To Believe or
Not to Believe
Meaning of life, pain and suffering
Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx and Charles Darwin are
the great triumvirate of 19th-century thinkers whose ideas still have huge
impact today. In this reflection we will focus on their belief in the existence
of God and the thoughts on suffering of one of the thinkers. And, also about Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton, a British explorer and
his 28 men who spent 497 days in icy Antarctica after their ship was trapped in
ice in Jan 1915.
To Karl Marx religion was:
“the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless
world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The
abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the
demand for their real happiness.”
Marx
was clearly an outlier among the triumvirate. He did not have good things to
say about why people believed in God. His thinking paved the way for communism,
which replaced God in people’s life.
The
pitch was that communism would give the people all what God could give them. The
leaders of the revolution made God of themselves going by the pictures of Marx,
Lenin and Stalin that hang in communist parties’ offices in India.
Nietzsche
and Darwin were more ambivalent about God. One was seeking what gives meaning
to life and the other about the origin of life itself.
Nietzsche (Oct 1844 - Aug 1900) was philosophy’s supreme iconoclast;
his sayings include “God is dead” and “Is man God’s mistake, or is God man’s mistake?”.
On belief in
God, Nietzsche is also quoted as saying,
“Here the ways of men
divide. If you wish to strive for peace of soul and happiness, then believe; if
you wish to be a disciple of truth, then inquire.”
The
death of God didn’t strike Nietzsche as an entirely good thing. Without a God,
the basic belief system of Western Europe was in jeopardy, as he put
it in Twilight of the Idols:
“When
one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out
from under one's feet. This morality is by no means self-evident… Christianity
is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main
concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole.”
One of the commentators writing on Nietzsche
said:
“He would not have been surprised by the events that
plagued Europe in the 20th century. Communism, Nazism,
Nationalism, and the other ideologies that made their way across the continent
in the wake of World War I - sought to provide man with meaning and value, as a
worker, as an Aryan, or some other greater deed; in a similar way as
to how Christianity could provide meaning as a child of God, and give life on
Earth value by relation to heaven. While he may have rejected those ideologies,
he no doubt would have acknowledged the need for the meaning they provided.”
Charles
Darwin (1809–1882), who proposed the theory of evolution by means of
natural selection heavily disputed the dogmatic prescriptions of the Christian
church, but later in life he clarified his position as an agnostic in
response to a letter from John Fordyce,
an author of works on scepticism:
"In
my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an atheist in the sense of
denying the existence of a God. I think that generally (and more and more so as
I grow older) but not always, that an agnostic would be the most correct
description of my state of mind."
This duality in Darwin’s faith in God and Christianity in light
of his scientific work, which gave birth to the discipline of ‘biology’, plays
out interestingly when two of contrasting beliefs love each other and who stayed
committed to each other to the very end despite differing beliefs.
Before marriage, Charles Darwin had
confessed everything to her. That he was in the process of rewriting the
history of life. That, according to his convictions, all living things
descended from a common ancestor. And that species were not to be attributed to
God's endless creativity, but were the product of a blind, mechanical process
that altered them over the course of millions of years. This alone was pure
heresy. Darwin even nursed doubts about the very survival of human beings.
Darwin was going to marry Emma Wedgwood. He did not believe a single word of the biblical story of creation. "Reason tells me that honest and conscientious doubts cannot be a sin," wrote the deeply religious Emma Wedgwood to her betrothed in a cautioning letter in November 1838. "But I felt that it would be a painful rift between us." Charles was supposed to find his way back to the right faith by reading the Bible: "I implore you to read the parting words of our Saviour to his apostles, beginning at the end of the 13th chapter of the Gospel according to John," she wrote.
Darwin was going to marry Emma Wedgwood. He did not believe a single word of the biblical story of creation. "Reason tells me that honest and conscientious doubts cannot be a sin," wrote the deeply religious Emma Wedgwood to her betrothed in a cautioning letter in November 1838. "But I felt that it would be a painful rift between us." Charles was supposed to find his way back to the right faith by reading the Bible: "I implore you to read the parting words of our Saviour to his apostles, beginning at the end of the 13th chapter of the Gospel according to John," she wrote.
But for Charles Darwin there was no turning
back. He definitely assured Emma in his reply that he would take her concern
seriously. But in fact, he was experimenting at that time with all kinds of
heretic theories. "Love of godhood is a result of intellectual organization,
oh you materialist!" he confided to himself in revolutionary words in his
secret notebook. And although his theories were not yet mature, he was completely
aware of their explosive nature: By dissociating intellect and morality from
god's power of creation, and attributing them instead to self-evolving forces,
Darwin undermined the very foundations of a society shaped by the Anglican
Church, with its hopes of eternal life and the omnipresent threat of
punishment.
It was not until 1871 that
Darwin commented on The Descent of Man, on
the origins of our own species. Eleven years later, he died in his country home
near London. Until the very end, his wife Emma, with whom he had been married
happily for 43 years, had watched by his bedside. Darwin's ideas were to
survive, his much-quoted prophecy, which was the only place in the On the Origin of Species to give any insight into his own view on
whether the "ape question," was to become true. It is said there:
"Light will fall on the origin of man and his history."
Having established how each of the greatest thinkers
of the 19th Century thought about belief in God there is an amazing
parallel between how St Paul and Nietzsche thought about ‘suffering’.
Nietzsche has
been pilloried unjustifiably at times because of his sister Elizabeth’s deeds. She
was married to an anti-Semitic and believed in Hitler’s vision of the Aryan
race, took possession of Nietzsche writings after his death. She archived his unfinished
works and ‘faked’ it to serve her ideological purpose.
Nietzsche from
childhood suffered from poor health, “That which does not kill us makes us stronger”, and his last eleven years was spent in
isolation in a sanitorium or looked by his mother before her death due to mental
breakdown, and later by his sister.
St
Paul in Romans 5:3-5 tells us:
“Not only that, but we also rejoice in our
sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance,
character; and character, hope. And hope does not disappoint us, because
God has poured out His love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, whom He
has given us.”
Nietzsche’s view on the necessity of suffering to have meaning in life, parallels
Jesus’ passion and crucifixion.
Nietzsche claims that man is
composed of two parts – a creative part and a part that is created – in other
words, mind and body. According to him, the body is meant to suffer, and the
mind is meant to fashion something beautiful out of the suffering of the body.
“In man creature and creator are
united: in man there is material, fragment, excess, clay, dirt, nonsense,
chaos; but there is also the creator, the sculptor, the hardness of the hammer,
the divinity of the spectator, and the seventh day – do you understand this
contrast? The body must be fashioned, bruised, forged, stretched, roasted, and
refined – it is meant to suffer.”
Nietzsche sharply criticizes
those people who wish to abolish suffering. According to him, suffering is the
only thing that bestows value upon the world. Without pain and misery, life
would be absurd and worthless.
To Nietzsche, suffering provides
the only test by which a person’s worth can be determined. In other words, the
person who can endure the greatest suffering is the greatest of men.
“To those human beings who are of
any concern to me I wish suffering, desolation, sickness, ill-treatment, indignities
– I wish that they should not remain unfamiliar with profound self-contempt,
the torture of self-mistrust, the wretchedness of the vanquished: I have no
pity for them, because I wish them the only thing that can prove today whether
one is worth anything or not – that one endures.”
Finally, Nietzsche asserts that
pain is sacred, and that mankind ought to revere pain as religious followers
revere their gods. He explains that the ancient Greeks were the first and
perhaps only people to realize this. “Every single element in the act of
procreation, of pregnancy, and of birth aroused the highest and most solemn
feelings. In the doctrine of the mysteries, pain is pronounced holy; the pangs
of the woman giving birth hallow all pain; all becoming and growing – all that
guarantees a future – involves pain.”
The notion of ‘pain’
and ‘meaning’ in life perhaps explains why some people take onerous risks that
has every possibility in resulting in death.
Sir Ernest
Henry Shackleton was an Irish-born British explorer who was a principal figure
of the period known as the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration.
On August 1,
1914, the same day Germany declared war on Russia, Shackleton departed London
on the ship Endurance for his third
trip to the South Pole. By late fall, the
crew had reached South Georgia, an island in the southern Atlantic. On December
5, the team departed the island, the last time Shackleton and his men would
touch land for an astonishing 497 days.
In January
1915, the Endurance became trapped
in ice, ultimately forcing Shackleton and his men to vacate the ship and set up
camp on the floating ice. After the ship sank later that year, Shackleton
embarked on an escape in April 1916, in which he and his men crowded into three
small boats and made their way to Elephant Island, off the southern tip of Cape
Horn.
Seven hard
days on the water culminated in the team reaching their destination, but there
was still little hope in getting rescued on the uninhabited island, which,
because of its location, sat far outside normal shipping lanes.
Seeing that
his men were on the precipice of disaster, Shackleton led a team of five others
out on the water again. They boarded a 22-foot lifeboat and navigated their way
toward South Georgia. Sixteen days after setting out, the crew reached the
island, where Shackleton trekked to a whaling station to organize a rescue effort.
On August 25,
1916, Shackleton returned to Elephant Island to rescue the remaining crew
members. Astonishingly, not a single member of his 28-men team died during the
nearly two years they were stranded. "I
have not lost one of those you gave me." (John 18:9)
In 1919,
Shackleton published South, his detailed
account of the journey and its miraculous ending. Shackleton, however, was not
through with expeditions. In late 1921 he set off on a fourth mission to the
South Pole. His goal was to circumnavigate the Antarctic. But on January 5,
1922, Shackleton suffered a heart attack on his ship and died. He was buried in
South Georgia.
“Difficulties are just things to
overcome, after all.” - Ernest
Shackleton
References:
Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton https://www.biography.com/explorer/ernest-shackleton
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