Page 24 - The Drucker Lectures

How Is Human Existence Possible? [ 5

becomes meaningless. [Danish philosopher and theologian So-
ren] Kierkegaard, who first diagnosed the phenomenon and pre-
dicted where it would lead to, called it the “despair at not willing
to be an individual.” Superficially the individual can recover from
this encounter with the problem of existence in eternity. He may
even forget it for a while. But he can never regain his confidence
in his existence in society: Basically he remains in despair.
Society must thus attempt to make it possible for man to die
if it wants him to be able to live exclusively in society. There is
only one way in which society can do that: by making individual
life itself meaningless. If you are nothing but a leaf on the tree, a
cell in the body of society, then your death is not really a death;
it is only a part of the life of the whole. You can hardly even talk
of death; you better call it a process of collective regeneration.
But then, of course, your life is not real life, either; it is just a
functional process within the life of the whole, devoid of any
meaning except in terms of the whole.
Thus you can see what Kierkegaard saw clearly a hundred
years ago: that the optimism of a creed that proclaims human
existence as existence in society must lead straight to despair,
and that the despair leads straight to totalitarianism. And you
can also see that the essence of the totalitarian creed is not how
to live, but how to die. To make death bearable, individual life
has to be made worthless and meaningless. The optimistic creed
that starts out by making life in this world mean everything
leads straight to the Nazi glorification of self-immolation as the
only act in which man can meaningfully exist. Despair becomes
the essence of life itself.
The nineteenth century thus reached the very point the pa-
gan world had reached in the age of Euripides or in that of the
late Roman Empire. And like antiquity, it tried to find a way out
by escaping into the purely ethical, by escaping into virtue as the
essence of human existence. Ethical Culture and that brand of