Even in a Savaged Landscape…

If a Lutheran impulse lurks within me, as I noted yesterday, I also have, you might say, a marginally existentialist temperament. When looking for a starting point for making sense of life, I find that point anchored in personal consciousness (with all of its powers included, of course). Before thought, there must be a thinker; before experience, there must be someone to have it. But my position does not extend to affirming what authentic existentialists do, namely that “existence is prior to essence.” For the hard-core existentialist, each human essence (“what we are”) is created by the person’s voluntary action. Curiously, as I grasp this—to the extent that I do—the existentialist’s “existence” is what Aristotle seems to have meant by potential. Potential is a devil of a concept. It must be there, but yet it isn’t—yet. In any case, for me, the core self has “features,” right out of the box, thus something that we are—long before we’ve done anything at all. We are a power of awareness and of will.

Been reading Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Anxiety. It is an admirable, brief summation of Sartre’s philosophy from the perspective of “the eternal feminine.” I owe Brandon Watson for pointing me in that directed quite some time ago. The book is inaccessible to people who’ve never grappled with Sartre—in whose Being and Nothingness the various core concepts de Beauvoir uses are first defined with plentiful examples; de Beauvoir does not bother with definitions: she is addressing other existentialists. But once those notions are firmly renewed, de Beauvoir’s work is helpful. Reading it came the thought: “Lord, that twentieth century! An absolute desert, a ravaged landscape. And yet spirituality rises from that wreckage nonetheless.”

Reorienting myself in this arcane world of thought and feeling born of ruin, I came across a wonderful short paper by Gordon R. Lewis, of the Conservative Baptist Seminary (Denver, CO), titled “Augustine and Existentialism” (link). Lewis traces the essence of existentialism back to Augustine (354-430). Augustine’s view is only marginally existentialist; he would also have found problems in putting essence second. He, of course, lived in a time of disintegration—that of the Western Roman Empire. The cultural landscape might have been similarly savaged.

I’ve come to think, reading another existentialist, Hans Jonas, in his The Gnostic Religion (link on this blog) that the same spirit, minus philosophical machinery, also inspired Gnosticism, a phenomenon that predates Augustine (say second century AD), with the Hellenistic order coming unraveled. The same phenomenon sprouting, each time, from a landscape of cultural chaos.