Walter Brueggemann - The Bible Makes Sense - The Existentialist Model

The Existentialist Model

Persons who have found the model we have just described wanting, have looked for an alternative.  And they have found one.  They have wanted an alternative to a world that is rational and objective and so have fashioned a model of reality which in some ways is the very opposite of the modern-industrial-scientific model.  If we cannot live life by what we know in a cool way, perhaps we can live by the hot action of making decisions. 

Existentialism has many popular forms.  It is the loner “who must do his own thing” and who believes it morally irresponsible to rely on tradition, on longstanding communities and institutions.  It is felt by this model that a community is by definition an act of deception or bad faith and finally the individual person must live his/her own life by his/her own resources.  This tends to be evident among young persons who must leave home, among rebels who believe that all rules must be broken and all seasoned decisions rejected.

This perspective was originally articulated to present an alternative to a coldly objective and rational world of control and mastery.  Existentialism holds that meaning exists only in, and derives from, the decisions made by the individual in the present moment.  It is thus a protest, and an important one, against a static view of reality which regards everything as fixed and closed and insists on keeping it that way.  Conversely,  this model of reality tends to be community-denying, locating meaning only in terms of the solitary decision-maker who must not only make decisions alone but also live with the consequences.  

Along with such uncompromising individualism, this model also tends to devalue the historical process as it moves from event to event.  It finds no meaning in the sweep of history or in the continuities of the process because meaning is located only in the now of the present decision.  While this view does appreciate the full power of the present moment, it tends to leave the individual in a vacuum because, by definition, memories and hopes are not matters of significance for the identity or destiny of the individual.  

In brief, existentialism posits the human decision-maker as the sole agent of meaning.  Not only can meanings not be appropriated from others, there is no possibility of transcendent meaning in experience.  No meanings can be given to, or be prior to, the individual in the moment.  While existentialism intends to be a statement of radical freedom and responsibility, it also holds the likely prospect of weariness and despair.  While the promise is great, if my world depends solely on me, that is more than I can bear. 

Walter Brueggemann's second example of chosen framing of reality is one that was more influential among intellectuals when the book was written than it is now.  As you can see in his description, existentialism always tended to incoherence due to its rejections of everything from rationality and history and community, which must result in everything being arbitrary and even random.  I remember reading its literature wondering if it wasn't the decadence that set in when intellectuals, running up against the limits of human reason's ability to discern everything at ever level of focus had either a crisis of faith in their god, reason and turned against it (as the Angel of Light does in the Genesis story) or that they had a very academic, very well mannered tantrum.

I think that the longest lasting effects of existentialism is in the various theatrical poses it created or adopted, rugged individualism,  tragic rugged individualism,  persecuted rugged individual or, as in Sartre's theater works, totally abject, pathetic, victims beyond any hope of redemption.   I always found it telling that Sartre mixed existentialism with Marxism which was entirely incompatible with it.  I suspect it was all a matter of fashion, as so much in intellectual and, even more so, quasi-intellectual, journalistic circles is.   I mean, the philosopher of ultimate individualism co-existing with the ultimate denial of individualism.  He may as well have been a Nazi at the same time.

You might suspect that existentialism was a lot like the current materialist-atheist model* that I've written a lot about in that no existentialist ever really lived their life under its framing, it's mostly an intellectual pose, something to write about, something to use to attack those people and their ideas which you don't like.

I am not sure of what the intellectual status of existentialism is in academia.  I suspect its theatrical products are still shown or given but only as a theatrical spectacle, not as an intellectual discourse.  Having read quite a bit of the fiction of existentialism,  I can't say that it was persuasive or even attractive, it was often quite deliberately repulsive.   I suspect it will finally die when the junior faculty with an academic stake in it stop teaching or finally die, themselves and it is replaced in college curricula.  Sometimes you have to wait for them to die before a dead philosophical fad dies out.   It's not like psychotherapy or old fashioned phrenology, there isn't really a financial motive in keeping it going.


*  No "brain-only" materialist in the entire history of that ideological dogma ever lived their life as if they were a meat-automaton whose actions were merely as a result of the particular chemistry and physics at work in their brains, producing whatever results based on the combinations of randomly present atoms and molecules.  They certainly don't treat their opponents that way as they ridicule and brow beat them for merely and, inevitably correctly, expressing what those materialists claim is beyond their control, that their belief in transubstantiation or The Trinity or the worship of fire, etc. comes from their material precursors.

Note:  I just noticed that I posted this in a draft form and I can't fix it right now.  I will later.