The Dichotomy of Modern Man

Filed under: Apologetics, Philosophy — Barry Carey at 11:16 am on Tuesday, February 28, 2006

In my previous blog, I reviewed Francis Schaeffer’s, How Should We Then Live?. A current which was found throughout the book is his belief that modern man is marked by a dichotomy, or two completely exclusive, unrelated orders.

“The dichotomy here is the total separation between the area of meaning and values, and the area of reason.”

He uses this concept of a dichotomy throughout the book, beginning with Plato’s realm of the forms and the realm of the particulars. Aquinas presented the nature/grace problem. The Renaissance dealt with universals and the particulars. Roussea saw autonomous freedom in contrast with autonomous nature. Kant postulated a noumenal world and phenonomenal world. Kierkegaard’s dichotomy was non-reason(optimism)/reason(pessimism).

A Christian worldview makes sense of the two realms, because it grounds all particulars (including humans and moral values) in objective truths and principles, in particular in the Christian God. The modern man in secular society is ultimately led down a road to despair because his practice of founding his worldview on the basis of the autonomous man, apart from God.

Just to clarify, the dichotomy is artificial and unnatural. There are two realms, however. There is a realm of the particulars and a realm of the universal. For example, there is the universal of “redness” and the particulars of a red ball or a red house. It is the universal that gives meaning to the particular. There are particular moral acts which only have meaning if they are grounded in the universals. So, the two realms are not artificial. The artificiality is the severing of the relationship between the two.

The problem of modern man is he has made these two realms into a dichotomy (a division or the process of dividing into two especially mutually exclusive or contradictory groups or entities, according to m-w online). He has severed the relationship of the particulars to the universals. Modern science has declared that knowledge and reason is found only in the lower realm. One can do with the upper realm as he wishes since we can truly never know that realm anyway.

Schaeffer, speaking of the art of the Renaissance states:

“Up to this point it could have gone either way. It was good that nature was given a proper place. And there could have continued an emphasis on real peole in a real world wich God had made - with the particulars, the individual things, important because God made the whole world…Or at this point humanism could take over, with its emphasis on things being autonomous.”

Kierkegaard, a Christian existentialist believed that everything in the area of reason is absurd and leads to pessimism. The only way to find meaning is to create your own. For Kierkegaard, this was done by a “leap of faith”. Abandon reason and concepts of objective truth and just have faith. According to Kierkegaard

“Subjectivity is truth” and “Truth is subjectivity”.

“The thing is to a find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die”.

For Kierkegaard, this was God, but I don’t see how he could argue that his “truth” was any better than any other truth. Finding meaning in drugs or eastern religions is just as valid. One might as well take a leap of faith to anything, as long as he finds fulfillment. As Schaeffer said, If we place everything which is religious into the realm of non-reason, there is no room for discussion.

Unfortunately, this view of faith is not just found in secular philosophy, nor in the philosophy of Christian existentialists of old, but is manifest in the church today. The emergent church movement echoes these same sentiments. But, when we all free to find our own truth, truth is meaningless.

4 Comments »

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Comment by Keith

March 8, 2006 @ 2:01 am

While Schaeffer’s view of Kierkegaard is rather negative, once Kierkegaard is actually read I don’t believe one can say that he proposes different truths for everyone. Even in Fear and Trembling, which I don’t believe is a good way to get to know his views on the matter, it is only the call of the Absolute, of God that should transcend the Ethical sphere.

In “Every Good and Every Perfect Gift” in Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Kierkegaard points out that faith must be in the Almighty, in the One who is above our dictates and whims, in order for the expectancy of our faith to find victory.

Then, in Training in Christianity, faith must be in the Person of Jesus Christ, for it is only in Him that the absolute contraries (which cannot be believed by reason alone) of God and Man must be believed to be united.

In his historical context, Kierkegaard lived in a time where Christianity was ‘easy,’ much like today. Kierkegaard’s intent was to point out that faith was hard - a point that through history has backfired in the Existentialist movement. No, one cannot have faith in anything and have it produce results. His point was rather that thinking that one objectively, mentally knows about Jesus Christ does not compare to a life lived full of faith in Jesus Christ, a faith that must be willing to suffer and die for Him. This is the sphere in which the single individual is higher than the universal, the sphere in which subjectivity is crucial. Even common sense shows that we live our life subjectively… The truths that we live for are the ones that we would die for. Yes, there is an objective reality. But the way we approach that reality is subjective, and we must decide who we’re going to serve. Kierkegaard was lashing out against those, like Hegel, who thought they knew it all and yet treated God as an objective concept that they could master through their intellect.

This blog looks excellent, by the way. We certainly need more Christians to think seriously every once in a while, in order to truly love the Lord with all of our minds.

I recently read Escape from Reason by Francis Schaeffer, and was impressed by most things except his treatment of Kierkegaard. Schaeffer is accurate about the history of thought after Kierkegaard, however. It’s unfortunate that those who followed him took his ideas to an extreme they were not intended for.

Keith Dow,
B. Phil. Dominican University College
Ottawa, ON

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Comment by Barry Carey

March 9, 2006 @ 7:44 am

Keith, Thanks for the comments. It appears you have read more Kierkegaard than I. I sincerely appreciate your insights. Certainly, mentally knowing something is not the same as committing one’s life to it completely by faith. If Kierkegaard’s motive was to cause people to live a life full of faith in Christ, and I have no reason to think otherwise, that’s great. However, I do still question his approach and his views on abandoning reason. His approach has had unfortunate consequences. Thanks for your kind comments about the blog.

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Comment by Ole Schenk

March 27, 2008 @ 12:14 pm

I’d like to again, re-iterate, that Francis Schaeffer’s popular reduction of Kierkegaard to the subjectivist “leap of faith” equivalent on a relativistic scale to drugs, self-knowledge, and mysticism is really an unfortunate and unjust (I would even add exploitive and manipulative) distortion of Kierkegaard’s genuinely orthodox and radically faithful Christian thought in the evangelical tradition of Luther, Augustine, and Paul.
In _Philosophical Fragments_, Kierkegaard’s character Johannes Climacus makes a profound critique of all “Socractic” (that is, subjective) knowledge of the divine. The question is: what is the condition for the possibility of knowing absolute truth? For Socrates, eternal truth is already found within the soul. All reason, all questions, all searches point the way to what is already within. All “teachers” are only “occasions” for revealing the truth that I already hold. This “Socratic” concept of the divine is the subjectivist construction of the divine schaeffer (and Kierkegaard) so vehemently denounces. Any appropriation of Truth that depends on the condition of the individual already having within him the capacity to recognize the Truth (whether through drugs, mysticism, self-knowledge, works, reason, self-justification) necessarily equates the individuals’ subjectivity with God. If my capacity to read the Bible and make judgments based on my reason is what saves me, then God is already immediately immanent in myself and my self-knowledge and works (reason). The alternative, according to Kierkegaard, would be a God who is Truth AND totally Other BUT nevertheless reveals himself to us. How is this possible? God could raise us up to Himself, but that would in effect nullify freedom. There would be no relation to truth there would only be Truth and no humanity and no creation, revelation, or redemption. The only way for such a completely Holy and Other God to come into a genuine relation with fallible humanity would be for him to bring Himself to us, in other words, to descend into our flesh, and bring his Eternity to our fallible temporality. Not only the Incarnation would be necessary, but Truth would have to die: if the Eternal Truth were to come into relation with us, it would necessarily need to come down into relation to us in the moment of our absolute falleness and into our very absolute helplessness to save ourselves and into our death and separation from God. God, in other words, to bring us into a genuine relationship with himself, would have to say those terrible words with us, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” And then, in the tradition of Luther and Augustine and Paul, Kierkegaard says, only then, we can receive the Truth that is truly Other and not ourselves as we receive it in a faith that demands our death and resurrection, such that we can say with Paul: “I [and all my works and all my reason and all my flesh] am crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but He lives through me.” Kierkegaard makes this argument in _Philosophical Fragments_ in a purely abstract, objective, logical fashion arguing from first propositions. But the argument itself cannot ever save anyone. Only a God who would make Himself incarnate and meet us in our absoltute falleness and death could save us: and only God can do that: no one can rationally argue God into existence.

Ole Schenk
English and Philosophy Student
University of Saskatchewan

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Comment by Ole Schenk

March 27, 2008 @ 8:18 pm

I recognize that my last comment did not directly address the issue of the original posting, namely, the dichotomy between “reason” and “meanings and values” facing “modern man” (the correct term faithful to reality is humanity).

“A Christian worldview makes sense of the two realms, because it grounds all particulars (including humans and moral values) in objective truths and principles, in particular in the Christian God.”

Schaeffer’s articulation of a dichotomy between reason and value is inaccurate, damaging, and I daresay idolatrous. In his historical analysis of philosophical ills, Schaeffer takes his point of departure from the Hellenic philosophy of Plato and Aristotle and imputes its categories into the Christian Bible. Schaeffer reads Plato as positing the universals ie: “redness” alongside the Just, Beautiful, and Good, which the human mind accesses and grasps and uses as reference points to grasp all particular examples of “redness,” beauty and justice. Then, the Christian Bible guarantees and anchors the truth of both reason and value in the absolute principle of reason: God. God is the great universal that rationality grasps and then uses to order and refer all particulars with confident authority, because God is both the Creator of rational creation and the Legal Encoder of all values.

Two immediate observations:

1) Schaeffer privileges unquestionably the Hellenic assumptions about the human mind’s immediate access to universal truth. Schaeffer, a great condemner of modern sin, himself completely fails to recognize the fallen-ness and fallibility of human reason. The “universals” simply do not exist, nor does the Bible preach the existence of universals. Humans exist as limited and fallible creatures in time and in relationships of communication, not with some fictional immediate access to “universals” present within our souls and guaranteed by the presupposed authority of the Hellenic logos (or Schaeffer’s Rationality). When Paul declares in 2 Corinthians 3:6 “He has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant—not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life” Paul effectively refutes the privilege of Hellenic thought over Hebraic. The Rabbis spoke a living word. They preached. They spoke the word God had spoken to them. The Word of God as living address to a living community. The Greek philosopher privileged rational presuppositions over testimony, witness, and preaching. The Spirit moves through the living word of address, spoken (in an action and an event) to the community of believers: it gives life. The Letter, that is, the Pharisaic privilege of the grasped legal code over the living address (ie: the living address of Christ and the Testimony of his Resurrection) and the Hellenic privilege of the logos grasped within, its universals and its propositions, instead of the living Logos of the Word of God, alive and active in the reality of lived temporality and community.
Schaeffer, inasmuch as he privileges the “rational” letter and its claim to universal truth based on the authority of human reason, over faithfulness to the living Word of witness and testimony, is a gnostic, not a Christian. We are faithful to the Word of the gospel in listening to Him, following Him, and bearing witness to Him, not in arguing the law and basing our authority on the hidden presupposition of our rationality guaranteeing the authority behind God.

2) The claim of immediate access to universal truth (even before imputing that claim upon the Bible) fails to account for our reality as fallen and limited beings in time: as sinners. In my country, Canada, I have seen first hand the blindness and sinfulness of “man’s” confidence in “universals.” Throughout the 20th century Canadian First Nations Peoples (Indigenous Canadians) had their children taken away from them and relocated in residential schools to be brought up in the “universal truths” of Western man. This was a hideous sin, a sin that has damaged the lives and families of tens of thousands of Canadians since. A crime against real human beings, who “lived, moved, and had their being” long before they ever met Europeans and the European “man’s” claim to universal access to truth. When we, as Christians, assume our immediate authority over the truth based upon our grasp of “rational law” instead of listening, following, and proclaiming a living Word, we justify crimes against real people based on our need to justify-ourselves, not on receiving our justification from a living God. Schaeffer’s thought amounts to self-justified Western Man’s desire to license his unlimited authority over all creation, instead of faithfully and humbly recognizing the utter fallibility of his western (not Biblical) reason.
Biblical “reason” is the Logos, not the law. As Paul, Luther, and Augustine, would proclaims: the law accuses us and demonstrates our need for God. The law, whether the universal law of reason or the universal law of morality, is the demonstration of our fallibility, not the guarantee of our authority to judge and dominate Others.

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