Studies in Early Genesis

The Foundation of Existentialism

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Pentateuch

Genre: Speech

Lesson: 6 of 11

Track: #51

Dictation Name: RR115C6

Date: 1960-1970’s

Let us begin with prayer.

Almighty God our heavenly Father we give thanks unto Thee that the government is upon Thy shoulders. And as we face the troubles of this world we can rest in Thee, confident that Thou art God, that Thou would give us strength sufficient for our daily task that Thou wilt deliver us from the evil one. That Thou wilt confirm us in our stand for Thy truth and Thy righteousness and prosper us according to Thy word. Now Father speak to us by Thy word and by Thy Spirit and grant us Thy peace. In Jesus name, Amen

Genesis 3:1-6

1 Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden?

2 And the woman said unto the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden:

3 But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die.

4 And the serpent said unto the woman, ye shall not surely die:

5 For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.

6 And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

In this story of the temptation it is important for us to remember the heart of the temptation is precisely this,” ye shall be as God” Every man his own God, every man his own ultimate source of authority determining for himself what is right and wrong. Because the Hebrew verb translated “to know” and quite literally so, has the force of governing, of determining, of establishing. And it is certainly the function and jurisdiction of God to determine that which is right and wrong. And when a man takes it upon himself or when a court takes it upon itself to determine that which is ultimately right and wrong then it has assumed the prerogative of God. The temptation of Satan to man was “ye shall be as Gods, knowing” or determining for yourself, good and evil. Every man his own God; this is the essence of original sin. This is the heart of man’s depravity. Now it is our fault as moralist very often to look at the {?} and say “this or that man is a good man” and to allow them to say to us “well we are good people” simply because they have not killed or murdered or committed adultery. But in the eyes of God this is not the essence of true morality. The essence of true morality is to recognize that God is God and that it is He who determines what is right and wrong and we submit to Him in these things.

So that a sinner who has broken all ten of the commandments but humbly acknowledges that God is God and seeks His grace is closer to God then the man who says “I haven’t killed, stolen, or committed adultery or born false witness, so I am a good man.” Not if he makes himself his own law and says “I do these things because I choose to do them, it is a matter of good sense with me, it is a matter of taste, it is a matter of choice. Not because any God requires such actions of me. We cannot keep the law in the true sense of the law if we have failed to keep it for the reason that God hath said it; He has required it, it is His word. But the temptation is to be one’s own God, every man His own private universe. Knowing, determining for himself what constitutes right and wrong and what constitutes ultimate reality. God spoke the word and created the worlds, and when man speaks his own word, determines for himself what constitutes right and wrong, he is saying “I am by my own word going to remake the world; I don’t like the kind of world that God has made for me”. God said that it was done, He spoke and the worlds were created and we accept the world and His law on His terms or we set ourselves up as Gods in His place, and then we proceed to remake the worlds to suite ourselves. This as I have already stated is original sin, the depravity of man, His effort to be His own God.

Now let’s take this sin of man which is basic to all men, this is our nature. This is our desire, we want to have our will done and even as Christians to often we approach God and we say “Now Lord, I’ve given you ten days of faithful service don’t you owe me something in return?” We want to bargain with God, we want to say “we have done so much now you owe us something” and of course this is illegitimate because it is not a matter of works and we are not giving anything to God we are simply living in terms of the glorious liberty of the sons of God when we obey His laws. We are living in terms of that which constitutes life and so the law of God is a gift to us, and our obedience is first of all our own acceptance of that gift, we don’t give anything to God by obeying Him, by being faithful to Him.

Now this sin of man his attempt to be his own God is not only original sin, but it is also the reigning philosophy of our world. It is, to give it its modern name, existentialism. Let us exam the dictionary of philosophy, edited by Bagabert B. Ruins {?} for the definition of existential philosophy, and to quote “determines the worth of knowledge not in relation to truth but according to a biological value contained in the pure data of consciousness when unaffected by emotion, volitions, and social prejudices”. The only value, the only truth is in a biological value to you as you live; unaffected by anything in our environment, in the world, anything in any book such as the Bible, unaffected by anything save our naked will and desire. Our biology, this is existentialist, and in every area virtually it is the reigning philosophy today.

For example, history. T.J. Altizer in his book Mercea Eliade and the Dialectic of the Sacred has said that only that which is totally governed by the moment can be considered historical, and by this he eliminates Jesus as we know him, and as the Bible proclaims Him as non-historical. He is mythological, why? Because he is governed by the will of His Father which is in heaven, because he declares Himself to have come from heaven “before Abraham was, I AM” because He is declared to be the Son of God, the Word by Whom all things were made and without Him was not anything made that was made. He is governed by eternity; therefore He is non-historical because only that which is purely of the moment can be historical. We are all of us here, so to speak, mythological people to a degree because we are governed by the Bible, we are governed by laws by standards that are given to us from the throne of God, from eternity. And the very fact that we are governed by the past is enough to render us as incapable of understanding existentialism. The only truth for existentialism is that which comes out the moment unaffected by the past, the present, eternity or anything except our biology. This of course is to reduce us to the level of the animal, the animal is unaffected, totally unaffected by past, present, or future; by God, by law, by anything except His biology. And existentialism declares that we should so live.

Accordingly for existentialist thinking the great men of history are the men who enter into the moment, In This Independent Republic on page 122. You will find a quotation from the historian Eric Goldman presently associated with President Johnson, in which he says that Eisenhower and Truman began as very poor, poor presidents but they became near great presidents because after some hesitation they entered into the impulse of the moment. They cease to be governed, in other words, by objective laws and standards and gave themselves to the moment entirely. The new morality of Bishop Pike and Bishop Robinson again is existentialist morality. Its only criterion is individual feeling, experience, existentialist love. An existential love says, that following Martin Buber, Paul Tillich and others that the essence of any value or any morality in the world is love, and this rests on “I-thou” feeling. The I-it relationship is to treat other people as things, impersonal. This is a pseudo-personalistic philosophy. But an I/thou morality says that you treat the other person a person therefore as long as you have an I/Thou relationship anything is valid, whether it be adultery or any form of perversion, it is legitimate. There is no law, only “do you feel love?” and we can render love much better as a biological urge, “do you relate to this person?” and if you relate to them then it is morally valid.

This new morality is the reigning morality of all the established churches today. It is more openly proclaimed in some churches then others, but it does prevail in all the major denominations. Again in religion we see this in that in contemporary theology is increasingly being taken over by what Time magazine has reported on lately but which is not a new movement, the death of God school of theology. The premise of this school of theology is that we cannot began to think religiously until we say that the God of the Bible is dead and the Jesus of the Bible is mythological; and the only validity is in humanity and the fulfillment of humanity. And if God is to be born in the future He is to be born only as mankind relates itself one to another in a perfectly unified meaningful whole. Then god is born as this re-united humanity.

In literature and in art Existentialism prevails. It substitutes purely private experience for meaning. Some years ago Archibald McLeish gave the basic philosophy of the existentialist school when he declared that: “a poem should not mean a poem should be.” This is all that is necessary not meaning, mere existents. It is not necessary in fact it is wrong for an artist to attempt to communicate something in his fiction, it should bear no resemblance to any reality that has meaning for you, it should simply be a meaningful experience for him to paint that picture. Communication is not his purpose. Now if you in looking at that picture have a purely private experience then it has registered and it is art to you. But the meaning that it conveys to you may bear no relationship to the meaning it had for the artist when he painted it. This is purely private meaning; every man is his own God in his own private world unrelated to anyone else and with no obligation to relate himself.

In science again existentialism prevails. What Life magazine on Oct. the 1st called “evolutionary humanism” or “scientific humanism” is simply existentialism. And man as his own God has set himself the task of remaking himself. Evolutionary thought is a form of existentialism, its goal is mans control of his own evolution and man, the social engineering scientist will control his own destiny, will re-make the world to suite himself and will demonstrate that there is no need for any God, or any law other than that of mans own making. And so the questions are seriously raise in the Life article “in the future will the family survive? Do we need it?” and the implication is certainly not if we can raise test tube babies and colonize far off planets by sending one biologist with a great many test tubes, people, cows, and pigs and so on. The family is no longer necessary only the biologist in social science.

In politics and economics again existentialism the satanic temptation prevails. Dewey’s great society and its instrumentalism represent, as does all pragmatism, existentialism. There is no objective law; only purely pragmatic law. It is interesting that this year the CPA has announced as conference studies the theme “The Innovative society”. The innovative society is a society not governed by law, constantly experimenting with new things. It is not a planned society because this is obsolete, a planned society posits a fixed idea in terms of which you plan, but it is a planning society, a society in which you constantly change your plan as the impulse strikes you and as the moment guides you. You are purely existentialist; you are not bound by your thinking of yesterday. And so it is with many of our statist leaders today there is no embarrassment if you prove to them that two years ago they said something exactly opposite of that which they say today. Nor did it register with most Americans when during the last campaign it was demonstrated that the successful candidate for president had often said exactly the opposite things when he was a senator. To you this may have meant something, but to most people because they are educated under existentialist teaching and taught by existentialist preachers as well as teachers, it is meaningless. Why should any man be bound by yesterday, nor by a past law, nor by a book several thousand years old? The innovative society, the planning society means that not only is the individual not bound by his yesterdays, but society itself is not bound by its yesterday, it is perpetually free. This is the essence of existentialism as it confronts us today. It is the reigning philosophy of our age and we meet with it on every side.

It is significant that on campuses such as Harvard where existentialism first came in, where it first began to mold the minds of the younger generation, not only is this purely private world of every man his own God the reigning philosophy but it has led to the logical step, the logical conclusion to such thinking; every man his own private world, and every man no longer bound by the outside world. And so it is that in all existentialist thinking today one of the most important areas of concern is LSD. To live in the dream world of narcotics, to live no longer bound by the real world of people, no longer bound by a world in spite of every denial cause and effect still prevails. You escape into the world of dream. And so it is that LSD is so important to the existentialist and today book after book appears from the presses heralding the glories of LSD. And we are given books such as The Drug Experience in which various of these existentialists describe for us the glories of this experience. We have the Psychedelic Reader and a host of other books whose one purpose is to open up for us this glorious world where we are our own gods and we don’t even have to know that there are other people around us as we embark on cloud nine.

This is the retreat into purely private world, the escape from reality into existentialist reality.

This is the conclusion of mans original sin, to be as God. God’s judgment on Adam and Eve was also his mercy. Had God left Adam and Eve there in Paradise with all the beneficent and happy conditions of paradise there would have been no change in their commission. They would of lived out their days in contempt in existentialist daydreams. But God drove them out and he blessed them in two ways by His judgment. He promised them the redeemer and second He promised them trouble in this world, hardship, the harsh realities of the everyday world; for to have left them in the ease of Eden would have been total doom. God’s judgment shall come upon our age as its salvation; and men shall be shattered in all their existentialist and LSD pipe dreams. They will be brought down from cloud nine to the real world of God. There is no escaping God’s judgment and we can be grateful that God is a God of judgment. There would be no salvation for man and no hope for our future if the judgment of God were not at hand. Let us pray.

Our Lord and our God we give thanks unto Thee for Thy word and we thank Thee that in the midst of an existentialist world Thy grace has spoken to us, Thy word has been given, and we have the blessed assurance that we are surrounded now, not by the nightmare of our dreams and mans dreams, but by the glory of Thy providential care. Therefore our Father give us grace day by day to take hands off our lives and commit them into Thy keeping to do the task Thou hast commissioned us to do and to leave the results in Thine omnipotent hand. We thank Thee our God that the government is upon Thy shoulders in Jesus name, amen.

Are there any questions, yes?

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes many people do this, they are non-existentialist to the extent that they go to work and to chain themselves in the everyday world and live in terms of traffic laws and other requirements. But when they put down the workday world they go off into this existentialist kind of nonsense.

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, this is very true and one of the problems on the college campuses is this unwillingness to leave the academic role for a work-a-day world, this is a compromise. Now in the riots in Berkley in the various meetings they held one sign that they had over and over again that they were waving “We do not trust anyone over thirty”. Why? Because they said everyone over thirty had compromised with his fate, he was thinking in terms of a job and he had a wife and he was thinking in terms of a baby. And what kind of existentialism is this? It was compromising, and therefore the banner “we trust no-one over thirty.” Now these students of course dread the day, and that’s why you have so many professional students in the academic world; people who simply will not give up. They want to remain a student, most of the time they are just there taking part in campus activities. There are thousands of them around Berkley and getting involved in endless politicking. They don’t want to grow up and leave their existentialist pipe dream.

Another question, yes?

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes it is a schizophrenic position. The logical existentialist is the one who commits suicide and Nietzsche in this respect counseled suicide as the logical course of the ultimate humanist. In his case he ended up in a form of suicide in that he went stark raving mad. But this was his council, and in a book which was in many respects a very prophetic one, Dostoevsky The possessed or it can also be translated The Demons Kirillov, one of the first if not the first existentialist portrayed in literature finally commits suicide. It’s his one way of logically denying God.

[Audience member] {Something about a Time magazine article and God is dead)

[Rushdoony] Yes this is a satirical comment on the position of these existentialists, the death of God school of theology. And by the way their great white father is Bishop Robinson and Paul Tillich; these two men are their source of inspiration. But they deny God, the death of God is the first premise and of course Jesus Christ as God. Then they take a purely human Jesus who is a social revolutionist, no relationship to the Biblical Jesus, as their goal and say “We want a Jesus who’s going to save the world” politically, socially, so that the true Jesus of the God who is to be born, this united humanity is the one or the institution bearing his name which will create this perfect one world order. So this is their purely mythical Jesus.

Yes?

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] Right, you’re very right they’re all forms of existentialism but for all of them basically it’s their own existence that is their only law. And for Sartre for example and his position is the existence or non-existence of God is no concern of me, the only problem is these other people whether they exist for me or not. In other words “do I choose to recognize your existence or not”. This is the only problem for Sartre because he lives in a totally self-contained world. Now his answer has been a thoroughly leftist answer to that, he’s decided that he will recognize the rest of us if we come into a totally statist order, such as he had in mind. But again for him the only reality is that which he chooses to recognize. And logically Sartre doesn’t have to be a Marxist or anything; his basic position is such that he has admitted that some of his best pupils have committed suicide. He isn’t ashamed of that fact.

Now I think Sartre’s book Saint Genet is the best example of what he regards as desirable. Sartre wrote this book about Jean Genet. Genet is a French ex-convict who has had a long life of thoroughly depraved activity as a professional male prostitute, pervert, pick-pocket, thief, quite a few things. And some few years ago, about 10-15 years ago he was facing a long term in a French prison, and Genet decided “Why should I be considered a criminal? If there is no God there is no law, and if there is no law there is no crime, therefore I’m saint of the new world- the godless world”. And so he began to write along this line and all the philosophers rallied around him and got him pardoned and put out of prison and Sartre wrote this book on him. Saint Genet he is the saint of existentialist because his principle is “If there is no God, there is no common law, if there is no law there is no crime, I as a criminal breaking the old laws of God, am a saint”. And he’s logical, he’s right, his premise is right. But of course he is an exceedingly depraved pervert. And he is one of the heroes of existentialism today, Jean Genet, you’ll find on some college campus book stores stacks of his books like this for sale.

Yes?

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, neo-orthodoxy is a form of existentialism. The great figure in existentialism is also the great figure in molding neo-orthodoxy Kierkegaard. Now Kierkegaard was a Kantian so Emmanuel Kant is the real fountain-head of existentialism and it has taken two directions. Its basic influence in philosophy and in religion and to a great extent in education has come through Kierkegaard. Its basic political influence has come through Hegel and Marx of course was a Hegelian with a call. Dewey was also a Hegelian. Yes?

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes there is a great deal of use of LSD in colleges and there’s not too much, that you can put your finger on, but there seems to be evidence that it is being used in seminaries; not only in the east but also in the West. That apparently some leaders in seminaries have gone so far as to regard it as the modern substitute for the Holy Spirit.

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] Well it’s exceedingly prevalent and it is increasing in its use.

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes a good question, it varies from existentialist thinker to thinker. Of course they’re all Freudian in their quotes in that they’re going to say it’s not a religious question it’s a scientific question and a hangover from the primal chord. But part of the necessity of escaping into this dream world of LSD is to escape from guilt feelings. Now this presents a problem too, because whether they take peyote or LSD you have to be very careful of the dosage because the wrong kind of dosage and all your guilt feelings can pour up the surface in such a fantastic way that it tears a person apart and can lead to suicidal impulses. But it can be a devastating experience, they can see demons, serpents, it can be a wild, wild experience. If they don’t control the dosage and keep it limited and if they are not prepared when they take it, they must take it under controlled circumstances and relaxed or it gallops away with them.

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, some people do. Many people have different forms of idolatry but when they worship money they are worshiping ultimately their self-will. If what money will do for them to enable them to gratify themselves to give them the sense of power they want. [Interruption] Yes, of course but the basic security they want is the fulfillment of their will. They can have externally a great…. [Interruption]… no it need not be to buy anything. For example one of the richest women in the history of America Hattie Greene was fantastically wealthy; her money ran into the hundreds of millions. And yet she was so niggardly that she refused to call in a doctor for her son when he was seriously ill and I believe he lost a leg, or something, as a result of it and became a cripple for life. She just didn’t want to put the money out for a doctor. And she lived all her life that way, and she enjoyed the sense of utter power but she didn’t want to use money although she couldn’t of spent all she had in a lifetime.

Yes?

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, exactly. What people want in money when they go to it for ungodly reasons is power. And our Lord said it is not money that is the root of all evil but the love of money. So it’s the person, and his feelings as he approaches it. It’s his desire for total power through it; and to control and to control man, to play God. But there is nothing wrong with wealth as such, in fact God makes it clear over and over in scripture that this is a blessing; and he blessings his saints very often materially with monetary wealth. Some He blessed in spiritual ways and some in material ways, that’s in the providence of God, but there is nothing wrong; absolutely nothing morally wrong with being wealthy if the wealth be honest wealth.

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes LSD is manufacture predominately in Israel and is brought into this country that is the major source. There is a foundation of two Harvard professors, O’Leary and I forget the name of the other man who founded a foundation dedicated to the promulgation of it and are enthusiastic champions of it for a while and they were finally kicked out of Harvard because of some scandals there, but they are back in this country because I believe Mexico made it clear that they were not wanted.

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes, you’re very right. It’s interesting you mentioned The Brave New World he calls the drug there “Soma” as you’ve said. A few years ago I was reading in a medical journal, I was sitting in a friends office who was a doctor that’s how I happened to read it, it isn’t my normal reading. There was a article on Soma, and they have come to the conclusion that there actually once existed such a plant, a Soma plant. All the evidence points to the fact that in Northern India this plant once existed and that by using the root they could go off into this dream world but they, and finally made it extinct because they were searching high and low throughout the mountains for it and digging it up and finally they killed it off entirely. But Soma once existed and we can be glad it no longer does, but we do have the artificial forms.

Now very closely related to LSD is peyote. I have had a great deal of experience with that in that when I was with the American Indians they are very much addicted to its use. It came into the Indian world in the nineties from Mexico, and if duly boughten its legal for the Indians, this was made legal by the New Deal because they claimed it was for religious purposes a part of their worship, and it’s brewed as a tea or they chew it or put it into stews and so on; and it has the same effects as LSD. But it is significant that the Indians who used it are the most incompetent and most defeated ones. Their people have no desire to make any progress, they live under the most abject conditions, they will be sometimes in a log cabin no larger than this inter-area here with a dirt floor, 10, 12, 14 people sleeping there and perpetually almost during some parts of the year under the influence of peyote. They especially give it to sick people and it’s regarded as a great healer. The healing property is simply this, you don’t feel a thing. However because it paralyzes the whole digestive tract and so much of your pain is connected with the digestive tract and has an effect on the heart so you don’t feel much. However what does happen, the people who take peyote and are not in good health it virtually stops all digestion and the food just piles up and they look as though they’ve got a small basketball at their belt, and it kills them. And I’ve buried many a peyote victim but it was significant no government record put down peyote as the cause of death. No government doctor would dare do this.

Many states have passed laws against peyote, and it is valid, but not against the Indians. California in the last 3-4 years did try to prosecute some Indians I believe in the Palm Springs area for using Peyote and they did find that a very large number of convicts in San Quentin were perpetually high on Peyote; it was being smuggled in to them. It’s a very common form of retreat from a world you’ve given up on and you don’t want to do a thing about.

Yes?

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] I believe you’re right, I don’t know particularly with respect to the mind but I do know that many of the Indian peoples in temporal America did use it for ritual purpose; they control it because while they knew its power and liked it, they didn’t want it to be used to freely because it would destroy society.

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes the sacred mushroom of some of the Indians tribes was discovered. I don’t whether as the same men did the discovery but it was discovered and some experimentation has taken placed with that also.

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] There are many such drugs that we are still ignorant of. I know that when I went to the reservation one of the old Indians whose grandparents had been medicine people often pointed out to me that never, when any Indian was around, many ordinary plants and hills which had powerful properties for inducing trances and visions. And he said” it’s a good thing that knowledge of this is now forgotten,” because he said, “these things are very dangerous.” But today we are on the search for these things because we are running away from reality, that’s the basic reason. And hence there is a demand for something. Now Aldous Huxley wrote an article in the Saturday Review about seven or eight years ago in which he expressed a hope that something would be developed, and he hoped that LSD would be the thing, which would enable man to escape from reality without any consequences. So there is this desire to escape from reality and this governs this continual quest for drugs which will have no consequences.

Yes?

[Audience member] {?}

[Rushdoony] There’s a great deal of experimentation in fact there are a number of foundations that are involved in this experimentation and some universities…[Audio cuts off]