Existentialism Mounier
Existentialism Mounier
Existentialism Mounier
AN INTRODUCTION
by
EMMANUEL MOUNIER
SALISBURY SQUARE
LONDON
-iiiPublication Information: Book Title: Existentialist Philosophies: An Introduction.
Contributors: Eric Blow - transltr, Emmanuel Mounier - author. Publisher: Rankin. Place
of Publication: London. Publication Year: 1948. Page Number: iii.
CONTENTS
V
TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE
1
HISTORICAL OUTLINE
7
I THE CONCEPT OF PHILOSOPHIC REVIVAL
II THE DRAMATIC CONCEPTION OF HUMAN
23
EXISTENCE
24
The First Concept: The Contingency of the Human Being
26
The Second Concept: The Impotence of Reason
The Third Concept: The Bounding-Leap of the Human l
29
Being
31
The Fourth Concept: The Instability of the Human Being
35
The Fifth Concept: Estrangement
The Sixth Concept: Conclusive-Finality and the Imminence
37
of Death
40
The Seventh Concept: Solitude and the Secret State
42
The Eighth Concept: Nothingness
50
III THE CONCEPT OF PERSONAL CONVERSION
61
IV THE CONCEPT OF ATTACHMENT
72
V THE CONCEPT OF OTHER-PERSON-NESS
90
VI THE REVEALED TYPE OF LIFE
107
VII EXISTENCE AND TRUTH
117
VIII THE KINGDOM OF BEING IS IN OUR MIDST
I
APPENDIX
131
NOTES ON SOME EXISTENTIAL PHILOSOPHERS
II
APPENDIX
136
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS QUOTED BY THE AUTHOR
139
INDEX
-viiHISTORICAL OUTLINE
THE very last thing in absurdity during this century must have been
the craze for Existentialism, the degeneration into idle daily gossiping
of a philosophy whose whole purpose is to drag us away from our idle
gossiping.
There was a time when frivolous people had enough common sense
to sip only the froth of intellectual thought; to-day, the madcaps are so
frivolous that, in their desire for excitement, they have prodded that
very swarm of doctrines which prefixes all its reflexion by declaring war
to the death against frivolity. These people are not even aware of what
they have done. Just let the world's misery be confined to a babbling
caf, and, lo, their worthy souls are comforted. This, then, has been
the first bit of bad luck for Existentialism. But, this fantastic bad luck
is already arousing interest--mockery chiefly haunts the courtyards of
the gods.
Misfortunes, however, never come singly. If ever there was a word
which seemed to be self-explanatory beyond any shadow of doubt,
that word is certainly "Existentialism." But, no sooner has it left the
preserve of philosophers and gone out into the world of laymen, than
it immediately comes to mean a craze for imagining nothingness to be
the basic fabric of existence. Nobody, outside the ranks of the
intelligentsia, doubts that Existentialism had already begun to represent
the richest and deepest stream of contemporary thought by the time the
great genius of Jean-Paul Sartre turned its attention to certain aspects
of the preserve more obvious than those of Existential psycho-analysis.
We need not retaliate by excluding Jean-Paul Sartre from a place amongst
Existentialist philosophers just because the popular section of his followers
has concentrated on a clearly-labelled swindle.
Still, it is not too late to give honour where honour is due, and,
ignoring the noisy craze, to bring this mixture of Existentialism and
non-Existentialism which constitutes Sartrism back to its proper setting
as the latest offshoot of one of the Existentialist traditions, a tradition
which, starting from Heidegger, has set itself up in radical opposition to
the founders of the modern philosophy of existence.
-1
Our object is to re-establish here the neglected fulness of this tradition.
Actually, no other has more to say to despondent contemporary man,
but its message is not a message of despair. No other fortifies him better
against his foolishness. But it prescribes for blind foolishness better
than a logical foolishness.
-2
concerned about man, or about his life and his death. But, with the advent
of Pascal, we come right up to modern Existentialism. He blazed all
the trails and he shaped almost every theory.
Nevertheless, Kierkegaard seems to be the titular father of the school.
What a curious fate this has been for the original Existential philosophers!
In their own day, they were remarkably modest about success. Success
has amply repaid them for it. I don't know how the Danes got on for
a hundred years with a prophet so unattractive to anyone in his right
senses as Sren Kierkegaard. In any case, he had to wait until the
beginning of this century before he was translated in Germany and until
the troublous inter-War years before his works got to France. A similar
fate awaited his French predecessor, Maine de Biran, whose star still
shines so faintly, even in his native land. Maine de Biran had maintained
the authority of purposeful existence against the humiliation of man
by the Sensualist philosophers of the eighteenth century. Kierkegaard
ranges himself against the Hegelian Absolute System, the systematization
of system, which he opposes with his theory of Absolute Existence.
These men, then represent the bole of the Existentialist Tree. At
the present time, the trunk is dividing into two branches.
One of them is immediately grafting itself on to the old Christian
trunk, the lofty dignity, as opposed to Nature, of God's image, ransomed and summoned by Christ Incarnate; it represents the precedence
of problems of salvation over the activities of knowledge and utility.
Is there an ontological 2 atmosphere better prepared to receive the
Existentialist call? Shouldn't it simply be said, then, that Existentialism
is only another way of preaching Christianity? Such, no doubt, would
be the reply of Pascal and Kierkegaard to a group of journalists pestering
them for an interview. Moreover, they did not christen their philosophy
by a new name; they saw no need for that. They considered themselves
witnesses for Christian evidence, an evidence which is communicated
more through testimony than by logic.
Existentialism reaped its richest harvest in the German School of
Phenomenology. The branch through which the sap of Christianity
runs has not produced a crop of Christians confident and comfortable
in their doctrinal edifice. That would have been contrary to the very
spirit of their belief. A man like Scheler switched several times from
orthodoxy to independence, from one confession of faith to the opposite.
A man like Jaspers, who set up Incompleteness as the measure of human
____________________
-11
at the same time, he is, to a greater extent than ever before, converted
into his real self." 8 Undoubtedly, when a man has been thus directed
towards his inwardness, he can lose himself in it and go mad. But wait.
Absence of inwardness is another kind of madness, even if it is hardly
discernible, because it is sociable madness. No one dares to think
much about the first kind of madman, the madman who is deep in his
inward dream, but the second kind of madman, the lucid and contented madman, whose life is nothing more than that of a thing among
things, we also shudder to contemplate, "for fear of finding that he
no longer has real eyes but glass ones and hair of straw--in short, that
he is an artificial production." 9 He calls to mind that other kind of
madman who, in order to prove that he was cured of his madness, kept
on repeating this phrase, which he thought "objective": "Whoops!
The earth is round!"
This denseness of the individual subject is essential to the success
and to the quality of the act of knowing. Pascal does not try to convert
the incredulous man or to present him with proofs before he has shaken
him out of his state of indifference and urged him on, from a vague form
of doubting, to an impassioned and never-ending form of doubting.
Existentialism tends to reduce subjective certitude or assurance, the
last refuge of spiritual immobility, in order to assist dynamic and mobile
passion which inwardly unites the existent with truth. He will then have
to follow this line of thinking almost to the point of maintaining that the
important thing is not so much truth as the attitude towards truth of the
man who has gained knowledge. Three or four times, Kierkegaard and
Jaspers stress this method of finding one's way. In any case, without the
inward attitude, knowledge is acquired in vain; it is deadened through
consciousness of itself. The Christian who imagines he is praying to
God, but who is, in fact, only imploring an accessory to his lusts or to his
own particular desires is not really praying to God, but to an idol, and,
to be even more precise, he is not praying at all. It is just the same for
anyone who thinks only by means of his desires or by means of the
machinery of his ideas. Socrates, on the other hand, decides about
immortality with a reservation, but, by this very reservation, he does
enjoy his life. There you have true knowledge, that of the "subjective
thinker." To exist is his first concern; the existence going on round about
him is his greatest interest. 10
____________________
10
Ibid., p. 208.
8
Post-Scriptum, Ed. Gallimard, p. 127.
9
Ibid., p. 129.
-12
IF existence, and particularly human existence, cannot be the object of
systematization, the relations between the man who is seeking knowledge
and the world are upset by it. We must abandon the traditional outline
(whose perceptible origin is obvious) of conscience or of knowledge,
"the eye of the mind," setting itself up in front of the world which it
regards as something to be gazed at and something which it systematizes
from a distance.
Strictly speaking, nothing is more ambiguous than this metaphor
of the eye. At one time, it is the receiving apparatus; at another, it is
the source of the light which illuminates the object. Gabriel Marcel
has stressed the traditional error which likens personal conscience to a
circle of light which is itself of maximum clarity (the soul easier to understand than matter), but which throws around itself a diminishing area
of illumination. On the contrary, wouldn't the primordial fact be the
opaqueness which I am for myself? And, moreover, doesn't the opaqueness of the world develop from that opaqueness which I create by intervening between myself and the next man? But this sort of intervention
and this form of intrusion of myself on the world I cannot avoid.
They form part of my fundamental state. From then on, the term
"certain knowledge," which is pictured as a kind of translucent vision,
no longer correctly describes the original act of consciousness. The
transparency of the Cogito is a superficial illusion. When you examine
it thoroughly, it is found to include an element of impenetrable obscurity.
The very act of thinking is a mystery; it is not entirely clear to the
mind. 11
Moreover, in this form of act, the man who has acquired knowledge
doesn't stand off from the world, doesn't stand up in front of the world in
order to survey the world as a spectacle, and to describe it from a distance.
To define a man or a thing is the most superficial act in the process of
knowing. The more we accept reality, the more it ceases to be comparable
with an object placed in front of us on which we can take our bearings.
Basically, it is undefinable. 12 Being is an "inexhaustible concretion"
which cannot be defined, but can only be recognized, in the same way
that a person is recognized, or, perhaps, it would be better to say "greeted"
rather than recognized. 13 The metaphor of possession does not succeed
in establishing contact between the man who has acquired knowledge
and being. We can only possess what is classifiable and valid. Now,
____________________
11
Etre et Avoir, p. 13-14. Du refus l'invocation, Ed. Gallimard, p. 95.
12
Etre et Avoir, p. 179.
13
Du refus. . p. 96.
--E.B.
-14he thinks, shows that thinking is an approach, rather than a systematization, a laying of foundations, rather than a construction of an edifice,
a clearing of the ground, which is always being restarted without any progress being made, rather than a definite pathway. "It is not so much a
question of building up as of digging down." 15
This refusal systematically to enforce our consciousness on our
existence can be carried to great or less lengths.
An extreme position is taken up here by Jaspers. Generalizing
Kierkegaard's attack on Hegel, he sets himself up as the accuser of
traditional knowledge. Objective knowledge is essentially a classification
of beings into more and more general categories, and all these categories
are to be included in The Being, the most generalized, and at the same
time, the most worthless category. Plato and Aristotle, although subject
to this temptation, characteristic of the Greek philosophy which introduced it to the West, did not yield to it, for they saw that the human being
cannot be generalized into any one category. But, for Jaspers, the human
being is something else besides being articulated or diversified. The
human being is torn asunder. 16 He reveals himself in three incommunicable guises: as an object (from the point of view of subjects);
as ego (wrapped up in subjectivism); and as himself (in his state of
transcendence 17 ): the world, freedom, transcendence. These three
guises simultaneously attract and repel each other in constant rivalry,
and each is torn asunder within itself. Thus, the ego must be supported
by the world of objects, in order, as an existent, to triumph over the
possessiveness of the objective world; it must be simultaneously destroyed
and recreated within the transcendent state of existence which summons
it only to crush it. There is doubt and distraction everywhere. Being
is revealed only in glimpses which have no connexion with each other.
For us, at least, there is no Being; there are only existents, and it is
not every existent who can himself be considered a fit subject for philosophical study, in the strict sense of the phrase. Strictly speaking,
knowledge is applicable only to a sort of conceptualization of their past
or their future, but not to that matrix of existence which represents the
____________________
15
Du refus. . . p. 22 and introd.--Homo Viator, Ed. Montaigne, p. 190.
16
Gabriel Marcel calls one of his plays The Broken World. He speaks elsewhere
( Homo Viator, p. 213) of "erratic clusters in a ruined universe."
17
TRANSCENDENCE-TRANSCENDENT: Quality of surpassing, excelling, superior
to. (Theol.). The attribute of God in being superior to, apart from, and
not subject to the conditions of the material universe. TRANSCENDENTALISM--A system of philosophy (usually associated with Kant) which
emphasizes the intuitive, rather than the empirical elements in thought and
knowledge.--E.B.
-15moment of eternity when freedom decides upon its choice. Existence
involves the free act, and the free act is unintelligible as far as man is
concerned. Existence is something which never becomes an object;
it can be conceived only in terms of gushing-forth. It represents the
fundamental resurgence (Ursprung) responsible for my thinking and my
acting. It is not a concept; it is a pointer which indicates a hinterland
to all forms of subjectivity. It is "what I cannot avoid being, but it is
not seeing and knowing." It is, as Gabriel Marcel would maintain, the
consciousness that something in the world depends on me, and on me
alone. In such a perspective as this, concern about totalness, the chief
concern of philosophies of systematization, is replaced by concern about
intensity, in the case in which existence is considered as something closer
to reality, or by authenticity, in the case where you believe more in the
reflective type of existence.
How is it possible to describe the type of consciousness which is left
after all this? Being can only be described or understood in its external
parts. Basically, it can only be illuminated. For Jaspers, this word has
a special sense. It means a light which is projected (or received), as it
were, laterally, and which is simultaneously seen and unseen, like objects
in the marginal focus, and whose clarity, isolated in a sort of solitary
intuition, is not capable of creating visibility or of any intelligible explanation. All the rational controls which we can exercise over existence
are only a vague set of numbers whose logic alone provides no key.
We find elsewhere less acceptance of the distractive notion about
being. Heidegger admirably begins his philosophic investigation by
an exhaustive analysis of human existence, taking advantage of the fact
that man is the only existing creature who possesses the faculty of
questioning himself. But he condemns Jaspers' Existential philosophy
for renouncing a theory of the human-being-in-general, and confronts
him with his own peculiar "Super-Existential" philosophy 18 which,
so it seems, in addition to a theory about human existence (the Dasein)
necessarily involves presentation of a theory of being. The theory of
Dasein had already led him to spread over his conception of existence
the ingenious network of Super-Existentialism, that is, the edifices of
existence. But, it must certainly be pointed out that, up to this point,
he has not yet emerged from his analysis of Dasein, and there are good
____________________
18
To describe Heidegger's particular form of Existentialism, M. Mounier uses
the newly-coined adjective "existential," as opposed to the normal French
adjective "existentiel" which is used throughout the book. There is
obviously no direct means of translating such a distinction. The -al ending
would seem to indicate a greater degree of intensity.--E.B.
-16
reasons for believing, as his commentator, M. de Walhens, does, that,
from the way in which he has conducted it, he has prevented all likelihood
of ever leaving it.
Gabriel Marcel's long pilgrimage through the realms of philosophic
Idealism necessarily left him permanently concerned about reconciling
a method of deep enquiry, necessary for understanding of existence,
with the requirements of a more continuous consciousness. He tries
to do this by means of his distinction between the mystery and the
problem. 19 To follow this, let us start from the description of an almost
entirely objectivated man separated from his existence. We already
find this sort of objectification in Jaspers' works. It is enlarged upon in
the philosophy of Berdyaev 20 and Chestov who, like all Russians, regard
objectification as Original Sin, the cause of the downfall of the world.
Take, for instance, a ticket-collector in an Underground station,
punching tickets with a vague sub-consciousness from morning till
night, or a man with a small private income sitting back in comfort.
These are the sort of lives which upset you to think that they are quasifunctionalized, with their hidden springs and their faculty for wonder
gradually drying up. Ultimately, they become lives without any mystery.
When we are faced with such forms of non-existence, we are seized with
an irresistible urge which compels us to reveal their mystery, to probe
the secret fulness of their existence which cannot be reduced, as it might
seem it could be, to a series of inconsistent states, or to a tale told by an
idiot.
I can only stifle this urge by means of some arbitrary act, by means
of some violent measure which crushes the very roots of spirituality.
I don't seize upon it as a reality to be gazed at; it really takes possession
of me; it exalts me or else it stifles me. It immediately confronts me with
my own problem, producing in me the same metaphysical power of excitement which, according to Jaspers, the act of a suicide produces in
us. A spirit of interrogation takes possession of me; if I respond to it,
it will provide me with an inexhaustible stock of questions, and, yet,
they will all centre round the profound assertion that I do exist. Thus,
an existent is a man who stumbles upon mysteries, but who stumbles on
hope and treachery, by means of which man can get to grips with his
situations or his fundamental temptations.
____________________
21
TOTALNESS--TOTALITY: The text has "totalit" which has been usually translated as "totality." I feel that this word, however, is likely to lead to confusion in the British mind with the word "totalitarianism," and, therefore,
prefer to translate "totalit" by the coined word "totalness."--E.B.
22
Du refus . . . p. 83.
-18
Should metaphysics still be considered? The term implies that this
latest type of philosophy is still finding its way along by extending the
objective world. Now, Existential philosophy is always urging us to
adopt a complete reversal of the objective point of view. As Bergson
says, it is urging us to a twisting of the habits of the mind. Here, philosophy does not begin with an acquisition, but with a conversion, a metanoia, 23 just as religion does. This conversion presents two aspects:
it represents silence, intensity, progression, or, as Gabriel Marcel would
call it, reflective abstraction; 24 in the other aspect, it represents false
enlightenment and distracting preoccupations. Like Jaspers, he describes reflective abstraction as an inward renunciation, a "relaxing in
the presence of," a recognition of what is already there and awaiting me,
if I decide to look back--to use the example of the myth about the
cavern, the fundamental Existentialist myth. But this dialectic of reflective abstraction is not a sort of quietism. Reflective abstraction also requires me to keep on resuming my existence right to the end of my life.
My being is, however, not the same thing as my life. Gabriel Marcel has
strongly emphasized the necessity of guarding against the degradation
of Existentialism into a glorification of vitally-necessary overflowing.
To some extent, this is what Nietzsche has done. 25
Finally, could we object to the far too mild nature of philosophical
terminology? Jaspers' more dramatic phraseology goes on to refer to
"wrenching." Yet, we have an earlier example of this in the everbiting maieutic 26 attitude of the Socratic irony. But, here, Existentialists
express themselves only in quasi-religious terms, even when they are,
as Heidegger always is, on their guard against all reference to ethical
concepts. Thus it is that, following the lead of Kierkegaard, they introduce the phraseology of sinfulness in the very midst of a dialectic of
being. Yet, for Kierkegaard, sin is no accident; it is the very fibre of the
being himself who, in order to exist, must make himself exceptional, and
who becomes sinful by this very same exceptionalness. Jaspers goes on
to stress the paradox even more. For him, existence is always being
shared between a form of objectivity which tends to disaffect it and a
back on one of those Emotionalist philosophies, which haunt the nightmares of M. Benda, just the same as one can say that the danger in
objective methods is that they may degenerate into Positivism. Existentialism simply refuses to hand the monopoly of revealing reality
over to the system of classification demanded by Rationalism. It is, for
instance, one of Heidegger's constant claims (and Sartre will be found
to have taken it up against the Freudian idea of the Unconscious), that
we are affected by realities which, although they are not exactly realities
____________________
27
P. L. Landsberg: Rflexions sur l'engagement personnel, Esprit, Nov., 1937.
-20of the unconscious, never succeed in crossing the threshold of consciousness. They are, in fact, revealed by fundamental sensations (Stimmung)
whose capacity for revelation is superior to the explanatory capacity of
the consciousness which is to develop them. The word "sensation"
is ambiguous: nothing must be considered in this connexion which calls
to mind biological urge or the enraptured ecstasy of emotionalism. We
must substitute instead of the concept of perception, at once global and
lateral, something quite different from perception in the ordinary sense
of the word. It is in this way, for example, that we are conscious of our
fundamental position in the world. We ought to refer to intelligence
as ambiguous yet implicit; as not merely conscious, but laterally so.
Thus, our fundamental conception of existence, this manner of treating
men and the life of man, which directs our every move, is obviously
lived by us, and yet it is neither clearly nor fundamentally understood
by us.
It is there, in us, according to the claim of Barrs, like an open secret;
it is similar to those ideas, animating us and guiding us, which we pick
up sometimes in a book which gives them just that form of expression
which we have not been able to give them. This confused consciousness,
according to Heidegger, has already become interpretation, even if it is
inexplicit and without any subject of reference. It is implied and active
interpretation--elaboration rather than elucidation. It can make the
object of an explanation posterior by means of its phraseology, or simply
by its behaviour.
The woman who is reading and who, after a vague feeling of uneasiness,
abstractedly pulls off the scarf which is making her feel too hot, while
still remaining absorbed in her book, has expressed her feeling by this
gesture. Perhaps, however, she has inwardly made the statement:
"It's too hot!" and it will not be until a short time afterwards that she
will make this unconscious gesture of hers.
____________________
5
Ecole du Christianisme, p. 258.
6
Ibid., p. 282.
-25Heidegger's works by the feeling of our complete abandonment in what
he calls the nothingness of manifestation, the "eternal silence of infinite
space." It is as if I am tossed aside by this nothingness, without any
consideration or protest, into some forgotten corner of the universe.
This does not occur, once and once only through my coming into the
world; every moment increases this sense of abandonment by handing
me over defenseless to the hostile world. It fills me with the strangeness
which surrounds me and even deprives me of that warm intimacy with
myself, and consequently despair enters into what was seemingly so
friendly. 7
As far as the philosophers we are dealing with are concerned, the
Existential factor always takes precedence over the critical factor. One
leads us to the other.
and can be evoked by analogy with everything else. 10 But the Existential
side of Kierkegaard is swallowed up by the religious side. In this
____________________
10
Le Gnie et l'Aptre, 1.
7
On this concept of strangeness, see: The Stranger, a novel by Camus.
8
Penses, p. 377.
9
Post-Scriptum, p. 135.
-26ubiquitous field, in which eternity meets time, there is no room for
unequivocal assertions and logical connexions. These presuppose concepts which man's intelligence can cope with and involve an immanent
liaison between antecedents and consequences. When the concept of
eternity bursts into our thinking and acting it thereby creates a sort of
electric storm which demagnetises all functioning of the mind. If,
according to Hegel, system is the ultimate result of all scientific knowledge about creations of the mind, then revelations vouchsafed to the
mind by means of transcendence can only be expressed in a new way.
They must be expressed as a mixture of knowledge and non-knowledge,
as something which stimulates investigation rather than something
which is absolutely certain. The paradox is precisely this. It bursts
forth at the meeting-point of eternity and historicity, of the Infinite
and the finite, of hope and despair, of the transrational and the rational,
of the inexpressible and the articulate. It insolently breaks all our
installations in the sub-human: logical immanence, 11 sthetic indifference, moral comfort. It enforces itself by its stern power. Let no
man try to apologise for it or to throw any light on it. As Jean Wahl
rightly says, there is only one single valid explanation of the Kierkegaardian paradox; it lies in grasping more and more firmly the fact that it
is a paradox. It gives no reasons for doubt; it silences doubt. It does
not invite the mind to take a step forward, to advance, but to leap forward.
It is associated with giving offence and with defiance. 12 It makes itself
offensive in the name of transcendence. It is a concept which Jaspers
is to take up, and which we find again in Chesterton's theological eulogy
of humour.
We find in theology and in Christian philosophy precedents for this
dialectic of ignorance which are farther away from and more extreme
than Pascal's conceptions. To go even farther back, Socratic ignorance
appears to Kierkegaard as a first sketchy attempt at the Christian paradox,
on the occasions when, like Nietzsche, he ceases to look upon Socrates
as the father of Rationalism. Job against his enemies; Abraham going
beyond the combined protestations of instinct and morality, are examples
of other historical figures who herald it. But it is only in conjunction with
Something seems to tell us that it is absurd that there should be anything absurd, and that, nevertheless, the absurdity of the world is not
____________________
14
Kierkegaard et la philosophie existentielle, p. 152.
15
ANTINOMY--A contradiction or inconsistency between two laws or principles.--E.B.
16
Penses, p. 420.
17
Ibid., p. 385.
18
PYRRONHISM--A form of scepticism. From Pyrro, c. 300 B.C.--E.B.-Penses, p. 395.
-28the result of an investigation but the expression of a resolve which is
no less determined than that of reason.
On this narrow base, a philosophy of impotence may be evolved.
Without it, one could only maintain the impotence of philosophy-in which case there could be no further argument.
itself, huge, ingenuous, too solid, and, in the opinion of the world, unwanted and superfluous--whence arises Nausea, that vague and stifling
uneasiness which all those who are not Dirty Beasts experience on meeting
it. The human-being, the conscious being, the being-for-oneself, is not
a super-being, but a "decompression of being." He does not fully
coincide with himself; he introduces into the concept of being the idea
of a certain amount of play, and even the idea of "playing a double
game," 19 falseness along with freedom. But, this decompression is not
____________________
19
"Play" (le jeu), in the sense of "a limited amount of free movement between
parts." There seems to be some "academic" humour implied in the pun,
"le double-jeu," which I translate as "playing a double game."--E.B.
-30
possible until a crack has developed in being, a crack into which nothingness worms its way. 20 The establishment of being thus constitutes
a decline, "a gap in being"; it creates a doubt about being; it constitutes
a victory for nothingness. As a matter of fact, it is by a singular paradox
that this doctrine has launched the word "Existentialism" on its career.
It would really be more apposite to speak of it as non-Existentialism.
This prospective conception of existence is closely connected with
the importance which all Existentialists attach to duration of time.
A doctrine of temporality is inseparable from any Existential philosophy.
Kierkegaard places the emphasis on the moment, on the actual point of
impact between eternity and time, that is, on the moment of Existential
decision, on the atomic unit of eternity and not on the unstable atomic
unit of time, such as the moment of pleasure. 21 For Kierkegaard and
Jaspers, time, like being, is a fulness. Heidegger emphasizes the call
of the future coupled with its tragic urgency, for this call is the call of
death. As far as Sartre is concerned, no matter how prospective it may
be, duration of time is irrevocably hollow and rotten. The past is what
is over and done with; it represents the degeneration from the for-oneself
into the petrified immobility of the in-oneself. The present represents
the perpetual flight from that death which is close on our heels; it does
not represent the bringing of perpetual freshness, as it does for Bergson,
or the promise of eternity, as it does for Kierkegaard. It means a rout
in the face of the hostility of being.
Thus, the ontological bounding-leap assumes opposite meanings
in the two Existentialist traditions.
feeling of solitude, and, as such, it arises from a reaction against petitbourgeois dailiness in which the being is comfortably settled amidst.
his reassuring surroundings, and in which his property, his common
sense and his natural goodness hide his remissness from him. It is a
feeling of superior assurance mixed with cosmic uneasiness, rather than
an intimate dissonance. But, this pure form of the concept, which
demands a rigid asceticism, is rare. Anguish usually degenerates into
the meaning of fear, that is to say, into fear of particular objects. Yet,
at the same time, this sort of fear wards off anguish and gives us a feeling
of reassurance; naturally, it is better for the ordinary man to know he
has a sworn and visible enemy than for him to be subject to the intangible
horror which lies hidden in the very midst of ourselves. Nevertheless,
the fearful state of mind does not sustain this fundamental anguish for
very long. It very quickly disperses it throughout the thousand and one
shelters of material and moral security. Heidegger seems resigned to
____________________
24
Concept d'angoisse, p. 121.
25
Ibid., p. 137.
26
Ibid., p. 108.
-33a sort of obstinate abandonment of all hope, and would, therefore, lump
all doctrines of salvation together as having been evolved in these fearshelters against anguish. He would accuse Luther or St. Augustine,
as well as Kierkegaard, of this betrayal.
In the stream of Christian inspiration, instability and anguish do not
simply represent weakness and nothingness. Both represent the ransom
of our chief source of strength, freedom and the right to decide. Decision,
according to Kierkegaard, represents the privileged moment of existence.
It runs through the whole of his thinking, just as worry about totalness
haunts the mind of Heidegger. The very titles of Kierkegaard's books
exemplify his breathless tempo: Either . . . Or, Guilty . . . Not Guilty.
For him, decision is the act which engenders personality. Then, while
the balancing of ideas leaves us still on the surface of ourselves, decision
sets in motion the vast resources of personality. It is as if we emerge
purified from it. 27 There comes over a man who has made a decision
once or more times in his life, just as there comes over the man who has
been in love, an unmistakable radiance. It is not extended to cover the
wrong decision which does not benefit us. It would even seem likely
that the choice of the decision, as a principle of life, has a guiding value
and reduces the chances of error. "Once you bring a man to a crossroad, and there is nothing else for him to do but choose, then he will
make the right decision."
which, for beings of powerful sensibility, are one of the aspects of egocentricity, have not begun to meddle in the business.
Here, the negation of the concept of transcendental being would
find one of its carnal bonds, in the same way as those who support the
concept betray their need for company and consolation. Ontology
must be constantly purged of these complexes masquerading as spiritual
aspirations.
One only has to look up Pascal. Everything he says tells of the narrowness of life and of the little amount of time left for the choice to be
made, when contrasted with the immensity of eternity; everything he
says reminds us of the imminence of the end. To turn away from neglect
to contemplate death is the solemn duty of Existentialism. Kierkegaard
makes the least possible delay about it. But, here again, we find preoccupation about death and suicide, and an even sterner train of thought,
haunting the works of Jaspers, as well as those of Gabriel Marcel. 32
Assuming a more classically Christian balance of thought, the latter
stresses the shamefulness of a philosophy which imagines the being of
man as a future state, and which accepts as the ultimate life an eventuality
which converts it into the absolute past. It is not, as some people claim,
evidence which can lead us to it, but simply and solely an active negation
of a great part of experience of eternity, which all love and fidelity constitute. 33
Here, as elsewhere, Jaspers takes up a position which cannot be classed
either as the Christian attitude or as purely Agnostic. The highest kind of
life for the existent is a restricted life. It cannot implant its experience
on being except by limiting it on all sides; it finally puts a ceiling to
limit-situations, and the first of these is my actual state in the world;
several more of these are experienced in death, in suffering, in fighting
and in sinning. These latter situations are just the same sort of impasses at the end of Existential experience; they never let themselves
be dominated by the mind; they are like a wall against which we hurl
ourselves. 34 The empirical being which is within me, that which builds
up knowledge, sensations and the will to live, tries to escape them, but
it keeps them in a state of dull unrest. I can neither escape from them
nor clear up their mystery. In the very act of curbing my energy they,
____________________
32
Who stresses the importance of the concept in his book: Du refus. . . p. 100.
33
Homo Viator, p. 207, et seq.
34
See Gabriel Marcel's excellent analysis in Du refus. . . p. 302.
-38nevertheless, offer it the only assignable direction, even if this is done
with irresolvable incertitude.
Such is the nature of death. It threatens only empirical existence;
it loses its grip on transcendent existence. Moreover, for this hope to
retain the importance of Existential risk and attraction we must accept it
in its entirety; this means that we must assume the very great improbability of any form of personal immortality co-existing with present
experience.
Let us pass quickly over the Christian boundary and this No Man's
Land that Jaspers occupies. With the advent of Heidegger, the finality
of the human being becomes absolute and fundamental. There is no
completion and no totalness to life. It is, therefore, absolutely impossible
for man ever to become or to be the master of his existence on any historical basis. Every life leads inevitably towards death. Death is no
accident; it is not something external, as trite opinion would like to think.
It is our greatest potentiality. Human existence is being-for-the-purposeof-dying. Dying my death is, in fact, the only thing nobody else can do
for me. My death is my most personal potentiality; it is the most authentic, and, at the same time, the most absurd potentiality. It does not come
at the end of my life; it is present at every moment of my life, in the very
act of my living. I am constantly trying to forget about it, to escape from
it, to misrepresent it to myself by means of such things as indifference,
diversion or religious myths. Living authentically, on the other hand, is
living in conformity with this concept of life: to live in constant expectation of death and its imminent possibility; to look squarely at this thing
which is our fellow during every moment of our lives. Then we have
attained "freedom in the face of death." Drer Soldier of Death,
which is Nietzsche's favourite bit of symbolism, is the chief specimen of
Heideggerian anthropology.
Sartre is to protest against this macabre cheerfulness. He sees in
this attempt to integrate death with the being of life yet another unauthentic attempt--in accordance with the very phraseology of Heidegger-to revive death in the midst of humanity and to prolong its fundamental
contingency. Of course, for Heidegger, death does not represent, as
it does for Idealism, a beautiful harmony of resolution in the form of a
melody. But its intimate connexion with sthetic life humanizes it, all
the same. Now, it is absolute contingency; it cannot give any meaning
to life; strictly speaking, we cannot delay it. It, on the other hand,
can only bring complete meaning to life by brutally cutting short a future
which has its meaning all in the past. Moreover, it petrifies my being
-39into that state of immobility from which nothing more can be produced;
it hands me over defenseless to the gaze and to the judgment of other
people; it represents my total dispossession; it is nothing else but a
concrete concept. "It is absurd for us to be born; it is absurd for us to
die." 35 Death is not the end of my life; it avoids me; I avoid it. It also,
just like me, is flung there, just like that. "We are always dying buckshee."
It is even more correct to say of Sartre than of Heidegger, and, a fortiori
of Jaspers, that "the story of any particular life is the story of a reverse," 36
because the Jasperian conception of reverse does include a vague sort of
promise; the Heideggerian conception of reverse may, nevertheless,
absolute, and, generally speaking, from then on he only relatively assimilates himself to the absolute.
The Knightly Warrior for the Faith cannot arrive at an understanding
of anyone, just as he cannot help anyone. Between him and others there
can only be the call of the Unexampled to the Unexampled. It may be
said that he has all the freedom of the children of God. But that sort of
freedom must not be confused with that of baby birds and roving spirits. 37
That sort of freedom is not easy to obtain. At the same time as it involves
renunciation of association with pleasure, it also involves renunciation
of the consolation that comes from performance of duties which can only
be performed by a common effort. All the Knightly Warrior for the
Faith does is "to put himself completely and utterly into a state of absolute
isolation." 38 Of course, at the same time as he is writing down such
prescriptions, Kierkegaard is writing certain extensions of meaning
into them. He says somewhere else 39 that, if the exception is not part
of the general, then, at least, it does make the same irruption there. The
well-founded exception does explain more things than the general, despite
its exceptional nature. Although it is an achievement quite distinct from
ethical generality, it is, nevertheless, an offshoot of it and reflects it.
Moreover, the latter secretly loves its offspring. But these reservations
only serve to extend laterally a philosophy which has always been shy of
synthesis of any spontaneous movement and shrunk unwillingly from
the inaccessible. They also project it on to a Christian background.
What is general is what is manifest. The existent is the hidden
being. In place of the Tu es vere Deus absconditus, 40 Existential philosophy sets up a Tu es vere homo absconditus.40 It also introduces one of
its favourite concepts; the concept of the secret state. As far as this
particular point is concerned, nobody else has kept so close to his master
as Jaspers. For him, also, the existent is rigorously deprived of his
direct communication. His statements and his answers are always
____________________
37
Crainte et tremblement, p. 122.
38
Ibid., p. 126.
39
La Rptition, Alcan, p. 190.
40
Verily, thou art the hidden God, Verily, thou art the hidden man.
-41ambiguous, secret and half-understood. In its other sense, the secret
state is the reserve-land of being. The existent can never, by means of
communication, give the objective indication of a route; at best, he can
open it up and make an appeal to it. His pronouncement cannot be called
communication; it is an invocation, an appeal from beyond an abyss. 41
-46
ourselves back at the Kierkegaardian idea that despair is no ordinary
state of mind; it is not a final residue. But it is a form of reality with
varying degrees, or, if you prefer, a form of reality with several dimensions.
Empirical despair, or soul-sickness (or intellectual-sickness), rests on the
very basis of egocentric enjoyment (the sthetic plane), and is a corrective
to it. It is the sum-total of deception of our desires. But despair is
something more than this mere phosphorescence of nothingness. If
it is detached from desire and if it expresses the longing of the human
being for being, it becomes a negative revelation of the Absolute, a dialectical phase of the process of our liberation. "Despairs with all his
heart and soul . . . Whoever despairs, finds eternal man. 50 The enticement of despair leads to the making of the Existential decision. "One
cannot despair without making the decision." 51 In Existential perspective, despair takes the place that methodical doubting occupies at the
start of the Cartesian philosophy. It, too, contains in its very denseness
a sort of ergo sum, provided one is prepared to meet, underneath the
finite despair, that infinite despair which fills our nothingness with the
fulness of appeal. 52 The concept of the absurd state cannot be refuted,
though it may be rejected, and on a logical basis, too. It is absurd that
everything should be absurd. Or, in Pascalian terminology, it is incomprehensible that everything should be incomprehensible. Philosophic Absurdism admits of a sort of logical blackmail. From the way in which it
sometimes conducts the argument, it seems that reason or being can be
sought in the world only by a sort of cowardly act or by an act of philosophical infantilism, and that any particular philosophical attitude can
only be maintained when it becomes untenable.
Let us cut these pronouncements short. It requires no more courage
to deny everything than it does to deny only some things. According
again to Pascal, the most difficult thing is to deny when occasion arises
and to make constructive assertions when occasion arises. Enthusiasm
does the rest--at great speed, no doubt; but truth is not estimated in
terms of speed. "Man is so constructed that, by dint of telling him
he is a fool, you can make him believe it, and, by dint of his repeating
it to himself, you, yourself come to believe him, too." 53 There is so much
uncertainty and despair in the world that Existential faith (which, for
some people, quite simply means The Faith) is not a reassuring thing,
but a pure gamble. Yet, it is only through this faith that despair has any
____________________
50
Ou bien . . . Ou bien. . . Ed. Gallimard, p. 502.
51
Ibid., p. 303.
52
Ibid., p. 504.
53
Penses, p. 502.
and gives it scope and opportunity. It represents the spirit of open adventure; it regards reality as beneficent, even if this reality must necessarily thwart my desires. We can forsake hope, just as we can forsake
love. It is, therefore, certainly a virtue, and not a form of consolation
or comfortableness. But it is more than a virtue: it is part of the ontological law of any being who can be described as transcendent within himself. 54 To accept or to forsake it is to agree or to refuse to be a man.
____________________
54
Bergson seems to have been hampered sometimes by a certain restraint (which
he derives from his professorial type of mind and from his scientific bent)
against developing fully all the implications of his reflexion, especially those
which cannot be supported on any direct scientific basis. It has been left
to Pguy to express poetically the optimism implied in Bergson's works.
-49III THE CONCEPT OF PERSONAL CONVERSION
THERE is a close similarity between the preoccupation of Existentialists
and Personalists. We find this common ground, not only in Gabriel
Marcel, 1 but also in Berdyaev. "Existential Philosophy is a personal
philosophy; the subject of enquiry is the human person." 2 The existent
is presented in the terms of a being in collision with the inertia or impersonality of the thing. Existentialists are unanimous on this point. They
have sounded the call to a revival of Personalism in contemporary thought.
That is to say, in general terms, Existentialism presents a picture
of a kind of intensified Personalism. We have seen how vivid was this
reaction to impersonalism among the Idealist and Materialist philosophers
and how it inevitably leads to the danger of isolating the individual in the
solitude of his impassioned quest. This danger is allied to a more general
problem which we shall deal with later.
If there is no system of existence, and there are only individual
existents faced with choices which cannot be reduced to any ethical generality, then the universe of the existent is in danger of being cracked beyond
repair as the result of a general shattering of isolated individuals, and the
individual himself is in danger of being cracked beyond repair, too, by
the splintering effect of arbitrary and incommunicable decisions. Ultimately, an absolute discontinuity would make the world both quite
unthinkable and quite untenable. This extremity has, perhaps, not
been reached; there is no doubt that Existential thinkers have brushed
up against it. It does not exactly mark the limits of Existentialism, but
there is a great lateral risk, similar to the risk involved in the stupidity
-51Knightly Warrior for the Faith can often present, from the outside, a
striking resemblance to what faith most despises, the bourgeois mind.
Here, again, we catch Kierkegaard pulling himself up short on the edge
of his own declivity. He then goes on to write in his Journal: "The
great point is to preserve in an individual life the greatest possible number
of generally-accepted human qualities."
Jaspers, as we shall see, was no less tempted to isolate the individual
in his spiritual conduct, though, in so doing, he has described one essential
aspect of existence, and denounced the misconception at the moment
it was arising. He distinguishes the ipse-ness, which represents oneness
with the world, from subjectivity, which means shutting oneself up in
oneself. The latter state, wherever it develops to excess, leads dialectically to a resentment against the limits of the self, with suicide at
the extreme limit. Anguish also expresses this self-concern abnormally
extended. But shutting oneself up in oneself is definitely evil, and one
must avoid evil by means of the factor of communication; this represents
the will to know and the will to reveal oneself.
Thus, the spiritual life of "me"--the "subjective-self"--is the
ground for an incessant dialectic whose tension is at once irresolvable
and creative. On the one side, it represents pursuit of unity, and, since
no one man can experience all the forms of unity, I must make narrowlylimited choice and plunge passionately in some direction towards existence, since that is the only way to meet existence. This selectiveness
what it is and what it is not. "Its motto is not sum, but sursum."
Intimacy is, like sincerity, a dialectical notion. In one sense, spirituality
is a total movement towards an intimus intimo meo, just as it also is a total
movement towards an outwardness and a beyond of myself. Now, in
the course of this movement, meditation seems to stick to a sort of
adhesion of myself to myself; in the course of its movement, it can
develop a sort of suffocation of me by me, and herein lies the danger in
a life which is too attentive to itself.
A good soldier, or a good member of a team, is a man whose skill
and vigilance have been developed to the utmost. Yet, although he has
been so perfected, he is, at the same time, accustomed to total disregard
of self when in battle or on the playing-field. It is just the same with
personal life, and, in order to keep the state of our inward intimacy and our
relations with our neighbour both healthy, we must also know how to
keep our distance. 15 As Nietzsche says, we must not be afraid of frequently disinfecting our love for our neighbour with love of the background.
____________________
13
Du refus, p. 113et seq; Homo Viator, p. 22et seq.
14
tre et Avoir, p. 162.
15
G. Marcel stresses the importance of distance even in the works of a poet so
much attached to the idea of contact as Rilke ( Homo Viator, p. 303).
-53Personal life is not created completely shaped to fit life. Every individual must take up the conquest for himself. Therein lies the very
essence of lasting enjoyment. Every type of Existentialism develops a
dialectic of conversion. Each type describes several ways of life echeloned
between the poles of existence lost and existence regained. A dissolvent
force, so intimately mingled with existence as to be sometimes indistinguishable from it, sweeps us along untiringly towards the loss of
existence while another untiringly summons us to reconciliation with
ourselves.
LOST EXISTENCE
ALL the descriptions of lost existence amplify the Pascalian idea of
diversion, which it would not be hard to find in earlier philosophies.
Kierkegaard, who had felt, from an artistic point of view, the seductions
of diversion, describes it as representing, above all, the fervent search
for "the interesting side" of life. It represents the sthetic plane,
the elementary plane of the dialectic of the existent. Just as for Pascal,
it is not the haunt of evil but of indifference. 16 Whoever halts there has
postponed his decision--note the fundamental choice involved, the
choice of the meaning to be attached to life: personal life, perhaps, in
the sense that he personally enjoys the sthetic side of his life and
sthetically enjoys his personality, 17 but not in any deeper sense. He
does not seek the authentic; he seeks the odd. For example, he leaves
his beloved after one night of love prepared for months ahead, abandoning
the reality of love at the moment he is beginning to throb with his real
life, the life of fidelity. He is capable of doing everything, but he undertakes nothing. If necessary, he will be capable of talking about God
better than a parson, yet he does not become a parson. Even at the
climax of sensuality, his eroticism is a sophisticated "spiritual eroticism"
rather than a real sensual passion. 18
Because it scatters life to the four winds, all sthetic conception of
life represents despair, conscious or otherwise. In contradistinction
to the first impression it creates, it expresses a sort of vital impotence
which is indicated by inability to find a way and to make a choice. Its
essence thus being indifference, and not perversity, the seducer-seduced
must be induced to abandon at all costs this indifference to making a
choice. Such was the attitude of Pascal towards the libertine, who
represents what Kierkegaard meant by the term "seducer." It is the
attitude which, in so far as it resembles Existentialism, the Marxist
____________________
16
Ou bien . . . Ou bien, p. 474.
17
Ibid., p. 238.
18
Ibid., p. 325.
-54critique is opposed to--only, of course, the Marxist critique is unaware
that Existentialism has always denounced the vanity of it.
Heidegger's attitude is more objective than Kierkegaard's, and,
moreover, his picture of the unauthentic life is less that of an artist and
more that of a metaphysician, moralist and sociologist. The existent
is continually faced, not with, but right in the midst of the possibility of
choosing between two ways of life, the authentic life and the unauthentic
life which, in spite of certain shades of meaning, may, in practice, be
confused with dailiness. Heidegger definitely refrains from giving these
words a moral value, but it must be pointed out that his usage of them
oscillates from the descriptive to the normative register. In human
existence, (and not only mixed in it) there is an incoercible tendency to
interpret it according to the nature of the objects with which it is concerned; it is a tendency to be absorbed by the world into which it plunges,
a Dirty Beast, because he does not adopt the point of view by which his
duplicity will be revealed to him.
Flabbiness is not the only thing which can cause us to fall into the
unauthentic state. Jaspers, at the opposite extreme, and adopting the
indifference standpoint, has shown the complex nature of the factor
of defiance. Defiance is also an attitude of two-sided enlightenment-explicit negation and violent negation, and by the very violence of this
constant negation it experiences the true life and pays it the homage of
its fury. By itself, indifference is total negation.
For Gabriel Marcel, in the end, the authentic life is essentially, as
we have already seen, undetachability and possessiveness.
EXISTENCE REGAINED
WE have spoken of "uprooting," and of "conversion." For the genesis
of consciousness there must be a liberating action, and, on the threshold
of this action we must make a choice. If indifference really means spiritual
death, then deciding the choice is the first effect of conversion. Kierkegaard, following Pascal's example, concentrates his whole dialectic on
this crucial point. "It is not so much a question of deciding to choose
between good and evil as of choosing to decide. 23 In this respect, it is
like the baptism of the will, which initiates it into the ethical order.
Nevertheless, although in the process of conversion we do choose to
decide, we may still decide upon evil; in this case, however, conversion
has had the chance, (which indifference hasn't had) of deciding upon
good. Instead of living his life as the seducer," the existent is, henceforward, going to exist his existence. "sthetics represents what man
automatically is, while ethics represents what he becomes." 24
Here, then, is a new Existential cogito: "Know thyself" is replaced
by, "Choose for theyself." 25
____________________
23
Ou bien . . . Ou bien, p. 474.
24
Ibid., p. 513.
25
Ibid., p. 538.
-57
The individual "knows" himself, in the Biblical sense, by being
ecundated, and the candidate enters upon his conversion through the
narrow doorway of repentance and truth--which represents a process
of retrogression as well as a state of lamentation. sthetic sadness, which
means nothing more nor less than being sick of living, and which, in the
middle of its cries of despair, frequently bursts happily into song, must
be swept away by ethical sadness; it must be purified by the resolve of
man humiliated by the thought of his own sin. Nevertheless, here, as
for Pascal, the move to a higher plane of life does not cancel out the values
of the lower planes; the move to the ethical plane does not entail the exclusion of the sthetic plane, though, strictly-speaking, the sthetic
plane becomes only relatively important. sthetic enjoyment of life
always depended on external contribution, and man never deliberately
based his life on it. It gives way to the factor of freedom by means of
which man becomes what he is.
Nevertheless, the ethical state is still operated according to the plan
of man in general. sthetic man was accidental man: ethical man is
man-in-general whose life is still a compromise between generality and
singularity. The move to the supreme plane, the religious plane, of the
Individual involves the sweeping away of any suspension of the ethical
plane. It begins with acceptation of the religious paradox which draws
us away from acceptation of generality and its assurances through the
force of the shock which it brings to us. It is the most difficult operation
of all, because all our faculties which are developed by tranquillity,
including the very highest ones, intelligence and faith, ally themselves
against the leap which puts us in full communion with the Absolute.
We have seen in what and isolation this decision puts the Individual,
but, at the very moment we are reaching the supreme goal of the whole
dialectic, the powers of wisdom become shaky. Religious choice cannot
be the object of verbal communication, but only of sermonizing; ( Jaspers
would call it "invocation," and Gabriel Marcel would call it "attestation.") By this factor, the Individual does communicate with the
Individual, but his words can only be transmitted by being drowned in
the Word of God. Even the gestures of the religious man poorly express
the fundamental decision he has made, for this decision is a secret one
which any expression of it is likely to betray. Kierkegaard extends this
reserve, which for him is half-sacred, half-pathological, so far that he
creates out of authenticity, not only the mask and the pseudonym, but
also a sort of comedy of irreverance and immorality so designed that,
under any circumstances, one mistakes the face of the religious man for
-58the grimacing incarnations which the religious man portrays in it. Perhaps it is here that one could find the philosophical roots of a certain
literary elevation of sin conceived as a sort of seal of spiritual authenticity.
Beyond this concept, there is nothing but Pharisaism.
In order that the existent may pass into the state of authentic existence imagined by Heidegger, he must realize the dispersive power of
the impersonal-theyself and free himself from it. This conversion is
not the result of a call of God, but is the response to a summons which
the existent serves on the existent--the existent who is shrouded in the
distress and nudity of his fundamental dereliction as contrasted with the
existent who permeates the impersonal-theyself. At best, this conversion is not, in this case, a transfiguration or a redemption, because
human nature is negative and cannot come out of its negativeness. As
far as this aspect of Heidegger is concerned, we are quite clearly atheistically separated from Lutheranism.
For Luther, too, human nature, if not exactly nothingness in its
essence, is nothingness in so far as power is concerned. It is overwhelmed with its burden of sin before God, and Grace can only give it
a faith; but, from the cradle to the grave, faith never inwardly transforms human nature. Heidegger, like Luther, considers the human
being to be so essentially a nucleus of nothingness that, as Luther says,
it would require a veritable destruction of his being in order to make him
capable of a transformation. The form of death imagined by Heidegger,
however, has no to-morrow, and, according to him, faith is only a final
trick by the unauthentic life to inspire us to recovery. Somewhat like
the Lutheran "faith," the" conversion "imagined by Heidegger is
nothing more than a form of efficient lucidity, a revelation of the intrinsic
sinfulness of existence which has been freed from the impersonal-they
at the same time as it is gripped by this sin. Looking squarely at his
condition, the existent undertakes the resolute decision, the ever-precarious
conquest and resummoning. We realize that it consists in viewing all
things sub specie mortis.
For Sartre, the highest type of life appears, above all, to be a revival
of freedom, and, in welcoming anything strange which happens to disconcert his world, the Dirty Beast can give himself the key to lucidity
and thus to freedom. 26 The first step in Existentialism is to convey to
every man the consciousness that he is entirely responsible for his
____________________
26
In Nausea, it is, for example, the disquieting appearance of the stranger in
a restaurant, the spectre of Nature devouring cities, the particular tongue
which changes to a milliped inside one's mouth--the Kafka attitude to
perfection.
-59existence, and that, in thus taking control of himself, he becomes master of
and possessor of the whole world. 27 Such a type of freedom, however,
If I were really to reject this point of view, and to evade this state of
affairs, I should never rise above myself; my life would be wasted in
vague ravings. Thus, the concept of attachment is not only a statement
of fact but also a rule for wholesome living.
Here, the two branches of Existentialism come closer to each other
than they do at any other point. Of course, here, we are only touching
-61
on man's state and not upon his ultimate developments. Even in
Kierkegaard, that Don Quixote of Existentialism, we recognize a second
Cervantes who, while still not rejecting the eccentric promptings of the
paradoxical life, eagerly inclines towards that form of being which is
based on dailiness, provided it is not worn thin through indifference.
As far as he is concerned, conversion to this exceptional type of life, to
that super-life which constitutes authentic Existentialism, could not
introduce any disturbing element into daily existence. It was the error
of the Middle Ages, he thought, the error of novices, and the result
of an insufficient amount of inward faith, to imagine the existent
as indifferent to the finite world. One must be religious and yet at the
same time go to Dyrhaven Park (the Danish Coney Island) as well! 1
Precisely in order to stress the absolute transcendence of inwardness,
the protagonist of secret inwardness must lead the same sort of life as
other people. Thus, as far as human affairs are concerned, his outlook,
with its somewhat disdainful orthodoxy, reminds us of the sceptic's
outlook. Previously, Pascal had advised his readers to "follow custom,"
while, at the same time, retaining their own ideas at the back of their
minds. Instead of: "Follow custom," however, another man was
destined to call upon his followers to "Revolt!" on the basis of other
conceptions. But the attitude remains the same. These ideological
evasions and mystifications which Marxism fights against arise, less from
stern conceptions of transcendence (which leave man to his own devices),
than from the widespread incidence of intermediary systems which are
neither things of this earth nor of heaven. Moreover, under pretext
of connecting them up, we separate them from each other. Kierkegaard
warned Christianity against the temptation to set up equivocal Christian
communities as the result of which the Christian Absolute is debased
through developments based on compromise. As far as these are concerned, he was not unmindful of the extent to which the influences of
earth and flesh can bind a being, circumscribed by choice, to the world.
The mystic makes a choice, but only by renouncing the world. Now,
"the true concrete choice is that by which, at the very moment when I
choose to renounce the world, I choose also to return to the world." 2
I make my choice as "a predetermined product in a predetermined
This state of first-love is, without the assistance of any other factor,
and at the time in question. It is like an an sich, like an in-oneself which
is perpetually void of any real content. It is "created by ephemeral
magic"; is wedded to a sort of miraculous infecundity; it is like something
infinite which "has no possibility of advancement"; it is powerless
to make its infinity finite, or to display it within the real eternity of
-63
duration, instead of isolating it within the illusory eternity of the
moment. This miraculous eternity of first-love is, in fact, real. But
it is not absorbed into the general state of marriage. In the married
state, it rises to a higher concentricity--from the sthetic sphere to
the ethical and religious sphere. The joys of first-love are embedded
in a state of active repetition; they represent a continually-renewed
rebounding of primitive sweetness. Youthful amazement is handed on
by means of the continual amazement arising from the life of decision.
The conquest of love yields to the incessant conquest created by the
inwardization of the relationship between the two partners who are in
love, and this tends to be objectivated into habit. First-love now becomes
part of a tale; its infinity is provided with finiteness; its eternity assumes
the aspect of temporality. It is an obligatory transformation: in order
to maintain our inwardness we must abandon pure inwardness. The mistake
made by first-love was the belief that it could only be achieved by a
retreat from the world. But, "Art is surpassed by a multiplicity of other
factors, while at the same time maintaining its mysterious side." We are
afraid that love will cease the moment the mystery of it is dispelled:
on the contrary, love begins when mystery is dispelled. The notion of
any mystery attaching to the present state is a piece of sheer childishness.
External tribulations are still spoken of as if they necessarily suppressed
the poetry of marriage, when, in fact, they only have to be inwardized
and transformed. At this stage, those who fear the results of continuity
and habit are people of a purely acquisitive turn of mind, and are incapable
of understanding what is meant by "possessing" something. Now,
since we are speaking about sthetics, we should remember that real
art lies in possession, not in acquisitive-conquest. It lies, not in possessing the particular, but in possessing the particular within the general,
and in consecrating it by this form of preferment. This is why the
wisdom of the ordinary man-in-the-street, as opposed to the restricted
wisdom of snobs, requires the celebration of an "Iron Wedding"
before a Silver Wedding Anniversary and a Silver Wedding Anniversary
before a Golden Wedding Anniversary. Thus, popular psychology
obviously considers marriage to be a continuous process of enrichment.
Here, then, are the two poles between which Kierkegaard's concept of
attachment is stretched. It is thus seen to be a dialectical attitude, in
particular position in it, because, for me, that represents the world.
I am not the observer of it; it is not a concurrence of objective circumstances which I could express in clearly set out schemes. I am in my
place in the world before I begin to elucidate it, and to elucidate myself
-65
as well as it, and before I begin to elucidate the world in which we find
ourselves. Nor is this view a subjective one, either. It is always lurking
on the outskirts of the consciousness which I obtain from it; it drags me
ahead of myself and my apparent-reality; it is contrary to the nature
of an idea, in that it is opaque, and it is contrary to the nature of
a dream, in that it is irrevocable. It weighs upon me like a sort of
Determinism (and here we meet the Heideggerian notion of "dereliction.") It confines me to a narrow and encompassed path along
which I move in search of being. And yet, it is mine only if I adopt it
along with my freedom.
Because it ceaselessly unravels itself as a consequence of the effects
of my acts, it becomes a choice which is always being put for my decision.
My only chance of reaching existence is through its narrow doorway
--narrowness being a condition of depth. Thus, the condition in which
I find myself is like a rare sort of knot which can never be undone even
by lucid thinking, for this knot binds freedom to necessity, the potential
to the real, time to eternity, and transcendence to immanence by a state
of mysticism which we are not competent to unveil, but which, nevertheless, is the source of life. The most obscure and yet the most fundamental situations are those borderline situations, like death, fighting,
suffering and sin, which, at the extreme point of existence, no longer
even unify me, as current situations do, but which seem, in some sort
of way, to hang over me and to restrict my understanding of being by
a black cloud through which man's gaze does not penetrate.
Thus, I realize my situation as the result of influences which are more
lumped together than the influences of perception or of ideas. Heidegger
would claim that my particular state in the world is that of preoccupation.
An isolated state of being, a Robinson Crusoe state of being, would
be a feeble and distraught state of being. The human being is fundamentally anxious-minded. But he is ceaselessly preoccupied about the
world; one may almost say that he preoccupies it. There can no more
be a world without a subject than there can be a subject without a world.
This is what modern Physics is forced to concede by its reintroduction
of observation into the Newtonian universe. It is man who gives the
world its meaning as the world; it is man who welds it to himself. Thus,
Heidegger refuses to put the problem of the exterior world, which he
finds absurd and shameful, as well as a survival of a speculative turn of
mind. Man and the world are presented contemporaneously, and are
related to each other.
One of the principal characteristics of the world is duration. Man's
-66being is a historical fact, but, there can be no kind of history, not even
Natural History, unless it is associated with a human existence. And,
there can be no human existence except that associated with history.
Unauthentic existence is not a process of continuous unfolding; it stagnates into a series of solidified present-tenses, opaque and successive,
which can never constitute an existence. Determined existence, on the
other hand, grasps the fundamental situation and the heritages of its
past in the world; it even bases the energy of its actions on the limitations
they provide. It represents individual history, and, by the same token,
it is a part of general history. Is there no friction between the two concepts? Whoever advocates individual history is automatically favouring
the introduction of a form of freedom; whoever advocates the History
of the World is automatically confronting the individual with a definite
necessity. Kierkegaard had thoroughly appreciated the difficulty involved here. In his day, history had already enabled Hegel to consecrate the spoils acquired by a Power-State, and to discourage all
thinking which contested the morality of the consecration. In the same
way, Kierkegaard, too, opposes Existence to History--but, when you
start arguing on the basis of what capital letters signify, well, there is
scarcely any more to say on the subject!
History contains the elements of inertia and creativeness. The
second Existentialist generation takes a less negative attitude towards
Hegel--Jaspers even goes so far as to defend the notion of the initiatingvirtue of penetrating into the works of all forms of collective machinery
and the preoccupations created by it. Although they do not throw
sufficient light on this knotty problem, Heidegger and Sartre stress the
fact that the limitations imposed by freedom are, in fact, the very pillars
of freedom. I can work out my plan of life only with the support of these
limitations. There is, in this world, and within my body, a sort of antagonism towards my freedom, a tendency "to gum it down." Moreover,
my method of being in the world must be more precisely determined.
"To be in the world, means to frequent the world, not to be clogged
down by it." 3 It means to embed the mobility of the "for-oneself,"
of the potential being, in the world. I frequent the world from one
end to the other and the world haunts the innermost recesses of my
personality. But the pressures exerted by the world are nothing but
inducements held out to me, and it may be claimed that the questions
it puts to me depend on the very answers I give to them.
had adequately suppressed man's primitive fears, but had not yet noticeably
developed its own dangerous tendencies. This "Golden Age" permitted
conditions for intellectual thinking which were less permanent than is
often imagined. It was the optimum era for man to be able to develop
____________________
4
L'Existentialisme est un humanisme--appendix, Naville dissent, p. 123-125.
-69
his meditation in the margin of the world, and to be able to forget, and,
to some extent, to despise, the world of objects. He had the advantage
over man of the Middle Ages, who was harassed by Nature-in-the-Rough,
and over present-day man, who is harassed by the commercialization
of the world. This happy state of tranquillity is no more, and, so
definitely is it no more, that it might never have existed. Consequently,
there is a fresh task for Existentialism. To-day, it has not only the job
of upholding subjectivity, in opposition to an objective world--or side
by side with it--but there is also the task, in the brave new technical
world, of preserving the salvation of inwardness, and of doing this with
the help of the technical world. Existentialism must do this by means of
and because of the ambivalences we have referred to, which are also
both for and against the brave new world, in the same way as Existentialism itself must do its job both with and without the help of deep
reflective thinking.
Here, the insufficiency of any form of pure Materialism (provided,
nevertheless, that this type of being postulated by Rationalism has
supporters anywhere), when it argues in its worldly way, is exemplified
by its misunderstanding of the human aspect of the world. The object
is the object for man. Although Husserl, for example, thinks there can
be, there cannot be any impartial observer of the world any more than
there can be, so to speak, any impartial object in the world. Every
object (the word is self-explanatory) is an object--something cast in
front of--presented before man; the world is a world--organized, unified
and productive--only when it is presented before man (and, for some
people, when it stands before God, and continuously before conscience for
its use). It falls to the lot of Existentialism to emphasize too strongly, in
this being-for state, the for at the expense of the being. It is what, in spite of
everything else, Heidegger's attitude seems most concerned with. The
world around us is conditioned more by our preoccupations than by the
objective relations between things. For him, things are not so much things
as instruments, which do not regard being as being-in-oneself but as
being-under-the-thumb-of-man, as a state of being which depends
ontologically on our activity. If, in any other way, man is preoccupied
with things before he is concerned to reflect about himself and to pivot
and seen the state of separation develop and then break down under the
effects of a deeper inspiration. If direct communication is excluded
as a means of communication suitable for existents, it is because it is
an outward expression of what is established inwardly; it does not flow
from the heart of one existent into the heart of another existent, and
does not bear the stamp of communicated being. Moreover this state
of affairs could still be possible even if there were no such thing as
inwardness. Is it not the aim of the technical world wherever possible
to replace man's incertitude by the precision of the machine? Between
existent and existent there can only be indirect communication by
means of signs, which summon others, and by means of enigmas, which
stimulate attention, and by means of examples, which impel others to
act. 3 To tell the truth, Kierkegaard was too much of an sthete, and
too much wrapped up in one side of himself to avoid being suspect,
in this connexion, of bringing a peculiar state of mind into his reflexions
about the straight and narrow path of existence. The problem of
expression and the limitations to it interested him much more than the
problem of communication. He would never speak about the latter
problem, except in the way some theologians allude to woman-kind
--by pointing out its dangerous side. We do not find in Kierkegaard
the same passionate concern about the other-person which torments a man
like Jaspers or Scheler. We have drawn attention to the emphasis which,
in "Either . . . Or," is laid on conjugal living-together. But this book was
his first, and this emphasis becomes rarer and rarer in his later works.
Nevertheless, if Christian Existentialism can discover gulfs of solitude
and uncomprehension between existents, then there does at least remain,
in a Christian universe, the chance of a reconciliation, and, from the
present-time onwards, some chance of the survival of the fundamental
brotherhood of man.
As far as the Atheistic branch of Existentialism is concerned, even
when it has tried to pick up some link between individual existences,
it has been expecting some form of antagonism or slavery. It is thus
to be radically distinguished from the "classical" Atheism of the
____________________
3
Post-Scriptum160et seq., 173et seq., 185et seq.; Ecole du Christianisme,
158et seq.; Christ, 86.
-73eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and from the social optimism which
characterized classical Atheism.
Heidegger ably argues that the sein, that is, being, represents mitsein,
that is, with-being. But, in this mitsein, Sartre himself discerns nothing
more than the "herd-feeling" which can inspire a lot of galley-slaves,
despite the fact that none of them has any direct relationship with the
others. On the contrary, there is in human existence an incoercible
tendency to be agglomerated into the doughy non-existence of the
world of the Impersonal-They, and this tendency is thus characterized
by its insistence on the fundamental servitude of the existent in so far
as the other-person is concerned. The existent does not belong to any
particular person, but, even when he does free himself from one person,
he merely falls into the servitude of another-person, and, above all, of
other-persons. My existence is unalterably heteronomous. A form of
servitude, which is much more degrading than the servitude I endure
under my masters, insures that I share in their degradation without
sharing in their triumphs--it is a form of servitude to human chaos,
an amorphous and intolerable form of servitude. Authentic existence
can only be obtained at the price of total dereliction. At the present time,
there is a good deal of talk about "a despairing human society." Actually,
there is nothing in Heidegger's works to suggest such a thing.
It is left to Sartre fully to reveal the evil of communication. We
shall dwell on this at greater length, because, in his analysis, Sartre
gives us the key to the problem. Let us recall the applications of his
thesis: It will be convenient at the start actually to show us anotherperson from the point of view of his reality as another-person. Anotherperson is not that body which is there, the one which is in front of me,
an object amongst objects; this body is one particular body, and, therefore,
separated from all other relationship; it is not the body of another-person;
it cannot confront me with another-person. As far as I am concerned,
another-person is no longer a representation of another-person; he is
a subtilized object, although still an object. In both cases, I try in an
attitude of inwardness towards him, that is, precisely to say, in an
attitude of being outside my fundamental "I--Thou" experience,
to make contact with another-person. 4 There is no common standard
of comparison between an object and a subject. As far as human existence
is concerned, the solipsism 5 can be avoided only if there is a state of
____________________
4
On this experience, see Martin Buber--Je et tu (Ed. Montaigne).
5
"Solipsism"--A term in metaphysics for the doctrine that nothing exists
outside the cognition of the self, and that the self can know nothing outside
its own experience.--E.B.
-74-
accord between one being and another, and the final stage of this accord
must be that between one subject and another. Therefore, there must
be some sort of Cogito relating to another-person, and this, by casting
me outside of myself, forces me to disembogue into some direct
experience of another-person in concrete shape. As far as Sartre is
concerned, this is simply a more detailed form of the Cartesian Cogito. 6
Here, Sartre invites us to adopt a fundamental reversal of attitude.
We always picture another-person as someone that I can see. Now,
he is also someone who can see me. I see another-person-(object),
but, at the same time, I am seen by another-person-(subject), that
is to say (and let us note this connexion), another-person-(subject)
sees me as an object. Now, I test this being-seen-as-an-object by
observing him in such situations as shame, timidity, embarrassment,
and, generally, in all the situations of the in-the-presence-of-anotherperson state, a state in which I imagine myself to have become an object,
and a dependent object at that. Now, I cannot be an object from the
point of view of another object, but only from the point of view of a
subject--and, lo, you have the Cogito all worked out! Being-seen-byanother-person represents an irreducible situation which cannot be inferred, either from another-person-(object) or from my-being-(subject);
it implies the presence of another-person-(subject). Fundamentally,
therefore, another-person is someone who is staring at me.
The perceived-being state is not one of Sartre's discoveries; it has
been a subject of deep interest for psychologists and psycho-analysts
in recent years. To H. Wallon, we owe a remarkable treatise on the
influence of another-person-staring on child behaviour. 7 The tendency
to get into the stared-at-state-of-being, and all its obscure guilty connexions, together with the tendency to desire to stare, the connexions
between immodesty and prying, and between modesty and discreetness
have been the subjects of numerous treatises. We have, in passing,
stressed the importance, right from the earliest days of Existentialist
philosophy, of the concepts of modesty and of the secret state. All that
is new here is the ontological utilization of these investigations.
The stare of another-person thus converts me into an object within
his field of vision. As far as I am concerned, another-person is a "system
connected with experiences beyond my capacity to attain, and a system
in which I figure as one object amongst a lot of others." 8 He thus
represents the complete negation of my experience as a subject. But,
____________________
6
L'tre et le Nant, p. 308.
7
Cf. Les Origines du caractre, Boivin.
8
L'tre et le Nant, p. 283.
-75he does not just make ("fait") me into an object--I become a despoiled
and dispossessed object as well. Here, slang terms become the language
of philosophers: "I'm 'spotted' ("vu")!" and "I'm 'nabbed'
("fait")!" are synonymous, and they are synonymous with: I've
been robbed!" 9
Now, what, as a matter of fact, does happen when another-person
enters my field of being? He enters it with his stare, and with his point
of view, and everything happens as if, at the same time as he is staring
all round him and expounding his point of view, my whole universe
were disintegrating on the spot; as if the objects which constitute my
universe, while still remaining stationary, were flowing away from it
and towards this strange apparition. "Suddenly, an object is presented
before me which has stolen the world away from me." In so far as
another-person is an object for me, this disintegration of my universe
is confined to the bounds of my universe; it does not escape into nothingness or withdraw outside itself; rather does it seem to be rent by a gap
of emptiness in the middle of its being, and to flow interminably through
this gap.
Nevertheless, if, when I consider my state of being and my universe
as objects, the damage seems moderate, and if the piercing of my universe
by another-person leads only to an internal flow from that universe-from the time I consider my personal presence in the world--I see
myself, as far as I am concerned, being impelled towards another-person
in a sort of external hmorrhage. It is, in fact, my freedom, that is to
say, the most intimate part of me, which is drained off by him. I am
this being-for-another-person which I become when I am confronted
with him, but I cannot get rid of him. He is no longer a for-oneself,
a mobile and potential human being; he is an in-oneself, a petrified,
immobilized and undetachable form of existence.
Thus, the impingement of another-person, far from bringing me
promise of a harvest, merely sows the seeds of death and damnation.
"The existence of another-person is the cause of my Original Sin."
It is the cause of my Original Sin and of my Eternal Damnation, because
death, in the minds of those who survive me, and of all future generations,
definitely turns me into a for-another-person type. "Hell is the presence
____________________
9
"(I'm) spotted!" "(I'm) nabbed!"="vu," "fait." M. Mounier likes to
have a dig at Sartre's use of slang: "Vu!" and "Fait!" are slang terms,
particularly associated with Paris pickpockets' "warning code"--on
hearing either of these words, other pickpockets in the vicinity "lay off"
until the "coast is clear" again. The phrase: "I'm robbed!" would
thus seem to be synonymous in the sense of the old story about the Scotsman
who "lost" sixpence because someone else picked it up before he could.
-76of others." 10 It is through the agency of another-person that, quite
literally, I fall into the world, and that my whole being is drained out
of me, and that I am exposed defenceless. 11 Once another-person has
taken possession of me, there is no longer any hope for me. I am no
longer an expression of freedom which can create and project itself.
I am in danger of enslavement and of being handed over to a scheme of
valuations which I never succeed in obtaining. At the moment of
attack, I irrevocably become what I am. The presence of anotherperson strikes right at my heart; it removes all the value from the secret
state of what I am. It is easy to understand the feeling of uneasiness
which comes over me from the moment a stare is fixed on me.
I have only one means of salvation; it is tit-for-tat. I must regain
my freedom, I must reconstitute myself as a subject, and, in order to
do this (we must emphasize this phrase in the same way as we did the
"that is to say" earlier), I, in my turn, must petrify another-person into
an object, because, obviously, the process can be reversed. He is certainly
a dangerous object to handle, for, at any moment, he may reassume his
spontaneity as a subject. Moreover, my constant worry, in the course
of my relations with him, will be to reveal enough cunning to keep him
an object as long as I can. But one conquering stare from him is sufficient
to bring my whole sheltering edifice crashing down in one second.
Right at the start, however, we find one fundamental means of
defence in the factor of modesty--if I wrap myself up in myself, if I
am retiring by nature, if I keep my feelings to myself, I decrease my
range of display of myself, and I can claim the privilege of seeing without
being seen, and of becoming an abstract-subject who cannot be
materialized by any stare from another-person. But this is still only
a defensive attitude, and "the best form of defence is attack." Conflict
is the fundamental basis of being-for-another-person. 12 Two men
together represent two beings who are lying in wait for the opportunity
to enslave each other in order that they can avoid being enslaved. Now,
there are two ways of retaliating, by taking the offensive, open to us.
The former is the more ambitious: Since another-person enslaves
me by means of his subjective-liberty, I should aim at this very otherness,
at his freedom, not as an object, but as a perceiving-being myself, in
order to exorcise, as it were, on the spot, the overwhelming power that
he has over me. Such is the ideal of love. It does not, as is imagined,
____________________
10
It was the theme of Huis Clos (a play by Sartre which was, incidentally, played
privately in London in 1946, with the title: Vicious Circle.--E.B.).
11
L'tre et le Nant, p. 321.
12
Ibid., p. 431.
-77seek possession of a body--it does not want to possess a body so much
as a corpse--it seeks a form of freedom as freedom. Another-person(object) cannot suffice to arouse love; love can only arise from the desire
of another-person-(subject). Now, this desire is a desire for revenge,
it is the desire of yesterday's slave to triumph over yesterday's master;
at no point is it a desire for reconciliation. In order that I may be assured
of this triumph, the freedom of another-person must not only be engaged,
but it must also become my captive. My handicap, my tendency to
objectivity, my factness combine to infect another-person with it since
another-person is infecting me with it.
For Sartre, this is what constitutes the basis of the ecstasy of love.
Once the proposition is stated, there is no harm in showing that this
project involves contradiction. I do, in fact, desire that another-person
should become embedded in my freedom, and that he should do so
freely, since I want to possess him as a manifestation of freedom. Therefore, I require him to be an object, while all the time I really want him
to be a subject. Moreover, in order to take possession of him as a subject,
I must (I again use italics) still remain an object as far as he is concerned,
and even an attractive object, too. But I (subject) no longer take possession
of him all of a sudden, as I had anticipated. The force of this impotence
can induce me furiously to regard myself as an object, just like a child
punching himself, or just as a man reviles himself and becomes
depressed after a defeat--such is the meaning of Masochism.
The "communion of souls" thus being admittedly impossible, 13
I then go on to try communion of bodies. Since I cannot take
possession of this freedom as freedom, I go on to try to embed it in
its own corporeality (in its "factness") and to entrap it in another waybut in its own trap and no longer in mine. There are different tactics
for this particular strategy.
I can objectify another-person by means of indifference. In this
case, I act as if he were not staring at me. I ignore him, and sometimes
I mock him. Then I am at ease; I am not estranged; I am in the inverse
state to timidity or shame. For some people, the vulgar sort (that
particular type of "Dirty Beasts"), this state can last a whole lifetime.
I remain in danger of being classed as a thing by another-person--I
am, of course, but I no longer realize the fact. I have partaken of the
death of another-person--my death.
An investigation, analagous to this, arouses sexual desire. Sexuality
is not a function dependent on my body, but a necessary component of
____________________
13
On this subject, see La Nause again, p. 137, and p. 148.
-78my being, a fundamental projection of my type of existence. It is I
who desire--but we must be more precise. It is I, sinking into the
quicksands of the factness of my body, experiencing my own body as
a fainting-fit to which I succumb. It is I, making myself flesh in the
presence of the flesh of another-person in order to try to appropriate her
flesh. I must, at the same time, make her into flesh, for she herself is
not basically flesh; she is being-in-a-situation, clad, not only in her
garments but in a thousand individual and social bonds. I must undress
her. Then I am reassured. She is no longer anything but this very
flesh which has been restored to its immediate confines by my hands.
She is no longer in danger of overflowing as the result of her freedom.
She, in her turn, is under a spell. Possession is thus an attempt to
achieve reciprocal twofold incarnation--but, at the same time, it can
only end in frustration, because, if I do continue to enjoy my triumph,
then, by the very way in which it acts, I find myself merely possessing
a corpse, and not "another-person"--in fact, instead of being master
of the situation, I myself am thereby sinking into the quicksands. By
its very efflorescence, the flesh of another-person is unpossessable.
This fact is the cause of the mad rage of the Sadist, who tries to humiliate
this flesh of another-person in order to destroy the freedom which he
cannot subjugate.
We have all experienced the irritation which results from those
little breakdowns in a piece of machinery caused by two parts which
have reciprocal functions being blocked. If you free one part, you
immediately block the other; the second part, in its turn, gets blocked,
and so the process goes on. According to Sartre's scheme of things,
our unfortunate experience with another-person is the result of a similar
sort of process. I do aim at taking possession of the subject as a subject,
but, whenever I present myself as a subject, it is petrified into an object.
Therefore, since I am faced with its subjectivity, I can only present myself
as an object incapable of affecting it. It must be capable of being revealed
to me simultaneously as an object and as a subject. Now, this is impossible.
"In principle, another-person represents the unpossessable; he avoids
me whenever I try to possess him, and he possesses me whenever I
believe in putting the burdens of the world and the fate of the world on
the shoulders of man himself.
Here, Sartre uses an absolute formula: "Without any help, and without any support, man is condemned perpetually to fabricate man." 9
He thinks, and with reason, that he is the first to point out the full consequences of any coherent philosophy of Atheism by his supposition of
the suppression of the bases (such as universal values, general morality,
sociological dogmas, etc.) which Atheism retains as substitutes for a
Loving God, and as if it regretted the passing of Christian universalism.
The existent, who is immediately thrust into the midst of his struggle,
is alone in the world, and subject to his own obligation. At this stage,
Marxist reaction is inevitable. Marxism remains a form of universalism,
and is partly dogmatic. It rejects the notion of this fundamental solitude,
or, as it might even be called, this solitude which explodes in the direction
of the world and which constitutes humanity. In this case, Marxism
____________________
7
Sartre: L'Existentialisme est un humanisme, p. 24et seq.
8
Kierkegaard, Le concept d'angoisse, p. 211, et seq.
9
L'Existentialisme est un humanisme, p. 38.
-97is nearer to a form of Christian Existentialism (if we ignore a Left-wing
of the Reformation) which admits that a basis for the world can exist
independently of man's existence, and a reality of the community over
and above the reverses caused by social intercourse. But, even if it does
bring reality into the environment of man, a Christian form of Existentialism is equally insistent that the individual is responsible for the
maximum obligation implied in this reality. Sartre is right in defending
himself against Christians who accuse him of discrediting the notion of
preference for action; nevertheless, he defends himself very unskilfully-all he does is return the compliment. 10 The eternal value of every one
of our acts gives them an importance equal to that with which their
absolute autonomy fills them.
Human existence seems to us, then, to be in a state of tension between
a superactivation of the subject owing to its eternal or solitary responsibility,
and this powerful internal thrust in the direction of non-action. It is
a similar tension to that we have already associated with the movement
in the direction of non-consciousness by which mystical theories of understanding introduce the dimensional-concept of transcendence into
consciousness. No Existentialist thinkers accept this notion of nonconsciousness as in any way representing an ethical guide or as a direct
principal of conduct. The basis of conduct is, on the contrary, composed
When you mention the word total in connexion with freedom, you
immediately think of arbitrary freedom. Though Sartre clears himself
of this charge, it is undeniable that the Sartrian hero never comes up
against the temptations of Gide's notion of untenability; to hold fast
to nothing, and to be nothing. Sartre's characters often exhibit such
gluttony for existence-by-oneself. 19 To be without any smell and without
any shadow and without any past: to be nothing more than an invisible
dragging of oneself towards the future." 20
But he also feels that this temptation represents the road to a new
kind of slavery, 21 and that choosing to be a man is choosing to possess
a life and performing acts which cannot be revoked. 22
I would never know how to avoid this temptation, since I am a Beingin-a-situation who is unable at all times to will anything at all. It is at
this stage, when I sum up all the restraints which press upon me and
all the limitations which hinder the flow of my acts, that, at first sight,
I seem to be something which is created rather than something which
creates itself. Nevertheless, the Sartrian form of freedom is hardly
affected by this network of limitations, and does, in fact, reimpose its
sovereignty on them. The obstacle which bars my way is my freedom
and it is my freedom which gives it its coefficient of adversity. "Who
will free me from this mortal flesh?" exclaims St. Paul. But this mortal
flesh only interferes with my spiritual energy because this energy has
first of all formulated the project of mastering it. For the man who
gives way to its temptations, the flesh is no longer any handicap. The
____________________
18
L'tre et le Nant, p. 78, et seq.
19
For example, L'Age de raison, pp. 17-18, 35, 69, 77, 143, 249.
20
Ibid., p. 93.
21
Ibid., p. 125.
22
Ibid., 125, 190, 307.
-102oppressed person can feel himself "free," even under the worst type of
dictator, if he has first of all renounced any form of freedom which is
too exacting. The past itself does not act in accordance with our
conception of how it should--it is not the heritage of 1789 which influences
our subsequent French history, but it is our way of interpreting it and
operating it. Ultimately, in order for there to be a free act, there must
be some obstacle; there must be some distance in between the simple*
project of some potential end and the realization of the potentiality;
there must be some distance between decision and triumph. It is true
that, in developing itself and launching itself against the obstacle, freedom,
opportunity and the achievement before me. Freedom does not bring
a state of perfection or any meaning into the world; it is nothing but a
perpetual inwardization of contingency, nothing but a return to the
primitive outburst of absurdity. By very hypothesis, decision is absurd. 27
It is ultimately useless to talk about the notion of situation if the
concept of encounter with it is eliminated. Could one have such a
thing as a limit if one never came up against it? It is useless to build
up a pathetic concept of reverse when there is no room in which to
create any positiveness for the state of reverse. ( Nietzsche rightly observed
that the only tragic thing about existence lies in achievement itself).
It is there representing an inward necessity for Sartrian ontology. Being
is revealed to us by two experiences which, if not entirely incommunicable,
are, at least, difficult to connect up: they are the experiences of
objectification and of subjectification. From the moment the whole of
reality is conceived as outside the realm of pure resurgence and becomes
a mere hallucination about the stare of another-person, such a philosophical
doubt will lead to a probing of every aspect of being. It will even probe
into subjective being which, by the sole fact that it lays claim to being,
will retain a bad impression, as it were, of diffused objectivity which it
accepts only because of the fact that it is spread throughout, if you can
use such a term, within-being. There is, from this moment, a fatal
temptation to reduce subjectivity to a form of non-being which is isolated
and which gushes forth into the world, which is paradoxically situated
in the world and given shape by this fact, but which never actually comes
up against the world; it is, in fact, the supreme paradox of a theory of
absolute responsibility, a theory by which I am not responsible in the
sight of anything.
We realize the supreme importance for Kierkegaard of the in the
sight of God concept. Kierkegaard sticks to his viewpoint and thus saves
it from Subjectivism. In this viewpoint, he represents this link with
____________________
26
L'tre et le Nant, p. 516.
27
Ibid., 559.
-104outwardness which is often isolated and hypostatized by Materialism,
but which is, nevertheless, a fundamental manifestation of Existential
experience. The Sartrian man stands in the sight of nothing, not even
(as Liberalism's man does) in the sight of his conscience. He does not,
I would say, even represent pure subjectivity, but a volatized form
of it. The whole problem is to know whether or not our fundamental
experience includes proof, not of objects to which I adhere, but of realities
cerned, to the how (one does adhere) to the what (is received). We
cannot go right to the end of the road to which we are thus committed,
but it is certain that this route leads us to the conviction that there
is a certain amount of indifference to the actual content of truth and a
corresponding interest in what might be called its power of effervescence.
We are aware, of course, that this effervescence is not a sign of quality
in truth, but adoption of such an attitude would undoubtedly mean a
return to systematization rather than a complete reaction in favour of
systematization; Kierkegaard's campaign against systematization insures
that the reaction is kept at the level we have indicated.
Nevertheless, to hand truth over just as completely to subjective
fervour would, of itself, involve the risk of blocking the lines of
communication, and without these lines of communication it would be
impossible to discuss the idea of truth at all. We have already described
this "temptation of the incommunicable" which affects Kierkegaard.
____________________
3
Post-Scriptum, p. 50.
4
Ibid., p. 134.
-109The "subjective thinker" is the thinker of secret things. Like Socrates,
he would even prefer to be not understood; he thus supresses the inevitable
misunderstanding. Moreover, his own particular method of expression
lies not in discussion but in paradox--in open, free and objective
discussion. Paradox is the spark which springs from the friction between
eternal truth and the use of words. Although it is the result of this
indescribable shock, it is, nevertheless, at the mercy of verbal expression,
and verbal expression is the means of provoking objective incertitude in
an atmosphere of subjective emotion. 5 It is not that eternal truth is,
in itself, a paradox, but it always is so in its relation to an existent.
In the course of history, paradox has assumed different names: It
was called Socratic Ignorance; it inspired the credo quia absurdum.
Nobody will ever be able to devise a system of logic for it; it can only
be justified paradoxically. The only explanation you can give of
paradox is that it involves grasping ever more firmly the idea of what
paradox is, and of being able to decide that such and such a paradox
is a paradox. It is for this reason that Christianity, which represents
ultimate truth, does not want to be understood. All it asks is the realization
that it does not want to be understood. It is better to be a man who
is indignant at the idea of Christianity and is thereby put into direct and
profound contact with it, than to be a mere "speculator" in Christianity
who claims to "understand" it. Truth may be an attractive thing,
but it always exercises its attraction by means of other charms than the
could there be any response? How, for instance, could the individual,
Jaspers, devise a philosophy of existence (even granting the non-generality
of existence) instead of merely talking to himself, since he himself is an
existent? This is what he himself quite realized. A philosophy which
is concerned with the human state is always to some extent a philosophy
which is concerned with spirituality. But, instead of a continuous
spirituality, instead of a sort of ontological manna scattered over the totalness of existents, Jaspers sees the intimate unity of existents as a kind of
rattling of a chain of appeals and responses, as a series of enthusiasms
and freedoms working in with each other and daring each other in their
common effort to attain transcendence. Another-person does not always
represent nothingness and hostility towards another-person, or, at least,
he does not, in so far as elementary dispersion of indifference and conflict
are concerned. Another-person represents a presence and an appeal;
another-person is similar, while, at the same time, remaining unalterably
____________________
11
Sometimes Jaspers calls transcendence "the particular-general" (Einzigallgemein).
-113another-person in the unfortunate state in which we find ourselves.
But if it is intercourse (which, by turns, takes the form of combat and
spiritual communion) which constitutes existence, as Jaspers claims,
then there can no longer be as many forms of truth as there are
existents. In order to achieve the state of being, existence must not only
be, but it must also appear. Existence itself is simultaneously within
and without; it represents intention at the same time as it represents
intensity. From this point on there can no longer be any original sin of
objectivity. "It is through philosophy that objectivity is called in
question. But the danger in such a form of reflexion is that it dissolves
all content . . . and is left stranded in Nihilism. The aim of philosophy
is to get a fresh grip on objectivity and so make it the means of causing
existence to appear." There is no longer any need to speak of the death
of objectivity, except in the sense in which Unamuno 12 evoked the anguish
of Christianity, in the sense of the anguish of objectivity, in the sense of a
passionate, necessary, unfortunate, but, nevertheless, transforming struggle,
in the sense of being which is accompanied by its own manifestation.
We realize how vigorously Heidegger proclaims the difference between
his ultra-Existential philosophy and the Existential philosophy of Kierkegaard and Jaspers. These two, he asserts (and we now know at what
price of simplification he does assert it), are acquainted only with
individual and incommunicable existents. He never stops proclaiming
(as they do) that, on the contrary, his ultimate aim is to elucidate the
I should like to suggest to M. Sartre that he apply Existential psychoanalysis to this "phobia of the Double," because it does not seem to be
absent from the opening pages of Being and Nothingness. Classical
psycho-analysis is concerned precisely with this, and has discovered
that, within this fear of our Double, there is the petrified anguish of our
own abysmal state. Or, to express it more clearly, this fear seems to
indicate, in an ambivalent way, that the evidence (which daily becomes
more concrete) concerning the world need not obliterate the meaning
of our presence nor our scrupulousness against basely reducing this
world of ours to our own standards. But mere denunciation of an
optical illusion is not sufficient to reveal its cause. We still want to know
if the "illusion of 'The Looking-Glass World'" does not presuppose,
because of its generality (which is ill-adapted to make allowance for
particular cases) a form of intuition, which is difficult to express
and which is really nothing but an imperfect reflexion from the
Glass.
This fear of laying oneself open to such an illusion proceeds, by means
-117of a sort of supercompensation, to corrode right through to this presenceof-being-belonging-to-oneself, right through to this form of living
repetition, and right through to that ample reservoir which constitutes
the immediate experience of being. As far as its most intimate life is
concerned, being certainly makes us think of Looking-Glass being, of
a sort of ontological denseness. But it is not a distorted projection on
to an abstract screen of complete being. Through its superabundance
and its perseverance, it reveals a vigorous source of being. The project
of the Looking-Glass World is, of course, a primary project, and one
which gives opportunity for thinking. But here, as so often, it happens
that the imperfect grasp of a badly detached truth is more valuable than
aberrations which have, for so long, been regarded as abstractions. In
criticising the project of the Looking-Glass World, we have gone to the
extreme of denying being itself--that form of being which gushes forth
from being, as well as the movement which impels it to make it gush
forth out of nothingness.
Sartre's particular form of nothingness is undoubtedly an advance
upon his predecessors' notions. Up to now, when you talked about
the sovereignty of nothingness, you meant by nothingness a sort of object,
a sort of negative universe--you used the word in the sense implied
when nothingness is humorously referred to as the substance of things.
There is little difficulty in showing that what was still meant by the
term "substance," which is now denied, was, literally, a form of substance
whose content of nothingness could only be established through some
kind of insincerity and playing about with words which permitted the
being of what they designated to be simultaneously affirmed and denied.
To this shadowy form of substantialism Sartre has applied the classical
criticism of a clearly-defined form of substantialism, and so connected
the philosophy of nothingness with the dialectic again. Nothingness
does not be; it is created by an absence of something; it persistently
thrusts before its own absence the state of flight from a form of detotalization which has never been totalized--the term "nothingized" is still
too strong an expression to use. We must, therefore, fall back on those
horrible neutral expressions which Psycho-analysis has successfully
used to denote a world from which all basis of personality has been
excluded. "That nothingizes on all sides." That actually nothingizes
much more than even Sartre's vocabulary claims, for, as we shall see,
in no way does he retain the right to speak of being.
What, exactly, is this concept of being?
When I put myself in front of being as an observer, what is, is
-118whatever I cannot entirely dispose of, whatever is, as far as I am concerned,
at least partly, a revelation of experience. Looked at from the inward
point of view, it is what survives; it is not only the identification of
self with self, which is a sort of paraded non-existence, but it also represents superabundance and leaping-forth--in a word, it represents creative
accomplishment. To accept the idea of being, is, then, to accept the
proposition that there is in front of me someone else besides myself, and
that, in being, there is some other sort of being than the actual being
which is present. By adopting such an attitude we gain a positive ability
for mobility: accomplishment, which is not actually present and which
is motivated by its intimate superabundance. The idea of creative
accomplishment occupies a central place in ontology. It expresses
simultaneously the abundance and the poverty which characterize our
experience of being.
Sartre has anticipated this dialectic of accomplishment and inward
mobility in being. But he breaks it up into two parts. He sets them
up opposite each other like two stumps of incommunicable being, though,
quite erroneously, he retains the name being for each of them. On the
one side, in "being-in-oneself," he petrifies accomplishment into mere
massiveness. Such a form of immobilization is fatal from the moment
when he denies being any inward dimension of spontaneity, and denies
it all depth of content. Being "is unveiled just as it is." There is no
power; everything depends on manifestation. If it is the case that being
is apparently disrobed by our grasp and that it is continuously fleeing
is not a source of power; it cannot give the for-oneself mobility and propulsive force. Propulsive force can no longer come to it from the stupid
immobility of the in-oneself. Thus, it can only represent a fall (or, if
you prefer not to use a term which has too much moral implication)
it represents a flight of the for-oneself in face of the in-oneself. Sartre
would call it a flight in face of clogging. 4 And, once more, we encounter
in his works, in reference to the relationship of the human being to otherness, that particular sensibility to appropriation, that special intolerance
of ontological contact, that degeneration of the state of encounter into
mere adhesiveness. In fact, this notion of adhesiveness certainly seems
to be the most constantly-recurring project in his particular view of the
world. Another-person can, perhaps, be represented by the LookingGlass "me" as well as by the Looking-Glass World. According to
Sartre, being glued to another-person, and being glued to oneself
are the two permanent ontological dangers. He has arranged being which
____________________
2
L'tre et le Nant, p. 195
3
Ibid, p. 353.
4
Ibid., p. 193
-120confronts man in such a way that it has nothing to offer man except an
avidity for snapping him up and reabsorbing him into his stupidity.
Man's being can do no more than flee from it in horror. This almost
hallucinating caricature of the makeup of the in-oneself state seems to
betray a sort of ontological tit-for-tat attitude, the meaning of which is
presented to us by Sartre himself in his analysis of Sadism.
We must remember that the Sadist is the man who is unable to
possess another-person within the bounds of another-person's freedom,
and, consequently, furiously sets to work to reduce him to an object,
in order to deprive him of that freedom which he, the Sadist, lacks.
What seems to happen is that, having only offered existence a desire for
possession and having found no means of attaining it, because it wants
to be summoned and loved, not appropriated, the Sartrian man directs
against it the resentment arising from his ontological disappointment.
He does this by presenting himself to it thereafter as something which
is intolerably stupid as far as the human being is concerned. The devaluation of being-in-oneself is the form of revenge which is indulged in by
the disappointed possessor. Sartre has, moreover, not concealed from
himself the fact that inability to possess arouses the desire to destroy,
and he even analyses the emotion of generosity down to a form of accelerated destruction. Then the Sartrian man projects his own avidity
into this devitalized and inaccessible form of being.
III.
without being
raised in the same
degree to a
superior way of
living
or to a more
perfect degree of
accomplishment.
Here, in fact, it is
not a question of
an articulated and
projective form of
immanence,
since, in the end, it
is towards himself
that the existent is
projected.
Finally
transcendence,
rightly so-called
(what Jean Wahl
calls
transascendence),
which lies in the
midst of existence,
the
experience of an
infinite, or, at
least, of an
indefinite
movement towards
a state of superbeing, a movement
so clearly inherent
in being that it
either accepts itself
along with the
movement or else
it rejects itself and
the movement too.
Confusion arising from the use of words, which we thus try to limit,
comes partly from that experience of authentic transcendence (which
is a form of conquest suggested to our freedom) which always presents
itself whenever there is a state of ambivalence. The freedom of man
cannot, in fact, be exercised except through decision, and, in order to
with words. Imaginary outlines of schemes in which I project my experience of inexhaustibility matter little. What does matter is the
amount of reality which it contains. It is such that the undiscovered
wealth of being, instead of diminishing with the number of my grasps,
seems to me even more inexhaustible than my investigation has shown
it to be.
Very closely connected with this initial form of experience is the
experience of irruption. I cannot contain my existence within me.
Whenever I am subject to a sensation, my thinking faculty is already
brooding and planning; in my thinking faculty there is something more
than my thinking faculty; in my desired will, dull sorts of desiring wills
which carry me beyond my consciously desired goals, and sometimes
they carry me in the inverse direction. It is upon such a type of experience
as this that the dialectic of a man like Maurice Blondel is based; his
is an immanence system which leads to a detachment from transcendence.
Enthusiasm is the affective aspect of this ontological experience.
____________________
8
This is a Platonic reference, and a reference to St. Augustine, and it also reminds
us of Pascal "Thou wouldst not have sought me, hadst thou already
found me," and of Kierkegaard's notion of "in the sight of God."
-125If the emphasis is placed less on the effervescence from this form
of inward super-being than on the inevitable character of its claim,
that is, on the way in which it predicts our own present state, then it
will represent the description of an experience of presence, and,
correlatively, an experience of attestation. We have met such a type of
description several times in the works of Gabriel Marcel. My being
does not represent my life. It represents a constant state of disappropriation of the "me--I," something which is inspired by whatever
within me causes me to fly into a rage with myself (when this rage reaches
the stage of white heat, it represents the experience of admiration). It
represents a recourse to a form of being which is better than my
empirical state of being, and better than my present state of being or my
individual state of being. It is here that the experiences of fidelity,
pardon and loyalism, are brought into play which are, at once, the
negation of the autonomy of solipsism and of heteronomy, a state in
which some people believe the relationships of transcendence can be
debased. My being is not only thrust into a state of abandonment,
just as if it had been "thrown there," but it is also conceived as having
been put there and forewarned into the experience of recourse to or
nostalgia for the factor of pardon.
GRENIER, J.
L'Existence
KIERKEGAARD
Christ (d. Tisseau)
Crainte et Tremblement (Eng. Trans. Fear and Trembling. O.U.P.)
L'cole du Christianisme (Eng. Trans. Training in Christianity.
O.U.P.)
Le Concept d'angoisse (Eng. Trans. The Concept of Dread. O.U.P.)
La Rptition (Eng. Trans. Repetition. O.U.P.)
Ou bien . . . Ou bien (Eng. Trans. Either . . . Or. O.U.P.)
Post-Scriptum (Eng. Trans. Concluding Unscientific Postscript. O.U.P.)
LANDSBERG
Rflexions sur l'engagement personnel
MARCEL, G.
tre et Avoir
Du refus l'invocation
Homo Viator
-136NIETZSCHE
Considrations inactuelles (Eng. Trans. Thoughts out of Season)
Crpuscule des Idoles (Eng. Trans. Twilight of the Idols)
Volont de Puissance (Eng. Trans. The Will to Power)
Par del le Bien et le Mal (Eng. Trans. Beyond Good and Evil)
Positions et Approches . . .
Aurore (Eng. Trans. The Dawn of Day)
Zarathoustra (Eng. Trans. Thus spake Zarathustra)
Alternative, The, 63
Anguish, 32 -4, 42, 45 -6, 52, 55, 94 -5,
97, 114
Another-person, 111, 113 -4, 117, 120
see also Other-person-ness
Aristotle, 15
Atheism, 73 -4, 97
see also Existentialism, Atheistic
Attachment, Concepts of, 36, 46,
61 -71, 84, 90, 92, 99.
Attachment, Kierkegaard's concept of,
63 -5, 91
Attestation, Experience of, 126
Authentic Behaviour, 94
Authentic Life, 55 -9, 74, 80, 88
Authenticity, 16, 90, 94, 108
Autonomy, 52
BARRS, 21
Barth, Karl, 3, 5, 95
Being, Conceptions of, 15 -6, 18 -9,
25 -6, 30 -2, 95, 104, 108, 117 -30
Being, Encroachment of, 36
Being, Heidegger's concept of, 93 -4,
114 -5
Being, Sartre's concept of, 101, 119 -20
Being and Nothingness, 117
Being-for-oneself, 30, 37, 43, 104, 120
Being-in-a-situation, 65, 79, 102
Being-in-oneself, 30 -1, 36 -7, 43, 119 -20
Benda, M., 20
Berdyaev, N., 3, 5, 17, 50, 96 (note),
123 (note), 136
Bergson, 3, 5, 19, 31, 49 (note), 69, 100
Biran, Maine de, 3 -4, 32
Blondel, Maurice, 3, 5, 9, 30, 125
Boivin 75 (note)
Boredom, 128
Bounding-Leap, 29 -31, 36
Broken World, The, 15 (note)
Buber, Martin, 3, 5, 74 (note), 87
CALVIN, 23 (note)
Camus, 26 (note), 136
Castle, The, 91
Categorical Imperative, Theory of, 7
(note)
"Certain Knowledge," 13
Chesterton, 27
Chestov, 3, 5, 17, 28, 136
Choice, 57 -60, 62, 66, 115, 121
Choice, Religious, 58
Christian Absolute, 62
Christian Philosophy, 2, 4 -5, 14, 23,
27, 34 -40, 44, 46, 63, 110, see
also Existentialism, Christian
Cicero, 134
Ciphers, 128
Claudel, 5, 8
Cogito, 13, 32, 75, 80
Conclusive-Finality, 37 -40
Contingency of the Human Being,
24 -6
Conscience, 13, 96
Counter Reformation, 23, 44
Crisis, 32
Crude Existent, Heidegger's, 30
DASEIN, Theory of 16, 114 -5
Day-time, Philosophy of, 112, 128
Death, 9, 31, 37 -40, 59, 66, 76, 78
Deceit, 92
Decision, 34, 47, 59, 96, 104, 124, 127
De Cuse, Nicholas, 112
Defiance, 57, 86, 128 -9
Demoniac, Definition of, 51
"Dereliction," 66
Descartes, 2, 30, 75, 80, 108
Despair, 26, 29, 44, 46 -8, 54, 73,
93 -5
"Despairing Man's Movement," 45
Detachability, 33, 60, 83 -4, 86
Detachment, 64
Determined Existence, 67
Determinism, 90, 101
Dialectics, 2 (note), 28
"Dirty Beasts," 10, 30, 56 -7, 59, 78,
97
Diversion, 54
Divine Decision, 96
Divine Grace, 23 (note), 37, 94
Divine Presence, Theory of, 5 -6, 22,
24
Duhem, 111
Drer's Soldier of Death, 39
-139
ECLECTI
C
Philosophe
rs, 123
(note)
Efficacy, 99
Effort, 32
Either . . . Or 34, 131
Encounter, State of, 120
Energy, Concept of, 31 -2
Epicureanism, 29
Estrangement, 35 -7, 56, 72
Eternal Will, 96
Eternity, Concept of, 27, 31
Ethical Plane, 57 -8, 96
Exceptional Being, 40, 51 (note)
Exist, To, 53, 57
Existence, Concepts of, 8 -11, 19 -21,
23 -49
Existence, Concepts of, Heidegger's,
29, 39
Existence, Concepts of, Sartre's, 30 -1
Existence, Lost, 54 -7
Existence, Regained, 57 -60
Existence and Truth, 107 -16
Existentialism, Atheistic, 6, 25, 28, 36,
44, 68, 73 -4, 96 -7, 129 -30
Existentialism, Christian, 4 -5, 14, 20,
24 -6, 35, 38, 44, 68, 73, 85, 98 -100,
125, 127, 129
Existentialism, Contemporary, 71
"Extentialism Existentialist," 105
Existentialist Tree, 3 -4, 67 -8
FAITH, 28, 47, 58 -9, 100, 127,
131, 133
Falseness, 56
Feuerbach, 35
Fondane, Benjamin, 45
For-being, 88
Franciscan Teaching, 37
Freedom, 35, 41, 56, 59, 61, 67,
76 -8, 87, 99 -105, 124, 127
Frenzy, 32 -3, 46
Freud, 20
VALRY, 11
Vicious Circle, 77 (note), 134, 137
Viscosity, Concept of, 37
Vitalism, 121
WAGNER, 132
Wahl, Jean, 27, 29, 94, 107, 123 -4, 137
Wallon, H., 75, 137
With-being, 88
"Wrenching," 19
XENOPHON, 134
ZARATHUSTRA, 40, 51 (note), 132
-142