Hegel changed the academic world, but at an awful price. With Rousseau and Kant he had paved a way to forsake reason in the search for meaning.
Beginning in the 19th century with Soren Kierkegaard of Denmark, philosophers gave up all hope that reason would enable them to find a unified field of knowledge. 20th century philosophers, such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus of France, Karl Jaspers of Switzerland and Martin Heidegger in Germany, forsook reason and settled for ‘meaning within one’s own head’ (existentialism) in their pursuit of ‘reality’ without God.
Centuries of using reason alone to discover a unified and true knowledge of what reality is, had resulted in failure. They should have admitted that biblical presuppositions of the Christians who founded science in the 17th century had led to conclusions that matched the created reality and blessed the world. Instead, in their desperation to cling to Godless rationalistic presuppositions, non-Christian philosophers grimly renounced reason as the route to reality.
Francis Schaeffer describes the situation this way:
“After all the centuries … the humanistic expectation of autonomous man’s providing a unity to all of knowledge and all of life had stalled. People had gone round and round variations of the same answers – like going around and around a large, dark, circular room looking for a way out – and it was slowly dawning on them that there was no exit. That realisation came in the eighteenth century, and with it the stance of humanistic man changed from optimism to pessimism. He gave up hope of a unified answer.”
When Kierkegaard forsook reason, philosophy fell below what Schaeffer perceptively called the “line of despair” that characterises ‘modern’ man. Unprecedented despair has infected western nations ever since.
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