Paul Tillich: The Courage to Be
Who is Paul Tillich? He was a Protestant theologian and something of an Existentialist (though, like most Existentialists, he did not consider himself one and regards it as something separate from his ideas). He died in 1965. According to my professor he was also a P I M P. Well, not really a pimp, but he had a magical way with the ladies and had an "open" relationship. Awesome nonetheless.
The Courage to Be is, as you can guess, a book by Paul Tillich. The subject is, simply stated, the courage to be. Doesn't really help much, but that's because we haven't started yet and I just feel like wasting space for whatever reason. Put up with it, I'm amusing myself.
"The courage to be" has two terms in need of explanation before we can go further. "Courage" is something Tillich spends perhaps more time than is necessary going over. Courage is not bravery. It is not climbing into a really really tall tree to rescue a kitten, nor is it standing in the way of a charging bull. Courage is a disposition; people are courageous in this sense, they do not commit courageous acts. This means that courage in the Tillichian sense is a constant thing, it exists in reference to a distinct and constant threat. That courage acts in reference to being, specifically the lack of it.
What is being? Being is to be, which is to say, to exist, to act, to be in a dynamic sense (the German term is sein, "to be", and as I have been told many times is not like the static English word "being"). This seems to come from Heidegger. Also coming from Heidegger is the problem that being is a problem. Dasein (humanity in an abstract sense), according to Heidegger, is unique in that for it its own being is an issue. Dasein is the one thing that can ask why to being. In other words, Dasein is the only thing that can ask existential questions about the why of things, the purpose of life, and so on. Furthermore, Dasein is always aware of and confronted with the threat of the end of being, of death. Tillich says this in a much simpler manner. Man is a being that is concerned about the threat of non-being. We have anxiety about life, we have existential crises. Tillich goes further in designating different types of anxiety. We worry about control of our lives, the problems of fate and death. We worry about purpose in the anxieties over doubt and meaningless, and we worry about our own abilities in the anxieties of guilt and condemnation. All of these are linked, and they point to the same problem: man is something, but not what man can or should be. Man is limited, and is aware of this. This is the essence of anxiety as Tillich addresses it.
Time has provided different ways of solving this problem of non-being. Religion and the ideas of eternity or immortality (Tillich explicitly differentiates between the two, claiming that immortality was never a Christian idea) can help us deal with death, fate, guilt, and the like. For Tillich, the only realistic alternative to a religion is something like Stoicism, which is "the only real alternative to Christianity in the Western world." Tillich is not just some apologist, however, as we will find. Christianity and Stoicism represent generalities, the sense-making religion and the living in accord with the world found in Stoic types. One can get meaning from a source such as religion, or one can try to live in the world and as a part of it, removing the causes of anxiety by letting it all become a part of the world with one's self.
Both of the above are examples of the courage to be. Both the Stoic and the Christian attempt to find ways to live in the presence of non-being, which is what the courage to be does; it attempts to affirm being in the presence of non-being. Within these two headings, of course, many differentiations arise. In my favorite part of the book Tillich differentiates the two major divisions, "being as a part" and "being as a self". Being as a part is being through participation in something else. Membership in a church, a state, any group can provide an umbrella of values that offers answers and ways of dealing with the types of anxiety. The individual sacrifices a part of the self to the group, and in return individual courage moves into group courage. This is opposed to the courage to be as a self. The group offers protection but can be seen as a danger to selfhood and as such can become in its own way a source of anxiety. Furthermore, the group itself is not eternal like many would hope. States perish, religions fade. The courage to be a self is far more difficult and not to be found in its pure form due to its difficulty (my professor considered Nietzsche a good example of this). But for one who can accept selfhood and be affirmative towards life in the manner that Existentialists (who for Tillich represent the furthest stretch of individualism currently) such as Camus or Nietzsche recommend, one is much better disposed towards life in times when institutions fail and the greater cause of man seems lost.
So far there have been no value judgments made towards the courages to be as a part and self. But one must remember what happens when ideas become ideologies and lose restraint. Those who live as a part can become controlled by that which claims control of the part. They can lose their selfhood completely, which is no solution towards the problem of being since it fails to accept the reality of individuality. The totalitarian state eliminates uncertainty by killing off the uncertain. On the other side, individualism destroys the selves who prostrate themselves before nothing. To have no connections to anything is not to live. It results in a short, drained, meaningless life. One can live as either one of these, but one will not truly live fulfilled.
Where then does one find the best courage to be? Tillich is very careful in this section. He uses the words 'faith' and 'God' but tries to steer clear of conventional theology, which he thinks (and rightly I believe) has lost its purpose and diluted its own language into meaninglessness. For Tillich God represents something roughly like one's greatest concern. Faith is "the courage to accept acceptance", which is to say the courage to accept one's self as a person and furthermore as a worthwhile person even in spite of one's own finiteness (in other words, courage to be in the face of non-being). This is not the elimination of the anxiety of non-being, for that is impossible. We exist finitely, so as long as we exist and exist fully aware of ourselves we must be aware of our finiteness and thus the threat of non-being. To try to escape this through something like mysticism (where one loses the self completely) is incomplete. To live completely "personally" is also incomplete as it is one-sided, ignoring the world itself when it is very much there (the threats in being a part and being a self are, respectively, losing one's self and losing the world). One must instead be able to transcend both of these positions. This is through faith, the courage to accept acceptance. One accepts one's individuality as well as one's position in the world and continues on, not because the problem is gone (it never will be), but because one has courage and faith.
Finally, in talking about faith it must be recalled we are not talking about showing up for Mass every week or baptism. We have faith in the "God above God". The God of theism is dead, as Nietzsche claimed. In fact he very well should be, as he was a false God. The theological God, instead of falling into the mystical or one-sided errors, is God as a part, as a member of the machine of logic and cause, and as such is not God but a fiction. This is more Nietzschean then one would think. In The Antichrist Nietzsche claims that "God is not God". In context it means that God as He is known in proofs and images is meaningless. He is simply a part, a postulate, a ground for moral theories and beliefs. He means nothing to people. For Nietzsche God reflects one's own vital power or the vital power of one's culture. For Tillich "God above God" is the belief in value and life beyond first causes and necessary beings, the source of the courage to be. Faith in this God is "being grasped" by it, and what this God is is specifically "being as ultimate concern". No more idols, but life itself as what is absolute and valuable.
Finally, in the last pages there is a random paragraph rant about how faith is in the Crucified who had faith in God until the end, and so on, and so on. Initially it seems very out of place, but upon reflection it is recognized as being to Tillich a symbol: when all else is lost, when even the God that held up morality and meaning and life is gone, when there is nothing left in the world to affirm, one can still affirm the "God above God", that ultimate source of the courage to be. Tillich's final sentence then becomes clear:
---
Next will in all likelihood be The Brother Karamazov. Not sure of what angle I will approach it from since there's simply so much. I might perhaps do what I was planning until recently to do with the paper for my Existentialism class, which is discuss exclusively the conversation in "Rebellion" and "The Grand Inquisitor". Whatever I do it will happen sometime next week, since I will spend my entire spring break reading for classes...
The Courage to Be is, as you can guess, a book by Paul Tillich. The subject is, simply stated, the courage to be. Doesn't really help much, but that's because we haven't started yet and I just feel like wasting space for whatever reason. Put up with it, I'm amusing myself.
"The courage to be" has two terms in need of explanation before we can go further. "Courage" is something Tillich spends perhaps more time than is necessary going over. Courage is not bravery. It is not climbing into a really really tall tree to rescue a kitten, nor is it standing in the way of a charging bull. Courage is a disposition; people are courageous in this sense, they do not commit courageous acts. This means that courage in the Tillichian sense is a constant thing, it exists in reference to a distinct and constant threat. That courage acts in reference to being, specifically the lack of it.
What is being? Being is to be, which is to say, to exist, to act, to be in a dynamic sense (the German term is sein, "to be", and as I have been told many times is not like the static English word "being"). This seems to come from Heidegger. Also coming from Heidegger is the problem that being is a problem. Dasein (humanity in an abstract sense), according to Heidegger, is unique in that for it its own being is an issue. Dasein is the one thing that can ask why to being. In other words, Dasein is the only thing that can ask existential questions about the why of things, the purpose of life, and so on. Furthermore, Dasein is always aware of and confronted with the threat of the end of being, of death. Tillich says this in a much simpler manner. Man is a being that is concerned about the threat of non-being. We have anxiety about life, we have existential crises. Tillich goes further in designating different types of anxiety. We worry about control of our lives, the problems of fate and death. We worry about purpose in the anxieties over doubt and meaningless, and we worry about our own abilities in the anxieties of guilt and condemnation. All of these are linked, and they point to the same problem: man is something, but not what man can or should be. Man is limited, and is aware of this. This is the essence of anxiety as Tillich addresses it.
Time has provided different ways of solving this problem of non-being. Religion and the ideas of eternity or immortality (Tillich explicitly differentiates between the two, claiming that immortality was never a Christian idea) can help us deal with death, fate, guilt, and the like. For Tillich, the only realistic alternative to a religion is something like Stoicism, which is "the only real alternative to Christianity in the Western world." Tillich is not just some apologist, however, as we will find. Christianity and Stoicism represent generalities, the sense-making religion and the living in accord with the world found in Stoic types. One can get meaning from a source such as religion, or one can try to live in the world and as a part of it, removing the causes of anxiety by letting it all become a part of the world with one's self.
Both of the above are examples of the courage to be. Both the Stoic and the Christian attempt to find ways to live in the presence of non-being, which is what the courage to be does; it attempts to affirm being in the presence of non-being. Within these two headings, of course, many differentiations arise. In my favorite part of the book Tillich differentiates the two major divisions, "being as a part" and "being as a self". Being as a part is being through participation in something else. Membership in a church, a state, any group can provide an umbrella of values that offers answers and ways of dealing with the types of anxiety. The individual sacrifices a part of the self to the group, and in return individual courage moves into group courage. This is opposed to the courage to be as a self. The group offers protection but can be seen as a danger to selfhood and as such can become in its own way a source of anxiety. Furthermore, the group itself is not eternal like many would hope. States perish, religions fade. The courage to be a self is far more difficult and not to be found in its pure form due to its difficulty (my professor considered Nietzsche a good example of this). But for one who can accept selfhood and be affirmative towards life in the manner that Existentialists (who for Tillich represent the furthest stretch of individualism currently) such as Camus or Nietzsche recommend, one is much better disposed towards life in times when institutions fail and the greater cause of man seems lost.
So far there have been no value judgments made towards the courages to be as a part and self. But one must remember what happens when ideas become ideologies and lose restraint. Those who live as a part can become controlled by that which claims control of the part. They can lose their selfhood completely, which is no solution towards the problem of being since it fails to accept the reality of individuality. The totalitarian state eliminates uncertainty by killing off the uncertain. On the other side, individualism destroys the selves who prostrate themselves before nothing. To have no connections to anything is not to live. It results in a short, drained, meaningless life. One can live as either one of these, but one will not truly live fulfilled.
Where then does one find the best courage to be? Tillich is very careful in this section. He uses the words 'faith' and 'God' but tries to steer clear of conventional theology, which he thinks (and rightly I believe) has lost its purpose and diluted its own language into meaninglessness. For Tillich God represents something roughly like one's greatest concern. Faith is "the courage to accept acceptance", which is to say the courage to accept one's self as a person and furthermore as a worthwhile person even in spite of one's own finiteness (in other words, courage to be in the face of non-being). This is not the elimination of the anxiety of non-being, for that is impossible. We exist finitely, so as long as we exist and exist fully aware of ourselves we must be aware of our finiteness and thus the threat of non-being. To try to escape this through something like mysticism (where one loses the self completely) is incomplete. To live completely "personally" is also incomplete as it is one-sided, ignoring the world itself when it is very much there (the threats in being a part and being a self are, respectively, losing one's self and losing the world). One must instead be able to transcend both of these positions. This is through faith, the courage to accept acceptance. One accepts one's individuality as well as one's position in the world and continues on, not because the problem is gone (it never will be), but because one has courage and faith.
Finally, in talking about faith it must be recalled we are not talking about showing up for Mass every week or baptism. We have faith in the "God above God". The God of theism is dead, as Nietzsche claimed. In fact he very well should be, as he was a false God. The theological God, instead of falling into the mystical or one-sided errors, is God as a part, as a member of the machine of logic and cause, and as such is not God but a fiction. This is more Nietzschean then one would think. In The Antichrist Nietzsche claims that "God is not God". In context it means that God as He is known in proofs and images is meaningless. He is simply a part, a postulate, a ground for moral theories and beliefs. He means nothing to people. For Nietzsche God reflects one's own vital power or the vital power of one's culture. For Tillich "God above God" is the belief in value and life beyond first causes and necessary beings, the source of the courage to be. Faith in this God is "being grasped" by it, and what this God is is specifically "being as ultimate concern". No more idols, but life itself as what is absolute and valuable.
Finally, in the last pages there is a random paragraph rant about how faith is in the Crucified who had faith in God until the end, and so on, and so on. Initially it seems very out of place, but upon reflection it is recognized as being to Tillich a symbol: when all else is lost, when even the God that held up morality and meaning and life is gone, when there is nothing left in the world to affirm, one can still affirm the "God above God", that ultimate source of the courage to be. Tillich's final sentence then becomes clear:
The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.
---
Next will in all likelihood be The Brother Karamazov. Not sure of what angle I will approach it from since there's simply so much. I might perhaps do what I was planning until recently to do with the paper for my Existentialism class, which is discuss exclusively the conversation in "Rebellion" and "The Grand Inquisitor". Whatever I do it will happen sometime next week, since I will spend my entire spring break reading for classes...
posted by Derek at 4:31 PM
3 Comments:
This comment has been removed by the author.
That was refreshing
Wow, thanks for taking the time to write your thoughts down. I just started reading The Courage to Be and found your summary incredibly helpful for getting a lay of the land.
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