The Courage to Be

Neurosis is the way of avoiding nonbeing by avoiding being

The vitality that can stand the abyss of meaninglessness is aware of a hidden meaning within the destruction of meaning.

Joy is the emotional expression of the courageous YES to one's own true being.

[A] process was going on in which people were transformed into things, into pieces of reality which pure science can calculate and technical science can control. … [T]he safety which is guaranteed by well-functioning mechanisms for the technical control of nature, by the refined psychological control of the person, by the rapidly increasing organizational control of society – this safety is bought at a high price: man, for whom all this was invented as a means, becomes a means himself in the service of means.

The courage to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.

the courage to die is the test of the courage to be.

We must be ourselves, we must decide where to go.

No self-acceptance is possible if one is not accepted in a person-to-person relation.

The neurotic is aware of the danger of a situation in which his unrealistic self-affirmation is broken down and no realistic self-affirmation takes its place.

Man creates what he is.

He who participates in God participates in eternity.

Reasoning as a limited cognitive function, detached from the personal center, never could create courage. One cannot remove anxiety by arguing it away.

Man lives 'in' meanings, in that which is valid logically, esthetically, religiously. The most fundamental expression of this fact is the language which gives man the power to abstract from the concretely given and, after having abstracted from it, to return to it, to interpret and transform it. The most vital being is the being which has the word and is by the word liberated from bondage to the given.

In the state of despair there is nobody and nothing that accepts. But there is the power of acceptance itself which is experienced. Meaninglessness, as long as it is experienced, includes an experience of the "power of acceptance". To accept this power of acceptance consciously is the religious answer of absolute faith, of a faith which has been deprived by doubt of any concrete content, which nevertheless is faith and the source of the most paradoxical manifestation of the courage to be.

real joy is a “severe matter”; it is the happiness of a soul which is “lifted above every circumstance.

Doubt is the necessary tool of knowledge.

Man is essentially 'finite freedom'; freedom not in the sense of indeterminacy but in the sense of being able to determine himself through decisions in the center of his being. Man, as finite freedom, is free within the contingencies of his finitude. But within these limits he is asked to make of himself what he is supposed to become, to fulfill his destiny.

the courage to accept oneself as accepted in spite of being unacceptable…. This is the genuine meaning of the Pauline-Lutheran doctrine of ‘justification by faith

For encountering God means encountering transcendent security and transcendent eternity.

The typical American, after he has lost the foundations of his existence, works for new foundations

Providence,” he argues, “is not a theory about some activities of God; it is the religious symbol of the courage of confidence with respect to fate and death.

And he wanted more than anything else, deeply and compassionately, to be of help; and he could be of help in this age, and was of help, because artist and philosopher as well as theologian, he cared for culture as well as for Christ.

Self-affirmation, for Tillich, is the paradox of “participation in something which transcends the self” (165).

It is the expression of the anxiety of meaninglessness and of the attempt to take this anxiety into the courage to be as oneself. (139)

loss of an economic basis is what, above all, fate means today.

Much enthusiastic reaction to religious appeal must be considered with suspicion from the point of view of a realistic self-affirmation. Much courage to be, created by religion, is nothing else than the desire to limit one’s own being and to strengthen this limitation through the power of religion. And even if religion does not lead to or does not directly support pathological self-reduction, it can reduce the openness of man to reality, above all to the reality which is himself. In this way religion can protect and feed a potentially neurotic state.

Le Dieu du théisme théologique est un être à côté des autres et, comme tel, une partie de l'ensemble de la réalité. On le considère certes comme étant la partie la plus importante mais néanmoins comme une partie et, à ce titre, comme soumis à la structure de la totalité. On le pense bien sûr comme étant au-delà des éléments ontologiques et des catégories qui constituent la réalité, et pourtant tout énoncé à son sujet le soumet à ces derniers. On en vient à le voir comme un soi qui a un monde, comme un je qui est relié à un tu, comme une cause qui est séparée de son effet, comme possédant un espace défini et un temps sans fin. Il est donc un être, non l'être-même. Comme tel, il est assujetti à la structure sujet-objet de la réalité ; il est un objet pour nous en tant que nous sommes des sujets. En même temps, nous sommes des objets pour lui en tant qu'il est un sujet. Il s'agit là d'un aspect décisif en ce qui concerne la nécessité où nous sommes de dépasser le théisme théologique, car un tel Dieu perçu comme sujet fait de moi un objet et, rien de plus. Il me dépouille de ma subjectivité parce qu'il est tout-puissant et omniscient. Je me révolte alors et tente de ·faire de lui un objet, mais la révolte échoue et devient désespérée. Dieu apparaît comme le tyran invincible, l'être en comparaison duquel tous les autres êtres sont sans liberté ni subjectivité. Comparable en quelque sorte à ces tyrans récents qui, utilisant la terreur, s'efforcent de tout transformer en pur objet, en chose parmi les choses, en rouage de la machine qu'ils dirigent, un tel Dieu devient le modèle de tout ce contre quoi l'existentialisme s'est révolté. C'est le Dieu dont Nietzsche disait qu'il faut le tuer parce que personne ne peut tolérer d'être transformé purement et simplement en objet de connaissance et de domination absolues. Là se trouve également la racine la plus profonde de l'athéisme. C'est un athéisme qui se justifie comme réaction contre le théisme théologique et ses conséquences inquiétantes. Là se trouve également la racine la plus profonde du désespoir existentialiste et de l'angoisse de l'absurde largement répandue à notre époque.

The God of theological theism is a being beside others and as such a part of the whole of reality. He certainly is considered its most important part, but as a part and therefore as subjected to the structure of the whole. He is supposed to be beyond the ontological elements and categories which constitute reality. But every statement subjects him to them. He is seen as a self which has a world, as an ego which is related to a thou, as a cause which is separated from its effect, as having a definite space and an endless time. He is a being, not being-itself. As such he is bound to the subject-object structure of reality, he is an object for us as subjects. At the same time we are objects for him as a subject. And this is decisive for the necessity of transcending theological theism. For God as a subject makes me into an object which is nothing more than an object. He deprives me of my subjectivity because he is all-powerful and all-knowing. I revolt and try to make him into an object, but the revolt fails and becomes desperate. God appears as the invincible tyrant the being in contrast with whom all other beings are without freedom and subjectivity. He is equated with the recent tyrants who with the help of terror try to transform everything into a mere object, a thing among things, a cog in the machine they control. He becomes the model of everything against which Existentialism revolted. This is the God Nietzsche said had to be killed because nobody can tolerate being made into a mere object of absolute knowledge and absolute control. This is the deepest root of atheism. It is an atheism which is justified as the reaction against theological theism and its disturbing implications. It is also the deepest root of the Existentialist despair and the widespread anxiety of meaninglessness in our period.