by Father Robert Lauder

For more than 40 years, I have been teaching the philosophy of existentialism, or at least my version of existentialism. When people discover that I teach this philosophy, they often ask “Just what is existentialism?” I have been asked that question a few hundred times. I have come up with a short answer that I think is an accurate articulation of the basic meaning of this philosophy.

In my answer, I emphasize that more than any other philosophy, existentialism stresses human freedom and emphasizes human responsibility. Existentialists believe that we are who we are because of our free choices. There are atheistic existentialists and theistic existentialists. An atheistic existentialist would stress that God does not exist and that each person is creating himself or herself through free choices; a theistic existentialist would say that we are co-creating ourselves with God through our free choices, that we are the product of God’s free choices and our own free choices.

At St. John’s University, Jamaica, I have been the only professor teaching the course on existentialism for more than 20 years. This past spring, a young professor taught a section on existentialism, and he used a book with which I was not familiar. Looking over the chapter on Kierkegaard (1813-1855) in the book was a really delightful experience for me because what I have been emphasizing in Kierkegaard’s philosophy was also emphasized in the chapter. I also learned something new, something I did not know about Kierkegaard’s analysis of society.

Kierkegaard described three types of despair. What he calls the first type has special interest for me because I am wondering if it applies not only to 19th-century Europe but to the 21st-century U.S.

In the volume, Existentialism: Basic Writings, Second Edition (Editors: Charles Guignon and Derk Pereboom, Indianapollis/Cambridge, 2001, pp. 362), the following is written about the first type of despair according to Kierkegaard:

“In Sickness unto Death Kierkegaard discusses various ways one might attempt to confront the most basic predicament for human existence: the need to express both one’s temporal and one’s eternal nature. There he describes three unsuccessful ways of managing this predicament, three stances he calls forms of despair. The first stance is to be unaware of the problem and thus to live a life of indifference to the most fundamental tension in one’s being. This type of life he describes as ‘not being conscious of having a self.’ If one is in despair in this sense, one does not even feel that one is in despair. For example, an aesthetic devotee of the momentary pleasures of partying and revelry may never realize that there is an eternal side to his nature that he is not expressing. He may feel that he is living well, but Kierkegaard holds that he is in fact in the worst form of despair.”

When I read the description of this type of despair, the words seemed to leap off the page at me. For a few years, I have been struck, not so much by how many people do not believe in God, but more by the number of people who don’t have any interest in ultimate questions, in whether or not God exists, in whether or not there is a life beyond the grave. Could it be that large numbers of people are in what Kierkegaard called the first type of despair?

I certainly have met people who seem to have no sense of their having what Kierkegaard called their eternal nature. I am not judging anyone, but I am interested in what seems like a strange phenomenon, that is widespread indifference to what philosophers and religious thinkers have for centuries seen as important questions. I suspect that the great Danish philosopher identified a serious problem that might not be confined to 19th-century Europe.

Reflecting on Kierkegaard’s insights into the mystery of human nature and the mystery of God, I am reminded what a wonderful gift philosophical geniuses can offer to the rest of us. When they see deeply into truth, all of us can benefit.

In an excellent essay on Kierkegaard in The London Tablet (May 4, 2013), George Pattison points out that there are two very different interpretations of Kierkegaard’s thought, each imagining what the final philosophy of Kierkegaard might be if he had lived longer. One interprets the Danish thinker as moving toward secularism. This interpretation makes no sense to me.

Commenting on the other, Pattison suggests that Kierkegaard might have been led to “a more Catholic version of Christianity and the rediscovery of Catholic Christendom’s own counter-cultural dimension. He once said of his authorship that he was essentially in the monastery when he first started to write. Perhaps – on this view – the monastery might have been a fitting home for such an extraordinary poet of the love of God.”[hr] Father Robert Lauder, a priest of the Diocese of Brooklyn and philosophy professor at St. John’s University, Jamaica, writes a weekly column for the Catholic Press.