FROM THE ARCHIVES: THE AVOIDABLE VOID (via Mike Daley):

How can I fill this void in my life? (ANNA SMYTH, 4/08/04, The Scotsman)

As Easter Sunday approaches, Christians across the world are preparing to celebrate the most significant festival of their religious calendar. The Jewish community is currently marking Passover. Those who follow other major faiths, or fulfil spiritual needs through less mainstream outlets, will be looking forward to their own key festivities as the year moves on. But for those who do not believe in the spiritual life, where is the answer to the meaning of life? For those who don't believe in God, where may a code of personal ethics be found? [...]

According to Dr Colin Gill, psychologist and founder of Psychological Solutions, which aims to maximise employees' potential via psychology-based training, philosophy is filling the emptiness felt by many.

Gill says that a key problem facing people in the West today is the lack of a common moral code. With the separation of religion from the state and an increased promotion of multiculturalism, our ethical boundaries have been blurred. "We are now in a more confused state than we have ever been," says Gill, a psychologist who specialises in ethics, morality and personality. "We don't have one agreed set of ethics, and aside from believing that paedophilia is wrong, everything is negotiable."

Gill adds that the central problem is one of absolutes. Society may have slipped into a spiritual slumber, but human beings remain innately curious creatures. As small children we need boundaries. Even as adults, if we do not know what is acceptable behaviour, we begin to lose our grip. But our instinct is to find a firm footing again. "This is evidenced by the success of one branch of the church which has returned to strict, traditional morals," says Gill.

"Some evangelical Christians are reverting to the morality of Victorian times, and within that defined framework, they are enjoying stable marriages and successful careers.They now know what is right and wrong. The price they pay for that is to be cut off from a surrounding culture which does not adopt the same principles."

Nevertheless, what Gill describes as the "surrounding culture" is searching for a moral substitute which in earlier, more God-fearing, times was readily defined by the teachings of the Church.

Gill believes Western society's uncertainty in the post-9/11 era may have added more than a little rocket fuel to this quest. As the West faces its first coherent external threat for many years, our secular community is evaluating the foundations on which its society is built, and considering what sort of world we would like to inhabit. "For the first time in centuries we are not fighting each other," says Gill.

"We are faced with a group of people who have in themselves a very clear, defined moral code, one that is so robust they are willing to die for it. If we are to face that threat we need to be united in our own set of standards. If we are to live in a secular society, we need a secular moral code."

Nietzsche's Truth (Damon Linker, August/September 2002, First Things)

Nietzsche was hardly the first modern figure to espouse atheism. The most radical writers of the Enlightenment suspected that God was a fiction created by the human mind. G. W. F. Hegel famously declared that modernity is "Good Friday without Easter Sunday." And throughout the nineteenth century, a series of authors, from Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx to Charles Darwin, claimed that religion is a human projection onto a spiritually lifeless world. Nietzsche agreed with this tradition in every respect but one. Whereas most modern atheists viewed their lack of piety as an unambiguous good--as a mark of their liberation from the dead weight of authority and tradition--Nietzsche responded to his insight into the amoral chaos at the heart of the world with considerable pathos. If in Human, All Too Human and Daybreak he flirted with the facile cheerfulness so common to his fellow atheists, beginning with aphorism 125 of The Joyful Science, Nietzsche showed that he now understood with greater depth that the passing of God has potentially devastating consequences for Western Civilization. This is the madman's requiem aeternam deo:

But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us?

If God is dead, then man has completely lost his orientation. There is no human dignity, no equality, no rights, no democracy, no liberalism, and no good and evil. In the light of Nietzsche's insight, a thinker such as Marx looks extraordinarily superficial, railing against religion on the one hand while remaining firmly attached to ideals of justice and equality on the other. He has failed to grasp the simple truth that if God is dead, then nothing at all can be taken for granted--and absolutely everything is permitted.

Ms Smyth would appear to believe that Man has just now struck upon this idea of trying to fill the gaping whole left by the loss of God with the consolation of philosophy. In reality it is the failed project of modernity. At least Nietzsche had the courage of his convictions and could accept, even embrace, the consequences of God's death. Most atheists though are rather pitiable. The attraction of denying God lies in the rebellion against authority. Rebelling then against the biggest Authority conveys a certain sense of courage and self-importance that must appeal to a certain type. But if you go scurrying around afterwards trying to reconstruct the same morality, human dignity, etc. that you've just kicked the props out from under then you can't help but look pretty cowardly. On the other hand, if you go around telling people that not only are you an atheist but you don't believe in morality, you'll not find much welcome--certainly not be asked to babysit anyway. So atheists are left in the comical position outlined by Ms Smyth, denying God but insisting that they can come up with their own god-replacement that will do all the same things as the original.

MORE (via Paul Cella):
Phil's Shadow: The Lessons of Groundhog Day (Michael P. Foley, Touchstone)

Phil (masterfully played by Bill Murray) is egotistical, career-driven, and contemptuous of his fellow man. "People are morons," he tells his producer Rita, played by an adorable Andie MacDowell. "People like blood sausage." Phil, in other words, is the typical product of modernity, the bourgeois man who lives for himself in the midst of others. Rita describes him--and us--well by quoting Sir Walter Scott's "There Breathes the Man":

The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonoured, and unsung.

By refusing to die to himself, Phil and those like him are doomed to die doubly, triply, innumerably.

The Punxsutawney celebration of Groundhog Day culminates with the town elders consulting a real woodchuck, also named Phil, about the next six weeks. The groundhog sees his shadow, an omen that more winter is to come.

Connors cannot wait to return to Pittsburgh, but trapped by a blizzard (which he failed to predict), he and the crew must stay another night in Punxsutawney. When he awakes the next morning, Phil discovers to his dismay that it is February 2nd--again. The same thing happens the next day, and the next. For reasons that are never made clear, Phil is condemned to live Groundhog Day over and over.

Phil's situation is unique, yet the movie hints that it is not unrelated to our own quotidian lives. Commiserating with two locals over beers, Phil asks, "What would you do if every day was the same, and nothing you did ever mattered?" The men's faces grow solemn, and one of them finally belches, "That about sums it up for me." Phil's preternatural plight bears a twin resemblance to ours: first, as a symbol for the Fall, with its "doubly dying" estrangement from God and return to the vile dust from whence we sprang; and second, as a symbol for life in the wake of postmodern philosophy.

For the great father of this philosophy is Nietzsche, and the idea that frightened him most was the "the eternal recurrence of the same," i.e., that even the superior human being must bear the same dreary existence an infinite number of times. Like us, Phil is the modern man who must now confront the hardship of postlapsarian life on the one hand and the metaphysical meaninglessness of postmodern thought on the other.

Indeed, Phil's various reactions to his enslavement read like the history of philosophy in reverse. Phil is shocked at his own impotence, so much faith had he put in his meteorological training. ("I make the weather!" he tells an unconvinced state trooper.) Phone lines and automobiles prove useless, as do his visits to a doctor and a therapist. All of the Enlightenment's societal buttresses--technology, natural science, and social science--collapse under the weight of a problem outside the parameters of space and time.

Once Phil realizes that in his Nietzschean quagmire there are no consequences to his actions, he also experiences modern philosophy's liberation from any sense of eternal justice. "I am not going to play by their rules any longer," he gleefully announces. His reaction epitomizes Glaucon's argument in Plato's Republic. Remove the fear of punishment, Glaucon argued, and the righteous will behave no differently than the wicked. Nineteen hundred years later, Machiavelli, arguably the father of modern philosophy, elevated this view to a philosophical principle.

And Phil embodies it perfectly: Once he learns that he can get away with anything he wants, he becomes Machiavelli's prince. He unhesitatingly steals money from a bank, cold-cocks a life insurance agent, and seduces an attractive woman.

To Phil's surprise, however, this life of instant gratification proves unfulfilling, leading him to set his sights on Rita, his beautiful and wholesome co-worker. The name "Rita," I contend, tells us something about the role she plays in Phil's life. Rita is short for Margarita, the Latin word for "pearl." To Phil, Rita is the pearl of great price. We know from Matthew's Gospel that this pearl is the kingdom of Heaven, but it may also be appropriate to think of it as happiness, since, according to Aristotle, happiness is that towards which everything in our life is ordered.

And so the overriding question of the story becomes clear: What will it take to attain true happiness? What will it take to buy the pearl?

[Originally posted: April 9, 2004]

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 9, 2009 7:47 AM