Book Review: The Existentialist’s Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age

The Existentialist's Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age

Dr. Gordon Marino. 2018. New York: HarperOne.

Dr. Gordon Marino may not be well known to existential phenomenological practitioners, but he is bona fide expert on the writings and life of Soren Kierkegaard and holds an academic position that will sound oddly familiar. Almost anyone who has read one of the many volumes of Kierkegaard's sprawling oeuvre may well have used an edition translated and/or edited by Howard and Edna Hong, and published by Princeton University Press in their familiar two-tone black and colored jackets with a decal of a thumbnail sketch of Kierkegaard in profile in the centre. Marino is the Director of the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf's College, a liberal arts college in Minnesota in the United States. He is the author and editor of several other more scholarly books about Kierkegaard and existential philosophy, as well as being a veteran amateur boxer and writer on boxing this latter factoid has some relevance to the book and the review. He is not, however, a psychotherapist or counsellor.

In this highly readable book, Marino combines his years of Kierkegaard scholarship with the pacier and more vivid style of writing that he doubtless employs for his boxing journalism. One imagines that this is a winning combination of styles for the students in his classroom at St. Olaf's and can be helpful in the present age, one that Marino dubs as an Age of Inauthenticity. He employs it in a neatly structured way to explore how the writings of Kierkegaard and other writers, thinkers and philosophers bear the label of 'existential'. Although the likes of Nietzsche, Sartre, Heidegger and even Tillich, May and Yalom are all mentioned, either substantially or in passing, Kierkegaard is very much centre stage here.

The narrative takes the form of seven chapters, each entitled with a single word/theme (with one exception) that is then explored through the lens of Kierkegaard's writings and the writings of others, to bring forth insights into how one might choose to navigate the life of the present age in an authentic and fulfilling manner. These themes include Anxiety, Depression and Despair (the exception), Death, Authenticity, Faith, Morality and Love – all very familiar motifs in Kierkegaard's writing and in the broader existential canon. Interspersed with illuminating examples of these themes from Kierkegaard's writings, Marino uses personal and often painful examples from his own, at times troubled, life. These assist in illustrating how Kierkegaard has helped him not just to build a successful career as an academic but to steer him toward living a good and fulfilling life, away from the casual violence and self-destructive behaviour of his younger years. His candor and openness in this respect turns this book from being merely a collection of 'Just So Stories' – How Kierkegaard Slayed the Black Dog, or How Kierkegaard Conquered My Fear of Tinder – into a much more personal and poignant exploration of central existential themes as actually lived. There is a certain hokey-ness to the title that undermines the genuine engagement of the themes of the book and the, for want of a better word, authentic struggle that they have involved for Marino.

It is tempting at this point to leave the review at that. A breezy introduction to existential thought through the front door of Kierkegaard, and one of the better examples of the tradition of the great American self-help book – no therapy required, just read the existential canon. As well as being a nice complement to Sarah Bakewell's slightly antecedent work At the Existentialist Café, which covers similar ground but with a much heavier emphasis on Sartre, de Beauvoir and French existentialism and was reviewed in this Journal a few issues back. However, this would be unfair on a few levels.

Firstly, Marino has in fact used therapy and several times refers to his ongoing suffering of bouts of depression. He is very complimentary of his time in therapy and views it as an excellent complement to his deep engagement with the philosophical and literary writings of Kierkegaard, naturally, and many others. Furthermore, he takes a clear stance, boosted by his positive experiences in therapy but led primarily by his rigorous application of the lessons of his guide, Kierkegaard, in favor of viewing mental health problems as problems of living and not as medical problems for medicating. He describes his therapy as a time when he was '… taught …about the matchless healing power of relationships, something easily forgotten in an era of pharmaceutical fundamentalism' (p 28). Marino formulates this stance on the basis of his reading of Kierkegaard and others such as Viktor Frankl that '…psychological suffering [is] not an illness to be passively tolerated, but an action you could perform either well of poorly' (p 30). The pugilist in him, and whatever ground of Being-in-the-world that this is founded on, may well be drawn to this kind of stoic and macho approach to the private suffering of the depressive.

It is an approach that I have some sympathy with myself, having only ever once started a course of anti-depressants, many years ago, simply to throw away the prescription. Perhaps this is a misguided approach but there is in Marino – and perhaps in me – something that wants to feel what we feel, directly, and not to have it medi(c)ated chemically. There is some sense of wanting to feel real whatever that might be, or, again for want of a better word, authentic. This leads us to the second and main point of contention of this work, the notion of authenticity. It is eponymously central to the purpose of Marino addressing us via this book and, I think he would contend, to the purpose of exposing the work of Kierkegaard to a more general readership. Somehow, the life of Kierkegaard, strange and short though it was, seems to provide for some a kind of template of authenticity. Kierkegaard famously, and painfully, broke off his engagement to Regine Olsen in order to pursue, more single-mindedly, what he saw as his duty to write about and critique the world he saw around him – to be his own person and to address the world as he saw it, on his own terms. Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and perhaps even Kant, provide similar templates for a type of authenticity, perhaps co-terminus with a notion of independence, in the pursuit of the truth of the world and how to forge a mode of Being in the world. This vision is somewhat undermined by the fact that all five of these exemplars, were moderately, or very privileged, individuals able to use financial independence or safe sinecures in academia to insulate them from the mundane world of das Man and the quotidian vagaries of earning and making ends meet.

Somewhat unfortunately, Marino also quotes Shakespeare's dictum, 'To thine own self be true' (p 122) as he explores existential ideas about authenticity. He does so without acknowledging that this adage comes from the famous speech in Hamlet during which Polonius offers a number of clichéd pieces of advice to the young Hamlet about to leave Denmark for student life in Germany. The speech is often thought to be intended to lampoon the pedestrian-minded Polonius rather than offer a masterclass of granite-hard nuggets of worldly-wise advice to the 'callow' Hamlet. These dicta of prudent living are simply wasted on the incredibly fertile and protean being of Hamlet.

One cannot help thinking that, whatever it is, this thing called authenticity neither Marino nor even Kierkegaard is quite able to encapsulate this notoriously slippery and contentious concept. In an Age of Anger, according to Pankaj Mishra (2017), notions of authenticity, forged in the revolutionary and romantic age of nineteenth century Europe, lie at the heart of extremist religious and nationalist movements on the rise in many parts of the twenty-first century world. This raises critical questions as to how we are to address the impetus of such movements without appearing to fall into the precise trap laid down by the rhetoric of authenticity, whereby to undermine it is to reinforce their critique of the rootless inauthenticity of the cosmopolite. Or, without retreating, as sometimes Kierkegaard threatens to do, into a religious 'arms race' of purity and its toxic partner, sanctimony. Nevertheless, as Thomas Mann (1992) writes in his novel Doctor Faustus, about another of those highly complex existential motifs, Freedom, '…we have the word too, it is at our service, don't think that it only occurs in dictionaries and that your idea of it is the only one dictated by reason' (p 102). Authenticity is in the conceptual world as part of our intellectual thrownness. As Brexit drags interminably on, it is worth remembering that underlying it are complex notions of authenticity. Finally, heroic though his efforts are, and highly readable though this book is, Marino and his anecdotes about the fight game do not quite overcome the aporia that one man's authenticity might be another woman's toxic masculinity. Despite these reservations, I will commend this book as a helpful, readable and personal journey into the foothills of both Kierkegaard's bewildering but effervescent writings but also the broader existential landscape.

Richard Swann

References

Mann, T. (1992/1947). Doctor Faustus. Trans. Lowe-Porter, H. T. Everyman: London

Mishra, P. (2017). Age of Anger: A history of the present. Penguin: London