Routledge Revivals: Paul Tillich (1973)

An Essay on the Role of Ontology in his Philosophical Theology

Alistair Macleod, Alistair M. Macleod

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351609685
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

First published in 1973, this is the first book on Paul Tillich in which a sustained attempt is made to sort out and evaluate the questions to which Tillich addresses himself in the crucial philosophical parts of his theological system. It is argued that despite the apparent simplicity in his interest in the 'question of being', Tillich in fact conceives of the ontological enterprise in a number of radically different ways in different contexts. Much of the author's work is devoted to the careful separation of these strands in his philosophical thought and to an exploration and assessment of the assumptions associated with them.

This book will be of interest to readers of Tillich and philosophers who specialise in ontology and linguistics.

Chapter 1
The Religious Quest

'The search for ultimate reality ... is the ontological question, the root question in every philosophy.' ¹

'We philosophise because we are finite and because we know that we are finite. We are a mixture of being and nonbeing, and we are aware of it...It is our finitude in interdependence with the finitude of our world which drives us to search for ultimate reality. This search is a consequence of our encounter as finite beings with a finite world. Because we stand between being and nonbeing and long for a form of being that prevails against nonbeing in ourselves and in our world, we philosophise.'²

'Every human being philosophises, just as every human being moralises and acts politically, artistically, scientifically, religiously ... Man is by nature a philosopher, because he inescapably asks the question of being.'³

The book from which these excerpts are taken—Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality—contains 'a slightly extended version' of lectures delivered in 1951, the year of publication of the first volume of Tillich's Systematic Theology. It was the primary purpose of the lectures to explain and justify the role of ontology in Tillich's theological system. Although attention is focussed throughout the book on the nature of the ontological question—although, that is, Tillich's remarks about philosophical problems and procedures are by no means peripheral to his primary purpose in the lectures—two different conceptions of the philosophical enterprise are to be found in the book. At times, the 'search for ultimate reality' is represented as the search for an answer to a question about 'ultimate reality', the 'question of being' as Tillich prefers, for the most part, to call it. At other times—as in the passages from which excerpts were taken above—it is thought of as a search undertaken by human beings (all human beings; human beings as such) in an endeavour to come to terms with that anxiety which consists in their awareness of their 'finitude'—their awareness of the fact that they are 'a mixture of being and nonbeing' and that they 'stand between being and nonbeing'. Construed in the first of these ways, the 'search for ultimate reality' is an intellectual enterprise in which only some human beings (those who are 'philosophers' or 'ontologists') engage; construed in the second way, the 'search for ultimate reality' is the religious quest, in which (according to Tillich) all human beings are inescapably involved.

Thoroughly implausible though it is to identify the philosophical enterprise with the religious quest, it is only by doing so that Tillich is able to advance such surprising claims as that 'every human being philosophises' and that 'man is by nature a philosopher, because he inescapably asks the question of being'. My primary task in this chapter will be to try to account for Tillich's intermittent acceptance of this plainly unacceptable view of the relation between ontology and religion. Thereafter I shall draw attention to two (quite different) formulations of the ontological question which, while presupposing the distinctness of the ontological question and the religious quest, nevertheless owe something to Tillich's insistence on the closeness of the relation between them.

How is Tillich's occasional identification of the ontological question with the religious quest to be accounted for? The answer, in general terms, is that Tillich often describes the religious quest in a way which facilitates its confusion with the ontological question. In elucidation and support of this answer I shall try to explain both (a) why Tillich thinks it is illuminating to describe the religious quest as a quest for being (or, in the language of Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality as a 'search for ultimate reality') and (b) why this description of the religious quest makes it easy for him at times to obliterate the distinction between this quest and the ontological question.

I Anxiety, The Threat of Nonbeing and the Quest for Being

Tillich's view that all human beings engage in the religious quest is bound up with his belief that there are certain anxieties from which all human beings suffer. It is these anxieties which generate the religious quest and a man's religion can consequently be seen as his way of coping with anxiety.

In The Courage To Be ⁴ Tillich identifies three anxieties to which human beings as such are alleged to be subject: the anxiety of death, the anxiety of guilt, and the anxiety of meaninglessness. The anxiety of death is occasioned by man's awareness of the fact that he is mortal, of the fact that he is destined some day to die. The anxiety of guilt is generated by man's awareness of the gap between what he is and what he ought to be. The anxiety of meaninglessness springs from man's sense of the ultimate purposelessness of the various activities which make up his life.

'In all three forms anxiety is existential in the sense that it belongs to existence as such and not to an abnormal state of mind as in neurotic (and psychotic) anxiety.'⁵

'The three types of anxiety are interwoven in such a way that one of them gives the predominant color but all of them participate in the coloring of the state of anxiety. All of them and their underlying unity are existential, i.e. they are implied in the existence of man as man, his finitude and estrangement.'⁶

It is unfortunate that Tillich should in this passage ground the claim that there are certain anxieties from which human beings as such suffer in certain ontological doctrines—the doctrines that human beings are 'finite' and 'estranged'. For one thing, there is an important strand in Tillich's thought about ontology (to be investigated in the next chapter) according to which these doctrines are themselves the product, not the ground, of a certain sort of analysis of the experience of 'existential anxiety'. Moreover, the assumption that the universality of 'existential anxiety' is an implication of the doctrines of finitude and estrangement stands in the way of unprejudiced consideration of the question whether the three anxieties distinguished are indeed universally experienced; and it is not at all evident that this question should be answered in the affirmative. Yet an affirmative answer is crucial to Tillich's insistence on the universality of the religious quest.

Now in the case of none of the anxieties distinguished by Tillich would it be natural to say that the quest it generates is a quest for being. The anxiety of death might plausibly be regarded as generating either a quest for immortality or (given a more pessimistic appraisal of our 'post-mortem' prospects) a quest for resigned acceptance of the fact that death is our final destiny;⁷ but neither of these quests can be described, without further ado, as a quest for being. Again, while the anxiety of guilt might not unreasonably be taken to be the source of a quest for forgiveness and the anxiety of meaninglessness the source of a quest for a sense of purpose in life, neither of these quests, it would seem, can be illuminatingly characterised as a 'search for ultimate reality'. Why, then, does Tillich suppose that the religious quest generated by the experience of 'existential anxiety' can be appositely described as a quest for being?

The bald answer to this question can be easily supplied. Tillich thinks he can maintain that it is a quest for being which is generated by the experience of anxiety because he is convinced that this universal human anxiety has its source in 'the threat of nonbeing'. For if it is 'nonbeing' which gives rise to anxiety, the quest generated by the experience of anxiety can be represented naturally enough as a quest for whatever has the power to deal with 'the threat of nonbeing'—and it is 'being' which, according to Tillich, has the 'power to resist nonbeing'.

But how can Tillich suppose that the various anxieties he distinguishes in The Courage To Be all have their source in 'the threat of nonbeing'? Part of the answer lies in the sort of distinction he tries to draw between 'anxiety' and 'fear'. But as we shall see this would show (at best) only why he thinks one of the anxieties distinguished—viz. the anxiety of death—consists in 'the existential awareness of nonbeing'. To throw light on the claim that the same general account can be given of the anxieties of guilt and meaninglessness as well, notice must be taken both of Tillich's ambiguous use of the word 'anxiety' and of his insistence that the word 'nonbeing;' has several senses.

Tillich's main reason for distinguishing sharply between fear and anxiety is that he wants to be able to admit that fears come and go—and that specific fears can be eliminated (at least in principle) by appropriate action—without being forced to abandon his conviction that anxiety forms the permanent and inescapable background to human life. Since he holds that fears are produced by and directed towards specific 'objects', the attempt to differentiate anxiety from fear takes the dramatic form of the claim that anxiety is occasioned by 'the negation of every object'—and 'the negation of every object' is, according to Tillich, 'nonbeing'.

'Fear, as opposed to anxiety, has a definite object (as most authors agree), which can be faced, analysed, attacked, endured ... But this is not so with anxiety because anxiety has no object, or rather, in a paradoxical phrase, its object is the negation of every object ... The only object is the threat itself, but not the source of the threat, because the source of the threat is "nothingness".'⁸

'Anxiety is independent of any special object which might produce it; it is dependent only on the threat of nonbeing ... In this sense it has been said rightly that the object of anxiety is "nothingness"—and nothingness is not an "object". Objects are feared. A danger, a pain, an enemy, may be feared, but fear can be conquered by action. Anxiety cannot....' ⁹

If Tillich were unprepared to endow nonbeing with any sort of ontological status, then the claim that nonbeing is the source of the threat which occasions anxiety would be either metaphorical or nonsensical. Tillich is emphatic, however, that 'nonbeing' is an indispensable ontological concept. Not only does he seriously entertain the question 'What sort of being must we attribute to nonbeing?'¹⁰ but he commits himself to substantive assertions about man and the world which presuppose that in his view 'nonbeing'—despite the suggestions of the word—stands for something. Consider the following claims, for example: 'man participates not only in being but also in nonbeing';¹¹ 'we are a mixture of being and nonbeing';¹² 'there can be no world unless there is a dialectical participation of nonbeing in being'; ¹³ and 'being has nonbeing "within" itself as that which is eternally present and eternally overcome in the process of the divine life.' ¹⁴

It is perhaps not altogether implausible to represent the anxiety occasioned by the awareness that some day one must die as a dread of ceasing to exist or of 'dissolving into nothingness'. Consequently if the horror of extinction were the distinctive element in what Tillich calls 'the anxiety of death', there would be some excuse for the view that this anxiety consists in 'the existential awareness of nonbeing'.¹⁵ However, it is not simply the anxiety of death but anxiety as such which is said to have its source in 'the threat of nonbeing'. Now this larger claim—which lacks even the initial plausibility of the more limited claim about the source of the anxiety of death—is made the easier to advance by an ambiguity in Tillich's use of the term 'anxiety'. Sometimes 'anxiety' is used restrictively to refer to the anxiety...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Contents
• Biographical Notes
• Introduction
• 1. The Religious Quest
• 2. Philosophical Anthropology
• 3. Ontology and Theology
• 4. The Conditions of Experience
• 5. Ontology and the Verb 'To Be'
• 6. The Mystery of Being
• 7. The Clarification of Concepts: I
• 8. The Clarification of Concepts: II
• Conclusions
• Bibliography