TYPES OF EXISTENTIALISt.A
63
Certainly,
after
the Abraham-Isaac episode even Kierkegaard
would judge a man willing to sacrifice his son or any other human
being on the altar of the Gods, by a different standard. Abraham's
resolution to carry out the first Divine Command can be justified
only because he knows or believes it is a Divine Command and only
because he knows or believes that the Divine Command is the source
of good. Feuerbach believed, I think truly, that men create God in
their own moral image, that morality is autonomous of religion, and
that although religious beliefs and symbols may support moral values
the latter can never be derived from the former. Where
this
is denied
or overlooked then the status quo in all its infamy is either accepted
in terms of a disguised value judgment or it is ignored as something
irrelevant to man's profoundest concern.
It is of course true that even an immanent theology can adopt
a morality which leads, as in the Hegelian system, to the belief that
whatever is, is right.
(Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht.)
Such
an identification receives a well-merited rebuke from existential theism
on the ground that it results in an idolatry of history, especially when,
as in Hegel, the path of history is interpreted as the path of divinity.
The great paradox of existentialist theism is that it properly per–
ceives the finitude of all human standpoints, the relativity of all
philosophical absolutes, but fails to see that a finite creature can cri–
ticize the finite only in the light of another finite, the relative (or
relational) only from the basis of another relative (or relational)
position.
The question remains whether existential humanism is
also
another form of idolatry.
If
ethical ideals are related to human inter–
ests is not man's pursuit of the good a worship of his own nature?
There is no doubt that sometimes this is the case. But it need not
be. Men, by projecting their ideals as standards, may appeal from an
existing self to a developing self, from what things and men actually
are to what they may possibly be or become. They may criticize the
structure of the self from the standpoint of shared interests with
others, which forms the basis of community. Time guarantees that
whatever the world is or may be, new visions of human excellence,
whether in conflict or cooperation, will prevent men from identifying
their limitations with the limitations of all human possibility.
