In 1972, I was asked to give an appreciative talk on modern philosophy at our high school’s Arts and Humanities Festival. It was an evening program for interested students, parents, staff, and community members. What follows is that presentation, which, as will be apparent, is a young man’s take on modern thought and represents his best efforts at conveying, in a spirit of empathy, what he felt modern philosophy is about.

One derives little comfort from modern philosophy. Anyone wanting from its pages a certainty, a reassurance, an answer will go away hungry. But were one to reseat oneself at its table, it would be less to satisfy one’s hunger for answers to the enigmas of life than to cultivate a deeper understanding of those enigmas obscured by those answers. The answers, if there are any, will come unbidden if they come at all, which would be a pity for it’s the enigmatic that keeps us alive.

It has been said that the truth is sometimes sad. Now, who is there who can say that modern philosophy is true, but for those who believe that it is, there is much sadness. In fact, it were as though certain experiences had driven them to a point where they needed to understand modern philosophy to understand themselves, as if, contrary to what is usually supposed, it is not the mind that seeks understanding, but the heart.

One can enjoy a prodigious verbal command over modern thought, a pyrotechnically dazzling mastery of its works and ideas, and an unrivalled grasp of its intricacies, yet still be denied entry, for modern philosophy is less an invitation to intellectual discovery than a primordial night sea journey into uncharted waters. Conventional charts, maps, and treatises offer little assistance in finding one’s way around its questions, whose answers may lead into desolate regions where resilience of spirit is needed even to listen to, much less accept, what one hears.

To those for whom the inherited answers of Western civilization still are intact; for whom the religious interpretation of the universe with its eternal verities of the existence of God and the comforting solace of an afterlife still reign supreme; for whom traditional religion with its immutable absolutes and the moral grandeur of its divinely bestowed laws still pulsate as a sustaining force in their lives, bringing peace and security, certainty and comfort; for all these believers, modern philosophy is and, of necessity, will remain a sealed book forever. For they will read its pages less to understand than to refute, forgetting that what is written from an experience of loss can never be refuted.

Not that what was lost was lost suddenly. There were six centuries of preparation: the gradual breakdown of the medieval synthesis, which had given Western believers a fixed place in the universe for over 1500 years; the Renaissance, which enabled men and women to rediscover themselves as something new, self-sufficient, and beautiful; the Age of Discovery and Exploration, which shattered the insular and self-confident view of a European world in having to confront all manner of troubling theological questions about how to account for all those previously unknown and different peoples on the other side of the world where, by rights, they shouldn’t have been at all;

The social and political convulsions of Europe’s Wars of Religion, which taught that little, if anything, in theology could ever be proven, as each denomination exposed the weaknesses of its opponents’ doctrinal systems; the rise of 17th-century Rationalism and Empiricism, which shook the metaphysical foundations of Western philosophy and theology; the Enlightenment’s Scylla and Charybdis, Voltaire and Hume, whose jaded mockery and urbane eviscerations of everything that had once seemed so unassailably true still trouble readers; the hallowed phenomenon of Immanuel Kant, whose epistemological critiques about what could and couldn’t be known about this world and beyond have yet to be answered;

The Four Horsemen of the Modern Apocalypse — Copernicus, who overturned the centuries-old geocentric view that this Earth was not, after all, the center of the universe, but an insignificant planet revolving about a minor star in one of a myriad of galaxies; Marx, who suggested that philosophies and value-systems, far from emerging from a dispassionate search after truth, simply arise as weapons to legitimate or challenge a ruling elite’s view of the world; Darwin, who posited that the first human being was not fashioned from the clay of the earth, but blindly evolved, without purpose, from lower life forms; and Freud, who believed that reason was not humanity’s crowning possession, but the puppet of blind passion and unconscious promptings.

These four seminal thinkers, as well as the social sciences of history, depth psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, biblical criticism, and comparative religions with their positivistic and historicist underpinnings all culminated in the anguished cry of Nietzsche’s “God is dead!”

However, few have understood this cry or felt the profound sense of grief out of which it arose. Certainly not those for whom modern philosophy is but the empty prattle of the cocktail hour with its glib familiarity with fashionable clichés.

Unaware of this six-centuries-long historical process that led to the breakdown of traditional certainties, many have dismissed these three words as the delirious ravings of a madman; the sacrilegious blasphemy of a crazed creature railing against his Creator; the sound of the gauntlet thrown down in hubristic challenge to usurp the Divine Throne, whereas, in fact, it was none of these.

Rather, it was a clinical description that, as far as many 19th-century Western men and women were concerned, God was dead as a psychological fact, dead as a meaningful Presence in their lives, dead as a result of this six-hundred-year-long period of disintegration. But the irony of it was that Nietzsche’s contemporaries hadn’t yet realized what had happened or what it portended for religious belief. Allow me to quote Nietzsche himself in abbreviated form as he relates this transfixing tale of the “Madman” in all its soul-stirring pathos:

Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace, and incessantly cried: “I seek God! I seek God!” As many of those who didn’t believe in God were just then standing by, he provoked much laughter. Did he get lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Thus did they shout and laugh.

The madman jumped into their midst and riveted them with his eyes. “Where did God go?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him — you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? Do we hear nothing yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? God is dead. And we have killed him.”

Here the madman fell silent and looked at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in amazement . . . “I have come too early,” he said. “My time has not yet come. This tremendous event is still on its way; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder take time . . . .

Modern philosophy takes this cry of desolation and moves beyond it by exploring the implications of this cataclysmic event for the modern soul. For if God is dead, if insofar as Western civilization is concerned there is no God, afterlife, or moral order as the expression of God’s will, what would this mean for living our lives? Would everything stay the same or be changed beyond recognition? Would we look at life differently, live our lives differently, carry on as if nothing had happened, or create for ourselves a new vision of life? These are the concerns of modern philosophy in relation to which all else is trivial.

Modern philosophy is then an attempt at reorienting ourselves to living in a new mental, emotional, and psychological landscape, with everything we had ever known, felt safe with, and were certain about suddenly gone and having to make our own way forward, alone. It introduces us, perhaps for the first time, to life’s ultimate questions, but leaves us to find our own answers, rather than inheriting them with little reflection from the family and culture into which we were born.

The meaning of life would no longer be given to us as a book of instructions passed down from one generation to the next, but be something we’d have to create on our own.

We’d have to confront human existence in all of its mystery as once did the Greeks as they stood upon the shore of the Aegean and, looking up into the dark night of a mysterious universe, felt its crushing vastness with its terrifying silence and grandeur. Transfixed by the unimaginable scale of it all and the searing awareness of their own insignificance, they were overwhelmed by the enigmatic, an experience so rarely felt in our modern world of practicality, distraction, noise, and sick hurry.