DAVID RAJA A.
REG.NO.B09007
The existentialistic approach to truth could be in three ways (1)
Ethical (2) Aesthetical (3) Religious. The ethical sphere is one where
duty and obedience to duty are predominant. The individual does not
realize himself from within; he rests rests satisfied with performing
duties which are universal laws imposed on him from without, that is
the society and its demands. It thus emphasizes on the universal and
general, and tends to suppress, in practice, one's individuality and
one's internal commitments before god. One is led to adopt the mores
of the crowd. The individual in terms of the universal, leaving no
room to the individual to remain true to what he is before god. The
tendency in the ethical sphere is to separate duty or law from inner
voice of god heard only in the within of man, in his individualness
and singularity. The outcome could be the wrong identification of
morality and religion.
The aesthetical as well as the ethical stages of life are in the last
analysis illusory. The illusion of the aesthetical stage is the
illusion of freedom. What seemed to have freed one remains a slave to
his own pleasures and passions. The illusion of the ethical stage is
the illusion of humanism. They have no transcendental backing they
cannot transform him from within; they were derived from human
requirements, and fixed, social standards. Being converted from this
stage to Christianity, he threw off the humanistic illusion and
finally adopted the standpoint of faith, which is characteristic of
the religious state of existence.
In the religious stage, man stands totally and singly before god. His
commitments are to god; his attitude is one of absolute faith in god,
which and man of aesthetical or ethical stage is unable to understand.
The greatest example of this is Abraham. To the ethicist Abraham's
action seemed to be paradoxical and an exception from the universal or
ethical. What god demanded of Abraham would seem paradoxical t the
ethicist. God promised Abraham that he would multiply his children
like the sands of the sea-shore the same god now asks him to murder
his only son, through whom were Abraham's children to multiplied
.god's demand also seems to be a demand for an exception from the
universal. The universal law given by god to men is: "thou shall not
kill!" the same god now asks Abraham to kill his innocent son! The
action of Abraham thus could not be understood by the ethicist.
Accordingly, to understand Abraham we are in need of a new category:
in drawing the knife. Abraham performed a purely personal action and
one which it is impossible to universalize –in fact, the universal
forbade it .yet, he was justified because he was in a private
relationship with god. This is the relationship of god, which
philosophers call the relationship of faith in which man blindly leaps
into god that the purely ethical does not acknowledge. Abraham was in
absolute relation to the absolute.
Abraham's action was dictated not by the universal, but by the
individual and the singular, that is, by the voice of god heard in the
heart of man in his singularity. The individual is higher than the
universal; the individual determines his relation to the universal yet
his relation to the absolute, not his relation to the anxiety, as
Abraham had to undergo a fierce struggle with him before he decided to
put his living personal relation with god above all moral laws.
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