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Romanticism, Existentialism And Religion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 February 2009
Extract
Thus Pascal sets forth the romanticist thesis that reason has nothing to do with the deep intimations of the worshipping soul. Religion is an affair of the heart, and the productive Source of all things cannot be comprehended by the exercise of the finite intellect. This doctrine foreshadows the Kantian dichotomy between phenomena and noumena: the understanding can legitimately operate only within the sphere of space, time and natural causality, as it knows nothing of the transcendental postulates of the moral life. In Kant's case, however, the opposition is worked out by means of a sustained and systematic analysis of man's faculties of cognition, and the intuitions of moral feeling are not without a rationality of their own. One might say that in Kant's view there is a logic of ethical sentiment as well as a logic of the scientific understanding, the former being practical, the latter theoretical. In the practical domain of morality the categories of the scientific understanding do not apply: the individual who acts from a sense of duty is free and immortal, besides being destined to receive rewards from the hand of God according to his deserts. The practice of the moral life therefore creates a sort of categoreal vacuum, the individual becoming a noumenon, emancipated from the shackles of the sensible world; from an empirical point of view, morality means self-transcendence.
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References
page 319 note 1 277, 278; cp. 282, 287. The references are to the Brunschwicg edition of the Pensées
page 319 note 1 Cp. Friedrich Schleiermacher's romanticist theory of “the sense of the eternal” in his Addresses on Religion (1799), and his later conception of “the feeling of absolute dependence” expounded in his theological work The Christian Faith (1821)
page 320 note 1 Cp. especially Kierkegaard's works Fear and Trembling, Either-Or, Concluding Unscientific Postscript
page 320 note 2 Cp. for example The Eclipse of God, pp. 46 f., 52 f., 69 f., 149 ff., 163 ft.
page 322 note 1 See op. cit., pp. 155 f.
page 322 note 2 Much confusion and prejudice have been evinced in discussions bearing on this topic, both in pro- and in anti-existentialist writings. Thus Mr. Sartre sings the praises of the heroes of the Résistance, while condemning representatives of Communism and Fascism; on existentialist principles this can merely be the outcome of a personal taste, like a preference for tea to coffee. Again, Mr. Heinemann writes of Mr. Heidegger's “human failure in the existential trial of the Third Reich” (Existentialism and the Modern Predicament, p. 87). But surely there is no principle inherent in Existentialism which prevents a person from associating himself with any particular political party; the important thing is that the act of joining should be the result of a deliberate choice, an act of self-commitment.
page 325 note 1 Dream and Reality, p. 103.
page 326 note 1 Cp. G. Marcel: The Philosophy of Existence, pp. 32 ff.
page 327 note 1 For these interpretations, cp. L'être et le néant, pp. 100, 439, 483, 684.
page 327 note 2 Cp. the Le sursis, pp. 283 ff.
page 329 note 1 See The Olive Tree, pp. 156 f.
page 331 note 1 Cp. D. Nicholl: Recent Thought in Focus, pp. 91 ff.