Page 25 - The Drucker Lectures

6 [ The Drucker Lectures

liberal Protestantism that sees in Jesus the “best man ever lived,”
the Golden Rule and Kant’s “Categorical Imperative,” the sat-
isfaction of service—those and other formulations of an ethical
concept of life became as familiar in the nineteenth century as
most of them had been in antiquity. And they failed to provide a
basis for human existence as much as they had failed 2,000 years
ago. In its noblest adherents the ethical concept leads to a stoic
resignation, which gives courage and steadfastness but does not
give meaning either to life or to death. And its futility is shown
by its reliance upon suicide as the ultimate remedy—though to
the stoic, death is the end of everything and of all existence.
Kierkegaard rightly considered this position to be one of even
greater despair than the optimistic one; he calls it “the despair at
willing to be an individual.”
In most cases, however, the ethical position does not lead to
anything as noble and as consistent as the Stoic philosophy. Nor-
mally it is nothing but sugarcoating on the pill of totalitarianism.
Or the ethical position becomes pure sentimentalism—the posi-
tion of those who believe that evil can be abolished, harmony be
established by the spreading of sweetness, light, and goodwill.
And in all cases the ethical position is bound to degenerate
into our pure relativism. For if virtue is to be found in man, ev-
erything that is accepted by man must be virtue. Thus a position
that starts out—as did Rousseau and Kant 175 years ago—to
establish man-made ethical absolutes must end in John Dewey
and in the complete denial of the possibility of an ethical posi-
tion. This way, there is no escape from despair.
Is it then our conclusion that human existence cannot be an
existence in tragedy and despair? If so, then the sages of the East
are right who see in the destruction of the self, in the submersion
of man into the Nirvana, the nothingness, the only answer.
Nothing could be further from Kierkegaard. For Kierkegaard
has an answer. Human existence is possible as existence not in