PALMQUIST - Tree.34. Angst and The Paradox of Courage

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34. Angst and the Paradox of Courage

by Stephen Palmquist (stevepq@hkbu.edu.hk)
The most fundamental question of all ontology is: Why is there something
(or being) rather than nothing (or non-being)? This question is the ultimate
basis of all existential wonder. For the question, Why is the world here?
leads directly to the question, Why am I here? and from there to a host of
questions about the meaning of life. The latter has been among the most
frequent topics addressed in my students' insight papers. This is
particularly true once we recognize that most questions about death are
also, at least indirectly, questions about the meaning of life. For the
awareness of non-being first raises the question of being; and in the same
way the awareness of death first raises the question of the meaning of life.
In Lecture 35 we will examine how the inevitability of death affects the
mystery that arises when we search for life's meaning. But first let's focus
on a closely related paradox that arises within us any time we choose life in
the face of death.
According to most existentialists, any time we come face to face with the
possibility of our own non-being (e.g., as when we reflect upon our eventual
death), we have a natural "existential response" involving a very special
kind of fear. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), the German existentialist
philosopher who, with Wittgenstein, is generally regarded as one of the two
most influential twentieth-century philosophers (see Week VI),
distinguished between this special existential fear and ordinary kinds of
fear in the following way. Ordinary fear is a person's empirical response to a
threatening object within the world: it usually requires us either to fight the
object in hopes of overpowering its threat, or to flee from the object in hopes
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of escaping from its threat. In both cases we can say the person who is
afraid of something in the world responds by trying to push something out
of the world-either the feared object or one's own self (see Figure XII.1a).
By contrast, existential fear is a response in the depths of a person's being
to the general human situation, especially when that situation reveals
within us the presence of non-being or "nothingness" in some way. The
natural human response is to flee from the threat, since it seems impossible
to fight against "nothing"! But in this case we flee not by seeking to escape
the world, but by immersing ourselves more fully into the empirical objects
of our ordinary experience (see Figure XII.1b). This may be done in many
ways, such as by pursuing hobbies, watching television, becoming an avid
sports fan, or even becoming a scholar and immersing oneself in books.
Heidegger's point is that the usual (unhealthy) way of escaping from the
threat of non-being is merely to pretend it is not there, by immersing
oneself in being.
(a) Ordinary Empirical Fear(b) Existential Fear ("Angst")

Figure XII.1:
Inappropriate Responses to Two Kinds of Fear
Using Heidegger's distinction as an introduction, let us now look back to
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the ideas of an earlier philosopher, who also had much to say about the
nature and function of existential fear. Sren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) is
generally recognized as the father of theistic existentialism (as opposed to
the atheistic existentialism fathered by Nietzsche). Kierkegaard
(pronounced "Keerkagore", meaning "churchyard"-i.e., graveyard) was a
lonely Danish philosopher who wrote twenty-one books (as well as 8000
pages of unpublished papers) in twelve short years, and whose ideas were
never well received during his own lifetime. He expounded his main
philosophical ideas in a series of books written under several different
pseudonyms (some arguing against each other!). But in the last few years of
his life he wrote a number of books using his own name, mainly attacking
the corruptions he perceived in the Christianity of his day. Of his many
interesting ideas, the only one we will have time to investigate here is his
use of the Danish word "angst" to refer to what I have called "existential
fear".
Although angst is sometimes translated as "dread" or "anxiety", neither of
these words captures the full depth of the existential fear of non-being
Kierkegaard intended this word to denote. Dread is too often associated
with extreme displeasure or apprehension at the thought of facing some
empirical threat, as when I say I dread going to the dentist. Likewise,
anxiety is too often associated with ordinary "stress", as when students say
they feel anxious about their ability to pass an examination. In order to
guard against the temptation to connect angst too closely with ordinary
empirical types of fear, many scholars have adopted the habit of simply
using the original Danish word-a practice I shall follow today. When I do
refer on several occasions to dread or anxiety, we should, of course, identify
these with angst, not empirical fear.
Kierkegaard's first book, Either-Or (1843), distinguished between two basic
ways of life, the aesthetic and the ethical. The former is based on feelings
and focuses on enjoying the pleasures of life; the latter is based on duty and
focuses on doing what is good. As such, this distinction corresponds to the
distinction we discussed in Lecture 22, between utilitarianism and
deontology. Those who first read the book debated over which of these two
opposing points of view the author actually wished to support. But
Kierkegaard's true intention was to demonstrate that either choice on its
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own is as absurd or incomplete as the other. For he later published another

book, Stages on Life's Way (1845), wherein he argued
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that the aesthetic and ethical

Figure XII.2: Kierkegaard's Three Life Stages and Two
stages both point beyond
Leaps
themselves to a third stage, the
religious, which synthesizes and
surpasses the two earlier stages
(see Figure XII.2). He defined the
religious way of life in terms of an
attitude of "inwardness" that transcends the "outwardness"
required for theoretical reasoning
and scientific knowledge.
In The Concept of
Anxiety (1844) Kierkegaard developed his idea of angst by analyzing the

Christian idea of sin. Angst, he claimed, is a psychological state arising
naturally out of the essential, ontological nature of man: our freedom gives
us infinite potential for the future; yet our presence in time makes us finite
and ignorant. In other words, angst arises out of the tension between the
sensuousness of our body (rooted as it is in time) and the freedom of our
soul (rooted as it is in eternity). Our ignorance insures that the choices we
make for our own future will eventually plunge us into sin, so that angst
comes to be experienced as "entangled freedom" (CA 320)-that is, as the
infinite tangled up in the finite. Sin, then, as the normal state of the human
spirit (see Figure XII.3), is the first of two "qualitative leaps" we must make
in order to progress through the stages of life shown in Figure XII.2. After
leaping from innocence to sin (as in the story of Adam and Eve), the second
leap is from sin to faith (as in the story of Abraham). The first leap
corresponds to the change from the aesthetic to the ethical (or vice versa),
while the second corresponds to the change from the aesthetic/ethical
choice to the religious. Paganism is rooted in the aesthetic stage, where the
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leap of sin is experienced as
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fate and the leap of faith as

Figure XII.3: The Ontological Origins of Angst and Sin
providence; Judaism, by contrast, is
rooted in the ethical stage, where the
leap of sin is experienced as guilt and
the leap of faith as atonement.
Christianity surpasses both of these
by actually being rooted in the
properly religious stage of absolute
faith in God.
Kierkegaard's analysis of angst and
sin suggests that the lack of angst is
the worst possible psychological
state, since without angst we could
never progress to the stage of spirit. In the original state of innocence angst
arises as a response to the "nothing" (i.e., the person's ignorance) of the
future: "anxiety is freedom's actuality as the possibility of possibility" (CA
313). To ignore this freedom is actually idolatry when it causes the person
in the aesthetic stage of life to grasp innocence, peace, happiness, beauty,
etc., as if they were good in and of themselves. For to do so is to separate
oneself from the spiritual depths of one's own human nature: "The most
effective means of escaping spiritual trial is to become spiritless" (385). Yet
once this freedom is utilized, an awareness of sin arises, causing a new kind
of angst, in the form of "anxiety about evil" (381-386). This comes in three
forms: (1) the desire to return to a state of innocence; (2) the threat of
falling deeper into sin; and (3) the wish that mere repentance were enough
to atone for sin. Unfortunately, the attempt of many religious people to
overcome such anxiety by means of outward goodness only gives rise to
more angst, in the form of "anxiety about the good" (386-420).
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The truly religious person turns away from both aesthetic and ethical aims
in order to become inward. "Inwardness" refers to immediate
self-understanding in action (CA 408), requiring a person to be open to the
eternal in one's own self. To turn toward oneself in this way is therefore
identical to turning toward God. As a result, it always begins by heightening
a person's awareness of guilt:
In turning toward himself, [the religious "genius"] eo ipso turns toward
God, and ... when the finite spirit would see God, it must begin as guilty. As
he turns toward himself, he discovers guilt. The greater the genius, the
more profoundly he discovers guilt....
In turning inward he discovers freedom....
To the degree he discovers freedom, to that same degree the anxiety of sin is
upon him in the state of possibility.... (376-377)
Such a person will then recognize that anxiety really points beyond itself to
faith:
The only thing that is truly able to disarm the sophistry of sin is faith,
courage to believe that the state [of sin] itself is a new sin, courage to
renounce anxiety without anxiety, which only faith can do; faith does not
thereby annihilate anxiety, but ... extricates itself from anxiety's moment of
death. (385)
In other words, the proper response to anxiety is to stop being anxious
about anxiety, accepting it in the belief that it exists for a higher purpose.
Whereas pagan anxiety expresses itself most profoundly as fate, and Jewish
anxiety as guilt, the anxiety of the true Christian (whom Kierkegaard
regarded as practicing the most advanced form of religion) is therefore
expressed in the form of suffering (see Figure XII.2)
Kierkegaard argued that the key to solving the problem of angst is to learn
to face it courageously, with the paradoxical feelings of "sympathetic
antipathy" and "antipathetic sympathy" (CA 313). Anyone who "has learned
to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate" (421). For "anxiety
is through faith absolutely educative, because it consumes all finite ends"
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(422). Despite its apparently negative character, the suffering caused by

angst is therefore essential to our spiritual growth: "the more profoundly he
is in anxiety, the greater is the man" (421). Kierkegaard had numerous other
philosophical insights, not only concerning the human experience of angst,
but also about numerous other topics, such as the paradoxical relationship
between history (the finite) and subjectivity (the infinite), and the true
nature of Christian faith as requiring a subjective willingness to die.
However, we will be unable to pursue these or other interesting topics here.
Instead, I want to point out that, given Kierkegaard's analysis of angst, the
relationship between dread and death is analogous to the relationship
between love and life: just as love is the moving power of life, so also dread
is the moving power of death. Whereas the former is the power of being,
driving us toward the unity of opposites, the latter is the power of
non-being, driving us toward the diversity of opposites. In other words,
dread is the driving power behind the "estrangement" Tillich regarded as
the necessary prerequisite for love (see Figure X.5). The struggle between
these two powers is, in fact, what keeps us alive, while at the same time
giving us a glimpse of our eternality in the midst of our finitude. In other
words, dread, in spite of being a primarily negative experience, reminds us
of our capacity for self-transcendence. Together, the powers of love and
dread remind us that, on the one hand, we are not at home in this world, and
yet on the other hand, we are not entirely strangers either. Recognizing this
paradox can help us respond to real experiences of angst in a way that is
appropriate to the eternal dimension of our lives.
The failure to balance the powers of eternality (love) and temporality
(death) in our lives usually results is some type of psychological
disturbance, and can eventually lead even to insanity. Insanity does not
come from paying too much attention to the paradoxes of human
experiences; rather, it results from the attempt to run away from them to
the security of either the infinite or the finite on its own. As long as the two
powers are engaged in a struggle within us, our mental health will be
preserved. But the loss of either eternality or temporality can drive a person
insane: for the former would limit us to an application of analytic logic,
thereby causing us to see the world as an unbearable diversity of
fragmented and disconnected bits, while the latter would limit us to an
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application of synthetic logic, thereby causing us to see the world as an

overwhelming unity, without discrete and intelligible parts. The former
describes the form of insanity that stems from an overemphasis on reason
over imagination, as when paranoid schizophrenics interpret their
experience within a narrow set of limits (e.g., "everyone is against me"); the
latter describes the form of insanity that stems from an overemphasis on
imagination over reason, as when the elderly lose themselves in the
limitlessness of senility.
Tillich argued that we are all guilty of losing our eternality to some extent.
The best explanation for the angst we feel when we think honestly about
our own death, he claimed, is that we all know deep down inside that we
deserve to die, because of the inauthentic way we have lived. Too often,
people's response to this guilt is merely to flee from it into the safety of
philosophical arguments for immortality or a religious hope for eternal life.
Yet the latter only increases the philosopher's over-dependence on logical
reasoning, while the former only increases the believer's over-dependence
on religious imagination. In other words, these common "solutions", though
not in themselves wrong, can sometimes backfire by intensifying the loss of
eternality that comes from denying one side of the paradox.
The only proper response to the loss of eternality revealed in our experience
of existential dread is, according to Tillich, to face the threat of non-being
with an existential courage to be. In his book, The Courage To Be (1952), he
described this response in the following way:
Courage is the self-affirmation of being in spite of the fact of non-being. It is
the act of the individual self in taking the anxiety of non-being upon itself
by affirming itself ... Courage always includes a risk, it is always threatened
by non-being ... Courage needs the power of being, a power transcending the
non-being which is experienced in the anxiety of fate and death, ... in the
anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness, ... [and] in the anxiety of guilt
and condemnation. The courage which takes this threefold anxiety into
itself must be rooted in a power of being that is greater than the power of
oneself and the power of one's world.... There are no exceptions to this rule;
and this means that every courage to be has openly or covertly a religious
root. For religion is the state of being grasped by the power of being itself.
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(CB 152-153)
Like Kierkegaard, Tillich therefore saw the threat of non-being as an existential problem whose only adequate solution is essentially religious. This
word "religious" should not be misunderstood as referring to religious
practices, such as going to church, singing hymns, etc. For as we saw in
Lecture 33, such things can be misused to keep us away from truly religious
courage. Instead, the point here is that to be religious means to be open to
an experience of the Being who, by transcending the distinction between
being and non-being, can alone supply us with the courage to be.
This basic experience of receiving the gift of the courage to be is closely
related, according to Tillich, both to mystical experiences of participation
in God, and to more ordinary experiences of a personal encounter between
man and God. Such experiences are rooted in a recognition that the
presence of non-being within us estranges us from our true nature, and that
this problem can be solved only if we are willing to be "grasped by the power
of being itself" (CB 153). For only when we "participate in something which
transcends the self" (161) will we be prepared to experience the most
profound manifestation of the courage to be, in the form of the "courage to
accept acceptance" (159-166). This courageous self-affirmation is not
merely "the Existentialist courage to be as oneself. It is the paradoxical act
in which one is accepted by that which infinitely transcends one's
individual self." Nor does this ultimate acceptance require us to deny our
guilt, for "it is not the good or the wise or the pious who are entitled to the
courage to accept acceptance but those who are lacking in all these qualities
and are aware of being unacceptable" (160-161).
At the beginning of the process of accepting acceptance, we experience the
courage to be as the bare "courage of despair [angst]" (CB 170):
the acceptance of despair is in itself faith on the boundary line of the
courage to be. In this situation the meaning of life is reduced to despair
about the meaning of life. But as long as this despair is an act of life it is
positive in its negativity.
By living our life in the paradoxical power of the courage to be, we will
eventually be ready to welcome death itself not as a tragic confirmation of
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angst, but as the final step in this life-long process. Along these lines, Tillich
claimed that Plato's arguments for the immortality of the soul were
"attempts to interpret the courage of Socrates", who had clearly recognized
that "the courage to die is the test of the courage to be" (164). We will look
more fully at the experience of death itself in the following lecture. For now,
however, it will suffice merely to summarize Tillich's theory of courage in
terms of the following map:
Figure XII.4: Courage in the Face of Non-Being

The religious basis of the courageous acceptance of life in the face of death,
of being in spite of the dreadful prospects of non-being, is made explicit in
the biblical notion of the "fear of the Lord". The Old Testament references
to fearing God are too often watered down to the point where they are taken
to mean nothing more than being careful to obey the Law lest we be
punished. But they refer far more profoundly to the fact that the God of the
Old Testament, as the Being who holds all beings in His hand, is the
ultimate source of life and death; as such, anyone who is courageous enough
to approach this Being must do so with the utmost reverence and awe. As
Mitchell put it: "Fear of the Lord is being in awe, aware of the shocking,
silent, presence of God" (IPW 75) -a comment reminiscent of Otto's notion
of awe in the presence of the numinous (see Lecture 31). Throughout the
Bible this fundamental, other-worldly fear is depicted as an existential
response to the human situation which, if we accept it, will give us
otherwise unattainable strength to cope with the fearful situations that
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arise in the ordinary world. This could indeed be regarded as the basic
message of the Psalms and Proverbs: "The fear of the Lord is the beginning
of wisdom" (e.g., Psalm 111:10; Proverbs 1:7) means we will learn best how to
respond to the threats within the world only when we have courageously
responded to the threat outside the world. In other words, angst and
wisdom are best regarded, paradoxically, as two sides of the same coin.
If we do not merely ignore the basic ontological question raised at the
beginning of this lecture, then we seem to have a choice between two
possible answers: either the existence of the world is meaningless and the
courage to be has no basis, or else there is a God who is, paradoxically,
beyond the very distinction between something and nothing, and who
thereby lends meaning to both being and non-being, thus forming the
ultimate basis of faith, and so also of our courage to be. But as Kant,
Kierkegaard, Tillich, and many other religiously-minded philosophers have
pointed out, this God cannot lend meaning merely by being a doctrine
imposed on us by the social pressures of a religious community; rather, we
must experience God as a reality that gives us power to cope with the
paradoxes of life, providing us with faith in the face of doubt, peace in the
face of turmoil, acceptance in the face of guilt, and courage in the face of
dread.
35. Death and the Mystery of Life
One of my students once defined silence as the state of no longer needing to
ask any questions. This suggests an interesting paradox in the claim that
the final goal of philosophy is to experience inner silence, since one of the
philosopher's main tasks is to raise questions whose answers are usually
not immediately apparent. Yet I believe it expresses a deep insight into the
nature and purpose of doing philosophy. If silence is actually a questionless
state, then have we merely been wasting time raising so many difficult
philosophical questions here in Part Four and throughout these lectures?
Not at all! Such questions must be raised, or the deeper levels of silence can
never be enjoyed: for the questions stir up in us the wonder that draws us
out beyond the noise of the world to meet the meaning of the world.
Wittgenstein expressed this basic paradox by saying the meaning of life is
found outside of life, which is why he believed we cannot speak about that
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meaning. Our inability to give scientifically verifiable answers to most

philosophical questions does not, however, mean the questions (or our
attempted answers) are meaningless. For their final purpose is not to be
answered in words-this may or may not be possible-but to help us discover
the meaning of life and of the world in the silence that such questions tend
to induce.
In the previous lecture we learned about the paradox of courage in the face
of the dread of non-being. This leads us directly to the ultimate
philosophical question, for the inevitability of our own non-being-that is, of
our own death-raises the question of the meaning of life; and this question
itself directs our attention toward the ultimate silence beyond life. As far as
we can judge by what we observe when a person dies, death marks the end
of our capacity to use words, and thereby ushers in a silence unlike
anything we have experienced during life. The mystery of what, if anything,
happens after we die is one of the primary sources of the "angst" we all feel
from time to time-this being, as we have seen, one of the primary concerns
of existentialist philosophers. This angst has therefore driven ordinary
people-even those who know nothing about philosophy-to propose various
ideas about what happens after death.
Is there a life after death? If so, what is it like? There are four basic ways of
answering such questions, though each type of answer, of course, has many
variations. We can analyze these four ways of envisioning the "after death"
experience as arising out of two questions: (1) Does our consciousness of
our own identity continue after we die? and (2) Will we acquire a new body
after our present body dies? With these questions in mind, we can map the
four traditional answers to the question of life after death onto the 2LAR
cross, as shown in Figure XII.5. This is probably not a "perfect" 2LAR, since
it is highly unlikely that all four possible answers describe what actually
happens after death. Although two or three of these views might be
simultaneously true in different ways, most people feel constrained to
choose only one as the best hypothesis. So let's compare these four
possibilities in a bit more detail.
The theories of extinction and reincarnation both agree that the part of me
that enables me to remember who I am (often called the "mind" or "soul")
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will not survive my death; but they disagree as to whether or not
Figure XII.5:
Four Basic Ways of Conceiving Life After Death
I will acquire a new body. If not, then I will simply cease to exist (--): my
individuality will discontinue altogether-though in some versions of
extinction, such as the mystical application of Aristotle's "spark of the
divine" (see Lecture 6, especially Figure II.9), something other than my
body and mind continues to exist. If, by contrast, I do acquire a new body,
then I will reappear as another person (-+), whose memory will be
discontinuous with my present memory. People who believe in reincarnation often claim we can learn to become conscious of memories from our
"past lives". We have to learn how to regain such memories precisely
because there is normally no conscious continuity between our different
reincarnations, even though there may be some deeper spiritual "core"
connecting the lives of these apparently different persons.
Those who, like Plato, believe in the immortality of the soul are actually
closer to those who believe in extinction than to those who believe in
reincarnation. For, although the immortality theory disagrees with both of
these two theories by claiming that we have a soul (i.e., a capacity for
continuous, conscious memory) that survives our body's death (+-), it
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actually agrees with the extinction theory's claim that our dead body will
not be replaced with a new one, as the reincarnation theory believes it will.
This might seem rather surprising, especially to those who view Plato's
belief in the immortality of the soul as the ancient Greek equivalent of the
Christian belief in life after death. The latter, however, is not based on any
logical arguments for the necessity of the soul's immortality, but on a
religious hope that people will be saved from extinction through divine
intervention in the form of resurrection.
The theory of resurrection must be clearly distinguished from each of the
other three theories. As the direct opposite of resurrection, extinction is
properly regarded by those who believe in resurrection as being our natural
fate, should resurrection not occur. By contrast, the other two theories
share with resurrection common factors that sometimes overshadow their
differences. Like immortality, resurrection assumes a person's conscious
powers will continue, more or less uninterrupted, after death. And like
reincarnation, resurrection assumes a person will have a new body after the
present body dies. But in opposition to Plato, resurrection focuses primarily
on the body, assuming like Aristotle that, without a resurrected body, the
soul itself would also die. And in opposition to reincarnation, resurrection
views the new body as a new kind of body, not just another body of the same
kind. The pictures that sometimes appear in religious literature, of bodies
floating out of their graves up into the sky, misrepresent the real meaning of
resurrection. For in the New Testament, a person's earthly body is
described as a mere "seed" in comparison to the fully matured "spiritual
body" to be given after death (see 1 Corinthians 15:35-44). That is, our
conscious life in the present body will somehow be united in a continuous
way with this new spiritual body (++), so that all our unrealized potentials
in this life will blossom and bear fruit in the life to come.
Although we do not actually experience our own death from within our
present life, we do experience other people's death as the ultimate end of
their life as we know it. As a result, none of us can know for certain until
after we die which of these four views best describes what lies on the "other
side". Perhaps this is why philosophers are often less interested in the
questions death raises about a possible afterlife than in the questions it
raises about life itself. Plato, for example, insisted that the fear of death is
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appropriate only for those who are still bound to the "cave" (cf. Figure II.7).
Transcending this fear by "learning how to die" is one of the basic tasks any
good philosopher must perform. Plato was referring here, I believe, to the
lifelong task of learning how to live with the darkness of the unknown, even
before we die; for when we do so, we discover that this absolutely real
mystery paradoxically sheds light on how we should live. In other words, by
raising the question of the meaning of life, death points us directly toward
the need to live what existentialists call an authentic life.
The psychologist Abraham Maslow referred to the authentic or truly
human life as the life that attains "self-actualization". This now common
term has often been wrongly criticized for promoting a selfish, "do your
own thing" lifestyle that permits a person to ignore the needs of other
people. However, this is a gross misunderstanding. For Maslow and many
others have been careful to point out that the inward focus of
self-actualizing people does not mean they care only about their own
egotistical interests, but that they are self-transcending people, whose
understanding of themselves has led them to reach outward to others in
love and compassion. Interestingly, one source of the misunderstanding of
such terms is that the self-actualizing life is itself essentially paradoxical.
The more he studied self-actualizing people, the more Maslow came to
realize that they are people who can resolve paradoxes within themselves:
instead of being either selfish or unselfish, they are somehow both (see e.g.,
TPB 139). Socrates' famous "know thyself" carries essentially the same
message: we know ourselves not in order to become self-enclosed solipsists,
but in order to become self-giving saints. And the more we know ourselves
(i.e., the more apparently selfish we are), the more we are capable of
knowing others (i.e., the more unselfish we can be).
Learning to transcend ourselves in this way will prepare us to accept death
with open arms as a gift. For we can view death as the ultimate gift only if
we have learned to live with death-that is, to live with our own non-being
through such acts of self-transcendence-while we are still alive. As we saw
in the previous lecture, the importance of recognizing the presence of
non-being in all beings was one of the key insights of the existentialists. The
ancient Chinese philosopher, Lao Tzu, expressed a similar insight when he
claimed non-being is actually more useful than being (TTC 11). For example,
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a window would be useless for seeing through if not for the blank space in
between the edges of the frame. And a cup would be useless for holding
liquids if it were not hollow inside. Such examples show that what is would
often be unable to fulfill its proper function if it did not make use of what is
not. Likewise, people should view their own death as a natural part of the
life process.
The two ways of describing transcendent reality, as either "being-itself" or
"nothing" (see Figure VI.2), suggest two corresponding ways of viewing the
"natural" relationship between life and death. I would guess nearly all of us
feel more inclined to hold one or the other of these two views. According to
Lao Tzu, a person who treats death as a natural part of life will no longer
need to search for the "infinite", or "eternal life". Viewing death as the
ultimate end of all life, he believed such a search is bound to fail, and will
only succeed in producing anxiety (see Figure XII.6a). Yet the anxiety we
feel at the prospect of our own death need not cause us to give up the search
for the infinite, provided we view death as a boundary, with the object or
purpose of our quest lying on the other side (see Figure XII.6b). Only in this
latter sense does it make sense to regard death as a gift that can truly be
affirmed as a natural part of life. If there is nothing after life but death and
extinction, then regarding death as a natural part of life makes no more
sense than regarding the wall as part of the window, or the space outside the
cup as part of the cup. A boundary is part of the thing it defines; but the
space outside the boundary is wholly other.
(a) Anxiety as the Boundary(b) Death as the Boundary

Figure XII.6: Two Views of Life and Death
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Whichever view of death is correct, the issue raised by Lao Tzu highlights
the central paradox of life itself: an essential part of the human task is to
seek after the infinite, yet this search is bound to fail because death makes
life itself finite. But the search "fails" only if success is judged in terms of
analytic logic. If we affirm the paradox, if we affirm (with Lao Tzu) the
presence of non-being within all being, if we affirm (with the
existentialists) our finitude in the very process of seeking the infinite, then
we have grounds for hope that meaning will break through in the midst of
our struggle. Even if this breakthrough occurs only after our death, it
legitimates the search within this life. Indeed, Lao Tzu's real point is not
that the search itself is wrong, but that we should not expect to discover the
infinite in a form we can grasp within this life.
We must therefore always be careful not to think we can resolve the
paradox of life by making something less than infinite the source of our
life's meaning. For example, I cannot count the number of students who
have written insight papers claiming "happiness", or perhaps "satisfaction",
is the purpose for which people ought to live their lives. Yet the problem
with this view is that, as we learned from Tillich in Lecture 30, once
happiness is reached, it ends. Those who live their lives in order to fulfill
their own desires inevitably end with a sense of emptiness and
meaninglessness, even if they are lucky enough to have those desires
fulfilled. Satisfaction is not ultimately satisfying. So the paradox is
accentuated to the point of absurdity if we direct our lives toward a finite
end. Lao Tzu's advice, coming from a person whose basic message was that
we must live in the presence of the mysterious (i.e., infinite) "Tao", should
not be taken to imply that there is nothing infinite worth searching for;
rather, it implies that the ultimate goal of the quest for the infinite is to
teach us that it is present now in the midst of our finitude, so that we can
give up the quest in order to rest in that presence.
The lesson we learn by facing the paradox of death, in other words, is that
the search for the infinite must be pursued in the context of a recognition of
the finitude of life as we know it. The need for a recognition of both human
finitude and an eternal context beyond human life is an insight recognized
by most religions. For example, one of the many ways the Bible expresses
this paradox comes in Isaiah 40:6-8:
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... All flesh is grass, and all its loveliness is like the flower of the field.
The grass withers, the flower fades,
When the breath of the Lord blows upon it;
Surely the people are grass.
The grass withers, the flower fades,
But the word of the Lord stands forever.
This "word" here is the same word John spoke about at the beginning of his
Gospel; and it is, paradoxically, a word that can be heard only in the depths
of silence: "'In the beginning was the Word....' The Word did not come into
being, but it was. It did not break upon the silence, but it was older than the
silence and the silence was made of it" (HMD 90-91).
The latter quotation suggests that life is to death as words are to silence.
Similarly, just as life ends in death yet draws its meaning from the mystery
that death veils, so also, as I mentioned at the beginning of this lecture, the
questions of philosophy end in a silence that no longer has use for
questions. Life is, in fact, full of such mysteries and paradoxes. The few we
have touched upon here in the fourth part of this course only represent the
tip of the iceberg. Our dreams, for example, put us in touch with a huge area
full of mystery and paradox. If we had more time we could look in greater
detail into some of these other dark and interesting aspects of our lives.
Indeed, I devote an entirely separate course to the subject of dream
interpretation and the unconscious aspects of self-knowledge (see DW). So
instead of developing that topic any further here, we shall return in the final
lecture to the question this course began with, in order to examine how it
too reveals the paradoxical mystery at the heart of human experience.
36. What is Philosophy?
This course began with a discussion of the question "What is philosophy?"
Some of you offered some interesting suggestions, demonstrating that even
before taking this course you had some good ideas about what philosophy is.
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Perhaps this is because every thoughtful human being has a philosophy of

one sort or another, though many never bother to work it out very precisely.
The problem is that most people never get beyond the stage of having "my
philosophy". That is, although many, if not most, people have established for
themselves a particular philosophical point of view, very few people
seriously work at expanding that personal point of view in such a way that it
can be regarded as having a legitimate range of application beyond their
own personal opinions. Yet this step is crucial if we are ever to understand
what philosophy really is. My philosophy must go beyond the stage of being
"my philosophy" and must become philosophy before I can rightly say "I am
a philosopher". That crucial step is one I hope you have begun to take while
studying this course.
In Lecture 1 I said I hoped by the end of this course you would know less
about philosophy that you did at the beginning. Some of you laughed at this
suggestion. Others seemed to be confused. Still others thought I was
confused. Most of you probably thought it was just a joke. But in fact, I was
quite serious. At several points during this course I have argued against
naive versions of relativism, on the grounds that certain boundary lines are
absolute. More adequate versions of relativism always recognize that the
very possibility of "relativity" depends on something that is, by comparison,
"absolute". In physics, for example, the theory of relativity was able to
acknowledge the relative character of events in our time-space world only
after physicists agreed to treat the speed of light as a "constant" (i.e., as an
absolute). I now want to add that the ultimate purpose of all philosophical
inquiry is to become more and more aware of such absolutes; for the more
we do so, the more fully we can appreciate the beauty of the "mystery" we
have been talking so much about here in Part Four. Indeed, the final
ontological paradox is that this mystery makes itself known first as my
philosophy, but gradually reveals itself to be the source of philosophy itself.
In other words, it is both absolute and yet the source of all relativity.
To explain how this can be so, I like to compare philosophy to a huge
diamond with many facets carved into it. At first, all I am aware of is that
my own perspective, the facet I can see most clearly, is true. When I take a
step back, I recognize that other facets on the diamond-other legitimate
perspectives-are equally true. This might seem to justify a belief in
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relativism: your facet is true for you and mine is true for me. However,
when I step back far enough to see the whole diamond,I suddenly recognize
that there is a pattern: each facet is related in such a way that the whole
does, in fact, display an absolute (fixed) design, in spite of the great
diversity of the individual facets. Those who continue to view philosophy as
entirely a matter of subjective opinion, and fail to see its potential for
bringing us to an objective truth, are merely chaining themselves to their
particular facet of the diamond, much as the prisoners in Plato's cave can
see nothing but the shadows on their particular section of the wall. But if
you have begun to take the step from a philosophy that suits you to a
philosophy that can be true for everyone, then I think you will have learned
at least something of the importance of the principle of recognizing your
ignorance: we can never see all the facets of the diamond at once, no matter
how far back we step! When you have learned to distinguish between "my
philosophy" and "philosophy", and when you have begun to transform the
former into the latter, you will then be prepared to begin constructing a
truly philosophical answer to the question "What is philosophy?"
You may have noticed that this entire course has, to a large extent, been an
attempt to answer this basic question. With that in mind, let me suggest one
last answer. When we consider how philosophy is different from other
academic disciplines, its virtually unending concern with self-definition
stands out, suggesting that philosophy may be defined as "the discipline
whose purpose is to define itself"-or more simply, "philosophy is the
self-defining discipline." For when any other discipline asks the question of
its own nature,it strays into the realm of philosophy. A history teacher is
doing philosophy, not history, when he or she asks students to reflect on the
very nature of history. But throughout this course we have discovered that
the focal point of most (if not all) good philosophers is precisely this
question: what am I doing when I practice philosophy? Of course, defining
philosophy as the self-defining discipline relates only to its form; the
content (i.e., the details of how philosophy actually goes about defining
itself ) has been the topic of this entire course.
Having now finished my attempt to introduce you to philosophy in such a
way that you can begin to participate in its self-definition, I shall take this
opportunity to summarize the entire course by relating the myth of the tree
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of philosophy to the account of mystery given here in Part Four. We began

this course by treating metaphysics as the roots of the philosophical tree; in
so doing we found in Part One that, in order to study these roots without
killing the tree, we had to recognize our ignorance. Without establishing an
area of necessary ignorance, nothing could be mysterious, since everything
would have to be regarded as a "knowable object". There would be nothing
hidden. No roots. In such a case we might think we understand the words
we use, but we would inevitably commit one of two mistakes: we would
conclude either that all mystery is nonsense (as does the skeptic), or that we
could (or have) actually attain(ed) knowledge of that mystery (as does the
dogmatist).
Both skepticism and dogmatism result from a failure to gain a proper
understanding of the logical trunk and the scientific branches of the
philosophical tree. For as we learned in Part Two, logic teaches us that,
instead of giving up the mystery by treating it as either meaningless or
knowable, the mystery itself has its own kind of logic. Having distinguished
between knowledge and ignorance, we learned how to use analytic logic to
understand words describing the former and synthetic logic to understand
words describing the latter. In this way we clearly defined the boundary
between knowledge and ignorance. Just as the branches of a tree show us,
as it were, the natural purpose or implications of the trunk, so also logic
remains abstract and meaningless unless we use it to gain knowledge
("science"); in so doing, as we found in Part Three, we can discover some of
the implications the mystery has for what is not mysterious. The latter is
the task of wisdom, and can be fulfilled only if we know where to place the
boundary lines around different kinds of knowledge, and when it is
appropriate to break through those boundary lines. In other words, only by
learning to love wisdom can we honor the mystery for what it is, while at the
same time allowing it to enlighten what need not be mysterious.
Finally, by treating our meaning-filled experiences as the leaves of the
philosophical tree, we have learned in Part Four how we can actually
become personally acquainted with this mystery, through opening ourselves to experiencing the wonder of silence. By allowing the mystery to
invade us rather than trying to take it by storm, by allowing it to grasp and
possess us rather than trying to grasp and possess it, the diversity of our
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knowledge can be unified by the power of the mystery. The paradoxes of life
then cease to be so troublesome. They are still paradoxes, for the reality of
our ignorance is not diminished but intensified by our experience of the
mystery. The difference is that we now have within us an ultimate concern
enabling us to cope with the fact that there are some things we can never
hope to know. Kant aptly expressed this ability to cope with ignorance when
he wrote (CPrR 148): "the inscrutable wisdom through which we exist is not
less worthy of veneration in respect to what it denies us than in [respect to]
what it has granted."
The capacity to wonder in spite of, or even because of, our ignorance is
actually one of the main characteristics distinguishing a good philosopher
from a bad one. That wonder is childlike may be why some philosophers,
wishing to appear "mature", shun the temptation to wonder. This is also
why children so often make such profoundly philosophical statements. The
difference between a child and a full-grown, childlike philosopher is that
the latter has added self-consciousness to the original instinct to wonder.
The problem is that self-consciousness tends to negate the instinct to
wonder: self-consciousness puts up with ignorance in its search for the
unity of the "I", whereas wonder wants to achieve knowledge in response to
its apprehension of the diversity of the world. Bad philosophers, as we have
seen, limit the philosophical task to only one of these two opposite goals.
Good philosophers, by contrast, will continually seek after the best way of
resolving (or at least coping with) the tension between these two forces.
One of the best ways of doing this, I believe, is to direct our
self-consciousness to the higher goal of self-understanding. For the neverending task of coming to "know thyself", rightly recognized by Socrates as
the ultimate goal of doing philosophy, requires us to reach ever-increasing
levels of both self-consciousness and wonder.
With this in mind, I would like us to consider a passage from a book that
encourages us to hear the wonder of silence throughout the busyness of our
everyday life. Anne Morrow Lindbergh's little book, Gift from the Sea, is a
series of meditations on her holidays at an island beach, focusing especially
on the symbolism of the activity of collecting sea shells. In considering the
following summary of her reflections on the prospects of returning home
(GS 113-116,119-120), let's interpret the "island" as a metaphor for studying
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philosophy, and the "shells" as a metaphor for having insights.

As she packed her bags to leave the island, Lindbergh asked herself what she
had gained from all her meditative efforts: "What answers or solutions have
I found for my life? I have a few shells in my pocket, a few clues, only a few."
She thought back to her first days on the island, and realized how greedily
she had collected the shells at first: "My pockets bulged with wet shells ...
The beach was covered with beautiful shells and I could not let one go by
unnoticed. I couldn't even walk head up looking out to sea, for fear of
missing something precious at my feet." The problem with this way of
collecting shells (or having insights) is that "the acquisitive instinct is
incompatible with true appreciation of beauty." But after all her pockets
were stretched to the limit with damp shells, she found it necessary to
become less acquisitive: "I began to discard my possessions, to select." She
then realized it would be impossible to collect all the beautiful shells she
saw: "One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are
few." Can we say the same for philosophical insights? Perhaps so. For
Lindbergh herself generalized the lesson she learned by saying "it is only
framed in space that beauty blooms. Only in space are events and objects
and people unique and significant-and therefore beautiful."
This insight, that beauty requires space and selectivity, prompted
Lindbergh to reconsider the reasons why her life at home tended to lack the
qualities of significance and beauty, so characteristic of her time on the
island. Perhaps life seems insignificant not because it is empty, but because
it is too full: "there is so little empty space.... Too many worthy activities,
valuable things, and interesting people.... We can have ... an excess of shells,
where one or two would be significant." Being on the island, by contrast,
had given her the space and time to look at life in a new way-as I hope this
philosophy class has done for you. "Paradoxically, ... space has been forced
upon me.... Here there is time; time to be quiet; time to work without
pressure; time to think ... Time to look at the stars ... Time, even, not to talk."
The problem in going home is that in many ways the island had selected
what was significant for her (as this course of lectures may have done for
you) "better than I do myself at home." She therefore asked herself: "When I
go back will I be submerged again ...? ... Values weighed in quantity, not
quality; in speed, not stillness; in noise, not silence; in words, not thoughts;
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in acquisitiveness, not beauty. How shall I resist the onslaught?" She

answered by suggesting that, in place of the island's natural selectivity, she
will need to adopt "a conscious selectivity based on another set of values-a
sense of values I have become more aware of here.... Simplicity of living ...
Space for significance and beauty. Time for solitude and sharing.... A few
shells."
In the end Lindbergh discarded most of the shells she had collected on her
island holiday, and took with her only a few of the most special ones. Her
experiences on the island, she explained, now serve as "a lens" that she can
take home with her in order to examine her own life more effectively: "I
must remember to see with island eyes. The shells will remind me; they
must be my island eyes." In the same way, I hope this course has provided
you with a new way of seeing yourself and the world. For the real reason the
university requires you to take a philosophy course is not to train you to
participate in academic debates on technical issues, but to enlarge your
capacity to experience the unifying beauty of life-that is, to enable you to
"see with island eyes", even when the examination is over and you have
returned home, to the ordinary world of your infinitely diverse personal
concerns.
In Shel Silverstein's story of The Giving Tree, the little boy does not learn
this lesson until the very end of his life. During his life he forgets all about
the carefree days of his childhood, when the tree was almost like part of his
own self. Instead he goes off on his own, in search of happiness and fortune.
The boy simply ignores the silent screams of the tree as she allowed herself
to be torn to pieces by the boy's selfish desires. Only as an old man is the
little boy once again able to sit and rest with the tree, enjoying with her the
wonder of silence. To some extent this process of leaving the tree, venturing
out on our own, and finally returning to it in the end, describes the
paradoxical steps each of us must inevitably pass through in our search for
a suitable philosophy of life. The tragedy of that story is that, unlike the
story of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the main character virtually destroys
the source of his wisdom in the process of looking for a meaningful life,
leaving only a stump in the end. My hope is that this course will have
supplied each of you with "a few shells" to help you avoid such a fate. With
these in hand, I hope each of you, even those who will never study any more
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philosophy in a formal way, will be able to live with a continuous, silent

awareness of the mysterious tree of philosophy and will always respectfully
wait to receive from the endless supply of gifts she has to offer.
QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER THOUGHT/DIALOGUE

1.A. Is it possible to choose both the aesthetic and ethical ways of life?
B. Is it necessary for human beings to sin?
2.A. Does angst actually help us to cope with ordinary, empirical fears?
B. Could resurrection and reincarnation both be true?
3.A. What would a "spiritual body" be like?
B. Could an unhappy person live a meaningful life?
4.A. How is philosophy like a tree?
B. What is philosophy?
RECOMMENDED READINGS
1. Sren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, ?, "The Concept of Anxiety"
(CA 313-316).
2. Paul Tillich, The Courage toBe, Ch. VI, "Courage and Transcendence" (CB
152-183).
3. Abraham H. Maslow, Toward a Psychology of Being2, Ch. 10, "Creativity in
Self-Actualizing People" (TPB 135-145).
4. Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching.
5. Plato, Phaedo and Book X of Republic (CDP 40-98, 819-844).
6. John Hick, The Fifth Dimension: An exploration of the spiritual realm
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(Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1999), Ch. 26, "Death and Beyond",

pp.241-252.
7. Shel Silverstein, The Giving Tree (New York: Harper & Row, 1964).
8. Stephen Palmquist, The Tree of Philosophy4 (Hong Kong: Philopsychy
Press, 2000[1992]).
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34. Angst and the Paradox of Courage

(a) Ordinary Empirical Fear(b) Existential Fear ("Angst")

own is as absurd or incomplete as the other. For he later published another

that the aesthetic and ethical

Anxiety (1844) Kierkegaard developed his idea of angst by analyzing the

leap of sin is experienced as

fate and the leap of faith as

(422). Despite its apparently negative character, the suffering caused by

application of synthetic logic, thereby causing us to see the world as an

Figure XII.4: Courage in the Face of Non-Being

meaning. Our inability to give scientifically verifiable answers to most

will not survive my death; but they disagree as to whether or not

(a) Anxiety as the Boundary(b) Death as the Boundary

Perhaps this is because every thoughtful human being has a philosophy of

of philosophy to the account of mystery given here in Part Four. We began

philosophy, and the "shells" as a metaphor for having insights.

in acquisitiveness, not beauty. How shall I resist the onslaught?" She

philosophy in a formal way, will be able to live with a continuous, silent

QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER THOUGHT/DIALOGUE

(Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 1999), Ch. 26, "Death and Beyond",

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