While Kierkegaard wasn’t a Daoist or a Buddhist, his Philosophy shares many similarities to them. At the beginning of the section, “On Becoming a Christian” in our book on page 24 Kierkegaard says, “What now is the absurd? The absurd is that the eternal world has come into being in time, that God has come into being, has been born, has grown up, and so forth, has come into being just like any other individual human being, quite distinguishable from other human beings....” and about halfway down the page, “The almost probable: that he can almost know, or as good as know, to a greater degree and exceedingly almost know--but believe it, that is impossible, for the absurd is precisely the object of faith, and only that can be believed.”
This view of god, of reality, is precisely the same kind of view Taoist or Zen Buddhists hold. Consider the first lines of the Tao Te Ching (English and Feng translation), “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao. The name that can be named is not the eternal name. The nameless is the beginning of heaven and Earth. The named is the mother of the ten thousand things.”
How similar they are! According Kierkegaard, the idea that God can be known, can be qualified as a kind of being similar to man, as absolutely ridiculous. The moment you try to pick apart what God is, it stops being God. It requires wholeness and the only way to achieve that is through faith. Contrasted with the first lines of the Tao Te Ching, this idea is indistinguishable from it; from the absurdity of knowing God, to the fruitlessness in trying to come up with terms to define God (you will end up with ten thousand things).
However, Kierkegaard falls victim to silly things like giving god a sex (he calls God a he), and spends far too much time referring to God as a being separate from us, . This is completely contrary to how Taoist and Zen Buddhists view the nameless source from which we all come. A Taoist would never ascribe a sex or anything remotely relating to a form for the Tao. It is indescribable, and utterly pointless to try to describe. I think Kierkegaard did his Philosophy a major disservice by attempting this.
The other interesting idea of Kierkegaard’s was his idea of possibility. Kierkegaard said that anxiety is freedom’s possibility, and that “only this anxiety through faith absolutely educative, laying bare as it does all finite ends and discovering all their deceptions.” To Kierkegaard, being educated by possibility is of utmost importance. To the Taoist, only the present moment matters, because the future is an illusion. Possibility is an illusion. To stand in the moment, to detach yourself from all anxiety about the future or regrets about the past, is the only way to be one with the Tao. You must be like water, formless, accepting of all things. To resist, to try to force the world to your will, will end poorly. You must give up any notions of changing the world, and accept it as it is. Only then will you be moving in harmony with the Tao.
Of course, Kierkegaard wasn’t a Taoist, and his Philosophy isn’t a Taoist philosophy, so one cannot fault him for viewing things differently. However I much prefer the Taoist explanations of the nameless source of energy from which all things in the Universe spring forth from. Perhaps had Kierkegaard spent some time reading Taoist or Zen texts, his Philosophy would have been a little more concise and well defined. As it is, I think is rather lacking when attempting to describe the indescribable.
(For those not in my philosophy class, we read a portion of Camus' Myth of Sisyphus and the entirety of The Fall.) Being someone that is rather introspective, suicide is something I have thought of often; indeed I’ve been wrestling with it for most of my adult life. Of course this really isn’t much of a surprise, since if one ponders life long enough, thinking of suicide is impossible to avoid. This isn’t to say that I've constantly held a gun to my temple, daring myself to pull the trigger. But rather, I have constantly turned it over in my mind, examining it, exploring its every crevice. It has been absolutely necessary to my development and my understanding of my place in the world.
But why you might ask.
Because it has been through my struggle with the idea suicide, that I have been able to make any sense of life. While I don’t think I’ve come to any realizations that will shake the foundations of the world (shaking my own foundations has been enough), I have decided that the ultimate point of life is life itself. While life seems incredibly absurd, the fact that it is so only makes it more apparent that it is necessary. If it wasn’t necessary, why all the fuss? Here I turn to Goethe:
"Finished. A silly word. Why finished, I'd like to know. Finished and sheer nothingness all one and the same. What use is this interminable creating, this dragging creation into uncreation again? Finished. What does it point to? It might as well never have been at all. And yet it goes its round as if it was something. Give me eternal emptiness every time."
This is exactly the idea I speak of. If life has no purpose, then why go on at all?
However this doesn’t mean we are capable of determining any meaning. It is obvious that the world has rules that we must abide. We cannot put our arm through a concrete wall without breaking it, or jump off a cliff and expect to continue on. There are very clear rules we must follow. It follows that our reasoning should have its own set of limitations (though it may have a spectrum within this limitation).
I would like to put forth an idea for you to toy with: that if we were able to determine some ultimate meaning, it would ultimately make life meaningless. What I mean is that if there were some absolute meaning, why would there be any variety or diversity, why so many different experiences? It is only through leaving things open-ended that we get the kind of diverse and wonderful universe that we came out of. (Another fun thing to think about is that we didn’t come into this world, we came out of it, like a wave comes out of the ocean. Just as a wave is something that whole ocean is doing, you are something that whole universe is doing.)
So why commit suicide? I don't think I'd attempt to argue that suicide is never necessary, however it seems like it should only be used as a last resort. Too many kill themselves because of some unhappiness with an experience that is transitory. If they had had but a little a more patience, they (likely) would have witnessed the passing of their tragedy and life would have become enjoyable again. Life is always in flux, it is a constant ebb and flow. There is nothing static. Hell, even some scientists think that the physical constants of the universe might not actually be constants, just precise approximations that fluctuate ever so slightly.
So what do we do? I say we live. Fully, ecstatically. We must drink from the marrow of life and stop looking forward or backward. We must let go of what we imagine the world to be, and accept it for it is. All over the world people value freedom; what freedom is greater than letting go?
I'd like to share some words from a wise man named Albert Einstein:
"A human being is part of a whole, called by us the 'Universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest--a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
If we truly are part of the whole, then you do not end with your death, only this experience does. And if suicide is meant to be an escape from this interminable creating, this dragging creation into uncreation again, and it doesn’t achieve that goal, you’ve accomplished nothing.
So unless your suffering has no conceivable end in sight, why bother?
(Before we get started, I'd like to apologize for the long post. Fortunately, most of it was written by people far more talented at writing than I am, so I'm hoping it's not too bad. There was no copypasta involved, so if there are any errors in the italicized text, they are mine and not the authors/publishers. To anyone reading this not in my philosophy class, this post is about Albert Camus' "The Stranger")
For those that don't mind watching, I'd like to start my post off with another Alan Watts video (I can't help it, I'm obsessed!). I found it apropos and thought it might help set the mood. So to speak. Perhaps you could play it as you read through my post.
As someone that is a little more interested in eastern philosophy than western, I am very much interested in concepts like samsara, the continuous flow of life and death, satori, a type of enlightenment, and nirvana, which is the end of suffering, and is also an enlightenment. During my research of The Stranger (brief as it may have been), I read that some feel that Meursault had experienced a kind of enlightenment in his cell at the end of the novel:
“It was as if that great rush of anger had washed me clean, emptied me of hope, and, gazing up at the dark sky spangled with its signs and stars, for the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still. For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howls of execration.”
After carefully reading over this passage, and considering it within the context of the novel, I think I would have to agree that Meursault experienced a kind of enlightenment; though not all kinds of enlightenment are the same, at least not conceptually. Satori and nirvana are both a kind of enlightenment, however satori is the first step towards nirvana, which is the ultimate liberation and a release from suffering.
Satori, in contrast, is considered to be what happens when you see/understand/experience/become aware of your self-nature. I think this is what happened to Meursault: “I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed, so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still.” That passage specifically matches up fairly well with the definition of satori as I understand it. He realized that the absurdity and meaninglessness he felt all of his life was simply a manifestation of the true nature of the universe, and he was at peace with it. Sounds like enlightenment to me.
To better explain this, it might be a good idea (rather than listen to me prattle on) to examine a passage within Siddhartha, a novel written by Hermann Hesse, a german author living around the same time as Camus. It is about one man’s spiritual journey to “find” nirvana. In this particular passage, the protaganist, Siddhartha, is discussing nirvana with an old friend, Govinda. It can be found in the last chapter, also named Govinda. Govinda asks Siddhartha if he could tell him any certain realizations that might help him on his own path:
Siddhartha said: “Yes, I have had ideas and realizations, from time to time. On occasions, for an hour or for a day, I have felt knowledge in myself, just as a man feels life in his heart. Those were numerous, but it would be hard for me to communicate them to you. Look, my dear Govinda, here is one of the thoughts I have discovered: Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness.”
Govinda asks if he is joking.
“I am not joking. I am telling you what I discovered. Knowledge can be imparted, but not wisdom. You can discover it, it can guide your life, it can bear you up, you can do miracles with it, but you cannot tell it or teach it. This was what I had several premonitions of, even as a youngster; it was this that drove me away from teachers. I have discovered an idea Govinda, which you will once again consider to be a joke or foolishness, but which is my best idea. Namely: the opposite of every truth is equally true! What I mean is: without fail, a truth can only be uttered and clothed in words if it is one-sided. Everything is one-sided if the mind can conceive it and words can express it; all of that is one-sided, all of that is a half-truth, all of that lacks completeness, roundedness, oneness. Whenever the sublime Gotama spoke about the world in his sermons, he had to divide it into samsara and nirvana, into illusion and truth, into suffering and salvation. You have no alternative, there is no other method for a man who wants to teach. But the world itself, which exists around us and inside us, is never one-sided. A person or an action is never totally samsara or totally nirvana; a person is never totally saintly or totally sinful. Because we are subject to illusion, it does actually look as if time were something real. Time is not real, Govinda; I have learned that over and over again. And, if time is not real, the span that seems to exist between world and eternity, between sorrow and bliss, between good and evil, is also an illusion.”
(Please stay with me, here is where it gets really good...)
“How so?” Govinda asks nervously.
“Pay close attention, dear friend, pay close attention! A sinner, such as you and I are, is a sinner, but some day he will be Brahma again, some day he will attain nirvana, he will be Buddha -- and now see: that ‘some day’ is an illusion, it is only a metaphor! The sinner is not journeying toward Buddhahood, now and today he already is that Buddha; his future is already completely there; you must revere the becoming, the possible, the concealed Buddha in him, in yourself, in everyone. The world, friend Govinda, is not imperfect or on a slow journey toward perfection; no, it is perfect at every moment; all sin already bears its forgiveness within itself; every little boy already bears the old man within himself, every infant bears death, every dying man bears eternal life. No one is able to look at someone else and know how far along on his journey he is; in the highwayman and dice player lurks a Buddha, in the Brahman lurks the highwayman. In profound meditation there is the possibility of abolishing time, of seeing all past, present, and future life as being simultaneous; and there everything is good, everything is perfect, everything is Brahman. Therefore, whatever exists seems good to me; death is like life to me, sin like sanctity, cleverness like folly; everything must be as it is; everything needs only my consent, my willingness, my loving comprehension, and then it is good in my eyes, and can never harm me. I learned from my body and my soul that I was in great need of sin; I needed sensual pleasures, the ambition for possessions, vanity, and I needed the most humiliating despair in order to learn how to give up my resistance, in order to learn how to love the world, in order to cease comparing it with some world of my wishes or my imagination, with some type of perfection that I had concocted, but to leave it the way it is, to love it, and to be a part of it gladly. --These, O Govinda, are a few of the ideas that have come to my mind.”
For me, after rereading this passage (one I find very powerful and beautiful), it was difficult to discern much of a difference between what Meursault came to understand towards the end of his days in the prison cell, and what Siddhartha came to understand after a long life of spiritual seeking. While Meursault doesn’t have the same kind of peaceful aura that Siddhartha seems to carry, and they certainly didn’t follow a similar path, their realizations were strikingly similar. A little before the scene where he seems to find peace, when he is in midst of his outburst at the priest, you can see some of the seeds of realization sprouting: when he claims that (I'm paraphrasing here) whether x, y or z happens, it doesn’t really matter, that death will eventually embrace us all, and thus, all men are privileged, and none is any different from the other. It is all one and the same.
These realizations are what led to his moment of satori, his enlightenment; his realization that he and the universe are inseparable and that the way he lived his life was justified, necessary even, because he was happy (and happy still) and that all that remained of it was to experience its end. (While listening to screams of execration.) So, everything was good, everything was perfect, everything was Brahman.
