Tillich, the Courage to Be, and Meaninglessness.

Continuing blogging my way through the reading of one of my favorite books, Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be.

I left off a while back with a discussion of the section on “The Anxiety of Fate and Death.” This was the first of Tillich’s “Three Types of Anxiety.” The next is “The Anxiety of Emptiness and Meaninglessness.” (Courage p. 46-51.) I liked this section for the way it addresses the issues it raises in such a careful intellectual way but really ends up stating a very common truth that many people I know have found on their own. A key point is stated very near the beginning of the section:

Spiritual self-affirmation occurs in every moment in which [humankind] lives creatively in the various spheres of meaning.

The basic idea seems to me to be: participate in life! Don’t just sit on the sidelines watching the world go by! This sounds to me like great practical advice. Lay around and mope and it is easy to be depressed. Get yourself to participate in an activity and there is not time to feel sorry for oneself. (Woody Allen, interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air yesterday seems to have a depressing version of this philosophy. He talks about it with Ms. Gross in connection with his new movie.) “Everyone who lives creatively in meanings,” writes Tillich, “affirms himself as a participant in those meanings.” Here he gives examples of the artist and the scientist but he notes that one need not be a creative artist or scientist to be spiritually creative, but one needs to be able to “participate meaningfully” in the artists creations and the scientists discoveries.

Tillich asserts that living “creatively in meanings” through art and scientific discovery presupposes taking the spiritual life seriously. A spiritual life in which these creative experiences are not had, Tillich says, is “threatened by non-being in the two forms in which it attacks spiritual self-affirmation: emptiness and meaninglessness.” (p. 47) The anxiety of meaninglessness is the anxiety over the threat of non-being to spiritual self-affirmation. It is aroused, says Tillich, by the loss of a spiritual center.

Emptiness, Tillich says, is different. It is connected to special threats of non-being to the spiritual life. It happens when you are cut off from creative participation in a particular cultural activity. You go from tradition to tradition and nothing satisfies because the tradition, no matter how well respected, has lost its power to give content today. You turn away from all “concrete contents” and try to produce an ultimate answer that satisfies you intentionally. But that is all but impossible to do, says Tillich, and only produces deeper anxiety. “The anxiety of emptiness drives us to the abyss of meaninglessness.” (p. 48)

Doubt comes into play and the spiritual life attempts to maintain itself by looking to those areas that doubt has not yet undercut. But this cannot be sustained and to save oneself, says Tillich, people look to something beyond themselves to sustain them – something he calls “transindividual.” (p. 49) Answers are given to the person authoritatively (by the Bible or the Koran, perhaps?) and freedom is sacrificed to regain meaning.

The result we see all around us: fanaticism. The person who has sacrificed their freedom to this transindividual something becomes consumed with the anxiety it was designed to conquer because to admit doubt becomes a threat to the sustaining of the regained meaning. Such a person can do violence on those who disagree with the authority he or she has accepted. The person threatening this authority has a power over the person trying to sustain it because that latter has to suppress the former and persecute dissent. Think biblical fundamentalists or Islamic extremists.

The problem becomes most acute when the symbols of the traditional systems lose their power to be understood in the traditional ways. Tillich gives the doctrinal symbols of Christianity as an example of this. “[Humankind’s] being includes [its] relation to meaning,” says Tillich indicating that ontic and spiritual self-affirmation cannot be wholly separated. We are “human only by understanding and shaping reality … according to meanings and values.” (p. 50) This shaping and understanding is present in our most primitive expressions. All meaning and value is potentially present in even our first formations of sentences and therefore meaninglessness and emptiness threaten our very being. It is why, he says, despair over the meaninglessness of life can even lead to one taking one’s own life. “The death instinct is not an ontic but a spiritual phenomenon.” (p. 51) The phenomena feed on themselves and non-being threatens from both sides – the ontic and the spiritual.

The frightening thing is that it is clear that for many of us these old symbols and doctrines have indeed lost their meanings and there is no going back. When I first came to not believe in a traditional way my first instinct was to find a way to remedy that through the traditional belief itself. This manifests in many of us through a sort of hostile atheism of a type in which you spend much of your time debating and fighting with that thing that you have rejected but can’t seem to really let go of. The hostility of many atheists to religion is a symptom of this anxiety over this loss, I think. One may not be able to embrace the original tradition, but if you are constantly fighting with it and debating about it you keep that tradition close to you in a way. How does that old saying go – hate is not the opposite of love, indifference is!

Another way must be found to conquer the anxieties of meaninglessness and emptiness. Albert Einstein recognized this problem in atheism and it was a reason he never wanted to be considered one. I remember seeing a bit of myself from years ago when I read what he said of “fanatical atheists whose intolerance is on the same kind as the intolerance of the religious fanatics and comes from the same source”:

They are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after hard struggle. They are creatures who - in their grudge against the traditional “opium for the people” – cannot bear to hear the music of the spheres. (Quoted in Max Jammer’s Einstein and Religion, p. 97)

The question for me is: if the old notes of that music fail to continue to move you, where do you look for the new melodies that can?