The Death of God and the Meaning of Life

Last Book Read - The Death of God & the Meaning of Life - Julian Young

In this work, Young presents an excellent history of the development of thought concerning meaning from the pre-modern age to the current postmodern era.  Central to the progression of history from one period to another is the death-of-God, a fundamental change in human understanding. He presents this transition as a stream of thought beginning with Galileo and the advent of science and ending with the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989.  As Nietzsche noted when he originally announced the death of God in 1882, that when Galileo unchained the Earth from the center of the universe, we were placed in a cold, dark void, moving in an uncertain direction with no up or down.  There was no longer any fixed point of reference, and no longer a fixed source of meaning.  We were left with the dangerous possibility of nihilism.  The modern age responded by providing new methods of fixed systems.  The worlds conceived by Hegel and Marx moved the true-world of religion into the future history of humanity.  This true-world was no longer an other-world in space, but existed away from us in time.  But this illusion could only be sustained for so long.  With the end of functioning Marxism in 1989, this revision of religion also became defunct, providing a final death of God.

Young suggests that Continental philosophy deals with the death of God - conservative continental philosophy being the modern-era revisioning of God.  With the end of that came radical continental philosophy, which finds any replacement for God to be impossible.  "A religion is anything that postulates or promises a true world."   Here we have worldviews such as non-theist religions and schools of thought such as Marxism, that all function as religions the same as theism does.  When Nietzsche announced the death of God, he proposed that any of these systems were no longer possible in performing the function that they had done in pre-modern world.

I think that we could view radical continental philosophy as the philosophies of existentialism.  There may be some non-existential worldviews that have subsequently developed in the branch of post-modernism, but I would hesitate to call these complete philosophies, but rather culture theories, at this point. In other words, I think that all philosophy of meaning following the death of God is existential in nature.

Young examines the philosophy of four existential philosophers: Neitzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and Camus, as well as the two postmodernists Foucalt and Derrida. He divides Nietzsche into three distinct periods of thought (early, late and posthumous), Heidegger into early and late and Sartre into two different early versions (ignoring the late).

He begins by tracing the lineage of thought of other-world meaning from Plato to Kant.  Schopenhauer takes Kant's notion of the hidden other-world and applies it to his pessimism, where passing from this world to the other is preferable.  Nietzsche continues this "European Buddhism" and attempts to overcome the implicit nihilism by suggesting that we can experience the other world through art.  Hegel and Marx continue a non-supernatural view of the other-world by relocating it to history.

When Nietzsche finally changes his mind about pessimism, he creates a whole new track of thought - radical continental philosophy- negating all the true-world views. Young then discusses Nietzsche's attempt at creating meaning by creating the self as a work of art, a complete narrative.  However, there is a problem of choice - the question of what life to choose.  He suggests these are the problems of authority and the immoral script.  Young then moves on to Heidegger, discussing historicity and the discovery of the authentic life.  For Heidegger your heritage, your community, are central to the meaning of life. But what if these traditions are not moral or meaningful themselves?  The problems of authority remain.

Sartre is up next. Dividing the work of Being and Nothingness, Young finds two views of  Sartre, based on slightly different interpretations of absurdity, as well as opposing views of humanity's desire to be God.  Sartre-two he dismisses as a nihilist based on this Sartre's understanding that all of life is conflict with others,  making life both meaningless and eternal conflict.  The views of Sartre-one come down to this: "(1) God is Dead. (2)Since there is no God to authorize the good, we have to do it ourselves. But (3) we have no authority over ourselves. Hence (4) we possess no authoritative account of the good, and life is meaningless (and so worthless)."

Finally we have Camus who views life as absurd - that is the disparity between how things are and how we want them to be.  But as many have argued (such as David Cooper and Camus himself ), the absurd hero of Camus' vision accepts this absurdity and happily lives in alienation, and this sets him apart from the existentialists.  Young suggest here that Camus believes life is better with no meaning. There is simply no possibility of a grand-narrative meaning.   What Camus really wants is life full of experience, "an ethics of quantity."  He looks to the "Barbarian Gods" on the beaches of Algeria, living without appeal and a lust for experience. Camus' version of the overman lives without appeal, because there is no divinity to appeal to, but rather lives with strength and majesty in this absence.  Aimlessness is preferable because a project of disciplined self development causes one to be a slave to their goals. Freedom is reduced and one always lives in the future, never in the now.  The absurd hero is indifferent to time and is only concerned with "being there."  Young ultimately rejects Camus' view and his hero as constructing static person that "will not change." Without some kind of goal, one will ultimately have a life that is simply boring.  He regards building one's life through self-defining goals as essential.

After analyzing the traps of existentialism and the unoriginality of the postmodernists, Young returns to Heidegger. He is clearly a Heidegarrian and takes the late un-existential Heidegger track as a means of escape from nihilism. Meaning is discovered rather than created, it is realizing the proper disclosure of the world and your place within it. Meaning comes from facticity - essence and existence become inseparable, according to Young.  Guardianship of the world, of Being, becomes our central task. This "Being" does not exist in a theistic sense,  but it is rather "the god of the poets," immanent in everything. 

Young does a better job at revealing underlying flaws in existential philosophy than other religious anti-existentialists that I have mentioned in the past.  He also provides an interesting and refreshing solution to the problem of meaning, by being non-theist and non-existential.  I am, at this point, however, not ready to dismiss Nietzsche, Sartre or Camus quite as easily.  I think that perhaps Young neglects some of the horrors of World War II and the Cold War, and their effects on modern philosophy, which explain some of the dark, nihilist leanings found within it.  Nevertheless, I believe existentialism is still optimistic and the right direction for finding post-death of God meaning.  As for Heidegger, his final position of Being is at least a non-true-world one.  Therefore, I can only assume that this Being, as sacred but not God, is a form of pantheism.  Of course, this leads to the question if Being is non-true-world, then does that mean pantheism is not religion?  Atheism and pantheism certainly function the same in practice, but any more on this matter will have to wait for another time.

Overall this book is highly recommended as one of the best works on philosophy in recent years.  It is an excellent work on many levels, first explaining the development of modern philosophy, as well as elucidating the existential positions and highlighting their particular details. Finally, it functions as a current state analysis of history by showing the progression from modernism to post-modernism through death-of-God realizations and the failed and desperate attempts at true-world transmutations.