Mormon Existentialism: A Historic Contextualization

As of late I have heard words from real people like you and me promote classic existentialism, promote angst, the absence of god, the purposelessness of life and its meaninglessness, and a world view, so common today, of nihilism.  So many isolate existentialism to a 20th century phenomenon that still effects human ideology even more powerfully today and this is accurate.  But in the same manner I have a different view. I see existentialism as old as the primitive peoples who sought ritualized veneration of the major life events such as birth, love, suffering and death, and this existential exploration over many, many centuries through art and history, has seen birth of Christ in countless images of the Renaissance, images such as Botticelli and van Eych, and in the Enlightenment Boucher, Watteau and Fragonard were all oriented to amorous affairs.  

Suffering is the great subject in life seen in every epoch from every country.  Europe in the days of the Barbarian Invasion was desperate for any kind of knowledge in a very dark age with only one place to find it and one place for it to be found… the Catholic Church.  Countless millions suffered in complete ignorance knowing nothing about the world beyond their free town of fiefdom and craved truth.  Suffering will find its rearing head ubiquitously to our day being a primary factor in all art so extensive it cannot be elucidated here, but this suffering was existential as those who did, learned and gained truths through a life fraught with suffering.  Death is also another common subject historically, this representation is largely the crucifixion of Christ, on the cross or with the Virgin in a pieta.  A ghastly graphic lifeless cadaver in the famous work of Mantegna and another iconic reference with skin greened and a skeletal body by Holbein Sr are other examples. 

How better to understand one’s own reality than to find peace in the death of Christ who was, like all will be, resurrected and ascended into heaven.  This theology bound all of Europe and Byzantium a millennia before the printing press.  This was the lands of mystics, witchcraft and superstition, and disease on a frightening scale.  This only sought many more to turn to the Church for answers, as much as could be gleaned, and no other resources for any kind of religious or secular learning existed anywhere outside of monasteries.  All of this mentioned and infinitely more that libraries are dedicated to, may be looked at as primitive and manipulative or it might be seen as some source of knowledge, a souse significance enough to instigate art including mosaics and crude painting and architecture as well as the single thread that kept the progression of Europe alive by this common factor and as people found answers in the Church, the church found supremacy in Europe.   

As existentialism was non existent in medieval Europe, even though there was no movement there still came the perpetual questions of subjects that people generally sought to find a comfort in what was a life of difficulty, the higher power, which was bigger, greater, mightier, all-power, the highest power, our Heavenly Father, offering understanding of something bigger than they were.  Those who built Stonehenge sought answers from the sky, the Greeks thought they could find the answer in man who was “The measure of all things,” the Renaissance thought that nature could provide the measure for all of the answers, the Enlightenment- reason and the faculties of mind devoted to art, philosophy, music, science, this was the path to truth, but man was to find no answers of his own making and nature, not as a measure but for a spiritual awakening for its own sake by Rousseau and then a revival of all that existed before the modern period of the Renaissance when things were simple and pure… artists that had been painting in the grand Rococo style suddenly painted peasants such as Fragonard, Bucher, Chardin, and then William Blake would reach the high point of truth of a humanity that almost found the answers it was looking for in the dialectic of good and evil powerfully expressed in Blake’s seminal poetic epic “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” 

But this closest mankind has ever been to a unified true reality could not last and the industrial revolution had to happen as did revolutions in France and the United States.  Modernity was a refinement of the industrial era as Napoleon III had grand schemes to modernize the great boulevards of Paris, which occurred in the form of Paris today, but there was nothing existential about this, only an ambitious emperor and the rapid passing of time in the great period of revolutions and civil wars as all men sought for the truth to one question…

Liberty?  The 19^th century saw both Germany and Italy become nations as this historical context is that which led to what is the pinnacle and at the same time what is the most threateningly ominous moment in time for the official movement of the early 20^th century that we will call Classical Existentialism.  It was the pinnacle due to the great works of men like Heidegger whose text “Being in Time” is one of the greatest volumes of philosophy extant and in a manner insightful and prophetic, Heidegger elucidates on the realities of being, called da sein, and the conditions of being within a society called “the they” while the self is troubled by perpetual angst, experiences the fullness of the uncanny being displaced from authentic reality.   Interestingly enough, time itself is an arbitrary condition cased by human consciousness as it is with everyone without choice in a temporal continuum of action, awareness, and stopping short.   Space is relative from one given point to any other given this being the foundation for phenomenon and the existence of the being of da sein.  

Existentialism has always existed and always will in many shades, and considering the shade of a philosopher grounded in delusions and ubiquitous influence subsequently, this is a pernicious thing indeed. Nietzsche, who cannot stand in the shadow of a philosopher at the level of Heidegger with Nietzsche writing prose, claimed a “proof" of denial of absolutes in existence and that morality cannot be proven individually or generally and this is the condition that he demonstrated convincingly to his people, whom, as can be well understood, found understanding for their day that explained their existence giving morality as myth used purposefully and not spiritually. 

“Christ was the only Christian,” Nietzsche said.  This one giant leap into the danger zone of a nihilistic personal reality and a nihilistic societal reality completely void of morality; of this he was certain of, to become the birth of popular nihilism, something that has only grown stronger in its insidious hold over popular culture and society in general.   “The death of God” was Nietzsche’s battle cry as if there was no morality there was no God and if there was no God there was no truth thus no meaning. This battle cry was second only to the “will to power” as what is the point for unity when nobody means anything to anybody except the self to the self so the “Superman” must live only for his own rise to power and personal attainment of property. Ultimately, this was the stuff that the purified state of the fascist was made of just as Marx influenced communism. 

Skipping Sartre, Camus, Foucault, Derrida; Nietzsche lived in the angst ridden pre-WWI German bubble.  The country had just been formed a few decades earlier and was desperate for power.  Nietzsche was a product of his time and nothing else, and had he been a 17th century philosopher the name Nietzsche would be unknown. But it came to be so and was very much a part of the exegesis of post-structuralism and deconstruction and the rape of meaning of humanity.  Today, our world being entirely interconnected in its multiculturalism, its global freedom of trade of knowledge, culture and goods, the unification through art, science, medicine, philosophy, theology, demographics of every kind… we are a world of plurality and that is a reality that cannot be denied as our reality of post-Modernism cannot be denied.  An existentialism such as Nietzsche is today a memory… a distant fragment of history that has no relevance and cannot have any hold on the though that it instigated on the absence of God, truth, meaning, and the rise of rationalism it gave form to as well as the propagation of deconstruction when reconstruction based on the human will to create meaning from randomness is equally valid.

The existentialism that passed through Nietzsche to Sartre to Derrida to Godard to Giacometti to Pasolini to Kubrick to Rauschenberg to Warhol to Baldessari to Obama is pure lazy mindedness and lack of insight and a useless capacity for vision or the ability to look past the physical and the polemics not knowing what it means to “transcend.”  Society must stop asking the same tired, trivial, mundane and very vogue questions.  Anybody who chooses to stop and consider and question the condition of today’s plurality will find one’s own brand of Existentialism based on personal life exegesis that is existence processed in the mind of conceptions.  Given the Modernist utopia, today there exists a utopia-like globalization and as such in the reality of plurality, one idea no longer can apply to all in today’s post-Modern world. 

All must face personal existential questions and for each person this inquisition will be different amounting to a unique shade of existential philosophy for each individual.  One must address one’s consciousness and decide to continue or to stop living in the shadow of a madman whose mind amounted to the most cumulatively evil of the 20th century as well as echoing louder in the 21st considering, he providing the fuel to fire fascism as well as secure the disturbance of angst, doubt, confusion and fear that his writings have instigated for the subsequent century on the popular level and rage loudly and angrily to this very day.  One must stop and listen to one person and that is one’s own self and find one’s own truth and what is authentically real.