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Modern Existentialism and How To Avoid It:

A Ceasism Manifesto

By V.E. Silber

Introduction To 21st Century Bohemia

First of all, what is existentialism? In two words: Existence Versus Non-existence. Example: It is better to be alive as appose to being dead, therefore we should concentrate more on making our lives better for ourselves rather than thinking about what do in this life that will, say, effect our future lives or our existence (or lack-thereof) in death. Question two: What is modern existentialism? In one word: Bohemia. Bohemians, or the Bohemians, believe in the here, the now, and improving quality of life from their point of view. Most Entrepreneurs share this paradigm, with the difference that Entrepreneur life is centered around consumerism, commercialism, and capitalism, and they’d rather be dead than consider themselves existentialists. The Bohemians, on the other hand, believe in “less is more”, “not dirty—rustic”, and “independently spiritual”. But as appose to any organized religion that believes in quote-on-quote “spirituality”, the modern day Bohemians come from the school of the thinking manifesto that preaches: “an intellectual creates his own moral universe”¹ (Allan, “Bullets Over Broadway” 1994). Thus, to the Bohemian, matters such as “Karma” are purely subjective and the true thing that matters is the present and how to best make the most of the time one lives in this mortal coil. Hence, existentialism.

The following is my own manifesto of sorts. Though to be a Bohemian or a follower of similar beliefs, such as an alternative modern existentialist, isn’t exactly a “problem” per say, a solution implies an alternate escape route from a present issue; i.e. an alternate line of thinking; a counterpoint, an opposition, a polar extreme, etc. So, here forth, we will be exploring the “solution” to modern existentialism, i.e. “How To Avoid Contemporary Bohemia.” Granted, it is slightly politically incorrect to imply that a cultural lifestyle is a “problem”, but then again the modern Bohemians/21st Century Existentialists being an extreme counterculture would probably delight at the implication that they are a matter in modern society that needs to be “dealt” with—though this is hardly what I am implying, it can nonetheless be perceived as such. Our first lesson in opposing the existential perception of life is, of course, death.

Chuck Klosterman and an Introduction to “Death”:

The Existential Counterpoint

Chuck Klosterman says on death in his 2003 essay “Waiting to die interlude”: “…Death is always original. It’s always a onetime limited engagement and (depending on your theology) it’s either the defining moment of existence or the final corporeal sensation of the universe’s most remarkable coincidence. How can anyone not be consumed by that?”² Though Klosterman can hardly compete with Kierkegaard on debatable standards, he is worth quoting in that he speaks on a very human and rational level and he does make a fine point. Death is defined as the single most important event in a human being’s mortal history for one simple reason: all life ceases. Whether one believes in reincarnation, heaven, or hell, one thing is absolutely certain: the life you’ve been living, preparing and cultivating is suddenly and indubitably over. To be no more. Gone. More people attend a funeral than a wedding or a birth. Death is by far the highest ranking event in a human life on a scale of one to monumental/revolutionary/grotesquely important. In a slightly distorted version of another Klosterman quote, we live our lives purely in a constant state of entropy² until the one defining moment of our existence occurs: death.

Death and Theology

In the biblical sense, death is what happens when our mortal body dies and our inner-self, or our “soul”, is judged by some great being in the sky; if the soul is not baptized, he remains in perpetual nothingness and in a state of nonexistence quite appropriately entitled “Limbo” until the legendary “Judgment” day; for the baptized soul, depending on the outcome of his judgment over the mortal life he led, he is rewarded or punished accordingly (Dante’s Divine Comedy is detailed, subjective levels of those). In the Judaic paradigm, death is what happens when the “soul” leaves the body and, as appose to being judged, just moves on to a “better place”, “greener pastures”, to meet up with old friends, or what-have-you; of course, if one has unfinished business or has been a terrible person in his mortal life, he becomes a ghost or reincarnates (not unlike Hindu beliefs). I always liked the Jewish perception of death much better than that of the Catholics: less suffering involved, and besides, the whole “judgment” concept seems like a giant grading of SAT’s, which in turn makes life out to be an enormous test that one either passes or fails with no option to retake, and tests, especially the SAT’s, make me extremely nauseous. Thus, that being the case, why would one want to focus on the actual test? What you should be thinking about is the outcome, that way the higher you aim the better you score. But the modern existentialists, or any existentialists for that matter, hardly believe in organized religion, which makes this a less than firm counter position; therefore, we move on.

The Egyptians believed in life after death. They also believed in a “final judgment” that occurred when they died. If they passed the test (a weighing of their heart on a scale opposite a feather) then they could go on to live an eternal life that was just a slightly more pleasant version of their mortal life. All that, of course, only applied to pharos, queens, and a few very important priests and royal advisors. Everyone else, including the royal noble who-nots whose hearts weighed more than Osiris’ proverbial feather, were accompanied by an odd half-crocodile-half-jackal deity to the land of the dead, not entirely unlike the ancient Greek/Roman land of the dead, where they were consumed by nothingness, darkness and boredom for all of eternity, not unlike the traditional existentialist Kierkegaard and Nietzsche view of what death is ultimately like. In the Egyptian view of death, Jews, Greeks and pretty much everyone else who wasn’t Egyptian, didn’t qualify for either existence after death and they simply disappeared, not unlike the concept of Catholic “Purgatory” or “Limbo” view of what happens to everyone not Catholic. On the whole, a very limited, naïve view of what happens when one dies; but notice the recurring themes of judgment, and a perpetually pleasant thing that occurs if the one judging deems that one has done well in his mortal time on Earth. The Egyptian Deist polytheistic beliefs can hardly be categorized “modern organized religion” or be measured on the same scale, thus we are getting closer to our counter argument. But the Egyptians also believed that the soul was found in the heart (which is why it was weighed like the Catholic counterpart’s soul is judged) and accordingly preserved it in a jar to be immortalized along with the embalmed body, meanwhile they extracted the brain out in chunks through the nasal cavity and threw it out along with last night’s dinner. So the ancient North African civilization can hardly be relied upon as a rational source (“rationality” which is the arch enemy of existentiality since the latter preaches that rationality doesn’t exist and so called “human reason” is just an individual’s instincts to do the best for themselves).

More closely related, another perception of existence after death in a deist belief system, is the ancient Greek/Roman theology. Lacking a deity of life, unlike the ancient Egyptian or Hindu theology, the ancient Greeks were not without a deity of the dead or lord of the “Underworld”. A brief interlude on “Underworld”: often a misconception in modern society or 21st Century culture, such as in the 2003 film, Underworld, concerning the present day interpretations of underground societies of vampires and werewolves³. Unlike the Catholic perception that a world “below” the mortal plane has a negative connotation or refers to some sort of “hell”, the traditional theology speaks of a “realm of the dead”, i.e. the dwelling place of human souls sans body. In Greek theology, the “Underworld” was not a place of suffering or reward, merely the place where the soul would go once its earthly time in a mortal body had passed, again referring to the soul’s immortality. The Hades ruled Underworld goes back to the ancient Egyptian and conservative existential views of death: perpetual nothingness, immobility, darkness and boredom, not unlike the atheistic approach to death that Kurt Vonnegut took in his 1969 book Slaughterhouse-Five, where he wrote death as being “nothing but violet light a dull humming noise.”4 Very boring. Vonnegut, a known atheist Bohemian, however, was not an existentialist and is therefore a valid counter argument to modern Bohemian existentialism.

Kurt Vonnegut and Quantum Time Perception

Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse also described a race of fifth dimensional beings that, unlike humans, did not experience death or time in a linear fashion, but instead experienced it all at once like “a human might be viewing a stretch of the Rocky Mountains”5 , and were therefore dying and being born and living their lives all at the same “time” and at the same “time” were therefore living “forever” since their human perception of sensation never ceases and since humans consider death to be the termination of all sensation; this form of “immortality” is the same situation for Vonnegut’s main character, Billy Pilgrim, because he has “become ‘unstuck’ in time” and therefore relives every moment of his life over again and in no particular order for eternity, including his own death. But far from being existential, which promotes the quality of present life because you “only live it once”, Vonnegut implies that these fifth dimensional beings and Billy Pilgrim don’t worry about what happens in their lives because they know the outcome anyway and thus their “present” actions don’t matter because they already know how it’s going to end—e.g. one does not bother rewriting a chapter in a book if you are unable to change the ending. Due, however, to the fact that human beings in the fourth dimension experience time linearly, this theory has one message: everything is already “written” and everything will have one outcome no matter what you do (which is ultimately the theory of “Fatalism”, which Vonnegut allegedly satirized in Slaughterhouse with the Tralfamadorians) and that outcome is the inevitable death of each and every human being on this planet or elsewhere (“Ceasism”), even the fifth dimensional “unstuck” ones; therefore making the entire existential theory at once irrelevant and incredibly rational—“reason” which in turn makes existentiality obsolete and thus winning our argument.

Conclusion: An Epilogue On Evolution

Though there are many more facts and theories and contradictions that ought be quoted in the argument of Ceasism (the philosophy of death) versus Existentialism (the philosophy of existence or life) they are not all entirely necessary since we have already come full circle and won our case. Is it really better to focus on death as appose to life? I don’t know, you be the judge of that; “an intellectual creates his own moral universe”reference:1 . For those on the opposing side of modern existentialism, it could be debated that if the soul is immortal it therefore “exists” after death, in turn making modern existentialism a limited half of a larger whole and making it so that perhaps a new generation of post-modern existentialists can spawn not only those that believe in the quality of today but also in the quality of tomorrow, when we’re dead—“In our next life, when we are both cats” (Amenabar/Gil, Abre Los Ojos 1997, trans. Cameron Crowe)6. So then maybe the answer isn’t to avoid or to find a solution to it as if it’s a problem or win as if it’s a competition, but instead maybe the answer is to evolve, be it in a state of entropy or growth. Then again, maybe it was never a question and thus did not need answering; perhaps it was a rhetorical question, and the answer is hidden in the question or is obvious. Theological, metaphysical, existential, one thing is certain: we live, we die and how we choose to see it, whether the proverbial “glass as half full or half empty”, is up to us as individuals, intellectuals, and human beings. I end with the words of the infamous Chuck Klosterman and the closing words of his “Waiting to die interlude” essay: “In all likelihood, you don’t think about dying enough.”7 Well said, Chuck. Well said.