From its origins in Greece, Western philosophy has long perpetuated this separation by regarding the reasoning mind as the essential substance that gives us knowledge of eternal truths and, as a result, the mind itself is conceived as a substance that is eternal, providing an escape from the temporal vicissitudes of the body. As Plato says in the Phaedo: “If we are ever to have pure knowledge of anything, we must escape from the body, and contemplate things by themselves with the soul itself” (66e). On this view, reason comes to be viewed as the supreme and defining characteristic of the human being, and this philosophical assumption remained relatively unscathed until the nineteenth century when existential philosophers and literary figures began to exhume embodiment, emotion, and contingency as being central to the human situation. Indeed, even with the historical rise and spread of Christianity through the Middle Ages, the vision of the human as the ‘animal rationale’ endured.
Although early church fathers like St. Paul (5 bce–67 ad) and Tertullian (160–220 ad) were still deeply committed to the principle of Hebraic faith, the cultural and political impact of Hellenistic philosophy compelled Christians to come up with ‘apologetics,’ rational defenses of their own religious positions and beliefs. Whereas for the Jews and the Greeks, faith and reason occupied two incompatible domains, Christians were confronted with both sources of transcendence. And, beginning with St. Augustine (354–430 ad) and continuing for over a thousand years, Christian theologians engaged this tension with the Augustinian expression ‘faith seeking [rational] understanding’ (fides quaerens intellectum) by showing how the timeless, universal truths of reason work in relation to and in harmony with personal faith (Barrett 1958, 97).
Unfortunately, as the alleged father of existentialism Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) would make clear, the aim of bringing together the conflicting domains of faith and reason was absurd. How, for instance, can one make rational sense of God's command to Abraham that he kill his own son, or the senseless suffering of Job, or the intrinsic sinfulness of human beings, or the Incarnation of the God-man? “The problem,” as Kierkegaard writes, “is not to understand Christianity, but to understand that it cannot be understood” (1959, 146). Indeed, Kierkegaard can be viewed as a philosopher who attempts to resuscitate the Hebraic experience of vulnerability and dread and of transcendence as passionate commitment, by articulating the qualitative difference between the impersonal and objective truths of reason, on the one hand, and what Kierkegaard calls “the highest truth available for an existing individual,” on the other. These latter truths are subjective and are fundamentally uncertain and inaccessible to logic or reason. Subjective truths cannot be thought; they can only be felt with inward intensity in the course of living one's life.
We will explore how Kierkegaard engages the tension between ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ truth in chapter 2, but at this point we want to make clear that at least one thing remained consistent in the historical transition from Hellenism to Christendom. This was the belief that human beings belong to and are dependent upon a divine, value-filled cosmos that provided an enduring moral order, a ‘great chain of being’ that determined the proper function and place of things and how humans ought to act. On this view, the people of Greco-Christian Europe inhabited an enchanted world filled with deities and supernatural meaning. This conception of a divine cosmos provided ready-made answers to existential questions such as ‘Who am I?’ ‘How should I live?’ and ‘What is the meaning of my life?’ The ability to answer these questions became increasingly difficult beginning in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as the pre-modern orientation began to break down in the wake of a new Enlightenment worldview, and early modern philosophers such as Galileo Galilei (1564–1642), René Descartes (1596–1650), and Isaac Newton (1643–1727) began to lay the scientific groundwork that challenged the inherent divinity and meaningfulness of the world.
The emergence of the modern worldview
Although admittedly simplistic, it is generally agreed that there were three key events that contributed to the historical formation of the modern worldview (e.g., C. Taylor 1989, 2003; Guignon 2004a). The first and arguably most significant was the advent of modern science. From the perspective of the new science, the cosmos was no longer understood from a teleological view, as a moral order of absolute ends, but as a valueless aggregate of quantifiable objects colliding with one another. The cosmos becomes, in the words of German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920), “disenchanted,” a vast, all-encompassing machine that operates on the basis of fixed, law-like formulas. The vision of the scientist, on this account, is that of a disinterested observer who impartially collects data and formulates theories. Crucial to this method is the ability to abstract out the subjective qualities that we give to things — such as beauty, meaning, purpose, and value — and focus only on the objective qualities of things, that is, those qualities that can be measured or quantified such as mass, velocity, and location in a spatial-temporal coordinate system. With this view, anything in the natural world can now be objectified, examined from a perspective of cool detachment as an object to be manipulated. This is an explicitly humanistic view insofar as it revolves around the human being as the knowing ‘subject’ who masters and controls ‘objects.’ Weber summed up the aims of the new science by claiming, “There are [now] no more mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world becomes disenchanted” (1948, 139, my emphasis). Of course, on this view, human beings too can be regarded as quantifiable objects to be manipulated for specific purposes. And human behavior is no longer explained in terms of incalculable meanings or divine ends but in instrumental terms of causality, where every action and event is necessarily determined by a set of antecedent conditions.
Many philosophers of the time regarded the scientific revolution positively. Not only did it liberate human beings from the superstitions and oppressive dogmas of the church; it also provided techniques for increasing our mastery over the natural world. But some philosophers expressed reservation. One of the earliest and most powerful expressions was provided by the proto-existentialist Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), who, although a brilliant physicist and mathematician in his own right, experienced this new mechanistic and de-animated world not with optimism, but with dread. In his Pensées, he offered a powerful description of a world stripped of any trace of divinity or overarching meaning: