogant, but it is also, argues Marcel, rationally unjustified, for the human passion for knowing lies at the heart of scientific discovery and technological progress. How does technology account for the creativity which makes it possible? It cannot; it simply thrives on it. It is this same passionate creativity that drives the philosopher to enquire into the conditions of human existence, and above all ‘to unveil what is hidden behind those simplest and most mysterious of all realities—birth, life, and death’ (TWB: 198). For Marcel, then, philosophy is not a process of deductive reasoning, but rather a creative passion, a personal itinerary whose destination is unknown and whose starting point is therefore unspecific. In the same way that Berdyaev says that his philosophy seeks to alter the world (SAF: 7), Marcel says that his point of departure amounts to a sense of discordance with a given situation. The challenge is how to evade excessive personalism and confer on the subjective chain of thoughts what Marcel calls ‘proper philosophic dignity’ (MOB: I, 10). His aim is to avoid, on

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the one hand, the self-indulgence of dwelling at length on his own states of being and, on the other, the utterly impersonal argumentation that lays claim to universal validity without applicability to the real person. Marcel’s point is identical to Unamuno’s: what applies to everyone without distinction applies to no-one, or rather, like statistics, a universal philosophy may have a broad relevance to the population as a whole but very little to the individual. The skilful philosopher has the sensitivity to know which are the questions that trouble the real person, and he knows this through a shared situation. Marcel’s philosophy is addressed to ‘an audience that would act as an intermediary between the enclosed subjective self, at one pole of an anthithesis, and the generalized thinking of science, with its claims to a quite universal validity, at another’ (MOB: I, 16). Marcel is fully aware that such an audience as he seeks is hard to define, and he does indeed deal with this aspect at length, but for our purposes what is to be noted is his contention that purely deductive reasoning, with its apparently impregnable logical method, is not conducive to the kind of philosophizing that interests him. He does not question the universality of reason; he merely questions its relevance and its apparent hold on academic philosophy. Experience is irremediably subjective, and this subjectivity must be given some measure of recognition in the attempt to do worthwhile research into the human situation. The philosopher should reject the ‘radical separation of knowledge and affectivity which is naturally required in scientific research’ (TWB: 150). The scientific approach to reality, then, gives us one kind of valid knowledge, but it sheds little light on the complexities of human experience. It is here that philosophy should help, for ‘philosophy provides the means for experience to become aware of itself ’ (CRF: 15). What Marcel appears to mean by this unusual but pithy definition is that genuine philosophy (not the kind of academic philosophy which is limited to commenting on others’ philosophies) must consciously involve a personal dimension; it is, as he explains in one place, a vocation: ‘I think that philosophy regarded in its essential finality, has to be considered as a personal response to a call’ (TWB: 3). It is also worth bearing in mind what Marcel wrote in the preface he supplied for the Belgian Jesuit Roger Troisfontaine’s study of his thought:

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Les philosophes jusqu’à notre époque, à un très petit nombre d’exceptions […], ont en général admis que la disposition intime du philosophe n’avait pas à entrer en ligne de compte. Mais ceci revient à dissocier de façon inadmissible l’homme et le philosophe où encore à confondre celui-ci avec le savant. […] on ne peut philosopher authentiquement qu’avec tout soi-­ même. (Troisfontaines 1968: 14)

Marcel’s comment once again coincides pretty much with Unamuno’s ‘it is the individual that philosophizes’ in proposing that authentic philosophy stems from a deep urge from within which is itself non-rational. The philosopher is a human being whose philosophy will reflect that individual’s situation or outlook; it takes the form of a personal quest. There is in fact a simple basis for this view of philosophy as a personal quest. A thought does not occur in a void or an imaginary space; it is tied to the mind that had it, or as Marcel puts it, ‘it is certainly tempting but infinitely dangerous to cut the umbilical cord that binds pensée pensante and pensée pensée’(TWB: 189). The danger of course is that of reducing philosophy to mere formulas. The existential philosopher does not draw conclusions from universal principles; rather does he focus on a real-life situation with which he is personally involved but from which he can stand back just sufficiently in order to reflect upon. Yet to speak of the existential philosopher, admits Marcel, is in one way misleading because the definite article implies a generality whereas ‘existential’ implies a singularity. Existential philosophy in Marcel’s sense does not lend itself to totalizing thought in the way that classical philosophy, following a well-­ laid tradition, normally does. Each philosopher digs into his own being and his own situation even as he seeks to broaden his horizons. To the objection that such an approach would reduce philosophy to the whimsies of the individual Marcel replies that what is subjective is not solipsistic, that between the exclusively personal and the scientifically objective there is a broad zone of subjective experience that can be shared, that has a sufficient degree of commonality to become meaningful, the creative arts being an obvious example. Such experience moves from the zone of the subjective into that of intersubjectivity, a concept that pervades Marcel’s entire philosophy.

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Marcel’s subjective experience is not based on the disembodied Cartesian ‘I’: ‘In general, the cogito in its idealist interpretation—I shall not decide whether it can be taken in any other sense—does not seem to me a likely point of departure for a possible metaphysics’ (CRF: 65). Here again Marcel coincides fully with Unamuno: neither sees Descartes’ abstract ‘I’ as helpful or even necessary.6 Marcel defends instead what he calls a ‘concrete philosophy’, one that starts from the reality of embodiment, from the inescapable fact of the thinker being a body among other bodies. This constitutes a datum that has no explanation, no transparency to itself. It is as it were the starting gate. For it is through our body that we experience the world, and it is experience that generates our decision to philosophize. Concrete philosophy exists within experience, not outside of it: ‘philosophy implies an exaltation of experience, not a castration of it’ (CRF: 80). For Marcel, philosophical reflection must be based on convictions which are experiential rather than rational or logical: system-­building must take a back seat. What has to be established—and this is the difficult part—is what level of experience, or what type of experience, merits philosophical treatment. Since Marcel believes that he is a body, the level of experience which he chooses to dwell on is that of sensations, not so much the obvious physical ones of hunger, thirst, fatigue, or libido, as the far more obscure ones associated with human feelings such as love, hope, sorrow, possessiveness, loyalty, belonging, receptivity, commitment, honesty, regret, dignity, or of course their lack. This kind of philosophy derived from personal experience should in fact turn out to be closer to the ordinary person than the kind of philosophy based on logical abstraction, and this for a number of reasons. Firstly, it shares concerns with contemporary literature, theatre, and film. Secondly, every thinking person has at some time experienced moments of unexplained emotional cognition, connected perhaps with a death, a birth, a meeting, or some such concrete event, an experience that calls for  On this point I have offered a critique of both Unamuno and Marcel in ‘Dismantling Descartes: Miguel de Unamuno and Gabriel Marcel’, Journal of Romance Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Spring 2020), 21–49. 6

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enlightenment. Thirdly, this modern philosophy will be capable of vigorously addressing the modern trend to convert the human being into a mere functional entity—an employee, a passenger, a patient, a voter, a passport holder etcetera—with the consequent and obvious danger of depersonalization; it should counter the sense of uneasiness caused by the dehumanization of an increasingly technocratic society; and it should attempt to locate and recover the roots of our being, obscured by the distorting façade of technocratic man. This should not be seen as a religious enterprise, for according to Marcel a religious disposition requires faith whereas philosophy demands reflection, more especially reconstructive reflection. As we shall see in due course, however, Marcel’s distinction, though no doubt valid in itself, does not establish a strict demarcation between religious sentiment and philosophical reflection, and the two will occasionally coalesce. Not that Marcel was unaware of this: he speaks of the need for a ‘hidden co-­operation between philosophy and religion’ (TWB: 15), despite their different approaches. The role that Marcel ascribes to the contemporary philosopher is as much that of social vigilance and protection of personal freedoms as of the dissection of epistemological and moral perplexities that have dominated philosophy since the seventeenth century. The potential objection that in such a philosophical plan he is imposing his own critical idea of modern man which those of a more modern outlook may not share is one that Marcel takes seriously. His answer is that a subjective scrutiny of any human condition must still take into account what other witnesses have said and aim as far as possible at a mutual comprehension. Furthermore, the object of such philosophical research should not be to innovate but to explore, perhaps to confirm existing ideas, perhaps to adjust or amplify them. Accordingly, it is the responsibility of the philosopher to maintain ‘a paradoxical equilibrium between the spirit of universality on the one hand, inasmuch as this is embodied in values which must be recognized as unaltarable, and on the other hand his personal experience, which he neither can nor should ignore’ (TWB: 31).

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2.4 Conclusions These three thinkers share one overriding belief, namely that there is a pressing need for philosophy to liberate itself from scientific discourse with its mathematical or (in second-rate science) pseudo-mathematical logic, its deterministic laws, and its narrowness of vision. Even Gabriel Marcel, who appears the most rational, or least irrational, of the three, is very clear on the limitations of logical discourse. Philosophy needs to break through the barriers imposed by positivistic science and confront the complexities of man and life in all their diversity and alogical attributes. Without wishing to denigrate science and its advances to the benefit of mankind, these thinkers want to move philosophy away from the rigid forms of thinking associated with science, which renders it incapable of making headway in the sphere of human sentiment. For our lives are not in the main ruled by scientific laws but by our feelings. Science moreover has been obliged to assume that nature was intelligible to the human brain, and from there has gone on to assume the existence of what it was searching for. But is this not tantamount to making an act of faith in the uniformity and unchanging character of nature? The physicists reduce everything to mathematical formulae. But are molecules, atoms, sub-atomic particles and their strong and weak nuclear forces more real than the human beings who invented those ideas, more real, say, than their human relationships, their joys, and their sorrows? As human beings we have our values, and for us they are real enough. Yet values there are none in nature. Are we to give them up because science has no use for them? To leave everything to science is to impoverish our existence: whither beauty, altruism, justice, friendship, solidarity and love? The human mind extends into areas beyond the reach of logic and discursive reason.7

 Here I have been paraphrasing William Macneile Dixon’s wonderfully entertaining Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Glasgow in 1935–1937 and published as The Human Situation (Dixon 1958: 338–39). William Macneile Dixon (1866–1946) was an almost exact contemporary of Unamuno and has strong philosophical affinities to all three thinkers studied here. Though a specialist in English literature, he could certainly be considered a Christian existentialist in the light of The Human Situation. 7

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In effect what we find in our three thinkers is thinking of two types: logical thinking and affective thinking. There is no radical separation; both are considered valid and overlap without our realizing. The difference lies in the kind of knowledge that they unveil, or even perhaps create. Scientific knowledge is deemed to apply throughout the cosmos; philosophical knowledge is confined to the human sphere. Science functions well in the physical sphere but runs into severe problems in non-­ physical areas such as thought, volition, memory, and the affects. To speak of thinking as the firing of neurons in the brain is to substitute one mystery for another. On the other hand, philosophical thinking moves in a nebulous medium where verification is well-nigh impossible. Yet paradoxically, no matter how different their spheres of action, both approaches are driven by a passion for knowing, and such a passion transcends man’s requirements for survival in his own environment and remains unexplained. Other species survive as well as we do without the need for the knowledge we hanker after. Furthermore, man’s destiny—and that is what these thinkers are primarily interested in—is no different whether we adopt a materialist or an idealist approach. ‘It matters not in the least whether you say “All is matter” or “All is mind”, as far as human beings are concerned, if they be looked upon as mere passing manifestations of the universal process, either as ephemeral appearances of a conjectured universal mind or temporary atomic structures on the stage of nature’ (Dixon 1958: 305–06), a point also made by Unamuno when he said that ‘it comes to the same thing to say that all is matter, or all is idea, or all is energy, or what you will’ [‘lo mismo da decir que todo es materia, como que es todo idea, o todo fuerza, o lo que se quiera’ (DST: X, 339)]. In the end materialism and idealism have a similar outcome: the end of individual consciousness. But whereas materialism, or scientism, blocks off all attempts to explain what it regards as delusions, idealism allows for a world generated by mind, not by matter or the electromagnetic, gravitational, and other physical forces that govern it. Unamuno, Berdyaev, and Marcel are not idealists in the traditional philosophical sense, but they are closer to idealism than to materialism in the sense that they seek to account for non-physical aspects of the human entity. These non-­ physical aspects are for them as real as the physical ones, and because they serve to characterize the human being they cannot be evaded.

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What these three thinkers demand, then, is that philosophy occupy the space that scientific thought cannot itself occupy. In order to do this it need not sacrifice reason, but nor must it allow itself to be constrained by it. Rational thought is but one of many qualities of the human mind. It does not cover existence in all its forms. It is a useful, indeed necessary tool, but it remains an instrument of the mind. For it is the mind that is the mover of the intellect, and the intellect has developed in subservience to the will-to-live, upon which none of the natural sciences, nor even religion for that matter, has been able to shed any light. Nor has traditional philosophy shed any greater light upon our inclinations, contradictions, and restiveness, upon the reality and purpose of the mind, upon the whole riddle of Being itself, as Heidegger might have said. Mind appears to us as the culmination of Being, as nature’s apex, yet we have no explanation for the phenomenon of mind. Human consciousness remains a mystery, despite its centrality to all our activities. It cannot be disregarded, as traditional science has done in its determination to ignore the presence of the observer, of the participator in the drama of the cosmos. This was to change in the first half of the twentieth century, concurrently with the new philosophical thinking brought on by existentialism. Nineteenth-century men of science had regarded nature as something quite apart from themselves and their theories; by and large philosophy had shared this view. The early twentieth century saw a significant shift: physics and philosophy coincidentally came to the realization that man was very much part of the picture rather than simply standing outside contemplating it. We are both spectators and actors in the great drama of existence, said Neils Bohr, one of the great physicists of the twentieth century. If the observer is part of the observations, the human mind is both author and audience. The observer (the human being) and the world (nature) cannot be disentangled; they need each other, or as Unamuno put it, ‘I and the world create each other mutually’ [‘Yo y el mundo nos hacemos mutuamente’ (CYC: VIII, 381)]. The anthropic principle came to be seen by physicists and philosophers alike as an ineluctable standpoint, but it raised the puzzling question of whether we can understand the cosmos without first understanding ourselves, and understanding ourselves entails the difficult business of understanding our minds. Can mind study itself? All one can say is that mind

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is the repository of our experience, of our intellect, of our affects, in a word, of our personality. Philosophy is thus the product of personality, a large part of which is constituted by our affective experience; hence it has to be a personal undertaking, each person’s philosophizing arising out of real-life circumstances. This is a key demand of the new thinking: that philosophizing be rooted in concrete experience. Yet experience is the sole prerogative of the individual. Can there be a philosophy of unique individuals? There is certainly no such science. Rationality demands rules, but then these are the rules created and handed down by the rationalists themselves. So perhaps in the end we shall have to accept Unamuno’s contention that Philosophy is a human product of each philosopher, and each philosopher is a human being of flesh and bone who addresses other human beings of flesh and bone like himself. Whatever he does, he is philosophizing not only with his reason, but with his volition, with his feelings, with his flesh and with his bones, with his entire soul and his entire body. [La filosofía es un producto humano de cada filósofo, y cada filósofo es un hombre de carne y hueso que se dirige a otros hombres de carne y hueso como él. Y haga lo que quiera, filosofa, no con la razón sólo, sino con la voluntad, con el sentimiento, con la carne y con los huesos, con el alma toda y con todo el cuerpo. DST: X, 297]

Or as Berdyaev said, philosophy should be a creative endeavour that recognizes the personal dimension of experience, a sentiment echoed by Marcel when he describes philosophy as a journey of discovery and a vocation. All three thinkers insist on seeing man as an active participator, not as a passive observer. What this means, of course, is that, despite the expressed anti-Cartesianism of these thinkers, the thinking self, with its concomitant consciousness, cannot be laid aside, for it is at the centre of everything, whether of scientific discovery, artistic creation, philosophical speculation, or behaviour both rational and irrational. The thinking self, or more correctly the personality that informs it, is the organizing principle of our world, the only one we can know. But how well can we know it?

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If mind is what moves us it does not do so in a vacuum. Our minds are intimately connected to our bodies, and our bodies are firmly implanted in a space and time which are recognizable and describable. Being is not simply existing. We participate in our existence in the sense that we have to engage with our spatio-temporal circumstances. Our life is an encounter between our self and our circumstances. We are not those circumstances, but we do not stand apart from them either. This is a fundamental tenet of existentialism, and is found in all our three thinkers, but we need to ask what those circumstances entail as well as who the entity is who encounters those circumstances, in other words we need to consider personal identity. What the spatio-temporal circumstances of my life give me is experience. So it must be true to say that I am my experience. To say that I am he who has been forged by his experience is about as close as we can get to answering the ‘who am I?’ question. But this is a far from satisfactory answer. Firstly, because my experience is never complete so long as I exist. And secondly, because ordinary experience hardly begins to explain that side of me which is made up of longings, expectations, apprehensions, transcendental beliefs, etcetera, that is, all those things of which I have no © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. A. Longhurst, Unamuno, Berdyaev, Marcel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81999-6_3

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direct experience through the sensory apparatus but which still affect me, not only feelings and emotions but also truth, beauty, justice…. We speak of a sense of justice, but this does not come to us through any of our five senses. To reduce my life to the narrowly empirical would be a distorting over-simplification. If this is so, then I am obliged to search for meaning beyond sense-experience. How is this to be done? The life of the body, a physical entity, is the only one we know; what we may call the spiritual side (or more narrowly psychological) is an affective experience rather than a physical one that comes through our senses, but it is nevertheless expressed via the body, like our predilection for music, poetry, painting, or even mathematics and crossword puzzles. That there appears to be more to human experience than the purely physical is incontestable, and stretching the concept of the physical to comprise the mental and the affective solves nothing, since this does not explain them. On the other hand, to say, with Plato and St Augustine, that we are embodied souls merely raises the question of human identity in reverse, for if that is what we are, what ends do our bodies serve? Why have a bodily mechanism if we are really affective or spiritual beings? This question has no more satisfactory answers than the question of why our physical bodies have spiritual or non-physical experiences. To say that the body is merely the soul’s representative in the material world, as many religions, and especially Christian ones, propose, is patently a specious argument that merely substitutes one unknown factor for another. The body question, then, cannot be evaded. Human beings are material bodies, and physics teaches us that material bodies emerge from the interaction of forces or energies. Does this mean that we are to treat certain aspects of human ‘beingness’ such as thought, volition, belief, or hope, in the same terms that we treat gravity or electro-magnetic radiation? Is it illuminating to consider mental and affective experiences solely as electro-chemical processes taking place inside the brain, as modern neuroscience insists? Reducing these experiences to brain states implies that brain states can analyze themselves, which is far from easy to understand. Are thinking, willing, feeling, constituents of the physical brain, agents by themselves? But if we do not accept this explanation we seem to be obliged to introduce the idea of a psyche (or soul in western philosophico-­religious terminology) beyond the brain, some kind of

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overarching controlling agent. And if we do, we face the task of accounting for its nature and provenance. The position seems irresolvable. On the one hand we know that the body is an organism composed of disparate accesories which lack individuality, and the union of these diverse parts of the corporal structure cannot credibly provide a governing power that not only controls itself but even enquires into itself. On the other hand we have no direct evidence of a self-in-charge. David Hume famously argued that he observed no subject of experience distinct from the experiences themselves. The subject of experience is just another posited object. So if there is no ‘I’, who is it who knows that there are thoughts, sensations, impressions, and so on? And where does the burden of responsibility lie if there is no agent? Those who like to recall Hume’s provocative questioning of the reality of the self forget that Hume recanted and confessed that the issue of personal identity was too difficult a problem for him to solve. Two centuries later the existentialists faced the same conundrum with no more success and in some cases a good deal less forthrightness. The degree of awareness or consciousness as it exists in mankind appears to be a unique phenomenon in nature. So far as we can tell, matter or its atoms or molecules show no such attribute.1 The other essential factor that marks the existential approach to being is our encompassment, the indispensable framework that defines our lives, or as Ortega y Gasset famously put it ‘I am I and my circumstance’. The world is a given without which no human being can exist as such. Descartes admitted that it never occurred to him to doubt the reality of the world. His problem was how to rise to the challenge of the sceptics and show that their subversive arguments were misconceived. Hence his protracted proofs of the indubitable existence of both the individual and the world. Existentialists recognize no such doubts about the reality of the world and the individuals in it, so their starting gate is placed further down the track, at the point where we simply find ourselves in the world  Pan-psychism, however, is not to be lightly dismissed. For a strong defence of pan-psychism (the universality of consciousness, however slight, throughout all matter) by the philosopher Galen Strawson, see Strawson (2006). It stands to reason that if consciousness is a physical phenomenon, it must be derived from the constituents of matter, be already there in some form. William James pointed this out. But the question of whether our awareness of the world is given to us by the world itself is far less obvious. Has nature really created its own spectators? 1

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and have to make sense of it and of our role. Philosophically this is a far from easy task. Firstly, our world, indeed the cosmos, is not a static and uniform place; it is dynamic, changeable, and imperfect. In a perfectly uniform and unchanging universe, the physicists’ state of entropy, there could be no life. Life implies disequilibrium. We are a product of that very assymetry and mutability, and subject to the same forces of change that have produced our environment. Secondly, this very dynamism and changeability work against the stability of our own nature and therefore of our questioning. The diversity of life pre-empts perfect answers. We seem unable to reach stasis, contentment, closure. We are continuously striving for better solutions, for a greater understanding. Thirdly, this very incompletion raises questions not just about the world but about our own capacities. What is the point of it all?, we have throughout the ages asked ourselves. Where are we heading? We cannot tell. We sense our reason giving up, sapping our energies, undermining our very attempts to grasp our raison d’être. Yet is not reason itself the product of life, meant presumably to help us find our way? Is there something beyond reason, an unknown dimension of our world, one to which we reach out in rare moments of insight, when we are not distracted by our rational pursuits, when we are led by the experience of, say, music, or poetry, or other artistic form of expression? There is additionally and centrally the reality of our fellow humans. My world cannot be reduced to me as subject and everything else as objects of my perception. In my fellow humans, and perhaps to a decreasing extent in other sentient creatures, I recognize not just objects but subjects too, with their own perceptions and reactions similar to mine. The recognition that I belong not just to a world of objects but at the same time to a network of subjectivities is a hugely complicating factor, one that has figured prominently in the work of religiously-orientated and atheistic existentialists alike. If a human being is characterized not by self-containment but by inter-relatedness, how does this ‘being-with’ affect the nature, status, and life-experience of the human entity? The presence, even the absence of others, shapes my existence.

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3.1 Unamuno: The Split Self ‘The Man of Flesh and Bone’ is how Unamuno titles the opening chapter of The Tragic Sense of Life. What interests him, he goes on to say, is the being ‘who is born, suffers and dies—above all dies—who eats, drinks, plays, thinks and loves, the man who is seen and heard, who is our brother, our true brother’ [‘el que nace, sufre y muere—, sobre todo muere—el que come y bebe y juega y duerme y piensa y quiere, el hombre que se ve y a quien se oye, el hermano, el verdadero hermano’ (DST: X, 275)]. Such a person is very evidently a physical entity, something which Unamuno appears keen to emphasize. He side-steps the Platonic-­ Augustinian idea of the human person as an embodied soul and starts from the perspective of the person as a body: ‘I am my body’ [‘mi cuerpo soy yo’ (ADE: 57l)]. Clearly to say ‘I am my body’ is by itself insufficient, since my body is subject to change and decay from birth to death, whereas the body’s awareness of itself, the ‘I’, appears by contrast to be a relatively stable entity or agent. Unamuno declines to separate this ‘I’ or consciousness of self from the physical body (as Descartes did with his distinction between res extensa and res cogitans), but he needs to invoke some principle of unity and continuity in the person. What has traditionally been called ‘soul’, he argues, is but a euphemism for ‘individual consciousness in its wholeness and persistence’ [‘la conciencia individual en su integridad y su persistencia’ (DST: X, 338–39)]. The real principle of unity is quite simply the mechanism of memory, a mechanism which, Unamuno contends, applies at the level of the individual and at the level of the collectivity or pueblo, whose collective memory is found above all in its literature. A human being, then, is a physical organism endowed with memory. The former can exist without the latter, but in that case there can be no self-identity. Our self-awareness comes from our memory, which provides the sense of continuity of experience needed for the unity of the person. Unamuno recalls his experience as a nine-year-old in Bilbao during the siege of the city by the Carlists in 1874. He knows that was his experience because his memory tells him so, and he derives the notion of self-awareness from the agglomeration of experiences attributed to the same physical entity. But is this good enough? It may be sufficient to

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explain the continuity from past to present; but it does not explain our acute sense of the future, which plays such a key role in our lives. Nor does it explain what happens when we forget, since we are often perfectly conscious of having forgotten. Who or what is conscious of forgetting? Who or what is making the effort to retrieve these mis-filed memories? Is memory conscious of its own failures? Unamuno does not address these questions. All he is interested in is discrediting the pretence of rationality in human immortality. What Unamuno wishes to reject, then, is the notion of the soul as a real, distinct yet immaterial substance. ‘They want to confer the status of objective reality on something that does not have it; on something whose reality exists only in the mind’ [‘Se quiere dar valor de realidad objetiva a lo que no la tiene; a aquello cuya realidad no está sino en el pensamiento’ (DST: X, 344)]. The fact that our identity persists in time in no way guarantees the substantiveness of the soul. ‘It is my living body which thinks, wills, and feels’ [‘Es mi cuerpo vivo el que piensa, quiere y siente’ (DST: X, 342)]. Unamuno repeatedly uses the word alma, soul, but he applies it indiscriminately to individuals, collectivities, territories, nations, and even works of art and fictional characters. It is an elastic concept, often closer to presence, quintessence, or emotional core than to a God-­ given spiritual essence. Unamuno is very clear that it is the body, not the soul, that supports our states of consciousness. Those who posit a separate entity are choosing to ignore the truly rational explanation, namely that a human being’s apperception and judgement are a result, not a causal agent. Consciousness is an attribute of the human brain, and thus the sense of an ‘I’ is a consequence of a physical entity, he argues. How an immaterial phenomenon such as consciousness arises from a lump of matter such as the brain is something on which Unamuno remains silent. His criticism of Descartes for separating the two and then failing to convincingly explain their interaction looks equally unconvincing. On the other hand Unamuno does show awareness that in our daily lives our bodies and our selves are not treated as fully congruent: I routinely refer to my body, ‘which I call mine, to distinguish it from I myself ’ [‘al que llamo mío para distinguirle de mí mismo’ (DST: X, 309)], which waters down the identification between self and body; but he does not follow up the implications of this

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observation, something which Marcel was to take up. Unamuno chooses to stop at this point: ‘The idea which I have of myself is simply me’ [‘La idea de mi mismo soy yo’ (DST: X, 343)]. In other words, rationally speaking there is no point in looking beyond the body: if my body is mortal so am I. It is not surprising therefore that David Hume’s contention that he could never observe his self in action but only the action itself should meet with Unamuno’s approval. Yet by saying that ‘I can never catch myself at any time without a perception and never can observe any thing but the perception’, Hume has created a phantom which nevertheless has the capacity to recognize itself as such. Was Hume, and Unamuno after him, not implicitly admitting the thinking ‘I’ of Descartes which had already been rejected? In the end of course the existentialists and all those who reject Descartes’ cogito are forced to return to some kind of dualism, for if I think and I am aware that I am thinking it matters little who or what the ‘I’ is: the fact remains that I have separated this consciousness of thinking from the physical home or generator of the thought. The only way out of this dualism, and a purely theoretical one at that, is to contend that matter and thought are one and the same substance or energy. But this monism is not physicalism in the material sense, something that Unamuno did realize: ‘since we do not know what matter is any more than we know what spirit is, and since all this about matter is just our idea of it, materialism is idealism’ [‘como no sabemos más lo que sea la materia que el espíritu, y como eso de la materia no es para nosotros más que una idea, el materialismo es idealismo’ (DST: X, 339)]. The outcome for Unamuno is the same whether we favour one or the other: the loss of individual consciousness either through physical disintegration or dissipation of ‘states of energy’.2 What Unamuno is really driving at is that the attempt to explain human identity and the human world rationally, whether through scientific rationalism or a religious kind of rationalism, is bound to fail. The soul or unifying principle is not a substance and is not to be located  Curiously the point Unamuno raises about matter is fully consonant with post-quantum physics, in which the line between the physical/material and the non-physical/immaterial has become increasingly fuzzy. A substantial body of literature has recently arisen on the new substance monism and its implication for the notion of the soul in Christian anthropology. 2

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anywhere. That kind of psycho-religious belief explains nothing. And for the same reasons—or more accurately lack of them—the idea of a necessary universe is a meaningless concept: ‘why must there be a world rather than no world, than nothing?’ [‘¿por qué ha de haber mundo, y no más bien que no hubiera ni mundo ni nada?’ (PPP: 664)]. Beyond the fact that the universe exists, man cannot rationally establish either its cause or its purpose. We cannot infer the existence of God from the existence of the universe and the existence of the universe from the existence of God. The universe is purely contingent. Rationalism—and science prides itself on its rationality—turns out to destroy both the idea of our world, a world for our benefit, and the idea of personality, that is, of our coherent, uniform being. We are a mere succession of states of consciousness, a flux of moments of experience interrupted by unconscious, disjointed slumber. The outcome of Unamuno’s meditations on the self is a clear anticipation of Sartre: As you penetrate into yourself and dig deep in yourself, you discover your own inanity, that you are not all you think you are, not all you wish to be, that in the end you are a mere nothing. [Según te adentras en ti mismo y en ti mismo ahondas, vas descubriendo tu propia inanidad, que no eres todo lo que eres, que no eres lo que quisieras ser, que no eres, en fin, más que nonada. (DST: X, 385)]

Yet this nadir, as it turns out, is Unamuno’s real starting point for an alternative philosophy of the self. Taking the rational road solves little because it reveals neither our provenance nor our destination, but even worse our own nature is left in a nebulous suspension. Unamuno has not abandoned reason, but he has laid bare its limitations. What is my sense of self? Why do I have it and why do I need it? Reason, which arises from life as an aid to living, to subsistence, is unable to provide a satisfying answer. Indeed it tends to undermine, perhaps even destroy, the concept of personality, of self-­ identity. For the human entity feels itself to be more than a succession of states of consciousness. The self has an awareness of its successive states that appears to be different from those states themselves, which it can seek to change. If I feel sad or angry I am not only aware of my state but

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I can endeavour to control it, which suggests that I am something more persistent than my passing states. It does not seem a viable assumption that sequences of states themselves produce some kind of overarching state that supervises those temporary states. Despite his initial insistence that a person is simply ‘a continuing sequence of states of consciousness’ [‘serie continua de estados de conciencia’ (DST: X, 281)], Unamuno’s quest for the heart of the self, for the source of his conviction that he enjoys a unique identity which he wishes to retain, must perforce take a different turn. That the conscious mind is body-dependent and therefore mortal is not questioned by Unamuno. That is the rational conclusion. But the rational explanation, though consistent in itself, is radically incomplete. Since we are affective and not just rational entities, our sentiments must be allowed their say. Because reason is selective and much is left out of its limited compass, argues Unamuno, we must strive to employ what he labels ‘sentimental values’ [‘valores de sentimiento’ (SFE: VIII, 648)] in our attempts to get closer to our human reality.3 The most preponderant of these sentiments or affective values is the will: consciousness is first of all will, above all the will to survive into the future. It is here that Unamuno chooses to refer to Spinoza’s conatus, the natural striving to survive that characterizes living creatures; but in fact Unamuno’s notion is closer to that of Nietzsche and especially to that of Schopenhauer (whose The Will in Nature Unamuno had translated). Nietzsche’s will to power and Schopenhauer’s cosmic will or blind energy are converted by Unamuno into a personal striving for perdurance. He distinguishes between sentir, to feel, and pensar, to think, precisely because thought is allegedly inimical to perdurance. Wishing to make a case for belief in survival after bodily death, he chooses to give priority to sentiment over reason. It is the will to overcome finitude that lies at the basis of non-­ rational explanations of our being. Whereas reason can only produce materialist explanations, the will can produce spiritual explanations, and these Unamuno sees as vital supports for the conduct of our lives and  In this essay of 1904, “Sobre la filosofía española”, Unamuno also suggests that the Spanish nation, which has contributed little to the experimental sciences, may be better endowed for the more intuitive study of the underlying layer of sentiment in the human being, a notion that reappears in the closing chapter of The Tragic Sense of Life. 3

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even for scientific enterprise; for while science itself depends on reason, the drive to know lies beyond reason. There is an intimate truth which is felt, not deduced: ‘to feel is something more intimate than to understand’ [‘sentir es algo más íntimo que comprender’ (QEV: VIII, 887)]. We carry within us a dormant sense of mystery which occasionally awakens without us knowing why. It is a deep disquietude invisible from outside and impossible to convey in words, an intimation of an invisible, silent world beyond the reach of reason (ESV: VIII, 923–25). How much truth is there in these divinations? Unamuno, like his favourite psychologist, William James, refrains from making any claims about the objective value of these intuitions; all he claims is that, ‘since a human being is a will’ [‘como la persona es una voluntad’ (DST: X, 426)], for the subject of experience truth can indeed be intuitive or volitional, not only rational or dependent on the senses: ‘What I feel is a truth, as true at least as what I see, or touch, or hear, or is demonstrated to me—even truer I think’ [‘Lo que siento es una verdad, tan verdad por lo menos como lo que veo, toco, oigo y se me demuestra—yo creo que más verdad aún’ (DST: X, 369)]. But Unamuno is not content with arguing that a human being has two distinct kinds of capacities, the capacity to rationalize the impressions it receives through the senses and the capacity to feel or imagine alternative solutions. He goes further, and pits one against the other: the truth of reason against the truth of the will and its reaching out or transcendence. The human being is pulled in two directions, and to live authentically is to recognize the impact of each force. Spinoza’s error was to reduce the conatus to simple survival: ‘The essence of being, more than the conatus to persist in the being itself, as Spinoza taught, is the striving to be more, to be everything: it is the hunger for infinity and eternity’ [‘La esencia del ser, más que el conato a persistir en el ser mismo, según enseñaba Spinoza, es el esfuerzo por ser más, por serlo todo: es el apetito de infinidad y eternidad’ (MAP: IX, 188)].4 For Unamuno, this yearning to transcend human limitations and finitude is a key attribute which must come from  This article dates from 1909. The idea is repeated in The Tragic Sense of Life: ‘The essence of a being is not only the determination to carry on existing, as Spinoza taught, but also the determination to achieve universality, it is the hunger and thirst for eternity and infinity’ [‘La esencia de un ser no es sólo el empeño en persistir por siempre, como nos enseñó Spinoza, sino además el empeño por universalizarse, es el hambre y sed de eternidad y de infinitud’ (DST: X, 440)].

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somewhere. It may not have an objective value, but it certainly has a value for the person feeling it. The implication of Unamuno’s view is that the human person is an incomplete being, unable to conciliate his actuality with his longings. The split personality syndrome is one that comes through powerfully in many of the characters we meet in Unamuno’s fiction, so it is clearly a central tenet of Unamuno’s beliefs about the person. The only treatment for this condition, if treatment it be, Unamuno found in Schopenhauer, or more correctly in a christianized version of Schopenhauer, as we shall see in due course. For the moment we need to complete Unamuno’s version of what it means to be human. In his treatment of the human entity Unamuno distinguishes between individuality and personality, although the distinction is not explained with sufficient clarity beyond the introductory remark that the individual refers to the holder or container while the person refers rather to the content, which is spiritual in nature (EIE: VIII, 527–28). This distinction, which first appears in the 1902 essay “El individualismo español”, reappears ten years later in The Tragic Sense of Life (DST: X, 411) with a different metaphorical illustration, but with the same idea of content and container: the richer the personality the more participative it becomes. Individuality is the distinguishing factor, what pulls one apart from others, whilst personality is the enriching factor, what makes one receptive and impressionable. The former ‘exhibits our finitude’ [‘presenta nuestra finitud’], the latter ‘exhibits our infinitude’ [‘presenta nuestra infinitud’ (EIE: VIII, 528)]; one has clear bounds, the other appears boundless. Given Unamuno’s intense interest in personality, which makes him return to the topic again and again in both essays and novels using varying terminology, we could compare this to the split he establishes between rational man and aspirational man, one recognizing the bounds of reason and the other reaching out to a wider and more mysterious world. On yet another occasion he speaks of two selves—or rather of two as a minimum out of many possible ones—a deep, radical, subliminal self which persists in time, and an exterior or supraliminal self which is more accidental and transitory (SCS: VIII, 951–52). On this occasion Unamuno is simply distinguishing between authentic and inauthentic conduct: the latter is the result of an over-concern with others’ expectations of one, ‘so that to maintain the idea that others have of him, he becomes a traitor to

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himself: he is insincere’ [‘para seguir siendo como los demás le creen, se hace traición a sí mismo: es insincero’ (SCS: VIII, 942)], that is to say conformism takes over from the creation of an authentic self, a clear anticipation of Sartre’s mauvaise foi. These two selves, derived from St Paul’s inner and outer man (2 Cor. 4.16) are relatively easy to grasp: the inner, pre-logical one that carries our vital attitudes, inclinations, uncertainties, and the outer one responsible for our social comportment and subject to social pressures. But Unamuno is not content with two selves: ‘The consciousness of each one of us is in effect a society of people; within me there live several ‘I’s, and even the ‘I’s of those I live with’ [‘La conciencia de cada uno de nosotros, en efecto, es una sociedad de personas; en mí viven varios yos, y hasta los yos de aquellos con quienes vivo’ (DST: X, 415)]. Knowledge of a distinctive or core self appears barred. What comes through in Unamuno’s varying and inconsistent attempts to explain the obscure nature of the human mind is his view of its contradictory quality. The mind is not all of a piece and defies definition and classification.5 Indeed according to Unamuno there is no logical requirement for personal identity other than as an implicit recognition of our own states of consciousness. But what is truly characteristic of the human being is that we are simultaneously aware of our own agency as individuals and of the agency of others. Others are always present to my mind, and even on my own I am conscious of an Other (‘el otro’). This is where Unamuno’s notion of personalidad comes in. What this term stands for is a mode of being in which personal identity is not so much a personal as a collective construct: the ‘I’ is framed in a ‘we’. In other words we cannot conceive of our own selves as separate, solitary, or self-sufficient. This would be an abstraction with no reality. ‘My living self is an I which in practice is a we; my living, personal self lives only in other, from other, and through other selves’ [‘Mi yo vivo es un yo que es en realidad un nosotros; mi yo vivo, personal, no vive sino en los demás, de los demás, y por los demás yos’ (DST: X, 413)]. And in another place: ‘But what can  Unamuno uses a reformulated version of St Paul’s classification of human types (into somatic, psychic, pneumatic) on at least two occasions, in ‘Sobre el fulanismo’ and ‘Intelectualidad y espiritualidad’: those who lead animal-like lives, those who subject life to reason, and those who are dreamers and poets (IYE: VIII, 613–14). It is the latter type in particular that most attracts Unamuno because it is the least explicable. 5

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be affirmed is that the idea that each one forms of himself is influenced by the idea that others have formed of him even more than the latter by the former’ [‘Mas lo que cabe afirmar es que la idea que cada cual de nosotros se forma de sí mismo está influida por la que los demás se forman de él más aún que esta por aquella’ (SCS: VIII, 942)]. What Unamuno is getting at is that personal identity is a reciprocal, not a solitary, creation. In practice self-definition is not possible. I cannot say who I am without being aware of who I am not: ‘I feel my own self when I sense I am not the others’ [‘Me siento yo mismo al sentirme que no soy los demás’ (DST: X, 387)]. Personal identity is thus a differential phenomenon, and I know myself only in relation to others. But this is only a starting point. What applies to me as an individual must apply to others as individuals. Each one of us is conscious of being simultaneously subject and object, and as a consequence identity is a complex of images. It means that a human being’s identity is dependent not on his individuality but on his inter-relatedness; it is the result of an interaction, rather than of genetic make-up and environment as nineteeth-century positivists had insisted. It is the end-result of an I-You relationship, a social or collective construction, not simply the result of biological or physical factors.6 Personal identity, then, is an intersubjective construction, an equation self-other which underlies virtually the entire corpus of existentialist writing, whether with positive connotations, as in Karl Jaspers, or negative connotations, as in Jean-Paul Sartre. For better or worse, others impinge on me and my conception of myself. The view that I have of myself is conditioned by the perception of me that I observe in others, a modern variation of Bishop Berkeley’s esse est percipi, but a notion that is fraught with difficulties the moment we apply it not to a single individual but to all individuals. If in order to forge an image of myself I need the feedback I get from you, the corollary must also apply: you need the feedback from  There is a strong coincidence here between Unamuno and Martin Buber’s I and Thou (originally published in 1923). Both authors make the points that the uniqueness of the human person is in fact characterized by relationships and encounters with other beings; that the I can never be independent of the You; and that it is in a genuinely reciprocal relationship that we encounter God as an eternal You. God thus becomes a communal presence, not something separate, precisely what Unamuno emphasizes in his novel San Manuel Bueno, mártir. 6

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me. How this mutual dependency comes into being, since there is no antecedent or catalyst, Unamuno does not explain, so such a theory appears to be in danger of infinite regression. A theory of personality which proposes that in order to know what one makes of oneself one first needs to know what others make of one implies absolute reciprocity, and since such reciprocity is logically impossible, the theory becomes questionable or at any rate incomplete. Whether it remains ontologically desirable despite its logical weakness is a different question, and no doubt one which Unamuno would have answered with characteristic conviction.7 The other instability produced by this theory of personality is that of the possibility, indeed probability, of multiple personality, one which Unamuno acknowledges. For if I react to how others appear to see me, it is highly likely that my personality will alter; and if this applies to each and everyone of us, the possibility of a stable personality disappears. The best we can do is to posit a nuclear self orbited by unstable, kaleidoscopic versions or transitory shadows of self. This is arguably the most surprising aspect of Unamuno’s inquiry into the nature of the human entity, one that Unamuno, following Schopenhauer, introduces through his use of the word representación: ‘personality, that which one is, is but a representation: one is to oneself what others represent one to be’ [‘la personalidad, lo que se es, no es sino una representación: uno se es lo que los demás se le representan’]; and ‘who is one to oneself? The one he represents, the one he is for others’ [‘¿Quién se es uno? El que representa, el que es para los otros’ (AYD: X, 909)]. In Spanish representación and representar do not simply mean representation and to represent; they mean putting on an act, or staging. Now if we are conscious of being watched we are more likely to act, to role-play, and if we are acting in front of one another this immediately raises the question of authenticity. Given the central importance of reciprocal projections in Unamuno’s theory of self-identity, if I  Unamuno’s novel Abel Sánchez is a perfect illustration of this impasse. For Joaquín Monegro, achieving a full understanding of his own personality depends not only on the perception he has of himself but also on the perception that Abel has of him. But who is Abel, what is he really like? Joaquín does not have a stable image of Abel, and if he is left in doubt about Abel, then Abel must be left in doubt about Joaquín. Neither can achieve plenitude in his knowledge of the other. Joaquín’s frustration is born of the fact that he cannot tell what Abel thinks of him and thus cannot complete his own self-picture. 7

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am aware of others’views of me and accordingly adjust how I project myself, how does this affect our reciprocal images? What happens to the real ‘I’? This phenomenon is what Unamuno refers to as ‘the mask’ ‘la máscara’, with which he clearly identifies: ‘my mask is I myself ’ [‘mi máscara soy yo’], he writes on one occasion (Unamuno 1966: VII, 1344). This is an obvious case of self-objectification, of contemplating a self that we invent as if it were something out there, of the perceiving subject becoming an object of perception while not ceasing to be the necessary subject. Does this image or projection of oneself have any reality? Self-­ identity may be dependent on our relatedness to other beings, but the moment we try to grasp it, it seems to slip through our fingers. Or as Berdyaev was to say, man is a riddle, not because he is an animal, not even because he is a social being, but precisely because he possesses personality.

3.2 Berdyaev: The Creative Self ‘Man lives in an agony, and he wants to know who he is, where he comes from, and whither he is going’ (SAF: 20), affirms Berdyaev, echoing Unamuno’s ‘why do I want to know whence I come and whither I am going?’ [‘¿Por qué quiero saber de dónde vengo y a dónde voy?’ (DST: X, 301). Why indeed does one want to know and where does one look for an answer? The human being known to biology and sociology, says Berdyaev, is simply the product of natural worldly processes, yet these processes have shed no light on those perennial questions. As a purely natural being man has no special significance; he is one of many living things and has to struggle to survive, like all the rest. But man has been endowed with a property that appears to be exclusive to his species: an exceptional self-awareness. A human being is a perceiving subject aware of himself or herself as just such a subject. Consciousness is at the centre of the human world and makes it possible both to know the world by observation and to go beyond that observation to reach an understanding of what is observed. The extreme consciousness of the human species is not explicable in the same terms that the natural world is explicable, and remains a mystery, ‘a break in the world of nature’ (MCA: 62). This

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quality precedes all philosophic perception of the world and mankind’s role in it: ‘Man’s consciousness of himself as a creative being is a primary rather than a derived consciousness’ (MCA: 113). The mystery of man’s self-consciousness lies behind all philosophical, or reflective, endeavours; it is indeed the starting gate, philosophy’s initial problem, because ‘philosophy is the inner perception of the world through man’ (MCA: 60). In other words, any study of mankind which sees it as an object (all standard anthropologies, biological, psychological, or sociological) will be incomplete. Each person is a subject, a creative point of view that provides a vision of the cosmos that scientific anthropology cannot cope with. A person is in effect, as Berdyaev likes to say, a microcosm. Man has the capacity to recreate the cosmos within himself, to make it meaningful. He is both part of the natural world and a contemplator of it. Man cannot evade the cosmos, but he can transform it because ‘he knows himself to be the absolute centre—not of a given, closed planetary system, but of the whole of being, of all planes of being, of all worlds’ (MCA: 76). Berdyaev is claiming that, spiritually, the human species remains at the centre of the universe, even if natural science shows that both it and its world are marginal and accidental. His claim is based on the key role that our consciousness of ourselves plays in our perceptions and thirst for knowledge. This gives human Being a special place in nature, which Berdyaev terms divine Being, by analogy with God as creator. Just as God created the world out of his own resources when there was nothing before, so we create our own world by conferring our own outlook and disposition upon it. ‘In every creative act there is absolute gain, something added’, writes Berdyaev (MCA: 129). Our being lies in our role: to make life meaningful. Why else is there knowledge? No good answer is forthcoming if we regard knowledge as a reflection of the object. The world as we conceive it, subjectively, is ‘a world dependent upon man as a being’ (SAS: 34). This is entirely Kantian. The world itself offers no rationality, no self-explanation; any explanation comes from man. In an important sense, knowledge is the creation of the human personality, because the subject does not passively accept knowledge from the object but transforms the object into knowledge. This knowledge becomes the significance of the object. There is ‘added value’ in the subject’s process of conferring meaning and significance. Where Berdyaev differs from Kant

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is over the question of the noumenon. Kant ruled out direct knowledge not just of the thing-in-itself, but of God, freedom, and immortality, as well as of the human self. This Berdyaev could not accept. Probably influenced by Schopenhauer, who held that Kant had overlooked the basic forces within man (thirst, hunger, libido) that pointed to the underlying driving force of the universe, Berdyaev argued that spiritual man was part of noumenal reality: ‘Man is on the inside and hence participates in the reality. He is a microcosm and a micro-theos, the meeting point of the material-mental and the spiritual; therefore he knows reality through himself, and this knowledge is itself reality’ (Spinka n.d.: 101). This intuitional knowledge is a creative act. ‘In a certain sense my ego itself is a creative act. The world is my creative act. God is my creative act’ (TAR: 76). What Berdyaev is getting at is that the intrinsic chaos or obscurity of the universe is countered by man’s creative faculty. This creative impulse is itself reflection of an aspiration to another plane, another world: ‘Man’s inspiration towards plenitude is a creative incentive’ (SAS: 34). It might be assumed from what Berdyaev says in The Meaning of the Creative Act and Solitude and Society that he is taking a radically idealist line and seeing the world out there as the creation of the human mind. In fact this turns out not to be the case, as becomes apparent in his next work, Spirit and Reality. Here Berdyaev argues from a notably more complex position. He criticizes both Scholastic realism, for repudiating ‘the attempt to discover to what extent the agency of the subject influences our interpretation and knowledge of the world’, and nineteenth-century realism for becoming ‘warped and corrupted’ (SAR: 12), presumably for inconsistency in its representation of reality. We need to go beyond realism (which holds reality to be the reality of objects) and idealism (which holds the world of objects to be a construction of the subject). There is a third way, argues Berdyaev, starting from the premise that the subject, who is the only example of an authentic being, is more than perception, more than a perceptive entity: the subject is also voluntarist and existential. In other words we need to take into account that a human subject is an eminently participative being and not simply an observer or even interpreter of sensory impressions. The subject does not create the world; he creates in the world. The human being’s apprehension of reality does not take place in a void; it is connected to his ‘existential quality’ and to

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his social relatedness. This is different from the post-Kantian idealism in which the subject is not concrete man ‘but rather the transcendental consciousness, the supra-personal subject, the absolute spirit’ (SAR: 13). The butt of Berdyaev’s criticism here is Hegelian philosophy. He wishes to retain the notion of spirit, but within each being, not in the abstract: ‘Spirit is the reality revealed in and through the existential subject, a reality emanating from within rather than from without’ (SAR: 13). Yet at the same time ‘the reality of spirit is an awareness of realities’ (SAR: 17). It is not easy of course to ascertain with any precision what Berdyaev means by spirit, or indeed whether it approximates to the equally nebulous notion of alma employed by Unamuno. What is at any rate reasonably clear in both cases is that spirit and alma are seen principally as attributes of the human person, whether singly or collectively. The purely rational concept of the human being, an objective-naturalistic one, is not at all congruent with an existential apprehension of being. To understand what it is to be human, argues Berdyaev, we need a philosophy of existence, one that takes account of the threefold dimension of man as a spiritual, psychic, and corporeal being. I am a body, I am a mind or intellect, and I am a spirit, exactly as Unamuno had said reinterpreting St Paul. My spiritual dimension is what takes me from the natural order of existence to a higher order that we associate with freedom, love, creativity, truth, integrity, beauty, value, and the search for union with a higher or more perfect world. These attributes, which are undeniably part of our experience, testify to the reality of spirit. But man is not only spirit; he is most visibly and tangibly a body. Compared to Unamuno and (as we shall see) Marcel, Berdyaev has little to say about embodiment. He does concede that the human person is a complex unity made up of the spirit, the intellect, and the body, so the latter cannot be ignored: the body ‘has its place not only in the material, but also in the cognitive sphere’ (SAS: 122). But if the body has a physical and psychological dimension, it lacks the spiritual dimension, which is neither object, nor substance, nor an objectified form of psychic life (which is what psychology studies). None of these things appear to interest Berdyaev because ‘the personality is spirit and, as such, it is opposed to the thing, to the world of things, to the world of natural phenomena’ (SAS: 123). Surprisingly perhaps, this does not mean that Berdyaev

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entertains a Cartesian split in the human being. On the contrary, he explicitly disowns Descartes, rejecting the latter’s dualism as absolutely false. Nor does he appear to see the body in Platonic terms, as an inferior product, as merely the external image of man. There is a ‘vital unity of soul and body’, so that ‘the life of the soul permeates the whole life of the body, just as the bodily life has its effect upon the life of the soul’ (SAF: 31). These latter effects, however, appear limited, or at any rate are not clearly drawn. Indeed the physical presence of man hardly appears in Berdyaev’s writings except in a broadly historical or social sense. Physicality can indeed appear more as an unwelcome distraction. When the topic of sexuality is raised it is usually to be contrasted with love: ‘A strong impulse to the sexual act has all too often no connection with real love, sometimes even predicates revulsion’ (MCA: 213); and again: ‘Sex is imperfection and deficiency and it gives rise to a yearning for fulfilment, to a movement towards the completeness which is never attained’ (SAF: 55). A puritanical attitude towards sex comes through in later works such as The Destiny of Man and The Divine and the Human. In the latter we read that ‘erotic union […] leaves a dreadful association and even hostility’ (DAH: 115), and ‘the curse of sex hangs over man’ (DAH: 118); and in the former that ‘while man remains a sexual being he cannot live in peace and harmony’ (DOM: 64). On the face of it this concurs with Unamuno’s view that an ‘obsession with sex in an individual betrays not a greater vitality but a diminished spirituality’ [‘La obsesión sexual en un individuo delata, más que una mayor vitalidad, una menor espiritualidad’(SLL: IX, 125)]. But Berdyaev goes further: there is allegedly a fierce and cruel struggle between man and woman because of their different sexual psychologies. ‘The horror and the curse of sex’ has instigated ‘heroic efforts’ on the part of Christian ascetes (DOM: 64), but the problem has never been solved and can lie subconsciously in our being. In this deprecation Berdyaev is different from Unamuno, who saw the sexual union, at any rate within marriage, as a prelude, not as an alternative, to a deep and lasting love. Carnal love for the sheer pleasure of it is avarice, Unamuno concedes; but ‘from this carnal and primitive love […] there arises a spiritual and painful love’ [‘de este amor carnal y primitivo […] surge el amor espiritual y doloroso’ (DST: X, 383)]. For Berdyaev, obviously influenced by Freud, the sex drive can lie unaccredited in the unconscious and wreak

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havoc. To sublimate the sex drive and divert its energy to more creative enterprises is to raise man’s existence to another level, as in the case of Kierkegaard, ‘who sacrificed his love and found compensation in his creative genius’ (DOM: 65). Unamuno would probably not have agreed about the need to sacrifice his love. His novelette Una historia de amor can be read as a calque on the story of Kierkegaard’s abandonment of his fiancée and the subsequent doubts and angst that this caused him. What one can read positively, as does Berdyaev led by his Pauline-inspired asceticism, can also be read negatively. On the other hand there is no doubt that Unamuno and Berdyaev would be in agreement over the challenging nature of the human personality. For Unamuno, the complexity of man lies in the fact that he cannot know himself fully no matter how hard he tries. For Berdyaev it stems from the fact that he is both an individual, a specimen of the genus homo, and at the same time a person, the one biological, the other spiritual, the one concerned with the struggle for life, the other concerned with values (good, evil, beauty, justice…) which seem to belong to a ‘higher’ world. If man is considered merely a part of the natural world these intangible qualities are inexplicable and man becomes an insoluble problem, a riddle. Indeed even man’s discontent with his lot is a puzzle: he seems ill-­ adapted to the world in which he finds himself. A human being is a tragic being, says Berdyaev, ‘in conflict not only with the world but with himself ’ (DOM: 47), and he could also have had Miguel de Unamuno in mind when he wrote it. His view of personality is nevertheless somewhat different. Whereas Unamuno interprets it as the dynamic, unstable outcome of the interaction between the ego and the others, Berdyaev sees it in more narrowly spiritual terms: ‘Personality is a wholeness and unity possessing absolute and eternal worth […]. The spirit forms personality, enlightens and transfigures the biological individual and makes him independent of the natural order’ (DOM: 55–56). Berdyaev is really using the notion of personality not so much to demonstrate our extreme consciousness of our own selves as to claim the presence of a divine streak. It has little to do with the self of the psychologists, prone to collapse and disintegration, as exemplified for example in the work of Proust, Svevo, Hesse, or Pirandello among many modernist writers of the time.

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Personality for Berdyaev is an unbreakable whole, not world-dependent yet existing in a relationship with the world. Like Unamuno, Berdyaev distinguishes between individuality and personality, and again like him with no great clarity about what personality really is. It is a spiritual, not a biological, psychological, or sociological category. But it is not a soul conferred upon a body and distinct from it, and it is far more elemental than an intellectual ego. It has its roots in an underlying stratum of existence, in a non-physical world, in the world of freedom rather than the world of objects: it is ‘the absolute existential centre’ (SAF: 26). Individuality is given to man by nature and confirmed by society. An individual being is a tiny part of a much greater whole. It is an object among objects. Personality on the other hand does not fit into a worldly scheme of things. It has the quality of universality, which individuality lacks. It is a microcosm in itself, not a part of anything. It grows by development, not by the accretion of parts. It exists only subjectively and is therefore unique, irreplaceable. But it does not exist in isolation, nor is it egocentric; on the contrary, it is all-encompassing, characterized by its capacity to relate, to look to universal or suprapersonal values. ‘The cosmos, mankind, society, are in personality and not the other way round’ (SAF: 38). It is capable of suffering and joy, indeed it is these very capacities, as well as others such as memory, creativity, love, sympathy, compassion, and sacrifice. Interestingly Berdyaev, in an attempt to pin down the elusive concept of personality, uses the same metaphor of the mask that Unamuno employs: ‘The Latin word persona meaning a mask, in connection with playing a part in the theatre, very incompletely expresses personality in the sense given to it by Christianity and the new philosophy’ (SAF: 33). He goes on to explain that the Thomist distinction between individuality and personality (the material and the non-material) is refined by Leibniz, who associates the latter with consciousness of self. Kant adds an ethical dimension, separating man from the determinism of nature. For Max Scheler personality is unity of experience and action. The Russian theologian Viktor Nyesmyelov sees personality as a reflection of unconditioned being, that is to say, stripped of the conditions imposed by an earthly or material existence. Berdyaev seems to want to go a step further and to see personality as the revelation or consciousness of transcendence, of a world

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beyond the world that is part of our essential make-up. It is an I-and-­ Thou awareness, a state of communion not with an external object but with another subject or inner self. Rather than the world being divided, egocentrically, into I and non-I, which is how the individual sees it, personality captures existence as a spiritual experience which cannot be expressed in concepts but only through symbols, and the greatest symbol is the image of God. It is not easy to make sense of Berdyaev’s notion of personality, since it is essentially mystical. We have to be content with accepting that personality in his sense is a heightened perception of being. In other words it presupposes higher values towards which it seeks to rise. It is characterized by a longing which is not satisfied by earthly existence, so that ‘personality cannot but be accompanied by yearning, because yearning denotes a break with the world setting into which man is born and the impossibility of adaptation to it’ (SAF: 53). The preceding ideas on personality are found in The Destiny of Man (1931) and Slavery and Freedom (1939), but in the later The Divine and the Human (1947), the last of his major works, Berdyaev shifts his ground somewhat and comes up with a more fluid concept of personality, closer to Unamuno’s own concept. Now he concedes that it is impossible to reduce the complexity of man to a unity. Personality is no longer a wholeness, ‘personality in man is the result of conflict. It is the multiple composition of man’ (DAH: 112). In its formation the dominant or central ego must shed all the other egos in pursuit of authenticity. Confronted with the many different aspects of life and its diverse activities (the habitual, the scientific, the religious, the political, the artistic and so on), man reacts in different ways and registers the imprint of those activities on his personality. The forging of personality becomes a dynamic and creative process. But, adds Berdyaev, ‘the human spirit must always transcend itself and rise to that which is higher than man’ (DAH: 113). The yearning for paradise remains. The ego’s purpose, then, is to realize its personality, but what is this ego? Here Berdyaev, exactly like Unamuno, turns on Descartes and reverses the cogito to suit his own purposes oblivious of Descartes’ own, alleges that if I think it is because ‘I am surrounded on all sides by an impenetrable infinity’, and concludes that ‘the Ego belongs to the sphere

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of existence’ (SAS: 65), as if Descartes had said that it didn’t.8 The primitive ego, a purely ‘existential phenomenon’, antecedes consciousness, so that ‘the birth of consciousness is a very important event in the Ego’s destiny’ (SAS: 65). The ego, it would appear, undergoes stages of development from unconsciousness to consciousness, or, as Berdyaev explains it, from an undifferentiated unity with surrounding matter, through the split into ego and non-ego, to a final realization that it is part of a wider Thou. This quasi-Darwinian explanation of the emergence of mind is of course both philosophically and scientifically unviable since it explains neither its nature nor its function, but at any rate it shows Berdyaev’s determination to mark the route towards a spiritual interpretation of man’s journey, what he terms the ego’s search or need to ‘actualize itself ’ (SAS: 66). This necessarily implies that there is something there to actualize, so Berdyaev is obliged to posit an immutable identity in the midst of change. This persistent identity or continuity was, in the case of Unamuno, ascribed to memory, which, he argued, explains our awareness of being the same person today as in the past. Berdyaev simply says that ‘the Ego may be defined as the constant unity underlying all change, as the extra-­ temporal centre that can only be defined in terms of itself ’ (SAS: 67). This could be considered a question-begging proposition (it merely states what it sets out to demonstrate), which tells us precisely nothing of what a human being is, but it can be said in defence of Berdyaev that he readily admits that ‘while the Ego’s variations can be determined objectively, its essence cannot be thus determined’ (SAS: 67). Gabriel Marcel was coming round to much the same conclusion at about this time, and we should remember also that the promised Part II of Heidegger’s own inquiry into being was never written—his explanation that it would have needed a recasting of Part I is a euphemistic way of saying that he had come to the end of the transitable road.  The attitude of twentieth-century existentialists and their epigones (including neurologists turned philosophers) towards Descartes is utterly uncomprehending. Recent anti-Cartesianism is every bit as bad as Cartesianism in ignoring Descartes’ purposes, in indulging in crass reductionism, in brushing aside his difficult circumstances and need for extreme caution at the time of Galileo’s persecution by Church authorities, and in distorting his real position vis-a-vis the mind-body dichotomy. For a much more profound and fairer assessment of Descartes see Desmond Clarke (2003), and Tom Sorell (2005). 8

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Whatever the ego may be, its purpose is to realize its personality, to achieve a particular state of being which entails a heightened sense of awareness, a recognition of an ‘extra-natural’ dimension to existence. One feels oneself to exist beyond the body and its brain. As we have seen, Berdyaev, exactly like Unamuno, associates personality with the root sense of persona as mask or role on a stage. This mask is worn by man to disclose himself to others as well as to defend himself, ‘to preserve his identity in the depths of his being’ (SAS: 125). The significance of the theatrical analogy lies of course in the presence of an audience. The inevitable question must relate to the authenticity of one’s mask or role. Here Berdyaev distinguishes between masquerade, which he sees as an attempt to overcome one’s solitude in society by playing an assumed role or pretending to be what one is not, and seeking to represent oneself through one’s ‘own reflection in another human countenance, in the Thou’ (SAS:125). Others thus become the mirror in which we see ourselves. We thereby abandon all egocentrism, which Berdyaev holds to be deleterious to the development of a cohesive personality, and focus instead on communion, which he sees as having ‘an ontological reality’ (SAS: 125). Berdyaev falls back on the ‘being-with’ dimension of existentialist philosophy, while recognizing both the dangers (empty role-play) and the benefits (inter-relatedness) of man as an essentially social phenomenon. What is clear is that he takes this inter-relatedness (Buber’s I-Thou relationship as well as an I-We relationship) in a fundamentally spiritual sense. Community entails communion (as we shall see in a later chapter). Spirituality is also a social manifestation: deeply personal at source, but in intention social and even cosmic, argues Berdyaev. What we have here after all is a quasi-religious interpretation of Heidegger’s secular view that we belong in a shared world characterized by our interaction with others. This idea will be even more central in the philosophy of Gabriel Marcel.

3.3 Marcel: The Incarnate Self Marcel, like Heidegger, is a philosopher of being, although in his case the noun might be better employed in the plural. Although Marcel admitted that the human entity must ultimately remain a mystery to itself, his

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whole life’s work was a determined effort to explore the nature of human life and to appeal to a less mechanistic, more transcendental, conception of man. Like Heidegger’s, his search takes the ontological route, but unlike Heidegger he neither resorts to abstruse terminology nor fights shy of using openly religious concepts which Heidegger studiously sought to avoid through the use of unfamiliar terms. The concern with the nature of being is, however, common to both, what Marcel himself refers to as ‘the sacred sense of being, the conviction that being is a sacral reality’ (TWB: 243). Nevertheless the emphasis is somewhat different: on Being in Heidegger’s philosophy, on beings in that of Marcel, who confessed he was never very clear as to the difference between Being and beings. According to Emmanuel Levinas, Heidegger’s concept of Being was so distilled and abstract that it had left its roots in ordinary man far behind and become inhuman. This is certainly not something that can be said of Marcel’s pursuit of being. For Marcel, Heidegger’s question ‘What is it for a being to be?’ is a self-cancelling one, for it makes no sense to ask a question that requires its conditions of asking before it can be asked.9 ‘What is being?’ is itself meaningless unless we specify what it is in relation to something else. As Marcel says, ‘every question arises out of an underlying foundation which can only be being itself ’ (TWB: 49). For the question of being to have meaning, argues Marcel, we must stick to the verb rather than the noun, ‘where being (l’être) is the infinitive taken substantively’ (TWB: 50): what does it mean to be? By itself though, the verb ‘to be’ conveys little: it needs a predicate. The only meaningful answer for Marcel is that to be entails belonging or participating: to be is to belong, and we would then proceed to specify to what we belong. Being as such is a gift or endowment, not a thing. That may raise the question of the giver, but it does not of itself tell us what being is. It tells us simply that we can think of being as existing on two levels, the ordinary level of the human beings  One might well compare the other question asked by Heidegger (after Leibniz and several others, including Unamuno [PPP: VIII, 664]) ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’, a question which cannot be reversed: it establishes its own conditions of asking. The notion of nothingness, of what does not exist, is not a sufficient explanation of something, of what does exist. Nonetheless the question ‘Why does the universe exist?’, which is what Heidegger’s question really amounts to, is hardly illegitimate. 9

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that we are, and the pleromatic level of being to which we might conceivably aspire without understanding what it is. Heidegger’s distinction between Being and beings is ‘radically suspect’ (TWB: 209). Here we may compare Berdyaev’s comment (on Heidegger perhaps?) to the effect that ‘the concept of being cannot be laid as the foundation stone of philosophy because that concept is ambiguous. Being denotes both subject and object’ (SAF: 75). Indeed for Marcel the word being, used substantively as Heidegger used it, is ‘entirely useless’ (TWB: 66). One can only grasp what being means at the level of the concrete, that is, of our own encounters and experiences as human beings in a given world. Marcel is very clear that we cannot separate being from existence as we know it. The question, then, is whether I can have an experience of being as distinct from the experience of existing. To exist is to emerge, to be out there, to become perceivable. I experience this ‘visibility’ the whole time because I am aware of others’ awareness of me. But what about visibility from inside? Can my own being be the object of my affirmation? After all, I am scarcely in a position to grant being to myself. My being is no more than my awareness, something I feel, a deep-seated conviction or urge, an ‘ontological exigence’ in Marcel’s terminology. If we reduce this conviction to knowledge, all I know is that I have a here, I have a now, and I have a sense of difference (since I am not others). But this personal domain needs to be filled in somehow, otherwise I shall be little more than a void. What can I say about myself that is purely myself? Nothing, says Marcel; at any rate nothing that will firm up my existence in space and time. For this I need the confirmation of others. This is what Marcel refers to as ‘this paradox, by virtue of which even the most self-centred among us looks to others and only to others for his final investiture’ (HMV: 11). If this is so, then we are dependent on our bodies to an overwhelming degree, since it is through our bodies that we make ourselves known. For Marcel, therefore, the starting point of our existence, the only one that we can know, is incarnation, the fact that we exist in, by, or through our bodies. We have no option but to come to terms with this fact: we are embodied creatures irrespective of our spiritual aspirations. We interact with the world through our bodies. Yet it is patently obvious that if we define a human being in terms of his or her body we will fall seriously

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short of what the person is. According to Marcel, I am my body, but I am also more than my body, since I can give in to my body, or I can resist it, or force it in some way, as well as look after it and of course destroy it. My experience tells me that my body makes demands, but that the decision to concede those demands or to override them belongs to another part of me. So there is a centre of operations which can work both with and against my body. If I feel dissatisfied with my body and wish I had a more attractive one, I am obviously acknowledging the connection between the body and me, yet at the same time expressing the view that a different body would still be me. It appears as if the person is not fully congruent with the body. If I lose all control over my body, say as a result of an accident, I still exist. If we consider our lives as consisting of our experiences, then it is via our bodies that we receive those experiences. But once again, I can stand back and judge the separate experiences that make up my life. This means that my judgement detaches itself from those experiences and enables me to judge my life. What is this consciousness that can look at my life as it were from outside? Marcel does not attempt to provide an answer to the question, whether by physical reductionism (as is common among neurologists, identity theorists, functionalists and eliminativist philosophers), or by any kind of theological induction. For him it is a dimension of the human person that remains unexplained, a mystery. Nevertheless there are aspects of this more impenetrable side of the human being which Marcel considers worthy of inquiry. What he dwells upon are those qualities of human experience which are not easily explained in materialist or evolutionary terms and which can be broadly classified as psychological. For Marcel the human entity finds itself in a given concrete situation but displays a clear tendency to move in a direction that demands a transphysical vantage point. We entertain attitudes and we show concerns whose origin is not immediately clear and whose purpose raises deep questions about human ontology, not so much about being itself as about what it means to be human. Because we are incarnate beings—rather than purely spiritual entities—we find ourselves in a concrete situation. Our itinerant condition through our given world is part and parcel of our circumstances. Those circumstances, moreover, are not simply something ‘out there’, something wholly outside of ourselves; they

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are constitutive of our inner nature, of what we are as well as of what we face in the way of obstacles and constraints. To be in a situation is to be exposed to given circumstances. We absorb those circumstances and we are characterized by an encounter with them, not in the purely physical quasi-automatic sense (as when we encounter hundreds of our fellow humans on our journey to the workplace), but in a way that forces us to recognize our relatedness, our sense of a shared world, of non-self-­ containment. This act of recognition (Marcel speaks of reconnaissance in all its meanings, including that of exploration [MOB: I, 172–73]) tells us about ourselves, our situation, our impressionability, our identity in a given context. Marcel emphasizes both our individuality and our relatedness in much the same way that Unamuno uses the notions of individuality and personality: I am myself in so far as I am not the others, but without those others self-definition is meaningless. My own self, my personality, is dependent on those of others. But this gives each of us his or her uniqueness. Marcel is emphatic on this point. A human being is not simply anyone, an anonymous one, a face in the crowd, a statistic. Impersonal expressions, such as one thinks, one says, one does, are a denial of the person who thinks, who says, who does (comparable to Heidegger’s das Man, an impersonal abstraction). Yet on the other hand, if in a human being we see the person rather than just another individual in a mass of individuals, are we inventing a fiction?, asks Marcel. How do we describe the person who inhabits the bodily object? A person is not an essence, so it is hard to describe a complete person simply by a list of properties; indeed this very indescribability could be considered to be part of the essence of the human being. But while the one is an evasion, a hiding-­ behind or dissimulation, the person is a genuine point of view, a confrontation rather than an evasion. To confront is to adopt a viewpoint on the world, though one ‘which is always in danger of degenerating into an attitude’ (CRF: 117), of becoming a mere pose. A point of view is tied to value, and value is an experience, generated or conferred from within the person. But it is also a shared experience, since value is possible only on this condition. It is thus an interior and intersubjective condition which points to the connection with an extrasubjective condition. That means that I am not alone, that I belong to a network of relationships. The

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human person is the individual who is conscious of the reciprocal condition of existence, a point quickly picked up by Emmanuel Levinas and made into a cornerstone of his philosophy from 1947 onwards (Levinas 2001). This awareness of others and of the sense of a shared reality is of paramount importance in Marcel. Our conception of and attitude to another human being are as real as our senses of touch, taste, smell, hearing and vision, but they go beyond what we see, hear, and touch. What is it about the presence of another being that transcends our ordinary senses, that evokes a special sensitivity? Just as an artist may well start off from a very ordinary and vulgar raw material and transform it to give it new significance, so transcendence is not simply a matter of going beyond our experience, but rather of seeing this experience in a different light. As Marcel points out, it is in any case impossible to go beyond experience. If transcendence is to mean anything at all it must be accessible within experience. And the most important experience in our lives is the experience of others. The key to being human, then, lies for Marcel in intersubjectivity. A human being has a certain undefinable quality—Marcel calls it presence—that objects or even animals do not have for us. We react to other persons as we do not react to objects or animals. And our reactions are heightened when something untoward happens, for example an accident or an illness, that shakes us out of our conventional indifference. We are concerned for the person who is hurt or ill because that person’s presence has been modified. But presence is not an activity or a way of behaving; it is rather a way of existing towards, and a self can be present to itself as well as to other selves. Nor does it necessarily depend on obtaining a reaction: a sleeping child, unprotected and vulnerable, nevertheless has the kind of presence that can affect us deeply. It is, we might say, a sacred presence. This presence is found in intersubjectivity. To inquire into our being requires ‘a metaphysic of we are, as opposed to a metaphysic of I think’ (MOB: II, 10). Concrete understanding of self cannot be egocentric. Egocentrism comes from a misconception of experience. To fully grasp my experience is to recognize its emergence from the experience of others with whom I am in communication. My experience is not simply my experience of me, so if I cut myself off from others I am in a real sense

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cutting myself off from myself. In fact egocentrism leads to an impoverished understanding of self: ‘A complete and concrete knowledge of oneself cannot be heauto-centric; […] it must be hetero-centric’ (MOB: II, 9). Marcel is arguing in the same way as Unamuno: the starting point for an understanding of self must be an understanding of others. But is this any different from Sartre? In his essay on Sartre of January1946 Marcel accused the author of Being and Nothingness of producing a philosophy of self-centredness, one that did not recognize the possibility of we as subject, so that ‘in his universe participation itself is impossible’ (POE: 76). Sartre responded immediately in the revised text of his well known public lecture, L’Existentialisme est un humanisme, in which he wrote: When we say “I think” we are attaining to ourselves in the presence of the other, and we are just as certain of the other as we are of ourselves. Thus the man who discovers himself directly in the cogito also discovers all the others, and discovers them as the condition of his own existence. He recognizes that he cannot be anything (in the sense in which one says one is spiritual, or that one is wicked, or jealous) unless others recognize him as such. I cannot obtain any truth whatsoever about myself, except through the mediation of another. The other is indispensable to my existence, and equally so to any knowledge I can have of myself. Under these conditions, the intimate discovery of myself is at the same time the revelation of the other as a freedom which confronts mine, and which cannot think or will without doing so either for or against me. Thus, at once, we find ourselves in a world which is, let us say, that of “inter-subjectivity”. It is in this world that man has to decide what he is and what others are. (Sartre 2007: 53)

Sartre’s booklet is a defence of his existentialism against reproaches made from various quarters (the communists, for example, had accused him of reducing man to an enclosed subjectivity), and it may well be that he has shifted his position just enough to counter criticisms. The position he describes here is little different from that proposed by Marcel, namely our dependency on others for knowledge of ourselves. The real difference between the two will only become apparent when we come to deal with the subject of communality rather than personality.

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Marcel’s approach to the question of being is via our essential communality. Being is not intersubjectivity, but rather arises from it. Our self or ego cannot be understood on its own but emerges from an encompassing reality, that of ‘a community which is deeply rooted in ontology’ (MOB: II, 19). Our sense of ourselves, of what we are, is embedded in our inter-relatedness, without which we can have little notion of our situation. Neither the abstracted self of Descartes’ cogito, nor Kant’s purely logical ‘I’ or transcendental ego, nor Fichte’s idealist ‘I’ is up to the job of certifying the reality of the self. Marcel summarizes his own views thus: ‘I concern myself with being only in so far as I have a more or less distinct consciousness of the underlying unity which ties me to other beings of whose reality I have a preliminary notion’ (MOB:II, 19. Author’s italics). Like Unamuno and Berdyaev, yet even more so, Marcel believes that the individual can only make sense of his or her own self as part of a network of human beings.

3.4 Conclusions According to the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, in turn developed from Franz Brentano’s theory of intentionality or intentional states, any kind of awareness is awareness of something other than itself. Thus if I am aware of living it is presumably not life that is aware of itself living; the awareness belongs to something else. There is a double question here: who or what is aware?; and what is it aware of? Existentialism tries to put the two parts together by saying that life is what I make of it. This does not explain what awareness or consciousness is. If we accept that consciousness is consciousness of something, this seems to indicate that my consciousness is not consciousness of itself or by itself. Is it nothing at all, as Sartre contended, or is it something else other than just the awareness? It does not appear to be the body by itself, since the latter is a mechanistic system of specialized parts: of tubes, fluids, articulated structures, fibres, assorted tissue, a pump, etcetera. Nor does it appear to be an object inside the body (such as Descartes’ famous pituitary gland acting as intermediary between soul and body), much less an object outside the body. Existentialism has not thrown any light on

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what human consciousness is, any more than has any other kind of philosophy, or, for that matter, physiology. What it has done is to say that my life and my awareness of it together form my life-project. The point of my life is the point I give to it. I am my own significance. Life and I may possibly have come together by a mere fluke, but I am free to make of it what I will. In Sartrian terminology, man is a maker, and what he can do is to make himself. This idea that every person is a maker, and that the authentic role of each is to be the master of his or her own world, could be taken, and indeed has been taken, to deny that our role is to participate in a world given to us, a world of which the most fundamental feature is other human beings. For Unamuno, Berdyaev, and Marcel on the other hand we make ourselves only by participating in the world of others. This world is the world into which we are born and of which we become aware perhaps even sooner than of ourselves, as a baby becomes aware of its mother and its dependency on her. We do not need either to prove our own existence (pace Descartes and the sceptics whom he was addressing), or to prove the reality of the world we inhabit (pace much philosophical effort in that direction, which Heidegger considered, against Kant, the true scandal of philosophy), or even that we have feelings such as pain or joy. We know all these things before we reflect on them because we find ourselves in a world from the very beginning. If we start from the premise that we belong to the world in which we find ourselves, that it is our world, shaping us and given to us for our development, then we must acknowledge from the beginning that there are countless others in our position. We share the same world, we participate in a common enterprise. Others can often be the source of one’s discomfiture, as when they hurt us or make us feel uncomfortable in some way; or they can be a source of reassurance, as when one is befriended by others. ‘Being-with’ is certainly a matter of degree, but intersubjectivity is deeply characteristic of human existence. We share not just the visible world of our physical environment but the invisible world of values. Relationships are not merely external encounters; they are inner states that make a difference to each individual, as opposed to relations between objects which make no difference to each object. Understanding of one’s self demands the understanding of other selves.

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One of the aspects of the human being that appears in all our three philosophers but seldom in other existentialists is the concern with the creeping dehumanization of modern man. A human being is increasingly being reduced to a registered entity, to a document, to a statistic. Instead of existing in relation to one another we are deemed to exist in relation to an organization which confers an identity upon us. I am my identity card, my passport, my driving licence, my purchasing habits, my yearly income, my pension, my tax return and so on. Unamuno, Berdyaev, and Marcel all make the point that human life has become despiritualized as a result of the overwhelming impact of scientism: the world with everything in it, including the individual, is objectified, and the value of each human life thereby reduced. The challenge is to reinstate or reinvigorate spiritual values. To do this via the re-assertion of religious authority (as the Catholic Church tried to do in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries under Popes Pius IX and Leo XIII) is counter-productive: people are no longer prepared to believe in dogma just because it is handed down to them to. Spirituality on the other hand is not dogma-­ dependent; it is seen rather as an openness towards the non-material aspects of existence. Unamuno makes it clear that his primary concern is with the spiritual state of his country (ERM: IX, 77), and that ‘the inner life, the life of the spirit, must be languishing in a terrifying emptiness’ [‘la vida interior, la vida del espiritu, debe languidecer en un vacío pavoroso’ (ERM: IX, 78)]. He attributes this loss of sensitivity towards spiritual values to so-called progress, a progress which is more a degrading superstition than all those superstitions which it pretends to combat: ‘Nothing is gained by a progress which forces us to become so inebriated with business, work, and science that we can no longer hear the voice of eternal wisdom!’ [‘¡Maldito lo que se gana con un progreso que nos obliga a emborracharnos con el negocio, el trabajo y la ciencia, para no oír la voz de la sabiduría eterna!’ (VES: IX, 303)]. Progress is worthwhile only if it liberates us from our daily toil, delivers our physical needs, and thereby enables us to focus on our transphysical ones. Instead, the idolaters of progress conceive mankind as a ‘doomed procession of ghosts moving from nothingness to nothingness’ [‘una fatídica procesión de fantasmas que va de la nada a la nada’ (VES: IX, 306)]. Much of the blame for this degradation of the

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human being lies at the door of our modern capitalistic system. The exchange value applied to human labour converts man into merchandise, which must rank as ‘the most odious aspect of the socio-economic regime which we are having to endure’ [‘el carácter más odioso del régimen económico-social que padecemos’ (LDH: VIII, 350)]. These various comments all predate The Tragic Sense of Life, and it is of course in the latter that Unamuno’s defence of the spiritual or transphysical dimension of the human personality reaches its most sustained and vehement expression. Berdyaev too blames a misconceived material progress for modern man’s spiritual poverty and disorientation. The technical revolution was a result of man’s creativity but has come to be his master, has outstripped man’s ability to meditate, to abstract himself from the increasing tempo of life inflicted by machines. The new machine age has turned man’s body into an anonymous means of production. It has subordinated the spirit to the world of objects brought forth by the techniques of mass production and the opening up of new sources of energy. Spirituality is facing a crisis, and the new materialism is resulting in exploitation, authoritarianism and confrontation, as well as in a decline of moral awareness: ‘We are witnessing the process of dehumanization in all phases of culture and of social life. Above all, moral consciousness is being dehumanized’ (FMW: 25). The spirit needs to re-assert itself, to become master and not slave of its inventions. Only through the recovery of spiritual values, argues Berdyaev, can mankind recover a sense of mission. Of the three thinkers it is Marcel who has most insistently denounced the depersonalization of modern man due to the growth of technology. The more dependent we become on machines the less we appear to want to think about those deeper values that underlie our existence. Indeed ‘technical achievements tend to seem more and more the chief, if not the only, mark of man’s superiority to the animals’ (MMS: 42). It is not technical progress that is at fault but the fact that we have turned to it to achieve material comfort and security and have made our happiness depend on it. This possessive attitude fosters laziness, resentment, and envy, and at the level of the State it encourages a destructive competitiveness based on outperforming other States (here Marcel had World War

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Two in mind and the resulting race for nuclear arms). Marcel’s is not just a philosophy of the interior life. Inhumanity and injustice figure prominently in his writings too. What he is against is the debasement of the human person by whatever means: hence his repeated and articulate denunciations of the politics of ‘function’ and of Marxist States. But even in democratic States technical man has become an idolater, failing to recognize where wisdom lies. And in so doing he has left himself open to the real possibility of becoming degraded in his own eyes. He is in danger of manipulation, of losing his freedom. This would be a disaster, says Marcel, because ‘man depends, to a very great degree, on the idea he has of himself ’ (MMS: 14). A purely materialistic conception of existence is self-degrading: man becomes just another material object, which is incompatible with freedom. At the very core of our existence as human beings is the conviction that our actions are free. If we lose this conviction we cease to be human. The key point that emerges from these various considerations of the human entity is that concrete man cannot simply be equated with material man. All three thinkers take material circumstances, and especially our physical reality as bodily creatures, into account, but it is our affective states that truly interest them as indicators of a reality beyond the physical. We cannot ignore our material existence and emplacement, but neither can we deny our sensitivity to values that take us well beyond the world of matter, and these values are as real to us as matter itself. Unamuno is the one who insists most starkly on the physical or bodily nature of man, yet he is also the one who most resoundingly rebels against that condition and converts the contradictory nature of man into a tragic drama. Berdyaev by contrast tends to downplay the importance of the physical in man in comparison to the transphysical aspects of existence which he sees as the truly characterizing features of the human being. Marcel probably offers the most balanced view starting, like Unamuno, from the physical fact of incarnation, but raising complex questions about embodiment itself which physicalism appears unable to answer. Central to our condition as human beings is the sense of freedom we carry within us, which persuades us of our ability to act, to think, and to explore our world and ourselves.

4 Freedom and Contingency

In daily life we tend to think of freedom in terms of free speech, free movement, free association, that is, we relate it to our expectations of social and political rights. Existentialism is concerned with a more radical or elemental kind of freedom, the freedom conferred on us not simply as a right upheld by law but as a quality of human existence which is as much a challenge as a gift. This kind of freedom, or origination, is not necessarily liberating in a psychological sense. Constantly having to make choices is recognized as a major source of anxiety, and Kierkegaard made much of this burden. This category of existential freedom presupposes free will, but it does not prove it. We certainly feel that we have free will when facing a choice of action, but once the action is taken there is no way of proving that it was free. All we know is that in the ordinary course of events we will be held responsible for our actions. If we accept that we live in a determined universe, a universe governed by the laws of Classical Physics, then human beings appear to become an exception if we consider ourselves undetermined. In theory we can certainly posit that our lives and our actions are causally predetermined by the inexorable concatenation of cause-effect phenomena. In practice we are, paradoxically enough, obliged to accept that we bear responsibility for what we do, say, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. A. Longhurst, Unamuno, Berdyaev, Marcel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81999-6_4

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and even believe. Human life would be impossible if we gave up this principle, whether real or conventional. Existentialism encourages people ‘to think of themselves as autonomous moral agents, capable of raising and resolving for themselves all questions about what they are to do […]. We make ourselves moral beings by adopting a certain perspective on our lives and on those of others’ (Olafson 1967: 238–39). Olafson’s point is that existentialism’s emphasis on freedom makes us more aware of the need to adopt a conscious ethical stance. Existentialism by and large has avoided the long-running and inconclusive philosophical debate over whether or not we possess free will. It has preferred to accept that we behave as if we do and has gone on from there. Existentialist freedom, the freedom to make ourselves by our actions, simply assumes free will because that is what we do in our daily living. Within the limits of our circumstances, we feel free to choose. In other words, irrespective of the controversies and outcome of the free-will debate, we take it that we possess a degree of autonomy sufficient to take control of our lives. This does not entail our being free from causality; it does entail an acceptance of our relative uniqueness in the natural world, since we enjoy a degree of self-control and decision-making not found in other species. This kind of freedom, however, is as inexplicable as the indeterminacy of the New Physics, and it may not be purely fortuitous that the existentialist-­style ungrounded freedom that was promulgated between the two world wars was concurrent with the development of quantum physics, which deems the life and movement of sub-atomic particles to be, if not spontaneous, at any rate subject to random fluctuation, in other words not subject to laws of causation as we know them, and therefore undetermined. Quantum events, such as the disintegration of heavy atoms into lighter atoms in radioactive decay, appear to be uncaused. The cause-effect relation was just our reading (or, as it turns out, misreading) of nature. We simply do not know why an electron behaves as it does when it decides to ‘jump’ from its orbit around the nucleus. All we can work out is the rate of decay and calculate statistical probabilities. Because there appears to be no cause, firm prediction at the sub-atomic level is impossible, and this led Heisenberg and Bohr to banish the laws of Classical Physics as inapplicable to the sub-atomic world. The

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mechanistic world of the determinists was thereby, if not shattered, certainly questioned. Even Einstein was shocked. The paradox, of course, is that the world at large, in which Newtonian, and for that matter Einsteinian, physics still applies, is made up of the sub-atomic particles which refuse to submit to our laws of causation. Is the split in the world of matter into caused and uncaused a reflection of our minds split into determined and undetermined? The mystery is as much the mystery of our consciousness of the world. Like the experimenter whose measuring apparatus is alleged to influence the behaviour of the very particles whose location and velocity the experimenter is trying to measure, our attempts to explain how free we are is distorted by our very approach, by our own qualitative sense of freedom. Within Christianity, the question is just as baffling. If God knows the future, is any choice left to us in bringing it about? There is one other important aspect of the existentialist notion of freedom: its close connection to contingency. The existence of any one individual human being, and hence of all human beings, is not necessary. It is the result of a random event that could easily not have happened. My father and mother need not have met, or might have conceived a child at a different time, in which case I would not be the I that I am. This means of course that I am not a necessary being whose existence was predictable all along. If I am not predetermined I am the result of chance factors, that is, I am a contingent being. If this is so, then I am in a very real sense a superfluous human being, unattached and floating, whose existence is every bit as random or fortuitous as that of the atom that undergoes radioactive decay spontaneously and unpredictably. In a similar way, while the growth or decline of the human population can be predicted with tolerable accuracy, each human being is not predictable. If we are the result of chance, not only are we unanchored, adrift, and directionless, but there appears to be nothing to make us decide to take one course rather than another. We are free to choose, but our freedom is ungrounded. This is the radical contingency leading to radical freedom at the heart of Sartre’s philosophy, a freedom which he held to be the most basic and distinctive quality of human existence. In existentialism freedom is as much a curse as a blessing because it obliges us to make choices, to make up for our contingent being by ‘determining’ ourselves, by proclaiming

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who we are and what we stand for. To turn our backs on this reality is to deny our humanness. There are of course degrees of freedom: Sartre’s is an extreme form of freedom, but in general, and within the constraints of our physical and social circumstances, all existentialists subscribe to the context of freedom in which man operates. This is so for religious existentialists as much as for atheistic existentialists, but clearly the former face the additional difficulty of trying to fit God into the equation.

4.1 Unamuno: Freedom as Ideal That freedom plays an indispensable role in Unamuno’s thought is probably incontestable, since his political and religious philosophy (the crucial importance of the collective will in the search for emancipation and salvation), addressed primarily to fellow-Spaniards, makes no sense without freedom of action and belief. But on the underlying question of free will he does not pronounce himself unambiguously. What he does do is to debate the issue novelistically, dramatically and poetically. The best-­ known example of this persistent leitmotif is his most famous imaginative work, Niebla (1914). What does the story of Augusto Pérez tell us, philosophically speaking? As he steps out into the world in the opening lines of the novel, Augusto Pérez is a being without a sense of identity. What follows is his attempt to discover himself, to gain a sense of self. This idea of making ourselves by an act of will, the actus essendi of Thomist philosophy which re-appeared seven centuries after St Thomas Aquinas (and without acknowledgement to its originator), is crucial in European existentialism, notably so in Sartre, although we already find something similar in Kant: the belief in self-creation, according to which a human being’s character is his own work because each person has the capacity of origination even in a universe governed by physical laws. Each one of us is the result of a biological inheritance and of those early experiences when we are in the process of formation, which is the situation of Augusto Pérez, wholly protected by his widowed mother and unaware of what it means to take decisions. How will he fare after the death of his over-protective mother as he appears at the door of his house as if newly-born to the world? The

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possibility of becoming or of changing, of making or re-making oneself, must depend to some degree, perhaps to a very high degree, on what one already is. We make ourselves as we take action, that is, as we make decisions in those instances, characteristic of human life, in which we are called upon to make choices. One’s mode of being, or character in everyday language, arises from our actions and reactions; hence our intuitive conviction that we are responsible for our acts and our decisions, that we are not merely the effects of causes over which we exercise no control but also the causal agents of effects, originators in the philosophical sense. If we identify ourselves with our actions, as does Augusto Pérez, we are thereby identifying ourselves with our being, with the way we are. And if we are subject to an impulse which we are loath to accept—for example, the unexpected sexual drive which so disturbs Augusto—that impulse that seems alien or unwanted will be so in relation to the rest of our character. This implies that the moral responsibility for what we do or fail to do (which is exactly the case of Augusto’s relationship with the two young women in his life, Eugenia and Rosarito) is intimately tied to what we are and to the responsibility for being the way we are. For if we do what we do because we are what we are, the responsibility for what we are, for our character, is ours. And conversely, if we do not bear responsibility for what we are, we cannot be held responsible for what we do. Here, between these two poles, is where the problem of volition is located. Augusto Pérez wants to acquire a character, a personality, a self-identity, and in order to do so he has to act, to take decisions. But he does not know how to act because he does not know what (or who) he is. Hence his vacillations, his musings, and his endless consultations with his friend Víctor, with his various acquaintances, and even with his dog. To be responsible for what we are, or make ourselves to be, we need to possess a previous nature that will allow our self-creation in an intentional, willed manner, something which Sartre failed initially to grasp but which, as Jonathan Webber has shown, he subsequently learnt from Beauvoir (Webber 2018). But this is where we come up against the troublesome problem of regression. Where is the origin of that first nature that will enable us to make ourselves? And if in the last resort we cannot assume responsibility for what we are (for our character and personality, for what drives us), can we be responsible for what we do? For that to be

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so we would need to have, or be, a self independently of the character traits and motivations that govern us, a self with its own capacity for decision-taking, a self who would be, like God, causa sui. When Augusto Pérez cries out to Professor Unamuno ‘I want to live, I want to live and be myself, to be me, me’ [‘Quiero vivir, vivir, y ser yo, yo, yo’ (NIE: I, 654)], the authorial figure retorts that it cannot be because there is no such thing as being oneself and hence as deciding for oneself. Augusto Pérez dies but we do not know what kills him, since we are given four different explanations (homicide, suicide, indigestion, cardiac infarction). In the light of the dispute between Augusto’s friend, the prologist (but fictive) Víctor Goti, and Unamuno in the prologue and post-­ prologue, critics generally have seen the confrontation between Augusto Pérez and his (fictive) creator as representing the alternative between human free will and predestination. But the deeper question is somewhat different: if I am free to do what I wish, am I also free to wish what I do? Freedom of choice and determinism may be incompatible, but will and determinism need not be. It is here that Augusto and his professorial master cannot agree. The former insists on exercising his volition while the latter insists that the personage lacks freedom of action. They can both be right. Philosophically there is no need to see the question as a Kierkegaardian Enten/Eller. The position seemingly adopted by the real Unamuno seems closer to Kant’s. Kant considered that free will and determinism are up to a point compatible. In the third antinomy of the Critique of Pure Reason he asserts that both the thesis and the antithesis are correct, that the deterministic laws of nature do not conflict with our sense of acting in an unconditioned manner (A542–558/B570–586). What is applicable in the phenomenal world is not applicable in the noumenal world. In the phenomenal world the actions of a human being are empirically determined, but in the noumenal sphere an action is the result of an unconditioned decision of a human being as a thing-in-itself, as an intellect, or, what amounts to the same thing, a decision of his innate capacity for self-determination. What Kant said, simply put, is that the existence of free will is unproveable, but that its non-existence is equally undemonstrable. Human free will remains a mystery. Unamuno seems to adopt a similar posture, and in Niebla the question remains open, although one cannot avoid the suspicion that the Kantian

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influence has an element of parody about it. The incongruous intervention of the ‘author’ at the end of chapter 25 to ‘correct’ his creature’s debate has all the bearing of a spoof version of the cosmological argument for the existence of God which Kant in the first Critique introduces (A605/B633) and then rejects (A613–616/B641–644): this is the argument for the existence of God based on the existence of his creatures, an argument which Augusto Pérez uses in an attempt to turn the tables on his ‘God’, don Miguel de Unamuno. Unamuno returns to the free-will-versus-determinism debate in the far more sombre Abel Sánchez (1917), in which the metafictional play and facetious antics of Niebla are left behind in favour of a tragic story of inadaptability and self-destruction. Beneath a story of envy lies the perennial debate over how far we are in control of our actions and reactions. It is a modern version of the Cain and Abel myth, but seen from the point of view of the murderer and outcast. For the question which the Bible fails to answer is why God favoured Abel over Cain, thereby making the latter envious of his brother. Should Cain be made to bear the entire burden of responsibility for his crime if his envy was provoked by an unsympathetic God? Joaquín Monegro and Abel Sánchez grow together almost since birth, yet they are looked upon very differently: it is always Abel who enjoys the approval and applause of others, it is he who wins over the woman Joaquín was hoping to marry, and it is he who becomes the favourite grandfather of their common grandson. It is no wonder that Joaquín feels rejected and cheated by destiny, and he asks why people react favourably to Abel and unfavourably to him. The answer must lie in their respective modes of being, which makes Joaquín ask himself why he is as he is. His answer is stark: that is the way he has been made by an adverse creator, and he concludes that he is an unloveable character. He feels himself predestined to constant rejection because he has been made an odious person. The result is of course a tragedy both for Joaquín and for his family, all the more so since Joaquín is shown to be capable of noble and unselfish acts, but acts which he feels unable to recognize as motivated by an intrinsic goodness because, as he tells his confessor, he feels nothing but envy and hatred. To the confessor’s plea that he must change his attitude by an effort of the will Joaquín retorts that there is no such thing, and in turn asks: ‘What did I do for God to make me like

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this, full of resentment, envy and malice? […] No, I don’t believe in human freedom, and he who does not believe in freedom isn’t free. No, I am not free! To be free one needs to believe that one can be free!’ [‘¿Qué hice yo para que Dios me hiciese así, rencoroso, envidioso, malo? […] No, no creo en la libertad humana, y el que no cree en la libertad humana no es libre. ¡No, no lo soy! ¡Ser libre es creer serlo!’ (ABS: I, 727)]. That Unamuno makes his character rectify on his deathbed and recognize that the way to a cure for his self-hatred would have lain in giving himself to others may suggest that he wants the reader to adopt a broader standpoint, to accept that human beings are capable of self-direction and self-­ improvement despite all social and biological constraints. Niebla and Abel Sánchez are two approaches, in fictional form, to the question of free will, the former lighthearted and parodic, the latter serious and disturbing. But the subject of willed action is ubiquitous in Unamuno’s imaginative literature and deeply controversial both within and outside the pages of the books, entirely as if Unamuno wishes to torment his characters and his readers. Neither can tell for certain to what extent free will is real or imagined. Here it is worth quoting a distinguished Unamuno scholar writing about agency in his fictional characters: There is very limited (and sometimes no) agency accorded to characters in Unamuno’s major fiction. The character Miguel de Unamuno and his implied reader have a bit more agency than other characters, but even in these cases the ability to act is limited by the other characters’ contrary fictionalizations of what the former can do. This static outcome is initially surprising, given Unamuno’s steadfast opposition to determinism in fiction. He said that he did not like the fiction of Zola, Maupassant, and Eça de Queiroz, and he seems to have admired only those moments in Pereda’s, Galdós’s, Clarín’s, and Pardo Bazan’s work when they focused on surprising personality quirks, willfulness, and spontaneous spirituality. For all of his fascination with willfulness and invention, his characters seldom find a way out of their existential dilemmas. (Franz 2018: 149–50)

The problem is not so much with agency itself as with its origins. What is it that drives us? The answers are far from simple because they have to do with our feelings, not our ideas, as Unamuno, and indeed all

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existentialists, fully realized. Unamuno’s fiction is unconventional and mostly exploratory (as is Marcel’s theatre), so cut-and-dried solutions to complex issues about motivation are never forthcoming. Yet the question of control (whether we control our actions, whether an author controls his characters, whether a philosopher controls his ideas) is usually at or near the centre of the work, suggesting that it was a subject that worried Unamuno. In a poem written as late as 1928 Unamuno is still expressing perplexity about the nature of free will, comparing it to a river that carves out its course to the sea. But is it the force of the river’s water or the lie of the land that determines its course?: Freedom of the will? It is like the stream that carves its course and kisses the feet of the willow tree. Even in the pools it finds no rest; the more it flows the faster it goes to die in the sea. [¿Libre albedrío? Es como el río que se hace el cauce y el pie del sauce llega a besar. En el remanso no halla descanso; cuanto más fluye más se concluye; para en la mar.] (Unamuno 1995: V, 271 and Unamuno 2015: 145)

Unamuno had in fact begun to explore the problem of free will well before he published Niebla, and indeed his position in earlier essays was more noticeably libertarian. That we are the result of our decisions and actions comes through clearly in an essay with the Augustinian title

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‘¡Adentro!’ [Inwards] (1900), which takes the form of an appeal to an unspecified correspondent to be true to himself and not give in to social pressures. He tells his addressee: ‘In your own consciousness, your life is the continuous revelation, in time, of your perdurance, the unveiling of your emblem; you will discover who you are in your actions’ [‘Tu vida es, ante tu propia conciencia, la revelación continua, en el tiempo, de tu eternidad, el desarrollo de tu símbolo; vas descubriéndote conforme obras’ (ADN: VIII, 315)]. Our actions reveal who we are, but we notice that here Unamuno invokes a consciousness of self that appears to be separate from one’s active life, something he will try to deny years later in The Tragic Sense of Life. Unamuno does not believe in planning one’s life beforehand, what he calls ‘trazarte un plan de vida’. Rather than trying to pre-empt the essential contingency of life by meticulous planning, he advocates retaining our potential to rise to the occasion, and thus continually to discover and re-make ourselves as possibilities arise: ‘To wish to lay down one’s path beforehand boils down to slavishly following the path that others assign to us’ [‘Querer fijarse de antemano la vía redúcese en rigor a hacerse esclavo de la que nos señalen los demás’ (ADN: VIII, 315)]. Our freedom is found in the very unpredictability of life because it allows us to act rather than be acted upon. We should not succumb even to the dictates of the past. Our actions should be governed by our outlook. Here Unamuno uses the word espíritu and synonymous terms (‘eternal depth’ [‘fondo eterno’], ‘inner space’ [‘ámbito interior’], and of course the ubiquitous ‘alma’) to denote an inner sense of purpose. Freedom is likewise an ideal, but that is its strength; it is ‘the very essence of our taking possession of the world’ [‘la esencia misma de nuestro posesionamiento del mundo’ (ADN: VIII, 317)], some kind of energy generated from within, an inner conviction. To be free is to feel free (as Joaquín Monegro tells his confessor): ‘Each one of us has to struggle to liberate oneself ’ [‘luchar cada uno por libertarse a sí mismo’ (RAM:VIII, 767)] because ‘any man has a higher worth than the entire universe’ [‘un hombre cualquiera vale más que todo el universo’ (RAM: VIII, 767)]. Although there is a

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precedent in St Thomas,1 it is not altogether obvious what Unamuno means by this, except perhaps that the human being possesses a quality that is denied to the rest of the universe: the freedom to reflect. This may be suggested by his comment that ‘freedom is in the mystery: freedom is below ground and grows inwards, not outwards’ [‘la libertad está en el misterio: la libertad está enterrada, y crece hacia dentro y no hacia fuera’ (ESV: VIII, 926)], or as he goes on to explain through analogy with a plant, freedom is not found in the plant’s shoots, or leaves, or flowers, but in its roots. When he re-states the value of man in a similar phrase in The Tragic Sense of Life he uses the word ‘alma’: ‘a human soul is worth the entire universe’ [‘un alma humana vale por todo el universo’ (DST: X, 284)], which is perhaps closer to St Thomas. This makes it clear that Unamuno is thinking of the human person as an acutely conscious being or soul, and a soul is more precious than any material object precisely because it has the capacity to be conscious of the universe. As human beings we are free to perceive, to assess, to wonder at the universe in a way that the universe itself, as a conglomeration of material objects, seems not to be. In ‘¡Plenitud de plenitudes y todo plenitud!’ (1904), which is perhaps Unamuno’s strongest defence of the reality of spiritual values before The Tragic Sense of Life, he refers to the exclamatory title as a ‘jubilant cry of liberation’ [‘grito de júbilo y de liberación’ (PPP: VIII, 660)]. Since he has just argued for the prevalence of a spiritual sensibility over a physical one, Unamuno appears to mean liberation from a purely materialist outlook, though with his characteristic fondness for paradox he speaks of a spiritually material soul, of the material world being a mere reflection of a far more substantial though non-material universe. In what seems entirely a spiritualized version of Schopenhauer, he argues that we are forced to believe in the world of appearances, but what drives us is the world of the spirit. To accept the reality of this other existence, as distinct from a  In Quaestiones disputatae: de veritate’, Aquinas writes: ‘There is […] nothing that the divine intellect does not know actually and that the human intellect is not capable of knowing potentially; for the actual intellect is defined as that which makes all things knowable, and the potential intellect as that by which we become all things’ (‘Nulla […] res est quam intellectus divinus non cognoscat actu, et intellectus humanus in potentia; cum intellectus agens dicatur quo est omnia facere, intellectus possibilis quo est omnia fieri.’ Quaestiones disputatae: de veritate, quaestio 1, articulus 2, ad 4). 1

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purely phenomenal existence, is to believe in what perdures and not in what is ephemeral, to substitute the cry of ‘¡Plenitud de plenitudes!’ for the defeatist one of ‘¡Vanidad de vanidades!’ Unamuno follows a similar line a year later in Vida de Don Quijote y Sancho (1905), in which Cervantes’ novel is the pretext for digressions on his favourite themes—Spain and Spaniards, life and death, faith and immortality. The world of appearances does not give us the truth: ‘What is true is what our consciousness feels sure about, and only that. Truth does not consist of the logical connection between the phenomenal world and our reason, which is phenomenal too; truth is rather the penetration of the world of substances in our consciousness, which is a substance too’ [‘Lo que basta para la seguridad de la conciencia, eso es la verdad, y solo eso. La verdad no es relación lógica del mundo aparencial a la razón, aparencial también, sino que es penetración íntima del mundo sustancial en la conciencia, sustancial también’ (VDQ: X, 126)]. Is Unamuno saying that our consciousness is simply another object in the world of objects and thereby gives us the truth of things? Or is he saying rather that our consciousness gives us access to a world the truth of which is barred from our rational faculty? The statement is fuzzy and leaves too many loose ends, but at any rate he does seem to imply that consciousness is far more than a passive receptor of sense impressions, that it can reach beyond the phenomenal world to which reason is circumscribed. This seems to be confirmed in his major philosophical treatise when he says that ‘our spirit is also some kind of matter or it is nothing’ [‘nuestro espíritu es también alguna especie de materia o no es nada’ (DST: X, 312)]. Since our will and our consciousness are closely tied (one cannot will unconsciously, one can only desire unconsciously), it follows that if it is our consciousness that tells us what has valid truth, then we are to an extent willing that very truth. That indeed is Unamuno’s persistent interpretation of Don Quixote’s actions, in which he sees a creative force at work: ‘It is action that creates truth’ [‘es la acción la que hace la verdad’ (VDQ: X, 214)]. Unamuno is of course referring to the truth of a moral, not a logical, order, to what is right to do. If our actions follow our beliefs or convictions, then in that sense it is our will that creates our truths. Don Quixote is not driven by madness but by a sense of freedom, the freedom to question the truth or rightness of the prevailing milieu. His conviction is thus

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a willed conviction that confirms his freedom to ‘make’ himself in the existentialists’ sense. This kind of creative freedom, it appears, is dependent in Unamunian ontology on recognising the validity of the world we intuit beyond the visible one. Don Quixote responds to this parallel world and wills himself a role in that world: ‘Don Quixote reasoned with his will, and when he said “I know who I am!” what he really said was “I know whom I want to be!” And this is what props up all human life: to know whom one wants to be’ [‘Don Quijote discurría con la voluntad, y al decir «¡yo sé quien soy!» no dijo sino «¡yo sé quien quiero ser!» Y es el quicio de la vida humana toda: saber el hombre lo que quiere ser’ (VDQ: X, 43)]. This kind of knowledge is not the one that comes to us from the phenomenal world or from abstract reasoning or from experimental science, but only from an Augustinian interiority. Don Quixote’s philosophy of life is ‘that of believing, of creating the truth. And this philosophy is neither that of professors, nor that which is demonstrated by inductive or deductive logic, nor that which emerges from syllogistic reasoning, nor that which is found in laboratories, but rather does it arise from the heart’ [‘la de creer, la de crear la verdad. Y esta filosofía ni se aprende en cátedras, ni se expone por lógica inductiva ni deductiva, ni surge de silogismos, ni de laboratorios, sino surge del corazón’ (VDQ: X, 242)]. We appear to be talking here of an attitude of mind that requires each of us to accept the reality of the spiritual dimension of man and act accordingly. But there is a complication in the form of the presence of our fellow humans: ‘however free one feels within oneself, as soon as one has to externalize oneself, to show oneself by speech or action, to communicate with others, as soon as one has to bring into play one’s body or those of others, one becomes tied to their rigid laws, one is a slave’ [‘por muy libre que uno sea dentro de sí, en cuanto tiene que exteriorizarse, manifestarse, hablar u obrar, comunicar con los prójimos, en cuanto tiene que servirse de su cuerpo o de otros cuerpos, queda atado a las rígidas leyes de ellos, es esclavo’ (IYE: VIII, 610)]. Here Unamuno is running up against an awkward problem. His aspires to be both a personal and a collective philosophy. As we saw in the preceding chapter one’s personality arises from the interaction of self and others. Freedom, like pain, is felt by the individual, but to be meaningful it requires some kind of broader framework;

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to be free is in one sense to be free from; and in the case of Unamuno it is clear from his repeated complaints of the social milieu that it is the encompassing marasmo or cultural and spiritual stagnation that he wants his fellow-citizens to break away from. We need to break through our shells, he argues, by which he means fossilized ways of thinking that impede self-development and true communication. Liberation can only come via a reciprocal breakthrough: ‘All redemption is mutual’ [‘toda redención es mutua’ (SOL; VIII, 792)]. Again we observe this tension between the individual and the collectivity in various comments which seem to pit one against the other, not least in the paradoxical ‘each person is worth more than the whole of humanity’ [‘cada hombre vale más que la humanidad entera’ (DST: X, 311)], which is Unamuno’s somewhat extreme way of emphasizing that ultimately it is the individual person who enshrines value and takes the decision. The soul is not for sale. Our freedom of spirit is there to be used positively; ‘A truly free man should not misuse his energies in accommodating himself willy-nilly to the surrounding atmosphere. […] If you feel an inner ferment asking to be freed, let it gush out whichever way it springs’ [‘No debe un hombre verdaderamente libre malgastar sus energías en acomodarse así como así al espíritu ambiente. […] Si sientes algo que te escarabajea dentro pidiéndote libertad, abre el chorro y déjalo correr tal y como brote’ (CEP: VIII, 503–04)]. Yet at the same time Unamuno warns that this very freedom to express ourselves can have negative consequences if misused, can create a false sense of freedom. One damaging misuse is to allow oneself to be led by the desire not so much to be free as to be totally different from others, to seek distinction rather than integration, ‘to differentiate oneself casting aside all respect for the necessary parallel process of integration’ [‘diferenciarse sin respeto alguno al necesario proceso paralelo de integración’ (LDH: VIII, 353)]. In that case we behave as if to prove that we have a higher exchange value than other human beings. Human dignity as its own value is thereby discarded. Freedom, then, appears to be a two-edged sword. It can be used wisely to proclaim human value, or egoistically to debase it. The modern trend to devalue the individual, protested against by Unamuno, Berdyaev, and Marcel, is the clearest example of the misuse of freedom, one reason

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indeed why existentialism insisted that we have to ‘make’ ourselves and not submit to conformism or brainwashing. Nevertheless to be free from social constraints and conventional ways of thinking is not ultimately what freedom is about. Nor is it even freedom from existential preoccupations. Having quoted Spinoza’s ‘homo liber de nulla re minus quam de morte cogitat, et eius sapientia non mortis sed vitae meditatio est’ (Ethics, Part IV, proposition 67), he then comments: ‘one would have to know what this business of a free man stands for. Man free from the supreme anxiety, free from the eternal anguish, free from the stare of the Sphinx, that is to say, the man who isn’t a man, the man who is the ideal of a modern European’ [‘habría que ver qué es eso del hombre libre. El hombre libre de la suprema congoja, libre de la a angustia eterna, libre de la mirada de la Esfinge, es decir, el hombre que no es hombre, el ideal del europeo moderno’ (SLE: VIII, 1001–02)].2 True freedom, then, does not mean turning one’s back on anxiety, anguish, and mystery, but rather choosing to face them. Similarly, when Unamuno writes ‘Freedom!, freedom!, but a deep freedom, not the official one’ [‘¡libertad!, ¡libertad!, pero la honda, no la oficial’ (ETC: VIII, 190)], he is not referring to freedom of religion or freedom of speech, or any kind of political freedom; he is invoking an inner freedom, a freedom by conviction, a willed freedom. If, as we have seen, truth is created by the will, not by the intellect, in other words if what is true for us is what we decide is true through inner conviction rather than convenience, then our freedom of choice amounts to a creative act, and in that sense becomes a ‘freedom for’ rather than a ‘freedom from’. It is a somewhat nebulous concept, originating at a time when Unamuno was familiarising himself with Kierkegaard, but clearly connected to his decision to conduct his own, highly personal, campaign in favour of a reformed Catholicism and an ethically-based (rather than military-based or Catholic-based) sense of patriotism. In one of his semi-humorous aphorisms Unamuno writes that time, space and logical consistency (or time, space and causality in  The Spanish translation of Spinoza that appears in ‘Sobre la europeización’ (VIII, 1001) is wrong, perhaps through a transcription error. The version given in Del sentimiento trágico de la vida of that same passage in Spinoza (X, 307) is correct. 2

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Schopenhauer’s reduction of Kant’s categories) are the three great shackles of freedom. This encourages the spirit to escape into eternity, infinity, and inconsequentiality. It tries to evade its fate on earth. What this implies of course is that so long as we are bounded by time, confined by space, and led by logical discourse we cannot achieve the freedom we crave. It is no more than ‘a playing at freedom’ [‘jugar a la libertad’ (AFD: X, 918)]. The kind of freedom we seek is the freedom to penetrate the veil of our existence, to understand what lies beyond space and time and to transcend the painfully circumscribed scientific explanations that our limited logical brains can manage, which is an understanding of the ‘how’ but not of the ‘why’ and even less of the ‘what for’, the ‘para qué’ that so haunted Unamuno. Hence the attraction of mystical thought, to which he returns again and again without, however, being able to share in its insights. The mystics may achieve freedom from cognitive constraints, but their science is not communicable because, unlike logical science, it lacks a universal language. Nevertheless Unamuno favours the mystics because they broke free of the falsification of religion by the rise of dogmatic theology which pretended to explain religious faith through rational arguments: ‘Dogmas have killed faith, mysteries drowned by the explanations given of them’ [‘Los dogmas han matado a la fe, los misterios han sido ahogados por las explicaciones que de ellos se han dado’ (PYE: VIII, 877)]. Religion was made the pretext for suppressing freedom of conscience, for forcing citizens to conform for the convenience of those in power. Unamuno greatly valued freedom of conscience and of expression, which he saw as creative, not disruptive or disolvente, as the Spanish ecclesiastical hierarchy liked to label any kind of unorthoxy. This liberating attitude is patent from his running dispute with both the church hierarchy and the Primo de Rivera political regime, both of which tried to silence him but only succeeded in provoking him to increasingly caustic and belligerent responses, more especially in the case of the latter. Some years later, in October 1936, the Franco military regime, after a very public confrontation, took no chances and firmly locked him up at his home for three months until his sudden and still unexplained death. But beyond the freedom to dissent there is the freedom to search for one’s own truth rather than accept institutional truth.

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It was this search for inner freedom, argues Unamuno, that led to the foundation of the contemplative orders, ‘the Pauline yearning for freedom’ [‘ansia pauliniana de libertad’ (DST: X 502)], or escape from the harsh laws of external life that prompted the flight to a cloistered existence. But did the cloistered orders truly achieve freedom?, asks Unamuno. ‘It is doubtful that they found it then, and today it would be impossible. For true freedom is not that of discarding the external law; freedom is the conscience of the law. A free man is not he who shakes off the law but he who appropriates it’ [‘Es muy dudoso que la lograran, y hoy imposible. Porque la verdadera libertad no es esa de sacudirse de la ley externa; la libertad es la conciencia de la ley. Es libre no el que se sacude de la ley, sino el que se adueña de ella’ (DST: X, 502–03)]. This sentiment is similar to one expressed in the poem ‘A la libertad’ which appears in Unamuno’s first collection of poems, Poesías (1907), and in which he beseeches Sacred Liberty to descend from heaven and take the place of the unequal and unjust laws of man, the ‘odious law’ [‘derecho infame’]. In a clear echo of the Incarnation, the poet anticipates the impregnation of mother earth, the carrying of the new saviour in her womb, and the spring birth of Liberty as man’s redeemer. The advent of freedom will require ‘blood and pain’ [‘sangre y dolor’] but bring ‘sun and life’ [‘sol y vida’ (IV, 81–82)]. In other words freedom is confrontation with prevailing or enshrined norms, not a mere escape from those norms. Laws, whether religious, moral, social or political, cannot be evaded, they can only be confronted and surpassed in the light of one’s conviction of what is important. It is not the state that gives us our freedom, it is divine agency. For all Unamuno’s criticism of Aquinas, this is not so far from St Thomas’ view that freedom is interiority and man is liberated through faith. Freedom, then, is a state of mind: to be free is to feel free, as Joaquín Monegro suggests and as Sartre was famously to insist on.

4.2 Berdyaev: Freedom as Spirit Freedom is a recurrent and increasingly complex theme in the work of Nikolai Berdyaev. At its most basic he sees freedom as the aspiration of mankind to rid itself of its sense of enslavement by its circumstances,

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whether material, social, or ideological. Freedom is conjoined to personality; indeed it is what makes personality (in the sense given to the term by Berdyaev) possible. To be human is to be free: ‘Freedom is the essential condition of the existential subject’, is his curt definition (SAS: 56), of which Sartre’s later and more famous aphorism ‘man is condemned to be free’ is simply an echo. Freedom is independence from physical and mental enslavement; it is to be free from the will to power (economic, political, hierarchical) and from the pressures of the world and public opinion. Berdyaev calls this kind of freedom spiritual, but we can also think of it as an attitude of mind that liberates one from the task of having to play a part in order to prove oneself to the world. To set out to prove oneself in the eyes of others is identical to Unamuno’s ‘false’ freedom, for it involves an element of representation or self-objectification, of not being true to oneself (Heidegger’s and Sartre’s inauthenticity). The struggle for freedom is a personal one, ‘a profound interior revolution which is brought about in an existential, not historical, time’ (SAF: 69). To bend the knee before history and myth, adds Berdyaev, is to give up freedom. In this sense, then, freedom pertains to spirit, as does personality. They are neither objects nor concepts; they are dynamic, subjective, existential forces, brought about by the conviction that man is a spiritual being. Berdyaev’s notion of freedom is derived in the first place from his reading of Dostoyevsky, particularly his Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov, as is apparent from his 1923 book on his fellow-­ Russian. Berdyaev sees freedom as the foundation stone of Dostoyevsky’s work. He distinguishes the freedom to choose between good and evil (which we can equate with freedom of the will and the consequent moral responsibility) from the freedom that comes from knowing the truth (which Berdyaev equates with faith in Jesus Christ as the embodiment of truth). Both freedoms have a role to play in human life and both have to be respected: the freedom to chose good and the freedom to believe. The latter goes beyond the former in attaining the form of an affective relationship with the divine. It contains ‘not only the Truth, but the truth about freedom’ (DOS: 71), which is probably an echo of St John 8.32: ‘And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free’. It is this kind of second stage of inner freedom that Berdyaev discovers in Dostoyevsky, a freedom often frustrated in Dostoyevsky’s tragic heroes,

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so that, paradoxically ‘their loss is an enlightening lesson for us, and their tragedy is a hymn to freedom’ (DOS: 77). Liberty of conscience was of paramount importance in Dostoyevsky, and that, according to Berdyaev, is the Christian’s answer to the Grand Inquisitor who claims that Christ’s concession of total freedom has brought to human beings, not happiness, but anxiety and anguish when facing their decisions: the answer to the Inquisitor’s accusation is that freedom is an act, not a state. Its goal is not the establishment of social happiness through revolution or eudaemonic manipulation, but rather the exercise of faith in Jesus Christ and his vision. Freedom is a dynamic force conducive to both good and evil (a Thomistic view), but also a transcendent reality for mankind. Dostoyevsky’s lesson, according to Berdyaev, is that ‘the existence of evil is a proof of the existence of God. If the world consisted wholly and uniquely of goodness and righteousness there would be no need for God, for the world itself would be god. God is because evil is. And that means that God is because freedom is’ (DOS: 87. Author’s italics). Freedom is thus ‘the tragic destiny of mankind and of God’ but as such ‘it appertains to the very heart of being as a fundamental mystery’ (DOS:88). It is this latter judgement that Berdyaev explores in other works. In order to sustain this concept of freedom—freedom as wholly independent of all physical circumstance—Berdyaev is obliged to reject any kind of determinism, including the determinism imposed by physical laws. He does not of course deny that nature is governed by deterministic laws, but he argues that even nature is not fully deterministic because ‘the statistical interpretation of law limits the sway of determinism over nature’ (SAF: 95). Spirit and the freedom inherent in it are not subject to causal laws at all, hence are non-determined. This allows Berdyaev to argue that freedom is achievable. Man is fettered by the conventions of civilization, enslaved by the idols he himself has created, wealth, power, sex, status, even objective knowledge, for objectivity is not to be confused with truth. The most objectivized knowledge is mathematics. But what is the truth of mathematics outside of itself?, asks Berdyaev.3 ‘The criterion  Since this was written in 1939, it is entirely possible to see in it an echo of Kurt Gödel’s 1931 incompleteness theorems which showed that the absolute truth or consistency of closed systems, such as arithmetic, cannot be proved. 3

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of truth is found in the subject and not in the object’ (SAF: 116), he replies. The apprehension of what we take to be truth has a social character, but this is deceptive, a mere objectivization which enslaves the subject. It is not surprising, then, that freedom from conventionalized ways of thinking is a far from easy target and that the average person gives up its pursuit. Freedom is the victory of spirit, but man is an animal too and therefore subject to the material pressures of his animal nature. Yet freedom is not an escape from reality into a ghostly world, insists Berdyaev. The spirit of freedom is not an abstraction; it involves itself with concrete experience. It is not self-enclosure or loss of personality in a formless cosmic element. Freedom is rather victory over fear, over all kinds of fear including death. Far from producing Sartrian nausea, freedom strengthens our personality and self-confidence. However hard it is to grasp Berdyaev’s concept of freedom, it is abundantly clear that it is significantly different from the idea of freedom based on the randomness and unpredictability of life that we find in atheistic existentialism. And yet both views of freedom share an important aspect: namely that man is, or should be, in control. We are undetermined in both notions of freedom, atheistic and Christian; but whereas one gives us vertigo and anguish, the other proffers independence and assurance, a way through the labyrinth, or out of what Berdyaev calls slavery. This is achieved through ‘the creative act’, which we could perhaps re-phrase as a state of attunement to the world beyond the visible. To be creative is to exercise our freedom, indeed the two are inseparable, in Berdyaev’s terms. In The Meaning of the Creative Act (1916) he speaks of the mystery of creative freedom, which he sees as a transcendent act from within. This kind of freedom is inexplicable because, being groundless, it cannot be rationalized: ‘Freedom is the ultimate: it cannot be derived from anything. Freedom is the baseless foundation of being’ (MCA: 145). Though not subject to rational categories, Berdyaev’s idea of freedom is not arbitrary: it has purpose. In other words it is not primarily a freedom from but a freedom for; and that is where creativeness comes in. Within the realm of necessity, only evolution is possible, since all it entails is the recombination of a given quantity of energy. By contrast, freedom’s creativity means that it can increase the boundaries of the human world. But this requires breaking free of the world’s enslaving

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materialism. If this is achieved, creative freedom acquires cosmic significance; it transcends our localized fettered existence. The individual who achieves this kind of freedom enjoys a universal fullness of being not otherwise accessible: ‘In its freedom and its creativeness the personality cannot be separated from the cosmos, cannot be divorced from universal being’ (MCA: 156). Despite the quasi-mystical nature of Berdyaev’s notion of creative freedom, which obviously entails the surmounting of an existence dominated by purely material values and pursuits, it is not equivalent to an asceticism that turns its back on a social existence. It is true that a free individual may experience solitude within society due to that individual having ‘outgrown certain conditions under which others live’ (MCA: 158); but asceticism by itself is not creative, does not contribute to expanding the horizons of our world, of enriching life. Its value lies in conquering the lower nature of being for the sake of the higher, in paving the way for a religious experience, but it is only a method, not an end, and there is nothing creative about it. Creative freedom does not deny the value of asceticism; but it is positive where asceticism is simply negative; it is, as it were, a stage beyond. Berdyaev’s comparison of St Seraphim and Pushkin is revealing: one is a religious creative genius, the other a non-­ religious creative genius. Russia and the world would have been poorer if Pushkin had tried to emulate St Seraphim and given up his literary calling: ‘Genius is another kind of sainthood, but it can be recognized and canonized only in the revelation of creativeness’ (MCA: 193). What Berdyaev appears to be saying is that freedom is a gift, acceptance of which we signal by our ‘will to genius’, entirely comparable to the will to saintliness. It is in our freedom that the potential lies. Some twelve years after offering this somewhat hazy notion of freedom Berdyaev returned to the topic in his Freedom and the Spirit (1927), in which he offers a more elaborate and developed concept. Here he makes it very clear that he regards freedom as a state of being which is unconstrained by the physical world; hence it can only be achieved within the spiritual realm, with the proviso that it must not be subjected to any kind of dogmatic theology, since freedom is a subjective experience wholly independent of beliefs imposed from outside. Freedom is the sine qua non of spiritual development and indeed of religious faith: faith based on

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habit or on the passive acceptance of tradition is no faith. Yet at the same time Berdyaev holds that freedom is not simply a matter of will-power; it subsumes but is not to be confused with free will: ‘Freedom has its foundation not in the will but in the spirit, and man is made free not by abstract will-power but by the efforts of his whole conscious being’ (FAS: 117–18). Free will, then, is a narrower concept; it serves to maintain moral responsibility. Spiritual freedom is not opposed to grace, as was free will in the historical controversy between grace and free will. To oppose freedom to grace would be tantamount, in Berdyaev’s view, to subjecting it to a rationalization which makes it conform to a natural order: ‘The question of freedom has nothing whatever to do with the question of the freedom of willing in the sense in which a naturalistic psychology or a moralizing pedagogy use the term. It is, rather, the question of the fundamental principle of being and of life’ (FAS: 119). Berdyaev goes much further than Unamuno in pursuing his idea of freedom. Unamuno’s notion, exemplified by Don Quixote, was not material, but neither was it confined to the spiritual realm sensu stricto: it represented the struggle to be free from conventionalized ways of thinking, whether secular or religious, and therefore to be available for the creative endeavour of changing the world. In this enterprise the will necessarily played a role, although grace in the sense of inspiration or vision was not discounted. Though he is no ascetic, Berdyaev seems nevertheless to want to leave our common world behind and to stake his claim for freedom in an exclusively spiritual dimension. Hence we get a string of definitions of freedom that leave the issue clouded in imprecision: ‘the irrational mystery of being’, ‘the inner dynamic of the spirit’, ‘a new birth’, ‘self-­ determination in the inmost depths of being’ (FAS: 121). The problem is that unless we are shown what the inmost depth of being or the inner dynamics of our spiritual nature are we cannot penetrate through this jungle of quasi-mystical language. That Berdyaev is aware of the problem is suggested by his defensive posture when he alleges that freedom of spirit is not a natural sensibility in humans and that it is only attainable through the experience of the spiritual life. The choice is stark: we either proceed to such a life if we wish to comprehend freedom or we give up any such aspiration to comprehension. By contrast Unamuno’s

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non-rational approach has at least the advantage that it is addressed to the religious and non-religious alike. When Berdyaev says that ‘in a state of freedom man […] is self-­ determined in the depths of his spiritual life and out of his own spiritual energies’ (FAS: 122) he is making of freedom an inner conviction, but he insists that it is not a ‘psychical reality’ because the latter is subject to external causes while the spiritual world is not. So ‘freedom is manifested in psychical reality [only] in proportion to the degree in which the spiritual world is revealed in it’ (FAS: 123). This immediately raises the issue of where psychical reality ends and spiritual reality begins. All Berdyaev says is that in the arena of the human soul freedom is operative only in ‘those phenomena of the life of the soul which can be called spiritual’ (FAS: 123). Here there is something of a circular way of presentation, but the problem is the usual one encountered in mystical writing of how to express a highly subjective intuition in words. Whether Berdyaev is led by an experience or an idea is probably irrelevant. His more accessible attempts to explain spiritual freedom more often than not take the form of saying what it is not; for example, it is not a mental state provoked by external phenomena, or a determination not to be influenced by our fellow-humans. What it is, rather, is an ‘inner, deep, hidden, and mysterious energy which creates life’ (FAS: 123), something which sounds, paradoxically enough, like a variation on Schopenhauer’s will of nature, but which is meant to be something utterly different since there is no causality involved. Given that the only entity not subject to causation is the divinity itself, it must follow that human freedom in Berdyaev’s sense is anything but human; indeed it must be what raises us to the level of the divine. And this, as it turns out, is Berdyaev’s own verdict. After saying that freedom ‘is revealed to us as something completely unfathomable’, he goes on to add that ‘freedom does not raise us upwards towards nature, but towards the idea of the divine, and towards the void which is prior to being. It is rooted in non-being’ (FAS: 124). Here we reach that point zero that reappears consistently in existentialist writing from Lamennais to Sartre: our potential nothingness, which is probably due less to our being nothing than to our inability to explain what we are. To say we are freedom merely leaves the door ajar.

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Berdyaev, to his credit, is not content to leave things here and goes on exploring the topic and offering us further thoughts on freedom. Man’s sense of freedom, he argues, lies deep within his own consciousness. It is a God-given quality, but that very condition entails its invocation in the turning towards God. As Berdyaev puts it with intended circularity, ‘Truth gives us the highest kind of freedom, but freedom is necessary for the acceptance of this truth’ (FAS: 127). The acceptance of freedom demands freedom, hence we cannot be the originators of freedom but only its users. Furthermore we find freedom in God only because we have been made free in relation to God. But if Truth gives us freedom, ‘freedom in the acceptance of Truth cannot be won from Truth itself, for it is prior to it’ (FAS: 127). We shall need to return to this primeval freedom, but for the moment we can take it that what Berdyaev appears to be saying (in a rather circular argument) is that our sense of freedom is part of our human profile, unlearnt and unregistered, yet we must consciously employ it to bring it to its plenitude, or what he terms the highest kind of freedom, which is tantamount to realizing ‘this very deep foundation’ (FAS: 128), the truth at the core of our being. This is what he means by ‘spiritual liberty’, as distinct from other kinds of material liberties. God has willed that man should be free, and man can only genuinely turn to God through that very freedom. Freedom is not a rational concept, for it lies outside reason. Indeed it was the extreme rationalism of Pelagius and his followers that forced St Augustine’s hand and made him demote freedom in favour of grace, with Catholics and Protestants, and Jesuits and Dominicans, repeating the error hundreds of years later. But if freedom is treated as ‘a mystery belonging to the inmost depths of the spirit’ (FAS: 129) there is no opposition between freedom and grace. What is opposed to freedom is necessity, not grace, and St Augustine’s disastrous error, which amounted to compulsion in questions of faith and to the denial of freedom of conscience, should be recognized and not repeated. It should be said here perhaps that if Berdyaev’s criticism of St Augustine for taking up an extreme position in the face of Pelagianism is entirely reasonable, his criticism of Thomas Aquinas, who ‘also completely rejected freedom, for which his scholasticism leaves no place whatever’ (FAS: 129) is anything but reasonable. Indeed it is a tendentious misreading, if it is based on reading at all, which seems doubtful,

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given St Thomas’ massive and detailed treatment of the topic not just in the Summa theologiae, but also in Quaestiones disputatae: de veritate, and other places. St Thomas referred repeatedly to man’s freedom, which he too saw as God’s gift. We are potentially free, and that potential freedom becomes actual through our active acceptance of God’s gift or grace. The full achievement of freedom requires divine grace, but in Thomist philosophy man has the universal capacity to accept or decline grace, so, contrary to Berdyaev, in neither Augustine nor Aquinas is there an ‘antithesis between freedom and grace’ (FAS: 130). We therefore have the capacity to achieve freedom, as St Thomas insists. We are not free to choose in what pertains to nature (that is, our natural needs, over which we have little or no choice), nor are we free to reject what is given to us through empirical knowledge, argues St Thomas. We are free through our voluntary action (Summa theologiae, prima secundae, quaestio 5, articulus 1). Even if we face physical constraints or coercion our will remains free (Summa theologiae, prima secundae, quaestio 6, articulus 4). It is clear that for St Thomas, just as for Berdyaev, freedom is a state of mind: once again, to be free is to feel free. Berdyaev, as Unamuno before him, demonstrates the usual existentialist prejudice against Thomism because Aquinas is seen as the advocate of a purely rationalist theology. This view, for which the neo-Thomists or modern Scholastics are partly responsible, is unwarranted. St Thomas held that faith resides not solely in the intellect but also in the will. We are free to choose whether to believe or disbelieve. Faith has to be willed because the intellect is subject to the deficiencies of human reason and cannot take the place that revelation plays in arousing faith (Summa theologiae, prima pars, quaestio 1, articulus 8), an idea that reappears in his famous hymn ‘Pange lingua’: ‘Praestet fides supplementum / sensuum defectui’ [‘Let faith stand forth as a substitute for the defect of the senses’]. Jesus of Nazareth was a free man because of his faith in God, and we are capable of that same faith and freedom. In Thomist terms, we reach the truth through freedom, which seems to foreshadow the very argument that Berdyaev is proposing in a considerably less translucent manner. His dismissal of St Thomas is based either on ignorance or prejudice. Indeed when Berdyaev says that ‘man though wounded and broken remains a spiritual being’ and ‘man bears

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upon him the mark of the divine image’ (FAS: 130) he is well-nigh paraphrasing St Thomas. It is perhaps Berdyaev’s decision to split freedom into freedom of choice (which can lead to good or evil) and freedom as truth-­consciousness that causes him to attack Aquinas’ account of human freedom, since he (wrongly) associates him narrowly with the former kind of freedom. But Berdyaev’s distinction between freedom of action and freedom of perception (the first leading as much to evil acts as to good acts, and the second provoking manipulative organization, whether political or religious in the search for collective eudaemony) introduces an artificial split in human psychology. As a concept, liberty is susceptible to an endless taxonomy, but as an experience it is only one thing: my feeling of freedom may be in what I do, say, believe or seek, but is one and the same feeling. In denouncing Thomists and Catholics as denying liberty of conscience, in rejecting liberty of evil while accepting liberty of goodness, and in making liberty dependent on divine necessity (FAS: 133), Berdyaev is being altogether too deferential to Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor. On the other hand, when he speaks of the ‘self-annihilation of liberty’ he points out effectively that human freedom is a two-edge sword: it can be used to destroy freedom itself. ‘The mystery of Christianity, the religion of God [i.e.of the freest agent] made man, is above all the mystery of liberty’ (FAS: 135). There is no very convincing explanation for our freedom—which includes the freedom to destroy ourselves—whether rational or mystical. We are back with Sartre’s nausée or existential vertigo. Our freedom appears gratuitous, ungrounded, both atheistically and theistically. For Berdyaev the solution lies in a third source of liberty, the liberty that (in Christian theology) belongs to God and is exemplified in the dual nature of Jesus of Nazareth, ‘the freedom of absolute spirituality undetermined from without’ (FAS: 137). Here of course Berdyaev seems to turn Sartre’s later argument on its head: Sartre was an atheist because he held that man unquestionably enjoyed the absolute freedom to create his own essence; Berdyaev was a Christian because man’s given essence entails the gift of freedom. Ultimately, then, Berdyaev’s concept of freedom is religious in nature: ‘Spiritual man enjoys freedom because he belongs to the generation of the Son’ (FAS: 138). It is debatable whether this is undetermined,

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ungrounded, freedom, as Berdyaev holds. It is nevertheless a freedom waiting to be discovered, akin to the divine nature of Christ the man, and thus available to all who ‘through His humanity […] are associated with His human freedom’ (FAS: 138). This kind of freedom is simply inoperative in the external or empirical world; it is not even dependent on religious truths proclaimed by church authorities. Freedom in Berdyaev’s sense is the potential capacity to respond to the spiritual dimension of our inner lives. It is intrinsic to our being, but at the same time a burden that entails suffering and sacrifice.

4.3 Marcel: Freedom as Value In his 1937 essay ‘My Fundamental Purpose’ (included in Presence and Immortality), Gabriel Marcel equates philosophical reflection with freedom: ‘On the one hand, philosophy is thought centred on Freedom, thought which is given Freedom itself for its content. On the other hand, freedom cannot be conceived except through freedom: it creates or constitutes itself in the act of thinking itself ’ (PAI: 21–22). He repeats the idea three years later when he writes: ‘Metaphysics should be defined as the logic of freedom’ (CRF: 26). Philosophical inquiry already implies freedom of thought: to argue philosophically in favour of determinism is self-defeating. Certainly Marcel’s whole philosophical endeavour, based on exploration and constant questioning, as indeed are his plays, demands flexibility of judgement and point of view, what Marcel himself refers to as ‘my predilection for dialogue’ (POE: 106). The awareness of divergence and incompatibilities in the human realm to which Marcel shows such acute sensitivity in his drama comes through, in his philosophical writings, in his cautious, prodding approach to the basic question of apprehending and describing reality, both immediate and ultimate. The world, for Marcel, is ‘an indeterminate place’ (POE: 115) which demands patient unearthing and gentle familiarisation. Marcel distrusts systematic thought because such philosophical systems tend to close doors instead of opening them. Reality, he says, ‘cannot be summed up’ (POE: 125); we have to work back from what we make of our concrete experience. It is our experience that gives us freedom. In the light of experience, the

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difficult question, philosophically speaking, of how we know we are free agents seems artificial: ‘The traditional problem of liberty has never worried me to any great extent: I have always held that man could not but have the liberty which he required, and that, consequently, there was no real problem’ (PPE: 126). In other words, freedom belongs to experience, and if one holds, as Marcel evidently did, that philosophical thought stems—or should stem—from experience and not abstraction, then freedom is built into the exercise. Nevertheless it should not be thought that Marcel side-steps the difficulty or ignores the importance of freedom. In his earliest writings, the Metaphysical Journal or diary which he kept between 1914 and 1923, he anticipates Karl Popper’s well-known falsification principle by arguing that anything unverifiable (that is, beyond falsifiability) cannot be thought of as susceptible of truth in its everyday sense. And he then goes on to make the unexpected proposition that freedom, which is after all the condition of all verification, is itself fundamentally unverifiable. This straightaway raises a problem. The realm of mind is the realm of freedom. For the mind, what is true is defined as what is outside of it, what is recognized as existing independently. The mind is forced into assuming that what is true is independent of it. But can the assumption be true in that case? Marcel’s answer is that ‘thought constitutes itself ’. Freedom, in other words, is self-authenticating, or as Marcel puts it ‘the act by which I think freedom is the very act by which freedom comes to be’ (MPJ: 31); or again: ‘Freedom is a ground of that very thought that tries to conceive it’ (CRF: 69). This may strike one as controversial, to say the least, but Marcel does acknowledge the problem, especially when transposed into the realm of religious belief: the relation of human freedom to divine freedom is indeterminable and must therefore remain a central mystery of the Christian religion. The point will need to be revisited when we come to the topic of the nature of religious faith. For the moment one may note that in his next ‘metaphysical diary’, incorporated in Being and Having (Être et avoir) and covering the years 1928–1933, Marcel writes that ‘to a Bergsonian, salvation lies in pure freedom; to a metaphysic which is Christian in its essence, freedom has an aim assigned to it, and that aim is salvation’ (BAH: 79–80). What this tells us of course is that in Marcel’s conception freedom is neither an end in itself nor a mere

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accident or accessory. It is in fact a gift, and one which, paradoxically, entails the power to accept or reject it, that is, the need to ‘presuppose its existence’ (CRF: 102). If Marcel already raised the question of freedom in his first book, Metaphysical Journal, he was still doing so over forty years later in one of his last, Tragic Wisdom and Beyond. Here he comments on the prevailing confusion over the meaning of ‘freedom’, not least among philosophers and intellectuals. We have to conquer freedom, he argues, not simply expect it as a political right. Freedom belongs to the person, not to the state, and what is inimical to the person is inimical to freedom. He dismisses the idea that a free man is an independent man as ‘a purely abstract view which has no basis in actual experience’ (TWB: 84). All citizens in any of those countries we call free come under numerous obligations which curtail their independence. Indeed retaining our collective freedom entails each one meeting his obligations to the community. And if freedom is not to be confused with independence, neither must it be confused with the absence of motivation. Gide’s acte gratuit, allegedly proving one’s freedom, is merely a display of arbitrariness. Freedom depends on the nature of the motive, not on the lack of one; non-­ motivation does not increase freedom. Nor for that matter is the constant need to make choices the real sign of our freedom, as in Sartre’s reformulation of Kierkegaard. Freedom for Marcel is ultimately an enabling tool that allows us to recognize and confront the truth of a situation. It may not allow us to act freely, as in coercion, or torture, or some kind of disablement, but it empowers us to search for truth; indeed truth and freedom are inseparable, as Marcel argues in Tragic Wisdom and Beyond (TWB: ch. 5). In between the latter work and the much earlier Metaphysical Journal Marcel repeatedly explored the nature and reaches of freedom. As is only to be expected, the idea of freedom looms large in Marcel’s 1946 essay on Sartre, ‘Existence and Human Freedom’ (collected in The Philosophy of Existentialism). While recognizing both the originality and importance of La nausée and Being and Nothingness, Marcel passes severe strictures on Sartre’s jaundiced view of human nature, especially when it comes to interpersonal relations. Sartre’s ‘absolute freedom’ renders communion with others impossible: freedom equals nothingness, argues

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Sartre, for it is because we are nothing that we are free. We are therefore not deprived of freedom but condemned to freedom; and it is this uncircumscribed freedom that enables us to make ourselves, that ‘condemns’ us to being something or other to combat our inner nothingness. Marcel’s critique of Sartre’s concept of human freedom is detailed and forceful. After taking apart Sartre’s ideas on freedom, in terms of intentionality, (dis)engagement, and unconditioned action, he upbraids Sartre for ontological reductionism (i.e. reducing being to doing) and for the absolute denial of altruism (giving as merely the means of enslaving others). For Marcel, these are the regrettable consequences of Sartre’s warped concept of freedom, which he finds ‘just as inexplicable and much more deeply unintelligible than the notion of creation which Sartre rejects and for which he has nothing but contempt’ (POE: 83). The point at issue between Marcel and Sartre seems to be the source of man’s desire to transcend himself, to be more than he feels himself to be, an urge which they both recognize as real. For Sartre, who looks backwards, this is a clear indication of man’s intrinsic nothingness; for Marcel, who looks forward, it is a pointer to the existence of a transcendent dimension of being. This is a fundamental difference that separates Sartre’s brand of atheistic existentialism from Marcel’s transcendent (in the sense of quasi-religious or spiritual) existentialism. But it is not simply a difference of outlook; there is a difference of argument too. According to Marcel, Sartre’s existentialism is logically incompatible with his militant atheism. Using Sartre’s own reformulation of Freud in which ‘existential psychoanalysis’ is credited with the capacity to unveil one’s pattern of being, Marcel asks what the pattern of Sartre’s atheism might be. His answer does not favour Sartre’s position. For either his atheism comes from an attitude of the will in accordance with his doctrine that we make ourselves what we are subjectively; or it comes from traditional objective arguments intended to show that there is no God. If the former, then much of Sartre’s metaphysics (contingency, nausea, even absolute freedom) falls apart because it is simply a case of what I will. If the latter, Sartre must give up existentialism and take up an obsolete rationalism. This may be a clever way of undermining the logical consistency of Sartre’s position, but of itself does not offer a more convincing alternative. It may well have been his dissatisfaction with Sartre’s idea of freedom

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and the felt exigency of a different approach that provoked Marcel into exploring the subject from a different perspective in his Gifford lectures of 1949–1950 at the University of Aberdeen. Here, halfway through his second set of lectures, Marcel makes a determined attempt to explain and justify what he had simply assumed all along, namely man’s inherent freedom to accept or reject the presence of an intersubjective transcendence. As usual Marcel sets off on his exploration from the starting point of his own living experience: ‘up to what point or within what limits can I or can I not assert that I am a free being?’ (MOB: II, 122). The word limits is a strong hint that at the very start of his enquiry Marcel is already distancing himself from Sartre. The caution shown by the formulation of the question is justified: for freedom must involve conscious action, and many of one’s actions are of course unconscious. On the other hand, as Marcel himself points out, freedom cannot be reduced to doing what one wants: desire is one thing and will is another, and the two can be opposed. For Marcel the greater freedom is in the will’s resistance to compulsion rather than in the yielding to it. Marcel does not deny that both are free decisions, but to take refuge in an appeal to compulsion (i.e. to argue that a temptation is too hard to resist) is unlikely to succeed even in assuaging my own consciousness, or as he puts it, ‘I cannot win such an acquittal except at the expense of my own being’ (MOB: II, 125). For Marcel, then, giving in to a compulsion is a misuse of freedom, it is freedom for enslavement. What this means is that freedom is not a phenomenal reality, not something to be observed; it is something established by the individual on each occasion that a decision is made, or as Marcel says, each one of us asserts his own freedom and no-one else can refute it. Marcel approvingly quotes Jaspers’ view that we know we are free when we recognize what others expect of us, but he adds the stipulation that the latter must not be seen as the cause of the former, for in this case our freedom would be determined by others’ view of us. This leads the usually cautious Marcel to make one of his occasional radical statements about the misconceptions of traditional philosophy: ‘in the whole history of philosophy there has been no more tragic error than that of trying to think of free will in its opposition to determinism; in reality it lies in a completely different plane’ (MOB: II, 127). The freedom that we enjoy, and which we express via our free will, is not a predicate: I do not possess

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freedom as I possess material belongings or even non-material ones such as artistic talent. According to Marcel, to say ‘I am free’ is tantamount to saying ‘I am I’, but with the proviso that in many circumstances I cease being my own self (through social pressure, obsessive-compulsive behaviour, alienation) and act automatically. Freedom is operative in a state of what Marcel calls ‘interior dialogue’, a state, that is, of conscious consideration or judgement open to modification especially in the light of others’ participation in one’s life as interlocutors. The real enemy of freedom, therefore, is not determinism but fanaticism, because the fanatic has sacrificed openness and dialogue for a closed system which repudiates and proscribes freedom. Freedom for Marcel, as for Berdyaev, is something integral to the person and not simply liberty of choice. The latter stems from indetermination, and we are naturally and constantly obliged to take one course or another in the face of this indetermination. But free will is not what makes us reach a decision: each decision will have its own reason or motivation driven by the personality of the decision-maker. What is significant about our freedom—and this is perhaps where Marcel’s view becomes complex—is that it makes us confront our sense of value. It is when what is at stake is truly important that we are most conscious of our freedom. The purely contingent, which constantly confronts us, is scarcely a free act; it is mere routine. The truly free act is a significant act, and by this Marcel means that it is an act based on values. It is an act in which something important is at stake beyond the simple outcome of the decision: ‘The truth would seem rather to be that I must realize in concreto that I should be betraying or denying myself if I failed to set this value on the stake’ (MOB: II, 130). It appears therefore that the free act, which is in turn a manifestation of our inherent freedom, involves ethical choices. Contra Sartre, freedom for Marcel cannot be separated from an ethical outlook, for in that case freedom becomes compulsion. My free act may be moral or immoral, as the case may be, but it serves to characterize me as a human being, and in this sense only it agrees with Sartrian philosophy: ‘No doubt one might say that what distinguishes the free act is that it helps to make me what I am, as a sculptor might carve me, whereas the contingent or insignificant act, the act which might just as well be performed by anybody, has no

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contribution to make to this sort of creation of myself by myself. To that extent it can hardly be considered as an act’ (MOB: II, 131). Marcel goes on to add that acting freely must not be confused with acting consistently or coherently; indeed there is a danger that coherence as a self-imposed guide could result in mechanical behaviour, a view that Marcel has in common with Unamuno. To be free is to be conscious of values, but these are values that are given to us and that we recognize, not values that we arbitrarily assign to ourselves as in Sartre’s ‘se faire’. As Margaret Chatterjee puts it, ‘for Sartre, freedom is the foundation of values, while for Marcel to be free is to be able to recognize values’ (Chatterjee 1973: 86). Marcel’s freedom is thus essentially the freedom to accept or reject what is on offer. And what is on offer for Marcel is the gift of life, or grace. One can of course deny that life is such a gift and see it instead as an accidental absurdity bereft of all meaning and transcendence. If we accept the latter view we must concede that truth is meaningless. The negative interpretation of life is self-destructive, but it is a tenable stance and, in principle at least, impossible to refute. The goodwill necessary to entertain the possibility of refutation is lacking in those who derive satisfaction from negation. Does freedom retain any value in such a situation?, asks Marcel pointedly. The answer of course is that all values lose their assurance and applicability in a meaningless situation. This is the idea that lies behind Marcel’s Man against Mass Society (1951), his most impassioned and outspoken denunciation of the degradation of the human person in the twentieth century, not just at the hands of tyrannical and totalitarian rulers but equally through the psychological manipulation of those who would reduce the citizen to a material function in a material universe. Such a reduction robs the person of the idea he has of himself, in effect of his dignity and consequently of his freedom, for ‘a materialistic conception of the universe is radically incompatible with the idea of a free man: more precisely […] in a society ruled by materialistic principles, freedom is transmuted into its opposite, or becomes merely the most treacherous and deceptive of empty slogans’ (MMS: 14). The pursuit of material comforts that has characterized modern society has meant that economic insecurity must be avoided even at the cost of personal independence and creative thought: the rush into secure employment in the state administration and other public

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posts, where creative thinking and critical attitudes are discouraged or impossible, is a clear sign of the willingness to put up with the demand for unthinking behaviour and impersonal, machine-like routines. If the sense of human values disappears the very word freedom loses its meaning; ‘and by the sense of values’, explains Marcel, ‘we must also understand the feeling that values are transcendent’ (MMS: 26). Thus Marcel makes human freedom dependent on our degree of awareness of that which transcends us. Freedom without transcendence is meaningless, ungrounded, amounting to nothing because the freedom of a being who claims to exist by himself and for himself amounts to nothing. For Marcel, then, true freedom is God-given, a form of available grace. But the perception of freedom is not limited to the religious sphere in the narrow sense: ‘it is in so far as he is a creator, at however humble a level, that any man at all can recognize his own freedom’ (MMS: 16). Artists, for example, believe in the value of their art, and this provides Marcel’s idea of transcendence, of the need to reach out to something beyond us. Accordingly, creativity is a revelation of freedom. It is no surprise therefore to read that ‘my freedom must be won’ (EBH: 87). To state that man is free, or that he is born free as Rousseau said, is to say nothing at all. Man is simply born, neither free nor fettered. Freedom is not an attribute; ‘freedom is a conquest—always partial, always precarious, always challenged’ (EBH: 146). The highest degree of freedom is achieved by those who give their existence the richest possible significance. And the richest significance for Marcel is that derived from intersubjectivity, from human relations: The freest man is also the most fraternal […]. The fraternal man is linked to his neighbour, but in such a way that this tie not only does not fetter him, but frees him from himself. […] This freedom is of primary importance, for each one of us tends to become a prisoner of himself, not only in respect of his material interests, his passions, or simply his prejudices, but still more essentially in the predisposition which inclines him to be centred on himself, and to view everything only from his perspective. The fraternal man, on the contrary, is somehow enriched by everything which enriches his brother. (EBH: 147)

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For Marcel real freedom, far from self-obsession, is, on the contrary, openness to others. Although this passage appears in a late work based on his William James lectures at Harvard in 1961, it only reiterates a point which Marcel had made in 1940, namely that the best use one can make of one’s freedom is to place it at another’s disposal: ‘it is by that very substitution that I realize my freedom’ (CRF: 40). We can conclude that freedom for Marcel, far from being self-absorbing, is very much the opposite: the key to his well-known disponibilité.

4.4 Conclusions The question of freedom of the will has never been an easy one for those thinkers of a Christian persuasion. The attention given to the subject by both St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas is a good indication of its centrality. The free-will debate split Christianity during the Reformation and split Catholicism in the aftermath, as exemplified by the Báñez-­ Molina controversy. But beyond the intractable philosophical issue of the degree to which the human will is free there lies the notion of freedom, of its nature, its manifestation, and its scope. Unamuno finds that Spinoza’s view of freedom, which the latter sees as closely allied to our search for happiness, is in fact a tragic, distressing view. In Part V of his Ethics, titled ‘Of the Power of the Intellect, or On Human Freedom’, Spinoza claims that through intuitive knowledge (knowledge of the ‘third kind’) we achieve an understanding of divine things which gives us the ‘greatest satisfaction’ (Spinoza 1996: 173 [Ethics, Part V, proposition 27]). This satisfaction sustains our sense of freedom, that is, our intuitive knowledge that we are more than accidental, transient creatures because we are the creatures of God, and since God and his love are eternal something of us must be eternal too. This for Unamuno is intellectual sleight-of-hand, ‘pure deception’ [‘un puro engaño’ (DST: X, 353)], since Spinoza has already shown that ‘the mind can neither imagine anything, nor recollect past things, except while the body survives’ (Spinoza 1996: 171 [Ethics, Part V, proposition 21]). To pretend that God’s love of mankind necessarily guarantees each separate one of us an eternal presence is patently an inconsistency and a fiction. Our

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freedom, says Unamuno, is not a recipe for satisfaction or happiness; it is, on the contrary, the instigation of a restless search for certainty, or ‘a tragic destiny’ in Berdyaev’s words. Human freedom, which Unamuno valued, turns out to be a double-edged sword. It thrusts responsibility onto our shoulders without giving us an intelligible reason for our agency. We carry our own sense of freedom within us without knowing either its provenance or its purpose. Berdyaev and Marcel are a little more sanguine about human freedom but they do not progress much further than Unamuno in explaining why humans feel free intuitively. The autonomy for action and belief which we enjoy is regarded as a mysterious quality and hence as a divine gift or grace. Our freedom is seen as a sort of enabling tool which is placed at our disposal to facilitate our creativity. We are as it were free creatures by design, and this sense of freedom which inheres in us gives us our free will and with it a sense of responsibility for our choices and actions. Despite their somewhat different approaches to the question of freedom (more emotional in Unamuno, more spiritual in Berdyaev, more conceptual in Marcel), all three thinkers have certain ideas in common. First of all they make the point that, while it is inherent in mankind, freedom is an active quality, not a passive one. Freedom is an inner conviction, but one that needs to be achieved in practice and not simply assumed: we must confront it and knowingly exercise it to bring it to fruition. This is not so very different from the Sartrian kind of freedom, but it does perhaps call for greater involvement rather than dismay in the face of its apparent groundlessness. There is accordingly, in the view of these Christian thinkers, a creative dimension to freedom, which Unamunian and Marcellian characters in novels and plays strive to express with varying results. Freedom is in a real sense self-expression, but all three writers make the point that it is outwardly directed, freedom not from others but for the sake of others, a freedom of solidarity and not insularity. The creative dimension lies in the potential which our freedom offers for achieving a collective sense of purpose beyond the numbing materialism of modern life. This sentiment, strong in Unamuno, re-­ appears in Berdyaev, who argues that modern man has abandoned the pursuit of freedom in his search for material wealth and status. Man requires ‘creative’ freedom to rise above his animal circumstances, to

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access the spiritual dimension of existence which lies within his grasp. It is Marcel who is most uncompromising in his denunciation of closed minds. The blind pursuit of materialism is not the creation of freedom but the denial of freedom: creative thinking is incompatible with the capitulation to conventionalized ways of thinking that economic security seems to demand. All three thinkers agree that to be free in the creative sense is to want to change the world. But if real freedom is creativeness, a reaching out, it is also, and even more importantly for these thinkers, what gives us truth. All three associate freedom with truth closely, indeed Berdyaev virtually equates the two. For him truth lies at the core of our being and we need the gift of freedom to uncover it. Marcel is more circumspect, preferring to talk of values. To be free is to recognize values that are given to us; for it is in our taking value-based—rather than desire-based—action that we realize our inherent freedom. Unamuno for his part argues that what we feel to be true is governed by our consciousness, which is in turn necessary for genuinely willed (i.e. conscious) action. Our freedom of action consequently exists in the light of truth: to be free is to know what is true; the further we are from truth, the further we are from freedom. Marcel might well have put it the other way round: the further we are from feeling free the further truth will recede from us. What is in any case apparent in all three writers is that our human freedom takes us far beyond our purely material and local needs and into a spiritual or transcendental universe. Freedom, though onerous, is seen as a gift that enables us to respond constructively to our situation. It is not our contingency that gives us our freedom but our conviction. Our contingency tells us that we are undetermined but not that we are free. Contingency is simply, and paradoxically, the necessary context for our operative freedom. We may come into existence contingently, but we do not need to so exist. For it is precisely our freedom that gives us truth, value, and purpose; without it, these notions would be meaningless. For Unamuno, how free we are is a function of how free we feel ourselves to be. Our freedom is free to choose or to deny itself. The problem for Unamuno lies in that freedom can be interpreted as a right to liberation from the pains and burdens of life, whereas for him freedom is rather the right and the ability to question our purpose and our destiny. For Berdyaev, freedom is what enables us to

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believe creatively in a transcendent universe: there is no meaningful role for freedom in a physical, materially-circumscribed universe. The freedom that we recognize in us is a pointer to a different dimension of existence, to our potential for envisaging and anticipating what he calls the spiritual realm. Our deep sense of freedom is not a quality of the natural world. Freedom must therefore originate not with us but with God. But by its very nature it can lead us as much away from God as towards him. For Marcel, freedom is the hallmark of humanity; it is the supreme quality of mind, what enables us not just to choose but to recognize what is important and of lasting value. Far from being groundless, far from being nothingness, it is integral to the human person and the source of our recognition of the value of all human life.

5 Faith and Intellection

If there is one thing that separates atheistic existentialism from Christian existentialism it is of course the matter of religious faith. Yet since existentialist thinkers have insisted that their style of philosophizing differs from the more traditional one in that it starts from the concrete situation of the human being—the person as an individual, embodiment, birth, death, interaction with other humans, the daily routine of living—rather than from abstract notions, it follows that Christian existentialists should see faith in similar terms, as grounded in our being and not as some forceful proposition based on the unprovable concept of a divine existence. If faith is to matter, it must be shown to play a part in, or be in some way relevant to, our everyday concrete existence, and taken on from there. Unamuno was brought up as a devout Catholic but lost his childhood faith as a student at university when he began to realize that the beliefs which had been inculcated in him were logically untenable. But while he lost his orthodox faith, he did not lose his need for faith, that is, his conviction that there must be a purpose to existence on which science and philosophy have been silent. Unamuno discovered that faith could not simply be dispensed with, but he faced the uphill struggle of explaining why this was and in what way faith might be retained. Marcel by contrast © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. A. Longhurst, Unamuno, Berdyaev, Marcel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81999-6_5

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was brought up in an agnostic family ambience in which religious indoctrination or practice played no part, so there could be no residual faith as there probably was in the case of Unamuno. ‘I cannot say that I missed consciously as a child the religious training which I was not given’ (POE: 110–11), writes Marcel. Yet despite the absence of a religious upbringing, Marcel was driven as an adult to explore the intimate side of the human being, the inward needs. For Marcel, it was his own experience of dissatisfaction with his ‘abstract and inhuman school system’ (POE: 114) that led him to consider not man in the abstract but man in the midst of his sentiments and emotions, and which eventually culminated in his acceptance of religious faith as a natural outcome (although his final choice of Catholicism over Protestantism appears to have been more accidental than doctrinal). For his part Berdyaev, at one stage enthusiastically inclined to Marxism and even initially approving of the Bolshevik revolution, returned to the Russian Orthodox Church in his late thirties and retained his allegiance to the end despite his heterodox writings. In this respect his position is analogous to that of Unamuno, except that, in his long French exile of twenty-five years he did not suffer the constant harassment which the Salamanca professor had to endure at the hands of the Spanish hierarchy, the Spanish state, and the Jesuit order. Faith for Berdyaev was a discovery, or at the very least a rediscovery, not at all an acceptance of received wisdom but a re-creation of a vision of what mankind could achieve as collaborator with a divine plan. All three thinkers, then, share the view that faith is in the first place a quest taken in response to an inner drive, but an inner drive that in some obscure way presupposes the existence of a transphysical or transcendental reality. Faith is creative to the extent that it cannot rely purely on an external input. Subjectivity is of course a central tenet of existentialism. Is faith as subjectivity acceptable to a Christian? Here is what a Jesuit priest has to say on the matter of faith in God: ‘I can speak to God in prayer or silent communion, but if I try to speak of him, my statements denote no more than a quasi-external being who, at bottom, scarcely interests me at all. It is useless to accumulate attributes and perfections: the God of the philosophers and savants is not my God, the absolute Thou before whom alone I am “I”’ (Troisfontaines 1950: 7). Faith must not be confused with the everyday evidence that comes to us via sense-data.

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‘The conviction of things not seen’ is a traditional and crisp definition of faith derived from Paul’s epistle to the Hebrews (11.1). We can see at once that there are two quite separate components: ‘the conviction’ needs a believer, a who, while ‘things’ needs an object of belief, a what. If we require both elements to define faith it is obvious that a definition acceptable to all implies an important measure of agreement on the content or object of the belief. That agreement has never been forthcoming, hence faith is reduced to meaning what one chooses or happens to believe. Acceptance of what an institution instructs us to believe is faith in only the most diluted way, since conviction is all but lacking. Faith defies precise definition. Even within Christianity there is no agreed definition of what constitutes real faith beyond the acceptance of Jesus of Nazareth as the keystone. Faith is therefore a hazy concept, one hard to pin down because there can be no satisfactory definition of what is after all a personal experience or stance. It is nevertheless central to religion and the philosophy of religion. I have chosen to start the topic by looking briefly at the two most influential theologians of Christianity in order to have some element of comparison with our three existentialists thinkers. In the religious sphere faith has often been contraposed to reason despite the fact that neither Augustine nor Aquinas saw any opposition. Reason is certainly different from, but not inimical to, faith. Augustine held that belief in God and the Incarnation was in the last resort a matter of God-given faith, but even so he still maintained that the decision to believe rested with us. In chapter 31 of The Spirit and the Letter, in which he discussed whether faith lies within our own capacities, he concluded that while the will by which we believe is a gift of God, ‘faith is in our own power’ [‘profecto fides in potestate est’, De spiritu et littera, chapter 31, § 54], by which he meant that faith is volitional, that it needs our assent. We need faith because ‘we are too weak by unaided reason to find out truth’ (Augustine 2006: 119 [Confessions, Book 6, chapter 5, § 8]). Reason leads us to earthly knowledge, but not to knowledge of God (Confessions, Book 5, chapter 4, § 7). Augustine therefore points to the insufficiency of reason, to its element of indeterminacy or open-endedness, rational knowledge being subject to revision, against which faith is ‘positive affirmation’, since ‘without positive affirmation nothing is believed’ (Augustine 2006:

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351 [Enchiridion, chapter 7, § 20]). When we believe in God or in Christ’s resurrection we unequivocally assert the existence of one and the truth of the other. Augustine accepted the Platonic approach to the divinity based on reason because reason is what principally distinguishes human nature from that of other creatures. Although reason must ultimately be guided by faith, we still need reason, for that is what facilitates cognition. What faith does, in the case of Augustine, is what a purified intelligence enabled the soul to do in the case of Socrates: ‘to rise up to the sphere of the eternal and behold, thanks to its pure intelligence, the essence of the immaterial and unchangeable light where dwell the causes of all created things in undisturbed stability’ (Augustine 2003: 302 [City of God, Book 8, chapter 3]). Faith enables us to turn our reason towards higher things. Reason by itself, being focused on earthly things and desires, must be purified or moved by something higher than itself. Reason teaches us about the world and our place in it; faith takes us on a voyage inwards where God resides. In Augustine, faith does not supplant reason; it precedes reason: crede ut intelligas. It follows that a purely rational approach is insufficient to achieve real insight into our relationship with the divinity. We need to acknowledge and to want God in the first place: that is, we need faith first and then reason to see beyond our temporal circumstances. ‘Seek and you shall find’ (Matthew 7.7), Augustine reminds us. Faith makes us seek, but reason gives us the ability to judge if we seek wisely: intellige ut credas. Reason can never supplant faith, but it is there to be used and cannot be set aside. Explaining the Christian faith, writes Augustine, is to be done ‘not merely by appealing to divine authority but also by employing such powers of reason as we can apply for the benefit of unbelievers’ (Augustine 2003: 843 [City of God, Book 19, chapter 1]). Reason, then, remains important, as it was in Plato, but it is not autonomous. For Augustine, to have faith is to acknowledge God (agnoscere) and his word through Jesus Christ. Faith is not credulity; rather is it a recognition that we need more than reason on its own to attain understanding of the human situation. Aquinas’ view of faith is considerably more complex than Augustine’s, but we find nothing that contradicts the African bishop’s view, for all that they have traditionally been pitted against each other over the question of free will and predestination. The common misconception that Aquinas is

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the supreme rationalist whose approach to the God question is purely rational is exactly that: a misconception based on ignorance of Aquinas’ writings. The rationality of St Thomas is certainly not to be questioned. But he repeatedly pointed out the boundaries of human knowledge beyond which we could not go. And beyond this boundary was God himself, whose nature we could not aspire to understand: ‘This is our final knowledge of God: to know that God cannot be known’ (‘illud est ultimum cognitionis humanae de Deo quod sciat se Deum nescire.’ Quaestiones disputatae: de potentia Dei, quaestio 7, articulus 5, ad 14). By something unknowable Aquinas does not mean intrinsically unknowable, but inapprehensible by and incomprehensible to a human being. This applies not only to God, but in a way to all created things: we cannot fully grasp their essence. At the boundary, reason fails; we can only cross it with the assistance of faith. Our reason fails not only to understand God but to understand the essence of anything: ‘the essential form of things in themselves are unknown to us’ (‘formae substantiales per se ipsas sunt ignotae.’ Quaestiones disputatae: de spiritualibus criaturis, articulus 11, ad 3), and ‘what the essential distinctions are we do not know’ (‘differentiae essentiales sunt nobis ignotae.’ Quaestiones disputatae: de veritate, quaestio 4, articulus 1, ad 8). St Thomas clips our rational wings pretty sharply. Our cognition must remain partial and incomplete: ‘Let us admit our own inadequacy for a perfect understanding’ (‘recognoscamus nos insufficientes ad perfectam comprehensionem.’ Quaestiones disputatae: de veritate, quaestio 5, articulus 2, ad 11). Created things, including mankind, are in darkness in so far as they proceed from nothing (‘creatura est tenebra inquamtum est ex nihilo.’ Quaestiones disputatae: de veritate, quaestio 18, articulus 2, ad 5). God surpasses our comprehension, but since created things reflect the creator in however distant a way, we can attain partial knowledge, though never full knowledge of anything, not even of ourselves. St Thomas does not deny the Augustinian axiom that ‘in interiore hominis habitat veritas’, but he puts the brakes on the progression towards that goal. This does not, however, mean that truth is barred from us. Man remains a knowing subject with the potential to understand, but this must remain just that, a potential. We recognize our potential in our inherent desire to know things, and it is this recognized potential that is

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transformed into faith. Faith in effect means fulfilling that potential or at any rate getting closer to it. Faith is as much faith in the future as it is faith in God today. It is because we are incapable of reaching anything like a complete explanation of the universe and our role in it that we turn to faith, that is to God, to a transcendent being who, as it were, holds the key to the mystery. And this, of course, happens to coincide with Jesus Christ as God’s revelation to man. For St Thomas knowledge is that which we can know and faith is that which we hope to know. Whereas for Augustine faith preceded knowledge, for Aquinas faith and knowledge are inseparable. Knowledge (of the Aristotelian kind, though St Thomas does not rely on Aristotle alone) must be brought into the picture because it is part of our world; but it can only give us partial truths, not the essential or complete truth which is the truth that belongs to the creator. As creatures we can access a part of that truth and we are capable of recognising what is missing. Our knowledge and its inadequacy together form the basis of faith. Faith thus becomes foreknowledge or, as St Thomas himself puts it in his Compendium of Theology, ‘faith is a certain foretaste of that knowledge which is to make us happy in the life to come’ (Aquinas 2012: 5). Faith is the signpost which keeps wayfarers on the right road. It gives us a kind of knowledge, which St Thomas summarizes as ‘the divinity of the Trinity and the humanity of Christ’ (Aquinas 2012: 5). It is clear from Part One of the Compendium as well as Part One of the Summa Theologiae, which the Compendium broadly mirrors, that Aquinas saw reason as supporting faith, though never as its substitute. Despite the fact that in this life we cannot know God or explain what God is, it is entirely reasonable nevertheless to accept the truth of his existence, of his timelessness, of his creative power, of his absolute purity or simplicity (i.e. non-compositeness), of his uniqueness, of his power and perfection. It becomes evident all the same that Aquinas is struggling to maintain his pedagogical approach to the subject of God in an account which becomes increasingly abstract and culminates in the admission that God is undefinable. His cataphatic theology becomes apophatic theology, as of course it is in many mystics: it is easier to explain what God is not than to explain what he is or why he acts. Yet despite our intellectual limitations, explicitly recognized by St Thomas, ‘our natural craving for knowledge

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cannot be satisfied until we know the first cause, and that not in any fashion, but in its very essence’ (Aquinas 2012: 110–11). Hence we persevere in our quest for knowledge, which can only cease ‘when at last it [the intellect] comes to the first cause, in which all truth can be known’ (Aquinas 2012: 111). Faith is what drove Aquinas in his incessant drive for truth, and in this sense his idea of faith as a wanting to know is not so very different from St Augustine’s, for as the latter said, ‘that which we believe, we desire also to know and understand’ (‘sed nos id quod credimus, nosse et intelligere cupimos.’ De libero arbitrio, Book 2, § 2.5). If there is one clear thing in common between these two religious thinkers, it is that reason and faith, while different, do not obstruct each other. In City of God, Augustine, writing at a time of severe backpedalling by Roman citizens who observed their empire in decline after their gods had been replaced by the Christian God, had argued that to live righteously one needed the true faith: ‘It is not in our power to live rightly unless while we believe and pray we receive help from him who has given us the faith to believe that we must be helped by him’ (Augustine 2003: 852 [City of God, Book 19, chapter 4]). Luther took up the idea of subordinating good works to faith, went much further than Augustine and Aquinas, and made faith the be-all and end-all of Christianity and salvation. He saw faith as the supreme divine grace conceded to mankind. It governs our actions and makes us what we are. It is not a matter of human choice but of human recognition of the gift, of confidence in God. Reason is simply irrelevant to faith because faith is necessarily an unquestioning trust in God, an awareness of God working in us. ‘Be on guard against your own false ideas’, he warns in his Preface to the Letter of St Paul to the Romans; ‘everything which takes place outside faith or in unbelief is lies, hypocrisy and sin’ (Luther 1983). To attempt to reconcile faith and reason is tantamount to denying faith, to imposing conditions on God. Our good actions stem from our God-given faith, not the other way round; hence justification as genuine Christians is based on faith, not on good works, which are but a reflection of faith: ‘faith alone makes someone righteous’, and ‘good works proceed from faith itself ’ (Luther 1983). Lutheran faith is thus presented as a complete way of life rather than being a way of compensating for our rational limitations or satisfying our hunger for transcendence. Faith does not call for debate but for

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unquestioning acceptance. It amounts to a radical rejection of any rational theology or even of any attempt to use our rational judgement to assess our faith. Given the aspiration of existentialist thought to amplify the rational framework, the Lutheran view of faith might have been thought to offer a grab handle to Christian existentialists, and may perhaps have done so, though problematically, in the cases of Bultmann, Barth, and Tillich, but not, as we shall see, in our three thinkers, for whom faith is a matter of creative freedom rather than of unquestioning acceptance.

5.1 Unamuno: Faith as Projection There is a handwritten letter preserved in the Casa-Museo Unamuno in Salamanca, ‘Carta a Juan Solís’, which Unamuno wrote in his mid-­ twenties while still in Bilbao before his appointment to the Chair of Greek at Salamanca, and in which he first raised the issue of what genuine faith might be. That it could emerge from any kind of rationalist theology he completely rejects, having first emphasized the inadequacy of the arguments for the existence of God. On the contrary, ‘faith is a fact that emanates from our sentiment in order to fill the void left by reason’ [‘La fe es un hecho que arranca del sentimiento para llenar el vacío de la razón’ (‘Carta a Juan Solís’, 6a)]. At this stage (c. 1890) Unamuno was still imbued with positivism, and he justified his appeal to the sentiments on the grounds that ‘our sentiment is as positive as our reason, desire as positive as fact’ [‘el sentimiento es tan positivo como la razón, el deseo tan positivo como el hecho’, (‘Carta a Juan Solís’, 7a)]. His central point is that faith based on theological authority is not faith at all: ‘Theology kills faith’ [‘La teología mata la fe’ (‘Carta a Juan Solís’, 6a)]. Not only is Unamuno’s view of positivism somewhat idiosyncratic, since it appears to include highly subjective inclinations, but he insists that ‘there is nothing more positive than that which appears least so’ [‘nada hay más positivo que lo que menos lo parece’ (‘Carta a Juan Solís’, 7a)]. Unamuno ends his letter by claiming that he has found a solution to the longstanding problem of faith versus reason: ‘This solution I am giving to faith and reason is the embrace of Don Quixote and Sancho, always together and always

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quarelling’ [‘Esta solución que le doy a la fe y la razón es el abrazo de D. Quijote y Sancho, siempre juntos y regañando siempre’ (‘Carta a Juan Solís’, 7a)]. This so-called solution turned out to be something of a cul-­ de-­sac, in trying to extricate himself from which Unamuno was subsequently to expend a great deal of time and effort. If our rational capacity has no role in our beliefs, and if our beliefs in no way affect our rational capacity, we are condemned from the start to be split personalities. That Unamuno turned to Protestant thinkers in search of arguments that would bolster his Christian faith in place of the Catholic theology that he found so unconvincing shows well enough that his reason was getting in the way, that it demanded a role: to go beyond is not to go against. Unamuno lost his faith as a young man and simply blamed an inadequate theology allegedly based on reason, but that proved to be a false start. The problem lay elsewhere: in the kind of faith that his constitutional or psychological make-up demanded. But he was not to find it in the Protestant thinkers either. For Unamuno the crisis of faith was to worsen, exacerbated by the suffering (and eventual death from meningococcal hydrocephaly) of his son Raimundo. His self-questioning prompted him to keep a diary from 1897 to 1902 in which he raises issues about faith in a predominantly aphoristic way which reveal his inability to find a satisfactory solution, whether philosophically or psychologically.1 He gives definitions of faith which are of some interest, but inconclusive: ‘Faith is the proof of the truth of what is believed’ [‘La fe es la prueba de la verdad de lo creído’ (DIN: VII, 285)]. This suggests that we choose what to believe first and then ascribe our choice to faith as justification. This later becomes ‘Faith is a fact for those who possess it’ ‘[‘La fe es un hecho en los que la poseen’ (DIN: VII, 344)]. Those who do not possess it are not qualified to discuss  Marcel too kept a diary from 1914 to 1923 (the Metaphysical Journal), but whereas the latter is unsystematic yet reasonably coherent because of the recurrence of a small number of key themes, Unamuno’s diary is not just unsystematic but personal to the point of self-indulgence and disjointed in its thematic diversity. Some critics have made a meal of it and read both faith and the absence of faith in what is neither a philosophical nor a religious statement, nor even a confessional self-assessment, but merely an attempt to grasp moods and feelings which vary from day to day. Unamuno never published it, and its publication in 1966, like that of his youthful, unfinished and quasi-philosophical novel Nuevo Mundo (1994) and his even more youthful and also unfinished Filosofía lógica (2016), can do his reputation as a thinker no good. 1

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it, he adds; though why those who do possess it might want to do just that he does not say. After all, a fact is a fact and scarcely admits of discussion. More interesting is the comparison of faith with sense impressions: ‘What realities correspond to those principles in which we believe as a matter of faith?’ [‘¿Qué realidades corresponden a los principios en que por fe creemos?’ (DIN: VII, 344)]. Unamuno replies to his question by establishing an analogy between, on the one hand, the correspondence of our sensible intuition of objects to the objects themselves (a Kantian perspective), and, on the other, the correspondence between the intuition of faith and the life of the soul. In other words, just as our senses give us the objects of our material world, our faith gives us the objects of our spiritual world. How good is this analogy? Our senses tell us that objects are real, but is faith as reliable a quality of our constitution as are our senses? In the ordinary course of events we have a pretty unshakeable faith in our senses, and only occasionally do they betray us; but do we have that same faith in faith itself? It would not appear that we are born with that same degree of certainty. Although the topic of belief is ubiquitous in Unamuno, two essays in particular stand out as a worthwhile exploration of the subject, ‘La fe’ (1900) and ‘Fe, esperanza y caridad’, Chapter 9 of The Tragic Sense of Life. In ‘La fe’ he rejects the traditional Pauline definition of ‘to believe what we did not see’ (which he fails to point out refers to Jesus Christ’s resurrection) in favour of his own definition: ‘No, not to believe what we did not see!, but to create what we do not see’ [‘¡Creer lo que no vimos, no!, sino crear lo que no vemos’ (LFE: VIII, 335)]. Faith thus needs a creative and re-creative element if it is to be a living faith. He denies that faith has anything to do with intellectual systems or explanations and prefers hazy quasi-pantheistic definitions: ‘Faith means to establish a communion with the entire universe’ [‘Fe es comulgar con el universo todo’ (LFE: VIII, 336)]. It is—and here Unamuno’s philological proclivities take over, as is often the case—a form of fidelity, a trust in someone or something, wholly independent of dogmas, as was the faith of the earliest disciples of Jesus. Unamuno insists that faith and knowledge are two separate things and that the former is in no way derived from the latter. Since what we can share is knowledge, this means that in practice each person will have his or her own way of believing and thereby of hoping

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with more or less confidence. In the early days of Christianity ‘each one gave to his hope the imaginative or intellective shape that best suited him, although within the common tenor of their shared hopes—tenor, not doctrines—thereby varying the ideas that could be formed of Jesus and his works’ [‘Daba cada cual a su esperanza la forma imaginativa o intelectiva que mejor le cuadrara, si bien dentro todos del tono común—tono y no doctrina—, variando así los conceptos que de Jesús y de su obra se formaran’ (LFE: VIII, 337)]. What believers have in common, then, is certainly not what they believe, but only the aim of their beliefs. Faith, for the Christian at any rate, should thus be a personal conviction of the divinity of Jesus and a trust in him. What all this leads up to is the denunciation of the Catholic Church’s exigencies in matters of faith. The faith the Church demands ‘is but an act of submission to an earthly power’ [‘no es más que un acto de sumisión a una potencia terrena’ (LFE: VIII, 340)]. Unamuno is not prepared to take the clerical attacks on him and other intellectuals lying down, and the remainder of the essay is a defence of his position in the face of the ‘decadent theology’ [‘decadente teología’ (LFE: VIII, 340)] of the Catholic Church. ‘Faith is above all sincerity, tolerance, mercifulness’ [‘La fe es, ante todo, sinceridad, tolerancia y misericordia’ (LFE: VIII, 345)], he declares, implying that the Catholic Church, or at any rate its Spanish branch, is short of each. And he concludes by appealing to fellow Spaniards to look for a harmonious co-­ existence not in rigid dogmas but in ‘a unity of faith rich in the variety of beliefs’ [‘armonizarnos bajo unidad de fe en rica variedad de creencias’ (LFE: VIII, 345)]. It is clear that for Unamuno faith is rather less what one believes and rather more a disposition towards belief, in effect a free, creative act whose practical manifestation is concern for others. Exactly halfway between the two essays on faith Unamuno published another essay, ‘¿Qué es verdad?’ (1906), which though not explicitly on faith has a highly relevant paragraph on the subject: To believe in God is to want God to exist, to long for it with all one’s soul. The person who, unable to conceive God’s essence with the intellect, considers the idea of God a hypothesis that explains nothing and pure sophistry the so-called proofs of his existence, but who nevertheless desires in his heart that God exist and adjusts his attitude towards him accordingly,

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conferring personality on the Supreme Ideal, that person has a much greater belief in God than the person who is convinced by logic that God exists, but does not take this into account in any way. [Creer en Dios es querer que Dios exista, anhelarlo con toda el alma. El que no pudiendo concebir con la inteligencia la esencia de Dios, considerando su idea una hipótesis que nada explica, y puros sofismas las que llaman pruebas de su existencia, desea, sin embargo, en su corazón que Dios exista y se acomoda a una conducta para con Él, dando personalidad al Ideal Supremo, cree en Dios mucho más que aquel otro que está convencido lógicamente de que existe un Dios, pero para nada lo tiene en cuenta. (LFE: VIII, 891)]

There is nothing very exceptional or objectionable in this view of faith in God, Augustinian in origin,2 faith by yearning rather than logical proof, but what we notice is that Unamuno not only contrasts willing belief with logical belief, but qualifies the latter with a negative condition which deprives the belief of any relevance or impact. In effect the distinction becomes one not so much of faith but of consequence: whether or not one’s belief has any impact on one’s life. Let us suppose that the person who has a ‘logical’ or intellectual faith also takes God into account at all times. What then becomes of the difference between the two types of faith that Unamuno pits against each other? Presumably if X believes with his heart and Y believes with his head they both share a belief in God and for them the belief is equally valid. But Unamuno is reluctant to concede any validity to the God of the rational mind; his God is a God of the emotions. Twelve years after ‘La fe’ Unamuno returns to the subject in ‘Faith, Hope, and Charity’ [‘Fe, esperanza y caridad’ (DST: X, 423)], one of a series of essays that appeared in 1912 and which became chapter 9 of The Tragic Sense of Life (1913). Unamuno repeats his earlier view of faith as another form of hope: it is because we hope to live on and rejoin our loved ones that we create our faith. But on another front he backpedals, and now admits the relevance of knowledge or of some form of reasoning in constructing or defining faith. Pure faith free of all dogma is a chimera, he admits, acknowledging his earlier error: ‘Faith needs matter upon  For the presence of Augustine in Unamuno see Thomas Franz (2020: 53–79).

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which to exert its influence’ [‘La fe necesita una materia en que ejercerse’ (DST: X, 424)], and therefore the earlier ‘variety of beliefs’ needs to be circumscribed. Granted this new and essential premise, that belief is belief in something that needs to be specified, Unamuno sees faith as a projection into the future. The person who believes in X is anticipating X. To believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ is to foreglimpse another resurrection, one’s own. Even science is based on the belief that scientific laws observed in the past will apply in the future. The distinction between the two forms of belief is that scientific expectation is based on rational extrapolation, whereas religious or transcendent belief has its origin in some life-giving force which lies outside the purely rational and which impels us to visualize a future outcome. To realize its potential, faith needs hope, not simply to ‘believe what we did not see’ but ‘to believe what we shall see’ [‘Creer lo que no vimos es creer lo que veremos’ (DST: X, 434)]. For this, what we need is not acceptance of a theory in which our will to believe steers our intellect towards understanding, but rather a creative imagination which in some way objectifies our longing for transcendence. Science tries to grasp what is there; faith tries to grasp what is missing, our ultimate destiny. ‘Faith is man’s creative power’ [‘La fe es el poder creador del hombre’ (DST: X, 428)], says Unamuno, equating wanting to believe with wanting to create; ‘Faith creates, in a way, its own objective’ [‘La fe crea, en cierto modo, su objeto’ (DST: X, 428)]. But if faith creates its own object of belief, one might ask, does that object have any reality outside the personal realm of faith? In search of an acceptable answer, Unamuno is here forced to work back from effects, that is, from observation, not from some kind of purely subjective intuition. The object of belief acquires its reality, he argues, if it is sought lovingly, because there is no doubting the real effect of love. When we love another we have faith in that other, and God is above all a loving relationship. Unamuno, then, appears ultimately, if reluctantly, to accept the role of our intellect in defining our beliefs, but he specifically denies that faith can be derived either from intellectual arguments, or from an ethical code, or from a judgement of decorum. This is because faith is neither logic (which admits of error), nor morality (which admits of falsification), nor aesthetic judgement (which admits of folly). In this, of course, although he does not say so, Unamuno is invoking Kant’s three Critiques.

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What he is left with is his own longing for transcendence, a longing seething with uncertainty, but one that cannot be evaded. ‘The person who affirms his faith through uncertainty does not lie and cannot lie’ [‘El que afirma su fe a base de incertidumbre no miente ni puede mentir’ (DST: X, 432)]. In Unamuno’s view, when we achieve a life of faith the material world comes to be seen as sustaining another world beyond the physical, the spiritual world of our imagination, which offers neither certainty nor falsehood. Interestingly it was his philological training and unusual linguistic sensitivity that persuaded Unamuno of the equal importance of reason and faith. As Allen Lacy showed in an early but key study of Unamunian philosophy, Unamuno discovered that the language of reason and the language of faith are two different languages. ‘Unamuno found the differences in the two languages to be much more radical than had been assumed by his countrymen’ (Lacy 1967: 219). The latter saw them as mere factional rhetoric, in accordance with the political (and even military) confrontation between liberals and conservatives that ravaged nineteenth-­century Spain. But Unamuno saw the rhetoric of reason and the rhetoric of belief as denoting something much deeper. The notions of God and the immortality of the soul are alien to reason: they do not contribute to a better understanding of the existence, the essence, or the purpose of the universe and our role in it. Rationally we should all be agnostics. But we are not moved by reason alone. The very fact that there is a language for the non-rational aspects of the human mind suggests that these aspects are relevant to and important for the human being. If we ignore them we ignore an essential part of ourselves, given the dominant role that language plays in human existence and in shaping our explanations and beliefs. So much so indeed that Lacy can conclude that The Tragic Sense of Life is not about the faith-versus-reason dilemma but about religious language: ‘We have here not primarily talk about God, soul, immortality, faith, reason, causality and the like, but the attempt to talk about the different languages in which such concepts as “God”,

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“soul”, “immortality”, “faith”, “reason”, and “causality” are thought to have logical propriety’ (Lacy 1967: 170).3 Unamuno’s point is basically that language has the potential to give us signification or validity in different cognitive spheres. It gives us logical discourse and it gives us spiritual discourse. Linguistically they are equally valid and relevant. It is worth comparing this standpoint with what Heidegger wrote fifteen years later in Being and Time. Because the Greeks associated logos with the linguistic form of assertions, the basic stock of ‘categories of significations’, which passed over into the subsequent science of language, and which in principle is still accepted as the standard today, is oriented towards discourse as assertion. But if on the contrary we take this phenomenon to have in principle the primordiality and breadth of an existentiale, then there emerges the necessity of re-­ establishing the science of language on foundations which are ontologically more primordial. The task of liberating grammar from logic requires beforehand a positive understanding of the basic a priori structure of discourse in general as an existentiale. (Heidegger 1962: 209)

The similarity between the two positions should be plain. Language has ‘categories of signification’. It is not simply a tool of logical discourse. It is an ontological phenomenon; it has what Heidegger goes on to call an ‘ontological locus’ (Heidegger 1962: 210), that is to say, it forms an essential part of our being and it creates signification. The agnostic Heidegger therefore vindicates Unamuno’s view that language gives us the reality of spiritual discourse as much as the reality of logical discourse. After The Tragic Sense of Life the question of faith appears indirectly or in passing in various works, including the novels Abel Sánchez and La tía Tula, but is again discussed directly in La agonía del cristianismo, completed in Paris at the end of 1924 (French version 1925, Spanish version 1931). Here Unamuno recycles the article he had written the previous  What Lacy does not say is that Unamuno derived his ideas on the importance of religious language from the work of the nineteenth-century Oxford scholar Max Müller, whose researches into the origins of myths and religions drew attention to the crucial role played by language in fashioning religious belief. Religion is every bit as much a linguistic phenomenon as an expression of a spiritual world. It is inconceivable without language. As the word implies, religion came to be a binding agent, as of course is language. 3

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year on Blaise Pascal. He argues that Pascal did not believe with his head but with his heart. In a man with the intelligence of a Pascal belief can only be a will to believe, says Unamuno, borrowing William James’ phrase. Unamuno is adamant that Pascal ‘did not believe with his rational mind, could never have done so even if he had wanted to, was never convinced by that of which he was persuaded’ [‘no ha creído con la razón, no pudo jamás, aun queriéndolo, llegar a creer con la razón, no se hubo jamás convencido de aquello de que estaba persuadido’ (ADC: X, 597)]. In accordance with the central thesis of The Tragic Sense of Life, Unamuno sees Pascal’s inner life as tragic: though he could not believe with his reason, Pascal wanted nevertheless to believe to counter the emptiness of a purposeless existence. This produces what Unamuno calls the agonía or life-struggle, which he detects in Pascal’s Pensées. Needless to say Unamuno sees Pascal through his own lenses. ‘Pascal was an apostate to reason’ [‘Pascal fue un apóstata de la razón’ (ADC: X, 599)], he writes with apparent relish. The whole thrust of Unamuno is to demonstrate Pascal’s outright denial of the role of reason in establishing one’s inclination towards spiritual truths. While it would be true to say that Pascal’s religious belief is marked by uncertainty, the alleged anti-rational bias is an exaggeration applied to a scientist and mathematician. It might be nearer the mark to say that Pascal appreciated the dividing line between the natural world and the spiritual world (as indeed did his compatriot Descartes, pace Unamuno’s attempt to place them in outright opposition to each other), and that he realized that reason did not help in establishing the truth of the latter in the way that it helped in establishing the truth of the former. Unamuno is not wrong about Pascal; but he exaggerates and in so doing oversimplifies Pascal’s more complex position vis-a-­ vis faith and reason. God is certainly revealed by faith and not by reason; but reason does not act against faith, as Unamuno insists. ‘Submission and use of reason; that is what makes true Christianity’, writes Pascal in his Pensées (‘Submission and Use of Reason’, fragment 167 of the first copy, 269 of the second copy); and again: ‘If we submit everything to reason our religion will be left with nothing mysterious or supernatural. If we offend the principles of reason our religion will be absurd and ridiculous’ (fragment 173/273, in Pascal 1995: 53–54). There is therefore a balance to be struck, a judgement to be made, as Pascal also explains. But

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Unamuno insists on seeing faith and reason as antagonists and himself and other would-be-believers as embattled soldiers struggling hopelessly to defend the vulnerable fortress of faith from the onslaught of a well-­ equipped army of rationalists. There are, then, for Unamuno no rational grounds for faith. Faith, to be genuine, must be mired in doubt and no kind of ulterior rationalization can extricate it from its compromised position. But this, paradoxically, is the very source of its strength. For it means that genuine faith cannot be imposed from outside, whether as a set of respectable moral principles, or as a body of dogma concocted by an authority basing itself on textual exegesis and alleged revelation. Genuine faith is an inner drive, not so much a conviction as an aspiration, a creation, not a reproduction. Where does this inner drive come from? It comes essentially from what is common to many existentialists: our sense, or fear, of nothingness. For the existentialist, being precedes everything, it is the starting point. Everything stems from being, and this applies to reason, to knowledge, and to God. But where does being come from? We cannot find a reason for being, for anything that is not being is nothing. Behind, below, or above anything that has being there is nothingness. Here Unamuno very clearly anticipates both Heidegger and Sartre. To counter our sense of nothingness, he argues in The Tragic Sense of Life, we develop a hunger for being. In an attempt to be-for-oneself (‘serse’) man craves to be everything (‘serlo todo’), which, projected outwards, takes the form of God. ‘The serlo todo for which consciousness hungers is, in the final analysis, God. Consciousness is specifically a hunger for God (apetito de divinidad). Unamuno defines God as a kind of projection of the serse to the infinite. All human action, therefore, can be seen as a project of becoming God’ (Ellis 1988: 36). God is needed by man to fill the void of our nothingness or ‘nonada’. In other words, God becomes an ontological need. Our extreme self-awareness culminates in God. Unamuno frequently insists on faith as a creative endeavour, and it must be creative because God depends on us, because we have to bring him alive, to resurrect him. If man forgets about God, as Nietzsche’s madman said, God will not exist for us, irrespective of whether he exists in himself. Because true faith is necessarily creative, it is surrounded by doubt, that is by uncertainty, in

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the same way that an artist in the midst of creating a work can never be sure of the next step. Nevertheless it is also the case that by the time he writes La agonía del cristianismo in the 1920s Unamuno is wary of defining faith solely as that which we consciously choose to believe, as a matter of volition, and he now admits an alternative form of faith, faith as ‘passive, feminine, the daughter of grace, and not active, masculine, produced by the free will’ [‘pasiva, femenina, hija de la gracia, y no activa, masculina y producida por el libre albedrío’ (ADC: X, 577)]. He is thinking of course of the faith shown by Mary in her acceptance of God’s extraordinary plan as revealed to her by the angel Gabriel, or the faith of Mary Magdalene who did not recognize the risen Jesus visually but nevertheless believed in his material presence when he addressed her. To place ourselves in such a position we need a faith that banishes our natural scepticism, a faith that Unamuno himself appears never to have attained. There is a virile faith, which is the faith of the will, and a feminine faith, which is the faith of acceptance. Interestingly, only a few years after offering this definition, Unamuno was to explore the nature of faith through male and female characters, a brother and sister, in his last major and arguably most intriguing novel. In San Manuel Bueno, mártir, the central character, whose story is being told by Ángela Carballino, is dubbed a saint and a martyr. The label ‘saint’ we can understand since Father Manuel is indeed an admirable figure who dedicates his whole life to others and who, at the time of the account of his life, is undergoing the Catholic Church’s process of beatification. But why ‘martyr’? As a philologist and teacher of Greek Unamuno must have known that martyr comes from a Greek word meaning witness. What, then, is Father Manuel a witness to? Either we have here a monumental irony and a mockery of the Christian concept of martyrdom (a witness unto death) or we must see the label as an invitation to reconsider what martyrdom is. The fact that Ángela, the narrator, uses the term herself to refer to Father Manuel’s extraordinary situation, suggests that the novel is intended, in part at least, as an exploration of the puzzling nature of faith. Ángela Carballino is reluctant to accept that the saintly parish priest of Valverde de Lucerna, who has dominated everyone’s life including her own, is a religious sceptic, for if that is so, his actions in sustaining the

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faith of others is meaningless. Angela’s brother, Lázaro Carballino, who is indeed a religious sceptic but chooses to play along with the priest in public and act out the role of disciple, tries to persuade his sister, who is bedazzled by the charismatic priest, that Father Manuel Bueno is not a believer but acts as he does out of solidarity with his parishioners, who have the simple faith of unsophisticated rural labourers that Unamuno himself respected but could not share. In other words Father Manuel harbours not faith but a social conscience, just as Lázaro himself does, the priest because he identifies with the community from which he himself sprang, and his unlikely disciple because he has progressive social ideas. These are the three main characters around whom the story revolves and who are responsible for its production and transmission, but as it happens they are far from transparent as far as their private beliefs are concerned. Father Manuel’s actions in the village and his devotion to his humble parishioners are not only exemplary but Christ-like, as various parallels with Jesus of Nazareth indicate. Yet Lázaro informs his sister that he has discovered that Father Manuel is not what he appears to be. Despite the public appearance to the contrary, his private conversations with the priest have uncovered a very different Father Manuel, one who does not believe what he preaches, especially in so far as the resurrection, whether of Christ or of Christians, is concerned. His role among the people, to promote hope of a reunion, is a sham. What, then, does he really believe in? Lázaro’s own motives are a mystery too, since he is the priest’s right-hand man and in unveiling his ‘secret’ he is admitting his own hypocritical action; but he still perseveres in the priest’s religious mission even after the latter’s death. Ángela had always accepted Father Manuel’s genuineness, but on the basis of what she hears from her brother she readjusts her view of the priest a posteriori and re-interprets certain words and hesitations on his part as indicative of his lack of faith. Although, unlike her brother, Ángela had always accepted her own faith, inculcated in her by the nuns at the boarding school she attended, she subsequently turns out to be not quite an orthodox believer who follows official doctrine unquestioningly. She is not a country woman but the daughter of an outsider who had brought his own private library when he settled in the village, books which his daughter absorbed as a teenager. She manifests a romantic and dreamy disposition quite unlike the

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hard-pressed country folk who have neither the time nor the inclination to engage in religious debate. She has doubts about some of the religious doctrines which she has been taught (e.g. hell), doubts which she brings to Father Manuel in search of reassurance. The priest does indeed reassure her, but her own uncertainties seem to be projected onto Lázaro’s account of Father Manuel’s apparent contradiction. These uncertainties come through in the way she tells her story, poetically, speculatively, so much so that at the conclusion of her account of the saintly yet sceptical priest she cannot help asking whether she herself believes: ‘And I, do I believe?’ [‘Y yo, creo?’ (SMB: II, 344)]. It becomes obvious at the end of her account of Father Manuel’s apparent unbelief that Ángela cannot even tell whether she herself believes, let alone what belief is: Do I know anything?, do I believe anything? Did what I am telling here really occur, and occur the way I have told it? ¿Can such things truly occur? Is all this but a mere dream within a dream? Or am I, Ángela Carballino, now in my fifties, the only person in this village to be assailed by these thoughts which are so alien to everyone else? And these others, those who are all around me, do they believe? What does it mean to believe? [¿Es que sé algo?, ¿es que creo algo? ¿Es que esto que estoy aquí contando ha pasado y ha pasado tal y como lo cuento? ¿Es que pueden pasar estas cosas? ¿Es que todo esto es más que un sueño soñado dentro de otro sueño? ¿Seré yo, Ángela Carballino, hoy cincuentona, la única persona que en esta aldea se ve acometida de estos pensamientos extraños para los demás? Y estos, los otros que me rodean, creen? ¿Qué es eso de creer? (SMB: II, 344–45)]

Ángela is right about her last speculation at any rate: neither the villagers, nor the Bishop, nor Father Manuel’s successor as parish priest could possibly imagine that the priest whose devotion to his people is legendary was, religiously, a fraud. But Ángela is curiously passive, an example of what Unamuno had called ‘feminine faith’, the faith of acceptance. In the face of Father Manuel’s reassurances her doubts are assuaged, but later, in the face of her brother’s account of the priest’s unbelief, she accepts his version of Father Manuel, even reinforcing it with her own observations. Yet something is not quite right, for she sees the enormous contradiction

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inherent in this position. Why encourage religious belief in others and devote one’s entire life to sustaining it if there is to be no joyful reunion with one’s loved ones in the next life, if it is all a gigantic deception? Lázaro’s explanation, that it is a consolation for an empty existence, that it is a matter of a social conscience, an alternative to the socialist solidarity that attracted him, does not satisfy Ángela: she knows that religious trappings are not necessary to help one’s community. While Lázaro, the religious sceptic, sees Don Manuel as another sceptic, Ángela sees him as closer to her own position: a believer malgré lui, a struggling believer. Her only explanation to the puzzle of the sceptical priest unveiled by her brother is that Father Manuel did believe, but unconsciously; in other words, he did not believe in dogma but in the eternal value of human life. It is this intimate conviction that drives Father Manuel and, to a lesser extent Lázaro, who becomes his disciple: an overriding conviction of their role in serving the community. If the villagers have an unquestioning faith, Ángela a passive faith which she must struggle to keep alive, and Lázaro a faith in the efficacy of action, Father Manuel, as revealed to us by brother and sister, appears to take the view that what truly counts is faith in the eternal value of others, not faith in one’s own survival after death, which is merely ego-centric. This is where faith is transformed into fidelity, as we shall observe more clearly in the case of Marcel. Far from being a testament to atheism, as some have wanted, this late work of Unamuno’s is rather a testament to the mystery of faith and conscience.

5.2 Berdyaev: Faith as Self-Revelation Compared to Unamuno, Berdyaev has not much to say on the nature of faith, but a great deal of what he writes on the world of the spirit carries an implicit assumption of underlying faith. Since Berdyaev held to the Pauline distinction between the psyche and the spirit (thereby proposing a tripartite division of the human being into body, mind, and spirit), he spoke of the human spirit as belonging to a different order of reality. Spiritual life is not to be confused with psychological (i.e. mental) life. It can be known only by experiencing it and never by direct description, since it is of a different order from that of the natural world: ‘We must

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discover the reality of the spiritual world for ourselves in our own experience of life, and not merely wait for it to be communicated to us from without’ (FAS: 102). What Berdyaev is saying is that we are born with the capacity to experience the spiritual world just as we have the capacity to experience the empirical or natural world. He speaks of ‘a certain particular orientation of man’s spirit’ which is analogous to the orientation that allows us to grasp the empirical world (FAS: 103). Religious experience, in other words, is as real and as feasible as experience of the world of matter. The difficulty in discovering the experiential quality of the spirit arises because we are so hypnotized by empirical reality that we turn our backs on that other, equally accessible, reality. We lose our sensitivity to the spiritual dimension, as it were. Nevertheless, according to Berdyaev, ‘a change in the structure of our consciousness is possible’ (FAS: 103). This is where faith comes in. Faith is based on redirecting the ‘primitive will’ (i.e. the autonomous capacity for self-direction which is intrinsic to our make-up) towards the realm of spiritual things. This spiritual world is revealed to us through faith: ‘The phenomenon of revelation requires the phenomenon of faith. Revelation is impossible without that fact of spiritual experience which we call faith, just as faith is impossible without that fact of the spiritual world which we call revelation’ (FAS: 103). By revelation Berdyaev does not mean scriptural or miraculous revelation but personal intuition. The spiritual is waiting to be revealed in us, but we need the sensitivity provided by faith to turn that world into an experience. This is not very different from seeing faith as a state of heightened consciousness which gives us greater insight than is ordinarily the case, a view put forward by William James two-and-a-half decades earlier in his The Varieties of Religious Experience of 1902 with more precise terminology. In any case Berdyaev insists that there is a primitive will (we might say elemental or primordial) and a mental or psychological will, and that it is the former on which faith is founded. It is this elemental will that is sensitive to an invisible or latent world, and it is the manifestation of this sensitivity that constitutes faith. But modern man has chosen to live in a world of visible things where faith plays no part. For faith belongs in an ‘intimate world of spirit which is conditioned by freedom and not by necessity’ (FAS: 104). We have, on the contrary, curtailed our own

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freedom and created necessities for ourselves by concentrating our efforts in the material sphere. Berdyaev’s ascetic streak makes itself felt in his insistence that modern man is bedazzled by the visible and fails to sense the reality of the non-visible spiritual world; because the latter does not compel, we fail to respond. In this respect Berdyaev’s view of faith is thoroughly Pauline. There is, however, a little more to say about Berdyaev’s view of the role of faith in our lives. The first point emerges from the foregoing considerations: Faith is ‘a voluntary redirection of our power of choice’ (FAS: 107). If we attain knowledge of the natural world it is because we first chose to believe in its reality. Similarly if we open ourselves up to the spiritual world it is because we first choose to believe in it. In other words faith is our prerogative. It is not a situation in which the subject is passive and God does the work, which, Berdyaev concedes, is a notion of faith often found in Protestantism and Quietist mysticism. This seems to approximate to Unamuno’s notion of feminine faith, faith based on acceptance rather than initiative. For Berdyaev, faith is a much more proactive stance or endeavour, or as he likes to say, creative: ‘In the basic and original life of the spirit faith presupposes tremendous action, and an intense and infinite creativity’ (FAS: 106). This kind of faith is the hallmark of our freedom. It is in fact the ‘natural’ man, not the spiritual man, who gives up his freedom. The second point concerns the purpose of this creative faith. Why should we redirect our consciousness towards things spiritual? Why should we foster this elemental or primordial intuition of a spiritual world? Because if we do not, argues Berdyaev, we fail to fulfil our potential as human beings. This creative faith is a capacity or talent given to us that we may realize it. Just as we use our own intellect to push outwards the boundaries of our knowledge of the natural world, so we should use our innate capacity for sensing the existence of the spiritual world in order to achieve an understanding of it. To refuse to do so is to shut the door on the possibility of gnosis, by which Berdyaev understands ‘spiritual knowledge based upon a living contemplation of the spiritual world which is totally different from the world of nature’ (FAS: 108). Were we universally to achieve such knowledge, we would not need to argue for a particular moral order or impose juridical standards by decree: ‘there

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would be no need of proving anything to anybody, nor yet of putting compulsion on anybody, for each person would be in contact only with beings spiritually akin to himself instead of with distant strangers’ (FAS: 109). In other words, through a universal participation in the world of spirit we would recognize the truth of the moral order rather than accepting its necessity for purely utilitarian reasons. In this respect Christianity too, and not just secular systems, needs to be rescued, for it has come to be dominated by dogmas, canons, organizations, directives, and legalistic minds. Real faith needs to be freed from these encumbrances, needs to create its own space in order to achieve the insight for which it was destined. Thirdly, we note that faith appears to go hand in hand with revelation. But Berdyaev does not restrict revelation to what the divinity chooses to reveal about itself via sacred texts, prophets, and miracles. ‘Revelation is not something that drops into man’s lap from outside and in which he has nothing but an entirely passive part to play’ (TAR: 46). Revelation is seen as conjointly the work of God and man: ‘it is divine-human by nature’ (FAS: 114). Berdyaev is of course thinking of Jesus Christ as encompassing the two natures simultaneously. God is like us, that is, he shares our humanity; and we are, to an extent, like him. Faith demands what Berdyaev refers to as ‘an eternally dynamic state of consciousnes and an eternal creative tension of spirit’ (FAS: 113). What this appears to mean is that we have to be alert and responsive in order to play our part in grasping the fundamental truth of Christianity. It is man who is in the driving seat after all. If we take a historical view, then ‘the various stages and periods of revelation are not only a manifestation of changes in consciousness and its receptive capacity, but they also reflect a theogonic process’ (FAS: 114). This is a radical statement, for what it is saying is that God is subject to our own outlook and to cultural processes that occur in time. If creativeness is ‘a growth, an addition, the making of something new that had not existed in the world before’ (DOM: 126), to be creative in faith is constantly to discover new aspects of our beliefs. We have become divine genealogists. This is perhaps a new way of regarding faith, but certainly a demanding one in the sense that it requires an ongoing creative response, a constant re-invention of our beliefs.

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Yet for Berdyaev faith seems less of a problem than it is for Unamuno, although they would both seem to agree that it is a quality that has to be cultivated rather than accepted. In the case of Unamuno, the antagonist of faith, reason, is a more powerful adversary than it appears to be in Berdyaev. Berdyaev does separate the two, but because they are seen to exist in different dimensions they do not cause irresolvable conflict as they do in Unamuno. For Berdyaev the real danger is not reason itself but abstraction, which is not an experiential quality but a distorting mechanism which can interfere with our perception of a felt truth: [T]here is in him [man] a spiritual principle, a capacity which is not determined from without. But so complex is human nature and so entangled man’s existence that he may fall out of one form of slavery into another, he may fall into abstract spirituality, into the determining power of a common idea. (SAF: 248)

What Berdyaev is saying is that we can easily slip from generalized and abstract thinking (the method of traditional philosophy and cognate disciplines) to a theological way of thinking that is equally abstract, that is, based on handed-down doctrines that stifle our spiritual resourcefulness. Spirituality does not lie in that direction, nor in the direction of a mental phenomenon as a by-product of the physical nature of man. The spiritual inclination of man may indeed be treated nowadays by philosophers and psychologists as an epiphenomenon, yet no adequate explanation is forthcoming. The problem of explaining spirituality stems from our inadequate grasp of being. Mental processes influence our conception of being, and we do not know ‘the extent to which the agency of the subject helps to elaborate a conception of so-called “primal” being’ (SAR: 8). Abstract thought tends to hypostatize concepts and then to treat those concepts as the real thing. Instead of discovering objective being, ontology discovers an objectified concept; in other words, what it takes to be being is only the artificial product of its own conceptualizations. On the other hand, to replace this abstract view of spirituality with a view based on allegiance to or compliance with elaborated dogma is equally misconceived. We need to leave behind ‘the stifling rationalization of Christian truths and sacraments’ (FMW: 124). In Berdyaev’s view, our

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predisposition towards the spiritual is an existential fact which needs to be recognized and experienced. Faith is the catalyst that makes that experience possible. It facilitates ‘the creative transfiguration of a world which is exposed to the malady of objectivization’ (SAF: 254).

5.3 Marcel: Faith as Fidelity Unamuno’s phrase in Angela Carballino’s account, ‘What does it mean to believe?’, also appears in one of Gabriel Marcel’s texts (CRF: 169). Furthermore Marcel writes that ‘we shall understand nothing of the relation between the believer and the non-believer […] if we fail to perceive something else which is even more mysterious, namely the symbiosis of belief and disbelief in the same soul’ (CRF: 121). This thought sums up Unamuno’s position perfectly, and may even have been inspired by a reading of The Tragic Sense of Life. Exploring the nature of faith, of the human tendency to search for transcendence, was one of Marcel’s primary philosophical endeavours, indeed it is the most persistent preoccupation in his work and therefore a subject that merits an entire book by itself. Only the basics of Marcel’s contribution can be covered here. Since, unlike Unamuno, Marcel had not had a religious upbringing, his dissatisfaction with the materialistic explanation of man cannot be ascribed to the childhood inculcation of religious beliefs. Starting from the incontestable fact of embodiment—and in this he is like Unamuno and all existentialists—he asked why we tend to think of ourselves, both consciously and unconsciously, as more than our bodies, and he came to the conclusion that there is more to human nature than its physical presence. This is the central theme of his earlier work, from which he proceeded, during the rest of his life, to explore the nature of this transphysical dimension, as well as the consequences for individual man and society of denying the reality of this aspect of human experience. Philosophically speaking it would be fair to say that there is more to Marcel than to Unamuno or Berdyaev—he has a greater affinity to Western philosophical thought in general—but in terms of the philosophy of religion he follows in the steps of the other two thinkers. There are in the work of Marcel surprisingly few references to Unamuno and Berdyaev, especially

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as both the Russian and the Spaniard were internationally known figures, one settled in Paris and the other in exile in Paris and Hendaye for five and a half years. It is inconceivable that Marcel did not at some stage come across The Tragic Sense of Life (translated into French in 1917) or Spirit and Reality (written and published in Paris and the author of which was personally known to Marcel). The scant references make one suspect that the approach to spiritual issues of Unamuno and Berdyaev (combative and prone to overstatement in the case of the former and somewhat mystifying or under-explained in the case of the latter) carried little appeal to the measured, cautious, even punctilious Frenchman. Be that as it may, the fact remains that Marcel moves in the same area as the Spaniard and the Russian, that is to say in the philosophico-religious area broadly considered, though never in the theological domain. The comment by Sonia Kruks that ‘the theological framework within which Marcel thinks must to some extent limit the significance of his work’ (Kruks 1990: 23) entails a misconception about theological thinking. One can entertain a philosophical approach to religion that has little to do with theology. There is scarcely any theology in Marcel and certainly no ‘theological framework’ because he is not concerned with the nature of God but with the nature of man. What Kruks really means is that, as the political scientist that she is, she is not interested in an anthropology of belief, which is much closer to what Marcel inquires into. Marcel deplores ‘mechanized’ anonymous man, whereas political scientists and sociologists thrive on group psychology. It must be clearly understood that, like Unamuno and Berdyaev, indeed even more so, Marcel in his writings is concerned with man, not God. Once again we find that faith is seen as a personal response to an inner state. There can be no universal criterion of validity in matters of faith. Faith in general would be as purposeless as poetry in general or music in general, says Marcel; the poetry and the music that we have is the work of real poets and composers. Similarly for faith: ‘The I believe is the act of a person considered in his concrete unity’ (MOB: II, 200). Marcel’s notion of faith is existential through and through, that is to say it is based on concrete experience, not on speculative abstractions. What is most mysterious about our existence is our desire to discover, to go beyond empirical knowledge, to venture beyond our immediate circumstances.

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We are not satisfied with the naturalistic affirmations ‘I am my body’ and ‘I am my life’. I can perceive (and be dissatisfied with) my body as an object, and I can hold up my life to judgement, so my perception is not my body and my judgement is not my life. There seems to be a gap between my being and my life. It is faith of some kind that Marcel sees as coming to fill this gap. Given his early agnosticism (he became a Catholic in mid-life), Marcel always showed respect and sensitivity to unbelievers, and would not have shared Unamuno’s stricture that ‘the reasoning of atheists strikes me as even more superficial and futile than that of their opponents’ [‘los razonamientos de los ateos me parecen de una superficilidad y futileza mayores aún que los de sus contradictores’, (MIR: IX, 53)], which thereby tars all atheists with the same brush. Marcel repeatedly refers to the arguments of atheists based on the existence of evil and suffering and does not belittle their position. He singles out Camus’ position (that he could not accept the existence of a God who allowed the suffering of children) as deserving of respect.4 Significantly, the one criticism Marcel does make of atheistic philosophers is that of arrogance for pretending to account for others’ experience as illusory. Marcel refers to the atheist’s statement I know there is nothing there as a ‘monstrosity’ which ‘is offered, or at least should normally be offered, as the conclusion of infinite research. In fact such research is impossible. Our position in the universe does not allow us even to begin it’ (BAH: 204). In conversation with Paul Ricoeur he referred to himself as ‘a philosopher of the threshold, a philosopher who kept himself in rather uncomfortable fashion on a line midway between believers and non-believers’ (TWB: 240). For Marcel, it would appear, as for Robert Browning’s Bishop Blougram (cited approvingly by Unamuno), there is no sharp demarcation line between belief and unbelief. Like Unamuno, Marcel began by establishing a radical distinction between faith and knowledge, but by 1929, the year of his conversion to Catholicism, he had shifted his position somewhat and accepted that  In fact Unamuno might well have been sympathetic to Camus’ argument. In one of several poems dedicated to his hydrocephalic son who died at the age of seven, he expresses his incomprehension at the purpose behind the child’s suffering. The two final lines of ‘En la muerte de un hijo’ (V, 900–01) read: ‘for I hear in his silence the other silence / with which God responds to our entreaties’ [‘pues oigo en su silencio aquel silencio / con que responde Dios a nuestra encuesta’]. 4

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religious experience, though not knowledge, was as analysable, as real, as any form of knowledge: ‘Far from rejecting reflection, as he would reject temptation, the believer should in some way undertake it’ (MOB: II, 142). What changed his attitude, he tells us in ‘An Essay in Autobiography’, was his experience of the death of loved ones (not least during World War I, when his job was to trace missing soldiers and inform the families of their fate), as well as his experience of music as both listener and composer, experiences that are in some way spiritual and therefore non-­ conceptual, yet real enough. Conceptualization does away with faith as experience, since faith is not a modality of thought in general, but nevertheless any experience of uncharted zones can still be retrospectively treated as material for reflection (POE: 128). This in fact tallies with Unamuno’s contention in The Tragic Sense of Life that he is attempting to ‘give logical form to a system of alogical sentiments’ [‘se trata aquí de dar forma lógica a un sistema de sentimientos alógicos’, DST: X, 440]. Marcel for his part says that his overriding philosophical concern has been with discovering how an individual subject, acting as such, is related to a reality which is not objective but which the subject perceives as real and compelling. This undertaking has to be carried out not from the outside, as an onlooker might regard a picture, but from within experience itself. While no rationalist, Marcel is less ill-disposed towards rationalism than Unamuno. He is not as dismissive of the traditional proofs of rational theology as the latter, who in fact blamed such unsatisfactory theology for the decline of religion. What Marcel says is that if in the past such proofs satisfied believers, it is because they were preceded by a disposition to believe. Belief came first and the proofs followed. Proof thus emanates from a prior conviction of the validity of any system. If, for example, one is not convinced of the truth-value of mathematics one is unlikely to accept its proofs. Proof is a phase of an inner eristic, and is always subordinate to an unvarying condition, or more precisely, to a system of values which cannot be questioned. Hence the less one acknowledges these values, or in other words, the weaker the spiritual tradition embodied in this system becomes, the more difficult it will be to produce a proof, just when the need for it becomes correspondingly pronounced. Thus we confront the paradox that

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generally proof is efficacious only when we can if necessary do without it; while on the other hand, it will always seem circular to the person to whom it is directed and who must be persuaded. It must be repeated that we cannot substitute proof for belief; but, what is more, there is a profound sense in which proof presupposes belief, in which it can only help to evoke an inner reaffirmation in the person who feels within himself a cleavage between his faith and what he takes to be a special requirement of his reason. (CRF: 179)

This in a way is Marcel’s answer to Unamuno’s predicament over faith and reason: he must not expect to satisfy both at the same time. According to Marcel, proof cannot deny faith; it can either presuppose faith or ignore it. Marcel goes even further and points to the error of neo-­ Thomists, although taking the precaution of distinguishing the original thought of St Thomas (which he does not go into) from modern Thomism. The neo-Thomists assume the existence of a natural man as a constant in human history. But this homo naturalis, argues Marcel, is a figment because natural man is also homo historicus and evolves across time. The man of today does not have the attitudes and ways of thinking of the man of seven centuries ago, and to present him with the truth-­ value of a rational theology supposedly derived from thirteenth-century thought lacks all persuasive power. Marcel distinguishes between ‘belief in’ and ‘belief that’. The latter usually expresses total conviction, closure; the former implies a degree of uncertainty, openness. Faith is akin to ‘belief in’. It involves one’s being (a point also made by Berdyaev) and it is therefore existential, not intellectual. Unlike knowledge, belief is not a possession (something that one has and another lacks); it is rather a state of mind, or as Marcel prefers to say, a state of being. The believer has to empathize with the unbeliever, otherwise he will be assuming that he has been given something which has been denied to the other. The real question is not whether one has something which the other lacks, but whether I as believer have ‘truly understood how to respond to the appeal addressed to me’ (CRF: 181). My response is my testimony. The believer can bear witness to his belief just as the unbeliever can bear witness to his unbelief.

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‘I believe’ is a statement of where I stand, ‘it is in fact the ground of what I am’ (CRF: 171). Yet I cannot even be certain that it wholly coincides with my ground because my being is not transparent. There is a side of me that remains opaque even to me. And ‘in so far as I am not transparent I do not believe’ (CRF: 172). Since belief is something felt, the only way to make my belief more tangible is to express it through concern or love. Faith, it turns out, is not self-sufficient; it is always directed, and hence Marcel argues—precisely as Unamuno had done albeit on philological grounds—that faith comes from or adopts the form of fidelity, belief in a thou (or in a him/her when we represent it to our minds). For Marcel as for Unamuno the ‘directedness’ of faith inevitably involves our fellow humans. The link with God that faith entails goes hand in hand with an ‘intersubjective unity which is formed by beings who love one another and who live in and by one another’ (MOB: II, 173–74). By intersubjective unity Marcel, who lost his mother when he was a young boy, really means caring for others to the extent of affirming their permanent presence, a presence, that is, beyond the physical. It is really fidelity in this sense—‘creative fidelity’ as he calls it—that in turn creates the greater, all-encompassing faith in God. But fidelity—belief in another—cannot be based on total knowledge of another being because that knowledge is not forthcoming. Fidelity to another person must necessarily take the form of fidelity to our perception of that person. If our perception changes for whatever reason, our fidelity may come to an end. This disappointment is of course less conceivable in the case of God than in the case of human beings, since God does not change (but our perception of him might). The God of faith is not the God of theology or even philosophy, but the God of testimony. Believers do not debate his existence; they testify to it, they become witnesses: we are witnesses ‘before a transcendence’ (POE: 94 and 97). But testimony or attestation implies a need to throw light on something that lies in darkness. What we do through faith is to illuminate those dark, mysterious corners of our hankering for transcendence, of our desire to be more than our body and more than our life, what Marcel called, in the most famous of all his essays, the ‘ontological mystery’, the fact that far from being content to leave things at the level of appearances, ‘what is only before me’, we ask about ‘what is in me’ (POE: 20).

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What is ‘in me’ is an identity, or a desire for an identity, beyond the purely circumstantial one of time, place, and public record; a recognition that my being goes beyond the reductive data of name, nationality, profession, etcetera. That such a value exists is a matter of faith. True to his conviction of the need to start any philosophical task from a concrete situation and not from abstract principles, Marcel, in the second of the three essays that form Part II of Being and Having (Ȇtre et avoir, 1935), gives us a straightforward account of what faith means for him as he experiences it. It is not an escape from the unpalatable facts of life, since these remain unchanged. Nor is it a flight of the imagination; nor a simple projection outwards or objectification of an exclusively internal event. It is rather a placing of himself in a reality which is both inside and outside. Faith is a response, though exactly to what Marcel does not explain. It has to do with one’s being, but ‘what am I?’ is an unanswerable question because ‘who am I to question myself on what I am?’ (CRF: 145). The question ‘who am I?’ needs a You to answer it; if I doubt You I doubt myself. In the face of this imponderable, Marcel simply categorizes faith as an ‘invitation’ which we are free to accept or decline, precisely how Berdyaev sees it without using the term invitation. It is in any case an awareness of some kind, an awareness the denial of which is problematical: ‘if the soul really asks herself this question [Am I really sure that I don’t believe?] in all sincerity, rejecting all angry prejudices and parrot imaginings, she will be brought to recognize, not indeed that she already believes, but that she is in no case to say that she does not believe’ (BAH: 209). This is of course the question raised by Unamuno in San Manuel Bueno, mártir, namely that if it is difficult to know what belief is, it is equally difficult to know what unbelief is. The negation of belief is itself a belief. Indeed Marcel speaks of ‘the incomprehensible, or perhaps rather supra-intelligible, polarity which lies at the heart of faith’ (BAH: 211). It is probably in an attempt to get closer to the nature of faith that Marcel introduces the analogy of attestation. Faith is seen as bearing witness and thereby as a form of fidelity, an idea he introduces in Being and Having, where he writes; ‘The closeness of the link between faith and attestation becomes fully apparent as soon as we touch upon the intermediary idea of fidelity. There cannot be faith without fidelity. Faith […] is simply unceasing attestation’ (BAH: 211). The implications of this

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approach he further explores some years later in Creative Fidelity (Du Refus à l’invocation, 1940) and again in the essay ‘Testimony and Existentialism’ included in The Philosophy of Existentialism (Positions et approches concrètes du mystère ontologique, 1949). The attestation or testimony, then, takes the form of fidelity. A testimony is not simply an impersonal observation, a ‘one sees’; it is an attestation made by a highly individualized ‘I’ with both a civic and a deeper identity. A testimony implies a guarantee, a commitment. It bears on something which is independent from the person bearing witness, something that we can bear witness to, something that is objectively real for the witness. Moreover the testimony commits the person, who then becomes answerable for his assertions. The tension generated between the objective end and the inward commitment Marcel sees as ‘existential in the highest degree’ (POE: 95). We bear witness to a truth, not to an institution; in other words, testimony is given before a transcendence. We do it out of fidelity to something beyond us. Now for Marcel fidelity is more than simply constancy or loyalty; it also involves what he has chosen to call ‘presence’, not an easy concept to grasp since it does not refer either to a physical presence or to a ghostly presence, but rather to a spontaneous rapport or bond with another, whether living or dead. It implies acknowledgement and commitment, but it is more than a relationship based on affection; it is rather a conviction based on the reality, not so much physical as transphysical, of the person in whom one believes. This kind of belief is ‘situated beyond any judgement referring to an objective datum’ (CRF: 169), by which Marcel presumably means that it is not based on the objective reality (i.e reality for everyone) of the person in whom we believe, but rather on the view that the believer forms of that person. It is in this sense ‘creative’. Indeed we may not even be aware of the idea that we have formed: ‘ordinarily, normally, I am in fact cut off from this belief with which I am identified and which is really indistinguishable from what I should in effect call my soul. This is the meaning of my often repeated statement that we ourselves do not know what we believe’ (CRF: 169). This is uncannily similar to those words which Unamuno puts into the mouth of his narrator when she refers to the beliefs of Father Manuel and her brother.

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Belief, then, according to Marcel is not an imperfect or vague form of knowing or imagined knowledge. To compare it to positive or objective knowledge is to invite incredulity, whereas faith conceived as fidelity has to do with one’s being, not with one’s knowledge. It is not, as we have seen, to be regarded as something that we possess or we lack, since belief can vary from clarity to obscurity even in the same individual. Indeed the believer has something of the unbeliever in him: there is a symbiosis of belief and disbelief in the same soul. Faith, ‘belief in’, is not an opinion, it is an affirmation rooted in freedom, and we must recognize that our disposition to affirm can vary depending on our outlook at a particular time and circumstance. But this need not be seen as a source of Kierkegaardian anguish in the face of an inscrutable and unintelligible deity. God is a mystery as much as we are, but faith can bring joy, not anxiety: If we want to satisfy ourselves of the truth of this, we must emphasize the intelligible aspect of faith; and in doing so we shall be obliged to diverge very considerably from the views both of the Danish philosopher and even perhaps of the writer in whom we may well be inclined to see his precursor—I mean Pascal; for there is a connection which it is the philosopher’s duty to underline with the utmost emphasis, the connection which binds together faith and the spirit of truth. (MOB: II, 198–99)

Unamuno as we saw was still stuck in Pascalian uncertainty when he wrote La agonía del cristianismo towards the end of his life. Marcel by contrast seems to have surmounted it precisely by having faith in reason.

5.4 Conclusions Among atheistic or agnostic existentialists faith in a transcendent being is of little or no relevance. For Sartre faith in a non-existent being is an absurdity; for Camus it is a contradiction; for Heidegger it is a revelation of man’s anxiety; and for Jaspers, more sympathetic to religious sentiment sensu lato than any of the others, it is an admission of human incompleteness. For Christian thinkers on the other hand, the question of faith—its

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nature, its provenance, its impact—is ineluctable. Unaided reason does not give us faith, since it cannot establish the objective truth or certainty of our transcendent beliefs. God as creator and as guarantor of human perdurance are not notions that can be logically established. Yet for the believer thereby to devalue reason and see it as no more than a tool of mere local relevance, useful in a mechanical sort of way for solving daily problems, is an unacceptable posture. For if one believes in God one must also believe that human reason is a God-given gift of supreme value. Augustine and Aquinas were well aware of the issue and evidently strove to reconcile reason and faith. Twentieth-century existentialism was based on the conviction that after more than two centuries of rationalism man had got nowhere in solving baffling questions about human nature, that is, about our being. A new approach was needed, starting not from abstract ideas about ourselves but from our concrete circumstances in the world. That this new attitude affected both the religiously inclined and the disinclined seems indisputable: in the case of the former it affected not only Christians but those of other religious persuasions too, notably Jewish thinkers. The inclination towards faith in a transcendent reality is one more concrete circumstance that deserves to be explored and explained. For the believer to dismiss reason as an obstacle to faith is merely self-defeating. Is there a way out of the labyrinth? The starting point on the road to faith is a longing for something other than that which we observe around us. From his somewhat simplistic early pronouncements on the nature of faith as a mere substitute for reason, Unamuno develops, from his mid-thirties onwards, a much richer notion of faith as a creative longing, one that, while not dependent on dogma handed down by theological pundits, need not banish particular articles of faith chosen by the believer. Each believer has his or her own way of believing, and while our motives for believing may remain unknown, belief has an effect on one’s outlook and behaviour towards others. Berdyaev sees this longing or ‘will to believe’ as innate, as a fact of human life, but one which depends on one’s conscious decision to invoke the spiritual dimension of our existence and summon the necessary responsiveness required to experience it. Marcel too sees faith as a response to an intimate condition, but one sparked by dissatisfaction with the encompassing world of matter and function. The need for transcendence

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thus becomes, for Marcel, a state of being, and one moreover that has transformative effects: it impacts on the perception of ourselves and others. The troubled relationship between faith and reason is a topic that occurs in all three thinkers, but the degree of conflict varies. At one end Unamuno sees them as irreconcilable, even though he came to accept that we need our intellect to define our beliefs. His is a dialectical way of presenting the problem. A part of him is disposed towards belief; another part of him is disposed to scepticism. Faith tells him that there is more to existence than our material circumstances; reason tells him that there is no logical argument for such a belief. The thesis/antithesis, or dialectical, approach can only be synthesized through the life-struggle, agonía, in which the individual consciously chooses to absorb and experience both positions conjointly. Unamuno, however, did eventually come to admit that there is also a non-conflictive view of faith in which acceptance is given priority over resistance, but this kind of non-combative faith is not one that was connatural to him. Berdyaev does not perceive the same degree of conflict between faith and reason, essentially because he allocates them to different dimensions of human experience. Faith is in no way dependent on reason for support since it creates its own reality, its own sphere of action. Faith is neither empirical knowledge, nor abstract knowledge, nor theological learning. It is certainly the product of our agency, of our freedom, and as long as we understand that, it cannot be undermined by reason, which is what ties us to the purely natural world. Spiritual man is freer than natural man. Marcel, like Unamuno, sees reason, or reflection, as giving us knowledge while faith does not, but this is not to the detriment of faith. While reason cannot supplant faith, nor should be confused with faith as happens in rational theology, it can nevertheless be a useful ally in helping to analyse ourselves, to understand why we need the sense of identity provided by faith and what the dichotomy belief/unbelief implies. So faith need not go against reason, since it is not concerned with the acquisition of knowledge, as is reason; it is an affirmation of truth that encompasses and goes beyond the world of reason. In that respect, Marcel, consciously or not, follows in the steps of Augustine and Aquinas. Finally, we need to consider the end-purpose of faith, or faith as fulfilment. For Unamuno faith is a form of hope; we need it to visualize a

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positive outcome, to overcome the disheartening view of our lives as a mere accident devoid of all meaning and purpose. We need to construct our destiny, not just our own personality in the Sartrian sense. We do this by digging deep into our imaginative and emotional resources and creating our faith, which takes us to a transphysical world beyond certainty and falsehood. Such faith is life-sustaining, a counter to the self-­destructive enticement of a conception of life as purposeless. The state of faith is its own recompense. For Berdyaev faith is the fulfilment of the spirit, just as positive knowledge is the fulfilment of the intellect, and physical wellbeing is the fulfilment of the body. If we do not cultivate our faith our spirit remains stunted and we do not achieve our full potential and stature as human beings. Marcel sees faith more in terms of fidelity and presence. Faith implies fidelity, which is directed at a You. We know from experience what it is to have faith in another person, to be aware of that person’s presence as a special relationship to us. Fidelity binds us to others not as objects but in a far more intimate, very special way. This achievable experience is a pointer to the experience of God, to faith in a transcendent You.

6 Hope and Anxiety

Hope is not of course simply one of the three theological virtues as conceived by St Paul and elaborated by Thomas Aquinas. Hope is a psychological trait of the human being which no doubt precedes the theological version. It is a natural mechanism which helps us to cope with the trials and stresses of life. It is a projection into the future of our in-built expectation of life: we orientate our lives towards tomorrow. Today’s ordinary actions, such as our weekly shopping, are taken in the expectation that we shall be alive tomorrow and beyond. Hope is therefore fundamental to life and quite independent of our optimistic or pessimistic outlook. It is possible to see hope as a wish, whether conscious or unconscious, and that is as the word is routinely used; but we may wish for something without having any great expectations of it coming to pass. Hope in a religious context is a rather stronger sentiment—not a mere wish but the confident expectation of a believer. In Christianity it is regarded as having a central importance, since it is derived from promises that appear in the New Testament concerning the resurrection of the human being. This kind of hope presupposes faith in the validity of those promises. Hope without some kind of faith is questionable, or even inconceivable. Faith without hope is certainly conceivable, though perhaps pointless as St Paul © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. A. Longhurst, Unamuno, Berdyaev, Marcel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81999-6_6

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avers in 1 Corinthians 15.19 (Unamuno’s epigraph to San Manuel Bueno, mártir). Hope is the fulfilment of faith during our earthly life: it is as far as human beings can go. There is nevertheless a basic difficulty with the theological notion of hope. Hope in the ordinary course of our lives implies desire but not certainty, as is very clear in the expression ‘I hope for the best but fear the worst’. It is the projection of a ‘best scenario’, but we are aware that it is a wish the fulfilment of which is far from guaranteed. There is always an element, however small, of wishful thinking about it. Now clearly, if our hope in a Pauline resurrection is tinged with uncertainty, this qualifies the kind of faith we have: we are taking biblical promises with a pinch of salt. For this reason Christianity has traditionally treated hope, not as an expression of preference about the future, which is what hope amounts to in our everyday life, but as a total conviction of what is to happen in the fullness of time: the future has already been witnessed by God. Our role is to prepare ourselves for a part in that future. The problem this poses to a Christian existentialist is obvious. A Christian’s hope stems from an interpretation of the biblical narrative of Jesus Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. An existentialist thinker does not start from abstract theological assumptions or interpretation: the existential starting point is the concrete human being in a concrete environment. This starting point cannot be the significance of Jesus’ resurrection as taught by Christian institutions. It has to be our own personal experience. That human beings experience hope is incontestable; but what does that experience signify, what does it tell us about ourselves and our aspirations? Why should we need hope? Indeed why should we be prone to anxiety in the first place? The notion of anxiety, sometimes referred to as anguish, or dread, has acquired notoriety as one of the requisite ingredients of existentialism. It must be made clear that anxiety is not the inverse of hope and may indeed exist side by side with it. Theologically the inverse of hope is despair, the notion that we are irremediably condemned creatures, but we are not here concerned with the theological binary despair/presumption, only with the presence of hope in our lives, what it means to hope. Kierkegaard wrote on both anxiety and despair: in The Concept of Anxiety the psychological state is caused by the individual’s urge to fulfil God’s will; in The Sickness unto Death despair is seen as the refusal to accept the role that

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God plays in our lives. There can be little doubt that the notion of existential anxiety was derived from Kierkegaard, but as the concept moved through other nineteenth-century thinkers and writers such as Dostoyevsky and Hartmann, early existentialists like Heidegger, and finally the existential psychoanalysis that married the ideas of Freud and Sartre, it underwent considerable change: from being a state of awareness it ended up by being a pathological state that threatened the mental wellbeing of the sufferer. In The Concept of Anxiety Kierkegaard had distinguished between objective anxiety and subjective anxiety. Objective anxiety he regarded as generic, as ‘Adam’s legacy’: we are all subject to a sinful predisposition or state of imperfection. This is not a cause of sin but a consciousness of sin, of its close proximity, of our state of fallenness. Subjective anxiety is a sensibility generated from within the individual when one is hoping or wishing to change from a particular state to another, for example, from sin to virtue, from indecision to resolution, from powerlessness to action. Anxiety is bound up with freedom, since choice is the result of freedom and of the endless possibilities it offers. But it is not despair; on the contrary, anxiety is a pointer to spirituality—the person who has no spiritual sensibility is not subject to anxiety—and has the potential to draw us towards faith in God. For Kierkegaard, therefore, anxiety is closely related to the challenge of deciding and fulfilling God’s will, and taking consequential life decisions. In the existentialists, notably Heidegger and Sartre, this anxiety cannot be ascribed to a preoccupation with the fulfilment of God’s will, since God is bracketed by the former and wholly eliminated by the latter. It is simply seen as inherent in the human constitution. In Heidegger anxiety is grounded in fear of oneself, fear of not finding a stable, authentic mode of being, fear of the incapacity to face the time-limit given to us, of being alone yet responsible, of the confrontation with ‘nothingness’, a nothingness which threatens to engulf our lives. Sartre takes up Heidegger’s theme and argues that man’s problem comes from his desire to overcome a lack of being, to learn how to use his radical and disconcerting freedom, to combat the essential absurdity of his situation by finding his own meaning for existing, to replace reliance on an outside agency (God) with reliance on himself, to meet the challenge of constructing a self out of nothing, out of a void. Man desires all those goals but does not know how to achieve them.

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The notion of nothingness, that there is no explanation for the existence of the universe or of ourselves, that we are going to return to the nothingness whence we came, that we might as well not have existed, is the root cause of our anxiety. ‘Being-towards-death is essentially anxiety’, writes Heidegger in Being and Time (Heidegger 1962: 310). Just as truth contains the possibility of untruth (you cannot have truth if there is no possibility of untruth), so being and non-being cannot be wholly dissociated. Being contains not only what is but also the negation of what is, and ‘hence freedom, which is grounded in Being, is at the same time grounded in Nothingness’, so that ‘man comes to understand himself as possessed by a freedom which is grounded in Nothingness’ (Roberts 1959: 1971). But what exactly is nothing?, one might ask. The logician would respond that nothing is simply the negation of something: X is not Y. But it could also be, Heidegger points out, that the category ‘nothing’ is prior to the logical definition of negation; that it is ‘nothingness’, or the category of nothing, that makes possible the denial that something is. This is the theme of his 1929 inaugural lecture ‘What is Metaphysics?’ which harks back to the magnum opus of two years earlier which had helped him obtain his appointment as successor to Edmund Husserl at Freiburg. ‘The nothing is the complete negation of the totality of beings’, and ‘the nothing [is] the counter-concept to being proper, that is, as its negation’ (Heidegger 2011: 49, 56). Where does this notion of nothingness come from? It can only come from what is, not from what is not, since only what is is familiar to us. Nothingness would then be, so to speak, the vanishing point of the totality of what is, a kind of black hole for all that exists. But how can we even begin to grasp the totality of what is? Even if we think of matter as the entire universe or as a single atom we are told that what is there is overwhelmingly empty, a vacuum, nothing or virtually nothing. So nothingness is paradoxically what makes something possible: no nothing, no something. Heidegger has been criticized for taking Nothing as something real: ‘The Nothing is merely an abstraction from the various instances of negation: it has no substance of its own’, thinks E. L. Allen writing from a Christian but generally sympathetic perspective. This means that when Heidegger says that every being is made out of nothing ‘he does not mean, nor does the Christian doctrine mean, that there was a pre-existent nothing out of which all things

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were made’(Allen 1953: 20, 22). Why not? Most of the universe and everything in it, including atoms and we ourselves, are made very largely of empty space anyway. This same reluctance to accept the possibility of nothingness completely vitiates Helmut Kuhn’s study of existentialism Encounter with Nothingness (1949), which, unlike Allen’s sympathetic attitude, evinces a visceral antipathy towards all major existentialists, who stand accused of falsifying metaphysics by reducing it to Nothingness. Far from safeguarding religion from the dangers of nihilism, this fails to recognize that the concept of nothingness has been bequeathed to western thought by the Judeo-Christian tradition. As we saw in Chap. 5, St Thomas says explicitly that we proceed from nothing. The Biblical tradition of creation ex nihilo reappears in the Nothingness evoked in western mystical thought, extending from the non-Christian Plotinus through pseudo-Dyonisius the Areopagite, Scotus Eriugena, Meister Eckhart, St John of the Cross, Jakob Böhme, and even Kierkegaard, for all of whom God was the Great Unknown. The Godhead lies beyond creation, in the Nothingness to which he belongs and out of which the universe was created. To be God he must indeed have created the universe out of nothing, for if there had been something already there God would not be God but a mere sculptor. Nothing is thus not negativity, much less nihilism; it is what necessarily precedes something at creation. John Macquarrie, much better informed than Kuhn, gives a very good account of the notion of nothingness and elucidates Heidegger’s use of the term better than most commentators. Nothing is ‘the nullity which we find within our existence’ (exactly as in Unamuno’s nonada). It is also ‘the wilting away of the familiar world which, though it normally preoccupies us and absorbs our attention, becomes nugatory in the face of death’. Furthermore, the notion of nothing makes it ‘possible for us to recognize entities as entities, that is to say, as things that are’. The nothing is the background or abyss which makes us wonder about the something. Finally, nothing is ‘paradoxically equated with Being itself ’. This is so because it reflects the attitude of forgetfulness, of ‘there is nothing else but entities’, when what this ‘nothing else’ is, is Being, which is not just something else, not just another entity, ‘so from the point of view of the metaphysical thinking that concerns itself with what is and “nothing else” this Being has to be relegated to the “nothing else”’ (Macquarrie 1966:

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85–86). Heidegger’s determination to challenge conventional metaphysics comes through clearly in his language, but the central point is that nothing is intrinsic to being, and it is precisely ‘the nothing [that] reveals itself in anxiety’ (Heidegger 2011: 52). In other words anxiety is the tell-­ tale sign of the presence of nothingness. But being is also freedom in Heidegger’s sense: ‘Freedom is not mere absence of constraint with respect to what we can or cannot do. […] Prior to all this (negative and positive freedom), freedom is engagement in the disclosure of beings as such’ (Heidegger 2011: 73). The connection is there: it is the freedom that comes with being, what Heidegger calls the ‘letting being be’, that lies behind our anxiety; hence our anxiety is caused by the nothingness which is at the heart of being. Sartre understood this perfectly and re-adapted it to suit his atheistic existentialism, much to Heidegger’s disgust. It is true that Heidegger considered the God-question to fall outside the realm of philosophy, but perhaps it was a trifle disingenuous of him to protest in his Letter on Humanism, written in response to Sartre’s pamphlet Existentialism and Humanism, that his philosophy had been wilfully taken to be atheistic and that ‘this arbitrary classification betrays a lack of careful reading’ (Heidegger 2011: 172). Sartre’s reading was indeed slanted, but it would have been most people’s reading in any case. For Heidegger had clearly implied that man’s innate anxiety came from man’s original nothingness to which he feared returning. Putting it that way ran the severe risk of an atheistic reading, whether careless or not. Heidegger of course was far more knowledgeable about the mystic tradition than Sartre and knew that nothingness was not to be equated with atheism. But should it be equated with apocatastasis, the return to the Godhead with a concomitant loss of individual consciousness? Or is Christian hope the solution?

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6.1 Unamuno: The Search for Ontological Security Unamuno offers a succinct definition of hope: ‘to believe in what we shall see—or shall not see—is to hope’ [‘creer lo que veremos—o no veremos—es la esperanza’ (ADC: X, 548)]. Here Unamuno defines hope as a natural effluent of faith, which is a standard way of approaching it. But it is worth noting that a quarter of a century earlier he had written in his Diario íntimo that ‘the idea occurs to me that I should believe so that I can live peacefully in hope’ [‘se me ocurre la idea de que debo creer para vivir tranquilo en la esperanza’ (DIN: VII, 329)], which rather reverses the cause and effect: I need hope to get on with life, therefore I will believe. It is in fact hard to tell which comes first in Unamuno: in his essay ‘Mi religión’, he refers to his struggle with the mystery of existence and declares paradoxically that ‘I have become used to drawing hope from despair itself ’ [‘me he acostumbrado a sacar esperanza de la desesperación misma’ (MIR: IX, 54)]. The hope and consolation lie in the very determination to penetrate the impenetrable. What is clear is that hope is a projection, a living for a future which must remain undetermined: ‘Only the future can be the realm of freedom […]. Hope, for only he who hopes lives; but fear the day in which your hopes become your memories as you leave the future behind, so to avoid this, turn your memories into hope, for if you have lived you will live’ [‘Sólo el porvenir es reino de libertad […]. Espera, que sólo el que espera vive; pero teme el día en que se te conviertan en recuerdos las esperanzas al dejar el futuro, y para evitarlo, haz de tus recuerdos esperanzas, pues porque has vivido vivirás’ (ADN: VIII, 317)]. The expression may be unconventional, but the idea is conventional enough: hope is life-­ sustaining. But to hope is also to plead, says Unamuno: ‘to hope is to beseech God […]. To hope is to go to the front door holding a light, and probe and watch the mists outside, and cry out in case someone responds’ [‘esperar es rogar a Dios […]. Esperar es salir a la puerta de la casa con la luz en la mano, y escudriñar y avizorar las tinieblas exteriores y dar voces por si nos responden’ (ADJ: VIII, 630)]. This is an active and searching hope, but one that seems to place the onus on God: we expect a response,

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but when will that response be forthcoming? Hope after all is the hope of the living. Unamuno appears to be aware of this and has an answer: ‘Hope, like faith, creates its own object’ [‘La esperanza, como la fe, crea su objeto’ (ADJ: VIII, 636)]. Unamuno several times turned the ancient aphorism nihil volitum quin praecognitum into nihil cognitum quin praevolitum, that is to say, we must desire something before we can find it. Putting desire before achievement is no doubt a very human trait, but one that appears to fall somewhat short of what Christian faith demands. The hope of a believer is standardly expressed as the expectation of one day seeing what already is, of participating in a pre-existing plan rather than creating one’s own blueprint. In fact, however, what Unamuno is getting at when he says that hope creates its own objective is not that this objective is thereby unreal, but rather that it is our conviction of our own value and uniqueness that persuades us that we must be more than a fleeting phenomenon: ‘How can a man who believes firmly in his own existence believe in his own death, in his existential death?’ [‘¿Cómo un hombre que crea de veras en su propia existencia va a creer en su propia muerte, en su muerte existencial?’ (PPP: VIII, 662)]. Given Unamuno’s well-known belief that each one of us is unique and irreplaceable, annihilation at death represents an unacceptable loss. Hope for Unamuno is here another term for our (or his) determination to survive; hence its association with creativity, or as he says: ‘to live is a continuous creation’ [‘vivir es una creación continua’ (PPP: VIII, 664)]. This hope (in one’s immortality) is what sustains faith, he adds; without it religion is reduced to an aesthetic stance. We need to be sensitive to our ‘own substantiality’ [‘propia sustancialidad’ (PPP: VIII, 669)] and to its perpetuation in order for religious adherence to be of consequence. What Unamuno is saying in effect is that it is not religion that drives us to hope, but hope that drives us to religion. We desire plenitude, which only God can provide. Unamuno’s existentialist stance is perfectly clear. It is in The Tragic Sense of Life that Unamuno gives us his most detailed account of hope. If faith, the Greek pistis, may be translated as trust, the Spanish confianza, then hope is trust in the future. Hope is thus faith or trust in tomorrow, a trust based on one’s perception of past and present. Unamuno stipulates that such a sentiment, to be valid, must necessarily

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be personal, never institutional. A total personal conviction of the validity of their hope is what characterizes religious martyrs. But hoping to such a degree is not within a normal believer’s range for the simple reason that we are by nature uncertain about the future; it takes a very great deal of self-persuasion to overcome this uncertainty. Hope is therefore both dependent on faith and an encouragement to faith. Unamuno puts it this way: And if faith is the substance of hope, hope is in turn the form of faith. Before giving us hope, faith is formless, vague, chaotic, unrealized, merely the possibility of belief, a longing to believe. But we have to believe in something, so we believe in what we hope for, we believe in hope itself. The past is remembered, the present is known, only in the future do we believe. To believe what we have not seen is to believe what we shall see. Faith is therefore, I’ll say it again, faith in hope; we believe in what we hope. [Y si es la fe la sustancia de la esperanza, esta es a su vez la forma de la fe. La fe antes de darnos esperanza es una fe informe, vaga, caótica, potencial, no es sino la posibilidad de creer, anhelo de creer. Mas hay que creer en algo, y se cree en lo que se espera, se cree en la esperanza. Se recuerda el pasado, se conoce el presente, solo se cree en el porvenir. Creer lo que no vimos es creer lo que veremos. La fe es, pues, lo repito, fe en la esperanza; creemos lo que esperamos. (DST: X, 434)]

We believe in what we hope. If this is so, it would appear to diminish the value of faith, for faith becomes a self-interested passport to immortality, hardly a theological virtue as conceived by the Christian Churches. Nor does this even accord with Ángela Carballino’s view of Father Manuel Bueno, for she concluded that the priest must have had some kind of faith despite apparently not believing in his own personal immortality. Yet Unamuno’s attempt to account for hope is stranger still. If faith is the human being’s longing for God, that is to say for eternity, hope is God’s reward to the human being for having faith in him: ‘Man aspires to reach God by faith, and says to him “I believe, give me, Lord, something to believe in!” And God, his divinity, sends him hope in an afterlife so that he may believe in it. This hope is the reward for faith’ [‘El hombre aspira a Dios por la fe, y le dice: «Creo, ¡dame, Señor, en qué creer!». Y Dios, su divinidad, le manda la esperanza en otra vida para que crea en

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ella. La esperanza es el premio de la fe’ (DST: X, 434)]. On the face of it this appears to be incompatible with Unamuno’s previous view of hope as ‘creative’, as something that wells up from within us and which we consciously re-assert, and it might even suggest that Unamuno is persuaded by the Lutheran view of justification by faith alone, which we know he was not. But it is worth noting that Unamuno writes ‘And God, his divinity, sends him hope’, suggesting of course that the God whom man addresses is a projection of his own aspiration. In that case God is simply another name for hope. It is hope too, not faith, that makes us look to God as father for protection and sustenance. There is of course a long biblical tradition, culminating in Jesus of Nazareth, behind this idea of God as provident father of mankind, but Unamuno is not concerned with tradition but with eternización. This longing for perdurance is reflected not only in a search for a beneficent, protective God, but in artistic endeavours as well, something which Unamuno calls ‘a semblance of eternization’ [‘un remedo de eternización’ (DST: X, 435)], so the sentiment is, in part at least, an aesthetic one, a longing for beauty which serves to entrance, to tranquillize the human spirit, ‘since beauty is an intimation of eternity’ [‘por ser lo bello revelación de lo eterno’ (DST: X, 435)], a platonic rather than a purely Christian sentiment. Because beauty is a pointer to what endures, we pursue that which provides aesthetic satisfaction: ‘beauty is the goal of hope, perhaps irrational at bottom’ [‘la belleza es el fin de la esperanza, acaso irracional en su fondo’ (DST: X, 435)]. It is, then, our search for fulfilment, for security, for protection from the ravages of time, that makes us appreciate the perennial nature of beauty and contrast it with our own apparent ephemerality; and it is this same aesthetic sentiment that creates hope for an eternal life: ‘What is the beauty of anything if it is not its eternal essence, what joins its past with its future, what rests and remains in the depths of eternity?’ [‘¿Qué es la belleza de algo si no es su fondo eterno, lo que une su pasado con su porvenir, lo que de ello reposa y queda en las entrañas de la eternidad?’ (DST: X, 435)]. Eternity is beauty by another name. Unamuno therefore defines hope as a longing for perfection, a longing that is as much aesthetic as religious or eschatological. The contemplation of beauty makes us forget our tribulations, makes us envisage an alternative existence of harmony

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and serenity. Our lives are the source of pain and anguish, but out of this intimate suffering there arises hope: ‘this pain gives us hope, which is the beauty of life, the supreme beauty, that is, the supreme consolation’ [‘este dolor da esperanza, que es lo bello de la vida, la suprema belleza, o sea, el supremo consuelo’ (DST: X, 436)]. And a little later he repeats the idea in poetic language: There are degrees of pain, depending on how far one penetrates, from the pain that floats upon the sea of appearances to that immortal anguish, the source of the tragic sense of life, which alights upon the eternal depths where consolation is born; from the physical pain that makes us writhe in agony to the religious torment that makes us rest upon God’s bosom, there to receive the life-giving moisture of divine tears. [Y tiene el dolor sus grados, según se adentra; desde aquel dolor que flota en el mar de las apariencias, hasta la eterna congoja, la fuente del sentimiento trágico de la vida, que va a posarse en lo hondo de lo eterno, y allí despierta el consuelo; desde aquel dolor físico que nos hace retorcer el cuerpo, hasta la congoja religiosa, que nos hace acostarnos en el seno de Dios y recibir allí el riego de sus lágrimas divinas. (DST: X, 438)]

Hope thus becomes a palliative for our existential anxiety. It is our need of hope that underlies faith, not faith that gives us hope. Unamuno has tried to reconcile a psychological interpretation of hope with a more traditional theological view, but with limited success. His explanation is in the end almost wholly existential, despite the religious trimmings. Hope is a coping mechanism for our rootlessness and anxiety. Unamuno’s concept of anxiety is only in part derived from Kierkegaard. For Kierkegaard anxiety was not so much fear, which normally has an external and identifiable cause, as an internal state of disquietude the precise cause of which is unknown but which is tied to our unbounded freedom—we are in a real sense fearful of our freedom because we do not know how to use it but are nevertheless anxious to use it productively. This very anxiety makes us deeply aware of our capacity to act, and for Kierkegaard this means acting in accordance with God’s wishes. Unamuno borrows this Kierkegaardian idea of anxiety but focuses it on one sole event: the death that awaits. What Unamuno emphasizes is a foreboding,

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a sense of helpless expectation which becomes in turn a source of anxiety. A good illustration of the unsettling effects of this anxiety are found in his novelette La novela de don Sandalio, jugador de ajedrez [The novel of Don Sandalio, chess player], in which the narrator, who is suffering from a heart ailment, displays his extreme anxiety in his use of symbols, omens, and enigmas. The game of chess is of course a symbol for the multiple choices we face in life: one wrong move and checkmate supervenes. We are constantly threatened with extinction, but we find it impossible to conceive what it is to pass from being to non-being. It is this fear of the unknown that causes our anguish, and it is this anguish that lies at the heart of our hope, that is, of our desire for perpetuation. And if we cannot survive in the flesh we will try to survive as an effigy, as a simulacrum: When we are invaded by doubts which cast a shadow over our faith in the immortality of the soul, the craving to prolong our name and our renown, to achieve a shadow at least of immortality, acquires strength and painful determination. Hence the terrible struggle to stand out, to survive in some way in the memory of other people and of those yet to come; a struggle a thousand times worse than the struggle for life, and which gives its tone, colour and character to contemporary society, in which the medieval faith in the immortal soul is vanishing. Each one of us wants to assert his presence, even if only in appearance. [Cuando las dudas nos invaden y nublan la fe en la inmortalidad del alma, cobra brío y doloroso empuje el ansia de perpetuar el nombre y la fama, de alcanzar una sombra de inmortalidad siquiera. Y de aquí esa tremenda lucha por singularizarse, por sobrevivir de algún modo en la memoria de los otros y los venideros, esa lucha mil veces más terrible que la lucha por la vida, y que da tono, color y carácter a esta nuestra sociedad, en que la fe medieval en el alma inmortal se desvanece. Cada cual quiere afirmarse, siquiera en apariencia. (DST: X, 316)]

But Unamuno knows full well that such self-affirmation, or erostratismo (after Herostratus, the arsonist at Ephesus) so characteristic of man, is a mirage, a false hope. The artist or writer who survives does so only as an idea and only for a time, since artistic forms have a limited shelf life too. To wish to live on in one’s works is simply one more symptom of anxiety, not a solution: ‘All that about living on in one’s children, or in one’s

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works, or in the universe, are feeble inventions which only those who suffer from affective deficiency find satisfactory’ [‘Todo eso de que uno vive en sus hijos, o en sus obras, o en el universo, son vagas elucubraciones en que sólo se satisfacen los que padecen de estupidez afectiva’ (DST: X, 287)]. For Unamuno the only real hope of surmounting anxiety is to face uncertainty squarely, to absorb it into our lives and not fear it. Our hope lies in affirming the value of life, in expecting and even demanding our perdurance, whatever the prospects: ‘Everyone merits salvation, but first of all and above all those who desire it passionately and even against reason’ [‘Todos merecen salvarse, pero merece ante todo y sobre todo la inmortalidad […] el que apasionadamente y hasta contra razón la desea’ (DST: X, 484)]. In other words we are responsible for creating our own hope, or at the very least for bringing it to fruition. Is hope, then, a purely personal sentiment? Or is it transmissible to others? Unamuno admits the possibility of collective hope, but no more: ‘There are indeed many who imagine the human race as one being, a collective and common entity, in which each member represents or may come to represent the entire collectivity, and they imagine salvation as a collective event too’ [‘Son muchos, en efecto los que se imaginan al linaje humano como un ser, un individuo colectivo y solidario, y en que cada miembro representa o puede llegar a representar a la colectividad toda, y se imaginan la salvación como algo colectivo también’ (DST: X, 472)]. Each individual becomes as it were the redeemer of his neighbour. According to this view, ‘or everyone is saved or no-one is saved’ [‘O se salvan todos o no se salva nadie’ (DST: X, 472)]. This kind of communal salvation, however, envisages the perdurance of human society considered as a single entity, and thus offers no guarantee of individual survival because what is saved is humanity in its essence, not in its multiplicity. The collective hope which this notion of salvation represents is of little consolation to Unamuno, who believes in the unique value of the individual being. Unamuno prefers to see hope as the prerogative of the individual. Starting from the simple premise that a sense of solidarity necessarily originates in the individual and from there spreads to others, he reverses the idea of salvation through the human collective and sees the individual as the embodiment, the true carrier, of collective sentiment. As a social product the individual carries within him a social sense.

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To aspire to perfection (as Jesus instructs his followers to do in Matthew 5.48) ‘is to be everything, to be myself and to be all others, it is to be humanity, to be the universe’ [‘es serlo todo, es ser yo y ser todos los demás, es ser humanidad, es ser universo’ (DST: X, 497)]. Redemption would thus become a collective hope, not an individual one: ‘redemption must be collective, for so is guilt’ [‘la redención tiene que ser colectiva, pues que la culpa lo es’ (DST: X, 497)]. Thus when I hope for myself I am hoping for all.1

6.2 Berdyaev: Redemption from Nothingness As we saw in the preceding chapter, Berdyaev accepts St Paul’s tripartite division of man, but he is interested primarily neither in somatic man nor in psychological man, but in spiritual man. He sees hope as a part of that spiritual dimension into which the individual lifts himself by his own effort.2 Since according to Berdyaev religious experience is wholly immanent, and since he associates man’s spiritual experience with that of St Paul (FAS: 95), it follows that hope should be the kind of hope taught by the latter. According to St Paul hope is indispensable because it is what saves us (Romans, 8.24), because it is what relieves our sorrow (1 Thessalonians, 4.15), because it is what gives us strength (Hebrews, 6.18–19), and because it is what gives us valour to publicly confess our faith (Hebrews, 10.23). Hope is therefore intrinsic to Christianity, ‘the religion of religions’ (FAS: 88). Nevertheless Berdyaev sees hope neither as a theological virtue based on biblical exegesis nor as a coping mechanism which is part of the  In his edition of Del sentimiento trágico de la vida, Nelson Orringer points out that the idea of perfection that Unamuno is using, to carry within one, and be responsible for, an entire humanity, is found in Fray Luis de León’s De los nombres de Cristo, in a passage known to Unamuno (Unamuno 2005, p. 453). 2  This is not the place to discuss the curious nature of Berdyaev’s notion of spiritual experience, but it is worth pointing out that he differentiates it from any standard notion of transcendence, sees it rather as a stage beyond consciousness or as a supra-consciousness, and regards its possibilities as infinite. Berdyaev claims that this capacity to experience the spiritual is within the remit of existential man, or as he picturesquely writes, ‘the conscious is raised to the level of the supra-conscious and is widened and deepened to an unlimited extent. The isolated psycho-corporeal monad begins to open up and the slumbering spirit awakes’ (FAS: 97). 1

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human psychological make-up. Indeed for Berdyaev our coping mechanism is not openness but closure, evasion: ‘We are always surrounded by an infinite world of which we are extremely afraid because we are unable to bear the vision of it, and we defend ourselves against this “redoubtable infinite” by a certain deafness and blindness’ (FAS: 101). What more infinite a world could we think of than that of living in eternity? Yet according to Berdyaev we perceive that possibility not with hope but with fear. To overcome this fear requires a determination to extend our experience beyond the world of the visible and reach out to that of the invisible (and here Berdyaev is again following St Paul’s lead). Although Berdyaev does not have much to say directly about hope, he does have a good deal to say about a closely related subject, redemption, that is to say, our expectation or desire of deliverance from the evil and suffering associated with earthly life. Redemption in the sense that Berdyaev gives the term does not mean ransom, restitution, or reparation, a view of Jesus Christ’s death which Berdyaev rejects as pagan. It means rather deliverance, liberation, emancipation. The messianic hope of Judaism was inherited by Christianity in an altered form: not as a solution to the problems of this world but as the promise of a better one. Pessimism, or hopelessness, belongs in the objective world, the world of finitude. Unlike Kierkegaard, Berdyaev finds no anxiety in the spiritual realm, only hope. No shadow of pessimism is compatible with Christian spirituality. Man’s fate is not devoid of hope; hopelessness belongs only in the material world, not beyond. We may be pessimistic about a solution to the problems of the human race, to the problems of this world; but man is creative and his creativity affects the end itself. That end involves God and man conjointly. When we are struck by the evil and meaninglessness of the world we are implicitly acknowledging the existence of another world free of these blemishes. Indeed it is this other world that Berdyaev sees as the end of history. In as early a work as The Meaning of History (1923) he gave his reasons for the need to reinsert the Christian tradition into our culture: it is the only one that makes any sense of history. Historical destiny demands resolution, and nineteenth-century ideas of progress were wholly deficient in that respect. Only Christianity offers that resolution by seeing historical time within the wider context of divine time, of eternity. Berdyaev perceives the necessary end demanded

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by man not just in man himself, but in the history of mankind. For him history is intimately tied to eschatology: ‘No conception of history is feasible without the idea of fulfilment because history is essentially eschatological’ (MOH: 32). The connection between history and eschatology is at its strongest in Christianity because the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is a historical event that dominates and transcends history: ‘it helps to knit together terrestrial and celestial history’ (MOH: 39). This ties in with Berdyaev’s contention elsewhere that mankind has a divine end, and that to remove this end, as the nineteenth-century positivist doctrine of progress had done, is to render history completely meaningless. To suggest that mankind is moving towards a materialist Utopia, no matter how close or how far this might be, is to disregard and degrade all past generations who have had to endure strife and suffering. Why should some future and unspecified generation be exalted at the expense of all the generations who have gone before? The fundamental moral contradiction of such a position invalidates the materialist conception of a historical destiny. The tragic nature of human history can only be resolved by integrating terrestrial history into celestial history, by re-asserting the Christian view that the end of history lies in the expectation of a new life for all, past, present, and future generations. Christianity’s hope in redemption from the world’s evils is, however, only part of the story. Berdyaev’s starting point is typically existentialist: the anxiety or anguish that characterizes man in his natural environment. In this he is no different from Kierkegaard and has something in common with Heidegger. One can see to begin with that fear is a natural quality that protects animals and people from exposing themselves to excessive danger. But is anxiety connatural to man? For Kierkegaard anxiety comes from constantly having to make choices and wondering whether we are making the right ones as well as from the prospect of being reduced to nothingness. Heidegger goes one step further: man does not simply suffer from a condition called anxiety; man is anxiety. In Kierkegaard we could regard anxiety as taking the form of alienation or the threat of alienation; in Heidegger it is innate, fundamental to humanity, whose time-bounded existence faces the prospect of extinction from the moment of birth. For Berdyaev too, ‘the fundamental background of life is anxiety and suffering’ (DAH: 68). Referring to angst, he explains

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that this ‘is experienced not in the face of empirical danger, but in confronting the mystery of being and non-being, when face to face with the transcendent abyss, in the face of the unknown’ (SAF: 52). This abyss is associated by Berdyaev with Jakob Böhme’s Ungrund, or primeval nothingness beyond divine creation (to which we shall return in Chap. 9). It is the continuing presence or memory of this Ungrund or void, from which undetermined freedom springs according to Berdyaev, that provokes anguish. Is this an acceptable position to take for a Christian? One Berdyaev scholar thinks not: ‘From the Christian point of view the doctrine of the Ungrund and Berdyaev’s later interpretation of it, as well as his attempts to equate it with the “divine nothing” of Dyonisius, should be rejected. There is no evidence of the independent existence of a nothing which God utilizes for creating the world’ (Nucho 1967:188). There is no evidence for the independent existence of God either! There is a misconception here, signalled in Nucho’s comment that ‘nothingness has no existence except as a concept in man’s mind’ (Nucho 1967: 188). Indeed so, but God too is of course a concept in man’s mind, and this does not disqualify him. In any case the Neoplatonic idea of Ungrund can be taken not in a pagan but in a Christian sense if we say that in Christ it moves from a state of undetermined or inapprehensible being (i.e. non-being) to the revelation of the divine logos as real being. This is probably how Berdyaev understood the nothingness of Böhme’s Ungrund, altogether different from Sartre’s version, but perhaps retaining some connection to Heidegger’s use of the term, as Berdyaev himself hints: ‘The idea of non-being, of nothingness, takes a very prominent place in his [Heidegger’s] thought, indeed it might even be supposed that his philosophy is a philosophy of non-being’ (TAR: 107–08). At any rate, what Berdyaev shares with Heidegger is the idea that angst is consubstantial with human existence. In Heidegger there is no solution but to face up to it; in Berdyaev the solution lies in the creative truth, or spiritual reality, of the logos. It is this that gives us hope, which in turn erases anxiety. For Berdyaev, release from anxiety can only take place at the spiritual level, not at the psychosomatic level, despite modern advances in psychopathology. Nor do socioeconomic advances, such as those proposed by Marxists, offer any hope, for Marxism does not understand that man’s unhappiness and disquietude spring from a spiritual, not a material,

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deficiency. Material advances, highly desirable though they are in the interests of equality, serve their purpose only in the material sphere, whereas the real problem lies in the enigmatic nature of life and death: When the social problem has been solved and all men are settled in the conditions of a worthy existence, when there is no suffering which is due to a lack of guarantee of one’s position in society, or to hunger, to cold, to illiteracy, to sickness, to injustice, then, precisely then, the feeling and consciousness of the insuperably tragic nature of life will be intensified. (DAH: 79–80)

The source of man’s anxiety is a fear of the future, and especially of death. Since fear and suffering cannot be evaded, they have to be accepted, but not submissively or resignedly: ‘Suffering is the testing of man, an assay of his spiritual strength as he follows the paths of freedom’ (DAH: 84–85). Berdyaev invokes the spiritual transfiguration of man as the only real source of hope, and this is where he differs from Heidegger. Heidegger associates anxiety with temporality: awareness of time is a form of anxiety. Berdyaev accepts this, but he adds his own crucial qualification: ‘Man’s outlook on the future is determined not only by anxiety and fear, but also by creative activity and hope’ (SAS: 98). Whereas the past is determined and decided forever, the future is open, undetermined, offering the freedom of creative activity—Berdyaev’s leitmotif. Only this creative outlook ‘can liberate Being from the tyranny of time’ (SAS: 103), that is to say, from Heidegger’s anxiety wrought by temporality. For this we need to develop a sensitivity to what is divine in every instant. That sensitivity, that hope, belongs only in the spiritual realm. But is not this spirituality perhaps the warped product of material suffering as Marx and others have argued? Berdyaev readily admits that suffering and spirituality are connected, but one is not the consequence of the other, for spirituality dwells deep inside man; it is at the root of his being, not a reaction imposed by external circumstances. Such external circumstances—misfortunes, deprivations, exploitation—deserve attention and redress, but the tragedy of life, its ephemerality, will remain. Man is a creature who is sensitive to evil and its consequent suffering, and who feels compassion. Hence man seeks deliverance from these inner

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experiences, not just from external factors like poverty and oppression. One way out in the past has been through the Buddhist nirvana, another through Orphism, yet another through Orgiasm and its associated Dionysian cults. But these forms of compensation for the evil and suffering of the world entail the loss of personality, the elimination of the consciousness of self. This for Berdyaev is as inauthentic as it is for Unamuno. It is in fact evasion. What Berdyaev repeatedly insists on is how we respond in full cognizance of our wretched condition. The crucial response in Berdyaev’s terms is not narrowly religious, as it might be in many Christian denominations (i.e. that we suffer, as Jesus Christ suffered, in expiation of our sins). The New Testament may tell us about redemption through Jesus Christ’s sacrifice, but, according to Berdyaev, it is silent on our response; that is left to our initiative, to our freedom. It is our response that marks our hope: just as we respond to God, God will respond to us. Here Berdyaev steers a course between man’s existential situation—our cosmic loneliness— and what has traditionally been seen as revelation: ‘Man hungers for a new and higher kind of life which is in accordance with his dignity and is eternal. It is this which really constitutes the revelation of the New Covenant’ (MCA: 176). There is no certainty, no prior knowledge; there is only expectation. In redemption Berdyaev sees a necessary step, but only an enabling one. What is redemption for?, he asks. It is to give us courage to play a creative part. ‘Man justifies himself before the Creator not only by redemption but by creativeness as well’ (MCA: 110). Hope reveals itself in creativeness. ‘Human nature finally justifies itself before the Creator not by extinguishing itself but by its own creative expression. Man must absolutely be’ (MCA: 111).3 Our hope takes the form of a spiritual assertion or striving. The human will is directed towards goodness, truth, and beauty. That is what it hopes for, symbolized by paradise. But against this there is hopelessness, symbolized by hell. Alongside the fear of hell lies ‘the dream of paradise […]. Our life passes between paradise and hell’ (DOM: 284). Because of his pain and suffering man dreams of recovering a lost paradise. An image or vestige of this lost paradise is retained in the beauty of  We can see here a precise anticipation of Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be (1952).

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nature, in the aesthetic contemplation of which we may forget our anxieties. Art and poetry can have a similar effect and make us feel participants in ‘heavenly bliss through creative ecstasy, i.e. through creative ascent to higher realms’ (DOM: 287). This paradise we dream of is ‘cessation of care, escape from Heidegger’s world of anxiety, and acquisition of spiritual wholeness’ (DOM: 287). But we must not be misled: this paradise we envisage is merely an escape from hell. ‘We live in a world of sin, on this side of good and evil, and it is extremely difficult for us to conceive of heaven’ (DOM: 287). Real paradise would be beyond the human categories of good and evil; it would, in human terms, be closer to beauty, to those rare moments of aesthetic absorption in which we attain a sense of completeness and equanimity. Berdyaev does not accept the more traditional interpretation of the symbolic narrative of a lost paradise: the sin of disobedience. In his interpretation the condition of a protected life in the biblical paradise was the acceptance of ignorance. But man declined blissful ignorance and ‘chose the pain and tragedy of cosmic life in order to explore his destiny to its utmost depths’ (DOM: 36). In other words man exercised his freedom, without which good and evil would make no sense. Hell is the price we pay for freedom—the freedom of distinguishing between good and evil and making our choice. Human hope is the dream of recovering a lost utopia. But we cannot return to that mythic paradise, for freedom itself does not allow us to renounce freedom.4 Our creativity, or participation in the higher plane of creation, depends on freedom. Because we know that we cannot recover the original paradise we envisage, a paradise of the natural world, we turn to a future paradise, a spiritual paradise or heaven. Man’s distinction between good and evil has been projected into a future life as heaven and hell. But this is a misconception: it misconstrues evil. The reality of evil lies in the fact that it puts freedom to the test. Through freedom we can engage in a heroic struggle against evil. Real hope is victory over evil, not escape from it. Berdyaev castigates those who reduce the idea of salvation to the hope of avoiding hell, that is, the continuation of the suffering associated with this earth. This is the idea of those who believe that the pursuit of  Here Berdyaev very clearly anticipates Sartre’s famous aphorism ‘man is condemned to be free’.

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happiness and contentment is the object of life, ‘the invention of those who hold the lowest moral theories—hedonism, eudaemonism, and utilitarianism’ (DOM: 291). They see life in God as bliss on earth. Release from earthly suffering is the hope of psychological man, whereas what interests Berdyaev is St Paul’s third category, spiritual man. The latter knows that evil and its consequences are the result of freedom, and it is this same freedom that allows us not only to confront evil but to recognize its paradoxical role in enabling us to identify good and hence God’s role in it: ‘The possibility of evil is the condition of the good […]. God’s toleration of evil is a paradox which is not sufficiently dwelt upon’ (DOM: 41). On the one hand hope is the antidote of fear, or, as Berdyaev says, ‘exile from paradise provokes terror’ (DOM: 41), and as a way of evading this terror we pin our hopes on God’s promise of salvation. On the other hand hope is a recognition of our capacity to overcome our sense of Heideggerian fallenness. Spiritual man understands that good and evil are human categories, the categories of our ‘fallen’ world. We cannot pin those terms upon God, only upon ourselves. Hence our hope must be seen as overcoming ourselves, or, more accurately, as creating new realities, new values, and new ways of thinking about ourselves, in a word, achieving a new spiritual outlook. This spirituality, Berdyaev argues, is not a purely personal matter. Indeed ‘the tendency to regard the spiritual life as a way of salvation, and Christianity as a religion of personal salvation, has led to spirituality being narrowed, diminished and weakened’ (SAR: 149). The longing for deliverance from our fallen world, that is, the longing for the ‘Kingdom of God’ and the truth which it contains, implies social, not just personal, salvation. Salvation amounts to the establishment of true human relationships, those of the Ego and Thou, the Ego and We, the realization of a sense of solidarity and identity with our fellow humans. Personal salvation makes sense only through a common salvation. Genuine spirituality is comprehensive, based on the enduring value of human relationships. ‘Every man is answerable to his fellow. How can I be saved if other men and the world are doomed to perish?’ (SAR: 150). Salvation, which is the ultimate object of our hope, must be a collective, universal calling.

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6.3 Marcel: Overcoming the Human Predicament Hope is central to Marcel’s metaphysics; indeed he subtitles his Homo viator with the phrase Prolegomènes à une métaphysique de l’espérance. His attempts to explain what hope is are often complex and not easy to grasp. Marcel’s approach is largely empirical, that is, based on experience and particularly his own. But for Marcel, we must remember, experience is not limited to the visible or material world; it includes the spiritual world. One indication of the reality of this other kind of experience he finds in music, which, he says, ‘has been for me an unshakeable testimony of a deeper reality in which it seemed to me that everything fragmentary and unfulfilled on the sensory level would find fulfilment’ (EBH: 21). Hope, like music, is found to be an accessible and fulfilling experience. The problem for Marcel is how to define it by analogy with other more easily recognizable experiences. This creates a difficulty, as we shall see, for Marcel is forced to accept that hope takes us beyond established or common experience. In ‘On the Ontological Mystery’ Marcel defines hope as ‘a mysterious principle which is in connivance with me, which cannot but will that which I will, if what I will deserves to be willed and is, in fact willed by the whole of my being’ (POE: 28). This raises more questions than it answers. Is this mysterious principle inside or outside? Who is to judge what deserves to be willed? How can one ascertain that the whole of one’s being is involved in asserting this mysterious principle? Marcel repeatedly returns to the problem of explaining the nature of hope and gives a range of definitions: ‘hope is the arm of the disarmed’ (TSN: 54); ‘hope is a surge […], a soaring leap’ (TSN: 53); ‘hope is even the very stuff of which our souls are made’ (TSN: 55); ‘hope is akin to courage’ (MOB: II, 177); hope might be ‘another name for the exigence of transcendence, or […] be that exigence itself ’ (MOB: II, 182). Marcel obviously struggles to define hope transparently, but he steadfastly maintains its centrality. He insists on the need to distinguish between what we desire and what we hope. Desire emanates from the ego, whereas hope is much more than an aspiration or preference; it has a firmness of purpose which desire lacks;

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indeed they belong in different spheres of our life. Hope is prophetic while desire is not; and while it may not see the future, hope ‘affirms as if it saw’ (TSN: 59). Because hope is a confident affirmation about the future, it follows that it is outside all possible empirical disproof. Nevertheless scepticism is misconceived because it does not take into account the faith of the subject who hopes: ‘It is the presence of faith that gives to hope its intelligible frame’ (MOB: II, 193). Hope, then, implies a belief; but is there any value in this belief?, one might ask. It is reasonable to judge that no miracle will supervene to transform our hopes into reality. But this applies to a ‘hope that’ rather than to a ‘hope in’ or simply hope. Marcel argues that to place conditions on one’s hope (if, say, I hope to recover from my illness by a specified date) is to limit one’s hope and admit the possibility of despair. Rather than a passing or situational disposition, hope is for Marcel an ontological disposition, an inclination that is connatural to the human being, but which nevertheless cannot be taken as an external guarantee of success, as a kind of free ticket, for this absolute hope is focused on a supreme agency on which we cannot impose conditions. In the human situation such an ‘invincible hope’ (HMV: 41) is unreal. Marcel is forthright in his rejection of religious leaders who resort to sophistry to reassure believers who might be tempted to despair in the face of terrible adversity. Hope does not entail any kind of absolute security. Uncertainty must remain because we do not know the designs of that supreme agency or God, and those who employ God’s assumed infinite goodness to guarantee a favourable outcome of adverse circumstances are guilty of verbal trickery. Absolute hope is thus an evasion. At first sight there may appear to be a contradiction between the view of hope as conviction, as affirmation, and the rejection of absolute hope as evasion and delusion, or as Marcel calls it ‘infinite apathy’ (HMV: 42). This may remind one of the theological notion of presumption (over-­ confidence in God’s mercy with no effort on our part), but what Marcel is getting at is that authentic hope in no way offers a pretext to avoid the unpalatable truth of the human condition. Our lives are full of all kinds of insecurity and we must accept this situation rather than defy it. Accept it, but not succumb to it. Here Marcel treads a thin line between the Scylla of despair and the Charybdis of presumption, not in theological but in existential terms. If on the one hand the adversities of life threaten

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to plunge us in despair, on the other the comfortable assumption of a benign outcome threatens to make us inactive spectators. Marcellian hope eschews this kind of total pessimism or total optimism. It is certainly a conviction, but not a Pascalian bet, nor a calculation. Of course one may not hope while at the same time thinking that reasons for hoping are wholely lacking. But reasons for hoping are not the same thing as hope. Reason can make its own calculations of the chances of something happening without it affecting hope because hope is not based on ‘the calculating faculty of reason […], and everything will be lost if we try to combine them’ (HMV: 59). Hope based on a calculation of probabilities is not hope but prediction. A person who hopes against all the odds or against all the evidence that a missing loved one will re-appear is not making a calculation of probabilities or a prediction. That person is expressing a deep desire for reunion which has nothing to do with whether it is reasonable or unreasonable to entertain such a hope. It just is so and beyond the reach of logic. For the person who hopes, hope is real, not a mere sophism. Given that hope is a personal conviction, what is surprising for an existentialist thinker is that it is said not to be derived from experience, or, more correctly, from past experience, and therefore cannot be judged on past outcomes. Hope is rather ‘the weaving of experience now in process, or in other words in an adventure now going forward’ (HMV: 46). It follows that since hope is constantly regenerated any analogy with past experience breaks down, yet Marcel contends that ‘this does not run counter to an authentic empiricism’ (HMV: 46) but only to a dogmatism which misunderstands the nature of experience. Of course a hardened empiricist might want to query this stance, for it seems entirely as if Marcel tries to get away with it by claiming, no less, that established experience is a narrowly misleading standpoint, what he terms ‘dogmatic empiricism’, from which to judge. Yet is not past experience after all what most living creatures rely on to cope with the new? Marcel’s argument is that to judge the unknown from the perspective of the known is tantamount to giving up hope. It is as if time no longer passes, the nihil novum sub sole of the Book of Ecclesiastes. It is not so much my experience or your experience as experience in general that Marcel is denouncing, for such a criterion suggests that time can bring nothing new, that there is no

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new experience to be had. For Marcel this is clearly unacceptable: experience is open to the future, indeed it must be if young people are to gain their own. Hope thus appears as an aspect of the openness of time just as despair is of its closure. Presumption is therefore as much a denial of hope as is despair: ‘Presumption is definitely foreign to hope’ (HMV: 49). It is analogous to ‘awaiting a gift or favour from another being but only on the grounds of his liberality’ (HMV: 49), not his obligation. The problem arises because this ‘hope in X’ is turned into an expectation or even a justified claim; by this means, genuine or pure hope is contaminated by self-interest, becomes degraded and loses its value. It becomes the type of hope that the uncritical masses naively place in the propaganda of unscrupulous political leaders and their self-serving promises. At the same time those sceptics who see hope as a mere illusion without foundation are in the same position as those who think humans do not take risks: what they are afraid of and what they really seek to avoid is disappointment, which is another form of presumption, this time in the negative: for them abstention is better than disappointment. Nor is hope for Marcel simply a subjective stimulant aimed at bringing all kind of human enterprises to a successful conclusion. This determination on the part of the agent is a contingent fact that applies to any enterprise aimed at producing a material result by whatever means: it would apply to ‘pitiless masters driving a multitude of terrorized slaves with whips’ (HMV: 51). Hope for myself, for my undertakings, for my well-­ being, for my fate could be little more than the instinct of self-­preservation. Genuine hope entails a relationship of love with what is hoped for; it is in that sense a creative, rather than a self-protective sentiment. It is a kind of communion, not a solitary undertaking. It demands an interaction, an exchange between giving and receiving, ‘an exchange which is the mark of all spiritual life’ (HMV: 44). It is at its most convincing when it is a common or shared hope; indeed we are loath to express it in front of those who do not share it or who deny its reality. At this point we can appreciate that, as is often the case in Marcel, the idea of communion forms the indispensable background against which individual sentiments acquire their significance and impact. Genuine hope transcends desire, in other words it does not remain stuck in the subject who hopes, but

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radiates out to express itself via a presence captured in Marcel’s phrase ‘I hope in thee for us’ (HMV: 54). This Thou is for Marcel ‘the guarantee of the union which holds us together […], the very cement which binds the whole into one’ (HMV: 54). There cannot be absolute hope, but there can be hope in an absolute Thou which is the common bond between those who hope. Hope and love cannot be separated; they come together in what Marcel calls a presence: ‘This presence is incarnated in the “us” for whom “I hope in thee”, that is to say in a communion of which I proclaim the indestructibility’ (HMV: 60). It is not easy to reduce to plain language this recondite explanation of hope as a common pursuit, but Marcel appears to be saying that his hope (by implication everyone’s hope) takes him outside of himself to a Thou. Since hope and fraternity are interconnected, because ‘to love one’s brothers is above all to have hope in them’ (EBH: 142), when I hope I am hoping in the name of all. Against a static future bereft of innovative strategies and overlaid with backward-looking empiricist constraints, there is the remedy of communion and hope. Authentic hope is thus directed outwards, at some power that does not depend purely on us. It carries an implicit recognition that alone we can achieve nothing. It is in this sense communion among beings. Yet this still leaves the central question unanswered, as Marcel himself recognizes quite explicitly: does hope depend on us or on an outside agency? Or to put it in different words, is hope innate or is it the result of a supernatural grace? But here we are at the margins of theology, and we know that Marcel had neither the wish nor the intention of crossing that particular boundary. Marcellian hope is both an interior force and an external offering. Something is offered to us, but we are free to refuse it. The centre of those promptings is not within our reach, but our response is. We assert our hope even though any outcome does not depend on us. But this recognition that ultimately our hope rests elsewhere must not be confused with passivity or quietism, or even a dispositional optimism. ‘Hope [is] the prolongation into the unknown of an activity which is central—that is to say rooted in being. Hence it has affinities, not with desire, but with the will’ (POE: 33). Given this double dependency, both on the will and on an external agency, Marcel goes on to suggest that hope could ‘be defined as the will when it is made to bear on what does not depend on itself ’

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(POE: 33). If this is so, hope is something active, even creative. But why do we bring it forth? Marcel’s answer is that hope is in some way correlated to despair. For it is only in a world prone to despair that hope can be affirmed. As the sentiment it is, hope belongs in the heart, not in the objective analysis of a problem. In the latter case a sceptical attitude towards hope could well be justified. To place one’s hopes in, say, technological solutions is to court despair because we hand over control to a system that does not understand our ontological needs. It is not technology that is at fault but our expectations of it. Both scientific research and artistic endeavour are creative if we do not become hypnotized and abjure our responsibility to our total being as distinct from our material well-­ being. We must exemplify what Marcel calls ontological fidelity. To hope is thus to be faithful to one’s being as well as to love (i.e. hope for) other beings. Hope is firmly focused on deliverance from our present trials. Marcel uses the analogy of prisoners of war in a concentration camp, kept alive in their tragic state by the hope of liberation, to suggest that hope is a reaction to a feeling of captivity: ‘To hope is to carry within me the private assurance that however bleak things may seem, my present intolerable situation cannot be final; there must be some way out’ (MOB: II, 179). Hope is ultimately the hope of salvation, of a path towards deliverance, and here Marcel, despite the complexities of his approach, adopts the familiar Unamunian stance: ‘Salvation is nothing if it does not deliver us from death. […] All hope is a hope of salvation’ (MOB: II, 202). There cannot be any deliverance in a world whose very structure is the inevitability of death, something that the dreamers of utopian systems of social organization, like Marx, have failed to appreciate. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that, despite his declaration that he keeps his metaphysics at arm’s length from religion, Marcel is here philosophizing as a Christian: ‘And I would say—not only as a Christian, but also as a metaphysician— that for me hope is the hope of salvation, being saved, being rescued, and I would say more exactly the hope for the resurrection’ (TSN: 59). Having raised all kind of objections to this transcendent hope and answered them, Marcel is left with a quasi-mystical affirmation. First, hope is said to challenge the evidence which has been adduced to challenge hope itself. Second, hope establishes a connection beyond logic between what

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is new and what is a home-coming (the Greek nostos). Third, preservation and revolution belong in the same unity ‘which dwells in hope and is beyond the reach of all our faculties of reasoning or of conceptual formulation’ (HMV: 61). This is the borderline where metaphysics begins to metamorphose into metamystics. There remains the question of hope’s connection to anxiety, a topic (broadly interpreted) to which Marcel devoted a whole book, L’Homme problématique (1955). It should be said that existentialist terminology is not consistent, with anxiety, anguish, angst, even dread, being used interchangeably by various authors and their translators; in effect these various terms are variations on Kierkegaard’s Danish Angest. Marcel has preferred to adopt the term inquiétude, rendered by his translator as uneasiness in Problematic Man. The kind of uneasiness Marcel has in mind, has elements of anxiety, anguish, and even other forms of mental distress, but is not necessarily destructive: the mental or spiritual restlessness which it invokes can be productive by stimulating creativity. This ambivalence is in itself a pointer to the fact that we are dealing with an existential attribute inseparable from the situation of man. Marcel raises the question of whether such an attribute is compatible with belief in the absolute goodness of God. His answer is incontrovertible: the kind of uneasiness or inquietude he has in mind is not only compatible with religious belief but even ‘required in order for faith not to degenerate into an almost passive abandon in which the soul, far from being able to develop or actualize its most precious virtualities, is in danger of growing numb’ (PRM: 71). This, too, is exactly the risk that hope runs: that of hybridizing into presumption and becoming infinite apathy. If this was an error in the past it is even more unacceptable in our own day, when ‘the repercussion of what takes place at certain nerve-centres of the earth’s crust upon the destiny of the entire species can no longer be contested but by those who seek to blindfold themselves voluntarily’ (PRM: 131). We cannot escape, even as individuals, into a protective shell separated from the rest of the world. Our planet has become both a local and a disturbed place: ‘No one can henceforth be completely protected against a certain disorder, a certain malaise, which corresponds to this disturbance’ (PRM: 152). Attempts to get rid of uneasiness and anguish by political dirigisme or economic laissez-faire are bound to fail because they make no allowance

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for the constitutive nature of the human predicament (which Marcel traces in his book from pre-Christian writers right through to his contemporaries). This existential uneasiness cannot be brushed under the carpet: it is a symptom of humanity, even more evident in our contemporary world than hitherto. To regard man as a mere functional unit who is there simply to fulfil a task, and whose uneasiness is dismissed as a pathological defect, is an abusive pretence. A human person is not a function but a being whose complexity and value are infinitely above that of a cog-wheel in a machine. Thus ‘uneasiness and the aspiration to being are today closely interdependent’ (PRM: 139). Uneasiness, then, is the norm, not the exception; indeed an absence of uneasiness betrays spiritual or psychological sclerosis: our inmost being is lost in mist, as is the being of others. Yet on the other hand uneasiness must not be allowed to evolve into a deeper anguish, for anguish, pace Kierkegaard and followers such as Heidegger, ends up by paralysing, by becoming a masochistic indulgence. Uneasiness can and should be an inner spring towards hope, such as is found in St Augustine: ‘For this uneasiness is after all the aspiration of a minus-being towards a plus-­ being, and it is quite possible that it can only find its term beyond the narrow limits within which our apparent existence goes on, in a loving contemplation which can only be a participation’ (PRM: 143). Uneasiness has the potential for becoming the spark that ignites our hope, may indeed be seen as an intimation that our material world does not satisfy our exigencies, does not quench our thirst for higher values. To deny hope is to deny our human status.

6.4 Conclusions Hope is in one sense a perfectly natural attribute of the human being: we need to look to the future simply in order to survive. Religion, and specifically Christianity, has raised this natural quality to the level of a supernatural virtue or divine gift. The question arises as to whether this theological concept can be treated existentially, that is to say within the parameters of our real experience and without resorting to untestable supernatural beliefs and assumptions. Our hopes may indeed cover both

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mundane and otherworldly matters, and in the case of many people probably do, but what we are concerned with here is the issue of analysing and explaining a transcendent sentiment in philosophical terms. Do these three thinkers succeed in giving a convincing account of why hope, and more especially hope in salvation, exists and what precisely it entails? For Unamuno hope stems from our existential insecurity or anxiety; it drives our search for ontological security and is the basis for faith. But he sheds no light on the origin of our anxiety or on how it is assuaged by a hope that on the face of it is wholly contingent. He met the concept of anxiety in Kierkegaard and took it no further save for extending the notion of religious restlessness to other conflictive believers such as Pascal, Lamennais, and Père Hyacinthe. On the other hand he is fully aware of the existential nature of anxiety, as distinct from a purely psychopathic condition affecting only some. Yet this by itself is not a sufficient explanation of transcendent hope, unless we assume that for every ailment there is a countervailing remedy to which we turn almost unconsciously. Certainly Unamuno makes much of hope as a protective measure, as a psychological tool almost: it is a coping mechanism. But this does not shed any light on hope beyond one’s life. For I could have hope in achieving better health, or better living conditions, or better employment as a way of coping with adverse circumstances yet without belief in an afterlife or transcendent phenomenon. What is it, then, that makes me seek consolation in the religious or transcendent notion of hope? Unamuno’s sole response to this question is that I do not want to die. Marcel, too, relates hope to anxiety, but less as a palliative than as an outright challenge. Anxiety can be positive or negative. It is negative when it is allowed to degenerate into a disabling anguish that immobilizes our will to overcome our earthly afflictions. It is positive when it incites us to turn to hope as the armament with which to confront adversity and defeatism. Hope is there waiting to be called upon to combat indifference and despair. If Unamuno sees hope as a home remedy or off-the-shelf medicament, Marcel sees it as a more radical surgical intervention, to which of course we have to give our assent. To do so is to recognize our innate aspirations to fulfilment and our openness to a higher dimension of being.

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Berdyaev, on the contrary, does not regard hope as a coping mechanism; indeed this is for him a misinterpretation of what we are truly afraid of, because what we really fear is not the future but infinity. And we fear infinity because of our hidebound notions of our world and our capacities. The problem lies in our ties to this world and our reluctance to open ourselves to a truly spiritual experience. Whereas Marcel sees man as desirous of fulfilment in a world that goes beyond our material circumstances, Berdyaev sees man as fighting shy of such an enterprise, as averse to any kind of spiritual adventure that loosens our ties with our earthly existence. Our hope, more often than not, is focused on deliverance from adversities in this life rather than on the enjoyment of a higher form of existence. Berdyaev does not deny the reality and impact of anxiety, and, like Heidegger, associates it with temporality. But he argues that hope is not the solution for this malady, because hope belongs in the spiritual realm and anxiety belongs in the psychosomatic world: only in the spiritual realm can we leave our anxieties behind. We have to accept the reality of the spiritual before genuine hope can be operative. The question of whether hope is something we generate from within ourselves or is a gift that is freely available does not evince a clear answer. Somewhat disconcertingly it appears to be both, perhaps because these writers are attempting to straddle the religious or supernatural world and the psychosomatic world. As a natural defence mechanism, however, hope does leave us short. It may help in our day-to-day living by persuading us to prepare for a tomorrow, but it hardly begins to address the looming question of our loss of loved ones and our ultimate destiny. Here Unamuno argues the simplest case: it is the hope of perdurance and reunion that gives us faith, because faith bolsters our hope, turns it into a conviction or strong expectation rather than a simple desire. We are born with the capacity to hope. What hope is telling us, argues Unamuno, is that life is too precious to be annihilated; it is a unique creation and one that, our instinct tells us, deserves to survive. This is supported by our sense of beauty, since we associate beauty above all with what captures the essence of a natural phenomenon, what lies beyond the accidental, what perdures amidst change. Beauty points to permanence, and if we are sensitive to beauty it must be because we ourselves are tuned in to values that stretch beyond the contingent and ephemeral. The fact that we hope is

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itself the best indication that our hope is justified. Hope is thus creative because it generates its own motion, it is a conveyance to our desired destination. Marcel follows this same line of thought but with sophisticated arguments that add considerable complexity. Hope provides its own fulfilment but its source remains mysterious. We have to accept it as a constitutive part of our psyche or soul, and it points to the fact that the human being demands a better, more fulfilling outcome while recognizing that there is no guarantee of such an outcome. Absolute assurance is inimical to hope because hope has to be nurtured and re-affirmed in the face of uncertainty and discouragement. If hope does not offer absolute reassurance, neither is it averse to risk: abstention is alien to hope. We have to assert our hope, to will it, even while conceding that there needs to be an external agency involved in bringing our hope to fruition. Interestingly, where Unamuno sees hope as a way of combatting our dreaded temporality, Marcel sees it more positively as an opening-up of our temporal existence. That our existence is open-ended is what enables us to hope, and hope in turn persuades us that no door has been closed and the future lies open to new experience, but an experience that may yet turn into the yearned-for home-coming, interestingly a notion found in Heidegger too, as we saw in the Introduction, and which evokes the frequent biblical symbol of exile/home. Berdyaev associates hope not so much with an innate disposition or an external agency as with freedom. Freedom above all is what characterizes human existence, and everything else stems from that condition. The future may cause some anxiety, but it also offers freedom. Because it is undetermined, it offers us the opportunity to engage creatively with it. This is what hope amounts to: the determination to rise above our wretched circumstances and aim at a higher kind of existence. It is in this creative endeavour that genuine hope reveals itself. Hopelessness is captivity, hope is freedom. Like Unamuno, Berdyaev holds that our sensitivity to beauty is a strong indicator of our awareness of a world beyond this one, a world which though difficult to conceive—not the lost Eden which we know is irrecoverable—is intuited nevertheless as a spiritual victory over suffering and evil. If freedom entails the existence of good

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and evil, without the recognition of which there could be no freedom, hope is that dimension of freedom that moves us to triumph over evil. There is a further aspect of hope that all three thinkers mention with greater or lesser emphasis: hope as a collective enterprise. Berdyaev is probably the one who has least to say on this, at any rate in terms of hope itself. Nevertheless, he does emphasize that salvation, which carries hope implicitly, should not be seen as a purely personal quest. ‘The concept of Christianity as exclusively a religion of personal salvation’ (RSC: 62) he considers to be a distortion, and individual salvation as meaningless. Salvation involves social transfiguration, and the vocation to the spiritual dimension so important in Berdyaev ‘always involves creativeness; and creativeness is always concerned with the world, with other men, with society, with history’ (SAR: 152). It is the human race which calls for salvation. Unamuno is a little less certain than Berdyaev about the idea of collective salvation because our hope for salvation, while there, cannot be given any logical or intelligible form. All that we know is that we share, believers and unbelievers alike, a longing for the perdurance of our consciousness, of our selves. Because this consciousness involves consciousness of others—each one of us depends on the existence of others for the awareness of one’s own identity—those who hope for salvation also hope for the salvation of others. How aware one is of this soteriological solidarity Unamuno does not say. Marcel is far more insistent on the communal applicability of hope. He argues that hope, especially as ‘hope in’, entails a relationship of love. It is not a sentiment directed inwards but outwards to another being or beings, since hope for Marcel is a form of fidelity. The ultimate hope is that of salvation from death as finality. But while I am responsible for my hope, I cannot bring about my own salvation. For that I need an external intervention, which must entail the possibility of universal salvation. Hence Marcel’s view of hope as communion. To a degree, then, all three thinkers associate hope not just with oneself but with others. Even if not a collective enterprise, hope, to be meaningful demands a collective outcome.

7 Love and Egotism

It is surprising that such an ubiquitous topic and common sentiment as is love has attracted so little attention among philosophers, especially among the moderns; only in the last two to three decades has the subject been accorded sustained attention. Existentialist philosophers are no exception: by and large they ignore the subject or see it somewhat dismissively as disguised sexuality or self-seeking indulgence. It would seem that for philosophers love has traditionally been an embarrassing topic that should be avoided. In Being and Time, when he analyses being-in-the-­ world and being-with-others, Heidegger has little room for love; the furthest he ventures is into solicitude, which ‘is guided by considerateness and forbearance’ (Heidegger 1962: 159 [§123]). In the case of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, the situation is far more negative: love is possession, it is conflict, it is enslavement; another’s love for me is a threat to my freedom just as my love for another is a threat to his freedom. Love is not a giving but a demand, ‘the demand to be loved’ (Sartre 2003: 397). Indeed love is impossible: ‘love as a fundamental mode of being-for-­ others holds in its being-for-others the seed of its own destruction’ (Sartre 2003: 399). The integrity of being demands the rejection of love.

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Thinkers of a Christian persuasion are, unsurprisingly, more open to the relevance of love, given the centrality of charitable love in the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. St Paul stated his priorities very clearly when he declared that the third theological virtue was the greatest of the three (1 Corinthians, 13.13); and he held that all commandments that deal with relations with one’s fellow men were comprehended in just one. Love, he concluded, ‘is the fulfilling of the law’ (Romans, 8–10). To the incontestable human attributes of being and knowing, St Augustine added a third and indispensable one: loving. Loving is no illusion, he says in The City of God. For even if the objects that I love were illusory, it would still be true that I love them. And if their truth is known, ‘who can doubt that, when they are loved, that love is an established truth?’ (Augustine 2003: 460 [City of God, Book 11, chapter 26]). For St Thomas Aquinas the virtue of charity was if anything even more important, and his death deprived him of writing the third part of his Compendium theologiae, which was to have been devoted to this topic after Part I on faith and Part II on hope. ‘Love is necessary that your affections may be put in order’, he tells his addressee in his preface to the Compendium (Aquinas 2012: 2). Even without the unwritten third part we obtain a clear impression of St Thomas’ conviction of the reality of love: ‘God is goodness itself, and goodness is the cause of love’ (Aquinas 2012: 176 [ch. 165]). Any existentialist philosophy that seeks to embrace Christianity must perforce give some account of love. There has unfortunately arisen some confusion about what kind of love Christian love refers to, whether one represented by the Greek terms eros or agape, and their very rough Latin counterparts amor and caritas. Eros has been devalued or distorted as merely sexual desire (which it was not originally, being more in the nature of a relationship). Agape was a celebratory meal, which in Christianity was turned into a symbol of God’s love for humankind which humanity is encouraged to return. Amor represented attachment, as in love of one’s country, and caritas was compassionate love. Since in Christianity love is closely associated with charity, with compassion and self-dedication to another, this is how the term will in general be taken here, with due recognition of any deviation indicated by each of the three thinkers under scrutiny. It is evident that the love extolled by Jesus of Nazareth in the Gospels is not simply a

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feeling: it is a call to action. It involves positive engagement with one’s fellow-humans, an openness to others, and a willing disposition to serve them. It is not an uncontrolled or accidental sentiment; it is a willed and conscious stance clearly exemplified by the Samaritan in the parable that carries his name (Luke 10, 30–37).

7.1 Unamuno: From Self-Love to Universal Love Although we are here primarily concerned with Unamuno’s philosophical essays, his production within the field of imaginative literature must not be forgotten. In some form or other, the love theme is ever-present in Unamuno’s work, though in this specific instance we are interested in those cases in which it appears in conjunction with a religious theme or situation. Nevertheless, one cannot crudely identify the apparent philosophy of a fictional work or character with the author. While imaginative works tell us something about the author’s interests, they must not be taken as direct expositions of the author’s personal stance or ideas, as essays can. Novels and plays have their own formal mechanisms which affect their message: the author does not speak directly. Bearing this in mind, one can select a number of instances in which the love theme is combined with a religious theme, notably La tía Tula, San Manuel Bueno, mártir, and Una historia de amor, to which one could add the play El hermano Juan. El hermano Juan is the most unusual of these four works in that it is a self-conscious variation on the Don Juan legend, especially Zorrilla’s version, where the love of the abandoned woman for Don Juan is transformed not into indignant or self-pitying protest as in the original Don Juan version of Tirso de Molina but into a salvific intercession. Unamuno’s play is not about Don Juan’s salvation but about his flight into the religious life. Though he loves his women, this Don Juan is overwhelmed by their possessive ardour, feels besieged and emasculated and seeks peace in the friary (We meet much the same sentiment of beleagueredness and debilitation in the novelette Dos madres where Juan ends up committing

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suicide.) That the story is about love and not sexual conquest is confirmed by Unamuno in the prologue which he added to the 1934 published version of the play, a fascinating essay on the Don Juan figure and on motherly love and the love between man and woman. Brother Juan, from the relative seclusion of his friary, becomes a matchmaker par excellence, famous in his land for encouraging and saving marriages. Instead of procreating himself, he encourages procreation in others. His motivation, however, remains a mystery, for there is nothing in his words to suggest that he does what he does for love of God or even that he found the peace he yearned for in religion. His love life has become a vicarious one. His affect appears to belong neither to the category of libidinous love, nor to that of the mutually supportive love of spouses, nor to the sublimated love of God. It is an unfocused kind of love, as if giving up the love of women had left him emotionally adrift. Love in La tía Tula is of a motherly kind, as the eponymous protagonist takes on the daunting task of raising a family of five children after the death of the father and his two wives. There is a religious parallel with the Catholic notion of the communion of saints, according to which Christians form a mystical body in Christ made up of the living (the Church militant) and the departed (the Church penitent and the Church triumphant), a doctrine derived from the Apostles’ Creed. The key notion is that of the unity of all Christians, both living and dead, in a single body. This is what Tula tries to achieve within the confines of her family: a harmonious unity in which the dead members have a continuing presence in the community of those who are alive. The basis of this ‘communion’ is a mystical love that eschews all sexuality, which Tula deliberately avoids for herself. But if Tula’s maternal dedication to her adopted family is exemplary (which is indeed Unamuno’s own view expressed in the prologue to El hermano Juan), her motives remain unclear. She could have married her widowed brother-in-law or other suitors, but rejects this possibility. Fear of the male? Repugnance towards sex? Resistance to biological reproduction? A religious vocation? All these explanations are mooted, but none is favoured over any other. What there is very clearly is fidelity to the memory of others, inspired in Jesus Christ’s injunction to his disciples at the last supper to keep his memory and his message alive (Luke, 22.19). This is what Tula does: invoke the presence of those members of

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her community that have pre-deceased her. The echo of Jesus Christ’s authority handed down to the apostles rings loud and clear when Tula, as her death approaches, entreats her chosen successor as head of the lay monastic order she has founded not to let the other members accept that she has gone forever. And indeed Unamuno prolongs the novel beyond Tula’s death to show that her influence and her spirit live on in the family community. It would be true to say that in Tula Unamuno has given us a complex personality and that we do not know what to make of her love for those around her, except that this is her calling, with its positive and negative aspects. It is undoubtedly a Christian love in the self-sacrificial sense, but Unamuno seems to interpret such love as a hunger for imperishability. In San Manuel Bueno, mártir we encounter further variations on the love theme. Love is central, but not monosemic. There is first of all the love of Father Manuel for his people, a love that is translated into a total dedication, both spiritual and material, to his flock. Whatever doubts he may entertain about life after death, Father Manuel has none about living for his people. Indeed it is his wish to serve his community that drove him to the seminary in the first place. His concern is love as caritas of a heroic kind. His is a Christlike love, as the repeated parallels with Jesus indicate. Ángela Carballino shares with the priest the love for their flock; but she shares it because she loves the priest in the first place, as she says her mother did, as she lets us see in a veiled manner in her memoir, and as Unamuno himself confirms in the prologue to El hermano Juan, where he refers to Father Manuel as Ángela’s idol. She is devoted to the priest’s cause, but only because it is his cause and he asks for her participation: it is through him that she learns to love, to care for, to identify with her rural community of simple folk. She represents the Christian who, attracted by Jesus’ charismatic personality, responds to his injunction to ‘love thy neighbour’, even when unsettled by existential doubts. Lázaro Carballino, as the intellectual that he is, does not love the man so much as the idea, what Father Manuel stands for: social cohesion and the happiness of the community. It is for this reason (reason, more than sentiment) that he allows himself to be won over by the priest and decides to collaborate with his social enterprise. He collaborates out of moral conviction. The villagers’ love is the simplest of all: they love their parish

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priest because he gives them hope, consolation, and a common identity. It is the love of a child for father or mother. All these forms of love are given their recognition, but clearly Unamuno reserves the title of saintly love for only one of them, the love of the Christlike Father Manuel for his people. Yet the motivation for this love remains a mystery. The novelette Una historia de amor, conceivably inspired by Kierkegaard’s decision to break his engagement to Regina Olsen, presents a distorted sense of love. What Ricardo and Liduvina fail to find in their contrived elopement after five years of engagement is a romantic, consuming passion. Their love for each other seems mere routine, if more acceptable to Liduvina than to Ricardo. The latter wonders if their childish and contrived escapade has not been a ruse of the Devil meant to distract him from a vocation to fulfil the injunction of the Gospel ‘Go ye and preach the good news to the whole world’ (Mark, 16.15). Which is more important, he wonders, returning Liduvina’s love or returning God’s love? He justifies his decision to abandon Liduvina after their elopement by looking upon their liaison as a purely spiritual union not subject to the laws of society. He sees himself as a new Augustine, devoting himself remorselessly to a priestly life of austerity and abnegation after tasting the gratification of carnal experience. In effect Fray Ricardo does not live the religious life, rather he acts it, as one of his fellow-friars insinuates. The story reaches its predictable climax when the famous preacher is called to preach at the convent where Liduvina has long been a recluse after professing her vows. There, preaching in the presence of his one-time fiancée, he is finally forced to acknowledge what for many years he has been hiding from himself: that love is a giving, not a taking, that his devotion to God’s work was based on an error brought about by amor propio, self-love or false pride. What he thought was a manifestation of love for God was in truth religious hubris. Ricardo has chosen to devote his life to preaching the word of God, but at the cost of sacrificing the happiness of another human being. His sermon in the convent is both an act of contrition and a confession of his error to sister Liduvina. Una historia de amor was written, though not published, in 1911, at a time when Unamuno was also writing The Tragic Sense of Life. We cannot discard that it may have been intended as an exploration and critique of Kierkegaard’s quest for an exclusive relationship with God. If the

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individual seeks such a relationship, all other (human) relationships become unimportant or secondary. But this is not Christian, Unamuno clearly indicates. The story illustrates in a more vivid fashion what Unamuno argues more academically and reflectively in the essay: love of God and faith in him do not belong in an otherworldly dimension; they can only be understood when grounded in our own human situation rather than based on theological premises and dogmas. It was said above that in Christianity love in practice takes the form of charity. But we must be wary of simply taking this to mean beneficence or the giving of alms. Benefaction by itself is not a virtue; it can even be a self-interested operation. Unamuno, like Galdós and Baroja before him, excoriates those charitable organisations, such as the Damas de la Doctrina, or the Damas de San Vicente de Paúl, which engage in the distribution of material goods among the indigent in exchange for doctrinal allegiance. Beneficence by committee was a well-known women’s activity in Spain, but it tended to be a pastime indulged in for social recognition rather than out of genuine love and compassion for the poor. This kind of warped charity is in the nature of a transaction, with conditions laid down for receiving aid. ‘Uncharitable charity’ [‘Incaritativa caridad’ (NMU: IX, 328)] Unamuno terms such a distorted notion of Christian charity. By contrast we can observe the far more authentic and, for Unamuno, admirable quality of maternal love. Time and again in his novels and poems he singles out the mother as the generator of a very special kind of love which she bestows not only on her offspring but on her partner: ‘She loves her lover or her husband with a maternal love, and her love grows when she senses his weakness, when she feels a need to defend him however strong in other ways he seems’ [‘Quiere al amante o al marido con amor maternal, y su amor crece cuando le siente débil, cuando siente que es preciso defenderle por muy fuerte que en otros aspectos aparezca’ (UAE: IX, 337)]. This is confirmed in The Tragic Sense of Life: ‘in woman, all love is maternal’ [‘en la mujer todo amor es maternal’ (DST: X, 384)]. This is unconditional love, which is much closer to the Christian ideal as conceived by Unamuno. Maternal love is analogous to the sacrificial love of Christ which Unamuno extols in his long poem El Cristo de Velázquez, in which Jesus’ sacrifice is repeatedly seen as motivated by pure love uncontaminated by demands, conditions, or

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exceptions: ‘We men deserve to die; but you without deserving to, of pure love died’ [‘Los hombres con justicia nos morimos; / mas Tú sin merecerlo te moriste / de puro amor’ (CDV: IV 551)]; and compared to the sun freely giving us its warmth: ‘[It was] the fire of love which gave the sun its light, pure gold of blood immaculate!’ [‘¡del oro puro / de tu sangre sin mancha, de que se hizo / con el fuego de amor la luz del sol!’(CDV: IV, 476)]. While Unamuno’s imaginative works abound in examples of this higher kind of love, it is in The Tragic Sense of Life that he expands his ideas on the metaphysics of love. This is a work whose primitive version carried the title ‘A Treatise on the Love of God’ [‘Tratado del amor de Dios’], an ambiguous title that can be taken as both God’s love for us and our love for him. Unamuno’s starting point for his exposition of the third virtue is, predictably for an existential thinker, sexual love, that is, the demand of nature for procreation that brings man and woman together. It is nature’s way of surviving. For Unamuno this is a sort of giving up a part of ourselves for the sake of perpetuation. Just as a cell splits itself into two, or sacrifices a part of itself for the benefit of the species, so a human being is required to give him or herself to another to ensure a kind of survival. Love is for some possessive: we need another to reproduce ourselves, whether we are conscious of this or not: ‘Each one of the lovers is for the other an immediate instrument of pleasure, and a mediate instrument of perpetuation’ [‘Cada uno de los amantes es un instrumento de goce inmediatamente, y de perpetuación mediatamente, para el otro’ (DST: X, 382)]. The downside of carnal love is that it leads us to think of pleasure as being its goal, whereas its real goal is reproduction. But to reproduce carries with it an implicit recognition of finiteness. We reproduce because we die, and in reproducing we perpetuate not only life but also death. By aspiring to survive in others as nature drives us to do, we inflict death on them. This is for Unamuno the real tragedy of carnal love: succumbing to it is equivalent to succumbing to death. He understands why virginity and celibacy have been exalted in some quarters, and he adds, paradoxically: ‘it is possible that there are those who in order better to perpetuate themselves preserve their virginity. And it is to perpetuate something more human than the flesh’ [‘es posible que haya quien para mejor perpetuarse guarde su virginidad. Y para perpetuar algo más

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humano que la carne’ (DST: X, 383)], an idea that he was to explore novelistically nine years later in La tía Tula (although the idea and early drafts of this novel go back almost twenty years before publication, thus pre-dating the philosophical work). The realization that a bringing-into-life is a bringing-into-death makes us identify with those around us with a sense of compassion, a word which Unamuno looks upon etymologically: Latin cum and passio, a with-feeling or shared feeling, while passion is also associated, especially in Christianity, with suffering. This compassionate love, the immediate example of which is maternal love—the compassion of a mother for a helpless infant needful of nourishment and protection—is derived from carnal love but has progressed from being a primitively erotic drive to being a caring sentiment, an awareness of our common outlook and a sharing of our concern. We are moving from the carnal to the spiritual realm: To love in spirit is to have compassion, and he who has the most compassion is he who loves the most. Those aflame with ardent charity towards others are so because they have touched the bottom of their own emptiness, of their own unreality, of their own nothingness, and turning their knowing gaze upon their fellow men, have seen their insufficiency, their illusory being, their nonentity, and they have taken pity on them and have bestowed their love on them. [Amar en espíritu es compadecer, y quien más compadece más ama. Los hombres encendidos en ardiente caridad hacia sus prójimos, es porque llegaron al fondo de su propia miseria, de su propia aparencialidad, de su nadería, y volviendo luego sus ojos, así abiertos, hacia sus semejantes, los vieron también miserables, aparenciales, anonadables, y los compadecieron y los amaron. (DST: X, 384)]

This compassion, adds Unamuno, is what characterizes genuine human love, a love that goes beyond the carnal, reproductive instinct; it is what makes us human rather than simply animals. We do not need to look beyond our human race to feel this compassionate love. So far most of what we find in Unamuno can also be found in the philosophy of Schopenhauer; indeed it is likely that this is where it comes

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from, given the latter’s very substantial influence on Unamuno. But from this beginning as it were from below, Unamuno builds up his view of love as a universal sense of identity or solidarity. The real basis is egotism, a love of self, which for Unamuno is not the same as selfishness, but is rather self-compassion, born out of the realization of our helplessness in the face of an ineluctable ephemerality. This realization that one’s being is no more than a momentary spark in a timeless void is a source of pain for the individual. But the sentiment applies to the whole universe, because everything in it is perishable. What we feel for ourselves we feel on behalf of all beings; in fact we cannot feel for others if we cannot feel first for ourselves. Strictly speaking Unamuno does not explain how compassion becomes love; he simply assumes that they are one and the same thing, or at the very least that one leads imperceptibly to the other. This is so not just in the arguments found in The Tragic Sense of Life but also in his depiction of the suffering Christ in El Cristo de Velázquez, in which the description of and meditation on the painting leads to an overwhelming compassion for the crucified man, and in which this sense of shocked pathos and tenderness is repeatedly invoked as love. Unamuno would presumably hold, therefore, that one cannot feel compassion without love, an arguable point, yet Unamuno insists that to feel compassion for a shining star whose days are numbered is to express a love for that astral entity, to sense a consciousness aware of its impending demise: ‘all consciousness is consciousness of death and pain’ [‘toda conciencia lo es de muerte y de dolor’ (DST: X, 387)]. This consciousness is participatory, as is compassion, it is an awareness-with, just as it is a passion-with or co-­ suffering (cum + passio). Love is anthropomorphic: to love something is to confer sentiment to it. By this route Unamuno arrives at the anthropomorphization of the universe. If our life is our universe and we desire to prolong life indefinitely, it is life itself, that is, the universe, which is yearning for perdurance. Our sentiment is not exclusively an individual sentiment; it is at the same time a universal one. This compassionate love which yearns for universal imperishability shares a consciousness with the totality, is at one with the universe and the universe is at one with it. This consciousness, that is to say, our consciousness extended to all creatures and bodies across the universe, is what we call God, ‘the personalization of the All,

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the Consciousness, infinite and eternal of the Universe’ [‘la personalización del Todo, la Conciencia eterna e infinita del Universo’ (DST: X, 387)]. Because we are capable of feeling we project this capacity onto the universe; the conscious or feeling universe is God. Hence the notion of God as supreme love. This is the point at which Unamuno begins to diverge sharply from the atheistic philosophy of Schopenhauer. Where the latter sees the universe as driven by a blind, unfeeling, impersonal energy, Unamuno sees it as driven by a consciousness which he identifies with compassionate love, even if it is a human being’s love projected outwards in the first place. Since this compassionate love which we bestow on ourselves and others must have an origin, Unamuno chooses to confer that origin onto a universal presence or God. And since we simply do not know why evolution—Darwinian or any other kind—has given us the capacity to feel for others and share in their suffering, Unamuno’s quasi-­ poetic hypothesis is as good as any other.1 From erotic love, which is egotistical love, comes love of the other, of our spouse, our children, our neighbour, especially because we sense their needs, suffering, or loss as we sense ours, and from this collective sense or solidarity emerges the love of God, a universalized love. Given that we feel our love as something real, can it be compatible with an unreal, that is, fugacious, impermanent, almost illusory existence? Is our capacity to love telling us something transcendental? What is truly real is that which feels, suffers, commiserates, loves, and yearns; it is consciousness; the only thing of substance is consciousness. And we need God to save our consciousness; not to think existence but to experience it; not to know why it is and what it is, but to experience what it is for. Love makes no sense if there is no God. [Lo único de veras real es lo que siente, sufre, compadece, ama y anhela; es la conciencia; lo único sustancial es la conciencia. Y necesitamos a Dios para salvar la conciencia; no para pensar la existencia, sino para vivirla; no  Unamuno himself puts forward the idea that the capacity for inter-communication that our bodily cells possess may be a sign of a rudimentary thought-process (pan-psychism); and if so, one could speculate that they or some of them might consider that they form part of a superior organism capable of collective consciousness. Mutatis mutandis, this might be true of man vis-a-vis the universe, i.e. that each one of us is a tiny fragment of a universal consciousness (DST: X, 394–95). 1

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para saber por qué y cómo es, sino para sentir para qué es. El amor es un contrasentido si no hay Dios. (DST: X, 399)]

Unamuno argues, then, that the experience of genuine love, closely associated with that of suffering, leads to God. His next step, however, is more controversial: love is said to be focused on the future, like a young woman ardent with love but endlessly waiting for the right lover to make an appearance. In other words, love becomes a form of hope, the hoping for fulfilment. It becomes a waiting game: we love God because we look to him for a future existence. But, we might ask, is not the love of those who have gone before us, whom we have lost, as real a love as that which we reserve for a salvific God? Are we not reverting to the original egotism which made us turn to another being to seek our pleasure or our reproductive yearning? Unamuno’s reply would no doubt be that love, though looking to the future, is in fact timeless because it carries an intimation of eternity. We love beautiful things because we sense beauty as transcending the accidental and transient. Beauty is thus a creation of love, as is eternity: ‘It is love that reveals our eternity and that of our neighbours’ [‘El amor es quien nos revela lo eterno nuestro y de nuestros prójimos’ (DST: X, 436)]. For Unamuno, what is essential about love is the desire for perdurance which we crave for ourselves and our fellows. This collective affect is transmuted into love of God, and this in turn emerges as charitable love, caritas, which is the sublimation of the compassion we feel towards our fellow-beings, or as Unamuno terms it ‘compassion towards God’ [‘la compasión a Dios’ (DST: X, 437)]. By identifying with the suffering of others we see God as a suffering God; hence our compassion. Genuine love for Unamuno is associated not with pleasure but with suffering. Happiness is not love but rather slumber because it kills our yearning, it anaesthetizes. The capacity to love goes hand in hand with the capacity to suffer. ‘Love is charity and compassion, and love which is not charitable and compassionate is not real love’ [‘el amor es caridad y compasión, y amor que no es caritativo y compadeciente no es tal amor’ (DST: X, 439)]. Within the life of the spirit the choice is between happiness and love: the more of the one, the less of the other. It is suffering that reveals the reality of our existence as well as of the existence of others. It

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is suffering that engenders love of our fellow-creatures. Likewise it is suffering that engenders love of God. Unamuno is well aware that to present God as a suffering entity on whom we dispense our compassion is bordering, if looked upon theologically, on the heterodox, but his insistent point is that God is not a distant entity but one representative of all mankind. For an existentialist, religious belief must necessarily encompass human suffering, hence the notion of a suffering God: ‘God suffers in all and each one of us; in all and in each consciousness’ [‘Dios sufre en todos y en cada uno de nosotros; en todas y en cada una de las conciencias’ (DST: X, 440)]. Unamuno is not simply holding up the suffering of the man Jesus on the cross as an example of divine suffering; he is going beyond this and explicitly identifying our own suffering with God himself, and our concern for a suffering humanity with our concern for God. There is no distinction. The highest form of love, charitable or caring love, is simultaneously love of God and the other. Charity, says Unamuno, is an overflowing of compassion, of seeing my own suffering in others’ suffering, experiencing that suffering as my own. From egotistical beginnings there finally springs charitable love, and it is this fraternal love that points to God: ‘that brotherhood reveals God’s paternity, that God is Father and exists’ [esa hermandad nos revela la paternidad de Dios, que Dios es Padre y existe’ (DST: X, 442)]. God suffers as a father suffers on seeing his children suffer. It is ultimately charitable love or caritas, the love for others in their suffering, that sustains our faith and our hope. By an unconventional route, when judged by conventional doctrine, Unamuno has managed to rendezvous with St Paul, if not on the road to Damascus, at any rate in the side-streets of a religious existentialism.

7.2 Berdyaev: Love as Transfiguration After freedom, love is probably the most frequent topic in Berdyaev’s writings; indeed he calls them ‘the two great principles of life’ (RSC: 115). It is not easy, however, to reduce the many variations on the theme to a coherent account, but there are recurrent ideas which demand exposition. Berdyaev distinguishes between three types of love: eros, caritas, and agape. He also classifies them according to whether they are

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descendant or ascendant. Eros-love ascends from the ordinary human sphere of the beloved towards the divine; it is ecstatic, platonic, revealing itself as love for beauty and the sublime rather than exclusively for the person of the beloved who awakens love in the first place. The love that descends is that which entails compassion and sympathy for the other, caritas, a loving kindness towards all fellow-humans which is freely given and demands no reciprocity. Eros-love may include or exclude caritas; if it excludes it, it becomes a sentiment that enslaves. A step beyond eros-­ love and caritas is agape, synonymous with Christian love as exemplified by Christ, a love based on communion and identification with the other in our common suffering and destiny, a love freely given without a motive, the highest example of which is God’s love for mankind. Agape cannot be wholly separated from caritas and eros-love because compassion and sympathy are inherent in Christian conviction, as is also the focus on a particular creature as a concrete being. Real love goes from person to person; it is not exclusively an idealized eros-love; it personifies what it loves. Even ‘love towards God presupposes personification’ (SAF: 237). In practice, then, Christian love or agape functions as a blend of person-­ focused eros-love and compassion-driven caritas, to which is added an awareness of the divine or love of God. The highest form of love encompasses all three, although they can be reduced to two essential modes or manifestations: love for man and love for God. Both together— but not singly—add up to Christian love. Love for man, moreover, should not take the form of a general philanthropy; it must be love for concrete man, that is, for real persons, not the idea of man or humanity in the abstract. Love for God, likewise, must be love for a personalized God, not for the idea of the divine. Furthermore, love of God without love of man is a distortion. God ‘demands that love for Him should at the same time be love for man and mercy for all creatures’ (DOM: 189). Berdyaev gives a good deal of attention to what he considers distorted forms of love, two in particular, libidinous love and ascetic love, neither of which he considers genuine love. Eros-love is especially prone to denaturization; ‘Eros-love becomes distorted, debased and profaned more than anything else in the world’ (BAE: 244). This occurs when sexuality takes over and becomes the dominant impulse. Sexual gratification has

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nothing to do with love; it is impersonal, whereas eros-love is personal: the union in body and spirit of a concrete man and a concrete woman. There need be no connection between sexual intercourse and love: the former is driven by an instinct shared with animals; the latter has a personal basis. Mere sexuality is indiscriminate, but to be in love is to focus on a specific personality for which there is no substitute. Such eros-love breaks through ‘the element of impersonal race to personality, to the unrepeatable human person’ (SAF: 225). This kind of love recognizes what is personal, attaches itself to what is enduring in personality, and affirms it as something that perdures. When we fall in love with a person we expect that personality to remain as such irrespective of the ageing process. Whereas love is freedom, because it is freely given, sex is enslavement, because it succumbs. Berdyaev does not go so far as to banish sexual activity; indeed he concedes that ‘through sexual love the fullness of man is realized in each of the two participants’ (MCA: 217). But he emphasizes that within the Christian conception of love the sexual act is acceptable in the interests of reproduction and not otherwise. Love must not be mistaken for the sexual act; the latter is indulged in for personal gratification. There is nevertheless something that may be termed sexual love, exemplified by such legends as Tristan and Isolde or Romeo and Juliet, a tragic love, a love not at all necessary for the maintenance of the human species. Such a love between man and woman exists, and like all love escapes regulation by society or institutions. Sexual love is ‘the absolute mystery of two persons’ (MCA: 208), something which external agencies cannot control or regulate. Sexual behaviour can to a degree be ordered and controlled by laws and social pressures; love cannot; it remains outside the social order, beyond conventional morality and legislation. Institutions and society can only regulate or ‘normalize’ the conditions of reproduction (essentially of the family) through such notions as marriage, the family unit, parental responsibilities, education, health. But ‘the family is not set up and put in order for marital love but for the good order and the well-­ being of the race’ (MCA: 211). The other way in which eros-love is distorted is through a misguided monasticism, when it is exclusively directed towards an ideal world, as in Platonism. True love is not love of an ideal but love of another being: ‘An

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impersonal love, which is not concentrated on any individual image, does not deserve to be called love’ (SAS: 89). The kind of spiritual quest which turns its back on society, such as that of monastic asceticism, is not Christian, since it does not fulfil the command of Christ to love one’s neighbour. Christian spirituality must simultaneously ascend and descend, that is, must both rise towards God and alight on human beings. A religious quest which becomes engrossed in self-improvement and personal salvation to the exclusion of one’s fellow-humans is an egotistical undertaking driven by a self-regarding fear of perdition: ‘Emotional states of that kind banish love. The Gospels and the Epistles contain no grounds for such an interpretation of Christianity’ (DOM: 122). By ignoring, even rejecting love between humans, such self-seeking asceticism falsifies and conflicts with the basic principles of Christianity. Berdyaev does not condemn the ascetic life as such; indeed he has words of praise for it on several occasions. What he condemns is the kind of asceticism based on a withdrawal from human relationships, that is, from eros-love proper which radiates out from human love to divine love. Because Berdyaev is attempting to make of love one of the pillars of Christianity, and to do so existentially, not theologically, he has to reconcile our everyday experience of it with the universal love for mankind manifested by Jesus of Nazareth in his vocational mission on Earth. On the one hand ‘the nature of love is cosmic, super-individual’ (MCA: 214); on the other hand our experience of love comes from the union of a man and a woman, and this union is a sexual one whatever other sentiments we add to it. Despite the repeated denunciations of lust-love as degrading, destructive, alienating (‘the mystery of disunion’, he calls it, MCA: 215), Berdyaev is obliged to find a place for sexual love, and this he does, not on the conventional grounds given by most Christian Churches of the continuation of the human race, but on the grounds of the unveiling of personality in the other. The reproductive argument is irrelevant argues Berdyaev, because marriage is based on two people falling in love, not on their wish to procreate. ‘No one longs for physical sexual union because he wants to beget children’ (DOM: 240), is Berdyaev’s blunt response to those who argue for the sacramental status of marriage on the grounds of procreation. Indeed procreation itself does not require love, so to present the marital union of a man and a woman as justified by procreation ‘is

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transferring the principle of cattle-breeding to human relations’ (DOM: 240). The continuation of the species is a by-product, not the central aim of a loving relationship between a man and a woman. It is the desire to be united to the loved one that leads human beings into a relationship which is both physical and spiritual. The spiritual dimension of a physical relationship can only be found in love, for love is ‘the reinstatement of the personal element in sex, not natural but spiritual’ (DOM: 241). This spiritual relationship of one personality to another is mutually enriching. It allows one to escape from the prison of self by identifying with the personality of the other: ‘The essential quality of love [...] consists in the discovery of another’s unique personality, in the fact that the personality expands only in relation to another personality’ (SAS: 147). What Berdyaev seems to be implying is that to be in love with another is to perceive that person’s enduring identity amidst change. Authentic love reveals another plane of existence beyond that of objects. In this way Berdyaev seeks to save love between man and woman as a Christian experience that is neither an esoteric sacramental abstraction nor a hypocritical presentation of what turns out to be a mere exercise in biological reproduction. The Schopenhauerian account, that is, the beguiling of man by nature for her own solely reproductive ends, does not satisfy Berdyaev: a purely biological union denies the spiritual quality of human existence that Berdyaev seeks to safeguard. It makes of human love a ruse and an illusion. Of course Berdyaev does not deplore the begetting of children. He sees child-bearing as a deliverance from a lower state akin to debauchery;2 it leads to maternal love, which is a self-sacrificial higher form of love which approximates to the love exemplified by Christ. A family is a communion of souls just as is the wider family of humankind. The main thrust of Berdyaev’s reasoning, however, is directed to saving eros-love, by which he means selective love, that is, love concentrated on one’s beloved. His argument is that such love, which is after all the one most widely experienced, is ultimately a spiritual love; not the conventionalized Christian love which has become an abstraction, but rather a  Unamuno makes exactly the same point in his novel Niebla. Víctor Goti’s marriage, before his wife conceives after many years, is described as ‘a kind of legal concubinage’ [‘una especie de concubinato legal’ (NIE: I, 553)]. 2

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Christian love which is creative, expansive, which summons to a union of which erotic love is but a pale reflection: ‘it means directing the energy of sex towards all humanity and the whole world’ (MCA: 223). Christian love is thus a uniting love, a giving of all to all, no longer two natures united but a single ‘androgyne’ nature. The experience of eros-love gives us a glimpse of this higher union, which demands a ‘creative upsurge towards another world’ (MCA: 223). This higher or mystical dimension of love is found not by worshipping or idolizing woman or her external beauty but rather ‘in communion with femininity, in the fusion of male and female natures into the image and the likeness of God’ (MCA: 220). The erotic idealization of sex is thus abandoned in favour of a higher love. It is by appealing to our higher sentiments that Berdyaev aims to save Christian marriage from its natural bondage in animal instinct as well as from its social conventionality and expedience, and to place it instead in what he calls ‘the realm of the spirit’. Beyond eros-love there is caritative love, a more universal form of love but one still focused on real beings, not on being itself: ‘Real love is always for the concrete and the individual’ (DOM: 187). The aim of caritative love is not only to assist our neighbour in his hour of need but also to ‘reach the union of souls, fellowship and brotherhood’ (DOM: 187). Good works in the Christian sense must be done out of love, not for self-­ justification or out of social acquiescence. They are not by themselves enough if the benefactor does not feel for his fellow-men. Pity or compassion for one’s fellow-men is a lofty sentiment, Berdyaev concedes, but love as caritas is a step above because it sees God in the other, or the other as part of God, that is, it affirms the other’s imperishable value. Berdyaev here equates caritas with universal mercy, but he warns that while we must be merciful to all we cannot love all because love is personalistic. Spiritual love may be regarded as applying to all, and in this sense is even greater than compassion because it has God in its sights. But Christian love needs to be targeted: it goes from one personality to another; we put ourselves in the place of another, we feel-with. In his laudable efforts to bridge the gap between the ordinary world and the, for him, attainable domain of the spirit, Berdyaev perhaps goes too far in his insistence that genuine love is always personal. After all, we may not always have the opportunity to know personally those to whom we are giving succour, as

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occurs, say, in times of natural disasters. Is our feeling for the victims and our help thereby devalued? When Jesus asked the rich man to give his wealth to the poor and follow him (Luke, 18.22) he was using a generic term. Had the rich man followed his advice, would his action have been devalued because individuals were not specified? Berdyaev seems to have too narrow a view of compassionate love. What he is presumably rejecting is indiscriminate almsgiving as a way of salving one’s conscience. That is why he is driven to say that ‘ordinary sympathy and compassion are more gracious and more like love than this theological virtue’ (i.e. the virtue of charity in the abstract), and for this same reason ‘love cannot merely be a means to salvation and redemption’ (DOM: 188). What Berdyaev means is that if caritative love is looked upon as a personal investment we are in effect putting ourselves before our neighbour and not in his place. Love radiates a creative energy which calls for the concrete realization of goodness not out of a sense of duty or for divine reward but for what Berdyaev calls the ‘transfiguration of life’ (DOM: 139), the recognition of the divine in the human. In his view of what love stands for, Berdyaev constantly appeals to the sense of dissatisfaction with earthly material life which he sees as characterizing the entire human race. Why this is so remains a mystery, a word much used by Berdyaev, but he takes certain sentiments, notably love, as an indication or revelation of an aspect of human existence which we can intuit but not directly observe. It is not that spiritual reality is separate from the reality of phenomena; it is rather that phenomena obscure the view. We need unusual sensitivity to capture a whisper of this noumenal—another word favoured by Berdyaev—world, and love is just such a hint: ‘the positive mystery of life is to be found in love, in sacrificial, giving, creative life’ (DOM: 141). The downside of this view is that ‘true love is a rare flower in our world and does not form part of everyday existence’ (DOM: 239). Why is genuine love rare?, one might ask. Not, obviously, because such an affect is rare in humans, but rather because we limit its range out of fear. This fear is the fear of commitment, not only fear of God (which according to Berdyaev is ‘impossible and wrong’, DOM: 176), but fear of what commitment to others may demand, fear of losing our snugness or contentment. It is fear which forces upon us a purely conventional morality: ‘All utilitarian morality is based upon fear;

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spiritual ethics is the only one that is not. Do not be determined in your moral judgements and actions by the emotion of fear, rise superior to it in your spirit, be inspired by the pure striving for the lofty, for the divine, for pure love—this is an absolute moral imperative’ (DOM: 177). Caritative love, then, does not save us from suffering. Even when one source of suffering is conquered by love, another will arise. Love affirms the value of existence and must therefore accept suffering; indeed it increases suffering because it makes us sense others’ suffering as our own. Compassion necessarily entails pain, which results in a paradox, since compassion means desiring a better, happier life for the sufferer. Yet suffering is what Christianity asks us willingly to embrace, to bear our cross. Christians must therefore accept suffering while feeling compassion for the sufferer and willing his deliverance. They are required to go to the aid of their neighbour, yet also to see his suffering as a redeeming experience after the example of Christ. What Berdyaev emphasizes is that love does not save from suffering but does make suffering more meaningful. A shared pain is a more endurable pain, but it requires empathetic love to reach this condition. Berdyaev gives the example of a dying person: Our attitude to all men would be Christian if we regarded them as though they were dying, and determine our relation to them in the light of death, both of their death and our own. A person who is dying calls forth a special kind of feeling. Our attitude to him is at once softened and lifted onto a higher plane. We then can feel compassion for people whom we did not love. But every man is dying, I too am dying and must never forget about death. (DOM: 121–22)

Love must encounter death. That is, in Jaspers’ term, the limit-situation of love. But the important point for Berdyaev is that love encounters death in order to conquer it. Love is life-enhancing; it refuses to accept death as final, as irretrievable loss. It opens up what Berdyaev calls ‘the vistas of immortality’, because ‘in the experience of love the Kingdom of God begins to reveal itself ’ (DAH: 125). In Berdyaev’s account, love is more closely linked to death than to birth. As so much else in Berdyaev, his view of love feels the pull of his mystical inclination, of the need to recognize the reality of the divine in human

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existence, of the desire to reconcile, to merge even, human nature and divine nature. There is a contradiction between the condition of man in his finite existence in a material world and his craving for sanctuary and plenitude. ‘Love is an urge towards fullness’ (SAR: 227). In other words, we express a desire, muted or even suppressed in many cases, to transcend our earthly limits. But for this act of transcendence human love is insufficient by itself; we have to invoke divine love. ‘It is divine-human love which conquers’ (DAH: 84). The experience of love is the highest available to man, but it is at its most revealing when it is eros-love, agape, and caritas all at once, when it embraces both man and God, and when ‘it is love for the created thing in its Godforsakenness’ (DAH: 124–25), that is, when it is compassion for man’s mourning in his sense of loss. This is perhaps Berdyaev’s central point: that meaningful love for our fellow-­ humans necessarily entails a love for God because that is what is missing. Love must encompass the corporeal presence, the psychological sensibility, and the spiritual longing in accordance with our whole being and with our unique individuality. Spiritual love cannot be separated from psychological love, because the soul or psyche is the nucleus of the human creature; but the spirit urges us to raise our love onto a higher level, to see it as a movement towards divine plenitude. The ultimate love is the love of God and his entire creation, but this spiritual love subsumes the psychological love which we experience towards those creatures nearest to us. This psychic-spiritual love strives to bestow endless futurity on mortal things; it represents for Berdyaev ‘the struggle against death in the name of eternal life’ (DOM: 253).

7.3 M  arcel: From Possessive Love to Oblative Love Much of what Marcel has to say about love in his philosophical essays is said in connection with his favourite themes: presence, disponibilité, fidelity. But there is no doubting the persistent presence of this affect in his theatre. An early play, L’Iconoclaste (1921), translated under the suggestive title of A Mystery of Love, offers a good example. Jacques Delorme

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remarries but retains his love and fascination for his deceased first wife, Viviane. It seems as if her ghostly presence has not only saved him from a suicidal depression but has continued to guide him, urged him to re-­ marry, and now steers his new relationship. The new marriage appears to be successful, but Jacques wonders whether what Madeleine, his new wife, feels for him is not pity rather than love. Madeleine for her part accepts that Jacques is still spiritually tied to his first wife and puts this sentiment to good effect in order to build a stable family environment for her spouse and adopted children. Jacques’ longtime friend Abel’s love for the dead Viviane Bréau is as mysterious as Jacques’. During her lifetime Abel was consumed by a passionate desire for her, but reconciled himself to the fact that she loved Jacques. His jealousy had been sublimated into friendship for the couple. But what sort of love is Abel’s love for the deceased Viviane? Has his former jealousy been truly converted to pure love? It would seem not, to judge from the mischief he causes as a guest of the Delormes. If Abel had been reconciled to losing Viviane to Jacques, he is far from reconciled to his friend’s second marriage after the death of his first wife. For him this is no less than treason to the memory of Viviane, a repudiation of her love, and he hates his friend for his action. Marcel makes it clear that Abel’s sentiments are genuinely felt, though no more explicable for that. For Abel, fidelity must outlast earthly existence, otherwise love is ephemeral. His own fidelity to the dead Viviane is even now dissuading him from marriage. Marriage is not a social institution; it is an unbreakable bond. But Abel’s love for the dead Viviane is not a love of the other. It is love of an ideal: Viviane is, literally, not a person of flesh and blood, but an idealized being. We see Abel’s egotism in that what counts for him is his own fidelity towards her; he cares not for Jacques’ wellbeing. In his view it is Jacques who has been unfaithful by re-marrying. He is intent on making him suffer by encouraging the suspicion that there had been an affair between him and Viviane. What persuades him to change his mind is his discovery that Madeleine’s love for Jacques is so total and self-­ sacrificial that she is not only the perfect mother for Viviane’s children but that moreover she encourages Jacques to commune with his dead wife as a way of gaining the reassurance he needs. Far from trying to

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obliterate Viviane’s memory from Jacques’ mind, to see his first wife as coming between them, Madeleine accepts Jacques’ continued devotion to his dead wife and her ghostly presence as the guardian angel of his new marriage. She realizes that for Jacques to come to believe that Viviane had been unfaithful to him, even if only in thought and not in deed, would be to destroy him. Abel at first cannot understand Madeleine’s wish to protect Viviane’s sacred memory. MADELEINE: (With fervour) Save him! ABEL: (Looking at her steadily) Are you sure that you want me to reassure him? MADELEINE: What do you mean? ABEL: That hallowed saint does stand between you. The erasure of this intrusive image is perhaps a victory for you. MADELEINE: Why do you tempt me? I want him to live, and this belief of his is his life. ABEL: Yes, that’s called love. MADELEINE: (Bitterly) No, don’t admire me; perhaps at the bottom of this sacrifice there is basically a shrewd calculation. If she is a phantom who has dropped him in my arms, can I hope that the phantom disappears? (MOL: 77–78) Abel recognizes Madeleine’s love for Jacques even better than she does herself. It is this that persuades him to change tack and to fabricate a fiction about Viviane to put Jacques’ suspicions to rest. Abel completely inverts Viviane’s undeclared love for him, pretending it was his own undeclared love for her that went unperceived. ABEL:

That horrible deed, of which you accuse me, I might have in my thoughts alone… JACQUES: Even if only in your thoughts! ABEL: But she never suspected it. Don’t you understand? Dear God, how can I convince you? (MOL: 84)

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Abel does appear to succeed in alleviating Jacques’ suffering. But his initial disposition to listen to Madeleine by saving his friend from bitter disappointment is short lived. Later that day he reverts to his iconoclastic self and destroys Jacques’ view of his dead wife just as he has had his own view destroyed, for Viviane, he now knows, had not been the perfectly loyal wife he had admired from afar. Viviane Bréau, it transpires, had been an illusion for both men. Pure, selfless love turns out to be a mirage. For Florence Bréau, who discovers Viviane’s unsent love-letter to Abel, Abel’s idealized love for her dead sister is an unjustified fantasy. For Abel, Jacques’ communion with his dead wife as if she were present is a utopian self-deception and Florence’s love for him a sterile aspiration because, as the iconoclast that he is, he cannot respond to it. And for Jacques, who has sought ‘divine’ reassurance from his dead wife only to find his hopes dashed, humans are reduced to ‘mere phantoms in the night’ (MOL: 99). Even the devoted Madeleine is uncertain of her motives and realizes she does not love the dead first wife but rather envies her. Oddly, it is the iconoclast who has the last word. Love remains a mystery by necessity: ‘you could not be satisfied long in a world devoid of mystery. That’s the way we humans are’ (MOL: 99). All we can do then is to ‘trust love’ (MOL: 100). But can we? At the end of a play whose characters have labyrinthine motivations, we find no solution. Marcel has explored the theme of love from different human perspectives. Yet if we are looking for a reassuring account we shall be bitterly disappointed. Love, it would appear, is too complex an emotion: we can experience it, but neither explain it nor judge it. It must remain a mystery. In Creative Fidelity (Du Refus a l’invocation, 1940) Marcel comments on this play and confirms that the central issue is the question of the possible value of a spiritual relationship between the living and the dead. Marcel, however, puts a gloss on his earlier production and interprets the mystery of love not as the apparently disappointing fiasco it appears to be in his play (in which everyone turns out to have been deceived), ‘but rather as a certain plenitude, and, what is more, as the expression of a will’ (CRF: 152), irrespective of whether we are forging false certainties. What counts is fidelity to the deceased: ‘Fidelity truly exists only when it defies absence, when it triumphs over absence, and in particular over that absence which we hold to be—mistakenly no doubt—absolute, and

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which we call death’ (CRF: 152). But this is a later reading. The play itself, if anything, offers the opposite impression. If love is a giving, there is little point in offering it to the dead. Both Jacques and Abel bring misery upon themselves and others for so doing. At the end of World War One, two years before A Mystery of Love, Marcel had started, but not finished, L’Insondable, The Unfathomable, eventually published in its incomplete form in Présence et Immortalité in 1959. The play is notable for the remarkable scene between two of the characters, Édith and Father Séveilhac. Édith’s husband, Robert Lechevallier, has just returned to France after spending four years in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. During that time his younger brother Maurice had taken over responsibility for looking after Robert’s family, and he and Édith developed a deep platonic relationship. After leave of absence Maurice has been re-called to the front shortly before the end of the war, has failed to turn up after the armistice, and is presumed dead, except by Maurice’s young wife Georgette, who refuses to give up hope. Father Séveilhac, an army chaplain who served in Maurice’s battalion, turns up on a visit to the Lechevalliers, and a private conversation with Édith ensues. Édith seeks to learn from Father Séveilhac what her brother-­ in-­law had confided to the priest, some indication that Maurice returned her affection before his death. She implores the priest to tell her: ‘Father, remember that we are speaking of a dead person, and there can no longer be anything impure in what he inspires in me’ (PAI: 274). The priest has very different ideas and regards the relationship as sinful. He refuses to respond to Édith’s plea on the grounds that Maurice is dead and one should only pray for the dead, not speculate about their emotions while alive. Édith revolts against the priest’s injunction to forget: EDITH: I can’t say to what extent your words chill me... It seems that this prayer to which you invite me exiles to infinity those for whom it is offered; between them and us, it puts more than space, it puts God himself. One can only pray for those who are truly absent..., but you can’t pretend that death is an absence! There are times, Father, when he is more immediately present to me than he ever was in life. No longer is there between him and me this dreadful fear of thinking of one another in a sinful way; no longer is there the disturbing image of third parties... There are no longer any

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third parties. Don’t give me that harsh look, Father; I see too clearly that you don’t grasp. And yet, you should remember, you should understand…. (PAI: 274)

But Father Séveilhac neither remembers (Christ’s injunction to his disciples at the last supper), nor shows any signs of understanding. He is adamant. According to him, in wanting to know Maurice’s final feelings towards her, Édith is fostering an unhealthy obsession, indulging in an unreal mysticism, and revelling in a secret delight tantamount to concupiscence. But Édith stands her ground and accuses the priest of not only failing to understand, but of actual disbelief: ÉDITH: You tell me that nothing outside can respond to my feeling. I don’t know what you mean by that. Or rather yes, I think I know. (With sobs in her throat) Basically, for you, the dead are no longer there; and your thoughts are in no way different from those who do not believe. Whatever be the glorious and unimaginable existence that you ascribe to them..., for you they are no longer of the living. But for me..., the truly dead, the only dead, are those whom we no longer love. (PAI: 277)

The confrontation is a tour de force, and it is not surprising that Marcel felt that he could not take the play any further. The point is made: love does not end with death. But Marcel leaves open the question of whether this love entails the survival of the deceased person in some form. Georgette, Maurice’s wife, still loves her husband and refuses to accept that he will not be returning. She loves a living being. Édith, on the contrary, still loves Maurice, although she knows him to be dead. Which love is the more genuine? Marcel does not say, and no one character speaks for him. As he several times declared, his plays are tentative explorations of themes which make a subsequent appearance in discursive form in his essays. The nature of another kind of love, love of God, is explored by Marcel in another of his plays, A Man of God (Un Homme de Dieu, 1925). Claude Lemoyne, a Protestant pastor, associates love of God with putting into practice the idea of selflessness, of total devotion to the welfare of others. Accordingly he saw it as his duty to forgive his errant wife and accept the

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fruit of her infidelity as his own daughter. For him this had been a test and a measure of his fidelity to God. But Edmée Lemoyne puts a rather different interpretation on her husband’s act of compassion. She believes forgiveness should have followed as a result of love for her, not love of God. Claude is playing the part of a saintly priest rather than being the loving husband that she wants. When Edmée’s old lover, now at death’s door, turns up wanting to see his grown-up daughter before he dies, he provokes a crisis in the Lemoyne’s marriage. The long-standing entente based on fidelity to God on the part of the man of the cloth and fidelity to the husband’s calling on the part of a supportive wife cannot withstand the shock of intrusion and recrudescence of painful memories. Husband and wife break down in recriminations against each other’s stance. Claude, the wounded husband, sees it as his Christian duty to allow his earlier rival to see his biological daughter, who is unaware of her real parentage. Edmée, the supportive wife who has devoted her life to charitable works to fulfil what is expected of a minister’s spouse, repudiates her husband’s stance, which requires her to meet a man whom she now finds repugnant. For her, her husband’s alleged moral duty to a dying man is sheer humbug, and she calls into question the morality of a decision supposedly based on Christian caritas. The reverberations of this limit situation are radically unsettling, especially for the dedicated and widely admired pastor who had taken his Christian devotion as a gift from God. The shock of discovering that both wife and adoptive daughter question his religious conviction and consequent dedication to his flock provokes a crisis of confidence not just in himself but in God: CLAUDE: [to his wife] I wonder if I really loved you in those days. And if you loved me. (A pause) You had staked your life on a look in my eyes, on a tone of voice, because they held a mysterious promise—of what?... a promise that has never been kept—and that is the whole history of our life together... And when I think about God, it’s the same. I have thought at times that he was speaking to me, but I may simply have been taken in by my own feelings in a moment of exaltation. Who am I? What am I? When I try to get hold of myself, I escape from my clutches. (TPL: 111)

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Marcel is implacable in making us question our motives, even when we think we love another being. Is forgiveness, a virtue central to Christianity, conferred out of love for those who have wounded us? Claude Lemoyne had thought that forgiveness had brought a divine inner peace as a reward, ‘the sense of a Power working within me and not instead of me, strengthening my will but not supplanting it’ (TPL: 47). But the contrary view is also expressed: that forgiveness is performed out of self-interest, that in Claude Lemoyne’s case at any rate he had everything to gain and nothing to lose by forgiving his wife, thereby avoiding public scandal as well as justifying himself in the eyes of God by ‘saving the soul of a poor sinner’ (TPL: 79). There is little doubt that what Marcel is here exploring is the motivation behind our feelings. The words he puts in the mouth of the other characters make this clear. Why did Edmée Lemoyne renounce her lover and confess to her husband? Out of genuine remorse and contrition? Out of love? Out of a renewed sense of loyalty? Michel Sandier, her former lover, now a dying man, gives her an alternative explanation which appears to hit home. He suggests that she left him to return to her husband out of cowardice: ‘You chose the easiest way, the way of confession, because you were too much of a coward to face the music and take the only risk there was’ (TPL: 74). Confession is the easiest way out of a moral dilemma, a means of obtaining reassurance and security. Seen from this perspective, a confession has nothing to do with contrition and love of God. The same goes for acts of kindness. Francis Lemoyne, Claude’s brother, says of Edmée’s charitable work that it is carried out mechanically, semi-consciously, not out of love for her fellow-humans. She is ‘so absorbed in good works—he says of his sister-in-law—it gives me the impression of a sleepwalker’ (TPL: 53), a view seconded by Edmée’s daughter who bluntly tells her mother that ‘you put no love into anything you do, and that’s the only thing that matters. Sitting on committees and running Rescue Homes and knitting socks for the poor doesn’t prove that a person is good’ (TPL: 76). Ironically the same opinion is enounced by Edmée herself of her husband’s selfless dedication to his parishioners, a ‘kindness that is only a professional virtue’ (TPL: 84). Are we then deceiving ourselves when we ascribe our charitable actions to some lofty motive, like love of other or love of God? Marcel does not say this, and his characters, once again, are not his mouthpieces. What emerges from the play

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is the connection, or lack of connection, between our actions and our religious aims. There is no questioning Claude Lemoyne’s moral integrity. The real question is whether that integrity is led by caritas, love of man in God. ‘That’s why it all happened’, says Edmée. ‘If you had really been my husband, if you had loved me as a man ought to love his wife, with the best in him and the worst in him...’ (TPL: 78–79). The implication is there: Claude Lemoyne has been not a man but a moine. His religious conviction has made him love God, not others. There is little doubt that this is a play that throws an almost cynical light on human nature. Coming back to it almost thirty years later Marcel admitted that ‘the play is gloomy’ (SEA: 106), but also that it offers no thesis or preconceived idea because ‘nothing is more important for a dramatic work than the absence of a definite purpose’ (SEA: 106). A definite purpose there may not have been, but the play casts a shadow on human love for God and for others. Are we suffering from self-deception when we think we love? By placing his characters in such limit situations and making them fail one another Marcel destroys our complacency. There is neither eros-love nor caritas here. There is only an egotistical desire to be loved, to be recognized, to be reassured. It is far more Sartrian than Christian. Marcel’s essays, however, tell a different story, even if the starting point is the same: our sentiments. In the case of objects we may be able to distinguish between what we see and what is there in reality (for example, as measured by appropriate instruments). But feelings are another matter: we cannot feel and distinguish the feeling itself from some kind of measure of our feelings. Sentiments have a unique reality for the person experiencing them, which cannot be verified or modified by instruments. The potential variance between perception and reality which can occur in the world of objects (what we perceive is subject to correction or readjustment) does not occur in the realm of sentiment: feelings are always real and not subject to re-definition, even if far more difficult to define in the first place (we can of course misinterpret the cause of our feelings, but that is a different issue). As Marcel says, ‘there must be a depth of affectivity within us which it is not possible for us to identify and hence define conceptually, still less to set face to face with ourselves and deal objectively’ (MPJ: 309). In other words, when we try to analyze our feelings as

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something independent of ourselves, as an object of thought, we ‘deprive these feelings of all ontological value’ (MPJ: 310). Unlike objects, the feelings cannot be viewed as independent of the experience. In some way or other we do not simply have feelings; we are those feelings. What we have has some degree of exteriority to ourselves; what we are does not. In the field of sentiments we cannot exchange places with another person as we could, say, on a viewing platform. Marcel refers to love—not to be confused with desire—as ‘the essential ontological datum’ (BAH: 167), what is most profound about the human personality because under the condition of love the self is subordinated to a superior reality, a reality which is neither wholly self nor wholly other but which transcends that distinction. As a sentiment, love has no external equivalent or counterpart; it is wholly generated from within. Yet at the same time it is directed at another being, almost as if intended to bridge the experiential gap between the two. This is what love is in the first place, and Marcel has a term for it, or rather for its basis: intersubjectivity, a form of communion, though not necessarily of a religious kind. Intersubjectivity is not an exchange of information; it is rather an openness to one another, ‘the fact of being together in light’ (PAI: 239). It is an empathetic feeling, an affinity, a placing of oneself in the other’s situation. Marcel speaks of ‘the threshold of intersubjectivity, that is, of the realm of existence to which the preposition with properly applies, as it does not properly apply [...] to the purely objective world’ (MOB: I, 221). Intersubjectivity is no more objective than love is: we still experience it from the inside and we cannot study and describe it from the outside. When I love someone, according to Marcel, I am linking this person ‘in the most intimate possible intersubjective fashion to what I am’ (MOB: I, 231). Intersubjectivity is the ground of love, just as presence is the consequence of love. It accounts for the possibility of love. Far from being an egocentric preoccupation that would act as a barrier between oneself and others, intersubjectivity is, on the contrary, what makes it possible for one’s experience to merge with others’ experiences, as Marcel struggles to explain in the opening chapter of The Mystery of Being, volume II. On another occasion he makes a revealing comment that helps us to

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understand what he means by intersubjectivity as the ground of our ‘openness’ (disponibilité) to others: In contrast to the captive soul we have described, the soul which is at the disposal of others is consecrated and inwardly dedicated; it is protected against suicide and despair, which are inter-related and alike, because it knows that it is not its own, and that the most legitimate use it can make of its freedom is precisely to recognize that it does not belong to itself; this recognition is the starting point of its creativeness. (POE: 43)

The soul is not its own. In other words the soul is simply a part of a shared world. It is almost as if there was but one soul in which each individual has a personal share. We are all linked through this universal soul, if only we are prepared to recognize it. This is the spiritual world to which Marcel constantly refers, often implicitly when he criticizes modern man’s lack of sensitivity to this universal affinity; ours has become a ‘broken world’ (le monde cassé as he likes to call it). Being creative, or creatively faithful, entails being open to others; and this openness or sensitivity is what Marcel means by intersubjectivity: [...] the idea of being creative, taken in this quite general sense, always implies the idea of being open towards others: that openness I have called in my Gifford Lectures intersubjectivity, whether that is conceived as agape (charity) or philia (attachment): these two notions in any case tend ultimately to converge. But what must be stated as forcibly as possible is that societies built on a materialistic basis, whatever place they tactfully leave for a collective and at bottom purely animal exaltation, sin radically against intersubjectivity; they exclude it in principle; and it is because they exclude it that they grub up every possible freedom by its roots. (MMS: 17)

Marcel’s philosophy is essentially a philosophy of intersubjectivity, so much so that he goes as far as to argue, writing about the philosopher’s role in the contemporary world, that the notion of essence, so devalued by certain existentialist thinkers, needs urgently to be thought afresh on the basis of ‘a kind of intersubjectivity whose rights the philosophy of the schools has too often failed to recognize’ (MMS: 85). Intersubjectivity is

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a nexus that serves as the foundation for Marcel’s ontology, linking such key concepts as disponibilité, fidelity, and participation. Marcel speaks of this intersubjective nexus as the inside of a structure of which we cannot imagine the corresponding outside, see it objectively as it were. We can only become aware of its existence, of its ‘singularity’, a word also used by astrophysicists to refer to the frontier of physical extrapolation beyond which they cannot go. In the case of intersubjectivity we can only have ‘a more or less distinct consciousness of the underlying reality which ties me to other beings of whose reality I already have a preliminary notion’ (MOB: II, 19. Author’s italics). It is this intersubjective nexus that, in Marcel’s ontology, explains the inseparability of faith, hope, and charity. Commenting on the absence of the word charity in his lectures, he explains that ‘we cannot fail to see that intersubjectivity [...] is after all nothing but charity itself, whether it is a question of agape or philia’ (MOB: II, 191). Such is the centrality of intersubjectivity to Marcel’s philosophy that nearly thirty years later, in conversation with Paul Ricoeur, he insists on how it has dominated his experience (‘so essential to me’). It is the bulwark to self-enclosure, it is the recognition of the other as concrete others rather than as an extension of self, and as such a key factor in how we experience the world: ‘I think that it is on the level of agape, on the level of charity or intersubjectivity, that experience undergoes a certain transformation in that it takes on the value of a test’ (TWB: 253–54). Love is therefore the clearest manifestation of Marcel’s philosophy of intersubjectivity, and in some sense encompasses both hope and faith. Hope is centred on love; indeed on various occasions Marcel insists on their inseparability. A being without love does not hope, merely craves or lusts. Similarly a being who loves will not withhold his faith in the beloved. Accordingly God has to be experienced first and foremost as love: you cannot invoke his existence out of mere desire or spurious proofs; you have to love God to bring him to reality. Marcel’s argument is simple in its essence. The main source by far of our knowledge of the world comes from our experience of it. Our sentiments are experientially real. The love we experience is love of real things. Hence if we love God he is real for us. We are not of course talking here of a verifiable reality in

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the scientific sense of the term, but of a sign of something that appears to exist beyond us and to which we direct our love. The same argument, if the term may be used in this non-objective realm, applies to Marcel’s notion of presence. A philosophy which stresses verification ‘ends by ignoring presence—that inward realization of presence through love which infinitely transcends all possible verification because it exists in an immediacy beyond all conceivable mediation’ (POE: 15). Presence is unmediated and is driven by love. Even death fails to break the bond; hence our irremediable sense of loss when someone close to us dies. Love makes death, in the sense of utter finality, unacceptable. The absence of the loved one does not end our love, as logically it should if we were wholly convinced of death as a cut-off point. Of course Marcel is well aware that love can be possessive and that possessiveness can lead quite simply to a sense of frustration at the loss of one’s possession. But Marcel is concerned with what he calls oblative love, a love that is giving or sacrificial, that is to say directed towards the other: ‘human love—and this word must be understood in a meaning broad enough to be applicable also to friendship, to philia—implies a reciprocity profound enough to let other-directedness work in both ways, to let each become the centre of the other’ (PAI: 235). While possessive love turns the person loved into a thing that can be lost, oblative love turns one’s inevitable suffering into a suffering for the sake of the other. I cease to think of the deceased as a lost object and see him as a being. I do not objectify him but rather maintain my relatedness to him. My sorrow will not be diminished, says Marcel, nor should that even be my aim. The purer the love, the greater the absence of ipseity: ‘The other is present in the act by which I liberate myself not from him, but from the idol I substituted for him in making him static’ (PAI: 89). My love confers presence on a thou, not on a him. The death of the being loved is the supreme test of my love. Both in Marcel’s life and in his writings love and death were inextricably intertwined.

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7.4 Conclusions As the key theological virtue of Christianity, one would expect love to figure prominently in the meditations of Christian philosophers, and this is indeed so in the case of these three thinkers. But love, despite being a very common sentiment quite apart from its status as a theological virtue, is a far from easy topic to deal with because of its diverse manifestations. In Unamuno’s imaginative works there are endless variations on the theme of love, but the central idea appears to revolve around love as an everyday expression of incompleteness, of a desire to reach out to the other, to break the barrier of ipseity. Sexual desire, or egotistical love for another, is but an initial expression that soon translates into unconditional love, seen at its best in maternal love, which is not selfish love but compassionate love, love based on the realization of our vulnerability and ephemerality. Awareness of our own finitude and that of our loved ones creates a sense of commonality, of universal concern which is expressed as love of God. The combination of love and suffering is what creates caritative love or God-love. Berdyaev’s exploration of the topic, though more detailed than Unamuno’s, yields similar conclusions. He is more insistent in excluding sexuality from any kind of love, but concedes that it can co-exist with a genuine love for the personality of the beloved. What love cannot be is impersonal; it must be targeted at real beings for it to become an experiential truth. This giving or self-sacrificial love, which includes maternal love, points to something beyond the reproductive stage demanded by our physical nature with its consequent egotistical desire for gratification. It is love of the other for the other’s sake. This higher love places us on the road to caritative love, which is a universal love because it spreads from the love of one individual to the love of the community of individuals, that is, to the universal presence of God in the other. Marcel’s is the most complicated exploration of love since the subject is approached through his notions of presence, fidelity, and openness to others. His dramatic explorations of this human sentiment are disturbing, but serve to show its complexity, attached as it is to the fuzziness of human motivation. But his concept of intersubjectivity as a higher form of love is the equivalent of Unamuno’s love of God as a universalized form of compassionate love for our fellow beings and of Berdyaev’s

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virtually identical notion of caritative love as a recognition of the divine in others. For Marcel, intersubjectivity, the sense of a shared spirituality, necessarily leads to love, and love, with its corollaries faith and hope, is a clear pointer (not a logical proof ) to a transcendent being or ‘beingness’. Indeed love is so fundamental that it constitutes ‘the only starting point for the understanding of such mysteries as that of body and soul, which, in some manner, is its expression’ (POE: 20). Although love is certainly charitable, charity is not always love. All three writers denounce the sort of charity that emanates from an uneasy conscience in the face of social inequalities or from a desire to seek social approbation. On the other hand this does not mean that genuine charity is God-centred, that is to say, performed out of a sense of religious compliance. All three thinkers are agreed that caritative love must be felt, must be based on identification with our fellow humans and therefore demands concrete expression or selectivity. Love in the abstract is not love. That is why all three decry, not asceticism, but monastic asceticism, the kind that cuts itself off from humanity in pursuit of a religious ideal; such a love of God is both egotistical and un-Christian. Genuine love of God is expressed through love of others. In this respect, the fulfilment of the theological virtue of charity is not a matter of religious adherence; it is a truly existential encounter arising from a concrete situation that demands involvement. It is how we respond to the needs of others that governs the genuineness of our caritative love. Benefaction by itself is not charity in this sense; charity necessitates a psychological commitment, a reaching out towards our fellow-sufferer, a shared exposure or co-ordeal. Only then does love of the other become love of God. It is an experiential quality, not a distant or ideal standard of perfection. Because caritative love is a giving or shared love—oblative love in Marcel’s phrase—it fosters a sense of communion, of sobornost in Berdyaev’s untranslatable Russian word which we might call a sense of togetherness, of harmony, of a common mission. Much the same applies to Marcel’s intersubjectivity: love is of course a subjective experience, but when it spreads from person to person it becomes the binding agent that creates a shared world, a community. This notion of communion, a wholly Christian concept—though in Christianity it is achieved mystically through the presence of Jesus Christ—is one of the key constituents

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in Unamuno’s writing in general and his poetry in particular. Communion for Unamuno means a shared relationship and dialogue, not only with his own private circle of family and friends but with his readers too, whom he often addresses in familiar terms. Love entails the acceptance of suffering as part of our earthly condition, though not a tolerance of it. In Christian thinkers this acceptance of suffering is no doubt to be expected, even if they do not seek to justify it, although Berdyaev goes the furthest in seeing suffering as a purifying and redeeming experience, yet as demanding liberation nonetheless. For Unamuno suffering is ‘the road to consciousness’ [‘el camino de la conciencia’ (DST: X, 387)], and consciousness of our suffering gives us our sensitivity to others’ suffering and thereby to our compassion. For Marcel the greatest suffering is found in our sense of loss, and it is precisely in this sense of loss that the perdurance of love is found through the notion of presence. Unlike Berdyaev, Marcel does not see suffering as purification; on the contrary, he sees it as thoroughly regrettable and ‘bad in principle’, although he qualifies this condemnation of suffering by adding that in ‘an appropriate spiritual climate’ it can be transmuted ‘into a principle capable of radiating love, hope, and charity’ (EBH: 107). Beyond suffering there is death, the major source of our suffering and anguish according to Unamuno. Here again there is a strong measure of agreement between the three thinkers: love and death are linked. Love according to Berdyaev cannot evade the reality of death; it must stare it full in the face and emerge victorious from the encounter. Love is, for Berdyaev, the strongest ‘intimation of immortality’, to borrow Wordsworth’s phrase, that we possess. It marks our desire for plenitude, it signals what is missing in our earthly lives, it is in effect ‘a real act of transcendence’ (DAH: 125). Marcel for his part repeatedly brings up the connection between love and death, a preoccupation with mortality which he has wholly in common with Unamuno, although he insists that we are far more deeply affected by the death of those around us than by the prospect of our own. The death of someone close to us does not bring our love to an end; it can even enhance that love, something that has neither place nor function in a purely material universe. There is no better illustration of Marcel’s notion of continuing presence even beyond death than Unamuno’s plaintive invocation of the presence of his dead wife:

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Oh, those eyes, that fire of a retiring star that shines with love’s eternal light in which I saw the mark of the footprints of our Christ! She is here, she is here, right by my side, released from every role upon the stage, she’s here with me, no longer tyrannized by questions and by fate. [¡Ay sus ojos, su lumbre de recatada estrella que arraiga en lo infinito del amor y en que sentí la huella de los pies del Señor! Está aquí, está aquí, siempre conmigo de todo aparentar al fin desnuda, está aquí, al abrigo del sino y de la duda.] (Unamuno 1995: V, 802–03, 2015: 49)

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8 Individual and Community

Existentialism, as a style of philosophizing supposedly based on what we learn from experience and not on abstract concepts, has had a noticeable bias towards the individual because experience is necessarily subjective. It has often been accused of excessive individualism and even of solipsism. But existentialists were aware of the charge and insisted that subjectivity exists among subjectivities, that it is a presence among others, and that the self ‘far from being a hermetically sealed “pure ego”, is an embodied engagement in a world where, necessarily, it is alongside others’ (Cooper 1990: 166). What most existentialists, both atheistic and Christian, object to, as we see clearly in both of those French antagonists Sartre and Marcel, is mass man, that is, the anonymous collectivity that acts unthinkingly because everyone else is acting that way. This attitude can all too easily degenerate into personal irresponsibility and an Oradour-sur-Glâne barbarity; and for an individual, any individual, to submit to the herd instinct, what David Cooper calls ‘tribalism’ (Cooper 1990: 166–69), is to give up both one’s freedom and one’s responsibility, to descend into Heidegger’s inauthenticity and Sartre’s bad faith. One of the most crucial questions facing the existentialist thinker, and one which caused a good deal of soul-searching and debate, was how to reconcile the fundamental © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. A. Longhurst, Unamuno, Berdyaev, Marcel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81999-6_8

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freedom of existence, which can only have significance at the level of the individual, with the welfare of humanity. For Sartre this meant adopting Marxist communism as a social philosophy and a political programme. For Camus on the other hand Soviet-style communism deprived all individuals of their basic freedom and right to self-determination, while for Marcel Marxism of any kind was unrelentlessly and unacceptably materialistic. This was no way in which to build a community. Yet for the human being a community is essential. As Jaspers said, ‘the individual cannot become human by himself. Self-being is only real in communication with another self-being. Alone, I sink into gloomy isolation—only in community with others can I be revealed in the act of mutual discovery’ (Kaufman 1975: 174). In the preceding chapter we saw that Unamuno, Berdyaev, and Marcel find the essence of community formation in caritative love. This is important, but there is more to be said on the question of the interaction between individual and community. A community of individuals may be said to share an experience, but it is the individual who undergoes the experience. Life is what we experience, and experience is irreducibly personal. Yet human beings live alongside other human beings with whom they interact in a variety of ways. Both Christianity and existentialism recognize this, though in rather different ways. For Christianity, the individual Christian, by virtue of being such, becomes part of a spiritual community in Christ. Philosophical existentialism (as distinct from any theological counterpart) goes so far as to recognize fraternity, but generally draws the line at anything that smacks of an otherworldly relationship. Only the individual can be authentic in the existentialists’ sense; society cannot because it is an agglomeration and has no experiential capacity as such. In the inter-war period Martin Buber had championed ‘dialogue’ with the other as the key component of the human situation. But only the disaster and the genocide of the Second World War persuaded existentialist thinkers that a universal ethic was crucial, that is, an ethic based on mutual recognition if not on a common outlook. Unamuno of course never knew the Second World War, and Berdyaev had written most of his work before then. Marcel’s work can more clearly be divided into pre-war and post-war, but the key ideas of disponibilité, fidelity, and intersubjectivity had been laid down before the impact of World War

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Two was felt, though they would be further developed in subsequent publications. But the most articulate ethical statement on behalf of existentialism was in fact made by an atheist, Simone de Beauvoir, in her 1947 book Pour une Morale de l’ambigüité (translated as The Ethics of Ambiguity). Despite its brevity, this is one of the key texts of existentialism, although regrettably often forgotten, perhaps because its sheer intelligibility makes it look less portentous than Being and time or Being and Nothingness. Beauvoir starts by declaring that existentialism was from the beginning ‘a philosophy of ambiguity’ (Beauvoir 2018: 8), by which she means that it ruled out a choice between pure inwardness and pure externality. Being a subject is not a solipsistic statement; it is a universal fact that applies to everyone. The moral principles that govern a person’s behaviour are not principles in the abstract but that person’s principles, yet individualist ethics are no different from Christian ethics or Kantian ethics, and they are not solipsistic, ‘since the individual is defined only by his relationship to the world and other individuals’ (Beauvoir 2018: 169). The question of course is whether or to what extent an individual’s moral code takes others’ well-being into account. Beauvoir insists that communal values arise from the reality of individual freedom. It is precisely by acknowledging and channelling our freedom that we create values. For man can identify no given values, but what he does possess is the capacity to give himself values, to disclose values. When man realizes that he is solely responsible for his being, ‘he will abandon the dream of an inhuman objectivity. He will understand that it is not a matter of being right in the eyes of God, but of being right in his own eyes’ (Beauvoir 2018: 13). We recognize both good and evil, and we turn the contingent fact of existence into a construction based on our freedom. That willed construction, precisely because it recognizes freedom, is both individual and collective and cannot entertain either anarchy or oppression. Despite Beauvoir’s lucid defence of an ethics of freedom, it remains the case that the being-with-others which existentialism emphasizes has often been seen in terms of what being with others means for me, the individual subject. There is rather less emphasis on what I contribute, or should contribute, to the commonality of beings. As a result of over-­preoccupation with the question of absolute freedom and the agony of decision-making

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there has been greater interest in individual states of anxiety and self-­ deception than in collaboration and mutuality.1 What indeed is a community? A mere collection of individuals? Or a body that has a real, autonomous existence beyond that of any individual member? And if there is such a thing as a community, what is the nature of the bond that makes it such? What is ‘common’ in community? Are a common language and/or a shared space sufficient? Is a ‘we’ an authentic expression of identity that goes beyond multiple ‘I’s? There is the additional question of the role of the individual in a community. Does the individual lose his individuality or a part of it because he is integrated into a community? Does the community appropriate his uniqueness, or on the contrary does it enhance his sense of identity? For some existentialist thinkers, notably the Christian Kierkegaard and the atheist Sartre, a community poses a threat to individuality, to self-­ fulfilment, whereas for others, notably Marcel, a communal ethic enriches the individual’s experience. But here of course one would need to specify what kind of community we have in mind. Marcel is the first to condemn the kind of collectivism associated with Marxist socialism. Egocentric individualism on the one hand and unthinking conformity (or even worse the herd instinct) on the other are the two enemies of a genuine commonality. For existentialists of a Christian persuasion the situation is made even more complicated because the Christian Church or, more correctly, Churches claim to constitute a community in Christ. But is this not sacrificing one’s individuality for a cause whose origins are remote in time and circumstance? Nor is it clear exactly what any Christian Church represents. Is the Church simply its mission, to proclaim the message of Jesus of Nazareth? Or is it rather a medium to personal salvation, a rite of passage to a promised land? And if, as Rudolf Bultmann and other Protestant theologians argue, the Church is a channel for obtaining God’s grace, what about those members who are not conscious, or perhaps not even hopeful, of receiving such a gift but persist in their quest: are they

 There are of course exceptions. Martin Buber is one and, rather later, Emmanuel Levinas is another. 1

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part of the community?2 Or for that matter what happens to those members of the Christian community who refuse to recognize the doctrinal authority of ecclesiastical leaders? The historical answer is tragically obvious. No burning at the stake in modern times perhaps, but Unamuno, we should remember, was subjected to persistent denunciations and vilification by the Spanish bishops and the Jesuits during his lifetime and well beyond, and indeed came close to excommunication, because his deeply-­ felt Christianity did not accept the relevance or truth of certain dogmas proclaimed by the theologians of Rome. And finally, the simplest but probably the most fundamental question of all is what exactly constitutes a Christian community: a common eschatological faith or a total dedication to one’s fellow-men? For the two need not go together. The fact remains that the role of the Church in bringing people to Christ has been controversial. The notion of the Church as mediatrix has not persuaded those who prefer to seek a direct line to God. For existentialist thinkers the removal of freedom is unacceptable. A community which does not come together by the free decision of its members is not a genuine community. For the three thinkers under scrutiny here the Christian community is worth retaining, but their approaches are nevertheless unconventional, and in two of the three cases have been considered heterodox.

8.1 Unamuno: Reconciling the Irreconcilable For a writer often accused of egocentrism, Unamuno is surpringly interested in the idea of community, whether at the level of the family, of the institution, of the village, of the region, of the nation, even of the readers of his own works. Not only his novels but his essays too often bring up the question of the relationship individual-community. In Chap. 3 we saw that Unamuno insists that one’s personality is a composite of how I see myself, how others see me, and how I react to other’s perception of  It is important to note that the Church in this context stands not for a particular organization but for the Christian community at large. In this sense, ‘Bultman thinks, the Church is conceived as something which does not belong to this world, it is the instrument for proclaiming God’s grace’ (Macquarrie 1973: 205). The Lutheran legacy is noticeable. 2

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me. We could call this a theory of entanglement, since it proposes that we cannot conceive of ourselves as self-sufficient or separate: identity is a reciprocal creation. For me to be an ‘I’ there must also be a ‘we’; others impact on me in a way that is fundamental to my being: ‘Our consciousness lives imprisoned by the idea that others have formed of us, an idea that ends up by imprinting itself on us’ [‘Nuestra conciencia vive prisionera de la idea que los demás se han formado de nosotros, idea que acaba por imponérsenos’ (Unamuno 1966: IX, 835)]. Given this inevitable entanglement of ourselves with others, what does Unamuno make of social existence? Referring to the Spain of his day, Unamuno deplores the current state of social disintegration, which he blames in part on a materialist interpretation of history, reducing human beings to mere pawns of economic forces. This approach denies the uniqueness of each human being and instead ascribes an exchange value to every individual. This is true of both capitalist and socialist societies. In appraising the economic worth of the individual we forget what is most valuable: our common humanity. Respect has come to depend exclusively on social distinction: ‘The issue is to achieve superiority and distinction, to differentiate oneself with no respect for the necessary parallel process of integration’ [‘La cuestión es elevarse y distinguirse, diferenciarse sin respeto alguno al necesario proceso paralelo de integración’ (LDH: VIII, 353)]. Integration, however, need not mean absorbtion or loss of individuality: for Unamuno, one person can never be a substitute for another. One can remain independent without separating oneself from one’s fellow-humans, or as Unamuno puts it, ‘look for society […] but without chaining yourself to it’ [‘busca sociedad […] pero sin encadenarte a ella’ (ADN: VIII, 318)]. By chaining oneself Unamuno really means adopting trite notions and common prejudices, as his frequent criticisms of hackneyed ideas and stereotypes make clear. For Unamuno society represents not a threat to the individual’s distinctiveness but a challenge, the challenge of communication, ‘of communion with your bretheren in humanity’ [‘comulgar con tus hermanos en comunidad’ (ADN: VIII, 320)], which requires that we face society, not ignore it. Paradoxically solitude can serve to bring one closer to others because we realize how lonely each one is at heart. It is this existential loneliness that we must strive to recognize and understand. ‘The human

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question’ [‘la cuestión humana’ (SOL: VIII, 781)] is the only one that really counts. Unamuno often reminds us of the difference between a mass and a community. The crowd that comes together to sing the psalms generates a sense of community because each individual contributes his living psalm to the whole, whereas the crowd that comes to listen to a political speech is not a genuine body but an amorphous mass. Here Unamuno is thinking of how each individual can contribute to the whole whilst retaining his distinctiveness, a leitmotif that runs through everything he writes about the authentic community. In the creation of such a community the appeal is to the individual, not to the anonymous mass. Indeed the mass psyche is debasing, and he who despises the mass may yet be paying homage to each person within it. The difference between a mass and a community is that between a mixture or aggregation and a combination or compound. The former has mere numbers; the latter is based on interaction, on sharing an experience and thereby achieving a degree of fusion. Unamuno, agitator of the slumbering masses, as he was sometimes described, a label he readily accepted, justified his provocative criticisms of the society of his day by arguing that he was trying to foster a ‘true collective spirit, the soul of humanity’ [‘el verdadero espíritu colectivo, el alma de la humanidad’ (SOL: VIII, 787)]. This tells well enough that what Unamuno misses is the shared world, the world that is sensitive to affairs of the soul. A fusion of souls leads to a shared or common soul. That is Unamuno’s ultimate goal, very simply expressed in his Diario íntimo: ‘Turned to himself, let each one pray for all, and all united in a common prayer will make a single spirit’ [‘Vuelto cada hombre a sí, ruegue por todos, y todos unidos en una creación común harán un solo espíritu’ (DIN: VII, 266)]. As is usual in Unamuno, however, this goal hides a tension, both at the ordinary social level and at the deeper spiritual level. In the ordinary world there is a natural struggle between imposing one’s own views and attitudes and recognizing the value of others’ views and attitudes. Indeed the situation is more complex than this suggests, since immersing oneself in society can be a way of fleeing from oneself, of adopting what for one are false values, a notion close to Sartre’s mauvaise foi. Unamuno insists that the individual must not lose his identity in the

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collectivity, for in that case he has nothing to contribute. Inevitably therefore ‘our life is a constant struggle between our spirit, which wants to take over the world, appropriate it, shape it, and the world itself which wants to take hold of our spirit and make it in turn its own property’ [‘Nuestra vida es un continuado combate entre nuestro espíritu, que quiere adueñarse del mundo, hacerlo suyo, hacerle él, y el mundo, que quiere apoderarse de nuestro espíritu y hacerle suyo’ (IYE: VIII, 611)]. This does not mean that social interaction is something to be avoided. On the contrary, our soul must be projected outwards, and the kind of intimacy that retreats into itself must be firmly rejected. Given our essentially social formation, there should be no opposition between self and society, since ‘I am society and society is me’ [‘yo soy la sociedad y la sociedad es yo’ (CYC: VIII, 386)]. There is thus a reciprocal effect between the individual and his environment, which Unamuno refers to as the communion between our consciousness and the world, a notion to which he attaches a good deal of importance. What gets in the way of ‘communion’ or mutual understanding is that in general we do not believe sufficiently strongly in the inner life of our fellow humans. Just like Berdyaev, Unamuno argues that many people are simply oblivious of the inner person, what he calls ‘el intra-mundo’ or world-within. Only those who are sufficiently sensitive to transphysical values are capable of the ideal state of ‘mutual understanding through spiritual presence’ ‘[‘entenderse por presencia espiritual’ (IYE: VIII, 611)] rather than staying at the level of factual communication. This is what truly interests Unamuno: to awaken fellow Spaniards from their spiritual slumber, as he himself declares to an imaginary interlocutor in one of his dialogical essays (NYE: VIIII, 734). We do not persuade others by selling them our ideas but by appealing to their experiences, their feelings, their fears, and their sufferings. Unamuno’s argument is that most people are closer to sentiment than to rationality. A religion based on rational argument is as little understood as scientific theories that aspire to explain how the universe works; religious dogma will not revive a dormant spirituality. What each one has to give to others is a spiritual vision: ‘Humans must try to imprint themselves on one another, to give their spirits to one another, to stamp their souls on one another’ [‘Los hombres deben tratar

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de imponerse los unos a los otros, de darse mutuamente sus espíritus, de sellarse mutuamente las almas’ (DST: X, 498)]. The resistance to recognizing the spiritual presence within each of us, which is what ultimately unites us, comes from fear, the fear of nakedness, in this case spiritual nakedness, argues Unamuno. It is this fear of disclosure, of allowing others to see into our deepest sentiments, that makes many fight shy of acknowledging their spiritual yearning. For Unamuno this spiritual aspiration is a natural condition which has been buried under the rampant individualism fostered by a materialistic capitalism which in fact negates the basis of all individuals, our humanity: ‘What is profound, what is truly original, is what was there at the beginning, what is common to all, what is human’ [‘Lo hondo, lo verdaderamente original, es lo originario, lo común a todos, lo humano’ (LDH: VIII, 353)]. What is human for Unamuno is what distinguishes us from the animals: our awareness of a spiritual or transphysical compass. This, above anything else, is what human beings have in common and what should be the basis of our communion. This Unamunian idea of a collective spiritual bond antedates The Tragic Sense of Life by at least six years, and is expressed very forcefully in the 1906 essay ‘El secreto de la vida’. Here Unamuno distinguishes between genuine spiritual nakedness, that is, the stripping away of layers of conventionalism to reveal the inner core, and mere exhibitionism. He expresses some reservations about his earlier appeal to divulge our souls and concedes that we can only do so through language, which is after all a conventional tool. In fact the antecedent of this collective spiritual bond is the linguistic and cultural bond of a race or nation derived from Herder and Humboldt and found in Unamuno’s earlier works. His later works move on from this and emphasize the spiritual at the expense of the environmental. He insists that we all carry within us a sense of mystery, a potential creative energy that will only become actualized if something or someone produces the spark, a Jesus Christ to resurrect Lazarus. Unamuno’s biblical metaphor is of course indicative of an awakening to a spiritual life, a life that enriches and in some even produces great works of science and philosophy (Unamuno mentions those of Newton, Spinoza, and Kant) which owe their existence to the sense of mystery and of puzzlement of their originators. To an extent we all carry this sense of mystery within us, what

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Unamuno calls life’s secret, but some of us are afraid of admitting it and distract ourselves with amnesic pastimes and gratifications, unaware that ‘nothing unites men more than a secret’ [‘Nada une a los hombres más que el secreto’ (ESV: VIII, 931)]. To grasp the inner secret of each individual, what causes his anxiety, his sorrow, his joy, the passion that consumes him or the longing he feels, may not be possible, but Unamuno insists that these are but variations on a common theme, branches of the root stem that is our common heritage: And the secret of human life, the generic secret, the root secret from which all others sprout, is the craving for more life, a fierce and unquenchable longing to be everything without ceasing to be what one is, to appropriate the entire universe without letting the universe appropriate and absorb one’s self; it is the desire to be other without ceasing to be oneself, and to continue to be oneself while simultaneously being other; it is, in a word, the appetite for divinity, the hunger for God. [Y el secreto de la vida humana, el general, el secreto raíz de que todos los demás brotan, es el ansia de más vida, es el furioso e insaciable anhelo de ser todo lo demás sin dejar de ser nosotros mismos, de adueñarnos del universo entero sin que el universo se adueñe de nosotros y nos absorba; es el deseo de ser otro sin dejar de ser yo, y seguir siendo yo siendo a la vez otro; es en una palabra, el apetito de divinidad, el hambre de Dios. (ESV: VIII, 932)]

This striving for spiritual plenitude which Unamuno perceives as the common bond of humanity is not easily assuaged. As we have seen, society has its problem in coalescing around the notion of a spiritual mutuality; but, more surprisingly perhaps, so has Christianity. If this spiritual longing identified by Unamuno is represented by what we call God, then the idea of God is at its most meaningful and influential as the sum total of every person’s longing for fulfilment, for understanding, for a purposive existence. God becomes the collective conscience, or as Unamuno starkly formulates it, ‘God [is] a social product’ [‘Dios [es] un producto social’ (DST: X, 297)]. God is what we have in common, whether we think of it as an inquietude, an anxiety, a hope, a projection of our wish to overcome our limitations; he is in other words, our collective identity. Again Unamuno is clear on this: ‘if there is a

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sentiment, a notion that is collective, social, then it is that of God’ [‘si hay sentimiento y concepto colectivo, social, es el de Dios’ (DST: X, 400)]; and ‘God exists and reveals Himself in the collectivity’ [‘Dios es y se revela en la colectividad’ (DST: X, 419)]. This approach is perfectly illustrated novelistically through the heterodox priest in San Manuel Bueno, mártir. Father Manuel Bueno is not concerned with whether God guarantees individual immortality. He is concerned with giving his community what he calls ‘unanimidad de sentido’, a common direction or bearing. As he says to Ángela’s mother, who on her deathbed believes she has to leave her children behind in order to meet God, ‘You are not leaving us […]. God, my dear, is here just as He is everywhere, and you will see Him from here, and all of us in Him, and Him in us’ [‘Usted no se va […]. Dios, hija mía, está aquí como en todas partes, y le verá usted desde aquí. Y a todos nosotros en Él, y a Él en nosotros’ (SMB: II, 327)]. God, the sentiment of the divine, facilitates social cohesion, and Father Manuel uses this notion to create his living community of Valverde de Lucerna, a community with a common sense of purpose and contentment. God’s reality, then, is the reality of the multiple imaginations that envision him. From here, it is but a step to claim God as the universal consciousness, as Unamuno goes on to do. Now Schopenhauer of course also conceived a universal ‘consciousness’ (or noumenon in Kantian terms) in the impersonal or blind will that drove the universe and nature remorselessly; but he declined to turn that universal will into God because he could discern no collective identity in humanity, merely the subjective drive to survival and reproduction in each of us. Unamuno, a Schopenhauerian in many respects, argues that the notion of God, or sense of the divine in its primitive origins, has been obscured by the more modern subject-object distinction. Divinity as a state comes from the non-differentiation between the subjective and the objective: ‘it is from that indistinctiveness that the sentiment and the notion of divinity come from’ [‘es de esa indistinción de donde el sentimiento y el concepto de divinidad proceden’ (DST: X, 401)]. God is both subjective and objective, both immanent and transcendent, because he comes from the individual but at the same time from nature, where mankind first perceived him through a dual process of projection/assimilation. Hence Unamuno’s contention that God is a social or collective phenomenon rather than a

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purely personal preference. In that sense he may be regarded as an objective truth, as something that pervades our subjective experience and renders stable what is essentially unstable. Given, then, that the God-sentiment is what unites us, potentially at least if not in practice, Christianity should be able to provide the communal identity that facilitates the solidarity and security that most humans seek. The problem that Unamuno sees is that the real essence of Christianity lies in its promise of personal survival, that it appeals to a person’s desire to perdure. Christian solidarity, if there is such a thing, arises purely from one’s social origins, not from Christianity itself: ‘The sentiment of solidarity comes from myself; as I am social, I need to hold on to human society; as I am a social product, I need to socialize and go from myself to God—who is me projected on All—and from God to each one of my neighbours’ [‘El sentimiento de solidaridad parte de mí mismo; como soy sociedad, necesito adueñarme de la sociedad humana; como soy un producto social, tengo que socializarme y de mí voy a Dios—que soy yo proyectado al Todo—y de Dios a cada uno de mis prójimos’ (DST: X, 494–95)]. In La agonía del cristianismo Unamuno makes much of this individual appeal of Christianity, namely that it does not offer to save humanity but it offers to save you. He opens his treatise by stating that Christianity has its roots in the most intimate depths of human individuality: the business of negotiating one’s personal salvation. This in effect makes of Christianity an individual pursuit, a solitary quest according to Unamuno, who indeed goes so far as to write that ‘society kills Christianity’ [‘la sociedad mata la cristiandad’ (ADC: X, 551)]. We live together but we die alone. To an extent life can be shared, death cannot. The expectation of eschaton or the end of time shortly after the death of Jesus produced a common outlook amongst his followers in the face of the impending apocalypse, but the subsequent realization that this was not about to happen turned this anxiety over the end of the world into an anxiety over the end of one’s own life. Religion became a personal matter, or a matter of personal survival, a ‘religio quae non religat’ (ADC: X, 555). The sense of togetherness was lost as Christianity was converted into a personal ticket to salvation. In Christianity we each seek our own survival, our own resurrection. Unamuno therefore detects in Christianity an irresolvable tension between the individual and the

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community. The idea of a social Christianity, known in Spanish as ‘the reinado social de Cristo’, publicized by the Jesuits in the early part of the twentieth century as an alternative to workers’ movements, comes in for severe and uncompromising criticism.3 For Unamuno, Christianity has nothing to do with politics and economics. Social problems are man-­ made and purely contingent; Christianity is concerned with combatting, not poverty or inequality, but the threat of extinction at death. In its origins it was wholly apolitical, and it was only after romanization that it developed a political consciousness and even ambition. When the Church and the Jesuits take on a political role, argues Unamuno, they cease being genuinely Christian. A Christian Church cannot aspire to become a substitute for communism or socialism or capitalism because that is not its role. Unamuno does not accept institutional change through time, at any rate not in its mission. He is very clear that the Church’s role is to maintain alive Christ’s promise of salvation, and we can see why. Though a Jew from birth to death, Jesus showed no interest in leading a race or nation. Salvation was not promised to a race, or a nation or an institution, or a sect, or even a defined religious community. It was promised to each individual qua individual, and any association of salvation with an institutional affiliation, as the Catholic Church has in the past upheld, with its slogan of ‘extra ecclesiam nulla salus’, is a distortion. According to Unamuno, the most faithful adherence to Christianity is that of the celibate St Paul. But to follow his example would mean the end of Christianity: ‘a universal monastery is an impossibility; it is impossible to have a monastery that would take in everyone’ [‘el monasterio universal es imposible; es imposible el monasterio que abarque a todos’ (ADC: X, 589)]. The inevitable result is a split among Christians between those who pursue their soteriological quest in solitude and those who, following nature’s call, devote themselves to producing more of ‘God’s children’. The former live by the spirit; the latter by the flesh. Something is sacrificed in either case: ‘Both, when they entertain religious feelings, live in an intimate contradiction, in agony’ [‘Unos y otros, cuando son religiosos, viven en íntima contradicción, en agonía’ (ADC: X, 589)].  The doctrine of the social reign of Jesus Christ was eventually given formal expression by Pope Pius XI in his encyclicals Ubi arcano Dei consilio (1922) and Quas primas (1925). 3

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Despite this inherent contradiction in Christianity—we must belong to another kingdom yet live in this one—Unamuno does not give up the idea of community, even if he consistently emphasizes the individual’s role. For even if we could imagine our own personal immortality, he asks, ‘is it not possible that we might feel it to be as terrible as denying it?’ [‘¿no cabe que la sintamos como algo tan terrible como su negación?’ (DST: X, 452)]. We cannot conceive of the next life except in the terms of this one. And in this one we belong to others as others belong to us. In the end the individual salvation promised by Christianity is incomprehensible and pointless: ‘Since no-one lives in isolation, no-one can perdure in isolation’ [‘Como nadie vive aislado, nadie puede sobrevivir aislado tampoco’ (DST: X, 476)]. Unwilling to sacrifice the notion of a community in Christ, Unamuno brings in the idea—though not as his idea—of those who see the human race as a single being made up of a collection of components or cells in which each component or cell is representative of the whole and who thereby imagine salvation as a collective enterprise: ‘Or all are saved or no-one is saved’ [‘O se salvan todos o no se salva nadie’ (DST: X, 472)]. This is a grandiose dream, an apocalyptic act of solidarity with our fellow-humans. But does losing our individual consciousness in the mystical body satisfy us? Unamuno at any rate expresses his own regrets: But in this final act of solidarity, in this genuine and supreme Christination (sic) of all creatures, what becomes of each individual consciousness? What becomes of me, of this poor fragile I, of this I the slave of time and space, of this I whom reason tells me is but a passing accident, but for the sake of whose salvation I live, I suffer, I hope and I believe? [Pero en esta final solidarización, en esta la verdadera y suprema cristinación de las criaturas todas, ¿qué es de cada conciencia individual?, ¿qué es de mí, de este pobre yo frágil, de este yo esclavo del tiempo y del espacio, de este yo que la razón me dice ser un mero accidente pasajero, pero por salvar al cual vivo y sufro y espero y creo? (DST: X, 476)]

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8.2 Berdyaev: Towards a City of God According to Berdyaev the greatest threat to human concord and solidarity comes from individualism and sectarianism. Individualism is the contemporary protest against the power of the social order over man’s freedom. But this individualistic claim to freedom is disunited, fragmented, ‘estranged from the world’ (MCA: 152). The individualist claims that ‘the world is always violating him’ (MCA: 152). This is a demanding attitude which refuses to recognize that each person is a microcosm related to the macrocosm. ‘Individualism is a devastation of individuality, its impoverishment, a diminution of its universal content, i.e. a tendency towards non-being’ (MCA: 153). Individualism, argues Berdyaev, is the opposite of individuality because the latter is a result of one’s contribution to the totality; individualism, self-centredness, contributes nothing. It is the cosmos that confers individuality through a sense of relationship, whereas individualism puts itself before the cosmos, is impervious to its influence, and reduces life not to real freedom as it thinks but to a vacant, purposeless freedom, the expression of an immature will lacking in creativity, since creativity is a positive response to the cosmos, an adding rather than a subtracting. Individualism is mere self-idolization, which ‘leads to the destruction of man, to his fall into non-being’ (MCA: 154). What Berdyaev means is that if there is nothing higher than man to which he can aspire, then there is neither purpose nor genuine freedom. Individualism is the clearest example of the attitude which reduces human life to a meaningless and static existence. In egocentric attitudes humanity becomes atomized and estranged, unable to relate to itself, for ‘only the microcosm knows the macrocosm’ (MCA: 155). An individualism that separates itself from the world cannot know the world. Only personality—the outward manifestation or culmination of individuality—can be at one with the cosmos. Sectarianism is individualism writ large: a sect wishes to break away, to ignore the world, to seek its own salvation. Berdyaev unceremoniously labels this attitude unchristian, because ‘the Christian conscience, the conscience of the universal Logos, cannot be reconciled either to individualism or to sectarianism’ (MCA: 156). To despise the world, no

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matter how fallen it is, is to reject a divine creation. In one respect sectarianism is worse than individualism: it creates a false impression of union. Berdyaev is not just referring to small, breakaway religious groups. For him, anything that lacks universality of spirit evinces a tendency to sectarianism; even the Catholic and Orthodox Churches are not free of this blemish of exclusivity and self-righteousness. Sectarianism is ultimately an attitude of mind: the sectarian spirit is worse than that of the hermit. Berdyaev distinguishes between individualism and sectarianism on the one hand, and solitude on the other. A solitary person has not necessarily chosen to isolate himself from his fellow-men, but only from certain conditions under which others choose to live. Nietzsche is for Berdyaev a clear example of a solitary person who thinks universally. An act of courage or a creative undertaking is compatible with leading a solitary life. Solitude in itself cannot therefore be classified under either individualism or universalism. The religious way of life need not necessarily be seen in terms of withdrawal, for it can and should move from the individual personality towards society, towards the cosmos. Freedom and creativity, two key notions in Berdyaev’s thought, demand universality, not insularity, to be meaningful. Collectivism, however, is by no means solidarity. Nor does it provide cohesion in the face of fragmentation. Marxism is for Berdyaev the wrong solution to the atomistic world view associated with capitalistic societies. It tries to impose a collective consciousness on disjunct fragments precisely because it perceives individualistic disunion. But a social consciousness emanating from false values is itself false. A consciousness that is authentically social cannot be imposed from above by constricting personal freedom; it must arise from ‘man’s consciousness of himself as a microcosm, a consciousness of man’s organic appurtenance to the cosmic hierarchy’ (MCA: 275). No policy can provide social cohesion if we do not recognize in our being a reflection of something much greater and vaster. Every kind of political organization and legal system is based on man’s distrust of man which must be brought under control. In religious jargon these are the consequences of sin to which we are forced to submit. But these social institutions, necessary as they may be, do not change the fundamental divisiveness of mankind because they are primarily concerned with maintaining order and providing material security. In so

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doing they tend to act against creativity and independent thought, demanding submission and acquiescence. This merely promotes unthinking conformity, not real unity. Nor are political revolutions the answer to stagnation: they are reactions to the old rather than openness to the new. Often driven by resentment, hatred, and revenge, they are backward-looking and lacking in creativity, ill-adapted to a cosmic vision. Political changes are mechanical; they stay on the surface of man’s being. To achieve real unity, not the spurious unity of stasis provided by the state and its institutions, we must focus on a dimension beyond political and economic life. Here Berdyaev brings in the quasi-religious notion of communion, which the state cannot provide. Communion is a spiritual occurrence which demands the renunciation of precisely that kind of security which the state promises to provide. The communion of personalities is what a genuine community amounts to. Berdyaev establishes a strong distinction between community and collectivity. Collectivism as an ideology is described as ‘the relation of man to man through his relationship to the collective reality or pseudo-reality, to objectivized society’, whereas ‘community means the immediate relation of man to man through God, the inner source of all life’ (RSC: 120). Community in this spiritual sense is connected to sobornost, which is ‘the communion in love of the Church with the Holy Spirit’ (RSC: 122). There is no sobornost in collectivism because the latter is something mechanical and external. Nor is there any point in looking for external evidence of sobornost because it is a purely spiritual common identity; it is community-in-spirit. Berdyaev leaves little doubt that modern society, whether capitalist or Marxist, does not constitute a genuine community, though he expresses a mild preference for socialism over bourgeois capitalism on the grounds that it is the next step in political development. Surprisingly, Berdyaev does not claim that, where other systems have failed, Christianity has been shown to have succeeded in achieving the desired higher order governed by a cosmic communion between human beings: ‘The Christian world has not yet known collective social sacrificial living, or love expressed in society. What was accomplished in the individual saints has never been realized socially’ (MCA: 285). So here we have the claim that certain individuals (Berdyaev mentions St Francis) have achieved what

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has yet to be achieved by the Christian community. Partly it was a problem of expectations: there was general scepticism of the possibility of realizing a godly society on this earth due to a deep conviction of the fallenness of our state as a result of the sinful inclination in man. But Berdyaev goes on to say that Christianity, whatever its historical failings, does offer the potential of achieving this state of harmony, ‘the creation of a new and unprecedented life, of a new communion of men, hitherto unknown’ (MCA: 285). This will require a material sacrifice from individuals and collectives alike, that is to say a degree of detachment from what many take to be absolute necessities but are no more than historical encumbrances and preconceived ideas. And Berdyaev specifically includes theocratic ideas among these outdated theories which need to be abandoned. He is arguing for a new Christianity, not for the existing one based on mandate and obedience. ‘The creation of a new communion or communality presupposes an anthropological revelation, a revelation of divine humanity, a Christology of humanity’ (MCA: 286–87). It is not easy to pin down Berdyaev on what he means by ‘anthropological revelation’, but we can see that it is at any rate a secular adaptation of the traditional theological argument of divine revelation when no better one is to hand. Berdyaev is evidently trying to anthropomorphize certain religious claims while retaining their relevance to the human situation. He rejects the Marxist interpretation of human society, despite its being the most advanced view of the social order, because it moves only within the material realm and obstinately refuses to recognize the spiritual dimension in man. A socialist community is incomplete because it ‘deprives man of his deepest and truest values’ (MCA: 288) and thereby degenerates into stagnation and bondage. By comparison, the power of Christianity lies not only in recognizing the equal value of all men but the absolute value of all souls. This absolute value implies a cosmic outlook, for it transcends both the historical and the contingent nature of human societies. We share in this absolute value of the human soul through what Berdyaev terms ‘communion in the spirit’ (MCA: 287). The community that Berdyaev has in mind is no less than a cosmic social order, a new City of God that does not reproduce the old order, whether secular or theocratic. We are not told exactly what this

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order will comprise, except that it will be ‘created in Spirit’ and is ‘untranslatable into the language of the physical plane of life’ (MCA: 295). Virtually all of the above emerges from the most important of Berdyaev’s early works, The Meaning of the Creative Act (1916), which contains in embryo a very large proportion of the ideas developed in his later books. The notion of an emerging spiritual community reappears in several of these. One problem facing Christianity is, as we have seen, how to transform the insight of the few (spiritual individuality) into the living attitudes of the community. Institutions in the end favour the collectivity, since they need the support or acquiescence of the masses to survive, and the masses have always opposed individuals whose spiritual outlook is an exception to the norm. What has dominated society and social institutions is therefore the outlook of the average man. The question that arises is formulated by Berdyaev as follows: ‘Must the question of Christian consciousness and knowledge be solved in a “democratic” spirit with a view to the requirements of average humanity, or will a more “interior” solution, beyond the comprehension of the masses, be possible and allowed by authority?’ (FAS: xiv). A genuine Christian community can only come about if mass man attains the insight of spiritual man. In a way this is the central and recurring idea in the whole of Berdyaev’s work: the attempt to persuade his readers that the discovery of spiritual values would lead to a better understanding amongst people, to a sense of togetherness or sobornost. How can the reality of a spiritual world be demonstrated to others given that there exists neither an external, objective correspondence nor a conceptual proof of its existence? Spirituality is a purely subjective experience, perhaps real enough as such, but if one has not had such experience how can one be convinced of its reality, of its transforming capacity? Berdyaev, who has no truck with dogmatic theology, does concede this difficulty, but argues that resistance to spiritual experience has always been negative, based on the absence of such experience in the majority of people. Empiricism, however rational, does not entitle one to set limits on another’s experience. On the contrary, it should encourage one to inquire into why another’s experience is different from one’s own, rather than make one succumb to the tyranny of the ‘average mind’. Here Berdyaev argues in exactly the way that William James argued in his The

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Varieties of Religious Experience (first published in 1902), namely that to those who have religious experiences those experiences appear unquestionably real. Berdyaev goes as far as to say that ‘the absence of spirit and of spiritual life in man is not a normal condition, but rather a state of sin and a debasement of the divine image’ (FAS: 29). One reason why such an absence has been seen as the norm is that spirituality was regarded as the preserve of saints and ascetics, says Berdyaev. The spirituality of the ordinary man was looked upon with suspicion, as not having its origin in God. The Church found it easier to deal with sin than with spirit, which it distrusted. In fact Berdyaev is considerably more adept at explaining the lack of spirituality in modern man than at setting forth how to achieve it. The best he can do is to write in circular fashion that ‘man becomes worthy of the spiritual life insofar as he is in effective communication with it’ (FAS: 31). Time and again he has recourse to the mystics, especially the Germans, as an example of communication with spiritual life: Eckhart, Böhme, Silesius are some of those signalled by Berdyaev as pointing the way towards a spiritual existence. One can appreciate that what Berdyaev is driving at is theosis. But how many ordinary mortals would make any sense of the writings of these mystics? What Berdyaev does explain much better is the tension created within the Christian community by the New Testament injunctions to love not the things of this world but one’s neighbour. Yet to love one’s neighbour in any meaningful way is necessarily to take account of his worldly existence and share in it. A Christian community cannot wash its hands off this world but has to live in it, share in its destiny and be responsive to its needs. We cannot properly fulfil Christ’s injunction to ‘feed my sheep’ if we turn our backs on the world. As Berdyaev writes, ‘man is condemned to a reciprocal activity, to the attraction and repulsion of the spirit and of the world, and of spiritual and natural humanity’ (FAS: 33). This is the crux of the problem of taking the spiritual route, and not many mystics have successfully reconciled worldly exigency and spiritual quest, though a few have, notably Unamuno’s favourite, the indefatigable St Teresa of Avila, whom Berdyaev scarcely mentions. The tension, then, between individual and community remains largely unresolved. Berdyaev acknowledges the problem but seems resigned to the fact that our existence is split between the inner and outer worlds: ‘Christianity is the revelation of the

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mystery of spiritual life, within which all is mysterious, and the hidden depths of being are unveiled as a divine mystery: within it, all is life, all is vital tragedy’ (FAS: 33). What is tragic is that we cannot hope to understand this mystery from the outside. Where does this leave the bulk of the Christian community? If understanding Christ’s mission demands a prior spiritual insight, can the vast majority of readers and followers of the Gospels derive anything meaningful from them? Was Jesus not making a telling point when he said that he spoke in parables to the people so that ‘hearing they may hear and not understand’? (Mark 4.11–12) Yet this is what Berdyaev states: ‘The Christ must be revealed in the interior life of the spirit before He is revealed in the exterior world of nature and history. Without the inward and spiritual acceptance of Christ, the truths set out in the Gospel remain unintelligible facts of the empirical, exterior world’ (FAS: 34). The closest Berdyaev comes to identifying the locus of spiritual life is his declaration that we receive an intimation of it in ‘all the intellectual, moral, and artistic life of humanity, all fellowship in love’ (FAS: 47). This of course is in line with his idea of creativity, of the need to formulate a creative response to existence. But this response, he admits, covers a qualitative diversity; not all responses are comparable. Nevertheless Berdyaev insists that, despite this diversity of response, unity is achievable via the spiritual side of existence, and he means unity in earthly life, not in an assumed hereafter, something very close to Father Manuel Bueno’s ‘unanimity of purpose’ (‘unanimidad de sentido’). Indeed he claims that ‘spiritual life is the arena in which human beings encounter one another’ (FAS: 38). What Christianity does in effect is to provide the ground for such an encounter. Starting from Martin Buber’s I-Thou conception, Berdyaev uses the notion of We, where each person is a Thou, not an It. Whereas society transforms each of its members into an It through a process of objectification, the Christian Church (Berdyaev does not refer to any one institution) retains the genuine We which recognizes each member as a Thou. ‘Society is the objectivization of the We which possesses no reality at all. […] The We in its existentiality is a communion, a fellowship, but not society’ (SAF: 104). In other words, what Christianity offers is a community based not on such objectified states of being as nationality, citizenship, social class, political affiliation, profession, employment and the like, but based on a communion which entails

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a mutual recognition in the formation of a universal outlook common to all and created by all. Each of its members is an active part of this universal life, of this authentic We: ‘The We is a qualitative content immanent in the Ego, for every Ego is invariably related not only to the Thou but also to multiple mankind. The pure ontological idea of the Church is founded upon such a relationship’ (SAS: 80). Although Berdyaev does not say so, this notion seems to hark back to the Gospel of St John 15.5, to Christ’s words ‘I am the vine and you are the branches’, suitably adapted to an existential ontology. For one Ego to intuit the spiritual life of another is to see that other as a Thou rather than as an object, an It. From the I-Thou relationship arises the We, which for Berdyaev is the true source of communion: ‘In order to achieve communion on an existential plane, it is necessary for the Ego to commune with another Ego, which must also be a Thou […] in the innermost depths of the We’ (SAS: 83). A true community involves communion, not the symbolic communication of social forms of interaction in our everyday collective life; and communion implies reciprocity and love (as again we find in St John 15.9–17). Berdyaev goes much further than Heidegger and Jaspers in pursuit of communal man. Social interaction, necessary as it is for the Ego’s very existence, does not satisfy the Ego, which ultimately seeks an inner community: ‘the Ego’s essential need is communion with the Thou’ (SAS: 85). Rather than losing its identity, the ego enriches it through this communal relationship: ‘When authentic community is achieved, the personality is strictly itself, and obeys the dictates of its own nature; instead of reincarnating itself in another Ego, it unites with the Thou while at the same time preserving its own identity’ (SAS: 125). This is the paradox of personality: it needs others to be fully itself, or as David Bonner Richardson puts it, ‘in knowing other persons spiritually and subjectively, man finds his own reflection and approaches closer to his true self. The personality thus becomes subjectively identified with the We’ (Richardson 1968: 136). This affective relationship, which can exist on many levels, even at the man-dog level, is at its highest and most rewarding in the realm of spirit. Genuine spirituality is universal and comprehensive, based on the enduring value of human relationships. Spirituality may be deeply personal, but its ramifications are cosmic. Union and communion thus demand and involve a spiritual community

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that stretches beyond our confined social interaction. For Berdyaev such a community is another form of freedom. This leads finally to a curious coincidence between early Berdyaev and late Unamuno. In his The Meaning of History, originally published in 1923, Berdyaev contends that human history is much more than a succession of disjointed, unco-ordinated phenomena which, in Kantian terms, separate us from an ungraspable underlying reality. On the face of it history exhibits a bewildering dynamic, but it is one with an eschatological basis. It only appears to trap us in the unstoppable flow of time. We could envisage two concentric circles of time with a potential interaction. A metaphysical approach to human history, as distinct from a materialist one, can transcend the inner circle of temporality, seeing it as embedded in the outer circle which we call eternity. Christianity allows for this greater circle to manifest itself in the smaller circle, for the eternal to make itself known to the temporal, for the divine to enter the human scale of things. There ensues ‘a struggle between the eternity of life and the mortality of time’ (MOH: 67). What Berdyaev is attempting to do in this visionary interpretation is to break through the temporality of history for each and every one of us, and to argue that human, collective, history has its own meaning beyond the apparent randomness and futility of its separate events. History thus becomes not phenomenal but ontological, ‘a revelation of the deepest essence of universal reality, of the destiny of the world focused on that of man. It is a revelation of a noumenal reality’ (MOH: 16). This sounds like a wholly unlikely admixture of Hegel and Schopenhauer, but it enables Berdyaev to perceive through the lens of his spirituality the permanent presence of the divine world behind the restless agitation of the human world. Unamuno read The Meaning of History in its German translation of 1925. The edition in the Casa-Museo Unamuno in Salamanca is heavily annotated and includes handwritten indicators of those pages which Unamuno found of special interest as well as marginal highlights of the text.4 It is possible that Unamuno laid his hands on this book during his exile in France in the late 1920s, probably too late in life to be influenced  For this invaluable information I am indebted to the distinguished Unamuno scholar Professor Nelson Orringer of the University of Connecticut. 4

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by it in any important way. One can nevertheless establish an interesting parallel between, on the one hand, Berdyaev’s attempt to overcome the gap that separates the plurality and dynamism of human life from the completeness and permanence of the divine, and, on the other hand, Unamuno’s symbolic use of nature in his late novels San Manuel Bueno, mártir and La novela de don Sandalio. For Berdyaev, the gap between the changeability of human history and the permanence of the deity can only be bridged by the mythologizing of history, by taking it out of our own scale of time and accident. In San Manuel Bueno, mártir, Unamuno depicts Father Manuel as in effect mythologizing nature, the lake, the mountain, the woods, the moonlight on the water, and the goatherd girl: ‘That lass, with those rocks, those clouds, those trees, those waters, forms part of Nature and not of History’ [‘Esa zagala forma parte, con las rocas, las nubes, los árboles, las aguas, de la Naturaleza y no de la Historia’ (SMB: II, 334)]. Nature offers constancy and permanence where human history offers mutability and transience. Father Manuel may find it difficult to believe in a personal afterlife, in another mutation of history, but he has no difficulty in mythologizing nature, in communing with it as a metaphor of eternity. As often with Unamuno, we are never very far from pantheism. We do know of course of his fondness for excursions into the countryside. The natural world was his real place of worship, as so many of his poems betray.

8.3 Marcel: Degradation and Its Antidote Marcel is known for his attacks on the depersonalization that occurs in a bureaucratic modern society, the reduction of a person to a function, a statistic, an index card, all of which devalues the ‘sacral’ in life. The mystery of human existence demands respect, but there is little in evidence in our machine-led society. On the contrary, what we find is fanaticism, violence, and cruelty, a complete disregard for the value of life. In his Man against Mass Society (Les Hommes contre l’humain, 1951) Marcel denounces the inhumanity not just of Stalinism and Nazism but of much of the political and social life of the democratic nations of the West. The masses have been fanaticized by false propaganda and ‘they partake of the

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human only in a degraded state, they are themselves a degraded state of the human’ (MMS: 8). For Marcel the growing depersonalization of human relationships, at its most potent in social institutions such as large businesses and government offices, which are infused with technocratic, impersonal attitudes rather than led by any sense of human service, has come about because of a radical weakening of spiritual values in the face of a materialist onslaught in which the acquisition of wealth becomes the over-riding aim in life. By spiritual Marcel does not mean religious in the widespread sense of the term, but rather an attitude of mind that respects the uniqueness of the person and fights ‘as actively as possible against the kind of devouring anonymity that proliferates around us like a cancerous tissue’ (MMS: 155). To recognize the intrinsic value of the other is the indispensable step towards a sense of belonging to a greater whole. ‘Identity does not mean unity’, warns Marcel (MMS: 124). What he means is that fashion, habits, narrow nationalism, political organisations, and the like are not based on genuine values, as are respect, friendship, love. This kind of outlook based on material values and ideologies breeds envy and resentment, not solidarity. Material success has tended to become the only value that is accepted. ‘The dominant fact about our world today is that life is no longer loved’, writes Marcel, for ‘nothing can less resemble the love of life than an unhealthy taste for immediate enjoyment’ (MMS: 141). The social mass of today does not form a community; indeed it shows the opposite tendency, disaggregation, because the aim has become to live off the whole, at the expense of the state, the business firm, or the client. The idea of service has become warped, associated with subordination, with a lack of freedom. ‘Yet to serve means to expend oneself on behalf of something: the soul of service is generosity’ (MMS: 143). But modern technocracy, with its emphasis on large-scale organizations and universal applications, has destroyed the humanizing conditions under which a spirit of service could flourish. The paradoxical result is human fragmentation, alienation, and the pursuit of self-­ gratification and social acclaim. And even worse is the growing belief in the inevitability of the catastrophe facing a world whose conflicts no-one can control; for such an eschatological expectation tends to lead to irresponsible hedonism. Averse on the one hand to the rampant and self-­ seeking individualism fostered by capitalism, and on the other to the

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Marxist contempt for the person in its pursuit of a compliant collective, Marcel strives to save both the dignity of the individual and the importance of deep communal relationships. A purely materialistic conception of life is degrading, for man is regarded as just another material object, and it is this, not the spirit of service to others, which is incompatible with freedom. As always, Marcel’s meditation on the connection between individual and community starts with the individual’s own experience. I am an incarnate being, which effectively means that I am a being-in-the-world. The world is not simply my representation; it is ‘something shaping me as in a womb’ (CRF: 29). From early on in life I recognize my dependence on others. But it is not simply that I belong in a world of others; it is also that I need others in order to recognize myself. I become conscious of myself as a person only in social conditions, that is to say, being in the presence of others is necessary for me to develop a sense of self. This is because, although no-one else can experience for me, my experience is nevertheless forged through my interaction with others. I become aware of myself as I become aware of others. My experience emerges very largely from the presence of others and therefore conjointly with the experience of others. Self-centredness leads to an impoverished understanding of self because, as we saw in Chap. 3, ‘a complete and concrete knowledge of oneself cannot be heauto-centric; […] it must be hetero-centric’ (MOB: II, 9). This means, firstly, that my personality is not just my own creation but is created in conjunction with others; and secondly, that I am more than my existence. I am aware that I exist, but I need more than raw awareness; I need my presence, not just my existence, to be recognized. I need to feel others’ awareness of me because I am not just a thing that is merely there. There is one crucial qualification to be made. Marcel is not thinking of one’s relationship to others in terms of membership of a club of which the common element is the membership card. What he wishes to emphasize, he declares, is ‘the presence of an underlying reality that is felt, of a community which is deeply rooted in ontology’ (MOB: II, 19). This leads straight into one of Marcel’s earliest notions, that of participation, one much adapted later. Marcel gives various examples of participation, on a scale that goes from the objective to the non-objective—from my share of a cake, through my share in a financial enterprise, to my

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taking part in a thanksgiving ceremony. In the last example, even if I were laid low by illness I could still experience a sense of participation without being physically present. Marcel’s point is that non-objective participation is a sentiment—not an idea—that is submerged within us but may surface in particular circumstances, such as when volunteering to fight for one’s country in a war. But it need not even be as visible as that. A peasant can be attached to the soil for much more than utilitarian reasons. Although he could be better off in the city he prefers to maintain his link to or rootedness in the soil, despite the inevitable hardships. What we have here is a sense of belonging, of participating in or responding to a situation in a positive way. Though participation is broader than feeling, feeling is certainly a mode of participation. Indeed it is the feeling of involvement rather than any visible activity that is central to Marcel’s notion. It is ‘through the subject that we must try to understand how we participate in being’ (PAI: 23), comments Marcel somewhat obscurely in his anxiety to dispel any thought that participation in his sense can be treated as an objective activity, like taking part in a sporting encounter. Since what we truly participate in is existence, or a facet of it, there can be no possibility of an objectivist reduction. ‘Existence […] is participation insofar as participation cannot be objectified’ (CRF: 23). If we have a sense of participation it is because we feel part of an experience or project which is supra-personal, or as Marcel puts it, ‘to exist is to co-exist’ (PAI: 205). In other words, being human involves belonging to and participating in a community. The kind of community Marcel has in mind is not one based on physical togetherness such as might exist among workers in the same factory or passengers in the same ship, although such situations do at least have the potential for a deeper companionship, the kind of companionship that can develop among soldiers at war or imprisoned in a camp who share an ordeal. But the important point is to realize that relationships are internal, not external, not driven solely by contingent circumstances. Such relationships at this deeper level make a real, felt difference to those involved precisely because it reaches down into the less manifest part of our being; it belongs to what Marcel calls ‘the reality of the invisible world’ (PRM: 142). Participation facilitates communication; there is no real difference because ‘existence is not separable from communication, i.e. from a

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certain coesse which is spiritually apprehended’ (CRF: 230). But we must be clear what Marcel means by communication here: the fact that this communication is spiritually apprehended means that the word carries a different meaning from the one it carries when Marcel declares that communication is not necessarily communion: ‘communication without communion [is] unreal communication’ (MOB: I, 252), that is, it exists on the physical level only. Communication that is also communion involves a depth of understanding or apprehension that goes beyond the meaning of words, that is in fact a co-sentiment, not an exchange of information. Once again, what Marcel is pointing to is the invisible network which joins humanity and which we need to plug into, so to speak, in order to communicate with others at the level of being. In conversation with Paul Ricoeur, Marcel proposed the word light in lieu of Heidegger’s rather abstract Being, as if what we have in common is a state of illumination that spreads from being to being. But light and darkness are of course terms suffused with mystical gnosis, and Marcel made it clear that he did not want his concrete ideas confused with mysticism. His wish is to operate as a philosopher, and he is wary of straying into mystical territory. Hence his constant endeavour, when writing on the philosophy of sentiments and affects, to offer examples and analogies taken from ordinary experience. Communication in Marcel’s sense, then, necessitates communion. Even communication with oneself, if it is to be fruitful, requires not withdrawal into oneself but a recognition of the other, or more precisely of the relationship between self and other. This is what Marcel refers to as ‘a metaphysic of we are as opposed to a metaphysic of I think’ (MOB: II, 10). Egocentricity is a warped sentiment; it is a misconception based on interpreting the maxim ‘know thyself ’ as an invitation to retreat into oneself and blot out the world of others. On this Marcel is very clear: […] we can understand ourselves by starting from the other or from others, and only by starting from them; and one could even anticipate what we shall have to recognize much later, and add that it is only in this perspective that a legitimate love of self can be conceived. Fundamentally I have no reason to set any particular store by myself, except insofar as I know that I am loved by other beings who are loved by me. Love of self can have a true

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foundation only by using others as a medium, and that medium is our only safeguard against ego-centrism and our only assurance that it will have the character of lucidity which otherwise it inevitably loses. (MOB: II, 9)

If the self only makes sense when seen amongst other selves, it acquires value only when it shares a togetherness with others. The ‘we’ is the mutual response of ‘I’ and ‘thou’. The second person is what can respond to me in a certain way, whereas the third person objectifies: ‘he’ is absent from me. This can happen even if ‘he’ is physically present, as in a dialogue where there is no empathy, where the two perspectives are wholly out of alignment. If there is something shared, such as an experience in common or a coincidence in artistic tastes, this opens the door to a potential ‘we’, to a sense of commonality, a ‘we’ that ‘reveals itself undoubtedly as really more profound than the I’ (PAI: 201). Indeed it can be said that the ‘we’ is not the substitute for the ‘I’ but its fulfilment. ‘The I becomes the We, and the We, though plural, does not cease to be the first person— hence community is never an impersonal affair’ (Smith 1984: 347–48). This is certainly the case when two people love each other: neither is a ‘he’ or a ‘she’ for the other; the ‘I’ and the ‘thou’ become a ‘we’ when love guides our steps and we become participants in each other’s being. Furthermore such a relationship allows each individual the better to locate himself or herself, for the exposure of self to other helps to illuminate the self and to uncover the essence of our being; and for Marcel of course the real essence of being is found in belonging to something infinitely greater than ourselves. The importance of community in Marcel’s writing comes through strongly in his essays on Martin Buber and Jean-Paul Sartre. Marcel approves of Buber’s contention that the group conscience of a true ‘me’ depends on a vital relation between members of the group and that this relationship incorporates the I-Thou relationship. The I-It relationship is a purely functional subject-object relationship, whereas the I-Thou relationship is a recognition of another subject in the person whom we address. For Buber, existence is a dialogue, notes Marcel approvingly: ‘On this point Buber obviously differs from Heidegger. For the author of Sein und Zeit “existence is a monologue”. The man of authentic existence in Heidegger’s mind is not the man who truly lives with other people, but

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rather a man “who knows true life only in dealing with himself”’ (SEA: 85). Buber’s notion of a ‘Between’ is what Marcel singles out as the key to an authentic ‘we’ relationship. His reading of Buber is fully in consonance with his own notion of intersubjectivity. Marcel’s acceptance of Buber’s I-Thou hypothesis contrasts with his rejection of Sartre’s brand of individualism. Sartre’s denial of any genuine sense of community—what Marcel calls ‘the sense of forming part of a we-subject’ (POE: 74)—his view of love and friendship as driven by egotistical motives, reveal Sartre’s ‘fundamental agnosticism and even nihilism’ (POE: 74). No doubt Sartre would reply that Marcel is looking at the world from a transcendent point of view led by an imaginary conception of the ‘good’, and that seen in the cold light of a purely earthly existence love is indeed selfish because what it seeks is recognition of the self, a counter to existential nothingness, to the non-being which lies at the heart of man and which he seeks to combat by whatever means. To which Marcel would in turn retort that the fact that one’s love does not end with the death of the loved one refutes Sartre’s idea that love is purely self-­ seeking. Marcel’s condemnation is categorical: Sartrian philosophy—and he includes Simone de Beauvoir in this—‘rests upon the complete denial of we as subject, that is to say upon the denial of communion. For Sartre this word has no meaning at any possible level’ (POE: 76). For Marcel on the other hand, between people who love one another there is a bond, a solidarity that goes beyond each individual, that reaches out to the supra-­ human. It is this reaching out that is the hallmark of a genuine spirit of community.

8.4 Conclusions Given that all three thinkers are deeply critical of the society that emerged from the industrial revolution, both in its capitalistic and socialistic versions, it is not surprising that they should seek an alternative approach to social integration. Capitalism thrives on the base sentiment of greed; socialism, especially in its Marxist rendition, on coercion and curtailment of personal freedom. Both forms of social organization produce depersonalization and estrangement, not the cohesion and contentedness that

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leads to a fulfilled life. The alternative is to seek the cohesion that human society demands through a recognition of man’s spiritual potential. The burning question is whether this potential, recognized by all three thinkers, can be harnessed in such a way as to produce genuine harmony and solidarity across mankind. Since all three entertain a Christian outlook, the specific question revolves around the possibility of Christianity offering a collective vision that will combat the divisive egocentrism and fragmentation that constantly threatens humankind with confrontation and conflict. The starting point of course has to be a recognition of the relevance of that spiritual awareness that these Christian thinkers detect in man. One might speculate that this contention is fostered by a religious upbringing, but this is not equally applicable to all three, since Marcel had an agnostic upbringing and only converted as he approached forty. Unamuno did have a traditional and pious Catholic upbringing, but went on to reject the beliefs inculcated in him as a child. Berdyaev was brought up within the Russian Orthodox Church in a routine way—he had a sceptical father and a half-French mother attracted to Catholicism— but never really left it, and at a certain point rediscovered its values; as he says of himself in his autobiography, ‘I cannot, in all conscience, call myself a typical “orthodox” of any kind; but Orthodoxy was nearer to me (and I hope I am nearer to Orthodoxy) than either Catholicism or Protestantism’ (DAR: 177). For Unamuno, the very fact that mankind has perceived God or the divine from early in its history is far more telling than any logical argument for God’s existence. The reality of God is man-made, a product of man’s relation to nature, but this, for Unamuno, far from showing that God is an artificial concoction, indicates on the contrary that man has always been aware of a spiritual being or presence simultaneously inside and outside. For Berdyaev, likewise, God is simply shorthand for spiritual experience or awareness; we do not need theology; the ability to access the spiritual realm is there for all if only we are prepared to turn our attention away from the heedless pursuit of material enrichment. If mankind has one thing in common, it is precisely the ability to recognize the relevance of non-material essences and values. Marcel for his part emphasizes the patent degradation of human society brought about by the widespread abandonment of spiritual values, among which he highlights

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respect for the transcendent value of the human person. In effect, then, all three writers appeal to the presence in man of a sensitivity to a latent world. We are not dealing here with a supernatural phenomenon but more simply with a heightened attention to a natural proclivity: that of listening to the inner voice of man, to our desire for a sense of fulfilment not satisfied by our materialist ambitions. We need to be tuned in to this spiritual wavelength to recognize one another’s significance and common roots. The absence of God, that is, of a divine dimension, robs society of any notion of collective striving, of social cohesion. To suppress our own capacity to perceive our spiritual affiliation is to invite egocentric attitudes and exploitative behaviours. It is only via this spiritual environment that real human solidarity can be achieved. Is there, then, a role for Christianity in filling the void created by the contemporary distraction with material progress? Can Christianity bridge the gap between a self-­ seeking individualism and a communitarian ethic? Unamuno’s theory of entanglement presupposes a community in any case, but the mutual respect and understanding that an authentic community demands is not ordinarily forthcoming; nor will it be forthcoming through the imposition of religious dogmas: adherence to doctrinal rules does not create a genuine fellowship.What is needed is a common vision or goal. The existentialist in Unamuno appeals to the common experience of our insatisfaction and anxiety, and the consequent need for ontological reassurance; the Christian in him appeals to the community of hope formed by the original followers of Jesus of Nazareth. Unamuno’s doubt is whether this early community can be re-created or whether Christianity has evolved into a religion of purely personal salvation. Berdyaev does not refer to the first followers of Jesus, but he holds that Christianity as a community has fallen short of its potential; only certain individuals have managed fully to achieve Christian ideals. He agrees with Unamuno on the irrelevance of a theocracy based on outmoded doctrines. For him the real significance of Christianity lies in its recognition of the value of human life, of the truth of its divine essence or image. In this respect Berdyaev’s is a more religiously-oriented version of Heidegger’s ‘sacral’ quality of Being. The mystical experience of the few is a pointer to the potential capacity of the many. Ordinary man too can

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achieve a level of spiritual awareness that is the key to mutual understanding and sobornost. For Marcel, what gets in the way of real social unity is the hedonistic approach to life which breeds exploitative attitudes. Communal awareness goes hand in hand with the dignity of the individual. Egocentrism is a limitation of the self, not its emancipation. Proper selfhood is attained through participation, and participation is a sharing of our humanness with others which turns the ‘I think’ into a ‘we are’. It is an enlightened state in which we come to the recognition that each one of us belongs to a scheme of things greater than oneself. That scheme of things is essentially spiritual. The notion of community and its relation to the individual has proved an awkward one for existentialism in general. In the case of Christian existentialists it appears to be, if anything, even more problematical. To be a Christian is in a real sense to belong to a defined community beyond that of our everyday dealings with our fellow-citizens. But it is not easy to explain either the nature of this community or the individual’s role within it. Unamuno, Berdyaev, and Marcel all acknowledge the existence of communal links within what we might call the Christian ‘space’, but there are differences of attitude towards its comprehensiveness and efficacy. The one aspect in which there is agreement is that, if there is to be a Christian community, the underlying basis has to be a concern for one’s fellow-humans. And by concern is not meant the Heideggerian concept of Besorgen, that is, the immediate way we relate to things of this world including other people, or even Fürsorge (solicitude), the way we approach others. Christian concern is essentially an attitude of self-­ sacrifice towards others based on caritative love. The Church’s claim that a common faith creates a community is not considered enough, not least because, as we saw before, a common faith is not objectively definable or attainable. We need to be ‘disposed’ towards others for the community to even begin to exist. But beyond this indispensable basis, the notion of belonging to a mystical community, as distinct from a political or economic or educational or sporting or some other contingent form of community, is one that is fraught with difficulties. What Christianity offers is the possibility of attaining the kind of spiritual insight into human existence which all three thinkers refer to as

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communion. But the Christian Church(es) is simply a relevant context or milieu, not a direct solution to the problem of social discord and disintegration. Unamuno points out that a Christian fraternity is as much subject to individualistic concerns as any other secular institution. What we have in common is our consciousness of finitude and our longing for perdurance. But this longing, which Christianity seeks to satisfy, is itself a danger to Christian communion if it is allowed to dominate our lives: each one can become captivated by his own salvation to the extent that he ceases to uphold a common human destiny. The community in Christ is all too easily converted into a purely personal transaction. For Berdyaev the worst danger to Christian communion comes not just from individualism but even more from sectarianism, the rejection of a universal human interest in favour of a narrow group concern. Indeed a few individuals have been capable of fulfilling the Christian ideal of self-sacrificial giving to others, but this has not led to a fully Christian community, that is, one that recognizes the divine quality in human nature. Christianity, imbued with the sense of sin, has so far failed to harmonize world and spirit, but only because the responses of its adherents have been inadequate: the communion which Christianity demands is one based on an inner relationship of spirit, not on a mutuality of circumstantial interests. Only in the realm of spirit can there be a real encounter between human souls. Marcel, too, speaks of the need to access human values hidden deep beneath the unbridled devotion to material rewards. Only the respect for the uniqueness of the person can begin to create a sense of community. Rather than the tension between individual and community that Unamuno detects, Marcel sees an egocentric blindness that bars one from appreciating our relationship to others. We do not need to create a community, we need to participate in the community that is already there in being itself. It is only when communication is based on a spiritually apprehended recognition of the other that it becomes communion, a genuine co-existence or sharing of our human identity. Only then does identity become unity, only then does Christianity move us beyond the collective stagnation of mass man towards an authentic being-in-the-­ world led by spiritual values. It is worth noting, however, that these three thinkers advocated greater social cohesion as a desideratum not because they were Christian but

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because the historical circumstances they lived through demanded it. Unamuno’s Spain had been since the Napoleonic era a deeply divided country socially and politically, with a recent history of wars, military uprisings, abdications and restorations of the crown, centrifugal tendencies, and increasing violence. The Catholic Church, far from preaching reconciliation, was a major factor in the ideological divide of the country, and was prepared to use and did use excommunication as a tool with which to beat intellectual dissidents. Unamuno was a radical Christian reformer who was persona non grata to the ecclesiastical authorities. It is little wonder that, while staunchly defending a renovated, non-dogmatic, more spiritual Christianity, Unamuno had serious doubts about whether Christianity, as an institution, could help to achieve the united Spain that he longed for and which the political authorities had so patently failed to deliver. Berdyaev, too, had become a political sceptic after his Russian experiences. Though from a privileged family, he was a radical who engaged with revolution, joined the Bolsheviks, and favoured dismantling the class-ridden structure of Czarist Russia. But he became estranged from the revolutionaries when the latter resorted to repression and abusive curbs on individual freedoms. From his enforced exile in Paris he maintained an uncompromising defence of human liberty rooted in a wholly ecumenical view of Christianity as a liberating religion precisely because, in its pristine state, it was not led by material considerations but by universal spiritual values. Marcel for his part, well before he became a Catholic convert, lived through the carnage of World War One with the distressing responsibility of informing families of the fate of their missing sons, an experience which never left him and which persuaded him—a conviction reinforced by World War Two and its divisive aftermath in France—that politics had failed to provide the unity and security that was necessary for a peaceful co-existence at a time of a dangerously increased military capacity. These three thinkers turned to Christianity and its notion of a spiritual community in search not of personal but of collective salvation, not in a timid flight from the modern world but in a resolute challenge to its nihilistic and destructive irreverence towards human life.

9 Evil and Suffering

The problem of evil and concomitant suffering has been by far the most awkward question that Christian apologists have had to face. How to reconcile the existence of an all-powerful, omnibenevolent God with the existence of evil has challenged some of the best minds in Christianity since its very beginning. Evil begets suffering on a vast scale, not just on moral defaulters but on countless innocent victims, yet God appears to permit it. St Paul acknowledged the suffering, but argued that no amount of suffering in this life could stand comparison with the eternal joy of the next. What this does is to convert the problem of evil into a matter of faith. For Kant evil had no conceivable origin, no explanation; it was simply there. Kierkegaard, although he regarded sin as a natural human state, was not overly concerned with the problem of evil; for him faith in God was a far more pressing question than why he allows evil, as his commentary on Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac in Fear and Trembling demonstrates. But the compatibility problem had worried religious thinkers long before then, including St Augustine of Hippo and St Thomas Aquinas. In the Enchiridion (§ 11–12) St Augustine defines evil as the diminution or corruption of good. This corruption ‘is an evil because it is, by just © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. A. Longhurst, Unamuno, Berdyaev, Marcel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81999-6_9

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so much, a privation of the good. Where there is no privation of the good, there is no evil. Where there is evil, there is a corresponding diminution of the good’ (Augustine 2006: 343). It is plain both here and elsewhere (e.g. Confessions, Book 7, § 18–19) that Augustine exonerates God from any responsibility for evil: everything created by God is said to be supremely good, and evil is simply man’s defection from the good. As for suffering, Augustine does not really get beyond saying that it is a ‘testing and correction’ and that those who endure suffering loyally will be rewarded by God (Augustine 2003: 41 [City of God, Book 1, chapter 29]). Aquinas may have found this Augustinian apologia insufficient, for although he accepts Augustine’s argument of the essential goodness of both God and man, and of evil as a privation, he attempts to construct sophisticated arguments to explain the presence of evil. Aquinas starts by explicitly acknowledging that the existence of evil appears to put God’s own existence into question: ‘If God were therefore to exist no evil would be encountered’ (‘Si ergo Deus esset, nullum malum inveniretur.’ Summa theologiae, Prima pars, quaestio 2, articulus 3). His response to this objection acknowledges and reproduces Augustine’s argument: ‘it thus pertains to the infinite goodness of God that he permits evil things to exist so that he may bring forth good things from them’ (‘ergo ad infinitam Dei bonitatem pertinet, ut esse permittat mala, et ex eis eliciat bona.’ ibid.). Of course this explanation requires what is a prior assumption: that God is absolutely good and will not permit evil unless good will come out of it. In effect this is tantamount to denying the reality of evil, to reducing it to a temporary inconvenience or frustration. There is no such thing as an evil force; evil only exists where good is absent, and good is absent primarily where moral will is lacking or corrupted. Evil is thus the (indirect) result of human decision and is recognized as such by humans themselves. Interestingly (in the light of Sartre’s view of man’s essence), the Augustinian-Thomistic view is that man’s being cannot be equated with man’s conduct: the two are linked, or indeed separated, by will. Man’s nature, or for that matter any nature, is not evil; evil ‘is on the other hand caused by defect of the agent’ (‘Causam autem per modum agentis habet malum’, Summa theologiae, Prima pars, quaestio 44). There is an inherent or potential goodness in God’s creature which is actualized in the way that the creature fulfils its destiny, that is,

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in actions directed to achieving its divinely-ascribed end. But whereas incorporeal substances are indefective, corporeal or corruptible substances are defective. This deviation is observable not just in man but throughout the natural world. In a material world agents necessarily interact, and this interaction brings about competition and confrontation, as in the struggle for sustenance, which results in suffering. But nature is not of itself evil; nor is the natural desire for the preservation of being. There is no evil in the lion preying on the zebra or the wolf killing the lamb. Evil is the negation of good, the deliberate decision not to act well, as we are commanded to act. This perversion simply cannot be attributed to God, either by commission or omission. Aquinas’ position therefore is ultimately to separate the question of evil from the question of God. Contemporary philosophy by and large does not accept this.1 From Aquinas’ position emanates the standard response to the problem of evil of most of the Christian Churches (with the possible exception of those which adhere to a strict ideology of predestination): God endows his creatures with freedom; therefore he does not predetermine their actions. To be capable of exercising moral good, they must be equally capable of rejecting it. Evil is therefore a consequence of free choice. But did Aquinas go too far in rejecting the reality of evil and attributing it simply to the perverted agency of free creatures? Is it satisfactory to say that everything that exists is in itself good and that evil is a temporary aberration due to an agent’s refusal to co-operate in following divine good? Does this not justify evil by envisaging a possible better future rather than looking at the state of evil itself? In any case this kind of attempt to re-define the problem of evil by arguing its subservience to the good leaves too many factors out of the equation. Firstly, the argument common to Augustine and Aquinas, that evil is simply an absence or privation of good, elicits the obvious answer that the mere possibility of deprivation of good is itself an evil. Secondly, to say that evil is the result of a mis-application of human free will is a specious argument. It is true that wrongdoing should be possible for moral choice to be a reality.  My summary of St Thomas’ intricate treatment of the question of evil, scarcely convincing to a modern mind, is admittedly sketchy. The principal sources are to be found in Summa theologiae, Prima pars, quaestio 49; throughout the whole of Quaestiones disputatae: de malo; and in the Compendium of Theology, chapters 111 to 121. 1

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But then one would need to explain why moral choice takes priority over good. If God cannot do evil, why does he tolerate it? Moreover the evil inflicted on animals can scarcely result in ultimate good for them since animals are amoral, though sentient, beings. Furthermore, natural evils (those which cause widespread suffering, e.g. diseases or earthquakes) have nothing to do with free will, so the latter cannot explain this kind of destructive activity or natural disorder. The fundamental question, therefore, still stands: if God is capable of creating a world governed by good and happiness, why has he created a world governed to such a large extent by evil and suffering? Surely an omnibenevolent God is much less likely to permit the extreme evil that is a feature of life on earth than a non-benevolent God (if he exists at all)? There is perhaps a need here to distinguish between moral evils, brought on by man, and natural evils, brought on by nature. On the moral front it can be logically argued that if moral values objectively exist, then the possibility of acting against those moral values must also exist (otherwise they would be no more than a mechanistic necessity, like our need to breathe oxygen). This takes the form of human evil (or sin, in Christian terminology). Moral values and moral choice must go together, though the cause-effect relationship, if there is one, remains unclear. To say, as some socio-biologists do say, that moral values are simply the result of biological adaptation is to say that evil does not really exist, that it is no more than a convenient invention, a way of expressing our dislike of behaviour that threatens our well-being or appears to transgress an evolved norm. Evil is real only if moral values are real. Both good and evil depend on there being standards by which to judge, standards of right and wrong. Natural disasters, which fall outside the compass of morality, are regarded as evil because they can cause suffering, sometimes on a vast scale. Whereas most human beings bear at the very least some degree of culpability for bringing about moral evil and consequent suffering, such an argument cannot in general be applied to suffering due to natural disasters, for which the victims bear no blame. In the former case it can be argued that in creating the world God has allowed for the emergence of both good and evil, but that it is man who is responsible for bringing about what is good and what is evil. In the latter case the argument is palpably invalid: God has created a less than perfect world. We must be

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clear, however, that in both cases what we are really objecting to is the suffering involved. In the case of suffering caused by moral evil there is obviously room for argument about ultimate culpability: God allows the evil deed, but man perpetrates it. In the case of suffering due to natural causes there is no such leeway: how can one justify the suffering of an innocent child brought about by some painful disease? Or the sudden death of a quarter of a million people in the 2004 tsunami? The questions have no obvious answer. In such a case our emotional reaction is to query either the existence, or the power, or the benevolence of the one being who could put a stop to this unmerited suffering. The pre-emptive argument that life is not for our happiness but for our discovery of God is so feeble as to merit little favour: many humans suffer and die so young that they have no chance of discovering God, let alone deciding for or against him. The problem of evil thus entails both a logical approach and an emotional approach. The logical approach to the compatibility problem ends in aporia. Whether God is compatible with evil and suffering cannot be decided on the basis of logical argumentation. Relative to the evil in the world, the existence of an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-benevolent God may seem more improbable than probable. Relative to other things, such as the human desire for good, the beginning of the universe apparently from nothing, the intricate conditions required for the emergence of life, the testimony of prophets, the religious experience of some people, God’s existence may seem more probable than improbable. Either way, there is no definitive argument. The problem of evil does not by itself render belief in God invalid; it simply raises the worrying question of compatibility. Nor does the antithesis between good and evil offer a sound solution, for it does not make of evil a necessity any more than the antithesis between truth and falsehood makes falsehood a necessity or the antithesis between health and illness make illness a necessity. There is no logical argument that justifies the necessity of evil. Moral evil may well be the semantic counterpart of moral good; but to be capable of a good act I do not have perforce to be capable of an evil act; I simply have to be capable of a good act or of no act. The argument that if humans were incapable of evil they would be equally incapable of good is thoroughly suspect.

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The emotional approach arises from the fact that evil and suffering are hurtful, and in such a state we are prone to either reject God or accept suffering as part of the human condition. In this dilemma Christianity has opted for the latter course on the grounds that we have brought suffering upon ourselves through sin, that is, estrangement from God. A Christian holds that Christ set the example in his acceptance of suffering on our behalf despite his non-culpability. Now it is perfectly understandable to see Christ’s suffering as brought about by an unjust condemnation and therefore as an evil deed committed against an innocent man. But this does not make suffering and evil synonymous or necessarily conjoined. We can suffer pain for a number of different reasons: as a warning, as an absence, as a loss, none of which need be evil. We can suffer as a result of both an evil act and a non-evil act. ‘Suffering is the natural state for a Christian’, wrote Pascal, and this indeed is a central tenet of Christianity derived from Christ’s own acceptance of his suffering. Devoting oneself to procuring the good of others is accordingly the Christian response to suffering. But this response does not of course provide an explanation for the existence of evil, nor does it serve to refute the view that evil is inherent in life; it simply offers a modus vivendi: that we counter evil by mitigating its effects wherever we can. That is what God has illustrated via Christ, the self-sacrificing God. Christianity acknowledges the ‘fallen’ nature of the human condition, in other words that we are surrounded by evil and its tragic consequences. It proposes to counter its invasive presence by making the resultant suffering a means of salvation, whether we see this terrenely or eschatologically. How far do existentialists of a Christian persuasion go along with this position?

9.1 U  namuno: Suffering as the Discovery of Self and Other Unamuno has rather less to say about the presence of evil in human life than about the impact of suffering. It is suffering, not evil, that raises his favourite para qué [what for] question. In fact Unamuno by and large turns the question of evil into a question of morals, perhaps through the

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influence of his reading of liberal Protestants. Are such things as falsehood, homicide, or adultery evil because God decreed them to be so, or did he decree them to be evil because they are so?, Unamuno asks. If the former, God has given no reason, so the law appears arbitrary. If the latter, it means that these evils have their own independent existence outside God’s control. There is thus no clear answer to the problem. Unamuno prefers to consider the problem squarely in terms of human perception. Evil is how we perceive certain acts, but the act, if seen by itself, is neither good nor evil. A person can be good or bad without committing good or evil acts; it is rather the sentiment behind the act that defines it. Thus rancour may avoid manifesting itself in external violence, but it corrodes the spirit. Transgression is identified by the law that forbids it, but what makes it evil is the intention behind it rather than the external law which proscribes it. The real law, the living law, is the law within: ‘And this living law is the law of sincerity; it is making our outside correspond to our inside, making our conduct the child of our feelings and our words the baring of our thoughts’ [‘Y esta ley viva es la ley de la sinceridad; es que correspondan a nuestras entrañas nuestras extrañas, que sea nuestro proceder hijo de nuestro sentir y nuestras palabras revelación de nuestros pensamientos’ (SLS: VIII, 715)]. What underlies evil is avarice, because it takes self-satisfaction (via wealth, sexuality, edacity etc.) as an end instead of as a means. What is it, then, that inclines us to good or evil? Not our beliefs, answers Unamuno. Our beliefs follow our inclinations and actions, rather than governing them. Conduct arises from the depths of our moral consciousness or sentiment. The arguments that appear as a justification of our conduct come afterwards. In the moral order, ‘it is our action that makes our truth’ [‘es la acción la que hace la verdad’ (VDQ: X, 214)], he argues somewhat capriciously in Vida de don Quijote y Sancho and repeats less sententiously in The Tragic Sense of Life: ‘Our doctrines are usually no more than the justification a posteriori of our conduct, or the way in which we try to explain it to ourselves’ [‘nuestras doctrinas no suelen ser sino la justificación a posteriori de nuestra conducta, o el modo como tratamos de explicárnosla para nosotros mismos’ (DST: X, 378)]. Now if this is so, our conduct, both good and evil, is built into us from birth, something that smacks of predestination, a doctrine which in its Lutheran

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and Calvinist formulation Unamuno refuses to accept. He prefers to say that we create our own conviction of what is right or wrong and that our acts appear to us to be right or wrong purely according to our perception and not according to what he terms ‘an objective foundation’ [‘un fundamento objetivo’ (VDQ: X, 245)]. This appears to imply that there is no divine criterion of evil. Nor for that matter, argues Unamuno, does fear of punishment in the next life affect our evil actions any more than does expectation of reward govern our good actions. Belief in a transcendent being that metes out justice is not what lies at the root of our righteous or wrongful conduct. We would behave in much the same way without such belief. Good and evil lie within us irrespective of any justification. Where then does this leave God? Is he beyond good and evil, unmoved by man’s attempts to do good to his fellow-beings or to bring harm to them by his selfish pursuits? Is God’s justice so unlike man’s, so perverted as it would seem to our eyes, that he is incapable of appreciating the good or of distinguishing it from evil? Is our conduct simply irrelevant when it comes to appraising us? Unamuno, who is no predestinarian, has only one response: ‘God is within both good and evil and enfolding them, just as eternity is within the past and the future and enfolding them, and by more than beyond time. And what is justice? In morality, it means something; in religion it means nothing’ [‘Dios está dentro del bien y del mal y envolviéndolos, como la eternidad está dentro del pasado y del futuro y envolviéndolos, y por más allá del tiempo. ¿Y qué es la justicia? En moral, algo; en religión, nada’ (ADC: X, 570)]. The incompatibility argument seems to evaporate as if by the waving of the wand. It is a moral question, not a religious issue. The existential argument displaces Christian tradition. Nevertheless, before we accuse Unamuno the Christian of sleight of hand we need to bear in mind that he considers God to be immanent in man; God is as much a creation of man as man is a creation of God. If God is both immanent and transcendent he is both inside and outside evil. Jointly with us he is responsible for the bringing forth of evil, for its moral relevance, but as a transcendent being he also stands apart from evil, is not responsible for evil acts, as is clear from our sentiment that good brings us towards a divine realm and evil draws us away. Indeed we have made of God the ultimate justification for our distinction between

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good and evil, irrespective of whether such a distinction has any objective basis. Here Unamuno is undoubtedly right. In a court of law, which seeks to establish the guilt or innocence of the accused, witnesses have traditionally been asked to swear by almighty God to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. God is thereby equated with truth as a supreme virtue encompassing all virtues. Our concept of absolute truth is a ‘divine’ concept, or as Unamuno says, ‘our sense of justice and that of truth are more deeply rooted than our sense of self-interest and falsehood’ [‘el sentimiento de la justicia y el de la verdad tienen más hondas raíces que el del interés y el de la mentira’ (QEV: VIII, 894)]. In the Christian Churches evil is generally equated with sin, but this has the unfortunate side-effect of persuading many that the avoidance of evil is in itself good and sufficient. Unamuno is clear that abstaining from evil acts entails a purely negative moral attitude. The kind of spiritual awareness that Unamuno is advocating demands not so much an awareness of evil as an active predisposition to the improvement of collective life: ‘It is not enough to refrain from killing, it is necessary to foster and improve others’ lives; it is not enough to avoid fornication, it is necessary to radiate purity in our attitudes; it is not enough to refrain from stealing, it is necessary to expand and enhance the well-being and resources of the public body and of all citizens; nor is it enough to refrain from lying, it is necessary to assert the truth’ [‘No basta no matar, es preciso acrecentar y mejorar las vidas ajenas; ni basta no fornicar, sino que hay que irradiar pureza de sentimiento; ni basta no hurtar, debiéndose acrecentar y mejorar el bienestar y la fortuna pública y las de los demás; ni tampoco basta no mentir, sino decir la verdad’ (VYV: IX, 57–58)]. Unamuno downplays the idea of sin as a satanic or accursed inheritance, one that brings divine punishment in its wake. Divine punishment is no more than an earthly invention meant to bring rebellious humans to heel, an invention of rulers directed at the ruled. Rather than see sin as rebellion in accordance with the mythological account of the Book of Genesis, he sees it as the spiritual equivalence of inertia in matter, which does not change its state or trajectory unless disturbed by some other force; in other words it defines a lack of spirit, of conciencia, which in Spanish of course denotes both consciousness and conscience. Conscience after all is simply consciousness of moral responsibility.

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What Unamuno appears to be saying is that materialism in man is equivalent to surrender to unconsciousness, to drifting in a current of selfish indulgence which is ultimately destructive, whereas the spirit in man will strive to focus on what stretches beyond ephemeral matter and see in fellow humans a similar aspiration: ‘And what is evil is everything man does as a mere individual, in the face of society, to preserve himself even at its expense, and what is good is what he does as a social person for the sake of the society to which he sees himself as belonging, with a view to immortalizing it and he himself in it’ [‘Y todo lo que el hombre hace como mero individuo, frente a la sociedad, por conservarse aunque sea a costa de ella, es malo, y es bueno cuanto hace como persona social, por la sociedad en que él se incluye, por perpetuarse en ella y perpetuarla’ (DST: X, 444)]. For Unamuno, then, evil, or its religious representation, sin, is a diminution, a taking away, while good is an addition, a creative endeavour. The practical implications of this view are spelt out in Chap. 11 of the Tragic Sense of Life, ‘The Practical Problem’ [‘El problema práctico’], in which he proposes that each one of us should strive to be of service to others within whatever walk of life we happen to find ourselves in. Marcel was to propose an identical strategy: ‘it is within the scope of each of us, within his own proper field, in his profession, to pursue an unrelenting struggle for man, for the dignity of man, against everything that today threatens to annihilate man and his dignity’ (MMS: 184). Rather than a theological one, Unamuno’s concept of good is therefore a wholly social one, just as is his concept of evil: an individual on his own could commit neither good nor evil. Unamuno, however, goes on to give this personal philosophy a quasi-religious status. The ultimate evil amounts to a negation of spirit, a turning away from a ‘divine’ existence to a transitory one in which others are seen as a material benefit. This attitude amounts to deicide, for such a person ‘crucifies God in matter’ [‘crucifica a Dios en la materia’ (DST: X, 444)]. Here we once again see Unamuno’s concept of a social God dominating his thinking. Unamuno, at any rate in The Tragic Sense of Life, is not strictly concerned with the carrying out of good actions or bad actions, which he sees as an ethical question; he is concerned rather with what goodness or evil might mean within the framework of the human aspiration to a better world which he is scrutinizing: that is why he can say that ‘to

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perpetrate an evil act and to be evil are not the same thing’ [‘no es lo mismo hacer el mal que ser malo’ (DST: X, 504)]. The arguments proffered by theologians for the eternal punishment of evildoers Unamuno dismisses as ridiculous and infantile; indeed they are not even Christian, since no genuine Christian could enjoy the mystical vision knowing that his brethren are suffering eternal damnation. If evil is reduced to culpability, then culpability is shared: no one can escape. Society is real because individuals co-exist and are inter-dependent, and in the reality of social responsibility no-one can wash his hands off evil. The difference between one individual and another is that ‘the intensity of culpability is measured, not by the external act, but by one’s consciousness of it, and one person will experience an acute pain and another no more than an itch’ [‘la intensidad de la culpa no se mide por el acto externo, sino por la conciencia de ella, y a uno le causa agudísimo dolor lo que a otro apenas si un ligero cosquilleo’ (DST: X, 504)]. All the many attempts to explain evil as a religious concept are shot through with inconsistencies, argues Unamuno, yet good has not merited comparable attempts at explanation. This of course suggests fear of the consequences of allowing evil to go unchallenged. St Augustine took the simplest way out and assumed that everything was good because it was God’s creation. This is not what mankind generally sees as good, since what drives us is our survival instinct and there is much in our world to hamper survival. What we regard as good is what tends to our preservation and what we regard as evil is what tends to our destruction. There is no sound argument for considering the one natural and the other anti- or extra-natural. What is positive or natural for one creature is negative or anti-natural for another, as we see in the case of predator and prey. The same may be said of human consciousness, which we value above all else and seek to preserve. In this case, bringing God into the equation changes nothing, except as it were the timetable: God provides the opportunity to prolong our consciousness beyond this life. That is the real notion of good, our survival, and its rejection is at the root of our notion of evil. Unamuno’s view is starkly coherent, if scarcely endearing to religious traditionalists. If we bring God into the equation, as we inevitably do if we wish to satisfy our hankering for perdurance beyond this ephemeral and perilous life, we then face another question: that of suffering. Seen as a

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consequence of evil, suffering retains its mystery, but with the added aggravation that it is often the least culpable who appear to suffer most. We do not know why we are subjected to suffering, yet according to Unamuno it is by suffering that ‘living beings acquire a consciousness of themselves’ [‘los seres vivos llegan a tener conciencia de sí’ (DST: X, 387)]. This is presumably because of the nature of pain, which is experienced personally; it serves to underline our individuality, our uniqueness. Joy, pleasure, happiness are distractions, a form of self-forgetting; suffering by contrast brings a heightened consciousness of self. Considering that he is a strong advocate of social man as against hermitic man, Unamuno is surprisingly insistent on this. Augusto Pérez, protagonist of Niebla, a caricature of man in pursuit of his identity, has been searching for his self since in the opening lines of the novel he steps out into the world from his maternal home, but it is only after suffering a belittling public humiliation that he becomes truly conscious of himself. Up till that point he had been scarcely aware of his existence, ‘but now, after what she has done to me, after what they have done to me, after this mocking insult, this merciless mockery, now I am aware!, now I can feel myself, touch myself, now I cannot doubt that I really exist!’ [‘pero ahora, después de lo que me ha hecho, de lo que me han hecho, después de esta burla, de esta ferocidad de burla, ¡ahora sí!, ¡ahora me siento, ahora me palpo, ahora no dudo de mi existencia!’ (NIE: I, 646)]. This same sentiment is expressed in less dramatic fashion in The Tragic Sense of Life: ‘Pain tells us we exist’ [El dolor nos dice que existimos’ (DST: X, 439)], and ‘only through suffering does one achieve personhood’ [‘sólo sufriendo se es persona’ (DST: X, 437)]. Awareness of one’s suffering also enables us to understand the suffering of other beings in whom we recognize our own capacity to suffer. What, according to Unamuno, is most characteristic of human consciousness is this capacity for suffering. The Schopenhauerian imprint may be detectable here, for Schopenhauer was a clear exponent of this view of suffering: the greater the consciousness the greater the capacity to suffer. For Schopenhauer suffering was implicit in human beings finding themselves helpless victims of the blind will of nature which impels us relentlessly to subsist and reproduce. Unamuno adopts Schopenhauer’s universal will or energy, but he converts it into a desperate search for the divine essence of

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our worldly existence: ‘And that force, one could say, is what is divine in us, that it is God himself, who is at work in us because in us he suffers’ [‘Y esa fuerza cabe decir que es lo divino en nosotros, que es Dios mismo, que en nosotros obra porque en nosotros sufre’ (DST: X, 393–94)]. Evil exists, since it is the cause of our suffering, but it cannot be directly imputed to a Christian God. Suffering, however, can, since Jesus of Nazareth, the God-Man, suffered. Paradoxically, the suffering that is for many the pointer to the absence of a God is converted by Unamuno into a pointer to his presence. We suffer not because he does not exist but in order to discover his existence: our suffering denotes a need for God. If one’s suffering demands and arouses compassion in our fellow-beings, collective suffering demands the compassion of a higher or universal being, what Unamuno terms ‘the consciousness of the universe’ [‘la conciencia del universo’ (DST: X, 394)]. Unamuno’s view of compassion (empathetic suffering or co-suffering), also involves God. Suffering is not only an enhanced consciousness of self. When I perceive suffering in others I am recognizing it as a universal phenomenon: it is not only my suffering that is real but the suffering of everyone and everything. It is as if suffering itself acquired consciousness. Just as individual suffering implies an individual consciousness, so universal suffering implies a universal consciousness. Unamuno thus proposes that our sense of a divine existence or entity emanates from collective suffering. If we did not suffer we would lack all awareness of God. Unamuno conceives of suffering not so much as physical pain as mental pain or anguish. Physical pain tells us something about the state of our body; mental pain tells us something about the state of our soul. This is what anguish is—awareness of spiritual suffering. Our own suffering makes us aware of God immanent. Our compassion for the suffering of others turns an immanent God into a transcendent God. The reality of God can only be found in our anguish: God is the personalization of our consolation and our hope. Unamuno is scathing about the traditional proofs of God’s existence. Arguments in favour of God as the ens summum, or the primum movens, or the designer of the world’s perceived complexity, are useless arguments. These and cognate explanations of God are mere representations of an abstract idea, or of its hypostasis. They do not evoke a real, living God: ‘The fact of the matter is that one

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does not reach the living, the human God by way of reason but by way of love and suffering’ [‘Y es que al Dios vivo, al Dios humano, no se llega por camino de razón, sino por camino de amor y sufrimiento’ (DST: X, 408)]. Just as pain tells us we exist, so our existential anguish points to God’s existence. Unamuno does not enquire into the causes of suffering—for him a pointless exercise—but rather into the potential implications or outcome of our capacity to suffer. Needless to say, it is a personal response argued from experience.

9.2 B  erdyaev: Sourcing Evil, Defying Suffering ‘I have said on many occasions—writes Berdyaev in his autobiography— that the only serious argument in favour of atheism is the difficulty of reconciling an almighty and benevolent Deity with the evil and suffering in the world and in human existence’ (DAR: 178). Berdyaev bravely acknowledges the problem of trying to account for evil and suffering in a divinely-created world and holds no truck with traditional apologetic arguments, namely, that evil is not self-standing but merely an absence of good, that it is no more than the misuse of man’s free will, or that in divine providence good ultimately emerges from evil. Indeed he ascribes the very compatibility problem of evil to ‘the rationalistic mind of modern man [which] considers the existence of evil and suffering as the principal obstacle to his faith’ (FAS: 158). This is indeed true of modern (i.e. post-seventeenth-century) man, but we should not forget that the problem itself was recognized by early Christians. Berdyaev, however, argues that this approach sees the problem the wrong way round if considered historically. For it was not evil and suffering that put men off God but, on the contrary, it was the desire to free themselves from the power of evil that drove men to God: ‘If this evil which confounds our world had not existed, man would have been content with this world here below, and the latter, free of all evil and pain, would have become his only God’ (FAS: 158). The existence of evil works just as much to bring us to God as to distance us from him. This of course does not explain the origin of

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evil, for if we ascribe it to God as we ascribe the good to him, we are ipso facto denying his benevolence to man. There are problems with both monist and dualist theories of evil. Monism (and pantheism for that matter) must either deny the existence of evil or assign it to the divine being. Dualism ascribes evil to a being one step lower than God, but in so doing places a limit on God’s powers: Satan is a powerful independent entity. The incompatibility problem thus remains unsolved. Furthermore the existence of evil poses other related questions according to Berdyaev. Firstly, if evil is ascribed to man’s free will it is evidently a severe abuse of that freedom. So why does God allow such a degree of freedom that it causes havoc and suffering on a vast scale? Free will is a fatal gift for which God must retain ultimate responsibility, as the Grand Inquisitor argues in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Secondly, why are many just people made to suffer more than other (often unjust) people? Good people may, understandably, not be able to reconcile themselves to the fact that God does not stop the wicked from doing evil. Thirdly, the traditional doctrine of God as all-knowing allows him to foresee the consequences of each individual’s life and acts, and that amounts to predestination. But this makes no sense, for why create beings whose fate is predetermined because it is known by God? The result of these imponderables is that the compatibility challenge posed by evil once again defies solution. Berdyaev readily admits the difficulty of explaining the source of evil, for if we rule out God, whom we see as the source of being and life, there appears no other entity of comparable stature to explain the existence of evil. ‘Evil being absolutely irrational, it is therefore incapable of being grasped by reason and remains inexplicable. […] Evil represents the absolute limit of irrationality’ (FAS: 163). It is at this point that Berdyaev offers his own, more sophisticated, not to say abstruse, solution to the problem. Greek thought considered evil to emanate from the meon, a kind of left-over or residual matter which caused interference. Heidegger was obviously familiar with the Greek notion of meontology or study of non-­ being, but Berdyaev does not mention him in this connection, perhaps because they alighted on the idea of the meon more or less simultaneously. The meonic state is a chaotic, formless, unassimilated condition. To this notion of basic or undisclosed matter Berdyaev applies Jakob

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Böhme’s more complex notion of the Ungrund, the void or divine nothingness from which everything emerged and which we may compare to the vacuum of modern-day astrophysicists within which a ‘quantum fluctuation’ acted as spark for the ‘Big Bang’. The Ungrund is a state of pre-­ creation, of nothingness, because there is no form, no beingness, at most a primordial state of possibility. What this void has is ‘the unfathomable irrationality of freedom’ (FAS: 165), precisely because it lacks all order. This void, the Ungrund of Böhme, holds for Berdyaev ‘the source of every kind of life and every actualization of being. It conceals within itself the possibility both of evil and of good. An initial, irrational, and mysterious void lies at the heart of the whole life of the universe, but it is a mystery beyond the reach of logic’ (FAS: 165). The point of using this notion of the Ungrund is that evil can thereby be ascribed to this ‘irrational void of freedom’ (FAS: 165), freedom because the void is in a formless state of non-being free from all constraints. It is this primordial freedom that makes both good and evil possible. Evil is ‘a malformation of being’ (FAS: 166), a ‘return to the void’ (FAS: 168). Berdyaev gives a list of evils—animosity, hatred, envy, vengeance, depravity, egoism, cupidity, jealousy, suspicion, avarice, vanity—and concludes that they all have a negative character, that is, that they are in a destructive way a return to that primeval chaos on which divine order was imposed. Whether Berdyaev is adopting or adapting Böhme’s notion of the Ungrund is a matter of debate. Matthew Spinka thinks there is an important difference: ‘Boehme’s Ungrund, which Berdyaev interprets to mean primal freedom, is to be found in the Godhead. Not so Berdyaev’s. For him the Ungrund—the primal freedom—is outside the Godhead, in the primal, meonic stuff’ (Spinka n.d.: 119). Freedom thus derives from the Ungrund, not directly from God himself as creator, so he cannot be held responsible for the misuse of freedom, i.e. for evil. Spinka also criticizes Berdyaev for using Böhme’s notion in order to circumvent the problem of evil. For even if we concede that freedom (and its potential for evil) existed in the meonic stuff, was God not aware of this danger when he decided upon creation? Or was he aware but powerless to counteract it? Berdyaev does not address these questions; he is content to argue that evil belongs to a state that is beyond the rational, the intelligible, that is, outside of creation.

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Evil, then, is ascribed to primordial freedom, and this freedom does not stem from God but from the Ungrund or pre-creation nothingness. Non-being accepted being, that is, it became God’s creation. But this creation had a residual streak of non-being through which evil and pain seeped into the world. It is this recalcitrant or rebellious non-being, the hostility to God’s creation of being, that is the real source of evil, not God himself or man’s free will. Man’s freedom is not a concession or gift. Man is created but freedom is not, since it is prior to all being, rooted in the vacuum, in nothingness, in non-being, and therefore outside God, who is the supreme form of being. ‘Being springs from freedom and not freedom from being’ (DOM: 27). Here we have an account of man’s ‘nothingness’ twelve years before Sartre used a similar notion in Being and Nothingness. In Berdyaev, God creates man’s nature but not man’s freedom. Freedom is inherent in the primordial state of non-being. ‘That which is called “the creature’s nothingness” is precisely that which is uncreated in the creature—its freedom’ (DOM: 27). The equation ‘freedom equals nothingness’ anticipates Sartrian ontology very closely, but what is remarkable is that it comes from a deeply committed Christian. Berdyaev is nothing if not ingenious in the way he has re-written the Book of Genesis to avoid ascribing evil to either a satanic being who is God’s antagonist, or to man’s thirst for knowledge, or indeed to a combination of both. Evil is equivalent to entropy, an absence of order, a return to primordial nothingness. It is not part of man’s created nature for the simple reason that, as inhering in the unconquered freedom of the Ungrund, it so-to-speak predates God’s creation of man. To make man solely responsible for evil would be to attribute to him the capacity to rise up against his creator. Man has a created nature and an uncreated freedom. Evil is made possible by this freedom, not by God. Non-being, or the freedom that goes with it, is the only explanation of evil that does not make God responsible for it. For freedom comes from the nothingness or vacuum from which God created the world we know, not from God. To destroy evil God would have needed to destroy freedom, the freedom inherent in non-creation, in non-order, in pre-adamic chaos. At creation God brought light into darkness, or order into chaos, but the potential for disintegration, the freedom, remained. ‘That is why there is tragedy and evil in the world; all tragedy is connected with freedom’ (DOM: 30).

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The world has an element of nothingness because that is what is was created from. ‘But the conception of createdness throws no light upon the “nothing” out of which the world is created. If that “nothing” is primordial uncreated meonic freedom, we are faced with an unfathomable mystery’ (DOM: 30). Yet this, claims Berdyaev, is more intelligible and less demeaning to both God and man than traditional theological explanations. At any rate, one might add, it is possibly more in keeping with our state of knowledge and beliefs than the biblical account and the theological interpretations which it spawned. But if the origin of evil is to be found in the irrational and mysterious primordial freedom, in the vacuum of pre-existence before the ‘Big Bang’, this does not mean that man carries no blame for his evil deeds. Indeed Berdyaev repudiates the contemporary rationalist approach to criminal acts which seeks to explain anti-social conduct in terms of social and psychological influences. This only breeds confusion and ultimately serves to beget more evil because it removes moral conscience. Rationalist explanations are misconceived because evil is irrational. We recognize it because intrinsically we are not evil. In accepting man’s responsibility for moral evil we are recognizing the transcendent nature of human personality, the fact that we are part of a system of values to which we are beholden. Without the capacity for good and for evil human personality would be of no consequence. We create or destroy our own world by our actions. Our history is testimony to our freedom, especially to our freedom for evil: ‘There would be no movement in the world if only the freedom of God and of good were to predetermine human history […]. The freedom of evil, indeed, forms the real foundation of history’ (MOH: 77). What then of redemption, so important a concept in Christianity? Why has it not worked? Because of human hatred, replies Berdyaev. Redemption is not a juridical system that punishes and incarcerates the wicked; it is an invitation to love, a spiritual conception, not a judicial process. The legalistic idea of Christianity that sees redemption in terms of reward and punishment is a wholly pagan conception. Because man requires judicial laws to impose social order he is inclined to see the law at work in all spheres. ‘The conception of God as judge is that of the natural man and not the spiritual, to whom a quite different aspect of the

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divine nature is revealed’ (FAS: 174). What spiritual man perceives in redemptiom is not human justice, not the settlement of accounts, but divine love. In Christ there was no legalistic attitude, but rather the contrary: in his teachings and actions love of others always took priority over legalistic matters. He did not suffer on behalf of man to satisfy the bloodthirsty vengeance of God, but to invite men to see that the wretchedness of their condition could be met by their capacity to overcome their bondage to evil ways through their acceptance of divine love. It is not a negative fear of punishment but a positive response to love that is required of man. ‘Evil cannot be overcome except by the participation of human freedom in the process’ (FAS: 178). This is no longer the primordial irrational freedom that made evil possible in the first place, but the freedom of love as practised by Christ, a higher kind of freedom which is creative rather than destructive. It is this willed freedom that gives us the opportunity to banish the evil inherent in primordial freedom. Redemption is not a return to a paradisiacal state but a positive re-creation. For Berdyaev evil is only too real, and Christians must accept its reality, otherwise the coming of Christ makes no sense. It is only through the spiritual experience of evil that we realize its destructive power, its drive towards non-­ being. It must be overcome inwardly, spiritually, not just externally by judicial imposition. Up to a point evil may be controlled by the State, but never defeated. The defeat of evil is a spiritual matter. When it comes to suffering as the consequence of evil, Berdyaev does not pretend to have an answer to the key question of why innocent people suffer. In his view the concept of original sin does not explain it, since this a general rather than a particular state. How does Berdyaev answer the atheist’s contention that the existence of unjust suffering postulates the non-existence of God? For a Christian, Jesus Christ is the supreme example of unjust suffering, and he of course was anything but godless. Berdyaev admits, nevertheless, that suffering is mysterious. The notion that it is merited punishment is counterproductive and wrong. The genuine Christian attitude is to bear it and help alleviate it through caritative love. What we have to accept is its irrationality and incomprehensibility, not its justice. Unjust suffering is the real tragedy of life: like death and eternity it remains a mystery. Like evil, which generates suffering, it is gratuitous and therefore incomprehensible; but the very fact that we

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recognize it as unjust serves to make us aware of an alternative existence free from evil and consequential suffering. Spirituality and suffering go hand in hand, but spirituality is not some kind of disease produced by suffering, as some materialists (Feuerbach, Marx) have alleged in arguing that a happy self-confident man whose life is materially secure would have no need of God. On the contrary, argues Berdyaev, it is materialism which circumscribes and distorts human nature: ‘The greatest of all rationalistic illusions is that ultimate deliverance from human suffering and unhappiness will be realized in the external sphere of organized life’ (SAR: 94). Deliverance from unhappiness caused by suffering cannot be realized simply by reorganizing external factors. This is to confuse social injustices, which are rightly condemned, with the essential mystery of life: human purpose, fatality, anxiety, death, as well as love and compassion. The cultivation of indifference to suffering, whether of the Buddhist or Stoic kind, is not the answer. Pain and suffering are at the heart of being; we either accept this and strive to overcome it and regenerate ourselves, or allow ourselves to be crushed, perhaps embittered. The hardest part of suffering is that it appears senseless, whether inflicted by nature or by human agency. This is where Christianity offers a guiding hand, according to Berdyaev. Unlike Buddhism and Stoicism, which seek to downgrade and evade suffering, Christianity accepts its reality and confronts it, facing the challenge and seeking liberation through suffering itself: ‘Suffering is bound up with sin and evil, just as death is—the last of man’s trials. But it is also the way of redemption, of light and regeneration. Such is the Christian paradox with regard to suffering and it must be accepted and lived through’ (DOM: 119). While suffering can be a source of spiritual strength, Berdyaev makes no attempt to justify suffering. What he says is that rightly or wrongly it is part of our world and we must learn to experience it in order to overcome it. What suffering can do is to generate compassion, and this encourages us to help others to overcome their own suffering. But self-sacrificial love does not mean that suffering is thereby justified, much less that we should in inquisitorial fashion inflict suffering on others for their alleged good. There are no grounds for assuming that human suffering pleases God. Jesus Christ did not approve of suffering and neither must Christians. Indeed to inflict suffering as a punishment for sin is ‘a perversion of Christianity’ (DAH: 78).

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There are for Berdyaev two kinds of suffering: the suffering that comes from a deficient social and political organization, which causes social injustices and which we must combat by legitimate earthly means; and the suffering that is inherent in life itself: in the loss of loved ones, in illness, privations, loneliness, disappointments and so on. The latter kind of suffering will cause us bewilderment, disquietude, unhappiness, but we have to accept it as our ‘cross’. Fleeing from it takes the form of hedonism or intellectual abstraction. Neither works: ‘To try to avoid suffering and run away from it is self-deception and one of the greatest illusions of life’ (DOM: 119). But this is not to be taken as a call to asceticism, which runs the risk not only of imposing pointless harshness on oneself but of wishing suffering on others, and which leads to the pseudo-Christian invention of the doctrine of eternal damnation, namely that if you try to avoid suffering in this life you will suffer in the next, the unholy trade-off of the self-righteous. On this Berdyaev is very clear: for the Christian, suffering can evoke only one reaction, compassion. That is its only saving grace.

9.3 Marcel: Evil as Experience For Marcel the problem of evil is a pressing one: ‘The religious question, as it presents itself to modern consciousness, is undoubtedly inseparable from some sort of taking into consciousness the problem of evil’ (MOB: II, 161). In response to a friend who requests his thoughts on evil, Marcel ponders the question in his ‘Metaphysical Journal’ (PAI: 218–225). Evil, he considers, is evidently part of reality, but is it a defect, that is, an absence of good, as St Augustine and Leibniz thought? No, answers Marcel, ‘it is not something which can be assimilated to the notion of something lacking’ (MMS: 6). The fact that we recognize evil, that it means something to us, indicates that we are participators in it and not simply spectators of something in which we are not involved. Is it a malfunctioning in a system? Can there be an intact world, one that functions perfectly? And why do I think that there ought not to be evil even when the evil does not affect me directly? Can this exigency be satisfied? Does one’s awareness of evil come from one’s own potential for evil rather than

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from fear of something outside? In that case, is it a matter of what I do or of what I am? Is the premature death of a loved one evil in the same way as is a deliberate crime? And perhaps the most awkward question of all: given that evil is personal and that any explanatory theory depersonalizes, can evil be theoretically explained at all without it as it were disappearing from our grasp? In his typically exploratory way, Marcel raises all these questions and considers their viability, but he does not proceed to answer them, perhaps because he finds no satisfactory answers. But he does have more to say on the subject on other occasions. His general approach to the problem of evil is informed by his well-­ known distinction between mystery and problem, where the latter is an issue that can be sufficiently objectified to be placed in front or outside of us and analyzed as something in which we play no part, and the former is by contrast something which encroaches on us, from which we cannot extricate ourselves in order to assess the relevant data as utterly objective information. The mysterious cannot be reduced to the problematical because it involves us as experiencing subjects. If we treat evil as a problem, argues Marcel, we are in effect seeing it as a disorder the causes of which we seek to identify: we see a system or machine which is malfunctioning. We stand outside it and regard it as an accident that befalls the mechanism of the world. This is evil as observed, whereas the reality of evil is that which is suffered as distinct from the imagined reality as seen from outside: ‘But evil which is only stated or observed is no longer evil which is suffered: in fact it ceases to be evil’ (POE: 19).2 For evil to be grasped, then, it has to be suffered, not looked at as if by a spectator. That puts it into the category of mystery because I cannot abstract myself from it: I suffer its impact. It is part and parcel of my intimate experience of the world; which does not mean that it is unanalyzable, only that I myself am part of any answer, that I cannot dissociate myself from it. But if evil is a mystery in Marcellian terms, it is no less real for that. We meet it constantly. As an example Marcel cites the massacre at Oradour-­ sur-­Glanne on 10th June 1944 in which 642 people, mostly women and  The quotation comes from the essay ‘On the Ontological Mystery’ (1933). Compare ‘But evil simply recognized, or even contemplated, ceases to be evil suffered: in fact I think it simply ceases to be evil’ (BAH: 171). This is from ‘Outlines of a Phenomenology of Having’, a paper delivered to the Philosophical Society of Lyons in the same year. 2

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children, taking refuge in a church, were barbarically incinerated by a German battalion. Can the notion of a benevolent God resist this barbarity and this suffering? Marcel is under no illusions about the seriousness of the question. It is an issue which cannot be evaded and which favours atheism: ‘Atheism finds its permanent base of supply in the existence of evil and in the suffering of the innocent’ (TWB: 169). Evil cannot be explained away by theological or philosophical sophistry. We can mythologize it by referring to the Fall, both of nature and of man, but that leaves the mystery untouched. The theologian, says Marcel, faces a heavy responsibility in accounting for evil, ‘for the seriousness and the charity [towards the atheist] which he will show or not show in his explanation of evil and suffering will determine finally the value and even the destiny of his theology’ (TWB: 169). Any attempt to attenuate the tragedy of evil by logical manipulations, to dilute or even justify the consequential suffering, will only serve to reinforce atheism. Evil is a threat to a being; there cannot be evil if there is no being. But the menace of evil lies both outside and within: it is something that happens to me and something that I can make happen. It is not something abstract. To even begin to understand a being who is affected by evil we must enter into a relationship with that person, whether as sufferer or as evildoer. We must assimilate the reality of the experience. Nevertheless, despite the understandable claim of the non-existence of God on the basis of his incompatibility with the presence of evil in his creation, the argument, according to Marcel, is not sound. It is more in the nature of an opinion on the part of the atheist based less on the experience of evil than on an insecure judgement of what is or is not compatible, since believers, too, have experience of evil. On what basis is the argument of incompatibility put forward? The argument is of the kind ‘if X, then Y’ or ‘if X, then not-Y’. In The Mystery of Being (Vol. II, Ch. 5), Marcel offers the analogy of a child who harms himself while playing with matches in the absence of his nurse. We are justified in saying that had the nurse been there this unfortunate event would not have happened because we have relevant information about the nurse, what sort of person she is and how she functions. By contrast the atheist is in no such position vis-a-vis God. He has no experience of God and relies wholly on an idea, ascribing a particular position or trait to him. Thus the

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first part of the argument, ‘if X’, amounts to the implication that God is a being who (a) must necessarily be intolerant of evil and (b) has the power to erase evil. Now in the case of the nurse we can affirm ‘if X, then not-Y’ because we know her prudence and the overwhelming likelihood of her stopping the child from playing with matches. What comparable historical evidence do we have of God’s behaviour? Either we do not have any, so we cannot rightly infer his attitude to allowing or disallowing evil; or what evidence there is—if biblical accounts are treated as evidence— does not point to incompatibility. What the atheist is arguing in effect boils down to saying that if he were in God’s place he would not permit evil. This may well be a perfectly legitimate position to take; but it tells us nothing about God, his existence or non-existence: putting ourselves in his place is, logically, an absurdity. To argue that if God does not will good to the exclusion of all evil it can only be because he does not exist is an insecure opinion with no basis in knowledge. The most the atheist can sensibly say is ‘it seems to me that’, but not ‘I claim that’. We are dealing therefore with a projection or preference: we would prefer that there were no evil; because there is evil we feel God has let us down; therefore we will deny his existence. Marcel dissociates himself from this kind of argumentation which reduces the God/evil incompatibility thesis to an either/or formula. All the same, he is willing to accept that if we are free to do evil it is because God has created us free. God may not will evil, but we still face the difficult question of something being permitted by God even if it is not his will. There is no solving this conundrum. Marcel also argues that the incompatibility argument misconstrues belief in God. ‘Belief in’ is not the same as conviction. To be convinced of something is to bring the matter to an end; it is a closed position. ‘Belief in’ is a commitment, or as Marcel calls it ‘a rallying to’ (MOB: II, 87). Belief in God, he says, is existential in character: it stems from the felt reality of one’s situation, not from intellectual abstractions or syllogistic arguments. ‘To believe in someone […], to place confidence in him, is to say “I am sure you will not betray my hope, that you will respond to it, that you will fulfil it”’ (MOB:II, 89). Such an attitude refrains from placing conditions upon whom we trust, since trust ‘on condition that’ is not real trust. For me to believe in God provided that he acts in accordance with my wishes or my ideal conception of him is not real belief.

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Faith is unconditional ‘and we should have no hesitation in saying that the more unconditional my faith is, the more genuine it will be’ (MOB: II, 153). Suffering, so often seemingly the result of evil, is likewise a mystery; that is to say, we do not know its underlying causes, why it exists. There are in Marcel’s writings frequent references to examples of modern inhumanity, to the sufferings of innocent people imposed by stalinism, nazism, pogroms, deportations, mass bombings, and atrocities of many kinds. The dehumanization and devaluation of modern life has brought about suffering on a scale unmatched by natural disasters, even if the latter should not be set aside as merely fortuitous. Once again suffering is not a phenomenon that lies wholly outside of oneself. Suffering is necessarily experienced, though one can also assume another’s suffering, that is to say, become so affected by another’s torment that it becomes a ‘suffering-­ with’. Suffering invades one, it is embodied, just as an ‘I’ is embodied. The more it is inside me ‘the more arbitrary is the act by which I consider the suffering as outside myself and (as it were) accidentally endured: the act, that is, by which I assume a sort of underlying soundness in my being (this is particularly easy to see in cases of bereavement or illness)’ (BAH: 116). But if the suffering is in me rather than outside me, is there any reason to suppose that it is some form of retribution? There has been a long-lived tendency among religious apologists to blame our suffering on man’s own inclination to evil. Now if for evil we substitute the religious notion of sin, the evil that we bring about by our selfish actions, then we will see that it is something that is universally applicable within the realm of conscience; even the greatest of saints have admitted to being sinful according to what their conscience tells them. Paradoxically, for Marcel ‘the notion of sin [is] a principle of communion’ (PAI: 99), that is, our proclivity to sin binds us together. Why do some people have a greater sense of sin than others?, asks Marcel, echoing Unamuno. This sense of guilt for sinning appears to come from an inadequacy that we feel in ourselves, and that inadequacy in turn stems from a feeling of not responding as we should. ‘It seems that the reality of my sin does not touch my conscience except to the degree that I awaken to the infinite love of which I am the object’ (PAI: 100). What Marcel is saying therefore is that my sense of sin or guilt is itself a revelation of a

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caring sentiment towards me to which I feel I should respond positively. Marcel certainly does not claim this phenomenon as a justification for the existence of evil and consequential suffering. What he claims is that an awareness of evil, and of our inclination to it, rather than negating God’s existence can actually serve to awaken in us an awareness of his love and our need to respond. This is what he calls ‘a transcendence [that] can be above all the quality of not belonging to myself ’ (PAI: 103). This appears to be not so very different from Kant’s moral argument for the existence of God or Cardinal Newman’s view of conscience as divine in origin. Our moral awareness helps to prevent us from perpetrating evil acts or makes us feel guilty if we do. That sense of guilt is what makes an evil act sinful. Why then is there so much evil? Marcel goes on to argue that the sense of sin, so much weakened in modern times, can be seen to be in inverse proportion to the evil committed in the world. Moral responsibility has been diluted as transcendental belief has waned. Yet it is not our recognition of sin, or of ‘fallenness’ in Heideggerian existentialism, that brings about suffering. Despite the temptation to see suffering as the result of sin, there is no necessary connection. Suffering is just as likely to strike an innocent person as a sinful person. We cannot ascribe to suffering ‘an explanation or justification which is also determined and particular’ (BAH: 143). To see it as imposed by God is to see God as just another person on the same level as the sufferer. Because suffering can strike any of us it must be apprehended as ‘participation in a universal mystery which can be grasped as brotherhood and understood as a metaphysical bond’ (BAH: 144). Someone’s suffering can often be the result of another’s evil act, but it has to be seen as part of the human condition, as our common identity, and treated accordingly. It is up to us all, not up to God, to alleviate it.

9.4 Conclusions I’m guilty, I know, but not what blame it is I bear for meriting this blessed punishment from you, which is my life.

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That I deserve my pain I do accept, my blame I recognize, but tell me, tell me Lord of life and death, where lies my blame? Yes, Lord, I sinned, I will confess, my guilt your punishment reveals, no suffering, no life, and yet I suffer, why? [Soy culpable, lo sé, mas no conozco la culpa que me aflige y a que debo este castigo tuyo que bendigo por ser mi vida. Acepto este dolor por merecido, mi culpa reconozco, pero dime, dime, Señor, Señor de vida y muerte, ¿cuál es mi culpa? Sí, yo pequé, Señor, te lo confieso, culpable tu castigo me revela, mi vida sin sufrir ya no es mi vida, mas … ¿por qué sufro?]   (Unamuno 1995: IV, 110)

Thus Unamuno in one of his psalms from Poesías (1907). In this fifteen-­ stanza poem the poet appears to take the ultra-orthodox view that human suffering is a divine punishment for sin, but this acknowledgement is repeatedly followed by the unorthodox view that such punishment is incomprehensible because we have not been told what we are guilty of. The poet appeals to God to let him know what he stands accused of. In the face of God’s silence, Unamuno will have to provide his own answer, which, as we have seen, he attempts to do shortly afterwards in The Tragic Sense of Life. But the poem illustrates the quandary Christian believers find themselves in, having to account for what appears to be gratuitous suffering, in itself tied to the problem of evil, which is seen as the root of suffering but is no more explicable than the suffering it begets. Atheistic and agnostic existentialists do not of course face the compatibility

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problem: God is either deemed not to exist (as in Sartre) or simply bracketed (as in Heidegger). Existential thinkers of a Christian persuasion cannot evade the issue so conveniently. But trying to account for evil is such a challenge that there can be significant differences even among existentialists working within a Christian ideology. What they have in common is the viewing of evil not as an abstract category but from the perspective of its impact on human life. Evil is an unfortunate and painful experience, not simply a metaphysical problem. For Unamuno evil is a human inclination, just as is the belief in a higher being. Evil and good are values or judgements built into our human nature, and the distinction is essentially between that which causes us harm, suffering, destruction, and that which brings contentment, relief, preservation. It is we ourselves who bring God into the equation, and in so far as God is immanent in us he is part of our disposition to evil. But since God is supposedly immanent in all, if we act against our fellow-beings we are in effect acting against God. In other words our transgression of the moral law of man can equally be seen as a transgression of divine law. Hence the historical interpretation of an evil action and its painful effects as an infringement of divine law or offense against God, and, contrariwise, of a good action and its beneficial effects as fulfilment of God’s law. Unamuno’s position is perfectly consistent. He is, in typical existentialist fashion, arguing from man to God rather than, in theological fashion, from God to man. God is still there, but what we have to account for is our attitude to him, not his attitude to us, which remains unknowable. Marcel adopts a broadly similar position. Evil is within our own consciousness, experienced as a threat to one’s being. We can recognize evil but not its causes, not even when we ourselves bring it about by our conduct, for we do not understand what drives us to evil. It is true that we have been endowed with freedom to do good and evil, but to infer God’s culpability from our evil actions implies a knowledge of God that we simply lack. The compatibility problem is real enough for Marcel, but by itself it does not impose a choice between God and non-God. What it does is to make us keenly aware of ourselves, of our choices, of our responsibilities, even of our failings. While recognizing the force of the atheist’s argument, Marcel in turn argues that we are no nearer to

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explaining our sense of evil by discarding God. Indeed our hope in an evil-free universe can be seen as a pointer to a transcendent being in whom we place our confidence. Berdyaev is even more emphatic than Marcel in regarding the incompatibility argument as a misconception, the argument of a convinced atheist rather than a convincing argument for atheism. The undoubted existence of evil has not driven human beings away from God but, historically, has in fact brought them closer to him. God has represented for mankind the promise of freedom from evil. Where Berdyaev differs from Unamuno and Marcel is in going beyond the fact of human consciousness of evil in his attempt to source its origins. Böhme’s notion of the Ungrund, the undifferentiated, undetermined ‘no-ground’ or void which precedes God’s self-revelation and creation, serves Berdyaev to claim that evil is a left-over of this primordial pre-existence and that any manifestation of it is a tendency to non-being, a reversion to the formless and meaningless freedom of the Ungrund. Evil belongs neither to God nor man but is rather a threat to both divine and human order. This in no way exempts man from responsibility; on the contrary, it should be a warning to us to be on our guard and not rationalize evil. All three thinkers, therefore, are in broad agreement that, whatever the origin of evil, which must remain shrouded in mystery, man, even if not solely responsible for it, has nevertheless the capacity to recognize it and cannot evade moral responsibility by pinning his actions on an external agency. In accepting moral responsibility for our conduct we are, to a degree, acknowledging a transcendental sense of values. To this extent, therefore, evil does not eliminate the presence of God. Unamuno is especially insistent on the close connection between our conduct and our sense of a divine purpose. Goodness does not stem from religious dogma, but dogma from goodness. Conduct precedes dogma and is the supreme test of ensuing doctrines. Morality is a form of finality, that is, a way of giving meaning to our existence. If our existence has no meaning, then no idea of good and evil or the conduct which justifies it can have meaning either. Yet we know that it is through our conduct that we either create or conquer evil. Hence our conviction, or at least supposition, of a transcendent truth or mission, that is, of a divine purpose. In a manner of speaking the problem of evil has been turned on its head: far from pointing to God’s

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non-existence, our recognition of evil and desire to overcome it amount to an indication of purposiveness, of divine presence. In the case of suffering, which we often experience as something arbitrary and gratuitous, Unamuno also constructs some kind of theoretical or speculative framework. The effect of suffering is to enhance consciousness, which in turn demands meaning, purpose, finality, in other words a goal which we call God. We need to ask not about the causes of suffering but rather about its ends. Human suffering, argues Unamuno, ultimately begets God. The key point in what we might call Unamuno’s theory of suffering is that man demands an answer, and this answer is not forthcoming from man himself; it can only be given by a higher being with a cosmic vision which we lack. The traditional (and Old Testament) idea of suffering as retribution is an absurdity and an insult to the innocent: what has a child done to merit being struck down by some cruel disease, as was the case with Unamuno’s own son? Suffering is unnatural, both biologically—we do not know why evolutionary nature should produce such a degree of suffering—and existentially—we do not know why we are prone to anxiety, anguish, and despair. This kind of mental suffering in particular makes no evolutionary sense, yet we are only too prone to it. For Unamuno the reality of such suffering can only mean one thing: awareness of our dissatisfaction with our earthly life, a mysterious sensibility to the incompleteness of our being. Furthermore, although pain is experienced individually, in the suffering of others we discover that one’s own suffering is not exceptional, unique, or temperamental. It is humanity that suffers. Berdyaev agrees with Unamuno that the retributive explanation of suffering is unacceptable; suffering is a tragedy because it is unnatural and unjust. Christianity must seek to alleviate it, not justify it by fanciful appeals to original sin and man’s culpability. Although suffering appears senseless, or precisely because it does, we must confront it as the reality which it is and neither rationalize it nor ignore it. Berdyaev does not evoke the nameless God of Unamuno’s poetry who hears our pleas in silence, but, like Unamuno, sees suffering as the hallmark of the human race, and solidarity in compassion as the only redemptive tool at our disposal. Marcel goes half a step further. Deeply affected by two world wars and the atrocities committed by the warring powers, he came to see

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suffering by and large as the result of man’s inhumanity to man, that is, as a result of evil acts and the decline of moral responsibility in the contemporary world, an ubiquitous theme in Marcel’s later work. This does not make the existence of suffering any the less mysterious, but it should certainly make us even more aware of its presence. Consciousness of the human potential for evil as well as of the consequential suffering which it precipitates should bring us to the recognition that only in unity can the human race face up to adversity. We can see therefore that all three of these Christian thinkers turn our existential suffering into an invitation to engage in a transcendental collective regeneration, broadly in accordance with the orthodox or generally accepted position summarized in the closing lines of the introductory section of this chapter. It remains to consider the nature of the transcendent power which beckons and the ultimate outcome of our response.

10 Immortality and God

Mankind finds itself in a universe which has neither an obvious origin nor a discernible purpose. Does the meandering, tormenting road of life lead anywhere? It is an old question, and if the answer is that it leads to oblivion, could anyone imagine a more pointless passage for a reflective being? It seems clear that since man appeared on earth he has not been willing to accept what appears to stare him in the face. For even where transcendental belief has been lacking, the human being has striven to leave an imprint, a legacy, a memory, even if it meant burning down the temple of Artemis at Ephesus. Yet to what end? The futility of all striving seems patent if oblivion supervenes tomorrow or in any distant future, as it is bound to do in a material world. Not only man but the entire universe appears to be a mockery if it is simply heading for extinction in heat death. Is it any wonder then that since the beginning men have sought solutions to the riddle of such seeming pointlessness? Man seems to be the product of a purposeless universe, yet man seeks purpose. How do we reconcile the two? Most existentialists would argue that we cannot expect the universe to give us purpose. Purpose belongs to man. The universe itself is neither absurd nor meaningful. As Simone de Beauvoir claims, the meaning of a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. A. Longhurst, Unamuno, Berdyaev, Marcel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81999-6_10

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human existence is not fixed beforehand; it has to be fought for continuously: ‘One cannot start by saying that our earthly destiny has or has not importance, for it depends upon us to give it importance’ (Beauvoir 2018: 15). We have to turn the contingent into something willed by man. We conquer our own freedom, says Beauvoir, by putting it to work constructively, and we must continue to conquer it so long as we exist (Beauvoir 2018: 170). Few would want to disagree with this sentiment, yet doubts about the role we assign to ourselves as individuals must clearly remain so long as we perceive no universal destination, so long as our existence is but a spinning out of the tedious thread of time. Some eastern cultures have regarded life on earth not only as purposeless but as so horrific that death comes not as unmerited extinction but as relief. Even in this case it is deliverance from a meaningless existence which is for some intolerable. Nirvana may be unconsciousness, yet still a form of salvation. Western man has sought a more active solution. Since it is not in our power to save ourselves from annihilation we must appeal to a higher power, and this indeed is what much of mankind has tried to do since it developed its acute sensitivity to death and its desire to know. There are those who believe that this ingrained desire for perdurance is itself a pointer to its feasibility, as well as those who hold that such a view is pure make-believe. Yet even those who regard death as the irrevocable end of individual consciousness may still acknowledge the force of the hope or expectation of further life. ‘We feel and know by experience that we are eternal.’ Thus Spinoza in his Ethics (Spinoza 1996: 172 [Part 5, prop. 23]). He is not of course referring to the body or its brain but only to that part of our essence that enables us to conceive of the eternity of God or Nature, that makes us not individual bodies located in space and time, but more fundamentally a part of Nature. Nature will survive, and in so far as we are a part of Nature so will we. But not as individuals with our separate consciousness. The atheistic Schopenhauer was happy to accept Spinoza’s view of immortality as a natural sentiment, but added that thinking of ourselves as eternal entails regarding ourselves as having no beginning. Anything that has a beginning has an end; only infinity and eternity have neither. ‘Consequently everyone can think of himself as immortal only in so far as he also thinks of himself as unborn’ he writes in The World as Will and

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Representation (Schopenhauer 1966: II, 487). To have an existence after death one must have an existence before birth, a condition which rather puts a damper on our hopes. The Old Testament did not promise immortality since it regarded the world as having been created out of nothing at a particular point. The New Testament on the other hand does, and therein lies a problem. The only solution is to posit the direct intervention of a higher agency capable of conferring eternal existence on a latecomer. Are we justified in doing so? This is an area where religion and philosophy overlap: over the question of God. If we are going to invoke the notion of God, we should start by explaining what God is, yet there has never been a satisfactory answer to this question. ‘My idea of God is different each time I think of it’, writes Unamuno [‘Mi idea de Dios es distinta cada vez que la concibo’ (DST: X, 347)]. Even the Christian mystics, who claim to have been in the presence of God, have admitted that their experience is neither transmissible nor translatable into words: the necessary language seems to be missing. The generalized tendency among Christians of course is to hypostatize God in Jesus, but this is hardly a valid move philosophically. God and immortality have been seen as complementary notions, though there is no logical reason why human immortality should necessarily follow from the existence of God. Greeks and Romans had their gods, but did not believe in the immortality of human beings, at any rate not beyond the Platonist ‘Ideas’ of man or his species. Nor did the Jewish Sadducees, who believed in the God of the Old Testament, subscribe to personal immortality. On the other hand, immortality without God looks a far more unlikely prospect than with God, though even this has had its defenders, notably the Cambridge philosopher John McTaggart, a contemporary of Unamuno’s, who was an atheist who believed in the immortality of the self. For the vast majority of Christians the belief in bodily resurrection derives from the Gospel reports of Jesus the Nazarene’s reappearance among his disciples after his death and burial. If these reports are true literally and not just symbolically, then one human being at least has been resurrected, which leaves the door open for other resurrections. The key issue here is not whether the spirit in us survives and the body perishes, but whether each one of us survives as the self-conscious entity that he or she is while alive on this earth. We express ourselves and

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communicate with others through our bodies, so we can have no worthwhile idea of what existence without a body would be like. Hence the choice of bodily resurrection to accompany immortality. The Christian tradition of bodily resurrection starts with St Paul, who insists that Jesus’ reappearance is a strong pointer to our own resurrection. To the question what kind of body the resurrected will have Paul sparingly replies that it will be an incorruptible and spiritual body because it will have been refashioned for heavenly life, not for earthly life. In City of God and Enchiridion St Augustine picks up this point and interprets it as meaning that the resurrected body will be both spirit and ‘flesh’, that is, it will have substance. Augustine obviously believed in bodily resurrection since he went to a good deal of trouble to quash, detail by detail, the mischievous and derisive queries of the sceptics about size, shape, stage of growth, sex, disabilities, deformities and so on of the resurrected bodies (Augustine 2003 [City of God, Book 22, chapters 11–21] and Augustine 2006 [Enchiridion, chapter 23]). Moreover, it is belief not only in a material resurrection but in the resurrection of the very body we had upon this earth, though without imperfections. Our precise, unique bodies were to be restored, according to Augustine, to the condition in which they would have been in their prime and free of all blemish, and this irrespective of any accident that might have befallen that earthly body, since resurrection and reconstitution were the work of God, not of man. The reassembled body was to be adapted ‘from the old animal body into a new spiritual body, clothed in incorruptibility and immortality’; or as he also puts it, the resurrected and immortal body undergoes ‘a change in quality’ to make it fit for heavenly habitation (Augustine 2003: 1064 [City of God, Book 22, chapter 21] and 536 [City of God, Book 13, chapter 23). These resurrected bodies are real bodies, not purely spiritual entities, as Augustine explains: ‘[they] are called “spiritual”, though undoubtedly they will be bodies and not spirits’ (Augustine 2006: 392 [Enchiridion, chapter 23]). Thomas Aquinas fully accepted the Augustinian view of the perfected body as necessary for immortal life. The human being is a composite of soul and body, and both are necessary for our existence in heaven as on earth. They can be regarded as separate substances, but each requires the other in order to fulfil its function. Seen in Aristotelian terms, the soul

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was the ‘form’ or animating principle of the body. The soul could survive the death of the body, but because it was assigned to a body it was incomplete without it. In Thomist theology, therefore, a human being cannot exist simply as a soul; it needs a body as well. The body plays a fundamental part because without it the soul cannot express itself. According to St Thomas, at a person’s death that person’s soul is held in suspension until that person’s body is reconstituted and fully restored to a perfected state. That is what immortality entails in Thomistic terms: the reunion of soul and purified body by the grace of God. St Thomas therefore held to what is usually termed ‘substance dualism’ (the separation or distinction of mind and body), but it is a moderate or limited form of substance dualism, since each substance is dependent on the other. Four centuries later Descartes came up with a more radical view of substance dualism. Whereas St Thomas retained a fundamental role for the body, Descartes abandoned the body to its evident perishability and instead ascribed a far more influential role to the soul or mind. We are fundamentally souls and only accidentally bodies. For St Thomas the body as well as the soul must be deemed immortal; for Descartes it is sufficient for the soul to survive our bodily death because that non-material side of us is what preserves our sense of self: it is the soul that makes us what we are as human beings and which gives us our capacity for thought and our self-identity. It follows that each soul is more than the necessary ‘form’ or animating principle of the body; it is something unique to each person that serves to characterize that person beyond his bodily manifestation. For Descartes, conscious awareness, or consciousness of self, was not inherently dependent on anything physical but simply on our thinking property, that is, on our mind. He could try to imagine himself without a body, but as he was doing this he was still thinking, therefore in some way existing. Now it may be true that one can imagine oneself as a bodiless being, even though we would have a problem in actually describing such a being. But this imagined situation does not constitute proof that a thinking substance (that is, a self-conscious substance) can actually exist without a body. It simply shows that we can conceive of such a situation. We could perhaps compare this to near-death experiences: the accounts given are perfectly intelligible, but we have no idea whether they describe a real experience as we have in wakefulness or something closer

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to a dream brought on by physiological changes in the brain. Descartes shows what is conceivable but not what is factual. He argues that if he can imagine himself to exist without a body he must have (or be) some other substance that is not his body but which enables him to think. That non-­ bodily substance, he concludes, must be the soul. This indeed shows that if you have a soul (or mind or thinking substance) you exist. But it does not show that a soul is all that is necessary for existence. We can grant Descartes his cogito, but there is still a body present during his thinking even if he imagines that it is not there; in other words, the thought of an absent body does not destroy that body. Descartes’ argument is therefore conjectural: there is nothing wrong with it logically speaking. But it does not prove that he has established a fact, only a possibility. To equate conscious thinking with having a soul is acceptable; to thereby posit the dispensability of the body and the independent existence of the soul, and hence its imperishability and immortality, is merely conjectural. Having separated res cogitans from res extensa, Descartes struggled to establish a connection or interaction between soul and body (i.e. between thought and matter, or mind and body) without success, heedless of St Augustine’s warning in City of God that the ‘conjunction [of soul and body] is utterly amazing and beyond our powers of comprehension’ (Augustine 2003: 986 [City of God, Book 21, chapter 10]). But then, no-one has yet succeeded where Descartes failed. In the opinion of many distinguished philosophers of today, Cartesian dualism, in a modified form that allows for possible natural explanations, remains the best account we have of consciousness, thought, and experiential capacity1; but it does not prove that the soul or self survives the death of the body. The physical and transphysical dimensions of the self may be so interdependent that when one of them ceases to exist, the other does too. If we set aside the notion of immortality, many people do accept that we humans are more than our physical bodies and brains, that there is indeed such a thing as a self or individual mind (more traditionally a soul) in addition to the body. Among the most vigorous proponents of such a view we find the philosopher Sir Karl Popper and the  Among the many one could cite the names of Thomas Nagel, Saul Kripke, Colin McGuinn, Galen Strawson; and of some scientists too, e.g. Roger Penrose. 1

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neuro-biologist Sir John Eccles (Popper and Eccles 1977). In effect theirs is a modern and more scientific version of Cartesian dualism. On the other hand, twentieth-century existentialists were, virtually without exception, anti-Cartesian, largely on the grounds that Descartes’ method was an abstraction which did not reflect experience: experience shows us that we learn to think, or gain our self-awareness, in the world and through the world. Since most of these thinkers were either atheistic or agnostic, Descartes’ claim to have demonstrated the soul’s imperishability was for them irrelevant and wrong. In the case of our three Christian thinkers, who are as anti-Cartesian as the rest, the dismissal of Descartes presents more of a challenge because they have to offer an alternative to his immortality hypothesis. Like Descartes they wish to defend some form of immortality, but not on the grounds of the self-sufficiency and indestructibility of the res cogitans. It is not, however, the form of immortality that principally concerns these Christian thinkers, whether through bodily resurrection by God’s hand or through the continued existence of a God-given immaterial soul, but rather the role that our sensitivity or openness to personal survival after death can play in our earthly lives.

10.1 Unamuno: Answering the Mortal Question The innate drive towards self-preservation and survival even after death, recognized by many who do not believe in such survival, is at the heart of Unamuno’s existential philosophy as expounded in The Tragic Sense of Life. Saving our consciousness is what everyone strives for, and Unamuno is firmly of the opinion that this striving is justified, for ‘if consciousness […] is nothing more than a flash of lightning in between two eternities of darkness, then there is nothing more execrable than existence’ [Si la conciencia no es […] nada más que un relámpago entre dos eternidades de tinieblas, entonces no hay nada más execrable que la existencia’ (DST: X, 285)]. But to have any hope of immortality the existence of God is presumably a sine qua non, and for Unamuno there is no rational basis whatever for the existence of God. If we want God to exist as guarantor

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of our immortality we need to look elsewhere than in our rational minds for God’s existence. In this Unamuno was pretty consistent throughout his life, from the ‘Carta a Juan Solís’ (c. 1890) preserved in the Casa-­ Museo through to the Spanish version of La agonía del cristianismo (1931). Time and again he declared that believing in God was not a matter of finding reasons for his existence. Reason can neither prove nor disprove the reality of God. Nevertheless the impossibility of giving God’s existence a convincing rational basis does not, according to Unamuno, justify our evading the issue. It is simply too important to ignore because God, correctly or mistakenly, has been the foundation of much of our conduct, our values, and especially of course our hope. Unamuno’s quest is to find an alternative basis for belief in God as the anchor for his hope in immortality. Dogmatic belief, that is, belief in the dogmas propounded by religious authorities, is not for Unamuno real belief; it is a form of ‘spiritual laziness’ [‘pereza espiritual’ (MIR: IX, 51)]. As we saw in Chap. 5, Unamuno had a combative view of faith, one that required it to be a highly conscious, willed, and creative affair: ‘The believer who refuses to examine the foundations of his belief is someone who is living in dishonesty and falsehood’ [‘El creyente que se resiste a examinar los fundamentos de su creencia es un hombre que vive en insinceridad y en mentira’ (VYV: IX, 63)]. Nevertheless, as we also saw in Chap. 5, Unamuno eventually came to acknowledge the validity of what he called the passive, feminine faith of acceptance. No doubt Concha Lizárraga’s faith was of this latter type as against her husband’s active, masculine faith. What, then, are the foundations for Unamuno’s own questioning belief in God and immortality? The most detailed account, though much more in the nature of an exploration than a justification, is that found in The Tragic Sense of Life. The final aim or goal of this treatise is to find an authentic basis for religious belief and in particular for belief in immortality. For this, some form of belief in some form of deity is necessary. But for Unamuno what is necessary first of all is to sweep away those religious claims based on specious or even spurious arguments. Indeed of the twelve chapters of The Tragic Sense of Life (the last of which is a barely relevant appendage on the alleged difference between Spain and Europe in part directed at the arch-European Ortega y Gasset), the first five are a clearing of the decks

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to make way for what will be Unamuno’s own proposal in the face of the problem of immortality. The pivotal point occurs well into Chap. 6, in effect the mid-point of the treatise, in which Unamuno, having signalled his disagreement even with such a radical Christian and existentialist avant la lettre as Søren Kierkegaard, writes: Faith in immortality is irrational. And yet, faith, life, and reason have a need of one another. That longing for life is not, strictly speaking, a problem, since it cannot adopt a logical form, cannot be formulated by means of basically discussable propositions, but nevertheless we have to face it, in the same way that we have to face hunger. [La fe en la inmortalidad es irracional. Y, sin embargo, fe, vida y razón se necesitan mutuamente. Ese anhelo vital no es propiamente problema, no puede tomar estado lógico, no puede formularse en proposiciones radicalmente discutibles, pero se nos plantea, como se nos plantea el hambre. (DST: X, 364)]

Reason does not recognize the problem of perdurance as a problem. The question of immortality lies outside its jurisdiction; hence it has nothing useful to say. Immortality lies within the realm of the will, and it is the will that insists that immortality is achievable. Up to this point in The Tragic Sense of Life Unamuno has been arguing that no explanation for the human concern with death and immortality, including the supposition of God’s existence, is satisfactory. Neither rational scientific explanations nor quasi-rational religious ones have proved convincing. Reason undermines our beliefs, yet some kind of belief is needed for reason to sustain itself, faith at least in its utility in our daily living. ‘Neither faith is transmissible or rational, nor reason vital’ [Ni la fe es transmisible o racional, ni la razón es vital’ (DST: X, 366)]. It was Unamuno’s philosophical rival, José Ortega y Gasset, who proposed ‘razón vital’ as an existential philosophy. But for Unamuno what sustains life is not reason but the will (Ouimette 1974). The upshot is that, while the vital instinct tries to coerce reason into supporting its desires, and reason tries to coerce the vital instinct into accepting the inevitable, we are caught in a cleft stick, trying to arbitrate between two implacable antagonists over the question of survival.

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On the one hand our vital instinct makes us reach for perdurance, yet on the other our reason undermines our hope and our vitality. How does this come about, given that our reason is itself the product of life? Unamuno does not tell us. He could have considered whether our desire for perdurance, which generates reliance on God, and our reliance on reason, which helps us solve the practical problems we encounter in our earthly lives, involve the same category of belief. For it is arguable whether they do. Reason is in large part the result of experience. We are born with the capacity to learn and we use our experience of the world to build on that capacity and stretch our reason. This enables us to make practical decisions in the first place and to expand our horizons of knowledge thereafter. We therefore learn to trust reason for the most part. We have no comparable experience of an afterlife, even if we yearn for it. As Kant argued, such belief is not and cannot be based on experience, and we cannot build on it as we can on our use of reasoning. It would seem therefore that our belief or trust in reason and our belief or trust in God and immortality belong in different categories and do not confront each other on the same battlefield as Unamuno insists. The entire case presented in The Tragic Sense of Life is based on the irreconcilability of reason and desire, and on the consequent split or scission in the human personality, but this presentation may well involve a category error. Unamuno’s own struggle with religious faith may have made him see irreconcilability and conflict where there need be none. Be that as it may, Unamuno is determined to make a way of life out of opposing tendencies: will versus intelligence, religion versus philosophy, instinct versus knowledge, vitalism versus rationalism, everything is at war: Any enduring position of agreement and harmony between reason and life, between philosophy and religion, becomes impossible. And the tragic history of human thought is but the history of a struggle between reason and life, the former determined to rationalize the latter, forcing it to become resigned to the inevitable, to mortality; and the latter, life, determined to vitalize reason, forcing it to support its own vital longings. And this is the history of philosophy, inseparable from the history of religion.

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[Toda posición de acuerdo y armonía persistentes entre la razón y la vida, entre la filosofía y la religión, se hace imposible. Y la trágica historia del pensamiento humano no es sino la de una lucha entre la razón y la vida, aquella empeñada en racionalizar a esta haciéndola que se resigne a lo inevitable, a la mortalidad; y esta, la vida, empeñada en vitalizar a la razón obligándola a que sirva de apoyo a sus anhelos vitales. Y esta es la historia de la filosofía, inseparable de la historia de la religión. (DST: X, 367)]

Time and again Unamuno insists that there can be no lasting truce between the opposing tendencies to which we are subject. The only constructive solution is to turn the conflict into a source of creative energy. Unamuno universalizes his own affective needs through a series of what he regards as life-sustaining ideas or speculations, whether or not they are reasonable. Yet this creative enterprise is necessarily carried out in an atmosphere of uncertainty. It is not just the believer who has a doubt about immortality; the sceptic too has a doubt about death as final. Absolute certainty is barred: any such certainty, one way or the other, ‘would make our lives equally impossible’ [‘nos harían igualmente imposible la vida’ (DST: X, 370)]. If we need God to even begin to satisfy our demand for survival we shall have to relocate him, for it is clear to Unamuno that traditional theological approaches are no longer tenable. The Judaic religions rationalized pagan Gods, yet that very rationalization made it susceptible to dethronement by the rise of science. But if the God of theology is dead, killed not only by modern science but also by a greater awareness of the history of theism itself, there remains the God that is a projection of our own consciousness upon the universe, an implicit recognition of our sense of solitude and disorientation, an expectation or intuition that the universe has a finality, a mind of its own so to speak. ‘And this cordial, felt God, the God of living things, is the personalization of the Universe itself, it is the Consciousness of the Universe’ [‘Y el Dios cordial o sentido, el Dios de los vivos, es el Universo mismo personalizado, es la Conciencia del Universo’ (DST: X, 411)]. Furthermore, because the human being is a social animal, this sense of collectivity was projected onto the Aristotelian ens summum and converted into the Christian Trinity. God is a triune God, that is to say, a relationship and a

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communion. God is thus doubly a social God, as a mirror of humanity’s collective sense and as a society within himself. And to finalize the picture of God as a projection of man’s own communal experience, the mother of Jesus of Nazareth was gradually raised to divine status, thereby completing the divine family, in much the same way as royal families have been conceived as constituting the collective quintessence of a people or state. God thus becomes the collective consciousness of the human lineage. The question, of course, is how this God can bring the prospect of immortality any closer. Unamuno’s answer is that the yearning for God and the yearning for immortality are at bottom the same phenomenon. They are the result of our living fabric, that is, of our constitution, of our sentiments, of our fears, and of our longings. If we are alive, so are those sentiments. Here Unamuno is adopting the stance of Blaise Pascal in separating intuition from rationalization. The desire for survival is sustained by our intuition, which is as much a part of us as is our capacity for analytical reasoning. The very fact that our imagination has gone to the trouble of evoking a dimension of being that is beyond our understanding is itself intriguing. Why should we be capable, irrespective of whether we choose to do it or not, of concentrating our faith, hope, and love on this projection of our consciousness, a consciousness which we cannot in any case explain? The question has no answer, but Unamuno hints that what man seeks is reassurance in a world that is a mystery to us. Without God we are nothing, just as our consciousness is nothing. All we know instinctively is that self-transcendence is not realistic, that ultimately the key to our fate lies outside ourselves. Our love for God is a pre-supposition or pre-reflection of God’s love for us, that is, of our hope for salvation. ‘But this God who saves us, this personal God, this Consciousness of the Universe who enfolds and supports our own consciousnesses, this God who gives human finality to all creation, does he exist?’ [‘Pero este Dios que nos salva, este Dios personal, Conciencia del Universo que envuelve y sostiene nuestras conciencias, este Dios que da finalidad humana a la creación toda, ¿existe?’ (DST: X, 420)]. Unamuno certainly does not appeal to theological arguments or revelation to prove God’s existence. He is after all enquiring into the possibility of immortality, not directly of God. God’s ex-sistence, the objective

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reality of God out there, is unknowable, so we are limited to projecting the God that we create or imagine within ourselves, in the same way that we create or imagine our own continued existence—our existence for others—as something real, not merely existence in a vacuum. As we saw in Chap. 8, it is others’ consciousness of me that gives me my sense of being real, and since this consciousness is necessarily mutual, it raises the possibility of a collective consciousness, and it is this collective consciousness that Unamuno employs as an objective correlative of his subjective notion, referring to it as a ‘Supreme Consciousness’ [‘Conciencia Suprema’ (DST: X, 421)], or Universal Consciousness. This universal consciousness clearly survives the death of any one human being, so if our individual consciousness is a reflection or semblance of the universal consciousness it may not perish: And if the soul of Humanity is eternal, if the collective consciousness of the human race is eternal, if there is a Consciousness of the Universe and it is eternal, then why should our own individual consciousness, yours, dear reader, and mine not be so too? [Y si el alma de la Humanidad es eterna, si es eterna la conciencia colectiva humana, si hay una Conciencia del Universo y esta es eterna, ¿por qué nuestra propia conciencia individual, la tuya, lector, la mía no ha de serlo? (DST: X, 421)]

There is here a strong element of pan-psychism, the notion that consciousness or mind is a natural phenomenon that pervades the entire cosmos and that man’s brain acts as a receiver tuned in to this universal force to an exceptionally fine degree. There is nothing especially new or remarkable in this semi-separation of mind and brain, for it has been posited before by scientists and philosophers as a possible explanation of the mind-body problem: the brain, obviously, is still needed to receive and decode this externally located consciousness. William James, for example, who as it happens was a significant influence on Unamuno, put forward the view that human beings were centres of experience who together formed or belonged to a network that made communication possible. Unamuno is of course perfectly aware that positing a consciousness that pervades the entire universe—not the blind will of Schopenhauer

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but rather a will that ‘knows’—does not of itself guarantee the survival of an individual’s consciousness as such: that individual consciousness could simply serve to enrich the wider consciousness as the stream enriches the ocean. But at least it gives the human race a role, a finality: ‘For one could even resign oneself to be absorbed by God if our consciousness melts into a Consciousness, if consciousness is the goal of the Universe’ [‘Porque hasta podría llegar uno a resignarse a ser absorbido por Dios si en una Conciencia se funde nuestra conciencia, si es la conciencia el fin del Universo’ (DST: X, 422)].2 Though no doubt better than total oblivion, than ending up with a universe without observers, something which Unamuno abhors as the acme of pointlessness, that sort of resignation does not satisfy him. Disappearance into a supreme Consciousness or godhead is not the kind of survival he hopes for. ‘What difference is there between being absorbed by God and absorbing him into myself? Is the brook lost in the sea or the sea in the brook? It matters not’ [‘¿Qué diferencia va de ser absorbido por Dios a absorberle uno en sí? ¿Es el arroyico el que se pierde en el mar o el mar en el arroyico? Lo mismo da’ (DST: X, 456)]. Indeed so, since with this kind of survival we are back to Spinoza’s view of eternity as our perception of God rather than as the persistence of self-identity, or Schopenhauer’s undifferentiated noumenon, which again is not self-­ awareness. Neither stands for the continuity of one’s self. It is also for this reason that Unamuno is not attracted by Pauline apocatastasis, for the latter can be read as the sublimation of our selfhood, as if we are all swept up via Christ into God’s consciousness, ‘that God may be all in all’ (Paul, I Corinthians 15.28), rather than continuing to exist as separate and individual consciousnesses. Our self-identity is based on difference, not on sameness. Even more vehemently, Unamuno refuses to seek a solution via the parallelism with the scientific theory of the eventual degradation of the energy which impels the universe, with the resultant entropy or stasis and the consequent loss of all consciousness. He is particularly derisive towards Spencer’s theory of an unstable homogeneity as the primitive  I have changed ‘se funda’ (is based) to ‘se funde’ (melts or merges), since the latter is, in the context, far more likely, especially as the idea is repeated in Chap. 10 of The Tragic Sense of Life using the verb ‘anegarse’, to be immersed or immerse oneself (DST: X, 448). 2

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state of the universe which leads to the heterogeneity which we observe, unaware that Spencer’s theory was soon to be revived by the New Physics, which ascribes the beginning of the universe or ‘Big Bang’ to an unpredictable quantum fluctuation in the vacuum. Yet despite making the quest for immortality and God into the existentialist life-project, no matter how hard he strives to save his consciousness, Unamuno, wherever he turns, perceives no meaningful account of what immortality might entail. He indulges in endless speculations of what form such an afterlife might take, but none satisfies him (Orringer 2020). Whether he conceives of it in terms of the beatific vision, or a universal paean to Love, or the ultimate understanding of Platonic ‘ideas’, or an angelic society of spiritual beings, or Pauline anacefaleosis (union of all in Christ as head of humanity), he finds no comprehensible view. ‘An eternal life is not conceivable’ [‘Una vida eterna es impensable’ (DST: X, 453)], he exclaims in frustration. No matter how much we crave it, we cannot envisage it. Far from irrational, this in fact seems a perfectly reasonable position to take: we are so bounded by this life that we can only imagine the next life as a continuation of this one. What is perhaps less reasonable is Unamuno’s contention, or at any rate proposal, that those who crave immortality deserve to be rewarded with it and those who do not crave it deserve to be deprived of it: ‘Only he does not deserve immortality who fails to long passionately for it, and with a passion that crushes every reason, and it is because he does not deserve it that he does not long for it’ [‘No deja de anhelar con pasión su propia inmortalidad, y con pasión avasalladora de toda razón, sino aquel que no la merece, y porque no la merece no la anhela’ (DST: X, 453)]. Here Unamuno’s speculation is driven by his own irrepressible desire to make his mark in this life and to continue doing so in whatever awaits him at death. He not only craves immortality but demands it as a right. Those who out of indifference or even humility make no such demand are branded as undeserving: ‘What cruelty is there in denying one what he desired not or could not desire?’ [‘¿Qué crueldad hay en negar a uno lo que no deseó o no pudo desear?’ (DST: X, 471)]. For Unamuno entitlement comes from commitment. The unintended consequence of taking this stance is that it lends credence to the view that Christ’s promise was not to mankind as a whole but limited to a few unconditional followers.

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At this stage one might begin to wonder whether Christianity is genuinely compatible with an existential outlook (and we can understand why the ex-Catholic Heidegger chose to sidestep the question). On the one hand, there is no denying the deep desire for perdurance that we all carry within us. On the other, every attempt to convert this desire into a credible set of beliefs in an afterlife in which we continue to exist as ourselves is a failure. That is what Unamuno called ‘the agony of Christianity’. We end up by creating myths. It seems as if for a sincere Christian the real and fundamental question is not personal salvation but personal sacrifice, whether, given Christ’s sacrifice for mankind, mankind is in turn prepared to sacrifice itself to him. Normally this is taken to mean giving up something in this life, but Unamuno interprets Pauline anacefaleosis as requiring us to give up our self-identity. This marks for Unamuno the end of the road, but it is not a terminus that he welcomes. The only alternative is to put aside all reservations, all rational doubts and arguments, and to commit oneself to the belief in an eternal self-conscious existence: ‘yes, we must yearn for it, however absurd it may seem to us; moreover we must believe in it, one way or another, in order to live. To live, right?, not to understand the universe. We must believe in it, and to believe in it is to be a religious person’ [‘sí, hay que anhelarla, por absurda que nos parezca; es más, hay que creer en ella, de una manera o de otra, para vivir. Para vivir ¿eh?, no para comprender el universo. Hay que creer en ella, y creer en ella es ser religioso’ (DST: X, 478)]. What we are left with as our life-project is a commitment to a particular belief, the belief that death is not the end of our self-identity, and to the practical consequences of that belief during our earthly lives. It comes down to a commitment in the face of all doubts, or perhaps because of them. This commitment is an existential one. We must defend and nurture that intrinsic desire for survival that is characteristic of our being. What Unamuno dislikes about atheism is not the atheist’s disbelief in God and the afterlife, but the fact that by his attitude he wills them not to exist, which for Unamuno is a crime of lèse humanité. To exist is our birthright, and we must have the courage and commitment to devote ourselves to fulfilling that destiny against all the odds.

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10.2 Berdyaev: The Noumenon in Eternity In The Beginning and the End, composed in 1941 in the difficult days of Paris under German occupation, a work meant to explain the essentials of his philosophy, which he refers to as ‘eschatological metaphysics’ (BAE: Preface), Berdyaev wrote: ‘My life is devoid of meaning if death means the final end of it; and even the values with which that life might be filled would not save it from absurdity’ (BAE: 230). This of course is a typical post-Nietzschean statement. Since this life is all there is, any values we create are not only home-grown but as ephemeral as we are. The alternative is to look for transcendence, and this transcendence is, for Berdyaev, immanent. The sense of infinity, of eternity, is to be found within us, finite creatures. This may be a paradox, but according to Berdyaev it is fundamental: ‘Man is a finite limited creature, but he holds infinity within him, and he demands infinity as an end’ (BAE: 230–31). This ‘end’ is central to Berdyaev’s thought and in particular (as we saw in Chap. 6) to his view of human history as moving towards resurrection, a new life for all. Indeed for Berdyaev, as for Unamuno, the idea of resurrection, of immortality, is such a fundamental issue as to be the chief problem facing humankind. But why should this be, why should man deplore a life without meaning and fear death as extinction? Berdyaev does not directly answer this question, though he often refers to the horror of death. What he does say, paradoxically as is his wont, is that the death of an immortal being is a tragedy. What he means, presumably, is that the necessary recognition of death which surrounds us is a tragedy for the living. ‘The need of immortality lies in the very depth of human nature’ (DAH: 162) he writes, echoing Unamuno. From the existential point of view, that is, from each one’s inward subjectiveness, death is not really conceivable, in the sense that our ego cannot think of itself not existing, since to think, as Descartes established, is to be alive. To face death and to experience dying is certainly possible, but not to experience the state of not existing. We can experience other people’s death, their non-existence, but not our own. Berdyaev bases his immortality claim on his idea of personality, which belongs in the spiritual realm. ‘The realization of personality is impossible in the finite, it presupposes the infinite,

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not quantitative infinity but qualitative, i.e. eternity. The individual person dies, since he is born in the generic process, but personality does not die, since it is not born in the generic process’ (SAF: 252). Despite Berdyaev’s declared anti-Cartesianism, which he has in common with Unamuno and Marcel, this looks suspiciously like Cartesian dualism under another name. And in another place Berdyaev writes: ‘Man as personality fights against death in the name of immortality’ (DAH: 150). What Berdyaev calls human personality has a noumenal existence, and the noumenon does not die, hence our sense of immortality of self, though not of immortality of others, since the noumenon, not directly belonging to the world of phenomena, can only be perceived inwardly, whereas others are perceived as phenomena. Personality is what opens the spiritual world to us, but it is not without its anxieties. The three nightmares of immortality are: eternal punishment, eternal reincarnation, and loss of personality in the godhead. The first one Berdyaev dismisses as incompatible with Christ’s sacrifice, as Origen had argued. The second is incompatible with Christian spirituality because it inserts a naturalistic conception into what is a spiritual outlook and dismembers personality. The third marks the end of personality, which is what makes experience of God possible in the first place. Immortality is not the same as apocatastasis if we assume the latter to be the restoration of an exclusively divine world with the return of all things to the godhead, since in fusion with God the ego disappears and immortality is not personal. Berdyaev’s objection to this kind of immortality is the same as Unamuno’s. It must not be thought that Berdyaev makes use of Descartes to claim the immortality of the human personality. On the contrary, he objects to Descartes’ substantializing the idea of mind or soul (as it appears to Berdyaev and countless others as a result of Descartes’ use of the medieval term substantia). Trying to prove immortality on the basis of the substantiality of the soul is, for Berdyaev, a notorious misconception based on a naturalist outlook: ‘Human personality is immortal not because the human soul possesses substantiality […], but because there is spiritual experience of eternal life’ (FAS: 39). God, too, is exclusively a spiritual reality, neither an object nor an idea. The reality of God and the spiritual world corresponds neither to the reality of our sense perceptions nor to the reality of our thoughts. The reality of God is given to us in spiritual

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experience; it cannot be demonstrated from without as the natural world can. Immortality likewise is the revelation of the spiritual realm as revealed in Christ and his resurrection. Christ revealed an immortality unconceived by Jews or Greeks. ‘Christianity is a promise of life for every human individual who has passed through the gates of death, not for the abstraction mankind’ (DAR: 292). This is altogether different from the Greek idea of immortality, limited to gods and demi-gods, or, as in Plato, to a universal soul. Of course, to say that the reality of God and immortality is a spiritual reality still does not tell us what it is or what form it takes. It is, so to speak, a warning not to expect either a naturalistic or a rationalistic type of explanation. This leaves us with the question of what form immortality might take. If it is a spiritual phenomenon, but not the survival of the Cartesian thinking soul, what is it? Berdyaev’s first major exploration of the immortality problem occurs in The Destiny of Man (1931). Unfortunately this takes the form in the main of a series of broad generalizations about death with little attempt to justify the statements made. Berdyaev declines to see death as the natural end of a living system or as the result of nature subordinating the individual to the species. This for him is a merely naturalistic approach and not an existential one. Instead of a natural event death is ‘the most profound and significant fact of life’, ‘the supreme horror and evil’, ‘a blessing and a value’, what ‘gives true depth to the question as to the meaning of life’, what ‘makes life senseless and corruptible’, what ‘testifies that meaning is to be found in eternity and in fullness of being’, ‘a denial of eternity’, ‘the acme of hideousness’ (DOM: 249–53). How is one to take all these idiosyncratic generalizations, or make sense of the many contradictions and occasional platitudes (e.g. ‘death is the destiny of everything that exists in this world’ DOM: 251), that tumble breathlessly upon one another in the space of a few pages? The essence of life is said to be the striving for eternity of all that exists; no advance therefore on Spinoza or Schopenhauer, not to mention Unamuno. When Berdyaev urges us to ‘act so as to conquer death and affirm everywhere, in everything and in relation to all, eternal and immortal life’ (DOM: 253) he is once again echoing Unamuno’s own adage, in turn based on Sénancour’s Obermann, that our conduct should be such as to make annihilation an injustice.

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The suspicion has to be that Berdyaev can make no more sense of immortality than can Unamuno but, unlike the latter, is not prepared to admit it. He is, as ever, eager to denounce Scholastic theology, which regards the soul as naturally immortal, as ‘a purely abstract and academic theory’ and as a ‘rationalistic metaphysic without any tragic element in it’ (DOM: 254). For Berdyaev there has to be an element of tragedy in the life spiritual, otherwise we are back with the banal transitoriness of natural life. Man has something over and above natural life, namely personality, which is a reflection of divine being, and if such a valuable gift were to end it would be a tragedy, whereas ‘there is nothing tragic about the death of the temporal and the transitory’ (DOM: 255). It is unthinkable that personality should die because it is, in Platonic terms, God’s idea of man, not generically but individually: ‘What is eternal and immortal in man is not the psychical or the physical element as such but the spiritual element which, acting in the other two, constitutes personality and realizes the image and likeness of God’ (DOM: 255). That is the kernel of Berdyaev’s theory of immortality. He insists that this kind of immortality is not the immortality of the species, which may survive while the individuals within it perish, but rather it is the immortality of the human person as a spiritual being. This kind of spiritual immortality ‘has to be won by the person and involves struggle for personality’ (DOM: 255). Here of course we are back to Unamuno’s irrational division of mankind into those who deserve immortality because they crave for it and those who do not deserve it because they do not crave for it (or do not crave for it because they do not deserve it, which smacks of predestination). On the face of it, this desperate proposition appears in both cases self-serving and questionably Christian. Berdyaev makes his philosophy of immortality even less appealing by misprizing as shallow those who dedicate themselves to human progress in the material sphere, and dubbing as melancholic those, like Stoics and Buddhists, who resign themselves to the reality of death. Christianity alone can conquer death, claims Berdyaev, but it would appear to be a form of Christianity that is meant for those of a spiritual self-definition and not for more ordinary mortals. What has an origin in time cannot be eternal, argues Berdyaev, exactly as did Schopenhauer; hence the image and likeness of God exhibited by the human soul must be God’s idea,

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existing in eternity and not in time. It is this likeness of God in us that we must acknowledge if we are to achieve immortality. In other words we must put aside what we observe in the natural world and set our sights on a non-natural spiritual reality: ‘Our natural world is the arena of the struggle of eternity and immortality, i.e. the struggle for personality’ (DOM: 258). Immortality is not simply the hope of someone who places that hope in Christ and his resurrection, but ‘the struggle of spiritual gracious forces with the powers of death’ (DOM: 258). Berdyaev makes it sounds almost like a new form of Manichean melodrama; but his point, in accordance with his principle of the creative act, is simply that self-­ determination must play a large role in our belief. We are, so to speak, born with the capacity to bring it about. Berdyaev’s view of immortality as a spiritual struggle also holds an apparent paradox, namely that eternity is attained in this temporal life, not in some future atemporal existence: ‘Eternal life is not a future life, but life in the present, life in the depths of an instant of time’ (DOM: 261–62). Eternity, adds Berdyaev, will not come in the future, only hell belongs in the future. Death, too, can only occur in the future; hence participation in eternal life, the tearing apart of temporality and the eternalizing of the instant where ‘time is torn asunder’ (DOM: 262), means that death becomes transcendence, that the being that has achieved a spiritual existence has already achieved eternity, that death does not exist because there is no discontinuity in the realm of spirit. For the spiritual being, immortality is already a part of this life; there is no such thing as a next life. The latter is a mere objectification derived from our experience of the natural world. ‘But eternal and immortal life regarded from within and not objectified is essentially different in quality from the natural and even the supernatural existence’ (DOM: 261). What it comes down to, then, is that a sense of immortality is indeed achievable, but only as a state of mind with no possible objectification. On the other hand, it is true that if all human beings achieved that state of mind, objectification would be rendered irrelevant, as Berdyaev repeatedly proclaims. There is yet a second paradox. One might reasonably expect that those who achieve this spiritual insight will be relieved by the discovery that their survival instinct or quest for perdurance is assured. But while Berdyaev is prepared to grant that faith in immortality is a comfort, ‘it is

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also a source of terror and of an overwhelming responsibility’ (DOM: 264). It is in fact the unbelievers who take the comfortable road and opt out of all responsibility by denying immortality, thereby escaping the ‘unendurable terror […] of judgement and hell’ (DOM: 264). This unwittingly turns religious belief into a form of psychosis. The real and crucial victory, argues Berdyaev, is not victory over death but victory over hell. And that, according to Berdyaev, is Christianity’s mission: to save us from our fear of hell. We seem to have finally moved from the realm of the mystical, the world of Eckhart, Böhme, Silesius and their delight in paradoxes, to the realm of the psychoanalytic, where the object is to relieve the state of psychosis bred by fear of the unknown or unconscious. Has Christianity really created hell in order to prod us into a war of salvation?, one might ask. Fortunately, there is a partial answer to this question in a later work, when in the course of a consideration of time, cosmic, historical, and existential, Berdyaev now suggests that ‘the monstrous and absurd doctrine of the eternal pains of Hell’ (SAF: 261) is a misconception based on the notion that time is something from which we cannot extricate ourselves. Hell is a mistaken projection into eternity of our earthly suffering in historical time; it belongs to our daily experience of time and to the sensation of entrapment by it. Eternity on the other hand has nothing to do with cosmic or historical time, it has to do with existential time as interpreted by Berdyaev: ‘It is only in existential time, which is to be measured by the degree of vigour and tension in the condition of the subject, that the way out towards eternity can be made clear’ (BAE: 231). This suggests of course that immortality is a matter of the will (the vigour and tension of the subject), not the blind cosmic will of Schopenhauer, but the conscious will of the existential subject. Rather than allow ourselves to be trapped by historical time, we must try to live our lives in existential time and project this onto historical time, which in turn is embedded in cosmic time with its natural cycles. ‘Is time conquerable?’ asks Berdyaev (SAF: 263). Not by man alone, he answers; it needs the collaboration of God. But is there not a problem here? One can understand Berdyaev’s contention that God’s time-frame is not ours; but can one understand what time means for God? Is not existential time, pace Berdyaev, really another name for psychological or subjective time? We

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saw in Chap. 3 that Berdyaev distinguishes between psychological and spiritual. But existential time cannot be anything else save how we experience time psychologically, subjectively, rather than by the clock or other external events. Nevertheless for Berdyaev what is existential is closer to the spiritual than to the psychosomatic. Existential time is, so to speak, God’s time. Here we have come full circle and are back at the starting point. Eternity belongs to God alone. God simply is: he has no beginning and no end. His eternity is part of his essence. Mankind can share it only to the extent that we can overcome our natural and temporal existence and make the transition into the realm of spirit. For Berdyaev this is possible because we are made in God’s image and God of course is Spirit. What is needed from us is a creative response. Needless to say the circularity of argument is patent. We first define God and then conclude what it is we share with him, in this case the capacity to overcome the constraints of historical time—with its beginning and its end—and to experience eternity. Berdyaev is ready to admit that ‘faith in God arises precisely in virtue of man’s longing for deliverance from this evil, suffering, infernal world’ (DAR: 293). He rejects the traditional apologetic arguments which naturalistic theology offers in defence of faith against atheistic attack, arguments which he considers ineffective and counterproductive. To be effective, theology must be existential, not based on rationalistic arguments; such an inward theology is immune to atheistic arguments, though whether it remains theology is not something that Berdyaev stops to consider. Instead of defending belief in God on rational grounds Berdyaev puts forward the view that our relationship to God is made manifest in Jesus Christ, who is both man and God. Because Jesus straddles both worlds, the divine and the human, so ‘can men and women strong in spirit and free in creative exultation’ (DAR: 301). Christ’s crucifixion ‘may not prove God, but it proclaims him in his divine humanity’ (DAR: 301). Hence to dismiss what Christ represents is not only to miss God, but to dismiss the divine dimension of the human personality. For Berdyaev this is an unacceptable limitation. Human beings belong to both the phenomenal and the noumenal worlds, and the latter is ‘aflame and creative’; love, for example, ‘is an energy which issues from the noumenal world’ (BAE: 245).

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Berdyaev is very insistent on the noumenal basis of man. Man is phenomenon and noumenon. Our existential experience brings us into contact with the noumenal. Once again we are in Schopenhauer territory, but with one curious addition: we find ourselves in the noumenal stage at the beginning and at the end, but in between we have lo live out our destiny in the phenomenal world. Since the noumenal self does not belong in the phenomenal world, it will not be affected by the end of that world. For the noumenal self death is not doom but freedom: ‘The end […] is the discovery of personality and freedom in the concrete universality of spiritual existence, in eternity. It is the transformation of the world, and man creatively and actively takes part in it. It is the new heaven and the new earth’ (BAE: 233). An interesting take on the Schopenhauerian noumenon, if nothing else. Immortality, then, is not a delusion, it is within our grasp, according to Berdyaev. But to achieve it we must somehow step sideways, from historical time to existential time, from phenomenal existence to noumenal existence, from the realm of Caesar to the realm of spirit. It is only within the realm of spirit that God’s existence can be known to man. But ‘man’s dissatisfaction with the finite, his longing for the infinite reveals the divine in man, it is the human testimony to the existence of God, and not merely of the world’ (RSC: 36). In other words we are aware—have always been aware—that there are two dimensions, the human and the divine, the one involving time and mortality, the other eternity and immortality. If we admit the existence of the two natures, divine and human, it is not because we understand them rationally, but rather because we carry within us an awareness of the possibility of transcending our limitations. The most fundamental limitation is that which death imposes on us. We sense, instinctively, that there must be a way of transcending this limitation. That way, argues Berdyaev, involves searching for the divine in us. Immortality is neither exclusively a human achievement nor exclusively a divine gift; it is both together, ‘a divine-human enterprise’ (DAH: 165). God is as much dependent on man as man is dependent on God. Immortality, it would appear, is a mutual endowment.

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10.3 Marcel: Thou Shalt Not Die Towards the end of his key essay ‘On the Ontological Mystery’ Gabriel Marcel writes: ‘[…] there is in the depth of Nature, as of reason which is governed by it, a fundamental principle of inadequacy to itself which is, as it were, a restless anticipation of a different order’ (POE: 46). Much of Marcel’s work is concerned with studying the viability of this ‘different order’, and this entails asking questions about ourselves and our fate. The ultimate question is whether human life is limited to a short sojourn on planet Earth. Is a life beyond this one a mere dream which modern man does well to discard? Is preoccupation with survival merely egocentric? These are the kinds of questions that Marcel seeks to answer. And his answer, as we shall see, revolves around a single but persistent idea. Marcel’s starting point, conventionally enough, is the fact of death. Amidst the many uncertainties of life there is one certainty that is inescapable, the inevitable prospect of no longer being. That I must die I know simply by induction; and I can also deduce it from the organic nature of my body. Presentiments of death—that is, a foreboding as distinct from knowledge—are psychological states that cannot be evaluated, but which in general cause considerable anxiety. What remains extremely obscure is whether any part of us can survive, whether what applies to the body applies equally to the ‘I’ that poses the question of the dissolution of its body. We cannot appeal to any kind of knowledge. Being-destined-­ to-die involves facing something which we cannot understand, because that something represents an absolute limit, an end to what we know. I am alive and I simply cannot know what it is for me not to be alive. Death is not so much something that will happen to me as something that will make everything that happens to me impossible, as Heidegger said. How does one liberate oneself from the torment of the impending?, asks Marcel. ‘The absolute despair to which my mortal condition beckons me remains a permanent temptation, which only freedom can overcome—a freedom which is manifested in the very act of suicide, in the absolute negation of oneself ’ (CRF: 142–43). I am free, not to deny death, but to frustrate its hold over me by self-destruction. This, however,

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is contrary to being, which is what creates the fear of non-being in the first place. The ontological counterweight to death can only lie in a different use of freedom, a freedom not to cut myself off from my fellow-­ humans, a freedom of adhesion. We could then say that death is not only counterbalanced but transcended. Yet transcendence has orientation, intentionality. Towards what or whom is my wish to be-with-others directed? Here Marcel resorts to quasi-mystical utterance, while acknowledging what he calls ‘the strangeness of this terminology’: Who am I? You alone really know me and judge me; to doubt You is not to free myself but to annihilate myself. But to view Your reality as problematic would be to doubt You, and, what is more to deny You; for a problem exists only through my agency and for me, the person who raises it, and in the present case it is I who am placed in question in that irrevocable act in which I humble my pride and yield myself. (CRF: 145)

It is in this yielding to the presence of the You—in its double meaning of fellow-humans and transcendent being—that Marcel says we can overcome the crushing fact of death. Presence for Marcel, we should recall, is not physical but metaphysical presence, an openness to presence that does not depend purely on bodily presence. To invoke or feel the presence of an absent person, absent even through death, is what Marcel terms creative fidelity. Absolute fidelity is that vowed to an absolute Thou, that is God, but this ‘is in danger of being construed today by the critical mind, which is generally allied to the common sense view, as an unconscious egocentrism which ends up by hypostatizing a subjective datum’ (CRF: 166). Marcel’s answer to this potential criticism is that what seems from the outside precarious because it entails a commitment to someone unknown, seems from the inside unshakeable when experienced as ‘a certain appeal delivered from the depths of my own insufficiency ad summum altitudinem’ (CRF: 167). Perhaps not egocentrism then, but still clearly a subjective datum and a personal choice. Marcel is well aware of the willed aspect of God’s presence since he speaks of a juncture of stringent commitment and desperate expectation; in other words my commitment includes the hope that I am right to make it.

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The case Marcel presents is that a commitment to God’s presence entails a commitment to the presence of others. Of course we could say that the real process is the reverse of this, as Marcel himself appears to concede. Fidelity to others, to be truly meaningful, must transcend death, must evoke the ‘Thou shalt not die’ ejaculation. It is this commitment to those whom we love, the assurance of an eternal presence, that makes us turn to God as the source and incarnation of that presence. The greater our fidelity to others the greater our awareness of fidelity as revelation of a dimension of being beyond us. But the distinction between fidelity to the absolute Thou and fidelity in our relationship with others becomes irrelevant once we admit that the ‘I believe’ stems from one’s being: ‘My belief is perhaps the very ground of my being’ (CRF: 171), writes Marcel cautiously, aware that the two are not fully congruent, since we tend to obscure those beliefs for much of the time. But we are obliged ‘to recognize a vacillation at the root of our being; and in our supreme moments there is a scintillation of belief which corresponds to this existential scintillation’ (CRF: 173). Or to put it another way, we are born with an awareness of ‘beyondness’ however much our daily living submerges it. Our awareness is revealed through what Marcel calls ‘participation’: ‘Knowledge of being is possible only because it is immanent in the one who participates’ (Keen 1984: 117). The presence of being is felt through love, fidelity, faith, and hope, that is to say, through our sentiments. It is our sentiments, not any empirical or logical proofs, that reveal the reality of God. Once again, as in Unamuno and even more in Berdyaev, it is our very being that is trying to tell us something. This something is entirely existential, not discovered through rational discourse or historical revelation. Marcel never takes the route of trying to prove the existence of God rationally. For him, the proofs of God’s existence are offered by someone who has already decided that God should exist. His reaction to Charles Hartshorne’s offer of an alternative to the thoroughly unsatisfactory causal proofs of God is revealing. In an interesting essay, ‘Marcel on God and Causality’, Hartshorne recognizes the correctness of Marcel’s rejection of God as cause. But Hartshorne is rather more of a rationalist than Marcel and substitutes the notion of influence for the notion of cause in reaching for an explanation of God. God is not a cause but an agent who

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exercises influence. In nature there is an element of indeterminacy (supported by quantum mechanics). God is an influence, not a determiner; hence there is always the possibility of deviation from divine order. The risk of evil comes with the freedom of indeterminacy. Chance is no more irrational than causation; both stand or fall together. God is generous in granting freedom to his creatures. This freedom saves us from being mere automata, despite the serious risk of evil. Freedom gives us dignity, self-­ respect (Hartshorne 1984: 353–66). Marcel will have none of this. He guardedly but firmly rejects Hartshorne’s arguments on several counts. Firstly, because influence applies to personal relations and becomes apparent only subsequently: there is no instant or unmediated recognition. Secondly, because he finds the difference between agency and causation trivial in the case of God. Thirdly, because attempting to integrate suffering and evil into an intelligible system amounts to a ‘sugar-coating to which an infantile theology all too often resorts’. And fourthly, because agency implies responsibility, and to say that God can only be responsible to God ‘either signifies nothing or is equivalent to saying that he is irresponsible’. He goes on to accuse Hartshorne of introducing ‘the idea of a steward-God—I would almost say a technocratic God—who in no way appears to fulfill what I would call the requirement of transcendence’ (Schilpp and Hahn 1984: 367–70). For Marcel, God is transcendence and proofs redundant. We either accept or decline the relevance of God to our lives, to our situation. The commitment has been made beforehand, and the proofs themselves are not self-standing and will not convince someone who has not made that commitment. The traditional proofs of rational theology, that is of neo-Thomism or other such theological systems, are futile as a proselytizing weapon or in any attempt to get the better of sceptics and atheists. They are convincing only to those who have previously found in God’s favour: ‘proof is efficacious only when we can if necessary do without it; while on the other hand it will always seem circular to the person to whom it is directed and who must be persuaded’ (CRF: 179). Proof presupposes belief, states Marcel unambiguously. And the only authentic belief is that which takes the form of ‘I believe in You, who are my sole recourse’ (CRF: 182). It is the death of those we love that provokes this invocation, this appeal to the absolute Thou. We are not prepared to give up a loved being

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to death because love does not die; we still love those whom we have lost. But is this not a refusal to accept a plain if sad truth, is it not a sentimental haven in the face of stormy seas? Here is Marcel’s early answer: Whatever opinion we may have on what we vaguely and confusedly call survival, it is clear that the dead person whom we have known and loved remains a being for us; he is not reducible to a simple ‘idea’ we may have; he remains attached to our own personal reality; he continues in any event to live in us, although it is impossible, given the rudimentary state of our psychology and our metaphysics, to clearly describe the meaning of this symbiosis. (CRF: 149)3

The continuing presence of the dead for Marcel is not simply a matter of retaining a memory or maintaining an image. The attachment is to the real person, despite the physical absence. The dead are still present to us. Marcel does not engage in speculations about what happens to the departed; he regards such accounts as either belonging to theology proper or else fantasies. What interests him is the continuity of our attachment, the existence and preservation of values. For values to be real, and not merely transitory or circumstantial, they require some element of permanence, in other words a consciousness that persists. If love is real and not a mere illusion it requires a universal dimension, which can only mean a universal communion centred on an absolute Thou. We can see that Marcel’s notion of intersubjectivity, within which love arises, itself requires a context, and this context is that of an invisible or spiritual order. Nevertheless the central question still stands: whether this ‘beyondness’ can be taken as an indication of human immortality. To give Marcel his due this is a question he himself raises in a slightly different form elsewhere: ‘Even if it is agreed that the act by which beings who love one another are united by a common bond implies within itself the inherent need for eternity (Ewigkeitsforderung), what enables us to say that this need is met in some substratum of reality which eludes our sight?’ (MOB: II, 173). Certainly one conceivable answer that Marcel  The passage first appeared in 1923 at the time of the publication of Marcel’s play L’Iconoclaste (translated into English as A Mystery of Love). He later reproduced it in the 1940 work Du Refus à l’invocation (translated into English as Creative Fidelity). 3

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quickly disposes of, and which reads like a corrective to Berdyaev, is the idea of the indestructibility of the noumenon. You cannot argue (as Berdyaev does argue) for the termination of the phenomenon on the one hand and the survival of the noumenon on the other, since the noumenon is merely an abstraction tied to the phenomenon as a ‘thing’: The fact is that the noumenon is still a that, and we shall always be justified even in asking ourselves whether we have there anything but a pure fiction elaborated by abstract thought from the basis of the empirical datum. It is not, I think, from the noumenal point of view that the indestructibility of the loved being can be affirmed: the indestructibility is much more that of a bond than that of an object. (MOB: II, 172)

The real question for Marcel is not whether the intersubjective bond or communion is noumenal but whether it is simply part of faith in something much greater, that is, God. When we invoke the presence of a dead loved one we are stating our belief in some form of personal immortality. Will God ignore our love for the dead person, or see it as something of no particular consequence, or even order its erasure? ‘Is it conceivable that a God, who offers Himself to our love, should range himself against this same love in order to deny it, to bring it to nothingness?’ (MOB: II, 174–75), asks Marcel rhetorically. The implication of course is that it is not conceivable, that if we accept the one we accept the other, although Marcel chooses not to address the question of whether it is our desire to immortalize a loved one that leads to a loving God or whether it is the latter that makes immortalization possible. Evidently for him, the two appear inseparable. Immortality is the bond both between ourselves and between us and God. Presence and immortality are thus closely related: ‘What matters is neither my death nor yours; it is the death of the one we love. […] Where love persists, where it triumphs over what tends to degrade it, death cannot but be definitively vanquished’ (PAI: 231). Presence is a kind of rapport between two people, a rapport which is still there during absence and separation, even separation through death. This rapport is experienced as a sensation, and we must remember that ‘the fact of experiencing sensations is a mode of being in the world’ (EBH: 45). This sense of

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presence holds for Marcel the potential for perdurance, and since this spiritual bond, though not an objective phenomenon, is nevertheless extendable across a community, it is not a purely subjective projection either; it has rather an intersubjective quality. The intersubjectivity of the experience of love and presence lends some support to the notion that something survives bodily collapse. Survival after death is therefore not unthinkable. There is a margin of uncertainty which is part of the mystery. This margin of uncertainty will vary depending on the position we take up: ‘It is plain that the more each one of us takes himself for a center, considering others only in relation to himself, the more the idea of the beyond will be emptied of all meaning, for this world beyond will then appear as a senseless prolongation. […] On the contrary, the more the other, or others, will have become an integral part of my experience the more I will be led to recognize their irreducible value as well as the difficulty for us of achieving a lasting harmony here below; and the more necessary it will be to conceive a mode of existence which is different from the one we have known, and which will lead us to the real and pleromatic unity where we will be all in all. (EBH: 141)

Two things stand out in this passage: the collective enterprise and the, not unconnected, Pauline outcome. It is clear that for Marcel the key to immortality lies in communion, in the common bond that enriches our lives. ‘The “we” reveals itself undoubtedly as really more profound than the “I”’ (PAI: 201). To a single human being on this earth immortality would mean nothing. It is only our sense of belonging that makes it meaningful. Human relationships have a transcendent aspect that seems to point beyond our contingent existence and to another state. That is the real basis for God and not any kind of formal argumentation. Commitment, fidelity, availability, presence, and promise make no sense if there is no overarching principle or motivating force. We make the inference of God’s existence through our experience of these intersubjective values. And our experience comes to us via our sensations, not through logical discourse.

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The disappearance of others among whom I am—to be is to be among others—is what drives home to me what it is to die. To die is to lose others. I can ignore my own death if I so wish, since I cannot experience it; but I cannot ignore the death of a loved one. To lose someone we love is much more than to lose that person’s body, a mere organic structure or object; it is to lose a subject, a being who can acknowledge and return our love and friendship. There is an intersubjective element which is profoundly affected when that someone dies. This is far more important, argues Marcel, than being headed for death, Heidegger’s ‘Sein zum Tode’, since this kind of death does not affect me outside the realm of ideas. The truly important aspect is that, if we love someone, we will want to recover that someone. Is that at all feasible? Or are love and hope wholly separable? Marcel evidently wishes to answer that love generates hope, and that if the former is real the latter must be too. He does, however struggle to get beyond this point, to answer the question, which he himself raises, of whether the expectation of reunion is not after all a mere defensive mechanism on the part of the mourner. His invocation of telepathy as a means of communication whose reality is incontestable though not understood does not help his case. Pace Marcel, the fact that we can sometimes read someone else’s mind does not prove that telepathy is a real and feasible method of communication, and ongoing experiments have, at best, been scientifically inconclusive, quite apart from the fact that they are conducted between two living beings separated by a measurable space.4 For the rest Marcel has no other argument to offer in defence of immortality, except that the loss of hope inevitably condemns us to a meaningless, merciless world. In the end it comes down to faith based on enduring love. As Clyde Pax has written, ‘God is a shorthand expression which encompasses the quest for meaning, purpose and hope. […] God is not the point of departure but rather the end result (or at any rate a possible end result)’ (Pax 1972: 105). It is therefore our intersubjective existence—our love, fidelity, and solidarity—that cries out for a God; and this transcendental God points the way to the enduring reality of a spiritual existence. For Marcel, that way lies in Christianity because it  Marcel’s undoubted interest in parapsychology is hard to assess. He seemed to think that the paranormal involved real phenomena, but he accepted that there was no reliable evidence. 4

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offers ‘that sense in which the soul goes beyond the visible world and in which the visible world becomes interior to it’ (SEA: 66).

10.4 Conclusions Immortality is hardly a subject that figures prominently in Western philosophy, dominated as the latter has been by epistemology. Even among the more ontologically-driven existentialist philosophers immortality is not a significant concern, unless of course the existentialist philosopher is also a committed Christian whose religious outlook informs his thinking. In that case the subject cannot be evaded, since for most Christians resurrection is a central belief. Nevertheless the philosophical, as distinct from the theological, elucidation of immortality presents a huge challenge, perhaps one that cannot be satisfactorily met. It seems evident that all three Christian thinkers studied here are struggling to justify their belief, or hope, in personal survival after bodily death. The only powerful justification for such a belief is in turn another belief: the belief in the historicity of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ resurrection and his promises. Such a belief cannot be turned into an established fact, even if a credible case can be made in favour of the truth-telling disposition of the evangelists and St Paul. But this aspect of Christianity, its historicity, is not in any case what interests these Christian thinkers. What interests them is the role and significance that belief in immortality plays in human life. In fact none of them claims outright that immortality is objectively true, true irrespective of what anyone might think. What is true is simply that many want it to be true. If the wish, or even the expectation, of further life beyond death is there, then it is an aspect of human existence that deserves attention and explication. To offer such explication from a Christian point of view, or at least from one that respects the Christian stance, is to start from the premise that this belief or expectation is justified, even if its fulfilment can in no way be guaranteed. The first stumbling block is the question mark hanging over God’s existence, but there are some misunderstandings here that need to be cleared up. There are those who think that the existence of God is largely immaterial. Robert G. Olson writes that since there is a barrier between

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man and God ‘the difference between atheistic and Christian existentialists thus becomes minimal, and it is a matter of relatively little importance whether one expresses their essential similarity by saying that Christian existentialists are close to atheism or by saying that the atheistic existentialists are essentially religious’ (Olson 1962: 37). That there is common ground is perfectly true; that there is little difference is debatable. It would make no sense to say that in practice Unamuno, Berdyaev, and Marcel are close to atheism; and Sartre would not have appreciated being called an ‘essentially religious’ thinker. What we have to remember is that for the Christian, as distinct from the deist or theist tout court, the real difference lies in Christ: he conquered life’s contingency through faith, hope, and charity, all of which he taught. His ‘way’, his ‘truth’, his ‘life’ break the barrier between man and God: ‘no man cometh unto the Father but by me’ (John 14.6). Mary Warnock repeats Olson’s view: ‘We may note in passing how little difference it makes to Existentialist theory whether it includes or does not include a belief in God. For in practice there is no help to be found in believing in God. The responsibility for the interpretation of God’s will is placed squarely upon the agent; and no-one else’s interpretation will do’ (Warnock 1970: 134). The latter point is of course ineluctable. One cannot legitimately tag responsibility for one’s beliefs onto somebody else. Both Christian and non-Christian existentialists are agreed on that. As for belief in God making little or no difference, this misunderstands the nature of existential choice, which is not based on any kind of philosophical consensus. We cannot decide whether or not God exists objectively and equally for all. Each one of us can only decide whether God exists for him or her. As Roger Troisfontaines writes, ‘existentialism is supremely interesting because it sets in full light the option which summarizes all life: with or without’ (Troisfontaines 1950: 50). Existentialism gives us the choice: to go with God or to make do without him. If I choose to believe in God it is because God means something to me and is going to make a difference. The choice entails a commitment, at any rate in principle (one can hardly generalize about the practice). Marcel, for example, makes it clear that God for him is the point of convergence where love, hope, and presence meet. Unamuno and Berdyaev too consider that love is a pointer to transcendence. The real problem with God is not that he makes no difference but that he falls

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outside the realm of sense-data and of logical discourse, and therefore we cannot fathom his purpose, something that is readily admitted by our three thinkers. On the question of the role of God in existentialism, Robert L. Wicks is, I believe, nearer the mark than Olson or Warnock. His judicious comment is worth quoting: There is some inherent friction between existentialism and Christianity insofar as Christianity grounds itself upon the being of God, understood as an otherworldly entity. To be thoroughly existentialist is to be completely down to earth, however, without looking beyond to extraordinary or otherworldly levels of being. In Christian existentialism, there is consequently a tension and need to arrive at a balance between the this-worldly and the otherworldly, where alongside the affirmation of what is this-worldly in the existentialist spirit, there is a reluctance to sacrifice the belief and ultimate dependence upon what is otherworldly. (Wicks 2020: 132)

This tension between the physical and the transphysical, or between our circumstances and our aspirations, is indeed there, and Wicks is right in detecting a degree of friction. But I would add that Wicks’ second sentence in the quoted passage could do with some slight modification. A Christian existentialist does not so much ‘look beyond’ as ask why we have the desire for perdurance, the aspiration to a higher existence, an aspiration or longing which affects us in this our world, irrespective of whether there is an ‘other world’. This is very much the point of Unamuno’s will-to-survive, of Marcel’s presence, of Berdyaev’s spiritual personality: these are considered characteristic aspects of human nature that appear to point us in a particular direction; they so to speak ‘create’ God. To negate God, or at least the possibility of God, is therefore for these Christian existentialists (and as it happens for Heidegger eventually as well) to negate a part of our being. Belief in God, then, is meaningful for the individual and can also be a shared or communal belief, even if the nature of belief is not communicable. Experience is subjective, but it isn’t simply experience that provides our choices; it is just as much our choices that provide our experiences. Our choices do make a difference and this applies to belief in God as to

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anything else. To choose to believe in God and its concomitances becomes a part of one’s being irrespective of contingency. The atheistic existentialist and the Christian existentialist share the contingent situation and the freedom of choice. But once the choice is made the difference is clear. What does of course apply to both is that the choice is made in a situation of uncertainty, and that uncertainty, as Kierkegaard and Unamuno repeatedly emphasized, cannot be obliterated. Without uncertainty there would be no such thing as belief. The motive for belief may of course vary from individual to individual. But the prospect of personal immortality would appear to depend on a higher authority of some kind to oversee the transit to a different sort of self-conscious existence. If man is the highest authority there is in nature, then we ourselves certainly cannot ordain our own perdurance. There must perforce be a more powerful agency to bring this about. All three thinkers are agreed that the tool we depend on for systematic knowledge of the world, our reason, is wholly incapable of establishing, or for that matter of suppressing, the existence of God. If we are to take the possibility of immortality seriously we are going to have to start from a different premise, though the idea of an enabling God may well emerge in the process. Unamuno is the one who is most insistent on the non-rationality of the enterprise. He does not belittle the role of reason in human affairs; he simply says that it is antagonistic to belief in God and immortality because it simply does not recognize the problem as a discussable subject. Reason needs evidence either derived from sense-data or from inference. There is no universally valid, or objective, evidence for either God or immortality: that is all that reason sees. Belief in either thus becomes a matter for the purely subjective will. Berdyaev makes much the same point: if we want to transcend the physical plane of human existence we must find the resources within ourselves. That this must be feasible stems from the fact that it is human nature itself that refuses to bow to annihilation at death. Immortality has arisen from the depth of being, so it cannot simply be dismissed out of hand as a childish fantasy. Whether or not we accept the notion of immortality as fact, its presence in our lives needs explanation. For Berdyaev this explanation is intimately connected to the spiritual dimension which he sees as characterizing the human being alongside the material and the mental. For Marcel too, what points to a continuing ‘presence’ is in our nature, but in a negative kind of way: we

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are beings-among-others, and it is in our nature not to be without others. The loss of others diminishes each one’s sense of self, one’s ontological security we might say, and this sense of belonging means that our ties with the dead continue beyond their death. We do not give up on them, as it were, and this in itself is an unusual feature that demands scrutiny. This is Marcel’s concrete starting point for his philosophical investigations of the possibility of immortality. All three thinkers see immortality as a challenge to be met creatively (Berdyaev and Marcel even reflect this creativity in the titles of their books). If we recognize the mere possibility of perdurance we must strive to make it a reality whatever the obstacles. Unamuno is perhaps the one who perceives the challenge at its most formidable. He finds that it is not only reason which is unhelpful, but, more surprisingly, traditional Christianity is so too. On the Catholic side, the Church has become dependent on an unconvincing quasi-rational scaffolding incapable of holding up the core belief in immortality. On the Protestant side, Christianity has been reduced to a moral code, which plays down what Unamuno sees as its fundamental value: an eschatological and soteriological orientation. To reduce Christianity to an ethical code is to confuse the end with the means. Religion at large is about overcoming the finality of death, and this is for Unamuno the only aspect that makes religion worth preserving. In this respect Catholic Christianity has the most to offer, provided it is not distorted by theological subtleties and dogmatic prescriptions. Unamuno evidently wanted to preserve Catholicism as the religion of hope, not as the religion of commination it had tended to become. In this respect Marcel’s position is very close to that of Unamuno, though he is far more reticent about denouncing official theology, while clearly having no taste for it. The most he will do is to dissociate himself from neo-Thomism and its claim that St Thomas had already proven the existence of God by rational means5; and also to express his sympathy for those who do not find religious belief within their reach. His ecumenical stance was well known in his day, and he went so far as to criticize Rome’s position during the period of the ecumenical movement (from the  As we saw in Chap. 5, St Thomas made no such claim, and his position has often been distorted both by Scholastic theologians and others who have not bothered to check what it is he said. He most certainly did not put reason above faith. Reason could help to put us on the way to God; but it was faith that finally brought us there. 5

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Stockholm meeting of 1925 to the Oxford meeting of 1957) as arrogant and unhelpful.6 But as far as the central message of Catholicism is concerned—the reality of salvation—Marcel is wholly orthodox. Like Unamuno, he sees little value in a religion which downplays the possibility of personal immortality, and he expresses his dismay upon learning of a Dominican priest who admitted that he could not bring himself to believe in immortality. For Marcel, what he calls the ‘light of the beyond’ (SEA: 71) is a central tenet of Christianity without which it cannot properly function. Berdyaev’s outlook is, if anything, even more insistently eschatological. He evidently replaced his early belief in the Marxist promise of a New Jerusalem in this life with the Christian promise of a divine existence in the next, though one to which we must begin to accede in this one. Immortality, according to Berdyaev, is a more pressing question for human nature than material success: it is ingrained in man. But in order to gain an insight into our immortal status we must be open to the spiritual quality of our personality, since immortality does not appear in the material or psychological spheres. In one way we could say that Berdyaev is substituting one unknown for another, but he is insistent that the spiritual dimension is accessible, and he often refers to the mystics as evidence for the reality of such a state of being. Human personality extends beyond body and mind to encompass a spiritual world, a world which is imperishable. It is this world which we must strive to inhabit. One notable aspect of all three thinkers’ treatment of the issue of human immortality is their strong tendency to generalize from their own sentiments. Thus immortality is not only a desire for personal salvation but also for collective salvation. This is true even of Unamuno, so often accused, not without some justification, of egocentrism. For him, his existence or anyone’s existence is largely dictated by other existences. Our dependence is mutual even to the degree that one’s own view of oneself is in part determined by others’ views of one. Interdependence and interaction are part of the human situation and should be recognized as natural  Marcel speaks of ‘a remarkable presumption’ in Rome’s position. When Rome claims to be the guardian of the Truth, ‘the non-catholic’s feeling of indignation is not only explicable, but is in large measure justified’ (CRF: 206, 201). ‘On the Fringe of the Ecumenical’, Chap. 11 of Creative Fidelity, is a measured but profound critique of the official position of the Catholic Church as regards ecumenism. 6

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and productive, or as he puts it ‘each one of us can and should determine […] to give himself to others in order to gather himself from them’ [‘cada uno puede y debe proponerse […] darse a los demás para recogerse de ellos’ (DST: X, 488)]. Immortality is far too important to stop at the level of the individual. What is worth saving is the human race and its role of custodian of culture: ‘It is not I, it is the entire human lineage that is at stake; it is the ultimate purpose of our human culture as a whole. I am one; but all are I’s’ [‘No soy yo, es el linaje humano todo el que entra en juego; es la finalidad última de nuestra cultura toda. Yo soy uno; pero todos son yos’ (DST: X, 374)]. For Unamuno this translates into a universal consciousness which, while not guaranteeing personal survival, does at least recognize the creative value of the human species, that we are more than physical objects that come and go at random. Both individually and collectively we have made our mark creatively, we have added value to a world of natural forces, and this merits recognition. To believe in immortality is to believe in the value of our contribution to God’s universe. This after all is a perfectly Christian attitude to take, since if Christ was sent to humanity it could only be because humanity was worth his intervention and example. Berdyaev makes the same point in a somewhat different way. The very fact that immortality is at least conceivable must mean that we share something with an immortal Being, that is, with God; we have something of the divine in us. The essence of God is existence, which implies eternity, timelessness. Since everything physical is time-bounded, God is not physical. We humans are certainly physical and find ourselves in a physical milieu which takes up much of our attention. Yet we are not unaware of a parallel world which harbours our aspirations. As we saw in Chap. 3, Berdyaev holds that human beings demonstrate a creative capacity in the way they construct meaning and a spiritual capacity in their concern with values such as truth, beauty, justice. It is this aspect, what Berdyaev terms personality and which moves us away from the natural order and towards a higher non-tangible order, that signals the divine in us. These values that we recognize are timeless, that is to say, spiritual. To nurture and proclaim those values is to consecrate ourselves to God and eternity. That is why Berdyaev insists that personality, or God-likeness, is the key to immortality. Far from being alien to us, it is in our nature.

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Marcel’s approach to immortality is perhaps the simplest of the three, although it turns out to be, philosophically, the least unsatisfactory. There is in Marcel rather less rhapsodic speculation or visionary hypothesizing than in Unamuno and Berdyaev and more analysis of recognizable sentiments. He writes as one sensitive to a Christian outlook which must not be impaired, but he does not let theology intrude, choosing to stay within parameters that Christians and non-Christians alike can recognize.7 Marcel coincides with Unamuno and Berdyaev in pointing to an aspect of human existence which is not explicable in physical terms, at any rate not on our present knowledge of the material, observable world. This aspect is bound up with our need of, and commitment to, others. Our attachment, which goes beyond the urge to procreate—a point also made by Unamuno—needs justification. Why do we retain our attachment even to those who pre-decease us? Marcel takes it for granted that we do, but probably over-generalizes from his own experience, since attachment obviously varies from person to person: will there not be those whose personal sensibilities do not extend even to feeling the absence of the other, let alone sensing their continuing presence? Nonetheless for Marcel this sense-experience is real and it is a question of love. Real love is not governed by a physical reality but by a presence that goes beyond the physical, and it is this spiritual projection of the other that does not end with death. We are not so far from Berdyaev’s idea of personality, a human attribute that appears to lend support to the notion that we are more than our visible or corporeal reality. But the question of whether our undoubted relationship to others indicates some kind of endless duration must surely remain an open one. For these three existentialist thinkers immortality is the most valued but also the most challenging aspect of Christianity. Unamuno admits that he can make little sense of it: he calls his own speculations ‘mythologyzing’ [‘mitologizar’ (DST: X, 375)]. Berdyaev tries to build a  That Berdyaev did not appreciate Marcel’s stance is shown by his comment, in his 1949 autobiography, that ‘he was at that time the only outstanding representative of existentialism in France. His philosophical utterances were brilliant, but he was rather at sea when it came to questions of theology and Christian doctrine’ (DAR: 263). Marcel was very clear that he was an existential philosopher with no interest in theology, and he specifically set out to avoid incursions into well-defined theological territory. He believed Berdyaev’s theological pronouncements to be merely idiosyncratic, since he wrote that Berdyaev, ‘because of the audacity of his personal convictions, cannot be considered a reliable representative of the confession in which he claims membership’ (CRF: 204). 7

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complicated system in which immortality is seen as an attribute of personality, which is in turn a divine endowment at the disposal of man’s freedom, itself derived from the primordial state of nothingness to which we are always in danger of returning precisely because the physical universe came from nothing. Immortality entails staying on this side of nothingness, that is, in the spiritual or divine realm, in God’s timeframe. Marcel for his part does not dwell on the nature or provenance of immortality. His starting point is the very human sentiment that we do not want to be cut off from our loved ones. If love is to be truly meaningful it must transcend death, must not be subject to time-interception. The intensity of our love for our fellow-beings both demands and suggests a more secure state of being than is achieved through our ephemeral stay on Earth. Both Unamuno and Berdyaev would doubtless agree with this sentiment; indeed the sceptical Unamuno becomes a strong believer in immortality in the intense love poem devoted to Concha’s continuing presence after her death in 1934 (V, 802–04). In the end immortality for the Christian existentialist boils down to the three cardinal virtues. Love for others creates hope for an enduring relationship; hope demands faith in God’s beneficence; and faith provides us with consolation and resolve. For all three thinkers immortality is a valid aim in this life rather than a safe-­conduct for the next one.

11 Conclusion: Existentialism and Christianity

After considering and comparing key aspects of the existentialist thought of the Spaniard Unamuno, the Russian Berdyaev, and the Frenchman Marcel, what can be said about their stance? There are really two questions here: has their existentialist style of philosophizing been rendered less authentic, less effective even, by their Christian stance? Has their Christianity become suspect, untenable even, because they have approached the problem of man existentially—as we find ourselves—and not at all theologically? In his L’Existentialisme est un humanisme Sartre argued that there were two kinds of existentialists: atheistic existentialists, among whom he included Heidegger and himself (although Heidegger later dissociated himself from this), and Christian existentialists, among whom he included Jaspers and Marcel (although it should be said that Jaspers’ philosophy, despite its spiritual underpinnings, is far from being specifically Christian). What Sartre is here saying in effect is that in the case of the Christian existentialists their Christianity has led to a distinct existentialism that can be differentiated from atheistic existentialism like his own, which, he finds ‘has greater consistency’ (Sartre 2007: 29). One can agree with Sartre up to a point: the existentialism of the Christian thinkers is © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. A. Longhurst, Unamuno, Berdyaev, Marcel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81999-6_11

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ultimately different from his and one could ascribe this difference to their religious point of view, or of course to his atheistic point of view. According to Berdyaev, ‘when a philosopher is a believing Christian, it is quite inconceivable that his philosophy should remain unaffected by his religious conviction’ (DAR: 104). This is no doubt true; but is there not an equal case for saying that one’s philosophical convictions will affect one’s religious beliefs? After all, Berdyaev’s own Christianity is hardly a model of orthodoxy. There is a case for saying that the Christianity of these thinkers has been altered by their existentialism; indeed there is a rather stronger case for arguing this way if one happens to be a traditionalist in matters of Christian belief. Unamuno and Berdyaev are, one could say, passionately Christian, but their Christianity is uncompromisingly questioning and unorthodox. Even in the case of the more prudent and tactful Marcel one can clearly discern a certain distancing from the more excessive claims of the Roman Church and its neo-Thomist supporters, a strong inclination to keep theological or even liturgical matters at arm’s length. Are we then dealing with Christian existentialists or with existentialist Christians? One has to start by acknowledging that the commitment to the Christian faith of our three thinkers is unquestionable, even if within their own denominations their nonconformity provoked varying degrees of censure on the part of the Church authorities, from outright hostility and persistent denunciation as a heretic in the case of the outspoken Unamuno, to a tolerance not entirely bereft of exasperation in the case of the idiosyncratic Berdyaev, and the occasional gentle rap in the case of the judicious but unflinching Marcel. In none of the three was toeing the official line in character, yet their defence of the spiritual values which they associated with Christianity was notably more articulate than that practised by their own institutions, beset as were the latter by inadaptability to new ways of thinking and, more especially in the case of the Roman Church, adherence to an authoritarian and exclusivist tradition that could be taken for unchristian arrogance. However unorthodox— judged by conservative standards—their religious outlook may have appeared, their determination to preserve what they saw as the core values of Christianity, universal love, hope in a divine existence, and the infinite value of each individual human life, marked their allegiance to

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the Christian faith, beyond the limits of reason if need be. At the same time their style of thinking has much in common with that of contemporaries who adopted an agnostic or openly atheistic approach to analyzing man’s situation and predicament, those twentieth-century thinkers who came to be known as existentialists. This raises two fundamental questions: firstly, are Unamuno, Berdyaev, and Marcel philosophers or religious apologists?; and secondly, have they succeeded in reconciling existentialism and Christianity, or, to put it more broadly, are a Christian faith and an existential ontology compatible? If they are not, the notion of Christian existentialism could be a total misconception. There is a third possibility: a purely existential Christianity. But if the term is to have any reasonably precise meaning we would have to go beyond the loose and anachronistic neo-Thomist usage in applying the label to Aquinas and be very clear that such a Christianity would need to be a fully alternative form of Christianity in which the latter is subjected to a way of thinking that prizes humanistic values that have no ostensible connection to a world beyond our earthly and transitory existence. Such a Christianity is perhaps possible (see Mountford 2011 as an example) and even defensible as a system of moral values that benefits mankind, but it would have to be seen as the legacy of an ordinary mortal and his early followers, not of a divine agent, and it would lack both eschatological and soteriological significance. Its value would be purely ethical or communal, and therefore no different from other moral systems and codes meant to promote good relations between human beings. Nowhere do Unamuno, Berdyaev, and Marcel propose that this is where the value of Christianity lies, indeed Unamuno goes out of his way to reject the view that Christianity can be reduced to an ethical code; it is about the promise of salvation. The preservation of transcendental beliefs, of the human person as a being endowed with supernatural gifts and promise, is implicit, sometimes even explicit, in the meditations of our three thinkers. Rather than a wholly new Christianity what we find is an attempt to rid traditional Christianity of fossilized dogmas and spurious rationalities, to dig deeper into its spiritual resources and uncover its relevance to a mankind wandering aimlessly amidst scientific bedazzlement and material distractions. But the perceived beneficiary of this stripping down to the spiritual core is always mankind. Indeed that spirituality of outlook is

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seen to be already there in man, but is best uncovered and expressed through the Christian faith. At the simplest level we might say that what we have here is not another type of Christianity but another type of existentialism, as Sartre averred, since after all what both types of existentialism, Christian and atheistic, share is the attempt to confer purpose on an existence that appears meaningless. The only problem with this attractive and apparently straightforward explanation is that existentialism is not, strictly speaking, a philosophy or a philosophical system, so ‘another type of existentialism’ is vague almost to the point of meaninglessness: Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty are all regarded as major existentialists, but their main philosophical works are very different even if their authors share the basic aim of studying man in his concrete environment. Nor can we realistically put forward the even simpler explanation that we are dealing with the existential-style philosophizing of thinkers who just happened to be Christian in their personal and private outlook. Their Christian conviction plays too significant a part in their philosophizing for this purely circumstantial explanation. The existentialism of Unamuno, Berdyaev, and Marcel is not driven by Christianity, but it is certainly influenced by Christianity. It is also true, nevertheless, that their Christianity is highly personal rather than canonical, a clear pointer to their religious outlook having been influenced by their existentialist stance. There are adjustments to be made in both directions, and their philosophical thinking is neither neutral nor detached, nor could it be. After all this is a simple and basic assumption of existentialism: that our ‘situatedness’ or mode of being-in-the-world impacts on our personality. The impact of their religious sentiment may vary somewhat from writer to writer or even from topic to topic, but we have to accept that their studies of man and the human situation are influenced by Christian thinking in an appreciable way, even if their stance is one of critical appraisal rather than of apology. They do not write in order to justify Christianity; or to rationalize belief in God; or even to allege the consolatory power of religion. But Christianity does to a significant extent inform their philosophical stance, even if it is a redefined Christianity, one that has little to do with the Christianity of beliefs which have been defined by theologians across the centuries and compulsorily prescribed to others

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as a condition of membership. In what way, then, are these three Christian thinkers to be regarded as existentialists? Existentialist philosophizing may be said to display three broad features. First of all philosophy is taken to mean the study of the human situation, by which is meant the elucidation of what being human entails. The correct starting point is the real, concrete situation of the human being in his world and among other human beings. Secondly, allowance must be made for the contingent nature of man’s appearance: there is no logical explanation for man in the universe or indeed for the universe itself; our reason is powerless to provide such an explanation even if we cannot help but wonder. Thirdly, what characterizes man above all is a radical freedom of action, which means he must assume responsibility for his life and the meaning he gives to his life. Concreteness, contingency, and freedom are all standard aspects of existentialist thought, shared alike by religious and non-religious existentialist thinkers, though each individual writer will qualify or nuance the general characteristics. That Unamuno’s, Berdyaev’s, and Marcel’s approaches to philosophizing are existentialist in the generally accepted meaning of the term is clear enough. The basic attribute of existentialism is not that it is irrational, as Anglo-Saxon philosophers unsympathetically and smugly proclaimed, but that it demotes rational motivation as the driving force of human behaviour. Our rational faculty, focused primarily on sense-data, does not give us an understanding of many important aspects of human experience, including our own selves and those of others. Existentialism is drawn to aspects such as freedom, indeterminacy, expectation, feelings and emotions, relationships, choice, responsibility, as well as the role of the self and of personal convictions. The centre of interest is shifted towards the human being as subject rather than as object. Each one of us is a centre of consciousness and what has to be explained in the first place is how the individual relates to the given world. All our three Christian thinkers fit comfortably into this pattern and in this sense are no different from other existentialist thinkers. They all practise the ontological approach to philosophizing that characterizes existentialism, that is to say they are concerned with unravelling the nature of what is; specifically of course what human existence is. Central to human beings is their experience of the world, including their own selves and other selves. Experience

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is, however, subjective, and any attempt at conceptualizing it, at giving it an objective value or generalized specification, runs the risk of distorting our way of existing, of rendering artificial how we experience the world. We can say that the existentialists’ approach is empirical, but in that case we must be clear what we mean by this word. Marcel, for example, at one point in his essay ‘An Outline of a Concrete Philosophy’ rejects empiricism, but that is because he associates it with the materialism of nineteenth-­century positivism, or Spencerism as he calls it. In fact he goes on to say that a concrete philosophy, his own, must have ‘the sting of reality’, that this reality is necessarily confronted by the ‘I’, and that it requires ‘the most stringent and vigorous reflection directed on our most intensely lived experience’ (CRF: 64, 65). In the autobiographical essay included in The Philosophy of Existentialism he says that ‘the error of empiricism consists only in ignoring the part of invention and even of creative initiative involved in any genuine experience’ (POE: 128), which evidently suggests that empiricism is acceptable provided it covers the full range of experience. This is confirmed in his exchanges with Paul Ricoeur when he mentions ‘experiential thinking’ as the correct substitution for ‘empirical thinking’ (TWB: 229). Empirical truth is the truth of what exists in space and time. It is a verifiable truth that is accessible to all subjects through the senses. Experiential truth is a broader concept because it covers experiences which are real for the subject of those experiences, but which, though certainly intelligible and even perhaps recognizable by other subjects, are not objectively verifiable. When applied to the existentialists, empirical cannot be limited to the old-fashioned definition of knowledge which is derived exclusively from sense-experience, but must encompass any kind of experience, including our emotions, our innate dispositions, our judgements, our inferences, and even our aspirations. It is the kind of empiricism that stands up to extreme rationalism without insisting on limiting itself to the five senses. The nineteenth-­ century idea that what is true is simply that which is objective, which is measurable, is regarded as much too limiting and unrevealing. By employing abstract concepts rather than studying how we experience the world to begin with, traditional philosophy, culminating in nineteenth-century positivism, had seldom avoided the risk of an artificial account of human nature. Knowledge of the human person cannot be reduced to the

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measurable. Rightly or wrongly this is the standard justification employed in existentialist endeavours, and it has consequences that affect all existentialist thinkers, and even some later non-existentialist philosophers.1 For those accustomed to the idea of contingency encountered in Sartre (especially in La Nausée), the contingent nature of human life may perhaps seem a surprising tenet for a Christian, but in fact it was used by Thomas Aquinas in his well-known ‘third way’: something that comes into being cannot explain its own existence for this would logically require that it already existed. To explain our existence we have to posit something that does not need explanation. Only God, according to St Thomas, is considered to require no explanation because his essence is to exist. The rest of us need not have existed. From the human point of view it makes no difference whether the ‘Big Bang’ was spontaneous or whether it occurred by God’s decision. In either case we are dispensable; none of us is necessary in the strong sense of the word. The individual person is a contingent being whose gratuitous coming into the world, or Heideggerian ‘thrownness’, is the mark of his cosmic insignificance. Each one’s existence is the result of a fluke encounter of a particular sperm among millions with a particular ovum among hundreds. The essentially contingent appearance of each one of us on this planet calls for self-affirmation or for a ‘life-project’ as self-justification to counter this apparent contingency and superfluity: we are called upon to find our values, our raison d’être. This applies to believers and unbelievers alike. The atheistic existentialist will always carry within himself that contradiction between the randomness and accidentality of life on the one hand and the wish, even commitment, to find a role to satisfy the sense of a coherent self. For the Christian existentialist, however, that life-project is an open invitation that accompanies our birth and is there for the taking, something which nuances the contingent nature of our existence. God does not give reasons or explanations any more than a non-conscious universe does, so we can know nothing of his purpose, and in that sense we are still contingent, but nevertheless man is endowed with essential values, values moreover  For a powerful defence of an empiricism that does not hold to a purely objectifying attitude towards knowledge, see Van Fraassen (2002). For the problems involved in reconciling the particularity of experience with the generality of science and philosophy, the subjective and the objective, see Nagel (1986). 1

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which, for the Christian, have been exemplified in the divine person of Jesus of Nazareth. The Christian, exactly like the atheist, still has to exercise his freedom, but has the conviction that the values he follows, are not simply man-made or utilitarian but have a divine origin or sanction. In other words, what is immanent becomes transcendent, and it is that transcendence that gives us our special sense of being. To have a sense of being, writes Marcel, is akin to being plugged in to a power source, a source that is outside our control. We can ‘take out the plug, thereby interrupting the current. This is what every kind of positivist philosophy does’ (Schilpp and Hahn 1984: 122). By contrast, a Christian philosophy helps us to recognize, or account for, the transcendent source of this ‘current’. The idea of transcendence is of some importance and qualifies the three general features of concreteness, contingency, and freedom. It also serves to establish a distance between religious and non-religious existentialism provided we make distinctions, since the word lends itself to varying usage. Sartrian transcendence, for instance, does not take us to another world or dimension. What Sartre means by transcendence is simply our capacity to imagine or present to ourselves what lies beyond the immediate and obvious facts of our given circumstances. And what lies beyond for Sartre is quite simply our decisions, our actions and reactions, that is, how we respond to our situation, how we reach out beyond it to construct or change our own lives. For a Christian existentialist like Marcel, and even for the existentialism of Jaspers, which is not specifically Christian, transcendence reaches much further and takes us beyond our material circumstances to a mode of being which we can only envisage at moments of heightened awareness, intense emotions, or aesthetic exaltation. Such transcendence we can take as a form of aspiration to an altered existence, which for the Christian existentialist is necessarily associated with the other-worldly existence invoked by Jesus Christ. Since this aspiration falls outside the realm of the rational, it cannot be subjected to logical discourse, much less used as a proselytizing tool as has been the practice of some Christian Churches in the past. Transcendence in this sense is not just Sartrian improvability; it is openness to the sensitivity that human beings have for non-physical values and to the potentialities for a fuller life. But it is still an existential value, not a theological

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notion, as indeed is suggested by the aesthetic experience provided by music and other arts or even by the thrill of the ‘eureka’ experience in the quest for hypotheses to explain natural phenomena. This sensitivity adds an extra dimension to the human being’s capacity for logical discourse and is by no means restricted to the religious sphere. An interesting corollary to the existentialists’ supra-rational approach to philosophizing is the close connection between existentialist philosophy and creative writing; indeed existentialism as a label has been attached to a greater number of novelists, dramatists, and poets than to philosophers. One thinks here not only of Sartre and Camus, but of Luigi Pirandello, Herman Hesse, Robert Musil, Franz Kafka, Graham Greene, Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, Eugène Ionesco, and Iris Murdoch, all of whose work, as a whole or in part, evinces strongly existential preoccupations.2 Two of our three Christian thinkers were creative artists in their own right and produced emblematic works such as Niebla and Le Monde cassé among many other works and genres. Even Berdyaev, who did not compose music or write novels, plays, or poetry, often used the literary productions of fellow-Russians to illustrate his ideas, and of course devoted a whole volume to Dostoyevsky, whom he saw as a clear forerunner of his own existentialist philosophy. In existentialism the line between writing philosophy and writing imaginative literature is not sharply demarcated, and Heidegger, we should remember, devoted a significant part of his writing to aesthetic theory and to the poetry of Hölderlin. Indeed Unamuno held that all great philosophers had something of the poet in them: they were driven not by logical reason but by a personal vision. What he meant was not that they are irrational but that there is a pre-rational motivation at work in them. One important reason why existentialists are attracted by or to artistic pursuits has to do with the ‘creative’ response that is required of the individual to make his or her life meaningful. But this imaginative response involves reaching out to others in some way. To write a play or a novel is self-evidently to write with an audience or a readership in mind. It is  Despite the aloofness of British academic (or ‘analytic’) philosophy and its dismissive attitude to Continental philosophy of the existentialist style, continental existentialism had its impact in Britain too. See Martin Woessner, ‘Angst Across the Channel: Existentialism in Britain’, in Judaken and Bernasconi (2012: 145–79). 2

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more than the discovery of a scientific fact; it is an effort to imagine what it is like to be another being, whether that being is the fictitious being of literature or the real being to whom literature or any other form of art is directed. Artistic creativity is arguably the best illustration of how individual, subjective experience becomes intersubjective experience. When we read or watch an imagined work we are crossing the boundary of the self and attempting to consider experiences other than one’s own. Much the same applies to our dealings with other beings. We cannot have their experiences, but we can visualize them as analogous to ours. What this means is that we are going beyond purely cognitive processes and into a realm of intuition or sentiment. We are not limited to what we know or can know by logical deduction; we can somehow apprehend others’ experiences and feelings through an obscure empathetic process. To a degree recognition of this sense of solidarity or being-with is applicable to all existentialists, even the more individually-minded ones like Heidegger and Sartre, but it is far more prominent in those of a quasi-religious outlook like Jaspers or in the three Christian thinkers we are concerned with. Unamuno argues (and exemplifies in his novels and plays) that one’s concept of one’s self is heavily influenced by others’ reactions, so that each one’s uniqueness is not simply a personal creation but arises from one’s relationships and dealings with others. The recognition that we depend on others psychologically every bit as much as materially leads to the notion that every ‘I’ is part of a ‘we’: no-one is self-sufficient, and thus we must acknowledge that while we experience our existence as individuals we are also aware that we are part of a wider mode of being that becomes for us a Being, that is, God. In the case of Berdyaev we are Heidegger’s ‘being-with’ interpreted in a spiritual way: the individual sees himself reflected in others, abandons egocentrism in favour of inter-relatedness, and finally elevates this awareness of communal existence to a sense of communion within a spiritual realm, in accordance with Berdyaev’s contention that we are firstly physical, secondly psychic, and thirdly pneumatic or spiritual beings. In the case of Marcel the ‘otherliness’ of existence is of paramount importance: it is our experience of others that governs our lives. This leads directly to Marcel’s notion of intersubjectivity, which is what gives us our sense of self and concomitantly our sense of others. Our sense of reality, both of the world and of ourselves, comes not simply

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from sense perception but from the fact that the world of each one of us is a shared world. This deep awareness of the crucial importance of other beings leads inexorably to the fundamental question of responsibility, which in existentialism is intimately tied to freedom. Here the emphasis is significantly different in those of a Christian persuasion. Whereas Heidegger and Sartre see responsibility primarily, though not exclusively, as what is due by the self to the self, that is, responsibility for self-determination and for living authentically, religious existentialists see it far more in terms of relationships, relations with others and through them with God. It was Jacques Derrida who said that ‘religion is responsibility or it is nothing at all’ (Derrida 1995: 2), and this indeed appears to be so in the case of our three Christian thinkers, but not in the narrowly orthodox sense that responsibility is the result of religious adhesion. We can be responsible because we are free. Indeed Marcel sternly dismisses Gide’s acte gratuit as denoting a lack of freedom as much as a lack of responsibility. Responsibility, rather than curtailing our freedom, emphasizes it. It is the responsible, not the irresponsible, person who is truly free, and not simply because that person chooses his or her own destiny but because he or she freely acknowledges that same aspiration in others and aids in its achievement. Our common wish to better our lives is symbolized in terms of salvation, whether we think of it eudaemonistically or soteriologically. For the orthodox Christian of course salvation comes in the guise of a transworldly existence, but what all our three Christian existentialists argue is that this notion of salvation is essentially a communal one. Just as God is a binding agent, so salvation is a common pursuit. What this means in effect is that our acceptance of responsibility towards the welfare of others goes hand in hand with our aspiration to immortality— they sustain each other, a point that can be found in Berdyaev and Marcel but which is especially prominent in Unamuno’s religious philosophy. All three make the essential point that responsibility becomes possible only in the face of the other: a single person on Earth could not exercise responsibility. Responsibility is thus a relationship; it amounts to one’s intention towards the other. This responsibility towards the other takes the form of love. But it is because each person is unique, irreplaceable as Unamuno likes to say, that he or she can exercise that responsibility

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towards equally unique beings. Taking control of one’s life, or living authentically in the existentialist vernacular, must mean recognizing, indeed promoting, that same aspiration in others. Recognition of the validity of the self must be universal. In Christianity it takes the form of conscience, that is, the recognition of those values which are seen as both immanent and transcendent. Here we begin to encounter a problem of which existentialists, both Christian and non-Christian, are fully aware: on what is our ethical code based? Since this is a question that has bedevilled philosophy at the very least since Plato, the subject is vastly beyond the scope of the present essay. Suffice it to say that if in what has so far been said about the exercise of responsibility there is nothing especially heterodox as judged by a traditional or conservative Christianity, there just might be the makings of a gap when it comes to dealing with ethical conduct. The problem arises because objective views necessarily develop from subjective perceptions. The subjectivity of conscious processes is a feature of reality: we cannot make those processes fully objective. And this applies to ethical conduct as much as to anything else. The problem is tied to our freedom. Existentialism holds freedom to be one of the essential characteristics of human beingness because it considers the subjective viewpoint to be more authentic than the objective viewpoint. We feel that we are agents and that we do what we do because we choose to do so. We could choose to do something different or to do nothing at all. The external or objective viewpoint considers what has already occurred and assigns causes to those events or actions, thereby removing or drastically reducing (conscious) human agency. The problem with the latter view is that if agency is curtailed, so is responsibility. For the existentialist the subjectivity of experience makes the human being the subject of any action, and agency thereby begets responsibility. Human freedom is an assumption since it cannot be proved, but it is an assumption that we all make in our daily lives and therefore an essential aspect of our existence. This makes us accountable both to ourselves and to others. Determinism works scientifically in explaining the natural world, though whether determinism is at work in every area of science has become a matter of debate, since quantum physics has introduced the principle of indeterminacy at the sub-atomic level. Nonetheless scientists still use the standard

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deterministic model at the macro-level because it produces predictable and verifiable results. But such a model does not appear to work in explaining human behaviour, and if it did it would create a paradox since the explanation would itself be determined. Our sense of self-­ determination, of agency, seems to be in-built: not only are we free to act but we can even act for no reason at all. That is the existentialist’s standpoint. The perennial and inconclusive debate over free will is generally considered otiose and irrelevant to any study of concrete man. The same, however, is not true where moral responsibility is concerned. The discharge of responsibilities will in many instances involve judgement, even in deciding what is good for oneself, let alone what is good for others. Some decisions, like the relief of pain and suffering, which we all wish to avoid, may be straightforward, but others, like the achievement of desires or ambitions will not be agent-neutral. We need only think of the controversy over voluntary euthanasia to perceive the problem: either we recognize the subjective validity of the patient’s wish to die, assimilate it, and help the patient achieve his or her wish, or we do not recognize any such validity and we abstain from helping the patient or even put obstacles in his or her path. Acting responsibly is a matter of judgement rather than knowledge. Indeed the more knowledge we have the less responsibility we need to exercise. This after all is the point made by Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling, the fact that Abraham had to prove his absolute responsibility to God in the total absence of any explanation as to why Isaac should be sacrificed. The inverse proportionality of responsibility to knowledge runs counter to the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church, which has always insisted that we act (morally or immorally) in the light of knowledge given to us. This is not what Kierkegaard or existentialists in general hold. For if a responsible decision depends on the accumulation of available knowledge it is less a decision and more a predictable and independent outcome, the result of a cognitive process, not of a genuinely free choice. It follows from this that to exercise responsibility is to do so in the light of one’s interior judgement and values. And yet such values must have some form of external sanction if responsibility is to mean anything. This is the source of the problem with Sartre’s philosophy, and one that has led to unfair accusations of self-centredness. The problem arises because

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Sartre cannot give a set of values, since he holds that all values are created by individuals and their actions (Solomon 1972: 314). He does not even hold with those modern humanists who argue that, for the sake of stability, some previously-sanctioned religious values should be retained as if they had absolute validity. Sartre’s position implies that there can be no universal values, which in turn means that Sartre’s own values of freedom, authenticity, bad faith, etc. can have no universal relevance. The position is of course wholly inconsistent (as Beauvoir realized). To say that there can be no universal ethics is to make a value judgement, but such a value judgement according to Sartre can only have a personal applicability, which rather begs the question. The real truth of course is that Sartre does accept the ethical notion of responsible behaviour towards others despite his argument that we enjoy complete freedom, including the freedom to create our own values. In the end he is forced to side with Kant when he says that ‘in truth, one ought always to ask oneself what would happen if everyone did as one is doing’ (Sartre 2007: 33). In fact Berdyaev had wrestled with the same problem years ealier in his attempt to develop a non-social or ‘non-objectivized’ ethics. Like Sartre, he strongly believed in the autonomy of the individual. But though Kantian philosophy recognizes this principle, Kant’s ethics departs from this principle: ‘Kant’s moral maxim that every man must be regarded not only as a means but also as an end in himself is undermined by the legalistic character of his ethics, because every man proves to be a means and an instrument for the realization of an abstract, impersonal, universally binding law. Morality is free in so far as it is autonomous; man, however, is not free or autonomous at all, but is entirely subject to law’ (DOM: 97). The origin of morality lies in the individual consciousness, but Kant has been compelled to objectify it, so that it is the moral law that becomes autonomous instead of man himself. This for Berdyaev is not the solution for it eschews the concrete, living individual in favour of a legalistic abstraction. Not that Berdyaev himself offers a solution, ‘for the greatest difficulty lies in harmonizing the claims of the individual and of society’ (DOM: 100). For a Christian, ethics is split between the ethics of law and the ethics of redemption. The former has to be respected because apart from anything else it helps to preserve us from undue interference and violence. But the ethics of redemption, the law of Jesus of Nazareth rather

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than of the Pharisees, is dictated not by social convention but by our love of our neighbour, which we give freely. Berdyaev distinguishes between something that is external and normative and something that is more in the nature of an appeal to an internal vision of liberation or longing for rehabilitation rather than for social stability. Christian ethics, as Berdyaev sees it, needs no objective foundation. It retains its recognition of the individual and the concrete: ‘Christianity is founded not upon the abstract and impotent idea of the good which, in relation to man, inevitably appears as a norm and a law, but upon a living Being, a Personality, and man’s personal relations to God and to his neighbours’ (DOM: 105). From this Berdyaev concludes that ‘the ethics of the Gospel is based upon existence and not upon norm, it prefers life to law […]. The Sabbath is for man and not man for the Sabbath’ (DOM: 105–06). Berdyaev’s conclusion reverses the Kantian axiom: one must not act in such a way that the action has universal application but in such a way that the action reflects upon the individual from whom it proceeds and the individual to whom it is directed. This is Berdyaev’s existential reading of the nature of Christian morals, which of course disregards the institutionalization or normalization of Christian ethics, something which Berdyaev abhors. Yet even if we grant Berdyaev’s point that the morality of the Gospel is not a norm or legalistic frame, is he not objectifying it or universalizing it by making a historical man’s teaching the model for all? In the end Berdyaev is forced to admit that social life has to exist alongside the personal quest for the divine: ‘The truth of the spiritual life cannot be made to fit into the natural life’ (DOM: 125). There is a need, then, in ethics, to go beyond purely personal preferences. Hence the appeal either to utilitarian principles (society as a whole benefits), or to divine authority as the originator of moral conscience. The problem with the latter course, as Kierkegaard realized, is that we know nothing of that silent, invisible, inaccessible authority. The inevitable question for the religious existentialist is whether it is consciousness of transcendence that results in ethical consciousness, or whether it is the latter that invokes the former (as in Kant). Unamuno felt that our conduct was not driven by our beliefs but that our beliefs arose a posteriori as an explanation of our conduct.

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As Colin Hamer puts it, Unamuno ‘regarded all explanations as, at best, post factum justifications for a fait accompli, the expression of man’s resolve to give a human purpose to an otherwise senseless history’ (Hamer 1978: 21). Berdyaev shared Unamuno’s view: ‘According to the ethics of law a man becomes good because he does good works. But in truth a man does good works because he is good’ (DOM: 99). We are led to good or evil acts by something other than our conscious religious beliefs. This does not necessarily negate an endowed capacity to act responsibly, but it does demote the role and importance of traditional belief, of accepted dogma. Such a view did not endear itself to the religious hierarchies, but nor can it be considered unchristian in the light of Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritan, a member of a community regarded as heterodox and despised by mainstream Judaism. The alternative justification for moral behaviour is the utilitarian one. Broadly speaking the utilitarian theory of ethical conduct does not endear itself to existentialists, whether religious or non-religious. For utilitarians the ultimate criterion of ethical behaviour is general welfare, and this is deemed to include the well-being of all individuals collectively. There is allegedly little or no conflict because we all belong to the totality. But this evidently requires that an impersonal or universal moral code be assimilated by the individual self as something that the self subscribes to. Motivation after all exists at the level of the individual, not at the level of the totality. The individual must be motivated, not coerced, into accepting the optimal good of the totality as taking priority over the good of the self on the grounds that what is good for the all is good for the one. If what ultimately counts is the collectivity, the individual must be prepared to benefit others at whatever cost to himself, whether it be his wealth, his position, his relationships, his health, his happiness, even his life. Personal sacrifice must take over as his life project. The question is not simply whether such a view of morality is rationally defensible (something which ethical theory has been unable to decide upon), but whether it can be valid in practice, in the world of the concrete. Is a moral code based on the qualitative precedence of the totality a practical proposition? Can it be made to apply to every single being, like the Christian adage that we should give to the poor, the applicability of which cannot in practice be universal? A universal standpoint that fails to distinguish between oneself

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and everyone else may be a mystical or Pauline vision, but life is a dynamic, not an entropic, state, which introduces imbalances and divergent viewpoints. As Thomas Nagel has written, ‘a fully agent-neutral morality is not a plausible human goal’ (Nagel 1986: 185).3 The ethical dimension of human existence looms large in any kind of existentialism because we necessarily encounter it in our relations with others. The non-religious existentialist does not deny the existence of ethical values, but makes the individual the originator of such values. This raises an awkward question: ‘How does one reconcile the individual’s having a choice of values with the existence of a collectively agreed on (if not an absolute) set of rules and principles?’, as Christine Daigle formulates it (Daigle 2006: 14). Partial answers to this question may be found in Daigle, in Olafson (1967), and in Webber (2018), but they are indeed partial and, as Olafson in particular admits, not wholly consistent. By trying to ground values in a contingent freedom that avoids any appeal to a transcendent source, an atheistic existentialist like Sartre faces the uphill struggle that Zarathustra (or his creator, Nietzsche) deemed necessary but never carried out. The Christian existentialist tries to overcome the problem of a universal ethics by positing that the moral imperative is both immanent and transcendent, indeed it is immanent because it is transcendent. Yet the question of whether what is right for me to do is also right for others and vice-versa is still not fully resolved. Granted that we are all responsible, are we equally responsible? As Olafson points out, one problem with the existentialist view of ‘moral autonomy’ is that it puts all human beings in the same boat, whereas in reality there are distinctions to be made as to the responsibility that can be assumed by different individuals both in relation to their awareness and in accordance to their situation. All actions are the actions of some individual human being, but the degree of responsibility for those actions cannot be assumed to be the same in every case (Olafson 1967: 245).  On the question of the choice between a subjective and an objective ethical viewpoint it is worth quoting Nagel’s view: ‘We are faced with a choice. For the purposes of ethics, should we identify with the detached, impersonal will that chooses total outcomes, and act on reasons that are determined accordingly? Or is this a denial of what we are really doing and an avoidance of the full range of reasons that apply to creatures like us? This is a true philosophical dilemma; it arises out of our nature, which includes different points of view on the world. When we ask ourselves how to live, the complexity of what we are makes a unified answer difficult’ (Nagel 1986: 185). 3

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There is, then, an irresolvable tension between what is due to oneself and what is due to others. The criticism often made of existentialists for their lack of social solidarity is not wholly deserved. It is true that they do not all value social relationships positively, but moral responsibility towards others is never shirked, not even in the case of Sartre, who believes that others get in the way of one’s striving for authenticity. The problem lies in the importance given to the individual stance: since experience is irremediably subjective, one cannot experience for others, one can only experience others, and this experience can become a distraction to the extent that one can succumb to the herd instinct rather than being faithful to one’s own life-project, a point made by both Heidegger and Sartre. But this kind of individualism, which involves defining our own ends and purposes, is certainly not the same thing as indifference to others. By using the notion of a mystical body under the spiritual leadership of Jesus Christ, Christian existentialists neatly avoid the apparent self-centredness of a Sartre; but it is only right to add that what they demonstrate is a relative movement towards collectivity, not a radical departure from the pursuit of individual aspiration and fulfilment. It is more a recognition that such fulfilment is tied to the well-being of others and cannot take place at their expense. Marcel’s intersubjectivity is all about each individual’s awareness of the feelings of other individuals and hence about mutual awareness and participation in an invisible world, but individuality is not thereby eliminated. Unamuno constantly insists that the individual must contribute to society without sacrificing his distinctiveness, indeed it is each one’s uniqueness that enriches the totality because each one recognizes the value of the other. Mutual understanding comes from each individual’s disposition to acknowledge the inner life of fellow humans, that is to say, their spiritual presence. Berdyaev for his part argues that a collective consciousness cannot emanate from social ideologies based on subjecting individual freedoms to curtailments from the centre as happens in dirigiste societies. It can only emerge from the general acceptance that each individual is a microcosm related to the macrocosm in a spiritual network. We must go beyond interaction at the social level and reach a communion which is deeply personal yet with cosmic ramifications. There is, it would apprear, a fine balance to be struck between the individual’s outlook and society’s outlook. And this for a perfectly simple

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reason: responsibility always lies at the door of the individual. The fork in the road, as Kierkegaard put it and so many have repeated (Unamuno and Borges among the many), is something that confronts the individual, what brings home the starkness of choice. It is the individual who is responsible for making the choice, or indeed for failing to make it. In this respect there is no difference between the atheistic existentialist and the Christian existentialist. But there is a difference in the approach to the common question of existential choice, and it has to do with moral order. In atheistic existentialism freedom of choice is considered to be ungrounded; it floats as it were in a vacuum which has neither origin, nor explanation, nor justification; it is absolutely contingent, as Sartre so strikingly illustrates in La Nausée and as Beauvoir so lucidly endorses in The Ethics of Ambiguity. In Christian existentialism freedom of choice may be no less daunting, but it is not ungrounded: choices are, or should be, governed by values that are intrinsic to human nature, that is, instantly recognizable and assumed to be God-given rather than invented by individual man for self-seeking purposes, as Nietzsche and his followers would have it, or for utilitarian purposes, as the pragmatists would have it. This is not quite the Kantian view—that our moral instinct points to a transcendent being—but not so far removed from it. Freedom of choice is seen not as a consequence of absolute contingency, as in Sartre and Beauvoir, but instead as a recognition that we are more than just contingent beings arisen out of an accidental collocation of atoms in a blind unconscious universe. We know that we face choices and we know that those choices entail consequences for the welfare of others. This has nothing to do with the natural world order; it places us in another dimension of being. We cannot explain ethical conduct in naturalistic or even cultural terms: it looks to a much broader horizon. Moral values are not newly created by our freedom of choice, as Sartre wanted; they are unveiled, not invented, they precede our existence and we have the capacity to recognize them. Yet the difference between the Christian and the atheistic positions is not huge. Both admit the reality of evil and concomitantly of man’s precarious position. Beauvoir’s comment to this effect is revealing. Evil is more than error, as it is usually regarded among humanistic philosophies. Among such philosophies

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Existentialism alone gives—like religions—a real role to evil, and it is this, perhaps, which makes its judgements so gloomy. Men do not like to feel themselves in danger. Yet, it is because there are real dangers, real failures and real earthly damnation that words like victory, wisdom, or joy have meaning. Nothing is decided in advance, and it is because man has something to lose and because he can lose that he can also win. (Beauvoir 2018: 35)

Leaving aside the adjective ‘earthly’, necessary for an atheist to avoid possible misunderstanding, what Christian other than the most obtuse predestinarian could possibly object to this statement of Beauvoir’s? So far in this concluding chapter we have been reviewing three key aspects of existentialist philosophizing: its empirical point of departure, that is our real-world circumstances as we experience them; its acceptance of the contingent nature of our existence and consequential insecurity; and its perception of a radical and destabilizing freedom of action in man and the ethical implications thereof. These are inter-related aspects that appear prominently in both Christian and non-religious existentialists, and the differences between the two groups, though perceptible, appear less divisive than we might have expected, given the presumed need in the former group to incorporate a far more purposive, because transcendent, approach to human existence. There are in addition certain other recurrent themes in existentialist philosophizing, of which the three most frequent are: embodiment; temporality and finitude; and concern or anxiety. It is necessary to consider how Christian existentialists treat these aspects. The relevance of the body is naturally connected to our worldly circumstances: it is through the body that we relate to the world. Although philosophy as a discipline has traditionally not found the body an interesting subject of reflection, except co-incidentally in the mind-body debate, there is in fact nothing new in attending to the subject philosophically. Embodiment is central to the religious philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas, who far from demoting the body vis-a-vis the soul as did Plato, argued strongly for its importance on Earth and its restitution in a heavenly existence: a soul without a body is helpless, or as he trenchantly put it, anima mea non est ego. Most existentialist thinkers have recognized the body as a key factor in the human situation, and some, notably Maurice Merleau-Ponty, have made it the central preoccupation

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of their reflections. It is not so much that existentialists reject the mind-­ body dualism—in general this is not a major topic of concern—but that they do not regard the body as a mere vehicle or instrument of the mind. Whatever else it is, and it may well be nothing else, the human entity is first and foremost a body with both physical and mental capacities. Heidegger for one, in Being and Time, does not distinguish between physical and mental attributes, preferring to see the human being as a wholeness or unity. He regards as inadequate the traditional Christian view of man as derived from Genesis I, 26 (‘And God said, let us make man in our image, after our likeness’), as well as the more modern interpretation which sees man as a transcendent creature, as capable of ‘seeing beyond’ (Heidegger 1962: 74). This view tells us nothing of man’s existential state, what Heidegger calls ‘Being-in-the-world’, which is not ‘the naive supposition that man is in the first instance a spiritual Thing which subsequently gets misplaced into a space’ (Heidegger 1962: 83). In Being and Time Heidegger rejects as ‘naive’ any possible connection between a human body and a spiritual representation, which of course could be seen as a deliberate challenge to most Christians, for whom Jesus of Nazareth was both a human being and a divine spirit. For Heidegger our corporeal nature is a fact which in normal circumstances we simply take for granted as we go about our everyday business. In Being and Nothingness Sartre has rather more to say on the body, distinguishing between the body as subject and the body as object. As subject, the body gives us consciousness and all the emotional states derived therefrom; as object it is what truly exists in the world, what is perceived both by self (up to a point, as when I look at my limbs) and by others. When I try to put the two together coherently, my subjective consciousness and my objective body, it becomes problematical because my consciousness is in my body, what enables me to live in the world, yet when I focus on this body what I see is an object, just as others see my body as an object. In fact the very notion of subjective consciousness is already problematical, for it is not so much a case of my body making me aware of the world as the world making me aware of my body: ‘Far from the body being first for us and revealing things to us, it is the instrumental things which in their original appearance indicate our body to us’ (Sartre 2003: 349). It is the world that I perceive around me that informs me of

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the reality of my body. My body gathers information, it is what Sartre calls a centre of reference because everything converges on it, so ‘my body is co-extensive with the world’ (Sartre 2003: 342). Sartre is surely right on this. On the one hand I am a conscious being and I am conscious of the world (since to be conscious is necessarily to be conscious of something); on the other hand it is equally the case that it is objects in the world that make me conscious. When one of those objects is another conscious being, I am conscious of becoming not a subject of consciousness but an object of consciousness. Yet my consciousness is not an object: ‘In fact what I am cannot in principle be an object for me inasmuch as I am it’ (Sartre 2003: 341). So I am an object and not-an-object. ‘To have a body is to be the foundation of one’s own nothingness and not to be the foundation of one’s own being […]. The body is necessary again as the obstacle to be surpassed in order to be in the world; that is, the obstacle that I am to myself ’ (Sartre 2003: 350). So my body is me, yet also what prevents me from being me. Or as Sartre goes on to write: ‘I exist for myself as a body known by the Other. […] A one-as-object is revealed to me as an unknowable being’ (Sartre 2003: 375). I can only occupy my own point of view, never the points of view which converge on me and of which I am nevertheless self-consciously aware. This awareness of one’s body as apprehended by the other can be alienating. We realize others see us in a way we do not see ourselves but which displace our self-integrity, as is demonstrated by the phenomenon of embarrassment. The upshot of this view of the body is, for Sartre, the impossibility of achieving satisfying personal relationships. When I become an object of the other, my sense of self, that is, my integrity, my independence, my freedom come under threat. It is precisely this aspect of embodiment as necessarily conflictive—it gives me my being yet also deprives me of my being—that comes under attack from Christian existentialism, notably from Gabriel Marcel. Marcel’s criticism of the Sartrian position is based on the latter’s rejection of the possibility of oblative love. Sartre sees an emotional attachment to another as an attempt to counter one’s own doubts about oneself, to bolster one’s confidence by appropriation of another’s point of view, a strategy which in a situation of mutuality renders a loving relationship a virtual impossibility, as Sartre himself recognized. Marcel’s point is that

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Sartre’s interpretation of love banishes communion between human beings (in a purely secular, not religious, sense), because any relationship is seen in terms of appropriation: in effect one turns others into one’s instruments. This emotional detachment, argues Marcel, has nothing to do with maintaining one’s freedom. My body-as-object-for-others does not deprive me of my radical freedom, my freedom to choose who I am, my self-determination in other words. What it does do is to make that personal freedom conditional: my freedom cannot be reduced to my doing, for the constraints which I face in my actions as a bodily member of a given community need not diminish my own sense of agency, even when my bodily freedom is curtailed. But even more important than this is Marcel’s criticism of Sartre’s rejection of generosity or altruism. For Sartre, a gift is a form of appropriation or of enslavement of the recipient; to remain free the recipient cannot accept a gift. But for Marcel such a view, while conceivably applicable in a material sense (a gift can be made in order to create an obligation), is not applicable in a non-material sense. To give (one’s attention, one’s devotion, even one’s life) is not to create an obligation in the recipient, much less to destroy that recipient, but to recognize our unconditional valuation of the other. It is a secular form of grace that carries with it the recognition that embodiment is more than an objectified physical phenomenon. Bodies are presences, not mere objects. The differences between the two thinkers are to be expected: after all Sartre was a materialist (and Marxist) philosopher, whereas Marcel was driven by a deeply spiritual sensibility. Neither Unamuno nor Berdyaev went to the lengths of Marcel (in his Metaphysical Journal (1914–1923) and ‘A Metaphysical Diary, 1928–1933’ above all, but also in discrete essays in Creative Fidelity and The Mystery of Being, Vol. I) to fathom out the puzzling connection between our embodied reality and our search for transphysical values. But as we saw in Chap. 3, embodiment is precisely the starting point of Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life, and corporeality is recognized by Berdyaev as a cognitive tool which has some bearing on personality. Yet if we are our bodies, we are also more than our bodies. It is not a matter of accounting for the Cartesian res cogitans but rather of recognizing that our aspirations seem to stretch well beyond corporeal needs and existence. We are especially conscious of time, we constantly project

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ourselves into the future, and while realizing our temporality are reluctant to accept our finitude. Temporality and finitude are notions central to Being and Time, and no twentieth-century Christian existentialist has devoted as much attention as did Heidegger to the importance of time in the human perspective. Heidegger’s treatment of the topic is long, complex, even abstruse, as well as inconclusive since it ends with a question about time, a probable indication that Heidegger was expecting to return to the topic. The key insight is that for the human being time is not some sort of container in which he ekes out his days. Dasein does not live in time; he is time. As Margaret Chatterjee explains, for Heidegger time is in a real sense man-­ made, for without Dasein there would be no time, that is, no history, no sense of past, present, and future; these are merely the ‘ecstasies’ of temporality (Chatterjee 1973: 138). Heidegger’s 1924 lecture ‘The Concept of Time’ already contains the basic ideas developed at length in the 1927 work. In this (subsequently published) lecture he introduces the notion of Dasein’s futuricity, in the sense that a human being’s awareness of finitude is ‘Dasein’s running ahead to its past’, that is to say that Dasein’s future lies ultimately in non-existence, in being a past, since the future is a ‘certain yet indeterminate past’ (Heidegger 1992: 12E). This past is not a content, not a list of events in a life; it is rather a recognition that what is most characteristic of existence is that there is nothing left: ‘the past takes everything with it into the Nothing’ (Heidegger 1992: 12E). This was to become, in Being and Time, the ‘Sein zum Tode’ or Being-towards-­ death criticized by Marcel as equivocal and as ‘existential solipsism’ (SEA: 61–62, 65). According to Heidegger, to live in awareness of our temporality is to live authentically, whereas to push death out of our mind or to live in fear of it is to live inauthentically. We have to make life meaningful continually precisely because of the looming horizon of our death. Death represents the end of our possibilities. In running ahead of itself or anticipating itself ‘Dasein is its future […]. Dasein, conceived in its most extreme possibility of Being, is time itself, not in time’ (Heidegger 1992: 13E–14E). Our temporality, then, is of the essence because what we are above everything else is temporal beings. The true question becomes not ‘what is time?’ but ‘who is time?’, and more specifically ‘Am I my time?’ (Heidegger 1992: 22E). It is true to say that Heidegger studiously avoids

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the question of immortality; he even says so himself in Being and Time: ‘In the ontological analysis of Being-towards-the-end there is no anticipation of our taking any existential stand towards death. If “death” is defined as the end of Dasein—that is to say, of Being-in-the-world—this does not imply any ontical decision whether “after death” still another Being is possible, either higher or lower, or whether Dasein “lives on” or even “outlasts” itself and is “immortal”’ (Heidegger 1962: 292). This disclaimer sounds like a concession to readers of a religious disposition: the semantic adjustments say it all. Dasein’s temporal boundaries have been clearly demarcated, a position confirmed in the Letter on Humanism of 1947 where Heidegger writes that his work ‘can be theistic as little as atheistic. Not, however, because of an indifferent attitude, but out of respect for the boundaries that have been set for thinking as such’ (Heidegger 2011: 173). In other words the question of God’s existence is simply out of bounds for the human mind, wholly undecidable. Our three Christian existentialists have no quarrel with that as an acknowledgement of our rational limitations; what they object to is shutting the door on the human being’s reaching out to God. Such closure to possibilities, far stronger in Camus and Sartre than in Heidegger, who at least leaves the door slightly ajar, was anathema to Marcel and would have been doubly so to Unamuno had he lived to know their works. But on the other hand neither Marcel nor Unamuno takes up the theme of time as such. It falls to Berdyaev to offer a Christian viewpoint on existential time. His most detailed treatment of time is in Solitude and Society (1934), with significant contributions in other works. With a nod in the direction of Heidegger, he recognizes that time is ‘the fundamental problem of human existence’ (SAS: 97). But it is not to be seen as a prison; it is simply the product of changing realities and can therefore be transcended. Berdyaev sees Heidegger as being overly concerned with one particular aspect of time, that which engenders anxiety. If we see time predominantly in terms of the future becoming the past, in other words as a loss, as something we cannot hold on to, then ‘time is an evil, a mortal disease, exuding a fatal nostalgia. The passage of time strikes man’s heart with despair, and fills his gaze with sadness’ (SAS: 101). But mankind need not be governed wholly by time-induced anxiety,

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understandable as this is; it can be governed by creativity and hope if we see time differently. Berdyaev confesses that he is attracted to an eschatological view of existence by the transitoriness of human life rather than by apocalyptic literature, which he finds distasteful. Eschatological Christianity is not the same thing as historical Christianity. The latter has compromised itself by adapting to a fallen world; the former looks to ‘transfigure this evil and stricken world’ (DAR: 291). In eschatological Christianity time is given a positive significance, it is made purposeful. This view of time has been adapted by the Western concept of history as linear progress in a purely socioeconomic sense. The widespread and especially nineteenth-­ century view of history as progress, social, technical, or moral, far from progressive is in fact regressive: time becomes enslavement because it binds people to a model based on vested interests. Evolutionary biology offers no solution either: the survival of the genus homo is no justification for the annihilation of the individual, because each individual is unique and irreproducible. In eschatological Christianity, whose goal is redemption, every individual has a right to participate in the divine plan. None of this of course negates Heidegger’s basic point of Dasein acting under pressure from time. What it does is to change time from something oppressive and anxiety-causing into something potentially constructive and reassuring. There is no naive wishful thinking here. Berdyaev and Marcel are both deeply critical of and alarmed by the state of the world and the menacing possibility of mass conflagration, but this only makes it more urgent to uphold an alternative outlook to post-Nietzschean nihilism and the danger of consequential irresponsibility or recklessness. Both make the point explicitly and both argue that Christianity offers a wholly different perspective on human history. Time need not be synonymous with finitude just because we are transitory creatures on this earth. Berdyaev’s response to Heidegger involves a distinction between objective and subjective time which Heidegger does not make, presumably because it makes no difference.4 Time is something that we apprehend  At any rate he makes no such distinction in The Concept of Time. In Being and Time he mentions that ‘there is a remarkable vacillation as to whether the character to be attributed to time is “subjective” or “Objective” (Heidegger 1962: 457). What is objective about “World-time” is its measurement, not time itself. If world-time is reduced to ‘the temporalizing of temporality, then it can 4

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because events appear to us to take place in succession, but, as Einstein showed, there is no such thing as absolute time. Natural time is simply the alternation of night and day or the seasons of the year. We experience time subjectively, even if we refer to it objectively, as when we speak of events in the past. ‘Whereas Heidegger affirms that anxiety helps to make Being temporal, it is evident that creative activity, on the other hand, can liberate Being from the tyranny of time. The creative act itself transcends time, but its actual material results have their place in one or other of time’s divisions—in the past, the present, or the future’ (SAS: 103). According to Berdyaev objective time belongs to a degraded world; it is a secondary feature. But time as a primary feature ‘belongs to the inner world of existence’ (SAS: 104). If ‘real’ time is created by us through our experience, this has surprising consequences, not the least of which is the matter of Creation. It is not so much that the biblical story is a conventional means of objectifying; most people today do of course see it as symbolic. It is that ‘Creation is an intellectual antinomy: the world cannot be eternal; nor can its origins be purely temporal’ (SAS: 103). What Berdyaev presumably means is that an evolving universe is expected to have a beginning and an end, yet since the ‘Big Bang’ created time, the original ‘spark’ took place out of time. But this antinomy is the result of objectification, adds Berdyaev. Looked at from our inner experience of the world, the Creation is independent of time since objective time is a material result of Creation, the result of measurement, never a cause. On the one hand, then, time itself exists within eternity, and on the other, as time-conscious creatures, we ourselves derive our significance from time, that is, from considering our past and our future. Although he does not put it this way, it would appear that Berdyaev is offering us two frames of reference for time: there is an objective or external time to which we relate our actions; and there is a subjective or internal time to which we relate our very existence and that of all creation.5 What Berdyaev does say neither be volatilized “subjectivistically” nor “reified” by a vicious Objectification’ (Heidegger 1962: 472). 5  Inevitably this reminds us of Henri Bergson’s division of time into abstract time—the discrete, identifiable units of time of clocks and of science—and lived time, where past, present, and future co-exist in a ceaseless and dynamic flow. Interestingly, in introducing his own duality of time, Berdyaev writes that ‘neither Bergson nor Heidegger attaches sufficient importance to this duality,

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is that ‘there are two possible ways of experiencing time: one is to experience the present without reflecting about the future and eternity; the other is to identify the present with eternity’ (SAS: 112). The former we can accept; it is after all how most of us generally experience time, that is, unconsciously. But the latter is not an experience of time; it is a conceptualization of time, it is to think of time either as non-existent or as stretching out forever, which amounts to the same thing. We cannot experience time as timelessness. Berdyaev does, however, recognize the problem of thinking a timeless world, since we project such a world into the future, which is an essential part of time. It is virtually impossible for us to envisage a state in which past, present, and future have no significance, which is what a God existing out of time implies. Unamuno makes the same point in his discussion of what Pauline apocatastasis might mean. For if God exists outside of time he must be, unlike us, an utterly static being. How do we reconcile this with our self-conscious perdurance, which is dynamic? We need time because time is a relationship. If we eliminate time we eliminate the possibility of relationship. The only solution, argues Unamuno, is to consider the beatific vision as a moving-towards-­ God. This looks like a straightforward re-arrangement of Heidegger’s moving-towards-death, except of course that Unamuno was writing long before Heidegger. It is really Heidegger who has adapted the Christian concept of Being-towards-God in his secular version of human beingness. As a Christian Berdyaev favours his second ‘experience’ of time, that is, equating it with eternity, or, shall we say, seeing it as a propaedeutic or anticipation of eternity, or in the traditional Christian terminology the beatific vision, which is what many Christians and especially the mystics have proposed in the past. Nevertheless Berdyaev is well aware that ‘the traditions and dogmas of Christian eschatology are full of insurmountable difficulties’ (SAS: 115). Even so, he argues, the Christian position is preferable to Heidegger’s ‘Sein zum Tode’, for ‘death as he defines it is “being-orientated-towards-the-end”. Heidegger has apparently no other solution of existence. That accounts, of course, for the profound pessimism of his philosophy, in which the idea of eternity plays no part’ (SAS: which is based upon the impossibility of admitting either the static or the dynamic aspect of human nature’ (SAS: 98). There is nothing like undermining others’ views to bolster one’s own.

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115). Christianity, argues Berdyaev, sees death in a different relationship to time. Rather than marking the end of time, death is a pointer to infinity, ‘for if we were to postulate an end to time, we would be involved in a contradiction, since without infinite time there could be no end to Being, there could be no such thing as death’ (SAS: 105). This may well seem an over-sophisticated argument, since after all what Heidegger says is not that Dasein is in time but that Dasein is time, so that from the point of view of subjective experience when one disappears the other does too (essentially a Kantian position), even though when alive one is unsettled by that ‘timelessness’ precisely because we are ‘timely’ creatures. On this Heidegger seems perfectly coherent. Berdyaev’s point, nevertheless, is that there is an alternative view of time, what he calls ‘qualitative infinity’, which overcomes the human preoccupation with finitude dominated by quantitative time. We wish to know our origin and our purpose, and paradoxically the non-eternal can have neither, its transitoriness robbing it of meaning. For the universe to have an origin and a purpose the beginning and the end must extend beyond time. It is our degraded state (and here Berdyaev and Heidegger would seem to agree) that underlies our sense of temporality and finitude. But there is another depth of being which is not subject to time in the conventional or historical sense. This is what Berdyaev calls ‘creative ethics’ (DOM: 144) or ‘the ethics of creativeness’ (DOM: Part 2, ch. 3), an attitude of mind found in the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth which demand a creative response to the problems of life, including the unknown. Instead of allowing ourselves to be tortured by anxiety in the face of an unknown future which includes the mystery of death, we can respond creatively ‘from the depths of being, which are not subject to time and belong to a different order of existence’ (DOM: 146). Heidegger’s ‘fallenness’ of man, which Berdyaev recognizes, is not the last word. Not everything is in time, nor time in everything. ‘Time is only a state of things’ (SAS: 97). Christianity has raised the significance of a mere moment in time, of a brief historical event, to stand for the whole of eternity. Creatively we can share in that eternization of history, of time. One salient aspect of human beingness in part attributable to Heidegger’s idea of the finite nature of time and its unsettling effect upon us is anxiety. Heidegger’s Angst (derived from Kierkegaard’s Angest and

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variously translated as anguish or anxiety) is seen as the dominant characteristic of the human being, a view which has been endemic in the medical sciences, in pseudo-medical symptomatology and therapies, and in the arts generally throughout the twentieth century. More generally we could say that Aristotle’s definition of man as a ‘rational animal’ has become contemporary man’s ‘anxious animal’. Existentialism has probably exacerbated what can all-too-easily become a self-pitying diagnosis. The modern view of anxiety had a Christian beginning in Kierkegaard’s concern over one’s motives and ultimate destiny. Heidegger, influenced by Kierkegaard’s view, transformed anxiety into an ontological datum. It is derived from one’s natural concern for oneself allied to one’s freedom. As in Kierkegaard, our sense of freedom when we face decisions leads to anxiety, which can result in authentic or inauthentic living (dependent on whether we respond consciously to our circumstances or whether we evade our responsibility to ourselves in a state of conformity to other’s expectations and prevailing conventions). Anxiety comes from Dasein’s recognition of its own possibilities: I cannot delegate my decisions about myself and my circumstances. For Sartre, anxiety (or anguish) is the result of a fear of existential freedom, which he compares to vertigo when standing on the edge of a cliff. Ontologically it is caused by our need for self-­ assurance, by the insecurity of the self or else by the fear that we may be nothing at all. We care about ourselves, our existence, and our relations. This constitutive attitude (one could equally say involvement) is manifested, in Heideggerian terminology, in Besorgen, concern, and Fürsorge, solicitude. Concern is a relational quality that I dispense towards things that I use, or that I seek, or that I avoid, or that I value; in other words it refers to how I relate to the world and its objects. When it comes to relations with other people this concern is revealed as solicitude. ‘Being-in-­ the-world is characterized as concern’ writes Heidegger in The Concept of Time (Heidegger 1992: 7E). It is the mixture of necessary involvement and irrational freedom in a time-bounded context that brings about anxiety. In one sense human agitation in the face of uncertainty is as ancient as mankind itself. Certain ancient philosophers, Epicurus, the Stoics in general, or an early modern philosopher such as Spinoza, held that an over-­ concern with death could lead to a state of anxiety, and that the solution

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lay in the cultivation of ataraxia or serenity derived from emotional impassiveness. Existentialism, however, has converted anxiety into a constitutional trait of human beingness which must be faced, and those who try to swamp their anxiety by diversionary activities are living inauthentically and even perhaps making themselves prone to mental disorder. Anxiety is essentially a fear of nothingness. Heidegger points to Dasein’s temporality and finitude as anxiety-producing factors, but in a militant atheist like Sartre death cannot be a mystery to be anticipated with apprehension since the state of death is nothing and cannot be experienced. Instead it is consciousness itself that has the capacity to negate itself, to become nothingness because of its relentless need to re-create itself anew at each moment: it has to create states for itself because by itself it is nothing. This is a source of tension and anxiety. What does a Christian existentialist make of this threat of the nothingness of being? As we saw in Chap. 6 Unamuno’s view of anxiety completely anticipates Heidegger’s. It is brought about by the human being’s sensitivity to temporality, to finitude, and to the mystery of death. In this respect the Christian and the atheist or agnostic are no different: we all share the same apprehension at the prospect of death whether or not we choose to believe in salvation. Berdyaev too agrees with Heidegger that anxiety is fundamental to humanity, not just a mental disease that happens to affect some. The only antidote is to strive creatively to justify humanity’s value and hence its hope of salvation. But it is Gabriel Marcel who gives us the most complete account of existentialist anxiety from a Christian perspective, something to which he devoted a number of discrete essays on the wretched condition of modern man as well as an entire historical survey of the topic, L’Homme problématique (1955). Marcel does not question the reality of existential anxiety or uneasiness. He takes it for granted that it has always been present, but notes that in the twentieth century it has reached a new level of acuteness. Is this anxiety, he asks, compatible with genuine faith? Is some degree of anxiety even required to stop Christian faith from becoming passive and numb? We saw in Chap. 6 that Marcel distinguishes between anxiety or uneasiness (inquiétude) and anguish (angoisse). Although there is no precise line of demarcation between the two, anxiety for Marcel is a diffuse state of inquietude which can pass into anguish when it becomes concentrated,

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as we find in Pascal or Dostoyevsky. ‘Uneasiness [has] its roots in the very nature of man’ (PRM: 99), so there is nothing abnormal about such a state of agitation. The question is not whether it is real but whether we see it in a positive or negative light. If it has become a more pressing question in our own day (the mid-twentieth century from Marcel’s perspective) it is because anxiety is brought about not simply by one’s own future as an individual but by the future of the entire human race. Americans and Soviets adopted an attitude of denial towards the problem of anxiety, relegating it, in the case of the former, to the status of a mere functional defect which can be corrected by psychoanalysis or some other therapeutic treatment, and in the case of the latter regarding it as a case of bourgeois political dissidence and disloyalty to the collective state. In both cases man is reduced to a functional unit, which far from solving the problem highlights its insolubility. A different approach is required, one that meets the reality of the condition head-on. Contemporary existentialist philosophy has recognized the problem, says Marcel, but its popular version has turned it into an indulgent self-torture in which people are tempted to wallow rather than consider its provenance and potential benefits. The anxiety which existentialist philosophizing has turned into one of its two trade marks (the other is freedom) has clear Christian antecedents, not least in St Augustine, whose questions addressed to God in the Confessions reveal a fundamental uneasiness in their ‘radical insufficiency, in the essential want from which man suffers as a creature drawn from nothingness’ (PRM: 91). And in terms of raising anxiety to a metaphysical level, ‘the genuine precursor of the philosophies of existence to the extent that they see in anguish a privileged metaphysical category’ is Blaise Pascal (PRM: 100). Twentieth-century existentialism has of course recognized Kierkegaard as a predecessor, but has not alighted on what connects him to Pascal, namely the daunting question of what it is to understand oneself ‘in the presence and before the face of God’ (PRM: 103).6 Existentialism has preferred to focus on Kierkegaard’s sense of  As it happens Marcel forgets that in La agonía del cristianismo Unamuno mentions Pascal and Kierkegaard in the same breath (ADC: X, 552). The context is precisely the sharing of the anxiety that others have felt. It is inconceivable that Marcel should not have known this work of Unamuno’s since it first appeared in French, published in Paris in 1925, and attracted numerous reviews and 6

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nothingness and the consequent anguish which this lack produces. But it was Pascal who wrote in his Pensées that a mind at rest is unreal, that we cannot rest, that we are process, activity. In other words we fear emptiness, nothingness (Pascal 1995: 38–40 [fragment 136]). But this menacing abyss can be filled by God: we can go from anguish and despair to salvation, from nothingness to plenitude or at least towards plenitude. Kierkegaard understood that it is our very existence, not any kind of abstract philosophizing, that is at the root of the problem of insufficiency and the anguish which it can produce (Pattison 1999: 32–34, 43–45). Though ultimately derived from Kierkegaard, Heidegger’s idea of anxiety is married to the idea of finitude in turn derived from Nietzsche. If Heidegger does not deny God outright it is probably because he realizes that the irrational violence of Nietzsche’s negation points to an underlying positivity, to a frustration or unsatisfied longing (which is precisely the effect we obtain from the outburst of the madman in the market place in The Gay Science—the catastrophe for mankind of God’s disappearance from the human scene). Heidegger therefore prefers to ignore the question, in effect to plead that it is not part of his brief. He stops his study of man at finitude, at death as the horizon beyond which we cannot see, on the grounds that I exist only inasmuch as I-exist-in-the-world. The problem here is that this does not explain mankind’s preoccupation with an afterlife. My possibilities are not limited to this world even if, as Heidegger argues, I am I only because I am a being-in-the-world, that is, I am my relations with the world. Anxiety, unlike fear, has no obvious cause, yet it is radically unsettling, alienating even. The false, ‘inauthentic’ solution is to flee into the anonymity of the herd or into diversionary pursuits. Heidegger is at bottom presenting a secular version of a traditional religious interpretation of man: original sin, the fall, the ensuing sense of guilt, the awareness of death, the search for authentic living. His diagnosis is similar to the Christian one, but he offers no possible solution. Unlike Heidegger, Sartre does not simply bracket the possibility of a divine dimension; he claims to have shown its falsity. Man is responsible official condemnation. Unamuno uses the word in its original Greek meaning of contest or struggle, but he might have done better to title his work ‘the anguish of Christianity’ because this is what it illustrates.

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only to himself and is therefore, as Nietzsche had announced, the generator of his own values: he has constantly to re-invent himself. But in Sartre this is not so much a consequence of the non-existence of God as of the fact that God has been discarded as a delusion in order to accommodate the thesis of man’s absolute freedom. For if God existed this would signal some element of constraint upon man. Anxiety therefore comes, not as in Pascal or Kierkegaard from pondering our free relationship to a divine being, but from the radical contingency of our existence, from our absolute freedom, paradoxically not just the freedom of the future but the freedom of the past too, since there is no guarantee that what I have been in the past I will continue to be in the future, or that what I have promised myself not to be again (e.g. a gambler) I will not return to being. My motives are no guarantee in the face of my absolute freedom. Whatever I choose to do, I cannot escape the anxiety of freedom. This leaves the door open to what Marcel criticizes in Sartre, ‘a morality of unconstraint’ (PRM: 119). There is thus a difference between Heidegger and Sartre in the way they conceive the source of anxiety. In Sartre the disturbing effect of Heidegger’s ever-present horizon of death is rejected in favour of seeing death as mere ‘facticity’, which is no more ‘my possibility’ than my birth is. It is my radical and disconcerting freedom, not the prospect of my ceasing to be, that causes my uneasiness or Sartrian vertigo. Marcel, who was probably Sartre’s fiercest and certainly most consistent critic, rejects both Heideggerian and Sartrian anxiety as negative, that is, as being based on two essentially negative factors: the negation of being through finitude, and the negation of being through the suspicion of nothingness. It would perhaps be too much to say that Marcel sees anxiety as positive in itself (and certainly it is far from good in its concentrated form, anguish), but its complete absence is not a desideratum either: ‘a soul to which all uneasiness about oneself is foreign is a soul affected with sclerosis’ (PRM: 140). Anxiety cannot be eliminated because it is consubstantial to human beingness. But precisely because of this we must recognize its presence in others and act with appropriate understanding irrespective of cause. This is where the Christian outlook has a role to play, not in banishing anxiety, which cannot be eluded, but in reminding us that there is another dimension to our existence, ‘that of

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faith, of hope, of charity, that of prayer, which is the only one from which one can serve peace by establishing it first of all in oneself ’ (PRM: 142). According to Marcel, the existentialism originating with Kierkegaard and secularized by first Heidegger and then Sartre runs the risk of turning a natural sentiment, anxiety or restlessness, into an unnatural one, anguish, which is an evil because it is ‘closed in upon itself ’ (PRM: 143). Positive uneasiness on the other hand ‘allows us to detach ourselves from the vise in which our daily life squeezes us, with its hundreds of cares which end up by masking the true realities’ (PRM: 142). This uneasiness is what makes us aware that there is another world, an invisible world, which we can only reach by self-transcendence. It is not the anxiety of the contemporary philosophers of existence, which can only lead to a self-­ centred and perhaps paralysing anguish, but the anxiety of St Augustine, the aspiration of an incomplete being to the plenitude of being, ‘that unity of all in all of which what Christian theology calls the “mystical body” presents us with the only notion susceptible of satisfying us’ (PRM: 144). We thus reach the point where existentialist anxiety ceases to be such and reverts to what it was in the first place: Christian expectation. But our aspirations are not simply a characteristic of Christian belief; they are of course part of our affective state as human beings. Whether we refer to sentiments (Unamuno), to intuitions (Berdyaev), or to anticipations (Marcel), we are talking of our affective life, of what we feel. Feelings are subjective and therefore difficult to reduce to objective generalization. Yet they play a crucial role in our lives and cannot be brushed aside. By and large philosophy in the past has been concerned with how we interpret the world or ‘represent’ it to ourselves, and it has chosen to ignore the affects. Existentialists have paid far more attention to our affective reactions, to moods, emotions, sentiment in general, and the religious existentialists have sought to integrate religious feelings into this pattern of the affective life of the human person. Unamuno, Berdyaev, and Marcel all vindicate the role of religion not on the grounds that it is something objective and self-standing but on the grounds that our very nature as human beings creatively projects our desire to live on, our love for other beings, and our search for permanent values onto a transcendent principle or spirit. For the Christian existentialist religious belief is not upheld on rational grounds but on affective grounds. It is not the existence of

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God that turns us into believers but our very own inclinations that call for fulfilment in this life, even if that fulfilment has to be based on the promise of a better one to come. Our brains are as it were pre-programmed to go beyond our immediate circumstances in search of a signpost to enlightenment. That we are not sufficient to ourselves is indicated by our restlessness and endeavours, by the impossible goal of homeostasis: we never reach equilibrium in our affects because some element is missing. I said in the Introduction to this book that it was not a study of Christianity but of existentialism as perceived and as practised from a Christian perspective. The closeness of the three thinkers looked at here to the central preoccupations of existentialist philosophizing shows conclusively that their marginalization on the grounds of religiosity is unwarranted. Their contribution to contemporary existentialist thought is very considerable, and their determination to include the religious dimension of human existence in their deliberations enriches the subject of concrete man immeasurably and restores a longstanding trait of human beingness in an increasingly secular age. Indeed to deliberately ignore this dimension, irrespective of whether one accepts or rejects the reality underlying the spiritual outlook, is to impoverish the compass of human experience and creativity. All three have much to say on the human predicament, each in his own distinctive way. Unamuno’s brand of existentialism is built around the idea of survival as constitutive of the human being. It is a boundless aspiration that clashes irremediably with our rational faculty. There is no solution to the anxiety caused by having to live with the prospect of annihilation, but Unamuno’s proposal is precisely that we should accept this irreconcilability of opposites as an essential part of our existence, and that a Christianity freed of its accumulated theological or dogmatic ballast is our best auxiliary in such an enterprise because it values human compassion and solidarity above all else. Unamuno’s Christianity is itself a philosophy of life that, in keeping with existentialism, seeks to give purpose and fulfilment to an otherwise senseless universe. It offers no guarantees, but our inescapable uncertainty is moderated by hope and the will to believe. Berdyaev’s Christian existentialism is in part at least a result of his frustration with the Bolshevik revolution which had promised liberation but delivered only an authoritarian conformity because the brand of Marxism which it implemented imposed a blind materialism that derided spiritual

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values. For Berdyaev human beingness entails a sensitivity to our collective destiny and a vision of mankind that take it beyond the material sphere and into what he calls the divine world. The divine and the human are interconnected dimensions: the figure of Jesus Christ is the symbolic bridge that provides the model and makes possible the aspiration to a fuller life through our own endeavours, which is what Berdyaev tries to convey by that insistent word, creativity, the means at our disposal to reach out beyond the visible, material world into the life-enhancing world of the spirit in contrast to the active repression of human possibilities. Marcel constructs his existential man around the puzzling nature of incarnation, of being a body yet being distinct from the body or more than the body. Upon this he builds the idea of intersubjective presence, the notion that a rapport with another human being involves a recognition of value in the other person that goes beyond physical substance or spatial proximity. This mutual presence is based on love, not possessive love but oblative love, and this love, which survives the separation of death, holds out the hope of survival and reunion. That is as far as Marcel will go. His philosophy of presence is metaphysics, not theology; or as he himself says, ‘it is, in the best sense, existential’ (PAI: 238). The religious orthodoxy of these three thinkers may certainly be questioned, but not their commitment to a deeply Christian outlook. Not the least of their achievements is that by putting Christianity through an existentialist filter they have come up with a more vibrant, more universal, less dogmatic version of what is after all a world vision. Christianity is humanized, de-theologized, becoming more human-centred and less God-centred in the process. Yet paradoxically this makes God not irrelevant, as Nietzsche alleged and Sartre was to uphold, but more necessary and more accessible. He re-appears not as a delusion but as a human need, a projection that becomes as real as we are. Proofs of our own reality are unnecessary, whatever Descartes felt in the light of the sceptics, so proofs of God are equally immaterial. The reality of God is our reality. He is part of our human world if we believe that we are more than useless objects fluttering aimlessly through an endless void. By allowing a Christian vision of the world and an existential appraisal of man to intimately interact, these thinkers have enriched both Christianity and existentialism, made each perspective more comprehensive and understanding of the human situation.

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Finally and perhaps most significantly, what this study has shown, I believe, is that twentieth-century existentialism has had a major input from Christian thinkers. In no way can existentialism justifiably be regarded as an exclusively or even predominantly atheistic or even agnostic philosophical endeavour. Irrespective of the displeasure of ecclesiastical authorities, the fact remains that all our three thinkers were practising and extremely well-informed Christians, that they upheld the relevance of Christian essentials to contemporary life, and indeed sustained the idea that humanity needs to focus on transcendent values in order to counter the nihilistic tendencies that threaten disintegration and self-­ destruction. This core belief in the spiritual unity and destiny of mankind feeds into their undoubtedly existentialist reflections on the human condition and informs both their criticism of current materialism and functionalism and their exhortation to an awareness of enduring values. As beings-in-the-world, mankind needs the universe, but the universe needs mankind as conscious and creative beings, for our role is to make it meaningful: de nobis fabula narratur.

Bibliography

The bibliography on existentialism, added to that of the three thinkers studied here, would take up several volumes. I can only offer a select bibliography, which consists by and large of items cited in the text. A very few which I have also consulted but which I have not had occasion to cite in the text are included here because I consider them to offer something of value to a potential researcher. In order to keep the bibliography within bounds, I have not included books which I have found to be somewhat less pertinent despite their presence in other bibliographies on existentialism. Where the date of the first edition in the original language differs from the edition used this is indicated in square brackets after the entry.

A. Primary Works 1. Works by Unamuno Unamuno, Miguel de (1966). Obras completas. 9 vols. (Madrid: Escelicer). Unamuno, Miguel de (1995). Obras completas. Edición de Ricardo Senabre. 10 vols. (Madrid: Biblioteca Castro). Unamuno, Miguel de (1998). Alrededor del estilo. Introducción, edición y notas de Laureano Robles (Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. A. Longhurst, Unamuno, Berdyaev, Marcel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81999-6

403

404 Bibliography

Unamuno, Miguel de (2005). Del sentimiento trágico de la vida en los hombres y en los pueblos y Tratado del amor de Dios. Edición de Nelson Orringer (Madrid: Tecnos). [1912]. Unamuno, Miguel de (2015). An Anthology of his Poetry. Translation, Introduction and Notes by C. A. Longhurst (Oxford: Oxbow Books). Unamuno, Miguel de (2016). Filosofía lógica. Prólogo de Cirilo Flórez Miguel. Edición de Ignacio García Peña y Pablo García Castillo (Madrid: Tecnos). Unamuno, Miguel de (n.d.). ‘Carta a Juan Solís’. Casa-Museo Unamuno, Salamanca. Caja N° 104/72.

2. Works by Berdyaev Berdyaev, Nikolai (1950). Dream and Reality. An Essay in Autobiography (London: Geoffrey Bles). [1949]. Berdyaev, Nikolai (1952a). The Beginning and the End. Translated by R. M. French (London: Geoffrey Bles). [1947]. Berdyaev, Nikolai (1952b). The Realm of Spirit and the Realm of Caesar. Translated by Donald A. Lowrie (London: Victor Gollancz). [1949]. Berdyaev, Nikolai (1953). Truth and Revelation. Translated by R.  M. French (London: Geoffrey Bles). [1947]. Berdyaev, Nikolai (2009a). Dostoievsky: An Interpretation. Foreword by Boris Jakim. Translated by Donald Attwater (San Rafael CA: Semanton Press). [1923]. Berdyaev, Nikolai (2009b). Freedom and the Spirit. Foreword by Boris Jakim. Translated by Oliver Fielding Clark (San Rafael CA: Semantron Press). [1927–1928]. Berdyaev, Nikolai (2009c). Slavery and Freedom. Foreword by Boris Jakim. Translated by R. M. French (San Rafael CA: Semantron Press. [1939]. Berdyaev, Nikolai (2009d). Solitude and Society. Foreword by Boris Jakim. Translated by George Reavey (San Rafael CA: Semantron Press). [1934]. Berdyaev, Nikolai (2009e). Spirit and Reality. Foreword by Boris Jakim. Translated by George Reavey (San Rafel CA: Semantron Press). [1937]. Berdyaev, Nikolai (2009f ). The Destiny of Man. Foreword by Boris Jakim. Translated by Natalie Duddington (San Rafel CA: Semantron Press). [1931]. Berdyaev, Nikolai (2009g). The Divine and the Human. Foreword by Boris Jakim. Translated by R. M. French (San Rafael CA: Semantron Press. [1947].

 Bibliography 

405

Berdyaev, Nikolai (2009h). The Fate of Man in the Modern World. Translated by Donald A. Lowrie (San Rafel CA: Semantron Press. [1934]. Berdyaev, Nikolai (2009i). The Meaning of History. Foreword by Boris Jakim. Translated by George Reavey (San Rafael CA: Semantron Press). [1923]. Berdyaev, Nikolai (2009j). The Meaning of the Creative Act. Foreword by Boris Jakim. Translated by Donald A.  Lowrie (San Rafel CA: Semantron Press). [1916].

3. Works by Marcel Marcel, Gabriel (1949). Being and Having. An Existentialist Diary. Translated by Katharine Farrer. Introduction to the Torchbook Edition by James Collins (London: Dacre Press). [1935]. Marcel, Gabriel (1952a). Metaphysical Journal (1914–1923). Translated by B. Wall (London: Barrie and Rockliff). [1927]. Marcel, Gabriel (1952b). Three Plays: A Man of God. Ariadne. The Funeral Pyre. With a Preface on ‘The Drama of the Soul in Exile’ by Gabriel Marcel. Introduction by Rosalind Heywood (London: Secker and Warburg). Marcel, Gabriel (1954). The Decline of Wisdom (London: Harvill Press]. Marcel, Gabriel (1960a). The Mystery of Being Volume I: Reflection and Mystery (Chicago: Henry Regnery). Marcel, Gabriel (1960b). The Mystery of Being Volume II: Faith and Reality (Chicago: Henry Regnery). Marcel, Gabriel (1963). The Existential Background of Human Dignity (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press). Marcel, Gabriel (1967a). Presence and Immortality. Translated by Michael A. Machado. Revised by Henry J. Koren (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press). [1959]. Marcel, Gabriel (1967b). Problematic Man. Translated by Brian Thompson. Foreword by Leslie Dewart (New York: Herder and Herder). [1955]. Marcel, Gabriel (1967c). Searchings. Foreword by Wolfgang Ruf (New York: Newman Press). [1964]. Marcel, Gabriel (1973). Tragic Wisdom and Beyond. Translated by Stephen Jolin and Peter McCormick (Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press). [1968]. Marcel, Gabriel (1998). The Broken World, in Gabriel Marcel’s Perspectives on the Broken World. Introduction by Ralph McInerney. Translated by Katharine Rose Hanley (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press). [1933].

406 Bibliography

Marcel, Gabriel (2002a). Creative Fidelity. Translated and with an Introduction by Robert Rosthal. Preface by Merold Westphal (New York: Fordham University Press). [1940]. Marcel, Gabriel (2002b). The Philosophy of Existentialism (New York: Citadel Press). [1933, 1946]. Marcel, Gabriel (2004). A Mystery of Love. Introduction, Translation, and Reflections by Katharine Rose Hanley (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press). [1921]. Marcel, Gabriel (2008). Man Against Mass Society. Translated by G. S. Fraser. Foreword by Donald Mackinnon (South Bend IN: St Augustine’s Press). [1951]. Marcel, Gabriel (2009). Thou Shalt Not Die. Selected and Arranged by Anne Marcel. Translated by Katharine Rose Hanley. Introduced by Xavier Tilliette SJ (South Bend IN: St Augustine’s Press). [2005]. Marcel, Gabriel (2010). Homo Viator. Introduction to a Metaphysic of Hope. Translated by Emma Crauford and Paul Seaton (South Bend IN: St Augustine’s Press). [1945].

4. Works by Other Existentialist Thinkers (Including Anthologies of Existentialism) Beauvoir, Simone de (2018). The Ethics of Ambiguity. Translated by Bernard Frechtman (New York: Open Road). [1947]. Buber, Martin (2004). I and Thou. Translated by Ronald Gregor Smith. With a Postscript by the Author (London: Continuum). [1923]. Camus, Albert (1983). The Outsider. Translated by Joseph Laredo (London: Penguin). [1942]. Camus, Albert (2013). The Myth of Sysiphus. Translated by Justin O’Brien. With an Afterword by James Wood (London: Penguin). [1942]. Friedman, Maurice (1991). (Editor). The Worlds of Existentialism. A Critical Reader (London and New York: Humanities Press). Guignon, Charles, and Derek Pereboom (1995). (Editors). Existentialism. Basic Writings (Indianapolis: Hackett). Heidegger, Martin (1962). Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford Blackwell). [1927]. Heidegger, Martin (1992). The Concept of Time. Translated by William McNeil (Oxford: Blackwell). [1924].

 Bibliography 

407

Heidegger, Martin (2011). Basic Writings: From ‘Being and Time’ (1927) to ‘The Task of Thinking’ (1964). Edited by David Farrell Krell. With a Foreword by Taylor Carman (London and New York: Routledge). Jaspers, Karl (1971). The Philosophy of Existence. Translated by Richard F. Grabau (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press). [1938]. Jaspers, Karl (1986). Basic Philosophical Writings. Edited, translated, with introductions by Edith Erlich, Leonard H.  Erlich, George B.  Pepper (Athens: Ohio University Press). Kaufman, Walter (1975). (Editor). Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre (New York: Penguin). Levinas, Emmanuel (2001). Existence and Existents. Translated by Alphonso Lingis. Foreword by Roberto Bernasconi (Pittsburg: Dusquesne University Press). [1947]. Macdonald, Paul S. (2001). (Editor). The Existentialist Reader: An Anthology of Key Texts. (New York: Routledge). Sartre, Jean Paul (1965). Nausea.Translated by Robert Baldick (London: Penguin). [1938]. Sartre, Jean Paul (2003). Being and Nothingness. Translated by Hazel E. Barnes. Introduction by Mary Warnock (London and New York: Routledge). [1943]. Sartre, Jean-Paul (2007). Existentialism and Humanism. Translation and Introduction by Philip Mairet (York: Methuen). [1946]. Tillich, Paul (2000). The Courage to Be. With an Introduction by Peter J. Gomes (New Haven and London: Yale University Press). [1952].

5. Works by Other Philosophers and Writers Aquinas, Thomas (2012). Compendium of Theology. Translated by Cyril Vollert. Introduced by Richard A. Munkelt (Tacoma WA: Angelico Press). Aquinas, Thomas (n.d.-a). Summa theologiae. www.corpusthomisticum.org. Aquinas, Thomas (n.d.-b). Quaestiones disputatae: de malo. www.corpusthomisticum.org. Aquinas, Thomas (n.d.-c). Quaestiones disputatae: de potentia Dei.www.corpusthomisticum.org. Aquinas, Thomas (n.d.-d). Quaestiones disputatae: de spiritualibus criaturis.www. corpusthomisticum.org. Aquinas, Thomas (n.d.-e). Quaestiones disputatae: de veritate.www.corpusthomisticum.org.

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Augustine (2003). City of God. Translated by Henry Bettenson. With a New Introduction by G. R. Evans (London: Penguin). Augustine (2006). Confessions and Enchiridion Edited and Translated by Albert Cook Outler (Louisville KY and London: Westminster-­John Knox Press). Augustine (n.d.-a). De libero arbitrio liber tres. San Aurelii Augustini Opera Omnia. www.augustinus.it. Augustine (n.d.-b). De spiritu et littera liber unus. San Aurelii Augustini Opera Omnia. www.augustinus.it. Bergson, Henri (1910). Time and Free Will. An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Translated by F.  L. Pogson (London and New  York: Macmillan). [1889]. Bergson, Henri (1911a). Creative Evolution. Translated by A. Mitchell (London: Macmillan). [1907]. Bergson, Henri (1911b). Matter and Memory. Translated by N.  M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (London and New York: Macmillan). [1896]. Descartes, René (2003). Meditations on First Philosophy. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Michael Moriarty (Oxford: Oxford University Press). [1641]. Descartes, René (2006). A Discourse on the Method. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Ian Maclean (Oxford: Oxford University Press). [1637]. Dostoyevsky, Fyodor (1972). Notes from Underground. Translated by Jessie Coulson (London: Penguin). Dostoyevsky, Fyodor (2004). The Brothers Karamazov. Translated, Introduced and Annotated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky (London: Vintage). [1880]. James, William (1982). The Varieties of Religious Experience. Introduction by Martin E. Marty (London: Penguin). [1902]. Kant, Immanuel (1998). Critique of Pure Reason. Translated and Edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W.  Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). [1781, 1787]. Kierkegaard, Søren (1992). Either/Or. A Fragment of Life. (Abridged). Translated and Introduced by Alistair Hannay (London: Penguin). [1843]. Kierkegaard, Søren (2004). The Sickness unto Death. Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Alistair Hannay (London: Penguin). [1849]. Kierkegaard, Søren (2006). Fear and Trembling. Edited and Translated by C.  Stephen Evans and Sylvia Walsh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). [1843].

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Kierkegaard, Søren (2009). Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Crumbs. Edited and Translated by Alastair Hannay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. [1846]. Kierekegaard, Søren (2015). The Concept of Anxiety. Translated, with an Introduction, by Alistair Hannay (New York: Norton). [1844]. Luther, Martin (1983). Preface to the letter of St Paul to the Romans. Translated by Andrew Thornton. www.christianhistoryinstitute.org. Musil, Robert (‘1997). The Man Without Qualities. Translated by Sophie Wilkins and Burton Pike (London: Picador). [1978]. Nietzsche, Friedrich (1961). Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated with an Introduction by R. J. Hollingdale (Harmondsworth: Penguin). [1883, 1885]. Nietzsche, Friedrich (2001). The Gay Science. Edited by Bernard Williams. Translated by Josephine Nauckhoff and Adrian del Caro Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). [1882, 1887]. Pascal, Blaise (1995). Pensées. Translated with an Introduction by A. J. Kraisheimer (London: Penguin). [1670]. Proust, Marcel (2006). Remembrance of Things Past. Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff. Vol. 1 (London: Wordsworth). [1913–1922]. Schopenhauer, Arthur (1966). The World as Will and Representation. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. 2 Vols (New York: Dover Publications). [1819, 1844]. Schopenhauer, Arthur (1992). On the Will in Nature. Translated by E. F. J. Payne. Edited with an Introduction by David E. Cartwright (Oxford and New York: Berg). [1836]. Spinoza, Benedict (1996). Ethics. Edited and translated by Edwin Curley, with an Introduction by Stuart Hampshire (London: Penguin). [1677].

B. Secondary Works Allen, E.  L. (1953). Existentialism from Within (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Ayer, A. J. (2001). Language, Truth and Logic (London: Penguin). [1936]. Bakewell, Sarah (2016). At the Existentialist Café. Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (London: Chatto and Windus). Barnes, Hazel E. (1961). The Literature of Possibility. A Study in Humanistic Existentialism (London: Tavistock). [1959]. Barrett, William (1990). Irrational Man. A Study in Existentialist Philosophy (New York: Anchor Books). [1958].

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Blackham, H.  J. (1961). Six Existentialist Thinkers (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Chatterjee, Margaret (1973). The Existentialist Outlook (New Delhi: Orient Longman). Clarke, Desmond (2003). Descartes’s Theory of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Collins, James (1977). The Existentialists. A Critical Study (Westport: Connecticut). [1952]. Cooper, David E. (1990). Existentialism. A Reconstruction (Oxford: Blackwell). Crowell, Steven (2012). (Editor). The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism (Cambridge: CUP). Daigle, Christine (2006). (Editor). Existentialist Thinkers and Ethics (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-­Queen’s University Press). Derrida, Jacques (1995). The Gift of Death. Translated by David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). [1992]. Dixon, William Macneile (1958). The Human Situation (Harmondsworth: Penguin). [1937]. Dreyfus, Hubert L. and Wrathall, Mark A. (2006). (Editors). A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism (Oxford: Blackwell). Earle, William, Edie, James, and Wild, John (1963). Christianity and Existentialism (Evanston IL: Northwestern University Press). Earnshaw, Steven (2006). Existentialism. A Guide for the Perplexed (London: Continuum). Ellis, Robert Richmond (1988). The Tragic Pursuit of Being. Unamuno and Sartre (Tuscaloosa and London: University of Alabama Press). Evans, Jan E. (2013). Miguel de Unamuno’s Quest for Faith. A Kierkegaardian Understanding of Unamuno’s Struggle to Believe. Foreword by Stephen T. Davis (Eugene OR: Pickwick Publications). Flynn, Thomas R. (2006). Existentialism. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Franz, Thomas R. (2018). Who has Agency in Unamuno’s Novels? (A Starting Point) (North Charleston SC: Create Space Independent Publishing). Franz, Thomas R. (2020). Unamuno and Religion (Seattle: Kindle Direct Publishing). Glenn, John D. Jr (1984). ‘Marcel and Sartre: The Philosophy of Communion and the Philosophy of Alienation’ in Schilpp and Hahn (1984). 525–50. Grimsley, Ronald (1960). Existentialist Thought (Cardiff: University of Wales Press).

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Hamer, Colin (1978). Voice in the Darkness. An Essay in Contemporary Catholic Existentialism (St Ives: United Writers Cornwall). Harper, Ralph (1972). The Existential Experience (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press). Hartshorne, Charles (1984). ‘Marcel on God and Causality’, in Schilpp and Hann (1984). 353–366. Heinemann, F. H. (1958). Existentialism and the Modern Predicament (London: A. and C. Black). Huertas-Jourda, José (1963). The Existentialism of Miguel de Unamuno (Gainsville FL: University of Florida). Johnson, Roberta (1993). Crossfire. Philosophy and the Novel in Spain, 1900–1934 (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky). Judaken, Jonathan and Bernasconi, Robert (2012). (Editors). Situating Existentialism. Key Texts in Context (New York: Columbia University Press). Keen, Sam (1984). ‘The Development of the Idea of Being in Marcel’s Thought’, in Schilpp and Hahn (1984). 99–120. Kingston, F. Temple (1961). French Existentialism. A Christian Critique (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Kruks, Sonia (1990). Situation and Human Existence (London: Unwin Hyman). Kuhn, Helmut (1949). Encounter with Nothingness (Hinsdale IL: Henry Regnery). Lacy, Allen (1967). Miguel de Unamuno: The Rhetoric of Existence (The Hague and Paris: Mouton and Co.). Langmead Casserly, J.  V. (1956). ‘Gabriel Marcel’, in Michalson, Carl (1956). 76–96. Lescoe, Francis J. (1974). Existentialism with or without God (New York: Alba House). Longhurst, C.  A. (2020). ‘Dismantling Descartes: Miguel de Unamuno and Gabriel Marcel’. Journal of Romance Studies, Vol. 20:1 (Spring 2020). 21–49. McBride, William L. (1997) (Editor). The Development and Meaning of Twentieth-Century Existentialism (New York and London: Garland Publishing). Mackay, John A. (1956). ‘Miguel de Unamuno’, in Michalson, Carl (1956). 43–58. Macquarrie, John (1966). Studies in Christian Existentialism (London: SCM Press). [1965]. Macquarrie, John (1973). An Existentialist Theology. A Comparison of Heidegger and Bultmann (Harmondsworth: Pelican). [1955].

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Macquarrie, John (1977). Existentialism (Harmondsworth: Penguin). [1972]. Martin, Clancy (2006) ‘Religious Existentialism’, in Dreyfus and Wrathall, (2006). 188–205. Michalson, Carl (1956). (Editor). Christianity and the Existentialists (New York: Scribner). Michelman, Stephen (2010). The A to Z of Existentialism (Lanham, Toronto, Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press). Mounier, Emmanuel (1948). Existentialist Philosophies. An Introduction. Translated by Eric Blow (London: Rockliff). [1947]. Mountford, Brian (2011). Christian Atheist. Belonging without Believing (Winchester and Washington: John Hunt Publishing). Nagel, Thomas (1986). The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Nucho, Fuad (1967). Berdyaev’s Philosophy: The Existential Paradox of Freedom and Necessity. With an Introduction by Dr Richard Kroner (London: Victor Gollancz). Olafson, Frederick A. (1967). Principles and Persons. An Ethical Interpretation of Existentialism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Olson, Robert G. (1962). An Introduction to Existentialism (New York: Dover Publications). Orringer, Nelson (1985). Unamuno y los protestantes liberales (Madrid: Gredos). Orringer, Nelson (2020). ‘Dinámica de la otra vida en la filosofía de Unamuno’, Claridades. Revista de Filosofía, Vol. 12 (1), 11–34. Ouimette, Victor (1974). Unamuno and the Heroic Will (New Haven and London: Yale University Press). Patrik, Linda E. (2001). Existential Literature: An Introduction (Belmont CA and London: Wadsworth). Pattison, George (1999). Anxious Angels. A Retrospective View of Religious Existentialism (London: Palgrave Macmillan). Pattison, George (2012). ‘Fear and Trembling and the Paradox of Christian Existentialism’, in in Judaken and Bernasconi (2012). 211–236. Pax, Clyde (1972). An Existential Approach to God: A Study of Gabriel Marcel (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff). Popper, Karl and Eccles, John (1977). The Self and the Brain (Berlin, New York, London: Springer Verlag). Reinhardt, Kurt F. (1960). The Existentialist Revolt (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing). [1952]. Reynolds, Jack (2006). Understanding Existentialism (Chesham, Bucks.: Acumen).

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Richardson, David Bonner (1968). Berdyaev’s Philosophy of History. An Existentialist Theory of Socialist Creativity and Eschatology. Preface by Charles Hartshorne (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff). Roberts, David E. (1959). Existentialism and Religious Belief (New York: Oxford University Press). [1957]. Schilpp, Paul Arthur and Hahn, Lewis Edwin (1984). (Editors). The Philosophy of Gabriel Marcel (The Library of Living Philosophers). (La Salle IL: Open Court). Shearson, William A. (1997). ‘The Common Assumptions of Existentialist Philosophy’, in McBride, William L. (1997). 279–95. Sinclair, Alison (2001). Uncovering the Mind. Unamuno, the Unknown, and the Vicissitudes of Self (Manchester: Manchester University Press). Smith, John E. (1984). ‘The Individual, the Collective and the Community’, in Schilpp and Hahn (1984). 337–49. Solomon, Robert C. (1972). From Rationalism to Existentialism. The Existentialists and their Nineteenth-­Century Backgrounds (New York: Harper and Row). Sorell, Tom (2005). Descartes Reinvented (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Spier, J.M. (1953). Christianity and Existentialism. Translated by D. H. Freeman (Philadelphia: Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Co.). Spinka, Matthew, (n.d. [1949?]). Nicolas Berdyaev: Captive of Freedom (Philadelphia: Westminster Press). Spinka, Matthew (1956). ‘Nicholas Berdyaev’, in Michalson, Carl (1956). 59–75. Strawson, Galen, et al.(2006). Consciousness and its Place in Nature. Edited by Anthony Freeman (Exeter: Imprint Academic). Sweetman, Brendan (2002). ‘Gabriel Marcel: Ethics Within a Christian Existentialism’, in Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy. Edited by John J.  Drummond and Lester Embree (London: Kluwer Academic). 269–87. Sweetman, Brendan (2008). The Vision of Gabriel Marcel (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi). Troisfontaines, Roger (1950). Existentialism and Christian Thought. Introduction and Translation by Martin Jarrett-Kerr (London: Adam and Charles Black). [1946]. Troisfontaines, Roger (1968a). De l’Existence à l’être. La Philosophie de Gabriel Marcel. 2 vols (Louvain: Éditions Nauwelaerts). Troisfontaines, Roger (1968b). What is Existentialism? (Albany NY: Magi Books). [1958].

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Van Fraassen, Bas C. (2002). The Empirical Stance (New Haven and London: Yale University Press). Wahl, Jean (1969). Philosophies of Existence. Translated by F. M. Lory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). [1959]. Warnock, Mary (1970). Existentialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Wartenberg, Thomas E. (2008). Existentialism. A Beginners’ Guide (London: Oneworld). Webber, Jonathan (2018). Rethinking Existentialism (New York: Oxford University Press). Westphal, Merold (2012). ‘Existentialism and Religion’, in Crowell, Steven (2012). 326–38. Wicks, Robert L. (2020). Introduction to Existentialism. From Kierkegaard to the Seventh Seal (London: Bloomsbury Academic). Wild, John (1955). The Challenge of Existentialism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). Woessner, Martin (2012). ‘Angst Across the Channel: Existentialism in Britain’, in Judaken and Bernasconi (2012). 145–179.

Name Index1

A

Allen, E. L., 35, 38, 186, 187 Ayer, A. J., 44n1 B

Bakewell, Sarah, 11 Barnes, Hazel, 32 Baroja, Pío, 8, 223 Barrett, William, 7, 11, 43, 44 Barth, Karl, 15, 31, 33, 152 Beauvoir, Simone de, vii, 1, 4, 6, 10, 32, 34, 38, 45, 111, 257, 284, 323, 324, 373, 378, 383, 384 Beckett, Samuel, 1, 10, 373 Bergson, Henri, 6, 10, 12, 17, 44n2, 56, 391n5 Berkeley, Bishop, 83

Bernasconi, Robert, 33 Böhme, Jakob, 187, 199, 274, 306, 319, 344 Bohr, Neils, 69, 108 Borges, Jorge Luis, 383 Brentano, Franz, 101 Browning, Robert, 172 Buber, Martin, 10, 15, 33, 83n6, 94, 256, 258n1, 275, 283, 284 Bultmann, Rudolf, 15, 31, 152, 258 C

Camus, Albert, 1, 5, 8, 10, 16, 17, 32, 38, 40, 172, 172n4, 178, 256, 373, 389 Chatterjee, Margaret, 139, 388 Clarke, Desmond, 93n8

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. A. Longhurst, Unamuno, Berdyaev, Marcel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81999-6

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416 

Name Index

Collins, James, 10, 26, 30 Cooper, David, 2, 3, 13, 255 Crowell, Steven, 33 D

Daigle, Christine, 381 Derrida, Jacques, 375 Descartes, René, 43, 46, 53, 58, 65, 73, 75–77, 89, 92, 93, 93n8, 101, 102, 160, 327–329, 339, 340, 401 Dixon, William Macneile, 67n7, 68 Döllinger, Johann Ignaz von, 14 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 6–8, 10, 22, 34, 41, 124, 125, 132, 185, 305, 373, 396 Dreyfus, Hubert, 33 Dyonisius the Areopagite, 187, 199 E

Earle, William, 38 Earnshaw, Steven, 5 Eccles, John, 329 Eckhart, Meister, 187, 274, 344 Edie, James, 38 Einstein, Albert, 9, 109, 391 Ellis, Robert Richmond, 161 F

Fanon, Frantz, 4, 6 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 310 Fichte, J. G., 101 Franz, Thomas R., 114, 156n2 Freud, Sigmund, 89, 136, 185

G

Galdós, Benito Pérez, 114, 223 Gide, André, 10, 135, 375 Gilson, Étienne, 38 Glenn, John D., 24 Gödel, Kurt, 125n3 Greene, Graham, 10, 373 H

Hahn, Lewis Edwin, see Schilpp, Paul Arthur Hamer, Colin, 380 Hartmann, Eduard von, 185 Hartshorne, Charles, 349, 350 Hegel, G. W. F., 9, 58, 60, 277 Heidegger, Martin, vi, 1, 3, 5, 7, 10, 11, 13, 17, 21–23, 25–30, 29n2, 35, 37–39, 44, 45, 52n3, 59, 69, 93–96, 95n9, 98, 102, 124, 159, 161, 178, 185–188, 198–200, 202, 211, 213, 214, 217, 255, 276, 282, 283, 286, 305, 318, 338, 347, 354, 357, 365, 368, 373–375, 382, 385, 388–395, 390–391n4, 391n5, 397–399 Heinemann, F. H., 45 Heisenberg, Werner, 108 Herder, Johann Gottfried von, 60, 263 Hesse, Hermann, 10, 90, 373 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 36, 373 Huertas-Jourda, José, 49–50 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 19, 60, 263 Hume, David, 73, 77 Husserl, Edmund, 45, 101, 186 Hyacinthe, Père, 212

  Name Index  I

Ionesco, Eugene, 373 J

James, William, 73n1, 80, 141, 160, 166, 273, 335 Jaspers, Karl, vi, 1, 3, 5, 10, 17, 21, 22, 25, 26, 29, 35, 37, 44n2, 45, 83, 137, 178, 236, 256, 276, 365, 368, 372, 374 Jesus Christ, 26, 37, 124, 133, 148, 150, 157, 163, 184, 197, 199, 201, 220, 221, 223, 226, 230, 232, 233, 236, 251, 256, 258, 259, 263, 267n3, 268, 275, 288, 296, 309, 310, 336, 337, 341, 343, 345, 356, 361, 372, 382, 401 Jesus of Nazareth, 33, 125, 131, 132, 147, 154, 155, 162, 163, 168, 184, 192, 196, 198, 218, 221, 223, 229, 232, 235, 258, 266, 267, 275, 286, 303, 325, 326, 334, 345, 355, 372, 378, 380, 385, 393 Johnson, Roberta, 12 Judaken, Jonathan, 33 K

Kafka, Franz, 8, 10, 373 Kant, Immanuel, 50, 58, 86, 87, 91, 101, 102, 110, 112, 113, 122, 157, 263, 291, 316, 332, 378, 379 Kaufman, Walter, 256 Keen, Sam, 349

417

Kierkegaard, Søren, 5–10, 17–19, 22, 31, 34, 37, 41, 60, 90, 107, 121, 135, 184, 185, 187, 193, 197, 198, 210–212, 222, 258, 291, 331, 358, 377, 379, 383, 393, 394, 396–399, 396n6 Kingston, F. Temple, 38 Kripke, Saul, 328n1 Kruks, Sonia, 171 Kuhn, Helmut, 187 L

Lacy, Allen, 158, 159, 159n3 Lamennais, Félicité de, 14, 129, 212 Langmead Casserly, J. V., 36, 37 Lavalle, Louis, 12 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 91, 95n9, 311 Lescoe, Francis J., 39, 40 Levinas, Emmanuel, 10, 95, 99, 258n1 Luther, Martin, 151 M

Mackay, John A., 36 Macquarrie, John, 28, 39, 187, 259n2 Malraux, André, 10 Maritain, Jacques, 15, 38 Martin, Clancy, 33 Mascal, E. L., 38 Mauriac, François, 35 McGuinn, Colin, 328n1 McTaggart, John, 325 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 10, 38, 45, 368, 384

418 

Name Index

Michalson, Carl, 36 Mounier, Emmanuel, 10 Mountford, Brian, 367 Müller, F. Max, 159n3 Murdoch, Iris, 10, 373 Musil, Robert, 12, 373 N

Nagel, Thomas, 328n1, 371n1, 381, 381n3 Newman, Cardinal, 316 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5, 6, 8–10, 22, 32, 34, 41, 79, 161, 270, 381, 383, 397, 398, 401 Nucho, Fuad, 199 Nyesmyelov, Viktor, 91 O

Olafson, Frederick A., 108, 381 Olson, Robert G., 355–357 Origen of Alexandria, 340 Orringer, Nelson, 196n1, 277n4, 337 Ortega y Gasset, José, 12, 46, 73, 330, 331 Ouimette, Victor, 47, 331 P

Pascal, Blaise, 22, 37, 46, 160, 178, 212, 296, 334, 396–398, 396n6 Pattison, George, 8, 15, 33, 34, 40, 41, 397 Pax, Clyde, 354 Penrose, Roger, 328n1 Pirandello, Luigi, 10, 90, 373

Plato, 58, 72, 148, 341, 376, 384 Plotinus, 187 Pope Leo XIII, 103 Pope Pius IX, 103 Pope Pius X, 31 Pope Pius XI, 267n3 Pope Pius XII, 25, 35 Popper, Karl, 134, 328, 329 Proust, Marcel, 10, 12, 90 Pushkin, Alexander, 127 R

Rahner, Karl, 15 Reinhardt, Kurt, 3, 4 Richardson, David Bonner, 276 Ricoeur, Paul, 24, 26–28, 61, 172, 248, 282, 370 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 10, 36 Roberts, David E., 28, 37, 186 Rosenzweig, Franz, 15 S

St Augustine, 22, 50, 72, 130, 131, 141, 147, 148, 150, 151, 156n2, 179, 180, 211, 218, 222, 291–293, 301, 311, 326, 328, 396, 399 St Francis, 271 St John, 124, 276, 356 St John of the Cross, 187 St Luke, 219, 220, 235 St Mark, 222, 275 St Matthew, 148, 196 St Paul, 82, 82n5, 88, 147, 183, 196, 197, 203, 218, 229, 267, 291, 326, 336, 355

  Name Index 

St Seraphim, 127 St Teresa of Avila, 274 St Thomas Aquinas, 38, 110, 117, 123, 130–132, 141, 147–151, 174, 179, 180, 183, 218, 291–293, 293n1, 326, 327, 359n5, 367, 371, 384 Sartre, Jean-Paul, vi, 1, 3–7, 10–12, 18, 21, 22, 24–27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 35, 37–40, 45, 78, 82, 83, 100, 101, 109–111, 123, 124, 129, 132, 135–139, 161, 178, 185, 188, 199, 202n4, 217, 255, 256, 258, 261, 283, 284, 292, 307, 318, 356, 365, 368, 371–375, 377, 378, 381–383, 385–387, 389, 394, 395, 397–399, 401 Scheler, Max, 91 Schilpp, Paul Arthur, 23–25, 30, 350 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 27 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 19, 20, 79, 81, 84, 87, 117, 122, 129, 225, 227, 265, 277, 302, 324, 325, 335, 336, 341, 342, 344, 346 Sciacca, Michele, 39, 40 Scotus Erigena, Johannes, 187 Sénancour, Étienne, 341 Shestov, Lev, 8, 10, 15, 33 Silesius, Angelus, 274, 344 Sinclair, Alison, 48 Smith, John E., 283 Solomon, Robert C., 378

419

Sorell, Tom, 93n8 Spencer, Herbert, 19, 336, 337 Spier, J. M., 35, 36 Spinka, Matthew, 36, 87, 306 Spinoza, Baruch, 20, 52, 52n3, 53, 53n4, 58, 60, 79, 80, 80n4, 121, 121n2, 141, 263, 324, 336, 341, 394 Strawson, Galen, 73n1, 328n1 Svevo, Italo, 90 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 60 T

Taine, Hippolyte, 19 Tillich, Paul, 15, 17, 31, 34, 38, 152, 201n3 Tirso de Molina, 219 Troisfontaines, Roger, 16, 34, 35, 40, 64, 146, 356 V

Van Fraassen, Bas C., 371n1 Vogüé, Eugène de, 8 W Warnock, Mary, 45, 356, 357 Webber, Jonathan, 4–6, 111, 381 Westphal, Merold, 33 Wicks, Robert, 5, 17, 34, 357 Wild, John, 38 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 6 Woessner, Martin, 373n2 Wrathal, Mark, 33

Subject Index1

A

Abstraction, 2, 4, 21, 44, 50, 53, 65, 82, 98, 126, 134, 169, 171, 233, 311, 314, 329, 341, 352, 378 Actus essendi, 110 Affective thinking, 68 Affects, the, 44, 49, 51, 59, 68, 70, 220, 228, 235, 237, 282, 399, 400 Afterlife, 191, 278, 332, 337, 338, 397 Agape, 218, 229, 230, 237, 247, 248 Agency, 82, 87, 114, 123, 142, 169, 180, 185, 205, 208, 214, 293, 310, 319, 325, 348, 350, 358, 376, 377, 387 Agnosticism, 26, 172, 284 Alma, 117

Anacefaleosis, 337, 338 Angst, 90, 198, 199, 210, 393 Anguish, 38, 121, 125, 126, 178, 184, 193, 194, 198, 199, 210–212, 252, 303, 304, 320, 394–399 Anthropomorphism, 34, 50 Anti-rationalism, 40, 44, 47, 160 Apocatastasis, 188, 336, 340, 392 Asceticism, 90, 127, 232, 251, 311 Atheism, 7, 20, 38, 39, 136, 165, 188, 304, 313, 319, 338, 356 B

Beauty, 67, 72, 88, 90, 192, 193, 201, 202, 213, 214, 228, 230, 234, 361 Being, 71, 96, 107, 145, 292, 323

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 C. A. Longhurst, Unamuno, Berdyaev, Marcel, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81999-6

421

422 

Subject Index

Being-in-the-world, 13, 59, 217, 280, 288, 352, 385, 389, 394, 397, 402 Being-towards-death, 186, 388 Being-with, 74, 94, 102, 374 Besorgen, 27, 287, 394 Big Bang, 306, 308, 337, 371, 391 Body, the, 14, 39, 61, 65, 70, 72, 73, 75–77, 88, 89, 91, 94, 96, 97, 101, 104, 119, 165, 172, 175, 181, 220, 231, 251, 303, 324–328, 347, 354, 360, 382, 384–386 C

Caritas, 218, 221, 228–230, 234, 237, 243, 245 Cartesianism, 93n8 Catholic, 14, 15, 25, 26, 31, 39, 130, 132, 145, 153, 172, 220, 285, 359 Chronology, 6, 7, 9, 17 Collective identity, 264, 265 Collectivism, 258, 270, 271 Collectivity, 75, 76, 120, 195, 255, 262, 265, 271, 273, 333, 380, 382 Communion, 55, 60, 92, 94, 135, 146, 154, 207, 208, 215, 220, 230, 233, 234, 240, 246, 251, 252, 260, 262, 263, 271, 272, 275, 276, 282, 284, 288, 315, 334, 351–353, 374, 382, 387 Compassion, 91, 200, 218, 223, 225, 226, 228–230, 234–237, 243, 252, 303, 310, 311, 320, 400

Compatibility problem, 291, 295, 304, 317–318 Consciousness, 24, 55, 58, 68–70, 73, 73n1, 75–79, 82, 85, 86, 88, 90, 91, 93, 97, 101, 102, 104, 109, 116, 118, 130, 137, 143, 161, 166–168, 185, 188, 196n2, 201, 215, 226, 227, 227n1, 229, 248, 252, 260, 262, 265, 267, 268, 270, 273, 288, 297, 299, 301–303, 311, 318–321, 324, 327–329, 333–337, 351, 361, 369, 378, 379, 382, 385, 386, 395 Creation, 11, 70, 83, 86, 87, 136, 139, 161, 187, 190, 199, 202, 213, 228, 237, 270, 280, 298, 301, 306, 307, 313, 319, 334, 374, 391 Creativity, 20, 22, 31, 32, 52, 53, 55, 56, 62, 88, 91, 104, 126, 140, 142, 167, 190, 197, 202, 210, 269–271, 275, 359, 374, 390, 400, 401 Culpability, 294, 295, 301, 318, 320 D

Dasein, 27, 388–390, 393–395 Death, 237, 324, 325, 392, 393, 394, 395, 341, 343, 18, 18, 19, 20, 24, 75, 79, 126, 145, 165, 190, 190, 190, 193, 209, 209, 215, 221, 224, 224, 224, 226, 236, 236, 236, 236, 236, 236, 241, 241, 242, 249, 249, 249, 249, 249, 252, 252, 252, 252, 252, 252, 252, 267, 284,

  Subject Index 

309, 310, 310, 323, 327, 327, 327, 328, 329, 329, 331, 333, 335, 337, 338, 339, 339, 339, 339, 339, 339, 339, 339, 340, 342, 342, 344, 346, 346, 347, 347, 347, 347, 348, 348, 348, 348, 349, 350, 351, 352, 352, 352, 352, 353, 354, 354, 354, 354, 355, 355, 358, 359, 359, 362, 363, 363, 388, 388, 389, 389, 393, 393, 393, 393, 394, 395, 395, 395, 395, 397, 398, 398, 401 Deductive reason, 47 Dehumanization, 66, 103, 104, 315 Depersonalization, 66, 104, 278, 279, 284 Despair, 184, 185, 189, 205–207, 209, 212, 247, 320, 347, 389, 397 Determinism, 91, 112–114, 125, 133, 137, 138, 376 Disponibilité, 141, 237, 247, 248, 256 Disquietude, 6, 80, 193, 199, 311 Divine law, 318 Divine providence, 16, 304 Dualism, 77, 89, 305, 327–329, 340, 385 E

Ecumenical movement, 359 Ecumenism, 23, 360n6 Ego, the, 90, 92–94, 101, 203, 204, 276, 340 Egocentricity, 282 Embodiment, 14, 65, 88, 105, 124, 145, 170, 195, 384, 386, 387

423

Empiricism, 37, 206, 273, 370, 371n1 Emplacement, 14, 105 Encyclical, 13, 25, 35, 267n3 Entanglement, 260, 286 Entropy, 74, 307, 336 Epistemology, 54, 60, 355 Eros, 218, 229 Eschatology, 198, 392 Estrangement, 18, 284, 296 Eternity, 80, 80n4, 122, 191, 192, 197, 228, 277, 278, 298, 309, 324, 328, 336, 339–346, 351, 361, 391–393 Eternization, 192, 393 Ethic(s), 52, 52n3, 53n4, 121, 141, 236, 256–258, 286, 324, 378–381, 381n3, 393 Ethical code, 157, 359, 367, 376 Eudaemonism, 125, 132, 203, 375 Exile, 26, 31, 146, 171, 203, 214, 241, 277, 289 Existential time, 344–346, 389 Experiential thinking, 370 F

Finitude, 52, 52n3, 79–81, 197, 250, 288, 384, 388, 390, 393, 395, 397, 398 Fürsorge, 287, 394 G

Grace, 128, 130, 131, 139, 140, 142, 151, 162, 208, 258, 259n2, 311, 327, 387 Grand Inquisitor, 125, 132, 305

424 

Subject Index

H

K

Home-coming, 210, 214

Knowledge, 4, 15, 16, 21, 22, 37, 48, 50, 51, 53, 55, 57–60, 63, 68, 82, 86, 87, 96, 100, 119, 125, 131, 141, 147, 149–151, 154, 156, 161, 167, 171–175, 178, 180, 181, 248, 273, 280, 307, 308, 314, 318, 332, 347, 349, 358, 362, 370, 371n1, 377

I

Idealism, 3, 68, 77, 87, 88 Identity, 13, 18, 27, 71–73, 76, 77, 79, 82, 83, 93, 94, 98, 103, 110, 176, 177, 180, 203, 215, 222, 226, 233, 258, 260, 261, 264–266, 271, 276, 288, 302, 316 Immanence, 196, 265, 276, 298, 303, 318, 339, 349, 372, 376, 381 Inauthenticity, 124, 255 Incarnation, 26, 96, 105, 123, 147, 349, 401 Indeterminacy, 108, 147, 350, 369, 376 Individuality, 33, 73, 81, 83, 91, 98, 237, 258, 260, 266, 269, 273, 302, 382 Infinity, 80, 80n4, 92, 122, 213, 241, 324, 339, 340, 393 Intentionality, 101, 136, 348 Intersubjectivity, 64, 99, 101, 102, 140, 246–248, 250, 251, 256, 284, 351, 353, 374, 382 Irrationalism, 47 I-Thou, 94, 275, 276, 283, 284 I-We, 94 I-You, 33, 83 J

Judeo-Christian, 26, 28, 187

L

Language, 12, 13, 19–21, 19n1, 28, 60, 111, 122, 158, 159, 159n3, 188, 263, 273, 325 Left Bank, 11 Liberty, 125, 130, 132, 134, 138, 289 Limit situation, 236, 243, 245 Literature, 10, 12, 13, 19, 47, 60, 75, 114, 219, 373, 374 Logic, 17, 27, 44, 45, 48, 50, 55, 56, 67, 119, 133, 156, 157, 159, 206, 209, 306 Logical positivism, 7, 37, 44n1, 56 Logos, 159, 199, 269 M

Marxism, 11, 146, 199, 256, 270, 400 Mass man, 255, 273, 288 Materialism, 55, 68, 77, 104, 127, 142, 143, 300, 310, 370, 400, 402 Mechanism, 13, 72, 75, 169, 212, 312

  Subject Index 

Memory, 68, 75, 76, 91, 93, 189, 194, 199, 220, 238, 239, 323, 351 Microcosm, 86, 87, 91, 269, 270, 382 Mind, the, 19, 20, 45, 46, 58, 67–69, 71, 76, 79, 82, 87, 88, 90, 93, 109, 134, 144, 158, 160, 165, 210, 239, 327, 328, 333, 335, 340, 348, 360, 385 Modernism, 3, 8, 12, 13 Monism, 77, 77n2, 305 Moral choice, 293, 294 Moral law, 318, 378 Mortality, 252, 277, 332, 346 Mutuality, 258, 264, 288, 386 Mysticism, 20, 167, 242, 282 N

Naturalism, 3, 12 Neo-Thomism, 35, 350, 359, 367 New Physics, 108, 337 New Testament, 14, 26, 183, 201, 274, 325 Nihilism, 4, 25, 187, 284, 390 Noumenal self, 346 Noumenon, 87, 265, 336, 339–346, 352 O

Objectification, 20, 21, 59, 176, 275, 343, 391, 391n4 Objectivity, 21, 48, 52, 125, 257 Old Testament, 27, 320, 325 Ontological exigence, 23, 96 Ontology, 20, 54, 97, 101, 119, 169, 248, 276, 280, 307, 367 Origination, 107, 110

425

P

Pain, 102, 119, 143, 193, 201, 202, 226, 236, 296, 301–304, 307, 310, 317, 320, 344, 377 Pan-psychism, 73n1, 227n1, 335 Paradise, 92, 201–203 Participation, 14, 100, 138, 168, 202, 211, 221, 248, 280, 281, 287, 309, 316, 343, 349, 382 Perdurance, 12, 79, 116, 179, 192, 195, 213, 215, 226, 228, 252, 288, 301, 324, 331, 332, 338, 343, 353, 357–359, 392 Perpetuation, 190, 194, 224 Personality, 7, 12, 18, 21, 22, 32, 33, 36, 46, 52, 54, 58, 60, 61, 70, 78, 81, 84–86, 84n7, 88, 90–92, 94, 98, 100, 104, 111, 114, 119, 124, 126, 127, 138, 153, 156, 181, 201, 221, 231–234, 246, 250, 259, 269–271, 276, 280, 308, 332, 339, 340, 342, 343, 345, 346, 360–363, 368, 379, 387 Physicalism, 77, 105 Positivism, 3, 7, 8, 12, 19, 37, 41, 44n1, 54–56, 152, 370 Predestination, 16, 112, 148, 293, 297, 305, 342 Presence, 15, 29n2, 33, 69, 76, 83n6, 90, 99, 100, 119, 141, 156, 162, 170, 175, 177, 181, 188, 194, 199, 205, 208, 220, 227, 237–239, 246, 249–252, 262, 263, 277, 280, 285, 292, 296, 303, 313, 319–321, 325, 348, 349, 351–353, 356, 358, 362, 363, 382, 387, 396, 398, 401

426 

Subject Index

Presumption, 184, 205, 207, 210 Protestant, 31, 36, 130, 153, 242, 258, 285, 297, 359 Psyche, 72, 165, 214, 237, 261 Psychical reality, 129 Punishment, 298, 299, 301, 308–310, 316, 317, 340 Purpose, 32, 53, 57, 78, 94, 126, 142, 143, 145, 158, 172n4, 181, 204, 245, 269, 275, 310, 319, 320, 323, 354, 357, 361, 368, 371, 380, 381n11, 382, 383, 393, 400 Q

Quantum, 7, 59n5, 108, 337, 350, 376 R

Rationalism, 13, 43, 44, 47, 54, 61, 77, 78, 130, 136, 173, 179, 332, 370 Reconstructive reflection, 61, 66 Redemption, 16, 196–203, 235, 308–310, 378, 390 Reductionism, 5, 45, 97, 136 Reproductive instinct, 52, 225 Responsibility, 6, 9, 14, 18, 73, 107, 111, 113, 124, 128, 142, 209, 241, 255, 292, 299, 301, 305, 308, 313, 316, 318, 319, 321, 344, 350, 356, 375–377, 381–383, 394 Revelation, 14, 16, 32, 36, 91, 100, 131, 150, 161, 166, 168, 199, 201, 235, 272, 274, 277, 315, 334, 341, 349 Russian Orthodox, 31, 146, 285

S

Salvation, 32, 110, 134, 151, 195, 202, 203, 209, 212, 215, 219, 232, 235, 258, 266–269, 286, 288, 289, 296, 324, 334, 338, 360, 367, 375, 395, 397 Scholastic, 28, 29, 34, 87, 131, 342, 359n5 Scientism, 7, 13, 31, 41, 43, 45, 47, 48, 54, 58, 62, 68, 103 Sectarianism, 269, 270, 288 Self-centredness, 100, 269, 280, 377, 382 Self-identity, 75, 78, 84, 85, 111, 327, 336, 338 Self-perpetuation, 20 Sentiments, 32, 44, 49, 50, 57, 61, 66, 67, 79, 79n3, 146, 152, 173, 183, 190, 192, 195, 207, 209, 212, 215, 217, 219, 221, 225, 226, 230, 234, 235, 238, 245, 246, 248, 250, 262, 265, 266, 281, 282, 297, 298, 302, 316, 324, 334, 347, 349, 360, 362, 363, 368, 374, 399 Sexuality, 89, 217, 220, 230, 231, 250, 297 Sin, 151, 185, 201, 202, 264, 270, 274, 288, 291, 294, 296, 299, 300, 309, 310, 315–317, 320, 397 Sobornost, 251, 271, 273, 287 Society, 378, 24, 66, 94, 127, 139, 194, 195, 215, 222, 247, 260, 260, 264, 266, 270, 270, 272, 275, 275, 278, 300, 300, 301, 334, 337, 379, 382, 382 Solidarity, 67, 142, 163, 165, 195, 203, 215, 226, 227, 266,

  Subject Index 

268–270, 279, 284–286, 320, 354, 374, 382, 400 Solipsism, 255, 388 Solitude, 38, 94, 127, 260, 267, 270, 333 Soul, the, 39, 61, 70, 72, 75–77, 77n2, 89, 91, 101, 117, 120, 129, 148, 154, 155, 158, 159, 170, 176–178, 194, 204, 210, 214, 233, 234, 237, 244, 247, 251, 261, 262, 272, 288, 303, 326–329, 335, 340–342, 384, 398 Spirit, 20, 47, 60, 66, 77, 88, 90, 92, 103, 104, 117, 118, 120, 122–133, 165–168, 178, 181, 192, 196n2, 221, 225, 228, 231, 234, 236, 237, 261, 262, 267, 270, 272–276, 284, 288, 297, 299, 300, 325, 326, 343, 345, 346, 357, 385, 399, 401 Spirituality, 14, 31, 89, 94, 103, 104, 114, 132, 169, 185, 197, 200, 203, 232, 251, 262, 273, 274, 276, 277, 310, 340, 367 Subjectivism, 14, 21, 40 Subjectivity, 8, 40, 63, 74, 100, 146, 255, 376 Survival instinct, 52, 301, 343 System building, 3, 65 T

Technocratic, 66, 279, 350 Technology, 62, 104, 209 Temporality, 6, 200, 213, 214, 277, 343, 384, 388, 390n4, 393, 395 Testimony, 174, 175, 177, 204, 295, 308, 346

427

Theology, v, 15, 20, 26, 28, 37, 41, 57, 122, 127, 131, 132, 150, 152, 153, 155, 171, 173–175, 180, 208, 273, 285, 313, 327, 333, 342, 345, 350, 351, 359, 362, 362n7, 399, 401 Thomism, 15, 131, 174 Transcendence, 11, 26, 80, 91, 99, 137, 139, 140, 151, 157, 158, 170, 175, 177, 179, 196n2, 204, 237, 252, 316, 339, 343, 348, 350, 356, 372, 379 Trust, 151, 154, 155, 190, 240, 314, 332 Truth, 26, 27, 33, 50, 55, 57, 58, 72, 80, 88, 100, 118, 119, 121, 122, 124–126, 125n3, 130–135, 138, 139, 143, 147, 149–151, 160, 168, 169, 173, 174, 177, 178, 180, 186, 199, 201, 203, 205, 218, 250, 266, 275, 286, 295, 297, 299, 319, 351, 355, 356, 360, 360n6, 361, 370, 379, 380 U

Uncertainty, 82, 158, 160, 161, 164, 174, 178, 184, 191, 195, 205, 214, 333, 347, 353, 358, 394, 400 Understanding, 1, 5, 21, 23, 35, 49, 51, 57, 60, 62, 69, 74, 84n7, 85, 96, 99, 100, 102, 122, 141, 148, 149, 157–159, 167, 242, 251, 262, 264, 273, 275, 280, 282, 286, 287, 334, 337, 369, 382, 398, 401

428 

Subject Index

Uneasiness, 210, 211, 395, 396, 398, 399 Ungrund, 199, 306, 307, 319 Universal consciousness, 227n1, 265, 303, 335, 361 Utilitarianism, 203

381–383, 387, 394, 395, 398–402 Verification, 56, 68, 134, 249 Vienna Circle, 44n1 Volition, 68, 70, 72, 111, 112, 162 W

V

Value(s), 8, 11, 33, 58, 59, 61, 66, 67, 79, 88, 90–92, 98, 102, 103, 105, 117, 120, 127, 133–141, 143, 144, 165, 173, 174, 176, 195, 203, 205, 211, 213, 236, 246, 257, 260, 262, 270, 272, 273, 276, 278, 279, 283, 285, 286, 288, 294, 301, 308, 313, 318, 319, 330, 339, 341, 351, 353, 359–361, 366, 367, 370–372, 376–378,

Will, 29, 32, 46–48, 50–52, 61, 69, 76, 79, 80, 100, 102, 107, 108, 110, 112–115, 118, 119, 121, 124, 127–129, 131, 136–138, 141, 142, 147, 148, 157, 162, 166, 179, 184, 185, 201, 204, 208, 212, 240, 244, 265, 269, 292–294, 302, 304, 305, 307, 313, 314, 324, 326, 331, 332, 335, 336, 338, 344, 348, 352, 356, 358, 377, 381n3, 400