Fear and trembling
In our time nobody is content to stop with faith but wants to go further. It would perhaps be rash to ask where these people are going, but it is surely a sign of breeding and culture for me to assume that everybody has faith, for otherwise it would be queer for them to be... going further. In those old days it was different, then faith was a task for a whole lifetime, because it was assumed that dexterity in faith is not acquired in a few days or weeks. When the tried oldster drew near to his last hour, having fought the good fight and kept the faith, his heart was still young enough not to have forgotten that fear and trembling which chastened the youth, which the man indeed held in check, but which no man quite outgrows... except as he might succeed at the earliest opportunity in going further. Where these revered figures arrived, that is the point where everybody in our day begins to go further.
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- > Surely you in your life you have met many Christians who said "God works in mysterious ways", "there is a purpose for everything", "trust in the Lord", etc.?
Yes, but this is something people say in times of grief, for the comfort of the grieving -- it's not a consistent moral philosophy that they hold to in other parts of their life, nor is it meant to be. There are better answers than this, but they are oftentimes much harder to process, and much more likely to accidentally pain the one who is grieving.
> It's arguably a necessary tenet for Christianity to hold together as a coherent belief system.
No, it's not. You're correct in that "you need some way to explain why bad things still happen", but we've come a long, long way from "stuff just happens". For example, the Catholic view is that suffering is A) not committed by, but permitted by, God; B) necessary for salvation and free will to coexist. In this view, evil is in essence a deviation from the will of God -- but free will must, in this conception, at the very least include the free will to choose to follow or choose to oppose God's own will. To quote St. Aquinas, paraphrasing St. Augustine: "Since God is the supremely highest good, he would not allow evil to exist in his creation unless he were so all powerful that he could even make good out of evil". More broadly, suffering is seen as having not only a redemptive but an edifying nature that can ultimately bring us closer to God.
I understand that this might sound repulsive on first glance, but frankly I do not think there is an answer to "why is there evil?" which would not be at initial examination -- certainly, it's no worse than the idea that we are simply here to suffer by random caprice, and that that suffering is itself meaningless, nothing but a failure on your own (meaningless) value function. Yes, one might hope that things 'could have been a different way' -- but what would a world without any grief, any suffering even be like? This is the point of the whole pleasure-machine/experience-machine thought experiment: many people would very much rather live in this world, with all its suffering, than one totally blank, devoid of depth and complexity. One might even go as far as to assert that no 'good' God could permit such terrible depths of suffering -- congenital illness, rape, torture, child slavery, so on and so forth. But so many times, in exploring theories of computational complexity or abstract mathematics or informatics, we see that what might have seemed to be simple assumptions can have enormous, essential effects: deciding whether all programs written for a FSM with one stack is simple, but for one with two stacks the problem becomes impossible. Perhaps it is impossible to have a world "with matter, with living things made from matter, with free will for those living beings, but without the ability of one living thing to enslave another". We cannot know -- but if there is a truly transcendent, omniscient God, then He certainly would.
For a more modern (more philosophically-flavored) take, I'd suggest reading Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling: he explores the binding of Isaac with the idea being to address this very question. In particular, he strongly disagrees with Kant's idea that God would simply choose to follow the categorical imperative, and emphasizes instead the transcendence of God and divine morality. But as an existentialist I think his writing is much closer to how we as members of the modern world can feel than philosophers/theologians who came before him.
- Fine, I'll just pick some random books: Feyerabend's Against Method, Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Nietzsche's The Antichrist, Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling, Descartes's Meditations, Spinoza's Ethics, Plato's dialogues, I could go on and on. Maybe you don't like all of these, but there are plenty of people who read these for fun, and all of them are taken seriously by philosophers.
- I don't mean to start a "religion versus atheism" comment battle, but just wanted to discuss the idea of moral responsibility. For context, I grew up in a Christian (Eastern Orthodox) household and attended church for some twenty-five years of my life - that is to say, the perspective of a believer is not lost on me, even though I am now agnostic.
For me, responsibility is irrevocably linked to the idea of care - caring for those other than myself makes me responsible for my actions, inasmuch as they impact those around me. That ranges from those I love (my partner, family, friends) to strangers on the street that I nonetheless "care" for, by recognizing our shared humanity. Care itself comes from the idea of finitude - specifically, the idea of fragility of life in the face of our mortal existence. If I'm being poetic, "living rightly" means a life that is spent caring for others, strengthening the bonds that link us in face of death. The consequences of our actions are felt precisely because of the finitude of our lives - all we've got is each other, and our responsibility is towards one another.
Religious morality of the other hand is best expressed in the story of Abraham being asked to sacrifice his son (it's no wonder the three major religions are called "Abrahamic"). For a deeper dive into the idea, I recommend reading Kierkegaard's retelling of this story in Fear and Trembling - to recap however, God asks Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, they travel to mountain where Abraham binds Isaac and lifts up the knife to kill him. At the last moment, God interrupts Abraham, and a ram is offered as sacrifice instead. This story, perhaps one of the most well-known stories from the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, goes directly against the idea of responsibility in moral judgments - Abraham does not falter, for he fully trusts his Lord, giving up his son in devotion to God's command. The idea of care or responsibility for ones actions is superseded by the belief that the will of God is, in fact, more important than caring for those around you. A true belief in an everlasting life presupposes a detachment from the world (as any cursory reading of writers such as Saint Augustine shows), in a way protecting and insulating the believer from truly coming to terms with the consequence of their actions (in this case, murdering their only son).
To sum it up, I just can't get behind the idea that a final judge is somehow required for having responsibility in moral judgments. In fact, the opposite is true - only through the secular faith that there is no better everlasting world can we form meaningful relationships and take full responsibility for our actions.
- I used to teach Existentialism before leaving academia. As the other comment mentions Kierkegaard's "Either/Or" is worth a read, I also recommend "Fear and Trembling."
The other two writers associated with this term I think are must reads are Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. The former's Notes From Underground is one of my favorite pieces of literature. I highly recommend reading it alongside his "Winter Notes on Summer Impressions," a travel diary he wrote that heavily inspired his later work. In it, he vividly describes the kind of anxieties he has with modernity that influences his work.
And for those wanting a higher level overview of Existentialism and the myriad (seemingly incompatible) writers associated with the term, I highly recommend Kevin Aho's "Existentialism: an Introduction." I've read most of the popular overviews and this one is hands down the best.
- I can see how those two philosophers can well-equip you with a good metaphysical framework for life. I haven't read Aurelius's Meditations but it's lying around somewhere - in due time, I suppose. I failed an existentialism course not too long ago and it partly focused on Kierkegaard. The particular books I like from him are Works of Love and Fear and Trembling. If you are interested in more of his thinking, you might like the Danish drama film entitled Ordet (1955). Also, if you want to know more about his personal life, I liked this read: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/keeper-loves-flame-regin...
- I plan to reread a couple core works for myself. Of that list the ones that I’d recommend for others are: Aurelius (trans. Martin Hammond) Fear and Trembling Man’s Search for Meaning Tolstoy’s Confessions Kundera’s The Art of the Novel
After doing a thorough reading of “How to Read a Book” I decided to try rereading a few books to pull more out of them.
I can’t recommend “How to Read a Book” enough - despite its anachronisms and glaring faults, it’s the only book I’ve found that has genuinely made me feel that I’ve not really read a single book in my life.
