The Folly of Existing
Perhaps there is no word more mischievous, more voraciously misleading, than “exist.” The world exists, I exist, you exist, God exists, Satan exists, or in logic, there exists some thing of which such-and-such is true and such-and-such else is false. This punctilious taxman will not leave us in peace until he knows precisely what does and does not exist.
Let us once and for all banish this word from our lives!
As a child, I often contemplated the infinitude of the universe — how could it go on forever, I asked myself, but equally how could it not? Surely a limit was inconceivable, for a limit would imply something on the other side of itself. But the absence of a limit? How? What kind of absence could this be? No wonder the human mind turns so often to circles in the hope of plucking out this conceptual thorn.
One stares into the depthless night, or into the mind of evil, awestruck by the grave totality of life. One circles human existence and then, finding death too slender a stalk to support this pernicious and exquisite bloom, one looks beyond the circle, finding either God or his absence, a lone circle drawn by no one.
Suppose we were deprived of these familiar alternatives. What would become of existence without the bitter sturdiness it gains from the banishment of God? Absent our vocabulary of disbelief, how could we look reality in the eye? Our pitiless clarity depends equally on that which we no longer acknowledge.
* * *
Consider Abraham: he did not believe in the sacrifice. How could he believe in the God that would ask him to kill his son? He could not, for to do so would be to predicate his faith on an act, and thereby subject it to the very impurity which would destroy it. Suppose he went through with the murder and Isaac’s sacrificed body lay before him: could God or even he himself not question whether the act was undertaken in earnest? Perhaps he did it for the reward — or even to save Isaac from God’s certain wrath had he neglected his duty. He may very well have killed Isaac out of love — but out of human love, not divine love, for a murder is never performed out of love for God.
No, Abraham did not believe in the sacrifice. He did not think to himself, “I will kill Isaac in order to …” Humanly speaking, he was prepared to lose his son. His suffering was absolute; he would ride to Moriah and kill the one person in the world he could not dream of killing. But his faith instructed him otherwise. “God will spare my son.” His faith understood the test as a test.
Consider the command: “Do as I say and you will reap the reward.” We hear these words often; what we do not know, what Abraham himself could not know with certainty, is who speaks to us thus. Is it God or Satan?
It is mistaken to think that Satan seeks to take away our faith; he only wishes to ground it in reason, to make suffering into a punishment, and faith into an absolute admission of guilt. For Satan, when punishment becomes superfluous through the hyper-vigilance of self-punishment, salvation has been reached and respite granted. Fundamentally, the Satanic command need not involve Isaac at all. “Ride to Moriah and sacrifice yourself” — that is one and the same command, for in that case Isaac would be left fatherless and distraught. One could even go further and imagine, as Kafka did, that Abraham never managed to leave his home in the first place, but merely puttered away his life in anxious anticipation of the burden thus inflicted, never satisfied that his affairs were sufficiently in order.
The Satanic command is indeed a circle, for it leads us, through self-punishment, from punishment to punishment, for we cannot punish ourselves without punishing equally those we love.
But when the command — “Do as I say and you will reap the reward” — issues from God’s mouth, it is not thus, for the reward is the miracle, the exquisite dislocation of the effect from the cause. Do truly as I say and you will not know what you do.
Humanly speaking, Abraham knew what he was to do. He was to leave his wife, to ride to Moriah with Isaac, to bind and kill him, and to return home alone. But his faith knew nothing of this. “Sacrifice” — the word was bereft of meaning. In what did it consist? How could he, a lowly human, perform a ‘sacrifice’? Humanly speaking, he loved his family. But his faith knew his love to be simple and weak, a vestige of his animal nature.
Riding in silence beside his son, together ascending sacred Moriah, all the while imagining the unimaginable, the secret growing with him, poisoning his inner life, driving him infinitely far from the God, hideously, whom he could not fail to serve — at last, reality broke to pieces all about him. This world did not exist, he did not exist, Isaac did not exist, there was no right or wrong, no death, no limit to the universe or the human understanding, no Satanic circle, no punishment, no self-punishment — only an unending torrent of language through which he and his son strolled, laughing uncontrollably, as through a downpour which, upon clearing, made him forget entirely why he had come to Moriah, and, riding side by side with Isaac, return home in melancholic silence.
* * *
What really did Abraham forget? Of course, he could not forget God or His gruesome command. And he could not now look upon Isaac except as one whose life had been spared, and so he loved Isaac not as his son but as the son he did not kill. In a sense then, Abraham hated Isaac, for Isaac stood between him and God. Or was it God he hated? — for He had introduced violent division into Abraham’s love.
Yet, for a moment, what Abraham knew humanly ceased to stand aloof from his faith. This hated thing was not God but that which he had called forth from his own breast in order to test himself. So when he heard the voice of God’s angel staying his hand, he forgot himself, his human love, and his confinement — the life whose breaking point he sought. He saw that God bound him to Isaac, for left to itself, his faith grew distorted.
Why does the world exist? Why is it as it is? Is a given action right or wrong? Why is the right way to act the right way to act? These questions are imposters. They seem to approach us from without, as though they asked themselves, as though existence and goodness were readymade crises poised for the occasion of the human mind.
But perhaps they are not really questions at all. Perhaps life affords no such perspective on itself as this, not even the consoling mystery provided by the final lack of perspective. As Kant warned, asking a question of existence is no simple matter, for we do so not as a pupil but as a prosecutor. Yet, because this special witness will one day kill us, we prefer to be the ones to brave the stand, imagining ourselves martyred for the truth.
Let us — like Abraham — refuse this fate.