The Christmas Conspiracy!

THREE: "THE LAW AND THE PROPHETS: ABOLISHED OR CONFIRMED?

LAW

THE THIRD ARCHETYPE

"'. . . that He may teach us about His ways
And that we may walk in His paths.'
For from Zion will go forth the Law
Even the Word of God from Jerusalem."
Micah 4:2

Existentialism:
AUTONOMY vs.THEONOMY

Existentialism is preoccupied with ethical situations where genuine decisions must be made by the "free" man. Being disenchanted by the total lack of help the noncognitivist schools offer one in making difficult moral decisions, and being entirely skeptical of all the solutions offered by the informativist schools of ethics, the existentialist centers on the moral psychology which comes to play in profoundly complex and extraordinary circumstances requiring definite ethical decision. The virtues of authenticity and radical freedom are extolled; this fact, coupled with the existentialist emphasis that all human situations are morally unprecedented (a man cannot look to previous answers) and that each man chooses for all men in his moral decisions, puts an intolerable [300] strain upon the moralist. He is to consider himself completely alone and without any moral guidance whatsoever; the dreadful responsibility he has leaves him in the anguish of moral paralysis. Out of such a situation authentic decisions can be made by the radically free man. This is the one virtue: that the moralist acts. The direction he takes in his behavior is irrelevant; what counts is that he alone made the bold decision and dramatically acted. He can help the man who is being mugged, or he can help mug him; either act, if an authentic choice, would be moral. Ethical decisions must be spun right out of thin air, for the man who makes the "authentic" decision must be free from his passions (for he chooses whether to resist or give in to them), from motives (since there is no psychological centrum or ego to which motives could adhere, and since the agent himself must first decide what kinds of reasons he will allow to have weight before he begins to rationally deliberate), from reality-in-itself (since man, who is being-for-itself, lies outside the causal series altogether), and from any human essence (since existence precedes and formulates essence). Existentialism, then, does not even have the advantage of being an unethical ethics of inclination (like emotivism, etc.); it is simply an ethics of pure volition (or alleges that it is anyway). Man is free from any antecedently fixed values according to the existentialist; value is defined as it is chosen. Jean-Paul Sartre says that the very starting point of existentialism is Dostoyevsky’s words, "If God did not exist, everything would be possible"; based on the absence of God, says Sartre, man has nothing to cling to and all values disappear. Every choice is consequently as justifiable as it is absurd; there are not good and bad choices, but just choices. Sartre has the protagonist, Orestes, say in The Flies, "I am doomed to have no other law but mine. Sartre says of Mathieau, the protagonist of The Age of Reason, "There would be for him no good nor evil unless he brought them into being." Obviously existentialism is the complete annihilation of ethics, for within that school of [301] thought it is impossible to make a wrong free choice. Responsibility and ethics are appropriate only to a world in which there are objective moral principles which can be accepted or rejected, followed or violated. There is nothing ethical at stake in a "moral decision" for the existentialist; hence, negative ethical judgments are impossible and positive ones are superfluous.

Next: Evaluation and Comparison