I am currently reading “Fear and Trembling” by Søren Kierkegaard which (more or less) opens with the following passage:
If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment, a power that twisting in dark passions produced everything great or inconsequential; if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair? If it were thus, if there were no sacred bond uniting mankind, if one generation rose up after another like the leaves of the forest, if one generation succeeded the other as the songs of birds in the woods, if the human race passed through the world as a ship through the sea or the wind through the desert, a thoughtless and fruitless whim, if eternal oblivion lurked hungrily for its prey, and there were no power strong enough to wrest it from its clutches — how empty and devoid of comfort would life be! But for that reason it is not so, and as God created man and woman, so too he shaped the hero and the poet or speech-maker.
This is perhaps the greatest opening to a book that I have ever read. The bit before this is a run through different versions of the story of Abraham and Isaac; then Bam! he comes right in with this all-encompassing explanation of existence, outlining his view on life, and in part justifying his evaluation of faith that comes through the rest of the book.
Perhaps I identify with the passage particularly as it kind of sums up my general intuition that a God exists, or perhaps more accurately, one of the reasons that I am not an atheist. I wouldn’t go so far as to use the despair of an independent, temporary existence to rationally argue that there is a God, but it resonates with my core feeling. On the other hand, you could say believing in a God purely to give life meaning is merely delusion through hope, or just a means of avoiding the reality of the despair described above.
Regardless, I think it is an excellent passage, with great imagery, and fantastic depth; I especially like “the wind through the desert”, which is the image of humanity I often take from science, especially geology or astronomy. Is it wrong to go searching through faith or mysticism to find an antidote this world view? To create a image of warmth and hope, even if it is irrational? (I’m not suggesting this is the reason all people look to faith, but I think it can be for many)
But the realization of being a wind in the desert is precisely the image I get from most strains of mysticism. Chogyam Trungpa considers hopelessness to be an absolutely essential spiritual revelation. This is consistent with my understanding of Buddhism, and the notion of killing the ego. At the top of the tree of life, there is *nothing*. Science has the cop-out of “serving man”, but the mystic doesn’t get that luxury
Kierkegaard’s description of the world seems accurate until he tries to save himself from it; I sense that he too must have intuitively felt, like Sartre and the Shakyamuni Buddha, that life was truly empty, but wasn’t able to reconcile this with his notion of God.
Thanks for your comment.
“…that life was truly empty, but wasn’t able to reconcile this with his notion of God.”
I think this was a large part of his reason for being a theist. He thought it was better to take a “leap of faith” and believe, even though he couldn’t fully reconcile God to the world around himself. I can certainly understand his reasons, even if I can’t quite follow them myself.
First time I’ve checked out your site properly, (sorry!) but I thought this was an astute commentary by Kierkegaard on the mysterious sense -not just you, but I also sometimes have of something greater than a cyclic view of life expanding and collapsing to, ultimately, nothingness. Whilst many biologists I know, and as Jacob points out, Buddhists also, find a satisfying beauty in this ‘nothingness’, I cannot. And to believe in something ‘greater’, even if it is, like you said, perhaps irrational and improbable, is the core of millions of people’s existence. In The Silver Chair (C.S Lewis) there’s a good illustration of the importance of such ‘irrationality’.