Existentialism 9781847600110

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The World is all that is the case

Philosophy Insights General Editor: Mark Addis

Existentialism Richard Gravil

‘Existence precedes Essence’ For advice on use of this ebook please scroll to page 2

Publication Data © Richard Gravil, 2007 The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Humanities-Ebooks.co.uk Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE

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ISBN 978-1-84760-011-0

Existentialism Richard Gravil

Bibliographical Entry: Gravil, Richard. Existentialism. Philosophy Insights. Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007

A Note on the Author Richard Gravil took his BA in Wales and his PhD at East Anglia. He has taught in the University of Victoria, B.C., the University of Łódż, Poland, and the University of Otago, New Zealand. His books include Romantic Dialogues: Anglo-American Continuities, 1776–1862, (St Martin’s, 2000) Wordsworth’s Bardic Vocation, 1787–1842 (Palgrave, 2003), and five edited works including Master Narratives: Tellers and Telling in the Nineteenth Century Novel (Ashgate, 2001). He is Managing Director of Humanities-Ebooks.co.uk and Academic Convenor of the Wordsworth Winter School and Summer Conference.

Contents A Note on the Author 1. ����������� INTRODUCTION

The historical moment: Paris in Wartime Existentialism comes into Existence Existentialism and Philosophical Tradition Existentialism and Phenomenology

2. ������������� ABANDONMENT, ����������� ABSURDITY, �������� AMBIGUITY Abandonment The Absurd and Ambiguity The ‘They’ Dread

3. WHAT ����� IS ��� MAN? ���

Consciousness and Freedom Being-in-itself and Being-for-itself Bad Faith Condemned to be Free Facticity and Possibility Being Dasein, or there-being Being-in-the-World Care Temporality Death Freedom-towards-death

4. ����� WHAT CAN ������I KNOW? ����

Philosophical Authority Subjective Truth Values

Irony

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Being-in-Truth The Encompassing The ‘Question-in-the-World’ A Caveat—Sartrean Solipsism

5. WHAT ����� MUST �������I DO? ��

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Sublimation The Will-to-Power The Superman The Choice of Existence Despair Choice of Self The Project Engagement The Kingdom of Ends Ends and Means Sartre’s Revolutionary Theory The Threefold Living Relation

Biographies 1. SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR 2. MARTIN HEIDEGGER 3. KARL JASPERS 4. SØREN KIERKEGAARD 5. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE 6. JEAN-PAUL SARTRE

A Glossary of Existentialist Terms Recommended Reading Works Cited Online Resources

Chapter 1 Introduction This introductory study sets out to trace the origins of one of the most influential movements in modern thought and to explain the principles that lie behind it. It looks at the historical background to the rise of Existentialism and examines the lives and works both of the leading Existentialists and of those earlier philosophers whose writings had an influence on them. Primarily, however, it is concerned with explaining what Existentialist thought involves and how Existentialist writers have set about trying to answer the fundamental questions that lie at the heart of all philosophy: Why do we exist? What is our purpose in life? What is our relation to the world, and to other people? There is some dispute as to who should be termed an Existentialist, since some its major figures were reluctant to be classified as such, and had considerable disagreements with each other. I shall take the broad view, and include the nineteenth-century precursors, Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, the major twentieth-century philosophers, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir (the hyperlinks here lead to brief biographical sketches), and a number of associated figures who have worked under the Existentialist umbrella, including two theologians, Gabriel Marcel and Martin Buber. To begin with a thumbnail sketch: essentially, Existentialism is ‘the philosophy of existence’, as opposed to those kinds of philosophy which are concerned with a realm of permanent ‘realities’ above and beyond this world of unstable ‘appearances’ or are restricted to what one can be logically positive about. To Descartes’ famous declaration, ‘I think therefore I am’, the Existentialists reply, in a variety of voices, ‘I think therefore I think: but whether I exist is another matter altogether’; ‘I rebel, therefore we exist’; ‘I am, therefore I think’. They assert, in contradistinction to a purely rationalist view of man, the themes of human being, and human freedom, and human action. The briefest summary of Existentialism is Sartre’s phrase ‘existence precedes essence’. You are what you do. This is an attack on the notion that people come ready-made, as it were, with predetermined personalities or fates. In Existentialism you choose your own fate, and you determine what you (in essence) are: even if you

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avoid decisive choices, or acts, you are responsible for that avoidance. You also create your own values. There is no authoritative tablet of stone bearing God’s unambiguous commandments for the good life. Even if there was once such a thing, it no longer has authority for modern man, because—in Nietzsche’s dramatic declaration—‘God is dead’. There are in fact Christian Existentialists—including the first Existentialist, Søren Kierkegaard—but for them, too, God’s will is objectively unknowable. Existentialists agree that only people can exist. (Tables and dogs just are.) The Latin root of the word is ex-sistere which means to stand out; man cannot avoid being conscious of himself, which means being able to stand off and look at himself, or transcend what he is. Human being is inescapably a constant self-transcendence. But some Existentialists tend to use the word existence to denote a particular quality of human being. ‘Existence’ always means the mode of existence of a concrete individual life, but it is also used to denote awakened self-determined life. Just as the narrator in Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952) is surrounded by ‘sleep-walkers’, all the Existentialists have their own favourite terms for the unawakened, who merely exist in the everyday sense of the word, and their own terms for fulfilled, or authentic, existence. There is a sort of Existentialist myth, like the Romantic myth of rebirth, or the Christian scheme of redemption from a fallen state. It goes like this (each of the italicised terms I am about to use is part of the Existentialist lexicon, and will be expanded upon in subsequent chapters). Most people are unawakened. They have not encountered themselves or their freedom. They do not even realise that life is absurd: it has no meaning, beyond what we give it. They have not heard that God is dead, that we make our own morality and that it is immoral to submit to a moral code you have not chosen. They identify with ‘the they’ (a Heideggerian term for aggregate impersonal existence), think what ‘they’ think, judge as ‘they’ judge, and so on. They are just segments of the crowd. They are in flight from themselves. But it is possible to come into existence through various agencies: perhaps a particular mood—especially nausea (Sartre), or dread (Kierkegaard)—or some kind of encounter (Buber and Heidegger), which awakens them from everydayness into a consciousness in which it is open to them to choose themselves and their freedom. The language for describing this process is bound to be paradoxical. Since you both are and are not what you are, such everyday phrases as ‘being yourself are not very helpful! Only God can say ‘I am what I am’. Your life is made up of facticity and possibility: your facticity is present and objective, while your possibility is (yet) to be. Heidegger says man is ‘a being-towards’: which means that the future is the

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important bit of you. You are always becoming, but this is frightening, and we like to escape either into some nice fixed role in which we can hide (often one that others have chosen for us), or into pure transcendence, both of which manoeuvres are forms of bad faith. Sartre’s major work, Being and Nothingness (1943), sets out the key elements of Existentialist ontology (or theory of being) very authoritatively and compre-hensively. He describes human ‘being’ as having three modes: being-in-itself, being-for-itself, and being-for-others. Very roughly: being-for-itself is free unconditioned consciousness, and being-in-itself is what you are conscious of in self-consciousness, while being-for-others is what you are as the object of someone else’s consciousness. This may sound complicated and technical, but it is a useful tool when it comes to analysing how people behave. Sartre is very good at describing the games people play, as they exploit this ambiguity: at one minute we identify wholly with our past, as though we are unchanging; but the next minute we refuse to be identified with some action performed a moment ago. For example: I am a radical, even though I haven’t done anything radical for twenty years and habitually resist all proposals for change in my daily life; but I am not a wife beater even though I struck my wife yesterday. In other words we all have different ways of thinking about who we are, and we pick and choose according to whichever theory produces the most flattering self-image or the least anxiety. However, you are condemned to be free: you cannot escape it. In its toughest form Existentialism denies man the excuse of any determinants, whether Freudian or Marxist or Feminist. If you have an inferiority complex, it is because that is the way you choose to see yourself in relation to others. You may think you are disadvantaged because you are a woman, but the true cause is that you choose to be submissive. (Both Sartre and de Beauvoir watered down their Existentialism as they embraced Marxism and Feminism which tend to perceive people as conditioned by society). While most Existentialists put a lot of stress on interpersonal life (‘all real living is meeting’ according to Buber), Existentialism is profoundly committed to the individual as the real basis of existence. There is no way in which a party or a state can usurp your total responsibility for your actions. The crowd ‘is untruth’ (Kierkegaard). Ultimately you are alone: in Sartre especially, there is a powerful logical drive towards the idea that it is impossible to know another—but since he is a politically engaged radical humanist he finds a way of arguing that when all are free, all will desire the freedom of others, so common political action and social reality become possible.

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The historical moment: Paris in Wartime In general I shall be looking at Existentialism as a long-established tendency in human thought, and the main branch of radical ethical thought throughout the period since the French Revolution of 1789. Popularly, however, Existentialism means something rather more localised: a Franco-German intellectual phenomenon which arose in the 1940s and 1950s, influenced the literature and cinema and life-styles of the Western countries throughout the 1960s, and gave way to new fashions of thought, for example, structuralism and neo-Marxism, in the 1970s. It is true that the term Existentialism first came into currency in the 1940s, and it seems appropriate to look first at Existentialism as it was developed by a group of Parisian intellectuals—notably Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), Simone de Beauvoir (1908–86), Albert Camus (1913– 60) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–61)—during the Second World War. JeanPaul Sartre was involved with the French Resistance during the war, and in 1940 was briefly imprisoned by the Germans. For him and for Simone de Beauvoir, who shared his life from the 1930s until his death, the war meant the abandonment of relatively privileged positions in the bourgeois intelligentsia, and the experience of engagement in human affairs—specifically the attempt to forge a socialist future. The end of the war was looked forward to almost in the spirit which young people—and particularly the Romantic poets—felt in the decade of the French Revolution, as an opportunity for the total reconstruction of humanity and human society. In her autobiography The Prime of Life (1960) Beauvoir reflects on the optimism and commitment she shared with Sartre, Camus, Merleau-Ponty and others at that time: although surrounded by competing systems and ideas ‘their defeat was imminent, and our task would be to shape the future’ (The Prime of Life, p. 562) The works of Sartre, of Beauvoir, and Camus, in fiction, theatre and philosophical essays, stressed liberty, human responsibility, and the emptiness of all systems of authority, especially in moral and metaphysical matters. Such a radical recasting of the intellectual universe caught the mood of the times. The period between 1938 and 1948 saw the publication of Sartre’s Nausea (1938), The Flies (1943), and No Exit (1944), Camus’s The Outsider (1942), The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), and The Plague (1947), Beauvoir’s The Blood of Others (1945) and All Men are Mortal (1946). In these early works of fiction and theatre, works of an unusually doctrinal nature, Sartre and Beauvoir, in particular, familiarised their public with many of the themes of   Full bibliographical details of works quoted in the text are given in the Recommended reading section.

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their more formal work: such themes as the ‘contingency’ of existence, the ‘anguish’ of action, ‘freedom’ as the ground of human existence, the threat of ‘the other’, the ‘absurd’, the idea of ‘nothingness’ as a fundamental constituent of existence. In consequence, they helped to create a remarkably wide audience for Merleau-Ponty’s dauntingly titled study of The Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and even for such monumental (and at times monumentally difficult) works as Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and (even more difficult) Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927). Existentialism comes into Existence In 1943, Beauvoir later claimed, she was embarrassed for an answer when asked whether she was an Existentialist, and attributed the term to Gabriel Marcel (Prime of Life, p. 548). Sartre at this time also rejected the term as applied to himself, even though he had already written, in Being and Nothingness, then being prepared for publication, one of Existentialism’s primary works. The question led Beauvoir to an invitation to write on the subject. She already knew the manuscript of Being and Nothingness intimately; she had already explored a number of philosophical issues in writing both The Blood of Others and She Came to Stay, and she was, after all, a philosopher by training (she studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, and graduated in 1929, taking second place to Sartre). Partly because of the preoccupation of the novels, her essay Pyrrhus et Cinéas is particularly eloquent on the existential meaning of death, which theme is the foundation of Heidegger’s Being and Time. In Heidegger and other existentialists, death gives point to our lives: ‘In Pyrrhus et Cinéas I wanted to demonstrate that without it there could be neither projects nor values’ and as its title implies, her next novel, All Men are Mortal, takes death as its central theme (The Prime of Life, p. 606). Pyrrhus et Cinéas is cast in the form of a debate between an active, adventurous kind of man, and a quietist, as to the meaning of life and the validity of action. In it she argues that any morality based on the idea of eternity is false, because ‘no human individual can establish a genuine relationship with the infinite, be it labelled God or Humanity’. At the same time she refused to admit that ‘other people’ could be used as an alibi. War does not free people from the responsibility for what they do, even if   I shall, on the whole report on the story of Existentialism as it is broadly understood. You should be aware, however, that Kate Fullbrook and Edward Fullbrook, in Sartre and Beauvoir: the Remaking of a Twentieth-Century Legend (Basic Books [Harper-Collins], New York, 1994) have argued cogently and in detail that Sartre found the arguments of his major work ready made in Beauvoir s early novel She Came to Stay. Their book makes a strong though not conclusive case for this view.

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they find it necessary to consent to violence, as implied in another of her novel titles, The Blood of Others (The Prime of Life, pp. 548–9) Part Two of the essay dealt with liberty: Liberty is the very modal essence of existence.… On the other hand actual concrete possibilities vary from one person to the next.… An activity is good when you aim … to set freedom free. (The Prime of Life, pp. 548-9)

The emphasis here upon situation, action, liberty and, if necessary, violence (the violence of the Resistance or of political struggle) marks the essay as one born out of the Resistance. It was to a war-torn people, needing a way to reconcile history and ethics, and anxious to find an alternative to Marxism, that the early works of Parisian Existentialism were addressed. Existentialism and Philosophical Tradition When Sartre and Beauvoir decided to make use of the term Existentialism they enrolled themselves in a remarkably varied tradition of thought. They themselves, having rejected their religious upbringings, were staunchly atheistic. Existentialism, which stems from the Christian Søren Kierkegaard (1813–55), as well as the anguished antiChristian Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), is not, however, necessarily atheistic. In fact, it seems to make very little difference whether an Existentialist believes in God or not. Martin Heidegger (1899–1976), for instance, who is technically the most influential of modern Existentialist philosophers, is not easily classified, as his atheism seems to involve a kind of poetic mysticism. Existentialism has also sheltered the independent theism of Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), a philosopher whose work some rate as highly as that of Heidegger, the benign Catholic Existentialism of Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973), and the genial theology of the great Jewish philosopher of religion, Martin Buber (1878–1965). These three contribute much of the light and   Gabriel Marcel’s work is the main body of Christian Existentialism in France and can be compared to that of Karl Jaspers in that although it deals with the same problems as those which are represented in the work of Sartre and Camus, it does so from the standpoint of occasionally radiant faith, Being and Having (1933) began as a metaphysical diary of the years 1928–33, and his whole output, related as it is to lived experience, has something of the immediacy and intimacy of Kierkegaard’s. In addition to a variety of philosophical essays his work includes a study of Coleridge and many plays.   Martin Buber was born in Vienna of a family of Hebrew scholars. After studying philosophy he edited two Zionist periodicals, Welt and Der Jude. In 1923, in which year he became Professor of the Philosophy of Religion at Frankfurt, he published his major work I and Thou, a culminating statement

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warmth to the Existentialist tradition, concerning themselves with man’s possibilities of relationship to the divine and to other men, with his need and capacity for ‘thou-saying’. Its political variety extends from the apolitical Heidegger (whose failure to pronounce on Nazism or to resist its influence in his university has been the subject of much controversy) to the Existentialism-Marxism of Sartre. Albert Camus, though a close friend and collaborator of Sartre and Beauvoir in the 1940s, never accepted the term Existentialism, as applied to himself, because of its association with both Christianity (he was resolutely agnostic) and Marxism (his position was broadly social-democratic). What these figures all share is a philosophical method known as phenomenology, which in some ways derives from Kierkegaard, but in its modern sense is associated with one founding father I have so far not mentioned: the German academic philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), whose student Heidegger was. But before I attempt to describe phenomenology, I must briefly contextualise the Existentialists in terms of traditional philosophy. In one sense it should be easy to slot Existentialism into the philosophical tradition, since such figures as René Descartes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel and Artur Schopenhauer are constant reference points for the Existentialists. From Descartes to Kant the thrust of philosophy is a sceptical onslaught upon the capacity of the mind to be certain of anything in the material and metaphysical realms of thought. In Hegel and Schopenhauer we find a preoccu-pation with the idea that human reality is dialectical and evolving, a manifestation of process, a perpetual becoming. On the face of it, these ideas should be congenial to the Existentialists. Yet to pass from academic philosophy to Existentialism is to enter an arena where the preoccupations seem wholly different. One gets the sense that Existentialism is an indictment, rather than a continuation, of the philosophical tradition—an indictment based upon the refusal of academic philosophy to express the despair it ought to feel if it believes what it says. Existentialists, from Kierkegaard onwards, have been deeply suspicious of the tendency of philosophy to build elaborate self-referential metaphysical systems, often of the most terrifying sceptical nature, from which their creators habitually escape into ‘real life’ at the end of each day. In particular, Existentialism could be said to origiin the long philosophical debate concerning the relations between the ego and the world. In 1938 he moved permanently to Israel. Between Man and Man (1947) collected a number of major essays, originally published in the years 1928-38, which contribute eloquently to the definition of Existentialism

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nate in the impatience of Kierkegaard with the ambitious systematizing of Hegel, and Nietzsche’s impatience with what he saw as the insincerity of Hume, the misguidedness of Kant and the hypocritical pessimism of Schopenhauer. There is no space in this short account of Existentialism to deal with all the philosophers who influenced the Existentialists, and certainly we cannot explain their ideas in any detail, or in a way that does them justice (the reader is referred to such works as Roger Scruton’s A Short History of Modern Philosophy: from Descartes to Wittgenstein (1981) for authoritative expositions). But it may be as well to briefly introduce some of them at this point, if only to explain what it was in their work that the Existentialists found objectionable. In particular, we cannot avoid a glance at Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer. René Descartes (1596–1650), whose surname gives us the term ‘Cartesian’ as a synonym for rational enquiry, is a major influence and a major stumbling block at once. His Discourse on Method (1637) is a philosophical manifesto committing himself to methodical enquiry, based upon systematic doubt and logical process rather than empirical investigation. Among the problems which he bequeathed to posterity was a radical dualism—his work prompted much philosophical enquiry into how an immaterial soul (which we are essentially, according to Descartes) can interact with material substance. Much of the preoccupation of Sartre and Heidegger with the contemplation of matter as alien to consciousness stems from Descartes. Another crux was his famous ‘cogito’, already referred to: to say cogito ergo sum, or, ‘I think, therefore I am’, appears to identify thought with existence. It is true that Existentialists are also preoccupied with consciousness and its freedom, but from the standpoint of Kierkegaard, to whom existence is a matter of choice and act, and not merely thought, the work of Descartes is evasive of human reality. Also, despite preaching ‘doubt’ as essential to philosophical method, Descartes appears to evade metaphysical Angst: he begins by ‘proving’, somewhat cavalierly, the existence of ‘God’, as a sort of guarantor of his thought. To some, this is little more than a philosophical conjuring trick. The Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–76) was arguably the most important of the eighteenth-century British philosophers. Although classed as an empiricist—one who argues from observation—his scepticism carried him far beyond that of Descartes. Along with challenging the idea that we can know anything of the material world, he rejected the idea of God (or, at least, regarded the bungling creator of this world as an object of derision), questioned the idea of the self, and undermined the notion that there is any basis for moral values other than sentiment. From the standpoint of Nietzsche such scepticism ought to have had consequences: if every-

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thing is subjective, yet there is no ‘subject’, what then? The fact that Hume went on holding views for which he had ‘proved’ there was no justification was evidence of a fundamental frivolity. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was inspired, or challenged, by the scepticism of David Hume into producing a new basis for rational enquiry, known as ‘transcendental idealism’. This term implies transcendence of the dichotomies in which rationalism and empiricism get bogged down. Kant argued that what the mind knows is a world of phenomena, not noumena, or things-in-themselves, and his philosophy leaves somewhat open the question of whether what cannot be known ‘in itself can be asserted to exist. His followers have taken both positions. For the English Romantics Kant’s importance was that he stood British empiricism on its head: our minds are not shaped by the world of objects, as John Locke (1632–1704) had implied, but vice versa, objects conform to the structures of the mind—the mind is co-creative of reality. From this aspect of his work, however, his German successors developed an extreme and anti-scientific subjectivism, reducible to the position that ‘the world is my idea’—a position which is not altogether easy to distinguish from lunacy. Despite the difficulty of his principal works, The Critique of Pure Reason (1781) and The Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Kant is a remarkably common-sense philosopher, whose work essentially distinguishes between those things which can be experienced and empirically demonstrated and those which cannot. You cannot philosophise without assuming what most philosophy strives to prove. One cannot prove the existence of God, freedom and immortality, under the aegis of pure reason, and the attempt to do so only leads to contradictions. Practical reason, however, takes them as given—they are postulates of reason and of the moral life. His Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785) is a classic, perhaps the classic, exposition of the doctrine that every man must be treated as an end and never as a means—its influence is apparent in the ethical arguments of Beauvoir and Sartre. There is, however, an element of sleight of hand in Kant’s progression from an original scepticism about noumenal realities, to his confident reinstatement of God, and his dogmatic certainty about categorical imperatives, which both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche found objectionable. If it is hard to summarise Kant, it is harder still to reduce Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) to a note. He is in some ways the most messianic of the great philosophers, and a species of logical mystic. His premise in The Phenomenology of Mind (1807) and The Science of Logic (1816) is the unity of the knower and the known: we exist by knowing, and the world exists in that it is known. His famous

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dialectic—of thesis, antithesis, synthesis—which he borrowed from Kant, is a process of inclusion. Intellectually, the enquiring mind encounters the resistance of what it seeks to know—knowledge being produced in the synthesis. Self-consciousness and acts of inclusion are synonymous. In nature, life is neither the bud nor the blossom nor the fruit, but each is necessary to the life of the whole. There is one substance and it is spirit: individual being—and individual subjectivity—are in a sense illusory, or abstractions. What we see in great men is absolute spirit working in them. All of human history is grist to Hegel’s mill, and while he can in one sense be seen as glorifying mankind as an evolutionary force, creating itself, he can also be seen as subordinating individual humanity to the god-like form of the state, and existing life to world-historical goals. Hegel was immensely significant—as an irritant—to both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, who resented him as a confident system-builder, a self-proclaimed explainer of everything, and saw his dialectic as one of the roots of the nineteenth-century’s belief in progress or evolutionism. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche objected strenuously to the way individual human existence is marginalised in Hegel’s work: the ‘concrete individual’ disappears in the interests of a ‘concrete universal’ towards which all creation is tending. The notion of dialectical strife between contraries can be a healthy one, but in Hegel’s version (and in its Marxist application to political history) it can also dissolve the notion of decisive individual choice. Even Kierkegaard’s titles mock Hegel: his Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) is an attack upon Hegel’s pretensions to scientific rigour and inclusiveness, and the title of Either-Or (1843–4) protests that Hegel’s dialectic, by resolving everything into everything else, dissolves the significance of choice. Nietzsche sympathised with the priority Hegel’s philosophy accords to ‘becoming’, but deplored the tendency of his kind of evolutionism to deprive human life of any particular significance. Sartre and Beauvoir were undoubtedly influenced by Hegel’s vision of human individuals and classes as engaged in a life and death struggle with ‘the other’. In Hegel, however, this struggle results in temporary mastery rather than shared freedom, until the universal spirit, to which each of us is merely tributary, realises itself. Again the objection is that the individual, and individual responsibility, is lost, and history becomes an alibi. Artur Schopenhauer (1788–1860), whose great work The World as Will and Idea (1819) taught Nietzsche the centrality of the will to power, also derived much of his position from the subjectivist interpretation of Kant. Even more than in Hegel, individual being, space and time are illusory. The sole reality is will, of which physical entities and acts are merely the phenomena. He saw the world of appearances, in

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a rather Eastern manner, as a veil of Maya, behind which lay the reality of impersonal ‘will’. The secret of the good life is not, however, conformity to this divine essence, as in Benedict Spinoza or Jakob Boehme, but in the denial of volition and a horror of existence. Human existence is futile, happiness is unattainable, and procreation is shameful collaboration with the cause of all our suffering. In Nietzsche’s demonology, however, Schopenhauer features as a person who combined a theoretical belief in renunciation of the world, with a practical appetite for indulgence. Against these confident system-builders, whose work claims to account for the world and everything in it, yet whose thought so rarely seems to impinge upon their lives, the Existentialists have concerned themselves with what Sartre calls ‘le vécu’, or lived experience. Philosophy can prove nothing, but it may, Heidegger says, reveal something. Unless what it reveals is of concern to me as an ‘individual human existent’ (Sartre), and is verified ‘through my personal being’ (Jaspers), it can have no existential validity or import. Existentialism is concerned primarily with what most philosophy leaves out or makes secondary. Existentialism and Phenomenology To concern oneself primarily with individual human existence rather than with the abstract thought of an abstract observer is clearly a radical departure in philosophy, but even to continue investigating, on a more subjective plane, the old philosophical question of the relation between the mind and what it experiences requires a subtler and more expressive method. Beauvoir reports that Sartre’s desire to replace analytical philosophy with a more concrete apprehension of individuals had received its first spur from Jaspers. Jaspers’s monograph Psychopathology (1913) had been translated into French   Benedict Spinoza (1632-77), mathematician and metaphysician, created out of the problems bequeathed by Descartes (to do with the relation between spirit and matter) one of the most remarkable and influential systems of metaphysics ever devised. According to Spinoza there is only one substance, which is God, whose attributes are thought and extension: Nature, and individual beings, body and mind, are all modifications of that one substance. In his Ethics Spinoza identified man s greatest happiness and virtue with the attainment of impersonality towards the self, the transcendence of envy, and identification with the vision of God. Spinoza’s thought, the intellectual foundation of pantheism, reappears in the Romantics, and aspects of it are important to Nietzsche, who objected less to what Spinoza was saying than to the scientific ‘armour-plating’ whereby he presents what he desires to believe as necessary truth.   Jakob Boehme (1575-1624) was a German peasant, a shoemaker and mystic. His intuitive and visionary work not only influenced such poets as Blake and Coleridge, but has some claims to have originated the central ideas of a number of subsequent philosophers—for instance, Spinoza’s belief in Nature as the ‘extension’ of God, Schopenhauer’s belief that ‘will’ is the vital principle of things, and Hegel’s belief in progression through the conflict of contraries.

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in 1927. Sartre, who worked on the proofs of the French edition, was impressed by Jaspers’s method of thought, which ‘worked through independent connections between isolated sets of facts, relying on intuitive guesses which had more emotion than logic about them, and which were presented as self-evident, irrefutable truths’ (The Prime of Life, p. 42). Jaspers presented this unphilosophical-sounding procedure as a form of phenomenology.

As developed by Edmund Husserl (whose work Sartre himself studied in Berlin in 1936) and by Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology aims at intuiting and describing things as they appear to the investigator before they are mediated through reflection and mental constructions. Philosophy has to be based on such a ‘recovery’ of the world, just as painting or poetry must, and clearing the mind of its preconceptions, and its stale-apprehensions, is both the essential and most difficult task of philosophy. Like the poet, the phenomenologist tends to reject the caveats of those philosophers who doubt the evidence of their senses. While the mind is itself creative, the world it encounters is nonetheless accessible to it: to be ‘conscious’ is by definition to be conscious of something. The philosophers’ nightmare of an unbridgeable chasm between the inner world of thought and the outer world of things is just that—a nightmare. By locating himself in the world in a relationship prior to ‘knowledge’, and negating the analytical mind’s division of experience into the subjective and objective, or mind and world, the phenomenologist achieves what Maurice Merleau-Ponty calls ‘l’être sauvage’. Phenomenology, he says, has the same quality of attentiveness and wonder as the artist, ‘the same will to seize the meaning of the world or of history as that meaning comes into being.  (The Phenomenology of Perception, p. xi) The reference here to ‘wonder’ underlines how for the Existentialists the boundary between poetry and philosophy is dissolved. Heidegger, Jaspers and Marcel, especially, write out of a relationship with the world comparable to that of Coleridge, Wordsworth and Hölderlin. Sartre, who went to Berlin in 1936 to study Husserl, rarely achieves quite such a pantheistic tone as these, but Beauvoir informs us (The Prime of Life, p. 31) that one of the few metaphysical systems the young Sartre did not reject out of hand was Spinoza’s pantheist conception of the universe as a synthetic totality in which the divine permeates the material world. Existentialist thinking frequently begins in the phenomenological unravelling of what Wordsworth, in his philosophical poem The Prelude, called ‘spots of time’ and others might call moments of epiphany. Wordsworth’s ‘spots’ were those in which there was a special feeling that the mind helps to create what we term sense perceptions, and yet could have meaningful experience of the natural world. Existentialist

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‘spots’ also have to do, frequently, with an experience of the essential freedom of consciousness (a term which in Sartre’s work—and Wordsworth’s—is virtually synonymous with imagination). They also deal with revelatory states of feeling, moods which extend the borders of consciousness (so that the self seems coterminous with its world), and moments of decision which become constitutive of the individual project. Phenomenology introduced into formal philosophy a central concern with emotion. Frequently, in the poetry of John Keats or T. S. Eliot, an account of feeling, passion or mood is simultaneously a psychological and a physiological description, and a manner of apprehending the world. Poetry, in this sense, is already more ‘anthropological’ than the social sciences. Existentialist writings share this poetic ‘method’. In one of the essays in The Friend (1818), the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge posed in a remarkably exact way the questions which Sartre and Heidegger would return to, and in his Notebooks he developed something remarkably like their method of exploring consciousness through the precise weighing of phenomena. Hast thou ever raised thy mind to the consideration of EXISTENCE, in and by itself, as the mere act of existing? Hast thou ever said to thyself, thoughtfully, IT IS! heedless in that moment whether it were a man before thee, or a flower, or a grain of sand? Without reference in short, to this or that particular mode or form of existence? If thou hast indeed attained to this, thou wilt have felt the presence of a mystery, which must have fixed thy spirit in awe and wonder. The very words, There is nothing! or, There was a time, when there was nothing! are self-contradictory. There is that within us which repels the proposition with as full and instantaneous a light, as if it bore evidence against the fact in the right of its own eternity.   Not TO BE, then, is impossible: to BE, incomprehensible. If thou hast mastered this intuition of absolute existence, thou wilt have learnt likewise, that it was this, and no other, which in the earlier ages seized the nobler minds, the elect among men, with a sort of sacred horror.   (The Friend, Vol. I, p. 514).

In this often quoted passage, Coleridge poses magnificently the questions to which the work of Martin Heidegger is addressed and which Heidegger attempts to raise for the modern age: the ‘lost’ questions of why there is anything rather than nothing; what the word ‘is’ means, and why, and how; the primordial wondering and astonishment which is the inception of philosophic thought, whether experienced in a sort of mystic joy, as with Heidegger, or an upsurge of nausea, as with Sartre, both responses being—perhaps—encompassed in that ‘sacred horror’. Sartre’s Roquentin,

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for instance, finds himself fascinated and repelled by the massive gnarled root of a horse-chestnut tree in the novel Nausea, which he findfs both irreducible and absurd, even as a sport of nature: Knotted, inert, nameless, it fascinated me, filled my eyes, drew me continually back to its own existence.

For Coleridge and Sartre and Heidegger, things, when closely observed, reveal not only their own existence but the being of the observer, and the feel of existence. Coleridge, in his Notebooks, looks into the motion of water in a cataract: ‘The wheels that circumvolve in it, the leaping up and plunging forward of that infinity of Pearls and Glass Bulbs, the continual change of the Matter, the perpetual sameness of the Form—it is an awful Image and Shadow of God and the world.’ A painting by Van Gogh is contemplated by Heidegger in his Introduction to Metaphysics (1953): ‘A pair of rough peasant shoes, nothing else …. But as to what is in that picture, you are immediately alone with it as though you yourself were making your way wearily homeward with your hoe.… What is here? The canvas? The brush strokes? The spots of colour? What … is the being of the essent? … Where in all this is being?’ (p. 29). In Being and Nothingness, Sartre watches honey slide from a spoon into a jar and responds to its paradoxical quality of ‘soft yielding action’ a quality that if felt as vertigo in the observer: ‘it draws me to it as the bottom of a precipice might draw me. There is … tactile fascination in the slimy’ (Being and Nothingness, pp. 608–9). (The reason for the vertiginous fascination, in this case, is that for Sartre the viscous—as slimy is better translated—is an image for the free, water-like, consciousness, turning towards the solidity and un-freedom, of matter: as he brilliantly puts it, ‘slime is the agony of water’ (Being and Nothingness, p. 607)). For each observer of each essent, the thing, when taken into the mind in its minutest properties, becomes capable of revealing the nature of being: the being which we are, the being in which we are, and the structure of feeling and apprehension which is our being-in-the-world. For each writer, the ‘psychoanalysis of things’ is a method of philosophic thought. The prerequisite for such a method is, of course, imagination of the most concrete kind.

Chapter 2 Abandonment, Absurdity, Ambiguity The Metaphysical watershed of the nineteenth century is Nietzsche’s proclamation that God is dead. It is an announcement which Nietzsche makes in fear and trembling. God may have been an illusion, but he was a necessary illusion, and while his death may constitute a gift of freedom, we have first to recognise in it the fact of man’s abandonment. For God, apart from being the cosmic mechanic, was the lawmaker and the supreme father-figure: as long as he lived, man had the possibility of a ready-made table of values, a source of succour, and a future home in the inheritance of eternity. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885), Nietzsche’s dramatic narrative of the life of an imaginary prophet, who is, of course, the mouthpiece for his own beliefs, the bulletin is a long time in coming, and there is some confusion among the witnesses about the cause of death. According to the Devil, who appears to have survived his adversary, God died ‘of his pity for man’. According to the ‘last Pope’, he suffocated. According to Zarathustra the ‘ugliest man’ (the atheist-deicide) is the murderer of God. ‘You could not endure him who saw you … through and through … this witness.’ Nietzsche’s attitude to the death of God is remarkably ambivalent. The ‘last Pope’ has a point when he remarks to Zarathustra ‘you are more pious than you believe, with such an unbelief’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 114, 273–6). In fact, the existence or non-existence of God poses the same problem for the antiChristian Nietzsche that it did for the Protestant theologian Kierkegaard. For neither of them can God be objectively known: he is not an objective certainty—and that is ultimately as much as Nietzsche asserts on the question. If, for the nineteenth-century poet, as for these two thinkers, God still lives, he is felt to be far off, as he was for Hölderlin: ‘über dem Haupt droben in anderer Welt’ (above our heads, up there in the beyond). As J. Hillis Miller has said, this absence is felt to be intolerable. The nineteenth-century writer has in place of God at best an empty nothingness, and at worst—as for Charles Baudelaire and Samuel Beckett—’a devouring darkness, the frightening reality of a positive rather than empty nothingness’ (The Disappearance of God, p. 13). What may remain, in place of God, is a god-orientated inwardness, a strong religiousness, which some nineteenth-century figures—including such novelists

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as George Eliot and Thomas Hardy—succeed in displacing on to Nature, Man, or History. God remains, but in the form of a longing, usually unfulfilled. Whether God is dead, or absent from his creation, or simply unknowable, or a vanished illusion, the problem is the same in each case. How shall we live, and what values shall we posit, if we no longer believe in a transcendental sanction, objectively ascertainable in the words of divine revelation? Abandonment For Sartre such abandonment (the term suggests man’s status as a waif, abandoned by his progenitor) is a primary element in man’s situation. If God does not exist ‘it is necessary to draw the consequences of his absence right to the end’ (Existentialism and Humanism, p. 33). The absurdist drama, especially that of Samuel Beckett, did so with anxious fidelity in the twentieth century, playing endless variations on the bleakest of Wordsworth’s images. In The Prelude (1850), one of the earliest explorations of the idea of the alienating city, Wordsworth sees a blind beggar wearing a paper on his chest to explain his story and he calls this label ‘an apt type … of the utmost we can know, / Both of ourselves and of the universe’ (The Prelude, Book VII, 637, my italics). This may imply an anguished agnosticism. The disorientation is just as acute for the Existentialist atheist because if God does not exist we lose, also, the possibility of finding values in ‘an intelligible heaven’ (Existentialism and Humanism, p. 33). Sartre’s disapproval of religion as one of the factors responsible for alienating man from himself, is equalled, one feels, by his disapproval of those who do not feel that atheism is a tragic situation: he is, as many have observed, a writer in the Protestant tradition (which is his background), and a deeply serious moralist. If man is abandoned, he is not adrift in a vacuum. We begin in the facticity of our situation. Our world makes demand on us, and we are surrounded by ‘projects in the course of realisation’ (Existentialism and Humanism, p. 33). We are abandoned, that is, in a particular predicament, not a general one. We have our own immediate specificities of environment and physicality, the total facticity of our world (facticity is a coinage which suggests the interiorized subjective ‘feel’ of factuality): but even this is without any meaning except that imparted to it by the consciousness of the existing individual. We can have no recourse to values outside ourselves; every choice we make is an act of valuation and a positing of an ideal. Between the secular and the Christian Existentialists there is wide agreement on this. The only guiding

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light, says the non-sectarian believer Jaspers, is ‘subjective certainty … the light that comes as his own conviction to the individual open to tradition and his environment’ (Perennial Scope, p. 71). In Existentialism and Humanism (1945) Sartre rigorously pursues the argument that there is no source of guidance in ethics, without a transcendental sanction, or in ‘signs’, in feelings, or in advice, for none of these can be ratified by anything outside our own consciousness. Dostoevsky’s declaration that if God did not exist everything would be permitted becomes—in inverted form—the Existentialist starting point. Because God does not exist, nothing is permitted. As Beauvoir explains, man creates his own world, for which he is responsible: ‘A God can pardon, efface, and compensate. But if God does not exist, man’s faults are inexpiable’ (The Ethics of Ambiguity p. 16) The Absurd and Ambiguity Existence has no meaning. In Nausea what is nauseating is the fact that things ‘exist’ rather than ‘are’: they have the existence of palpable, viscous entities, rather than the being of ideal essences. Sartre begins with a shudder at the flabbiness and stickiness of existents, their contingency (accidentality, incidentality) and inescapability, and, in Nausea, their almost surreal quality (the vivid and threatening ‘presence’ of objects in Nausea has been ascribed to Sartre’s experimentation with drugs: they pursue Roquentin, rather than lying there in discreet inertia). Existence cannot be coerced, and Roquentin recoils into the realm of pure being: of music and ratiocination. His is the Modernist manoeuvre, the attempt to circumvent life through art—to create and sustain a world of pure form, where art is not an imitation of life but a sublimation of its recalcitrant elements into ideal essences. Kierkegaard saw such retreat as the perennial temptation of the poet, to become fixed in the aesthetic plane, declining the plunge into ethical existence, and Nausea, published in 1938 at the end of the Modernist period—five years before Being and Nothingness and ten before Existentialism and Humanism—suggests how strongly the pre-war and pre-Resistance Sartre felt that temptation. It is, after all, a seductive, though anti-existential response to the absurd. Our existence is absurd: it has no meaning, no purpose, no essentiality and no value, beyond what we give it. That we exist is absurd; that we die is the crowning absurdity, for death may, at any moment truncate whatever pattern of meaning or harmony we may give to our existence: ‘Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being—like a worm’ (Being and Nothingness, p. 21). Freedom itself is an absurdity.

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It is not something we can understand essentially, though we necessarily encounter it existentially. We are free, without knowing what it is to be free. Freedom (a key category discussed in the next chapter) is something we are sentenced to: we cannot evade it, and it is integral to consciousness. ‘Man is condemned to be free. Condemned because he did not create himself yet is nevertheless at liberty, and from the moment that he is thrown into the world he is responsible for everything that he does.’ He is responsible for his passions, for his interpretations and valuations, for his feelings (which are formed, Sartre says, by his deeds, and are therefore not guides to his actions) and for what he is, since this abandonment in freedom implies that ‘we ourselves decide our being’ (Existentialism and Humanism, pp. 34, 39). Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus raises the question whether suicide might not be an appropriate response to an absurd universe. Camus decides not: the suicide is one who has abandoned the struggle with fate, and capitulated to the absurd. Even the man condemned to death is more free than he, for he can hold himself superior to the absurdity which condemns him. The Greek legend of Sisyphus concerns one who is condemned to the utmost futility: his fate is to roll a rock to the top of a hill, whence it returns to the bottom under its own weight. Yet, in Camus’s reading of the legend, ‘There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn’. It is in the power of Sisyphus to live a fidelity which negates the gods who torture him. Around this myth, Camus builds what is in effect the first survey of the Existentialist heritage, engaging with the insights of Goethe, the Romantics, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Husserl, Dostoevsky and Kafka. Simone de Beauvoir, recognising that Existentialism does not in fact mean that life has to be absurd, objects to the use of the term. To call existence absurd suggests that it cannot be given meaning (The Ethics of Ambiguity, p. 129). Her preferred term ‘ambiguity’ suggests, rather, that meaning cannot be fixed, and has always to be won. The ‘They’ The description of man as abandoned in an absurdist universe may seem unreal to most of us. We may easily go our ways, unaware of any such predicament. But that, the Existentialist replies, is because we have never stepped into existence, never encountered ourselves. When Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre or Beauvoir write of the unawakened they strike a clear note of disapprobation. Much of Thus Spoke Zarathustra is devoted to a diagnosis of various types of men who have lost the

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Dionysian life, who are incomplete, and who represent the sicknesses of society. Nietzsche criticises among others the moral philosophers, those purveyors of opiates to a race of sleep-walkers, in a mock beatitude— ‘blessed are the drowsy men; for they shall soon drop off—and the hollow men of the ‘land of culture’ who ‘could wear no better masks than their own faces’. Sartre speaks of the ‘salauds’, and Kierkegaard of those who are ‘in untruth’. The estrangement of men and women from their proper being is also expressed in a variety of ways. In Heidegger man is ‘thrown’. Marcel’s unawakened man is encumbered with the self. Heidegger’s is ‘in-the-midst-of-theworld’ and forgetful of existence in the ‘at-homeness’ of the ‘they’. Man is, in these accounts, estranged from his own being, encumbered with illusion, personality, custom and role. He has to find reality, freedom and will. Unawakened Heideggerian man lives as das Man (the ‘one’ or the ‘they’, in the sense of ‘one does this’ or ‘they say that’) in a state of inauthentic existence which Heidegger calls Verfallenheit (fallenness), a state of tranquillized absorption in the world. What should be an authentic self-projecting individual is here estranged from real selfhood and exists as a segment of the crowd. To exist merely as das Man, the ‘they’, is to be unfree, and in flight from one’s authentic possibilities. Man’s being, which Heidegger designates Dasein (or being-there), is that of a being-in-the-world, but such being-in-the-world has authentic and inauthentic modes. ‘Falling’ being-in-the-world is dominated by the fascination of the ‘world’ and of ‘others’. Such a state is a temptation, and tranquillizing. Dasein is alienated from itself, when the mode of its relation is no longer the free projection of being-in, but entanglement in being-with-one-another (Being and Time, pp. 222–4). The neuter term ‘das Man’ chosen by Heidegger to express such entangled and inauthentic existence means, in his characterisations, more or less everything that ‘they’ or ‘them’ tends to mean in ordinary speech, as long as one remembers that Heidegger is describing an existential mode of the individual Dasein. Being with others dissolves one’s own being into that of others so that margins become blurred. In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the real dictatorship of the ‘they’ is unfolded. We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as they take pleasure … we judge as they judge, and find shocking what they find shocking. The ‘they’, which is nothing definite and which all are, though not as the sum, prescribes the kind of Being of everydayness.  (Being and Time, p. 164)

The phrase the ‘dictatorship of the “they”’ has acute political overtones, remarkably

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prescient for the 1920s, before the rise of Hitler, which are still more prominent in a further passage. Responsibility for judgement and decisions is passed to ‘the they’: ‘It was always the “they” who did it, and yet it can be said that it has been “no one”’ (Being and Time, p. 165). Heidegger’s style is an acquired taste: his work has, however, a quality of sociological concreteness, combined with a stance of objectivity towards human frailty which enables him to avoid the tone of self-righteousness which can enter such discussions of inauthentic everydayness, and how it passes imperceptibly into political barbarism. Beauvoir, whose term for the inauthentic is the ‘sub-man’, falls rather too often into just such a tone in The Ethics of Ambiguity. She writes as though she is herself exempted from human frailty. If it were possible for men to live ‘like trees or pebbles, which are not aware that they exist’, we would regard such lives with indifference, ‘but the sub-man arouses contempt’ (The Ethics of Ambiguity, p. 42) The sub-man may take refuge in ready-made opinions, but this does not make him harmless. By evading his freedom, he steps out of the ethical. All the dirty work of history, the pogroms and the lynchings, Beauvoir concludes, is done by sub-men, possibly manipulated by a more subtle and more dangerous character, ‘the serious man’. The ‘serious man’ does not confound himself with objects, but subordinates himself to received values as though they were unconditioned, and in this way he, too, attempts to dispose of his freedom (p.47). No writer, including Heidegger, has demonstrated the various modes of the ‘they’ as well as Charles Dickens. In Our Mutual Friend (1865), for instance, the portraits of Veneering and Podsnap and their society constitute a sustained analysis of inauthenticity and the flight from existence. Twemlow, one of Veneering’s friends, is introduced at the start of the novel as though he were a table (when the Veneerings give a dinner party they start with Twemlow, Dickens writes, and ‘add leaves to him’). The parts of the novel which deal with this social realm are almost entirely without plot and almost without distinguishable character, except that in the final chapter, ‘The Voice of Society’, poor Twemlow, who has subsisted from first to last in a state verging upon Angst (which suggests that he feels and fears the possibility of existence), succeeds in staking out his independence from ‘the they’. It would be possible to read Heidegger as an apt commentary on the Dickensian modes of character presentation—especially in Our Mutual Friend, or in Great Expectations (1861), where the dehumanised characters are variously presented in terms of mechanical rhetoric, or identified with the artefacts which they possess, or by which they are possessed.

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Dread If man is alienated in the seduction of the ‘they’, he may yet encounter himself through the agency of mood. The awakened man, says Karl Jaspers, has ‘existential anguish’ as a basic characteristic (Perennial Scope, p. 86). The group of dark moods known as dread or anxiety (variant translations of Angst), anguish (Angoisse), and despair are closely associated with all Existentialist descriptions. Such moods were not patented by Existentialism of course. William James (1842-1910), the Harvard philosopher and psychologist, speaks memorably of ‘a touch of nausea … a whiff of melancholy, things that sound a knell’ as having ‘an appalling convincingness’ and somehow appearing to be ‘the best key to life’s significance’ (The Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 145, 169). In much imaginative literature, certain moods which possess us and awaken us to the contingency of life—as in Thomas Beddoes’s sense that ‘nothing’s true / But what is horrible’, or Blake’s feeling that human life life, like that of flies, lasts until ‘some blind hand / Shall brush my wing’—are revelatory of the need for existence. But the Existentialists have made the theme their own, and among them the foremost psychologists of mood are Kierkegaard and Heidegger. Moods, Heidegger suggests, are adoptive rather than adopted: they are something we become, and by which our ‘there’ is discovered to us. Moods are states of attunement through which we discover ourselves in a situation which has meaning. This consequence, however, is a possibility and not a natural law, since a mood may obscure as much as clarify, disorientate rather than orientate, just as fear may issue in panic—and a deepening of ‘theyness’—as well as in resolution. The principal revelatory mood is dread, or Angst. In Heidegger’s description of dread, and Kierkegaard’s on which it is based, the mood is double-edged in that it makes us afraid of something and yet impels us towards it, like vertigo. But dread differs from being afraid in that it is a mood with no conscious object. It is an indefinite fear, or a terrible sense of possibility, which defines the special status of that particular being known as Dasein. Existential dread confronts Dasein with a conviction of nullity and a sometimes numbing, sometimes tantalising, sense of possibility. It invites, tangibly, to existence. The familiar becomes uncanny: a word which in English appears to suggest ‘unknown’, or ‘unfamiliar’, and in German ‘unhomely’—Heidegger’s word for the uncanny is unheimlich, so to feel unheimlich is to feel unhoused. We find ourselves, in Wordsworth’s phrase, ‘moving about in worlds not realised’. The impact of dread, according to Heidegger—and according to Tolstoy (in The Death of Ivan Illich (1886)), Kierkegaard and Sartre—is that it makes us free. The

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hold of the ‘they’ and ‘theyness’ is broken in dread, and we have the possibility of realising our power-to-be, or projecting ourselves toward free possibilities. Dasein is a being who ‘goes to himself in time’; he is also a being-in-the-world, partaking of facticity (limitation) without which he would cease to exist, but which, in surfeit, is a threat to his freedom. The ‘flight’ of fallenness is a flight from the uncanniness inherent in Dasein’s being-in-the-world, toward the ‘“at-home” of publicness’. The everyday being of das Man is continually threatened by the advent of dread, for what causes dread is being-in-the-world as such. When Dasein feels anxiety it is experiencing its ‘ownmost potential’ and the freedom it cannot evade, the freedom to choose itself (Being and Time, pp. 234, 232). As H. J. Blackham observes, the vague emotion of dread is paradoxically the most significant of emotions: ‘a pitiless pointing to my original situation, an aweful anticipation of my personal choice, a fear of being already cast into the world and a fear for my authenticity in living in the world’ (Six Existentialist Thinkers, p. 95). By dread, or by nausea, as Roquentin discovers, we are made free: free to encounter ourselves, and to ask ourselves in existential pathos the fundamental questions. To Coleridge, in his Philosophical Lectures of 1818–19, these were: ‘what and for what am I made? what can I, and what ought I to make of myself? and in what relations do I stand to the world and to my fellow men?’ These are of course the perennial questions of philosophy. In surveying the answers given by the Existentialists it will be convenient to marshal their ideas under the similar structure suggested by Kant. So the following chapters are built around Kant’s similar questions. What is Man? What can I know? What must I do?

Chapter 3 What is Man? Man, says Existentialism, is the being who can transcend himself. Man is the existent which properly lives in consciousness of its being, which questions existence, which can ex-sist, or stand outside himself as a being-in-the-world or as reflective observer. He is capable of various authentic or inauthentic modes of relation to his world, yet he alone can withdraw from his entanglement and raise the question of being, or of why there is a world, why he is. His capacity for transcendence of his own facticity is grounded in consciousness. Only in consciousness are we capable of self-understanding, of knowing, or attempting to know our modes or relation to the Other, of identifying the Grenzsituationen (German: literally, ‘frontier situations’) of existence and responding to them, of seeing ourselves as a compound of facticity and transcendence or as a being-towards-death. Only in and by consciousness and its modes can we apprehend and nullify the restraints on our development, our freedom, and project ourselves toward chosen possibilities and our societies toward new ends. In consciousness lies our freedom, says Sartre. And it is with Sartre’s account of consciousness and its structures that we should begin to answer the anthropological question, ‘What is Man?’ Consciousness and Freedom To say, as Sartre does, that the nature of consciousness is to question its own being, implies a division between a transcendent consciousness and the ‘being’ of which it is conscious and which must therefore be something other than itself. ‘Consciousness is a being, the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being’ (Being and Nothingness, p. 47). Consciousness is paradoxically both nothingness and the ground of reality, since in this consciousness all the objects of consciousness have their being: ‘objects’ ranging from the physicalities of the world, to values and truth, and the individual’s self-image. In a remark quoted by Heidegger, Artur Schopenhauer put this very poignantly: among the many things that make this world so enigmatic and so thought-provok-

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ing, the closest and most immediate thing is this: however immeasurable and massive the world may be, yet its existence hangs by a single thread: and that is the given individual consciousness in which it is constituted. (Cited in What is Called Thinking?, p. 40)

The essence of this constitutive consciousness lies in its transcendence and freedom: it is in the world in the mode of something separate from that world. Consciousness opposes its own creations, its own images, to the ‘real’ world in, for example, the act of noticing absence. And its fundamental power is the ability to negate, doubt, extricate itself from the world. Similarly, the ‘genuine liberty’ of the Romantic ‘imagination’ lies in its power either to dissolve and dissipate, in other words, negate, or to realise and unify. Imagination and Sartrean consciousness are modes of freedom and transcendence in that they both extricate us from our situational facticity, so that we may see it in its complexity, negate it in its present structure and project ourselves in terms of possibility. Being-in-itself and Being-for-itself That process of extrication points to consciousness as initially being-in-the-world, as a being which is essentially consciousness of something. Consciousness enters Sartre’s structure of the person as the dominant faculty in a tripartite selfhood. The self is a trinity of modes—the être-pour-soi (being-for-itself), être-en-soi (being-in-itself) and être-pour-autrui (being-for-others), in which the last two exist as objects: the en-soi as object of the pour-soi, and the pour-autrui as object of the Other. The being-foritself and the being-for-others correspond to subject and predicate in ‘I am not what I am’, Iago’s chilling manifesto in Shakespeare’s Othello. ‘I’ am not equivalent to the objectified image of myself in the eye of the world. The being-in-itself is the ‘I’ in the mode of being of a thing: self-contained, solid, as a stone is a stone. The for-itself is the ‘I’ which affirms, negates, or is dimly conscious of that objectified being: it is the transcendent volatile part of ourselves which never fully coincides with the in-itself. It is divinely absent, in the past, in the future, or simply outside, at the fringes of the world of our consciousness. That we are not what we are is the freedom to which we are sentenced. ‘The being which is what it is cannot be free’ (Being and Nothingness, p. 440). At the heart of man lies a nothingness and a driving lack which forces him to choose himself, or to make himself, for he cannot just ‘be’. This nothingness is freedom. ‘I’ am free from what ‘I am’ in the sense that being conscious of something involves a radical separation from

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that something. Being conscious of ‘what I am’ means that I am not that of which I am conscious: nor am I what I have been. As consciousness expands, and the more the in-itself is known and objectified, the less is the for-itself bound to that apprehended mode of being, the more free it is for projecting new ends. The for-itself is the perceiver of future but undetermined possibility, which gift is grounded in the awareness of ‘lack’ (one of the meanings of ‘Nothingness’ in Being and Nothingness)—of human reality’s status as an incomplete being. Our life is a ‘perpetual surpassing’ in Sartre’s phrase. But the fact that possibility is undetermined, that we determine ourselves by our choices, make ourselves and are continually remaking ourselves in a free project, is the ground of anguish, from which we may yearn to escape in closer identification with the in-itself or the for-others. We seek to identify ourselves with the secure objectivity of the in-itself, or alternately to delude ourselves that we are pure for-itself, pure transcendence. Neither is possible. Even the for-itself, in so far as it is being and not nothingness, is grounded in the facticity of the in-itself: and the in-itself, though ‘engulfed and nihilated’ in the upsurge of the for-itself, ‘remains at the heart of the for-itself as its original contingency’ (Being and Nothingness, p. 82). Although Sartre’s terms may seem forbiddingly technical, they enable him to mount convincingly concrete analyses of the way human existents exist. In any case, some such structure underlies much of the imaginative literature of the past two centuries: fictional characterisation, in hands as diverse as those of Jane Austen, Dickens, Conrad and John Wain, has consistently sought to counterpoint the transcendent consciousness with the objective self, and both with the more or less objective image of a particular character in the eye of society. The hero of John Wain’s picaresque comedy Hurry on Down (1953) is engaged in constant flight from various ‘selves’ either foisted upon him by others or unwittingly projected by his own deeds. Kurtz, in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ (1902), is a victim of his own belief in the glittering être-pour-autrui that he ‘is’ in the eyes of the company which employs him (and in the eyes of Brussels society), and which veils from all except the narrator Marlow the hollowness within. Bad Faith The games people play in their relations with each other and themselves are grounded in this structure. We are at once facticity and transcendence, and self-deception or bad faith arises when we attempt to ‘affirm their identity while preserving their dif-

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ferences’. We demonstrate this, says Sartre, in the simplest of our behaviour patterns. An ageing idealist, accused of apostasy, will protest that ‘I am what I have been’. But confronted with evidence of culpability at some point in the past he would say about his proven failings, ‘I am not what I have been’. So we have to deal with human reality as a being which is what it is not, and which is not what it is. If we are both facticity and transcendence, what happens when we evince bad faith? Sartre’s answer is this. For a murderer to state that he is not a murderer, in the sense that a stone is a stone, is right: he cannot help transcending such a state of being. But if, in evading the law, he persuades himself that he is not a murderer ‘in the way that this table is not an inkwell’ he is in bad faith, for he is trying to claim his possibility of transcendence as the only objective reality (Being and Nothingness, p. 63). We are doomed to be free; but we are also doomed to the guilt our freedom may choose. Bad faith, then, can be evinced both in flight from facticity and in flight from transcendence: in claiming that we are what we are, and claiming that we are not what we are. In the writings of Simone de Beauvoir the term is used with greater freedom than in Sartre’s work; it seems to crop up rather too easily as a term with which to berate attitudes other than her own to the possibilities of life, though it is interesting that one of the ways in which Beauvoir’s feminism exhibits its Existentialist roots is in this concept of bad faith: she diagnoses the condition both in women who mask their complicity beneath a layer of facticity, and men who mask their assumptions of superiority beneath a layer of liberalism. Kierkegaard lays a similar stress on the meaning of freedom as constituent of man. Man’s freedom is given, but the freedom is always a matter of choice, always imminent in no matter what duress, to choose one’s own self. Such freedom is both gift and responsibility. We are free, and we are bound by freedom: free to make ourselves, or to choose ourselves, and bound to a continuity of that freedom of choice. In itself freedom is not something we choose but something we are—the most ‘momentous’ thing. But what, then, is this self of mine? It is the most abstract of all things, and yet at the same time it is the most concrete—it is freedom. (Either-Or, Vol 2, p. 218)

The ultimate implication of this view of freedom—an implication made explicit by Sartre—is that man is unconditioned. In his early work Sartre even denies the unconscious—that Freudian escape route from responsibility—in his discussion of bad faith. How, he asks, can a drive disguise itself without knowing that it is repressed, and why it is repressed, and entering a project of disguise? Psychoses and complexes

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are conscious. The inferiority complex, for example, ‘is a free and global project of myself as inferior in the eyes of others; it is the way in which I choose to assume my being-for-others’ (Being and Nothingness, p. 459). Sartre denies the unconscious because he is not prepared to admit any degree of determinism into his description of man; and he similarly copes with ‘fate’ which he regards as identical with the free choice which a man makes of himself. But Sartre’s anxiety concerning anything viscous, uncontrollable, outside the reach of the masculine rational powers, is not shared by all Existentialists. Some of them allot to the unconscious an important role in individuation, along with Jung. None of them, however, pleads the unconscious as an excuse for indecision or in mitigation of responsibility. Sartre revised considerably his attitude towards the Freudians, though he maintained his critique of their terminology as unacceptably mechanistic. In Between Existentialism and Marxism (1974) he excused his early bravado by saying that he found Freudian terms both ambiguous and mechanistic. ‘I am completely in agreement with the facts of disguise and repression, as facts. But the words “repression”, “censorship”, or, “drive”—words which express one moment a sort of finalism and the next moment a sort of mechanism, these I reject’ (p. 37). Instead of unconscious drives Sartre preferred to think in terms of data of which we are aware, in our ‘lived experience’, but which we do not allow ourselves consciously to know. A remarkable passage in Richard Wright’s novel Native Son (1940), a classic of black American fiction, dramatises Sartre’s point. It was not until after the war that Wright migrated to Paris and developed his friendship with Sartre, but his 1940 novel is nevertheless distinctly Existentialist. Bigger Thomas, a disadvantaged black youth, has been plotting with his friends to rob a white man, but is in fact scared to do so. His fear explodes in a violent confrontation with his friends. Like a man staring regretfully but hopelessly at the stump of a cut-off arm or leg, he knew that the fear of robbing a white man had had hold of him when he started that fight with Gus; but he knew it in a way that kept it from coming to his mind in the form of a hard and sharp idea. His confused emotions had made him feel instinctively that it would be better to fight Gus and spoil the plan.… But he kept this knowledge of his fear thrust firmly down in him; his courage to live depended upon how successfully his fear was hidden from his consciousness. He had fought Gus because Gus was late; that was the reason his emotions accepted.   (Native Son, p. 80)

One of the major impacts of Existentialism has in fact been on contemporary practice

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in psychotherapy, particularly in democratising and humanising the relation between patient and therapist, and recognising the need to treat patients as beings-in-the-world. The concept of Daseinsanalysis, as developed by Ludwig Binswanger and Medard Boss in Switzerland, A. H. Maslow and Rollo May in America, and R. D. Laing and David Cooper in England derives from Heidegger and Sartre almost equally. Laing and Cooper, especially, also learned from Sartre’s concept of ‘schizophrenic families’. Condemned to be Free The suggestion that man is condemned to be free carries differing degrees of conviction according to what is meant by freedom, and the Existentialists have been much criticised for appearing to say on the one hand that since all men are conscious, and consciousness is transcendence and transcendence is freedom, therefore all men are free; while on the other hand they seem to use freedom as a way of sorting the Existentialist goats from the bourgeois sheep—or, in Kierkegaard’s phrase, the wild geese from the tame. The confusion is more apparent than real. In its descriptive use Sartre means the inherent instability of consciousness and man’s non-coincidence with himself. At another level he refers to the deliberate cultivation of reflection, and here the freedom of consciousness is something we choose, in that its exercise becomes purposive and existential. As Karl Jaspers says, ‘without infinite reflection … we should become superstitious [i. e. settled]. An atmosphere of bondage arises with such a settlement. Infinite reflection therefore, is, precisely through its endlessly active dialectic, the condition of freedom. It breaks out of every prison of the finite’ (Reason and ‘Existenz’, p. 32). At that level the only compulsion to such disciplined freedom is an instinct for truth—to which we are very clearly not condemned. But when Goethe laments of the human race that in a life already packed tight with work and compulsion ‘the little freedom they have left frightens them to such an extent that they will stop at nothing to rid themselves of it’ (The Sorrows of Young Werther, p. 27), the Existentialist merely observes that the endeavour to get rid of it is—however negative—an inescapable exercise of freedom. Sartre insists that inaction, flight, irresponsibility—these too are choices by which we decide our being. What we choose is undetermined. All that is determined is that we are responsible for the choice. So important is the idea of freedom in the Existentialist analysis that Beauvoir   Existentialist psychiatry is beyond the scope of this book, but the reader may like to look at such works as A. H. Maslow s Towards a Psychology of Being (1962) and Motivation and Personality (1954); Rollo May s Existential Psychology (1961); Ludwig Binswanger s Being-in-the-world (1963); R. D. Laing s The Divided Self: an Existential Study (1960) and Sanity, Madness and the Family (1965).

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extends it—or rather did so in the early ‘heroic age’ of Existentialism—even to what most people would regard as genetic endowments, such as sensitivity or intelligence. Even the body is not ‘a brute fact’. Its attractiveness, or otherwise, is determined not by physiology but by how we relate, through it, to others. What we call ‘sensitivity’, as though we were born with it or without it, is simply an attentive mode of presence to the world: similarly we choose, and are capable of modifying, our ‘vitality’ or ‘intelligence’, in so far as these arise in the generosity or otherwise of our social relations (The Ethics of Ambiguity, p. 41). Facticity and Possibility ‘Our life is compassed round with Necessity; yet is the meaning of Life itself no other than Freedom, than voluntary Force: thus have we a warfare’ (Sartor Resartus, p. 257). In that gleeful phrase the Victorian thinker Thomas Carlyle expresses the Existentialist’s attitude to the relation between facticity—our situation in itself—and possibility—man’s indeterminate freedom. For Existentialism, though it has extended the area of man’s freedom, does not claim that consciousness works in a vacuum. If you steal, you have chosen to steal; if you go to war—or if you fail to oppose war— you are guilty of men’s deaths: Existentialism insists that these are choices and that nothing exculpates the individual. But you do not choose to be web-footed, or sevenfoot tall, male or female, black or white. Neither does such facticity nullify one’s freedom, however much it may qualify it. Whatever is done is chosen, what ever is, merely is. ‘I must die, I must suffer, I must struggle, I am subject to chance, I involve myself inexorably in guilt,’ says Jaspers. We cannot change these Grenzsituationen of our existence. But only in ‘unfaith’ do we allow these conditions to persuade us that ‘the human condition becomes a biological fact among other biological facts’ (The Way to Wisdom, pp. 20, 74). It is not in a change of the circumstances but in the recovery of what Jaspers and Kierkegaard call faith—the faith of man in his potentialities—that freedom lies. Our situation, our facticity, is given; even Sartre’s man is abandoned in a world of facts and of competing human projects in the course of realisation. But these facts, the empirical self, our bodily needs, the inalterables of our situation, our entire facticity or limitation, do not dispose of our freedom. They are rather the stuff of our decision, the question posed to our liberty. The past is past, the present may be or may appear to be determined, but our valuation of both of these dimensions is not determined, and the future remains pure possibility. Existentialism invites us to assume, as Beauvoir

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says, our fundamental ambiguity, to assume our selves, to will liberty, and to create the future. To transcend, by denying, empirical fact is a form of bad faith. The challenge is to incorporate facticity into one’s project. Wordsworth, for instance, records many instances of encounters with resolute and suffering lives, lives less free than his own, yet chastening in the degree to which they seem to have assumed themselves. Their resoluteness is even able to liberate his own. Keats, in Endymion (1818), makes his hero discover that There never lived a mortal man, who bent His appetite beyond his natural sphere, But starved and died. (Endymion, 4:638)

Facticity may show itself as bondage, but undiluted possibility is mere dream. Being ‘Alles Seiende ist im Sein’, writes Heidegger: ‘All being is in Being’ and ‘in the appearance of Being being appears’ (What is Philosophy?, pp. 48–9). His work is concerned, initially, not with the quality of individual existences, but with what is ontologically basic to human existence. What is the Being of beings? In Platonic thought we might say that it is the real / ideal ground of all appearances / phenomena. In modern Christian thought, on which Heidegger has had enormous influence, God is the Being in whom beings have their existence. But Heidegger is a metaphysician, in a post-Nietzschean world, working from an anthropocentric standpoint. The very title of his work, as George Steiner has pointed out, is a challenge to alternative metaphysics: the ‘and’ in Being and Time challenges the idea that Being is timeless. As we shall see, death, finitude, time, are essential to Being itself in Heidegger’s work. His whole philosophical endeavour has revolved around this mysterious combination of words, being and Being: what is the Being that makes all being, and all beings, possible; and why is there anything rather than nothing? Heidegger shares the Coleridgean wonder at the simple words ‘is’ and ‘be’, a wonder which is intensified in both languages by the grammar. Being is what a being does: more directly in German it is the infinitive verb sein that underlies the noun Sein. Either way, the noun has the uncanny quality of frozen action. But what action? Heidegger’s work thrives upon etymology, some of it necessarily speculative, and incurring the same kind of

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incredulity as the eighteenth-century etymologists who ‘proved’ to their own satisfaction that Welsh was the language of the patriarchs and Druidism their religion. In the 1951 essay ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’ we find part of Heidegger’s answer. He is investigating the verb bauen, ‘to build’, and notes that in Old High German buan means to dwell. But beyond that is an Indo-European root, bhu, which—while meaning the same thing—has become the verb form bin: ‘I am, you are’ being in German ich bin, du bist: What then does ich bin mean? The old word … answers: ich bin, du bist mean I dwell, you dwell. The way in which you are and I am, the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is buan, dwelling. To be a human being means to be on the earth as a mortal. It means to dwell. The old word … also means at the same time to cherish and protect, to preserve and care for, specifically to till the soil, and cultivate the vine. Such building … takes care ….  (Basic Writings, p. 32)

The etymology of this particular word confirms the prior analysis of Being and Time: man’s being is a being-in, a dwelling, and a caring. A further interesting thing about the verb ‘to be’ is the nature of its irregularity. English has ‘to be, I am, you are, he is, it was’. German has sein, ich bin, du bist, er ist, es war. Are there Indo-European roots for ‘ist’ and ‘war’ as well as ‘bin’? If so, do these roots contribute a kind of semantic lamination to the fully conjugated verb ‘to be’? In Introduction to Metaphysics Heidegger does in fact offer derivations for all three forms, though one’s confidence in the method may be somewhat shaken by his attributing a different meaning to bhu. Now bhu means ‘to emerge, to appear’. From Sanskrit asus, meaning ‘life, the living’, Heidegger derives the word ‘is’ (ist). From vasami, he derives the German wesen and gewesen, or English ‘was’, to which he transfers the meaning to dwell or to endure. When we say ‘is’ we are unconscious of the richness of the term we use. To exist is to live, certainly, but if we attend to the forms of the verb ‘to be’ it is also to emerge (Heidegger associates Existenz with the Greek ek-stasis, with its connotations of transcendence), to dwell and to endure. Dasein, or there-being The word ‘person’, or ‘individual’, hardly appears in Heidegger’s work. Instead he uses the curious term Dasein. It is not possible, says Heidegger, to posit an ‘I’ located at the centre of my being, for the nature of man is the ability to transcend himself—or is the fact of his transcendence. My being is not co-extensive with my body but rather

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with all that affects me: it permeates the world with which I am involved, the relations which I not only have but am. Heidegger explains his term Dasein as follows: To characterise with a single term both the involvement of Being in human nature and the essential relation of man to the openness (‘there’) of Being as such, the name of ‘Being-there’ was chosen for that sphere of being in which man stands as man. (‘The Way Back’, p. 213)

The essential idea here is ‘the relation of man to the openness of Being’, which, as I have suggested, may be understood (though only in defiance of Heidegger’s express disapproval) as a secular reflection of Kierkegaard’s notion of the self as grounded in ‘the power which posited it’, or, in his terms, God. It is, of course, very difficult to use such terms as ‘man’, ‘self, ‘person’ without suggesting something objective and finite. But Heidegger agrees with Max Scheler that ‘The person is not a thing, not a substance, not an object’, for ‘essentially the person exists only in the performance of intentional acts, and is therefore essentially not an object’ (Being and Time, p. 73). Dasein is a being which exists as a standing out into the world, and the main expression of its existence is as a being-in-the-world. Being-in-the-World This particular term of Heidegger’s is chosen to avoid suggesting either containment (though inauthentic Dasein may approach a condition of being factically contained by the world) or the dualism of a Cartesian relationship between consciousness and world. Rather, being-in-the-world expresses ‘a unitary phenomenon’, which has nevertheless three ‘constitutive items in its structure’. Being and Time discusses the idea of ‘in-the-world’, or worldhood as such; the nature of the ‘who’, or that ‘entity which in every case has being-in-the-world as the way in which it is’; and the ontological constitution of Inhood (Inheit), or being-in. It is impossible to paraphrase or compress Heidegger’s general argument: the richness of Being and Time lies in the author’s mode of thinking, and the passion of his attempt to open, in his own metaphor, Holzwege, or forest trails towards the clearings or open spaces of being. It may be more useful to instance the kind of relation which interests Heidegger, so as to illustrate the tenor of his thinking. His discussion is in fact surprisingly concrete, for this reason: ‘Dasein’s facticity is such that its beingin-the-world has always dispersed (zerstreut) itself or even split itself up into definite ways of being-in.’ He instances ‘having to do with something, producing something

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… letting it go, undertaking, accomplishing … discussing, determining,’ and so on. Such ways of being-in imply that Heidegger’s world is not an objective counterpart to the subjective person, but rather one component of the being-in-the-world of which the ‘being’ and the ‘being-in’ are equally components. For Dasein the world itself, in Heidegger’s strange language, is composed both of natural existents (Vorhandenheit, or things-at-hand) and of fabricated existents (Zuhandenheit, or things-to-hand). For man to take up relationships toward the world is possible ‘only because Dasein, as being-in-the-world, is as it is’: the relationship is not merely ‘by way of an extra’ (Being and Time, pp. 78–9, 83–4). Dasein and the world of his concern are related in the kind of matrix which Heidegger posits in his discussion of ‘interest’ or ‘utensility’: interest pervades both the ‘subject’—the interested person—and the interesting object in which he is interested. William Barrett, in Irrational Man (1962), appropriately dubs this sense of the structure of person-world a ‘field theory of man’. When Dasein has an interest in some object, for example, a hammer, a ‘matrix of significance’ is set up in which the Being of this particular being is revealed. ‘The more we seize hold of it and use it, the more primordial does our relationship to it become, and the more unveiledly is it encountered as that which it is’ (Being and Time, p. 98). Preposterous though such a meditation on the essence of hammerness may seem, it is driving at an interesting point: what is a hammer? Is it a stick of wood with a lump of metal on the end? Or does what it is include its various possibilities of utility, the utensil being essentially a ‘something-in-order-to’, and its status as a ‘something-for-the-sake-of Dasein. For this relation Fernando Molina, in Existentialism as Philosophy (1962), offers the succinct formula that utensil, Dasein and utensility are all links in a concatenation to which the telos, that is, the ‘end’ or purpose, is given by the Dasein. It may help to substitute for a moment Karl Jaspers’s explanation of a kindred concept, that of the ‘Comprehensive’. We call ‘the being that is neither only subject nor only object, that is rather on both sides of the subject-object split, das Umgreifende, the Comprehensive (Perennial Scope, p. 9). Being, or the Comprehensive, is manifested in the dichotomy, for as subject or object only, a thing breaks away from the Comprehensive. The Comprehensive is not something we can know, but something in which we know; ‘everything else is manifested in it’ (The Way to Wisdom, pp. 30–1).

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Care I have used the phrase ‘the world of his concern’ in speaking of Dasein and mentioned that one meaning of to be is to care. This is another of Heidegger’s key themes. ‘The Being of Dasein itself is to be made visible as care,’ says Heidegger, suggesting that those expressions of ‘care’ which we know as tribulation and melancholy, or gaiety and freedom from care, ‘are ontologically possible only because Dasein, when understood ontologically, is care’ (Being and Time, p. 84). Heidegger first desynonymises the terms ‘concern’, ‘solicitude’ and ‘care’—giving each a separate shade of meaning—and then suggests an ontological relationship between them. ‘Because beingin-the-world is essentially care, being-alongside the ready-to-hand could be taken … as concern, and being-with the Dasein-with of others as we encounter it within-theworld could be taken as solicitude. Being-alongside something is concern, because it is defined as a way of being-in by its basic structure—care’ (Being and Time, p. 237). Care is always, ontologically, concern or solicitude for the to-hand, or the at-hand, or the other. Concern with the bodily needs of the Other is a form of solicitude: such solicitude is conversely an existentiale of the universal ontological structure of care, the being of Dasein. Care is clearly a value-laden term, as well as a technical one, and it is true that Heidegger’s thought lends itself more easily than Sartre’s to a positive sense of community. To leap ahead for a moment from the purely descriptive anthropological element to the prescriptive ethical element in Heidegger, we might note how, in Heidegger’s terms, solicitude can leap ahead for the Other in order to return to him his ‘care’, giving it ‘back to him authentically as such for the first time’. An authentic existence—Heidegger sometimes says ‘resolute’ existence—may bring about a confrontation between another Dasein and his authentic care, as distinct from his neuroses or self-absorption. Dasein is essentially as being-with, even in solitude. Such a way of thinking about human life seems remarkably pertinent to the Wordsworthian poetry of encounter. The Leech-gatherer in Wordsworth’s poem ‘Resolution and Independence’ (1802–7) leads an authentic though uncomplicated life. Because he exhibits fidelity to his particular calling as care he is capable of concern and solicitude—the solicitude which discreetly frees the other for his own self-projection. ‘When Dasein is resolute, it can become the “conscience” of others’; but such genuine being-with-another is possible only to authentic selves, not to the ‘they’. Resoluteness thus calls forth resoluteness from its ‘lostness in the they’ to a perception of the existential particularly of its situation (Being and Time, pp. 158–9, 156, 344).

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Approaching the idea of care through the more precise ideas of concern and solicitude may help to make clear what is meant when Heidegger formulates his conception of the ontological whole of Dasein as ‘Already-being-in-the-world, in-advance-ofitself, as the being-concerned-with-beings-encountered-in-the-world’ (Existence and Being, p. 64). This bewildering formula concatenates three elements of Heidegger’s analysis. Man is the being which finds itself ‘already-being-in-the-world’ within a particular facticity and past with which he is concerned. Man, as the being which comes to itself in self-projection, through time, experiences care for his indeterminate future as a being ‘in-advance-of-itself. Man, in his presence to the world, and in particular relationships, experiences care as ‘the being-concerned-with-beings-encountered-in-the-world’. Care is the ontological basis of these three existence-modalities. Underlying the structure is Dasein’s essential temporality. Temporality Past, present and future are, therefore, to be seen as existing dimensions of Dasein, the grounds of its tripartite structure as care; and of these the dominant dimension is future. Temporality, Heidegger says, is the ‘meaning’ of authentic care. Between its boundaries of birth and death the self maintains itself through a succession of actualities or ‘nows’ with ‘a certain selfsameness’. Both the ‘ends’ and the ‘between’ are. They exist as the ek-stases of temporality: the thrownness of Befindlichkeit, or the ‘past’ (the already-being-in-the-world), and the being-present-to things of one’s concern, have meaning to Dasein on the ground of its constitution as a being-towards. Essentially Dasein, or care, is a being-in-advance-of-itself whose existence lies in its potentiality and its projection toward authentic possibilities of being. To the existing Dasein, future, past and present are significant as the ‘“towards-oneself”, the “backto”, and the “letting-oneself-be-encountered by”’. So Dasein’s conduct, in the mode of being of authentic care, is characterised by Heidegger as ‘anticipatory resoluteness’, or ‘the loyalty of existence to its own Self (Being and Time, pp. 374, 377, 425, 433). We can, as Sartre says, ‘choose’ our past. We can also, according to Kierkegaard, cultivate the act of repetition. Heidegger understands the significance of the past— what has been—in Kierkegaardian fashion. His own term ‘resolve’ indicates the equality of existential time: a ‘time’ which is co-present in all its tenses, since we combine the not-yet and the no-longer, giving the future primacy according to our nature as a being-towards. But just as the future will become the past, so the past

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can be the future: if, in repetition, or Wiederholung (again-fetching), we choose our past, we are resolutely taking over the past into the present resolve for the future possibility—we are ‘revering the repeatable possibilities of existence’ (Being and Time, p. 443). The past is in fact open to us only as the future: as the past it is unenterable, because, says Sartre, it is—it is substance. It may help to clarify some of the implications of Heidegger’s concern with temporality if at this point we rephrase the Existentialist understanding of time in Sartrean terms. Like Heidegger, Sartre speaks of existence as lack and flight. Man, we remember, is the being which is what it is not, and is not what it is. Presence, similarly, ‘is not what it is (past) and is what it is not (future)’. Existence is ‘a flight towards its being; that is, towards the self which it will be by coincidence with what it lacks’. Sartre’s ‘for-itself’ can be defined as the being ‘which comes to itself in terms of the future’ and which ‘has to be its being instead of simply being it’ (Being and Nothingness, pp. 119–26). Death Dasein as the ‘between’ is between birth and death. As care it is anticipatory and temporal. As temporality it is a being-towards. ‘Care is being-towards-death’ (Being and Time, p. 378). Though phrased more soberly, this is Heidegger’s expression of Sartre’s more famous dictum that ‘man is a useless passion’: he is a transcendence born to die. Death is an important factor in the Existentialist analysis and recurs in many contexts. As a concept its place is here, in answer to the question ‘What is Man?’, since, whatever attitude is taken to the fact, Existentialists hold fast to the consciousness that ‘man is—to die’. Sartre regards this fact as the crowning absurdity. Where Heidegger calls death ‘my possibility, now’, Sartre says that it is rather ‘the nihilation of all my possibilities’ (Being and Nothingness, pp. 537, 615). But Sartre’s response to such nihilation, or chance, is qualitatively within the existential-romantic tradition. He apprehends death as the meaning of life, though that meaning be absurd. The ultimate contingency, the innate finitude of man, is apprehended in the ‘possibility’ of death, which can be seen as goal or blight but which is either way a part of the facticity toward which Dasein must cultivate an authentic relation. Death is a constituent of my being: my being and the possibility of non-being are not merely contiguous but concentric. I am finite not because at some time I shall end, but because I am to end. The literature of the past often treated death as preferable to decay, or as something intrinsic to life itself rather than merely its negation. Shakespeare, Keats and

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Friedrich Hölderlin, for instance, all wrote of human life in terms of autumnal ripeness, as in ‘Your life is ripe, like grapes in Autumn. Go, perfected one!’ (Hyperion, p. 151). Modern society, by contrast, seems dominated by a hopeless flight from death, a desperate intent to use every means to delay the dying hour. We seem to have agreed that it is unthinkable to die; that hospitals should conspire to prevent or fractionally postpone death, by any means; that talk about death is morbid. We have more euphemisms for death, probably, than for any other ‘obscenity’. Our life is a flight from death. The psychologist Carl Gustav Jung suggested that we might do better if we could bring ourselves to regard death as perfectly natural. Jaspers suggests that we have to learn to will our death, to choose it, not as an escape but as consummation. Beauvoir makes mortality the very ground of man’s passion and of all projects. Heidegger embodies death in his central account of man’s being. .

Freedom-towards-death The problem, Heidegger suggests, is to become ‘certain’ of our death. We all concede that death is certain, but in an ambivalent manner—as an empirical event to take place at some time in the future. ‘Along with the certainty of death goes the indefiniteness of its “when”’. By becoming certain of our death Heidegger does not mean that we should think about how or when it might occur, and he doesn’t suggest that it is the task of Dasein as being-towards-death to bring that death about. What is required is the conviction that this ‘ownmost possibility is non-relational’, that all possibility of being-alongside and being-with is to cease in that ‘death lays claim to’ Dasein ‘as an individual Dasein’. Our flight into the life of das Man, the they-self, is a flight from this ‘ownmost possibility’, but authentic existence cannot project itself ‘upon the possibility of the they-self’ (Being and Time, pp. 302, 308). In resolute and individualised anticipation death is an existential category. In English literature there is no more remarkable expression of this theme than in the act of courage which was John Keats’s art and life. To look upon one’s ‘mortal days with temperate blood’, was to Keats the highest expression of his highest existential category, that of ‘disinterestedness’. And in his remarkable sonnets—‘Four Seasons fill the measure of the year’, ‘When I have fears that I may cease to be’ and ‘Why did I laugh tonight?’ (1818–19)—this is Keats’s own achievement. His most perfect ode, ‘To Autumn’ (1819), is also a poem about the acceptance of natural process, and a world of ‘last oozings’ where the next swath is spared only momentarily. But Autumn does not touch us, in itself. Our mortality does. And it touches Keats in

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two particular ways. Death, when we are authentically certain of it, gives an absolute value to existence. And at the same time it makes free. It establishes the life-irrelevance of any value other than intensity, and reduces to empty totems the values by which the inauthentic existent lives. In freedom-towards-death one can attain liberation from ‘the world’s gaudy ensigns’, be they even ‘Verse, Fame and Beauty’. As Heidegger put it, resolute anticipation ‘shatters all one’s tenaciousness to whatever existence one has reached. (Being and Time, p. 308) Dread, we saw, makes free; and death is the greatest occasioner of dread. Heidegger’s own summary is perhaps the most striking formulation of the position: anticipation reveals to Dasein its lostness in the they-self, and brings it face to face with the possibility of being itself … in an impassioned FREEDOM TOWARDS DEATH – a freedom which has been released from the illusions of the They, and which is factical … and anxious. (Being and Time, p. 311)

A similar conviction is evident, of course, in the value which many writers—nt only Christian ones—have placed upon suffering. Man is a creature who is perpetually becoming, whose stability is perpetually at risk, who is always incomplete. Nothingness or nullity lurks at the heart of being, and man must be kept conscious of his lack if he is to grow and realise his power-to-be. ‘Man adores suffering’, says Fyodor Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground (1864), ‘because it is the only cause of consciousness’. In suffering a creature comes to know itself for what it is, distinctly individuated from other beings: in collision with the world he discovers his own extension and limitation. ‘The great object of life’, says Lord Byron, ‘is sensation—to feel that we exist, even though in pain.’ To Hölderlin, ‘He who steps on his misery stands higher’, and despair makes free ‘a power in me, something indomitable, that sets my frame sweetly trembling whenever it awakens in me’ (Hyperion, p. 131). If man is to rescue himself from the fate of das Man, it is at all times necessary, Martin Buber says, ‘to keep the pain awake, to waken the desire (Between Man and Man, p. 139).

4 What Can I Know? To the question ‘What can I know?’ Existentialism replies by changing the question, initially, to ‘What is truth?’, and to that question Kierkegaard gave the definitive, if paradoxical reply, ‘Truth is subjectivity’. An outburst in Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection (1825) casts light on the matter: Evidences of Christianity! I am weary of the word. Make a man feel the want of it; raise him if you can, to the self-knowledge of his need of it; and you may safely trust it to its own Evidence … (Aids to Reflection, p. 272)

The rebuke contains several features of the nineteenth century’s approach to the individual’s relation to truth. The headstrong relegation of evidence to another sphere; the role of emotion in causing that relegation; the insistence that even if evidences of the understanding were possible they would not be existentially pertinent; the suggestion that only a subjective appropriation of truth is an operative truth; the doctrine that a writer is not a purveyor of truth but an awakener of awareness—these make common ground with most of the writers considered in this volume. Kierkegaard’s ‘Truth is subjectivity’ is an extreme formulation which Coleridge might not have countenanced—and Kierkegaard himself accused the German Romantic idealists of falling prey to an endless unconditioned subjectivity—but it is offered as a corrective, dialectical move to those who confound truth with abstract reason or certainty. For unless a truth is subjective it is not operative; what the subject perceives depends to an extent upon what he is, and since he is a changing process the truth will change for him. Coleridge and Kierkegaard do not jettison objective truths in favour of capricious feeling, but they see that a truth becomes operative for the existing individual only when it is combined with feeling. As Coleridge says: ‘I do not wish you to act from those truths. No! still and always act from your feelings; but only meditate often on these truths, that sometime or other they may become your feelings’ (Anima Poetae, p. 18).

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Philosophical Authority If subjective truth is a corrective postulate, what it corrects is the naivety of eighteenth-century philosophical systems. However much David Hume and Immanuel Kant had achieved in liberating man’s mind from metaphysical ‘childishness’, preRomantic philosophy does not, in the view of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, take us beyond the threshold. For the most part, God is retained as an ‘as if’ in moral philosophy; and in the sphere of action we are still asked to be guided by what Kierkegaard regarded as the naivety of an ‘intellectual categorical imperative’. Kant’s imperative is formulated thus: ‘Act only on that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law’ (Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, p. 88). Both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche find this formula lacking. Kierkegaard does so because he believes that in precisely those moments when the solitary individual is engaged in an act which concerns his eternal soul it may be necessary for him, in fear and trembling, to suspend the universal ethical. In matters of faith, and of entering upon existence, Kierkegaard argues in Fear and Trembling and elsewhere that the individual is higher than the universal. But Kierkegaard does agree that the suspension of the ethical, though a dictate of faith, is nevertheless sin. Life demands, however, that the Single One grasp firmly and painfully both the universal and the particular way: their demands cannot be mediated, but they must be taken together. Nietzsche’s antagonism is differently based. He entertains a radical suspicion of pure idealism, believing that philosophers always create the world in their own image: ‘philosophy is this tyrannical desire: it is the most spiritual will to power’. Whether or not the philosopher knows it, his conscious thinking is ‘secretly guided by his instincts and forced along certain lines’. Hence what Kant was really saying, says Nietzsche, is ‘something like “what must be respected in me is my capacity for obedience, and you shall not be any better than I am!” In short, moralities too are but a symbolic language of the passions.’ Not that Nietzsche despises obedience to such imperatives. In the end he claims that all freedom, subtlety and power depend upon ‘such arbitrary laws’ as people devise: but Kant’s law cannot be authoritative for us, and by what right, in any case, could Kant himself know what should be a universal law? Nietzsche’s breezy irreverence in the face of philosophical truths is further illustrated by his comments on Spinoza, in whose case he says philosophy (which is etymologically ‘the love of wisdom’) means really ‘the love of his own wisdom’. The ‘hocus-pocus of mathematical form with which Spinoza masked and armour-plated

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… his philosophy’ is merely an instrument of intimidation (Beyond Good and Evil, pp. 3–9, 94). Beware the moralist, the idealist, the essentialist, the purveyor of timeless codes, he concludes in The Genealogy of Morals (1885–8): let us beware of the tentacles of such contradictory notions as ‘pure reason’, ‘absolute knowledge’, ‘absolute intelligence’. All these … presuppose an eye as no living being can imagine, an eye required to have no direction, to abrogate its active and interpretative powers—precisely those powers that alone make of seeing, seeing something.   (The Genealogy of Morals, p. 255)

The problem for Kierkegaard is entwined with our fundamental abandonment in freedom. Man is a free project: which is to say that there is no ‘world-historical’ source of instruction, and no pellucid God-ward imperative. In what concerns us most deeply we are thrown back on our own decision. The speculative reason, says Kierkegaard, cannot help us in the matter of existence, for to speculative reason, existence ‘is a matter of infinite indifference’. Furthermore, I am utterly alone in my plight. Other things may be shared and taught among individuals, and handed down by the generations, but in that which is genuinely human there is no learning, no osmosis, and no progress. ‘No generation begins at any other point than at the beginning’ (Fear and Trembling, p. 130). Existence, which is what we want to understand, cannot be understood, because, once it is thought, it is at once not existence. The famous cogito ergo sum of Descartes, ‘I think, therefore I am’, is parodied by Kierkegaard, who says ‘I think, ergo I think’ (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 282), but whether I as a concrete individual exist or not is another matter. Of course the content of my thought ‘exists in the conceptual sense’, but speculative thought should not confuse itself with reality. This ironical view of the limitations of the conceptual understanding is echoed by Ortega y Gasset, the Spanish philosopher (1883–1955), who suggests that all concepts are at best ironical: useful and expendable formulae which do not lead us to reality itself but which ‘man needs and uses in order to make clear his own position in the midst of the infinite and very problematical reality which is his life’. Life is struggle, and concepts are ‘the strategic plan we form in answer to the attack’ (The Revolt of the Masses [1930], p. 143). Similarly, Karl Jaspers has said that conceptual philosophy is useful not as knowledge but as an orientative procedure: ‘The purpose and meaning of a philosophical idea is not cognition of an object but alteration of our consciousness of being and of our inner attitudes towards things’ (Reason and

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‘Existenz’, p. 75). Such formulations are a modern legacy of the sceptical attitude towards cognitive processes instituted in the eighteenth century but made existentially pertinent by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in the nineteenth. To insist in this way that the understanding is finite and fallible is not to degrade it, nor to espouse anti-rationalism, but merely to recognise its proper limitations in the experience of the whole man. ‘How many men’, asks Kierkegaard in 1849, ‘ever experience the maturity of discovering that there comes a critical moment when everything is reversed, after which the point becomes to understand that there is something which cannot be understood. That is Socratic ignorance and that is what the philosophy of our times requires as a corrective.’ Until that critical moment the understanding may well satisfy our rational needs, and indeed without it one could not become aware of the incomprehensible. But when the understanding defines, systematizes and simplifies, it abrogates and distorts what it is concerned to clarify. ‘Multiplicity of meanings’, says Heidegger, ‘is the element in which all thought must move in order to be strict thought’ (What is Called Thinking?, p. 71). When the understanding attempts to account in totality for the mode of our existence it produces only, as Coleridge said, ‘the philosophy of death’. True philosophy, or philosophising, cannot aim at scientific positivism: it has to be a continual rediscovery of what has been hidden, a remaking for the contemporary situation of the on-going orientative project of philosophy. The kind of thought which has meaning for us is tentative or dogmatic, according to its temper, but never authoritative; exploratory rather than systematic, and above all a questioning. Such philosophising may be ‘a union with the One through the searching thought of existing men, an anchor which is thrown down and which each throws as himself, says Jaspers, a philosopher for whom the Bible is valuable precisely as ‘the deposit of thousand years of human borderline experience’ and a portrait of man ‘in his fundamental modes of failure’ (Reason and Existenz, p. 136; Perennial Scope, p. 103). For the Existentialist philosopher, thought is a form of existential engagement: his communicative project is to raise and to fortify the perennial questions of philosophy and to instil them as anguished questions in the reader of his work. We have been told enough, thought Kierkegaard, and now ‘the task of our age must surely be seen to be that of translating the results of philosophy into the personal life, personally to appropriate these results’ (The Concept of Irony, p. 340).

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Subjective Truth Kierkegaard’s attack on the Church and on education stems from his belief that both pervert truth. By claiming that knowable truth exists, and that they can offer it, both institutions prove to Kierkegaard that they lack truth, and are ill-equipped to recognise it. Institutional Christianity is a matter of knowledge, and so is education. But both are interested only in objective truths, packaged and marketable. For an existing individual, however, the question of truth is resurrected, and cannot be laid to rest by ‘third person’ abstract understanding. The existing self, with its choices, projects, fidelities, is the ground of its own truth. ‘For a subjective reflection the truth becomes a matter of appropriation, of inwardness, of subjectivity, and thought must probe more and more deeply into the subject and his subjectivity’ (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 171). When Kierkegaard rejects the formula that truth is ‘identity of thought and being’, calling it ‘a chimera of abstraction’, he does so not because truth is not properly so defined but because for the knower truth is not so defined, he being ‘an existing individual for whom the truth cannot be such an identity as long as he lives in time’. The equation of truth with subjectivity is the subject of an argument of some length in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Objectively, says Kierkegaard, we are concerned with whether our notion of God accords with the true God, but subjectively we ask whether ‘the individual is related to a something in such a manner that his relationship is in truth a God-relationship’. The ‘how’ of belief is the ‘passion of the infinite’, which is in turn subjectivity. Hence the resonance of Kierkegaard’s paradoxical formulation: An objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation process of the most passionate inwardness is the truth, the highest truth available for the existing individual.  (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 182)

Coleridge’s similar thought is quoted approvingly by John Stuart Mill: ‘Neither will truth, as a mere conviction of the understanding, save, nor error condemn. To love truth sincerely is spiritually to have truth.’And in a formulation which looks forward to Cardinal Newman’s The Grammar of Assent (1870), Wordsworth had written, in   Mill on Bentham and Coleridge, ed. F R Leavis (London: Chatto & Windus, 1959) 164   In The Grammar of Assent, John Henry Newman (1801–90) followed Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection in arguing that ‘logic’ deals only with abstractions, whereas ‘belief’ is an act of apprehension. We feel certain of something as a result of an accumulation of intuitions, rather than rational demonstration. Proofs cannot be shared, and ‘certainty’ belongs to the mind, rather than to a proposition the mind may entertain.

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1838, ‘Assent is power, belief the soul of fact’. Kierkegaard, however paradoxically, expresses a nineteenth-century consensus concerning the subjectivity of truth. Values Hence, we ourselves authenticate our values. Sartre insists that man’s values are founded in the individual’s freedom, and are justified by ‘nothing, absolutely nothing’. Similarly for Nietzsche, whatever is of value has had that value bestowed on it by man in the fulfilment of his being. To respond to the death of God by falling into nihilism is therefore a blasphemy against the earth. Nietzsche reserves his deepest anger for purveyors of nihilism. If we have lost the old transcendental values we have to create new ones for ourselves and the world we inhabit. Man is essentially the evaluator, says Nietzsche, and ‘we only have created the world which is of any account to man’. To deny value denies man in his sublimest function as creator. The nihilists ‘encounter an invalid or an old man or a corpse; and straightaway they say “Life is refuted!” But only they are refuted’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 72). And Nietzsche warns the professional denigrator, ‘you fool; where one can no longer love, one should—pass by!’ In Nietzsche’s criticism of moral philosophy, materialism and idealism meet on the common ground of a betrayal of life. It is to life itself—he suggests in his ‘three theses’—that man must return with fresh affirmation. Man is alone in a world in which he must accept that life has a Dionysian character; he must root himself in recognition of the will-to-power; and he must ultimately affirm the ‘greatest idea’ of the eternal recurrence. Any system which fails to satisfy these three fundamentals will ultimately be overthrown, but in the long haul for truth every people must continue the creation of its own values, ‘the table of its overcomings … the voice of its willto-power’. At every stage a people must forge its own values for its own time: ‘If a goal for humanity is lacking, is there not still lacking humanity itself?’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 84). In the positing of these goals, or the reaching of a moral judgement, it is not objective wrongness or rightness that counts. The falseness of a given judgement does not constitute a valid objection against it, so far as we are concerned [‘we’ being those who are Jenseits von Gut und Böse, or beyond good and evil]. … The real question is how far a given judgement furthers and maintains life … (Beyond Good and Evil, p. 4)

Nietzsche would agree with the ironic position of Karl Jaspers. Jaspers, having identified three modes of anti-philosophy—‘Demonology’, ‘Deification of Man’ and

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‘Nihilism’—remarks that ‘all three can, as transition, as language, or as spur, perform a function of truth’. Fallacy arises only when the chosen position becomes ‘definite and fixed’: fanaticism for truth can become untruth, in the abandonment of ‘dialectical circling’ (Perennial Scope, p. 147)—a phrase which expresses a good deal of the attitude to philosophising that we find in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche as well as in the Romantic ironists. Man’s task is to be what he is, a creator of values, eternally, for there is no constant good and evil. But to create new values it is necessary to smash the old lawtables: the creator is first the destroyer of petrified ‘thou shalt nots’. Nietzsche does not scorn order. What he despises is what Paul Tillich has called ‘authority in principle’ as opposed to the ‘authority in fact’ of our day to day dependence. Authority ‘in principle’ is, on principle, unjust. It ‘disregards the intrinsic claim of human beings to become responsible for ultimate decisions’ (Love, Power and Justice, p. 89). Tillich’s target here is the authority represented by popes, teachers and fathers—the scribes of Nietzsche’s law tables. The man who smashes the tablets incurs the wrath of the ‘good’ and the ‘just’ who hate most of all ‘him who smashes their table of values’, but he, says Nietzsche, ‘is the creator’. The one who—as in Blake’s revolutionary new testament, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell—will ‘drive his plough over the bones of the dead’, including the bones of his own past thoughts, is the creator of new values, who alone can lead man to his inheritance. But if, having stamped the stony law to dust, he looks about him to ask where the new values shall be found? Then Thomas Carlyle representatively answers: ‘Fool! the ideal is in thyself, the impediment, too, is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same ideal out of …’ (Sartor Resartus, p. 167). Irony If deep truths are paradoxical, and truth for the existing individual changes as he changes, irony is clearly an essential part of the existent’s intellectual equipment. The ironic tone of the above comments is not merely a part of the surface texture of nineteenth-century philosophising, for in a confusing and paradoxical world irony is necessary. Irony, says Karl Solger, ‘is a clear consciousness of the infinitely full chaos’ and the ability to make a full account of it which is at once detached and self-conscious.10 In Romantic thought, given over to affirming life in its contradictory totality, irony enters in many guises. One 10  Vorlesungen uber Aesthetik, cited in R. Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism: 1750–1950, Vol. 2, The Romantic Age, Jonathan Cape, London, 1955, pp. 15, 300.

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expression of such intellectual ironic detachment is perhaps Keats’s ‘negative capability’: the power to see contradiction and paradox without disintegration on the one hand or futile gestures towards system on the other. To be committed to a single position is a fanaticism which leads to untruth, and for all the English Romantics, as for Byron, doubt was the authenticator of belief—the element which sustained an existential integrity in the midst of temporary intellectual orientations. Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Irony (1841) is a history and critique of irony from Socratic dialogue down to Fichte’s subjective idealism.11 In it he accuses German Romantic philosophy of falling prey to the temptations implicit in this most dangerous of intellectual weapons. Irony, to the Existentialists, is a tool to be used in the service of existence. It confers freedom by confounding the present moment in the service of a new actuality. Irony confers freedom on thought (by rescuing it from superstitious fixity), but then ‘in order for thought, subjectivity, to acquire truth and content it must allow itself to be born: it must sink down into the depths of the substantial life …’ (The Concept of Irony, p. 291). But in its degenerate form, as represented (in Kierkegaard’s view) by Fichte, romantic irony merely negates all historical actuality in a sterile round of solipsistic indulgence. The habitual ironist is engaged in a perpetual emancipation of himself from the claims of a particular life; and irony, which should be an instrument of truth, becomes merely the tool of a subjective and illusory freedom. ‘It is not this or that phenomenon but the totality of existence which it considers sub specie ironiae’ (The Concept of Irony, p. 291). Irony, thus abused, becomes in the Hegelian phrase ‘infinite absolute negativity’. From an Existentialist standpoint, then, irony is essential in the face of ‘seriousness’—the choice of absolutes under which to shelter from the anxiety of freedom—but it is also a threat to ‘engagement’. Irony, properly used, as the function which reveals limits, and encourages selfawareness, and distinguishes the spurious from the real, is for Kierkegaard the beginning of the personal life. It liberates the individual from the crowd (Kierkegaard’s version of das Man) and from ‘untruth’. It frees him from passive and jejune orientations. ‘As philosophers claim that no true philosophy is possible without doubt, so … no authentic human life is possible without irony.’ And: 11  Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814). Where Kant argued that we cannot know things-in-themselves, but appears to have assumed that they do exist, his successors developed an extreme version of subjectivism, in which the world only exists in a set of appearances which derive from the self-creative activity of the observing ego. In order to explain the existence of a common world, rather then be stuck with the possibility that everything was his own creation and that only he existed, Fichte posited the remarkably obscure concept of an absolute ego of which the world is the self-creating strife.

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There is in every personal life so much that must be repudiated.… Here again, irony is an excellent surgeon. For when irony has been mastered … its function [is to help] the personal life to acquire health and truth.   (The Concept of Irony, pp. 291, 271, 340)

It is in this sense that Nietzsche proclaims: ‘Objection, evasion, joyous distrust, and love of irony are signs of health; everything absolute belongs to pathology.’ Being-in-Truth Like Kierkegaard, Heidegger has a doctrine of truth which departs from the notion of conceptual understanding. What he offers is an ontological description of knowing which takes precedence over the question of knowledge: truth is practically equated with ‘openness’ or ‘unconcealedness’. To exist authentically—to stand out in being— is to be in the truth. A high school, for instance is there, it is undoubtedly an essent, and it remains there (whatever sceptical philosophers might imagine) even if nobody looks at it, but what it is cannot be the same for everyone. For us who … ride by, it is different than for the pupils who sit in it; not because they see it only from within but because for them this building really is what it is and as it is. You can, as it were, smell the being of this building in your nostrils.… But … the building’s being is not based upon this odour that is somewhere in the air.… Wherein consists its being? When and to whom does it reveal itself? Who apprehends being?  (Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 27–8)

To seek the truth about something is to let it reveal itself. The urge to know argues a ‘deficiency’ in our concernful relation to the world, which is met by a mode of dwelling among beings-in-the-world. The openness, or unconcealedness applies as much to the ‘I’ as to the ‘it’. ‘Freedom, so understood as the letting-be of what is, fulfils and perfects the nature of truth in the sense that truth is the unconcealing and revealing of what is’ (Existence and Being, p. 336). To Heidegger, this is the kind of thinking which distinguishes great poetry. Art is not a reflection of the beautiful but is properly engaged in disclosing Being, the Being of whatever existent is approached in freedom by the poet. To achieve such disclosure it is necessary to interpenetrate, to bring the Dasein-with to stand in the being of what is other. ‘Only those who can do so … master the word; these are the poets and the thinkers’ (Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 111).

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While Heidegger’s view of poetic thought is derived from Hölderlin, on whose work he has commented extensively, it also constitutes an illuminating commentary on both Wordsworth and Keats. In the first place, one thinks of that act of strenuous presence-to-the-world which Wordsworth (in ‘The Tables Turned’) called ‘wise passiveness’, and his suspicion of the reasoning faculty when it prefers ‘to sit in judgement than to feel’. To Wordsworth the true poet is ‘familiar with the essences of things’, and one ‘willing to work and to be wrought upon’. Secondly, Heidegger, unlike those positivist critics who cannot digest Keats’s famous neo-Platonic line ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’, recognises that the quest for beauty and the quest for truth are both a matter of the disclosure of being, and that ‘Beauty is a fateful gift of the essence of truth’. There is more than one way into Being. As Heidegger puts it, in a lucid paradox, ‘what is stated poetically, and what is stated in thought, are never identical, but there are times when they are the same—those times when the gulf separating poesy and thinking is a clean decisive cleft. This can occur when poesy is lofty, and thinking profound’ (What is Called Thinking?, pp. 19–20). The Encompassing The ground of the poet’s sense of transcendence or sublimity, or his moments of epiphany, is that Dasein is constituted as a being-with. Relation is the fulfilment of a constitutional lack at the heart of Dasein. Authentic existence, in Heidegger’s account, requires such relation with the world of other beings. Human realities depend upon one another, and being-with ‘is an essential characteristic of Dasein even when factically no other is present-at-hand or perceived’. Ontologically man is so made that his life is fulfilled in the ‘we’. ‘The Other can be missing only in and for a being-with’ (Being and Time, p. 156). This ontological position is not peculiar to Heidegger. It is also maintained in Jaspers’s understanding of man as the Encompassing or Comprehensive. Like Heidegger, Jaspers relates the possibility of reason to his ontological description of man, and defines reason as ‘in itself the total will to communicate’. His formula again clarifies Heidegger:’ … and because being-there is possible only with other beingthere, and existence can come into being only with other existence, communication is the form in which truth is revealed in time.’ To Heidegger and Jaspers, then, authentic being and being-with are the ground of truth. The Joycean epiphany—as in Stephen’s vision on the beach in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ‘(1916)—is a fulfilment of Dasein’s authentic potentialities. And when Wordsworth speaks of something as

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inexpressible as his ‘Tintern Abbey’ experience of unity with creation and the uncreated, speech is trying in Jaspers’s terms to bridge the two Comprehensives—that which we are, and that which is Being itself—and to draw Being itself into the mode of the existential (Perennial Scope, pp. 45, 36). Thought, as an act of presence of the whole man, encounters the unthinkable. The ‘Question-in-the-World’ A variant on Heidegger is to be found in Martin Buber, who makes the question of openness his primary existential challenge. To Buber, ‘nothing can refuse to be the vessel for the Word’. The forms of nature—an animal, a plant, a stone—the events which befall a man, what he hears and sees, and feels, ‘each concrete hour’, speak to the man who is attentive. The speech, Jaspers has said, manifests ‘the speech of God, a speech that has always many meanings and that can become historically unequivocal for existence only in the evanescent moment’ (The Way to Wisdom, pp. 9–10). This sounds like pure Romanticism, and when Buber speaks of God in the following rhapsodic passage the God invoked is very much the God of the poets. Buber refuses to see the created world as a bar between man and his Creator, for God is in the world, as question. The single one must put his arms round the vexatious world, whose true name is creation; only then do his fingers reach the realm of lightning and of grace … he must face the hour … just as it is.… He must hear the message, stark and untransfigured.… And he, the single one, must answer, by what he does and does not do, he must accept and answer for the hour, the hour of the world, of all the world, as that which is given to him, entrusted to him. Reduction is forbidden; you are not at liberty to select what suits you, the whole cruel hour is at stake, the whole claims you, and you must answer—Him. (Between Man and Man, pp. 27, 89)

This concern with the mysterious, the evanescent, the unanalysable, may strike one— in a positivist age—as curiously regressive. Does philosophy, in the hands of the Existentialists, revert to communing with plants and gazing at the stars? Well, yes, there is an element of regression, in the sense of a quite deliberate desophistication of philosophy, and in Karl Jaspers it returns us to the Romantic cult of the child. The faculty which is perhaps strongest in children is that of wonder: to which faculty, said both Plato and Aristotle, we owe philosophy. If philosophy has to do with answers, its province is experience: but if, as the Existentialists tell us, philosophy

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begins in an appropriation of the deepest questions of existence, it is the province of innocence and wonder. Jaspers begins his The Way to Wisdom with a discussion of precisely this problem. We accept that where art is concerned genius is in a sense the capacity to maintain in experience the creative powers of innocence. Perhaps the same is true of philosophy. Perhaps we are born philosophers, just as we are born artists. The child, Jaspers says, as he comments on particular childhood experiences, is ‘perplexed at the mystery of his “I”‘; he senses ‘that there is no end to questioning’; he is seized ‘with the wonder of existence’, that ‘things do not exist through themselves’: and in the growing child we may witness a ‘forlorn evasion’ of his ‘wonderment and terror at the universal transience of things’ (The Way to Wisdom, pp. 9–10). Jaspers is not speaking of prodigal feats of infant intellect but of occurrences in everyday childhood experience and behaviour. For the philosopher, as for the artist, it may be necessary to regress to the most primal and urgent questionings, and to restore, in his dealings with the everyday, the daily questioning of the being of things. If wisdom is not a matter of what one can know but of how intently one is able to question, perhaps to be instilled with tireless wonder and a ceaseless questioning is to be wrapped (in Wordsworth’s phrase in ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’) in ‘clouds of glory’. What can I know? Very little, it appears, and never for very long. In any case, what one knows will scarcely help one to act, for one’s knowledge is often an exquisite refinement of self-deception. But one may question, everything; and one must be open, always. A Caveat—Sartrean Solipsism It is a long time since I mentioned Sartre, who is much more rigorously dualistic with regard to consciousness and existing things. While Sartre agrees that ‘knowledge is nothing other than the presence of Being to the for-itself, and the for-itself is only the nothingness which realises that presence’, his departure from Heidegger is implicit in the resonant negatives of that formula. His scrupulous doubt leads him to remark further that from the ‘being’ which surrounds me ‘I am separated precisely by nothing; and this nothing because it is nothingness is impassable’ (Being and Nothingness, pp. 216–17). Hence Sartre’s austere solipsism. We know in interiority, and what we cannot know of the other is himself in and as interiority, or as what he is. Sartre accepts neither Husserl’s nor Heidegger’s attempts to overcome isolation. When Husserl says that ‘my ego … can be a world-experience ego only by being in communion with oth-

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ers’ (Cartesian Meditations, p. 139), Sartre objects that the only connection between I and the other is still ‘knowledge’. Against Heidegger he maintains that although Heidegger’s human reality exists outside the self, ‘this existence outside itself is precisely Heidegger’s definition of the self (Being and Nothingness, pp. 235, 249). To Sartre, communion is, at best, projection. To Heidegger and Marcel, however, it is a necessity of life to be able to feel the Other as a presence, something that impinges upon one at deepest levels. Only then is one open to one’s own being. To be unavailable, to be incapable of presence, is a form of death. It is, says Marcel, ‘to be … encumbered with one’s own self (The Philosophy of Existence, p. 27). The individual—and this is common ground to Jaspers and Buber also—cannot become human by himself. Consciousness may tend to constitute the other as part of the world of ‘it’, but overcoming that tendency is one of the most vital tasks of existential becoming.

Chapter 5 What Must I Do? Nietzsche’s worst indictment of the Christian God is that he is an absentee landlord, and that to concern ourselves with him is to devalue the here and now. Thus Spoke Zarathustra begins with the proclamation of a new, earthly heaven: for Nietzsche, as (usually) for William Blake, the earth is holy and its creatures divine. The burden of Zarathustra’s prologue is an undermining of the Christian (and Platonic and Kantian) demand for some higher realm of absolute values. Nietzsche does not bother to deny an afterworld, but he suggests that since we cannot know one it is not worth our while to think one: for a concern with heaven is the source of a debilitating devaluation of the earth. What we have hitherto called temptation, let us now call good. To the question ‘What shall I do?’ Nietzsche replies in this manner: let us cease to bury our heads ‘in the sands of heavenly things’ and carry proudly ‘an earthly head which creates meaning for the earth’. We want ‘no signposts to super-earths and paradises’, for too much virtue has already flown away from the earth, and we must lead it back to where it is engendered, where it lives and has its meaning. Henceforward, in the religion of man and the earth the most dreadful thing will be ‘to blaspheme the earth’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 260, 60, 42). Or, to put the same point in Simone de Beauvoir’s terms (she and Sartre responded powerfully to this aspect of Nietzsche), ‘Existence must be asserted in the present if one does not want all life to be defined as an escape toward nothingness’ (The Ethics of Ambiguity, p. 125). Nietzsche is not demanding that we seek stability and surety in earthly things. Rather, it is stability and static values that we must abjure. We must cease to be aghast at the most blessed feature of the earth, its nature as a perpetual becoming and decaying. The intransitory—the grail of the philosophers—is a mirage. ‘The best images and parables should speak of time and becoming: they should be a eulogy and a justification of all transitorinese’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 111). It is precisely because art does this that Plato condemned the poets, as Beauvoir points out. The artist sees existence, not some imaginary beyond, as itself a reason for existing. His work reveals the absolute value of the transitory.

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The Marriage of Heaven and Hell The attempt to petrify life is the greatest treason, because life and values are grounded in energy. Like Blake, Nietzsche seeks to loose life from its moral fetters and return it to a sense of the holiness of its impulses. The notions of good and evil are the moralist’s attempt to interpret what is essentially transitory and evolving by set— and therefore unreal—criteria, such as the ten commandments. Blake’s theme in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is (as W. B. Yeats recognised) writ large in Nietzsche. Zarathustra bids his listeners trust their impulses: where they failed is not in sin but in moderation, even their ‘meanness in sinning’; and having blasphemed their passions by calling them evil they should learn that virtues grow out of those same passions. The young aesthete in Kierkegaard’s Either-Or expresses something of the same temper: ‘Let others complain that the age is wicked; my complaint is that it is paltry: for it lacks passion’ (Either-Or, Vol. I, p. 27). Zarathustra promises his disciples that ‘at last all your passions [will] become virtues and all your devils angels’, and through energy and experiment they will reach the higher life and the ultimate joy, for ‘to the discerning man, all instincts are holy’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, pp. 43, 64, 102). Truth is found not in the transcendent and the inconceivable but in following one’s senses ‘to the end’. Faith in the impulses of the heart is one half of health, though the heart may destroy itself if it is not married to that other sanctity, reason. Nietzsche’s insight is imaged in Blake’s belief that ‘Energy is the only life, and is from the body; and reason is the bound or outward circumference of energy’. In his remarks on the future of science, in Human All-too-Human (1878), Nietzsche explains that a ‘double brain’ is the requirement of health, which degenerates if either the ‘heart’ or the reason weakens, since ‘in the one lies the source of energy, in the other the regulator’. The metaphor for this synthesis, to which D. H. Lawrence’s heroes also aspire, is Dionysus, Greek god of culture and of the vine, and for Nietzsche an image of full humanity which he uses as a touchstone for man’s maturity and autonomy. The rigorous acceptance of the Dionysian life defeats all threat of dualism of matter and spirit, for this particular god is worshipped in the fullest release of the life-force. All festivals—of which the Dionysian revels are the archetype—assert existence even though in a destructive mode, spending rather than conserving energy. Nietzsche, in his first work The Birth of Tragedy (1872), saw the vision of the Greek tragic chorus as an outgrowth of the dark enchantment of the Dionysian revelry, and Beauvoir follows him in speaking of art as an attempt to give more durable form to the assertion of existence made in the frenzy of festival.

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Nietzsche’s Dionysus is a controlling image in most of the principal works, and plays the role of familiar spirit, reminding one of Blake’s conversations with his favourite devil. ‘“I often contemplate,” said Dionysus to Nietzsche, “how I can help man on and make him stronger, more evil, and deeper than he is.” “Stronger, more evil, and deeper?” I asked in horror. “Yes, I will repeat: stronger, more evil, and deeper; and also more beautiful. “ At that the tempter-god gave me his halcyon smile as though he had made a charming witticism’ (Beyond Good and Evil, aphorism 995). Sublimation To man, therefore, Zarathustra addresses a challenge: ‘I’ teach you the Superman. Man is something that should be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?’ Such overcoming is not an automatic development to which progress, evolutionary or scientific, will impel us, for such unconscious ‘progress’—the bane, in Nietzsche’s view, of the nineteenth century—is more likely to produce what he calls the ‘Ultimate’ man, a mere spectre of humanity run to seed and most contemptible because as an automaton he can ‘no longer despise himself. Nietzsche’s contribution to the quest of authentic existence lies in the doctrine of sublimation, by which is meant an unceasing process of becoming and overcoming, a new kind of loyalty to the self: Oh youthful hope for my own kind of loyalty! The vain elation That I had loyal-changing friends was my imagination. The spell of getting old has made them flee: Only a man who changes can be true to me. (‘From the Summits’, Beyond Good and Evil, p. 328)

Zarathustra calls sublimation ‘the road to one’s self. It is a process of watchful severity, of changing what is weak into something healthy, and making the healthy healthier. It is a battle—a compressed Darwinian evolution taking place as a constant battle of drives within the growing and self-discovering individual. The development is conscious, controlled and watchful, but the driving force is of course the will-to-power, the basic drive in all living creatures.

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The Will-to-Power Everybody who has heard of Nietzsche knows the term ‘the will-to-power’, but there is much disagreement as to what it means, and what to make of it. Some take it figuratively. Others see it as a crude piece of psychological reductivism, prejudicial to the rich ambiguity of Nietzsche’s major work. In the twentieth century the concept was tamed somewhat, as in George Bernard Shaw’s ‘life force’, but Nietzsche makes such derivatives seem suspect. In The Gay Science (1882) he makes it quite clear that he considers the will-to-power to be the only honest explanation of our pet illusions concerning such emotions as love (which is really the will to possess) and pity (which is the will to assert superiority). He offers the term as ‘a solution of all riddles’: ‘This world is the will to power—and nothing else’ (The Will to Power, p. 550). Nietzsche’s will-to-power is a strikingly powerful distillation from an idea of Schopenhauer, made existentially much more challenging. Schopenhauer had said: ‘Because everything in nature is at once appearance and thing-in-itself, or natura naturata and natura naturans, it is consequently susceptible of a twofold explanation, a physical and a metaphysical. The physical explanation is always in terms of a cause, the metaphysical in terms of will; for that which appears in cognitionless nature as natural force, and on a higher level as life-force, receives in animal and man the name will’ (Essays and Aphorisms, p. 56). This mild exposition helps us in fact to see the full import of Nietzsche’s idea, though it lacks the provocative Nietzschean emphasis. It is Nietzsche rather than Schopenhauer who enables us to see this metaphysical proposition as a diagnosis of the history of the West. It explains something about the vibrant culture which Nietzsche admires in classical civilisation. But it also explains the less admirable behaviour of administrators, moralists and philanthropists in imperial times, as consequences of the dynamic dualism in which Western man has sought to master and subdue his world. Mastery, in this imperial sense, is not what Nietzsche preaches. He sees too well that a cerebral culture perverts the possibilities implicit in the will-to-power, and he draws, like Martin Buber, a distinction between the world will and the arbitrary self-will. The free man, according to Buber, has to subordinate his ‘unfree will’, controlled by circumstance and instinct, to his ‘grand will’ which has to do with realizing possibility. When he dos so ‘he listens to what is emerging from himself, to the course of being in the world … to bring it to reality as it desires …’ (I and Thou, p. 59). Nietzsche’s will-to-power is also a will to growth and a will to truth. It is not at all

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the nameless horror its simplest formulation may suggest, and certainly not (as popularly supposed) a justification of fascist bullying. ‘In knowing and under-standing too, I feel my will’s delight in begetting and becoming; and if there be innocence in my knowledge, it is because will to begetting is in it’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 111). It is innocent, Paul Tillich suggests, because ‘Nietzsche’s “will-to-power” means neither will nor power’ but is rather ‘a designation of the dynamic self-affirmation of life’. The term ‘power’ does not signify political or social power, or indeed any form of transitive power, but ‘the drive of everything living to realise itself with increasing intensity and extensity. The will-to-power is not the will of men to attain power over other men, but it is the self-affirmation of life in its self-transcending dynamics, overcoming internal and external resistance’ (Love, Power and Justice, p. 36). This may go too far towards taming Nietzsche’s concept, yet one must recognise that in both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche the primary use of the term is to designate not control of others but whatever force it is that enables one to endure, to recover, to overcome, to love, to know, to beget, and to become. The will-to-power may drive the mob to mass slaughter or the ascetic to martyrdom, but through sublimation it is harnessed in the service of the Dionysian ideal and to the project of the Superman. In part, the project of the Superman is self-love and self-knowledge. ‘To learn to love oneself is no commandment for today and tomorrow. Rather is this art the finest, subtlest and most patient of all.… For all his possessions are well concealed from the possessor; and of all treasure pits one’s own is the last to be digged …’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 211). This then is Nietzsche’s answer to the question ‘What must I do?’ The task is a perpetual sublimation in the Dionysian life under the aegis of the will-to-power. The Superman The Superman, or Übermensch, or Overman, is one who has overcome himself, achieved existence, and allowed the sacred ‘Yes’ to supplant the sacred ‘No’. Without metaphysical support he affirms life, and affirms the values of the earth in a new beginning. He exercises that responsible freedom of which Blake spoke when he said ‘I’ must create my own system or be enslaved by another man’s’, an active freedom, which must always be chosen. ‘Do you call yourself free?’ asks Zarathustra, and he answers himself in words which echo for the English reader in the writings of Thomas Carlyle and of D. H. Lawrence:

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‘I want to hear your ruling idea, and not that you have escaped from a yoke. Are you such a man as ought to escape a yoke? There are many who threw off their final worth when they threw off their bondage. Free from what? Zarathustra does not care about that! But your eye should clearly tell me: free for what! Can you furnish yourself with your own good and evil?’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 89)

The freedom of the Superman amounts to a solitary adventure, a continuing battle to discover truth in which the ground always changes and truth is always in contest. Gravity and caution must be overcome: ‘Life is an experiment, O my brothers! And not a contract! Shatter, shatter that expression.’ We are commanded to live dangerously; to fight the good war that hallows every cause; to plunge as an existing soul into becoming. By discarding all metaphysical props and stays, our wisdom will be joyful. We shall find that with insight comes the great trinity of joy—greatness, serenity and sunlight—and ‘thoughts transfigured’ (‘The Wanderer and his Shadow’, aphorism 332, in Human, All-too-Human). It is perhaps surprising to find in this transfiguration reference quite such a sacramental sense of life, but of course there is the same almost mystical dimension in Nietzsche’s strange doctrine of the eternal recurrence. The climax of Zarathustra deals with the prophet’s encounter with, and coming to terms with, the alarming insight that ‘I shall return with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent—not to a new life, or a better life or a similar life: I shall return eternally to this identical and self-same life’ (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, p. 237). There is no world-historical progress in which, once and for all, one plays a part, no grand design which one can help to a certain conclusion, no after-life of rest from the labours of discipleship: but there is this substitute eternity, an uncompromising, unglamorous substitute, but the possible ground of a new valuation. Zarathustra already has the courage to destroy and to despise, but can he acquire the courage to affirm life unreservedly—even to the extent of affirming weakness and mediocrity, since they too will return in ‘this identical life’? In The Gay Science Nietzsche called this doctrine the ‘greatest burden’, and in ‘The Eternal Return’ he discusses it with Kierkegaardian pathos. The task, he says ‘is to live so that you must wish to live again’, and in so living one must always know that what one does is ‘a question of eternity’ (aphorisms 27–8). This is the Nietzschean ‘one thing’, and at the threshold of every act recurs the question: ‘Is it of the kind that I am willing to do an infinite number of times?’ Heidegger, in What is Called Thinking?, wonderfully says that freedom from revenge is the Superman’s essential nature. Acceptance of eternal recurrence is the forgiveness of time.

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The Choice of Existence Compared with all this breezy rhetoric, Kierkegaard’s challenge to his reader (and himself) may seem a little prosaic. For him the task is to come into existence. To become aware of the want of existence, of what it is and to attain it, is the existential challenge. ‘Existence’ is the category in which all man’s constitutive faculties reach their authentic expression. It is not enough to perfect the imagination, or thought, or feeling, as if these, or one of them, were the secret of life: ‘The task is not to exalt the one at the expense of the other, but to give them an equal status, to unify them in simultaneity; the medium in which they are unified is existence’ (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 311). Existence cannot be imagined or thought. By its nature passionate and paradoxical, ‘a synthesis of the infinite and the finite’, existence cannot be reduced to system or objective analysis, caught and understood, without losing precisely the tension that makes it existence: It is just this that it means to exist if one is to become conscious of it. Eternity is the winged horse, infinitely fast, and time is the worn-out jade; the existing individual is the driver. (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 276)

It is when he is the driver of this ill-assorted pair, and not a sleeping passenger, that the individual exists. The encounter with existence lies in the ‘Either-Or’ of choice. In choice—that is, in choosing decisively, in such a way as to realise a life-possibility and renounce, for ever, another possibility—we encounter reality, the reality of an existing self, in pathos. In choice one chooses one’s particular humanity: initially in dread, since the encounter involves the recognition and experience of despair, and subsequently (if all goes well) in joy, since existential choice banishes dread. When one discovers the self one discovers freedom: for the self is freedom—it is the relation between infinity and finiteness, and possibility and limitation. Despair is the disrelation of these elements: self exists in the synthesis. For a man to be unconscious of himself as self is the sickness-unto-death: ‘it seems to me that I could weep for an eternity over the fact that such misery exists.’ But to achieve self it is necessary to venture. What one ventures is (from this point of view) immaterial, ‘for if I venture amiss—very well, then life helps me with its punishment’ (The Sickness unto Death, p. 167). The major task proposed to every human is to become ‘subjective’. What is difficult about this is that man is ambitious to do much more than this, and in some way progress historically from the example of his best forebears, and that the ‘winged

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horse’ and the ‘worn out jade’ of Kierkegaard’s analogy are involved. ‘But really to exist so as to interpenetrate one’s existence with consciousness, at one and the same time eternal and as if far removed from existence, and yet also present in existence in the process of becoming: that is truly difficult’ (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 272). In Either-Or, the temptation for the young aesthete in Part One is to remain in thought, impervious to existence, and thought, Kierkegaard maintains, does not contain reality. But a thought at least signifies the possibility of being—it reflects reality and action, and the concrete reflection may be enough to disturb the ‘disinterestedness’ of thought. In any case, the kind of act that Kierkegaard requires is not merely external action. Action is really ‘an internal decision in which the individual puts an end to mere possibility and identifies himself with the content of his thought in order to exist in it’ (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 302). Decision is itself sometimes the existential dimension of action. The moment of decisive choice, the existential act, makes growth possible. Now if, during the whole course of his life, a man never acts in so decisive a way that the educator can get a hold on him: well, then the man is certainly allowed to live on … in a state of illusion … the greatest lack of grace … [but] Once a man acts in a decisive sense and comes out into reality, existence can get a grip on him and providence educate him. (Journals, p. 182)

Of this interpenetration of thought and existence, this existing in ‘the content of his thought’, through internalising action and externalising thought, Kierkegaard’s own decisive acts and writings are exceptional embodiments. In his life, act and writing interpenetrate. The major decision in his emotional life, the renunciation of his engagement, becomes the substance of his thought in Repetition and Fear and Trembling. But all his writings, from the confessional Journal to the formal utterance of the Concluding Unscientific Postscripts, have the weight and pathos of existential ventures. Despair Kierkegaard describes certain spiritual states in terms of physical disorder, and spiritual changes as physical movements. One of these states is dread, which Kierkegaard defines as ‘a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy’. This is the condition of moral vertigo—a paralysing presentiment of sin. Dread is in fact the ‘principal

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category’ of original sin: the presentiment and the ground of sin itself. Dread may issue in various ways: it is realised in despair, or sin, neutralised in faith, or potentiated in remorse. Kierkegaard rejects remorse as a valid determination. Remorse, he says, is ‘in advance’ of itself, discovering the consequence before it comes, and closed to all possibility of freedom: it brings about a self-precipitation into sin. Yet he who has ‘learned rightly to be in dread has learned the most important thing’, for ‘dread is the possibility of freedom’ and he who has learned to make his spiritual dread a ‘serviceable spirit’ will dance in the presence of ‘the dreads of finiteness’ (The Concept of Dread, pp. 38, 103, 139, 142–5). In this, of course, Kierkegaard is followed by all the Existentialists, as we have already seen. In Kierkegaard’s analysis, however, what the condition of dread reveals is man’s constitution as despair. In the category of despair itself Kierkegaard realises his most subtle description of a psychic reality. He makes it the crux of the terms dread, possibility, limitation, leap and repetition. Despair is the factor which distinguishes human from other existences in Kierkegaard’s view. Paradoxically, ‘The possibility of the sickness is man’s advantage over the beast’, though it is an advantage that is best realised in avoidance, for ‘in the case of despair … being is related to the ability to be, as a fall’ (The Sickness unto Death, p. 148). Man, being created as a relationship between polarities, finitude and infinitude, possibility and limitation, is set free, unconditionally free, from the power which created him, and is under the responsibility of sustaining the relationship, which is the self. Despair, the disrelation of the self, is the sickness-unto-death: ‘this agonising contradiction, this sickness in the self, everlastingly to die, to die and yet not to die … to live to experience death.’ Despair as we use the term in everyday speech usually expresses the sense of despair over something: we attach despair to the external object or occasion of our mood. Kierkegaard insists, however, that in such concrete cases as the despair of a girl over the loss of a boy-friend, the despair is really over the impossibility of accepting herself without her boyfriend: the loss reveals a void, a failure in the self, and in despair we seek to escape from the self and its lack. Despair—this distinguishing feature of man—is a universal condition: ‘there lives no one … who is not in despair’ (The Sickness unto Death, p. 155), who does not have a lack, a void, in his or her constitution. If the omnipresence of despair is not self-evident, this is only because of the multiplicity of disguises it assumes. ‘One form of despair is … not being aware of it.’ Our state of dejection may not mean much, but ‘precisely this fact, that it does not mean much, is despair’. Of this we should be glad, for despair is the evidence of the freedom and responsibility of our state, the concession and the

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demand of eternity that we ‘have a self (The Sickness unto Death, pp. 156–7). This last phrase should not be taken as implying—unexistentially—that we have a predetermined self, or a particular potential self. In Kierkegaard, as much as in Sartre, we create ourselves by realizing possibilities, without having a blue-print of what we are to do or what we are to become. All we know, is that we must choose. For a possibility is ‘a hint from God’, and ‘it is very dangerous to go into eternity with possibilities which one has prevented from being realities’ (The Sickness unto Death, p. 168; Journals, p. 147). Choice of Self ‘My friend, what I have so often said to you I say now once again, or rather I shout it: Either-Or, aut-aut.’

Judge William’s letter to his aesthetic friend in Either-Or expresses the burden of Kierkegaard’s message to his age: a call to change from speculation to decision—‘stop this wild flight, this passion of annihilation which rages in you … you would satiate the hunger of doubt at the expense of existence’. Finally, a man must choose, for ‘the choice itself is decisive for the content of the personality, through the choice the personality immerses itself in the thing chosen, and when it does not choose it withers away in consumption’ (Either-Or, Vol. 2, pp. 161, 164, 167). Choice banishes despair and locates the self in its fulcral position between the infinitudes of its constitution, in freedom. Kierkegaard does not prescribe what is to be chosen, for he believes that what matters is the pathos of the choice, and that as soon as a man is brought to stand at the crossways ‘he will choose the right’. In this Kierkegaard places himself in a Nietzschean light. In formulation, the first two sentences of the following passage could be Nietzsche’s. In effect, if not in tone, so could the rest: My either/or does not in the first instance denote the choice between good and evil; it denotes the choice whereby one chooses good and evil/or excludes them. Hence the question is under what determinants one would contemplate the whole of existence and would himself live. That the man who chooses good and evil chooses good ... becomes evident only afterwards: for the aesthetical is not the evil but neutrality, and that is the reason why I affirmed that it is the ethical which constitutes the choice. It is, therefore, not so much a question of choosing between willing the good or the evil, as of choosing to will, but by this in turn the good and evil are posited.  (Either-Or, Vol. 2, p. 171)

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‘The Ethical’, here, is not so much a code as a mode of existence. The closest thing to a ‘system’ in Kierkegaard’s work is his delineation of three ‘levels’ of existence; the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. They correspond, as it happens, to the stages of his own life, for when Kierkegaard first escaped the oppressive atmosphere of his father’s house he devoted himself to a period of what he would later call ‘aesthetic’ indulgence, involving a variety of intellectual pursuits, but little serious application. This was followed by a period of dutiful self-government in accordance with a strict ethical code, and then by a religious conversion. ‘“The individual” is the category through which this age, all history, the human race, must pass.’ Kierkegaard’s demand, in view of his prescription for singleness, is strenuous. It is also apparently a general demand, and Kierkegaard, unlike Nietzsche— who appears to predicate a pioneering elite—expects his precept to be considered humanly normative. We are all to become ‘concrete’ and attain strenuously to our selves. But ‘the majority of men are curtailed “I”s; what was planned by nature as a possibility capable of being sharpened into an “I” is soon dulled into a third person’ (Point of View, p. 128). The Project Between the Kierkegaardian leap of faith and Sartre’s anguished project, or between a paradoxical religiousness and an absurdist humanism, the transition is really less awesome than at first appears. When one recognises—with nausea, if he is Sartre or his hero Roquentin—that existence is not an inoffensive abstract category, but the very ‘stuff of things’, and discovers also his creative freedom within a world of vital existents—what is he to do? Sartre’s thought does not encompass the possibility of relation available to Kierkegaard, or to Marcel or Buber, or even to Heidegger’s being-in-the-world. Man cannot know the world, nor the world him, except as object—as what consciousness is not. The only meaning he can discover is that which he himself creates, not in reflection but in his free project. When a man commits himself to anything, which in Sartre’s work means to act, he is taking on a profound responsibility, and in his act he discovers anguish and despair. A military leader, for example, ‘cannot but feel a certain anguish … it is the very condition of [his] action’ (Existentialism and Humanism, p. 32). The anguish is caused because one is confronting the fact of freedom and responsibility, and in deciding one is deciding one’s own and the world’s future being.

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Anguish is involved in the experience of freedom and the apprehension of one’s own project and the acceptance of inescapable guilt. One must act, but to act is to be guilty. The Existentialist does not persuade himself that in acting he evades guilt. Rather, he accepts what Jung, in Civilisation in Transition (1964) sees as the necessity and the dignity of guilt. He chooses his guilt as an ‘enrichment’, while the massman seeks only to shift the blame. One acts, too, in despair, a despair grounded in the groundlessness of one’s anticipation. To the Existentialist Sartre—as opposed to the Marxist one—despair means that there is no communal movement which can assume the role of one’s individual conscience, and one must act as if everything depended upon oneself. Our decision is solitary and groundless, but as Marcel observes—concerning our ignorance of the future to which we pledge ourselves—’the very fact of my not knowing is what gives worth and weight to my promise’ (Being and Having, p. 53). The Kierkegaardian language of faith and paradox seems just as applicable to the world of Sartrean absurdity as to Kierkegaard’s religiousness. The terms act and project are not synonymous. A man is no other, no less, than ‘a series of undertakings, the sum, the organisation, the set of relations that constitute these undertakings’, but what counts for human authenticity is the total commitment, for it is not by a particular case or particular action that you are committed altogether’ (Existentialism and Humanism, p. 43). The project is the continuing ground of the particular acts and choices a man makes. Jaspers calls the project the ‘Unconditional Imperative’: in obedience to our chosen imperative ‘our empirical existence’ is made ‘the expression and the serviceable material of the idea’. The imperative becomes the source and not the object of our will. Existence, or Existenz, for Sartre and Jaspers, begins with the initial project. ‘The unconditional imperative’, Jaspers writes, ‘comes to me as the command of my authentic self to my empirical self. I become aware of myself as that which I myself am, because it is what I ought to be. This awareness is obscure at the beginning and lucid at the end of my unconditional action’ (The Way to Wisdom, pp. 52, 55). Thereafter, what one must do is constantly to reaffirm, in act and choice, one’s initial project. The need for reaffirmation implies, of course, that the project, once chosen, is not immutable: it can be changed or it can wither away. Sartre’s description of consciousness offers the hope that having been a coward one may yet become a hero—existence perpetually precedes essence—but the price of this is the knowledge that the process is reversible. If one is walking with a group of people, says Sartre in one of his less martial but still muscular illustrations, and one is about to yield to fatigue as one has always done before, ‘I can refuse to stop only by a radical conversion of my

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being-in-the-world; that is, by an abrupt metamorphosis of my initial project—i. e. by another choice of myself and my ends’. But such a modification is always possible: ‘The anguish’—and in this illustration the concrete value of that term is peculiarly apparent—’is witness to this perpetual modifiability of our initial project’ (Being and Nothingness, p. 464). The initial project is the choice of being, but a constant renewal of our project is, for Sartre, the task of existence. This is so because man ‘is wholly and forever free or he is not free at all’. Camus, also confronting the absurd, reminds us of this heroic creed in The Rebel (1951), resurrecting, unlike Sartre, the notion of ‘human nature’—why rebel if there is nothing worth preserving in myself? Camus enjoins us to preserve and enlarge the footholds of human dignity in the face of a world which insults it: to pursue the vigilant rebellion which alone converts history from fate into opportunity. The pure outburst of rebellion—which is for Camus, as for Byron and Shelley, the assertion of an ultimate freedom and responsibility against all that denies men’s highest possibilities—is what ‘keeps us erect in the savage, formless movements of history’ (The Rebel, p. 265). Engagement Kierkegaard—Marx’s contemporary—shares with other Existentialists the problem of attempting to reconcile his essential individualism with human universality. It must follow from a doctrine of the subjectivity of truth that ‘a crowd is the untruth’: even a crowd of ‘individuals’ becomes untruth in the abrogation of singleness. Contrary to some opinion, however, Kierkegaard does not use the term ‘crowd’ as synonymous with ‘rabble’: he means by ‘crowd’, simply ‘number’. A number of noblemen, or a heterogeneous assembly of citizens, or a congre­gation of saints, would equally constitute a ‘crowd’. Kierkegaard’s objection is the same as Sartre’s, that in number man is in flight from his essential responsibility and liberty. Man’s isolation is insurmountable. Neither in history nor in law, nor in the rule of the mob or of the constitution, can man evade his responsibility to make—whatever guidance he may himself choose to ratify—his own decision on his individual responsibility. For Kierkegaard, the realm of existential decision is mainly that of man’s ethical and religious choices, and Kierkegaard—unlike Nietzsche—distinguishes what is Caesar’s and what is the individual’s. ‘In relation to all temporal, earthly, worldly matters the crowd may have … decisive competence as a court of last resort’ (Point of View, p. 110). And though the task of the individual may often be to fight against

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the mass, he is also bound to a form of comradeship in which the complement of his objectivity towards himself is to be ‘subjective towards others’. Each of these others, after all, may be ‘the One’. The crowd may be untruth, but each constitutive ‘he’ is to be reverenced. While it is only as an individual that he can will the good, the individual finds himself a social world, and there he has a social task. Silence when speech is called for, or contemplation when action is needed, may incur ‘the most atrocious guilt’. In Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing (1946), Kierkegaard celebrates the category of the individual, whose courage is opposed to the cowardice of the crowd, but he asks also, ‘what is your attitude to others?’ By willing one thing, one is ideally at one with all, and Kierkegaard expunges from the ideal of singleness the ‘impurities’ of selfishness, reservation, and self-differentiation. ‘Alas there is something in the world called clannishness … the enemy of universal humanity’ (Purity of Heart, pp. 180–1). Certainly his point of view is distinctly solitary, but it is not based, as Sartre’s is, on a sense of enmity towards ‘the Other’ as an alien freedom confronting mine. It does not seem to me that Kierkegaard would dissent at all from the position Beauvoir takes in The Ethics of Ambiguity, that ‘no existence can be validly fulfilled if it is limited to itself or from the corollary that ‘the idea of such a dependence is frightening’. Kierkegaard’s ‘concrete individual’ is required to realise the universal. That ideal, however, is the precise dialectical contrary of Hegel’s ‘concrete universal’. Kierkegaard demands that the individual in his act and decision shall give rise to the universal, rather than that man shall be dedicated to realising in himself the ‘given’ universal, and in this he is closer to Marx, Sartre and Beauvoir than to Kant or Hegel. As philosophical idealists, Kant and Hegel require obedience to the historical or rational universal, which they take to be discoverable. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard require the universal to be established in the concrete individual and his personal decision. And in a way Beauvoir and Sartre side with them. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir enlists the help of Marx himself on the side of subjectivity and ambiguity. For Existentialism, she argues: it is not impersonal universal man who is the source of values, but the plurality of concrete, particular men projecting themselves toward their ends on the basis of situations whose particularity is as … irreducible as subjectivity itself.

In Sartre’s case, however, as one who had promoted a rigorously individualist philosophy, the idea of political engagement involved difficulties. His solution to those difficulties is highly controversial, and ranks as one of the most discussed intellectual

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events of the post-war period. 12 Existentialism and Humanism still argues against a world-historical perspective, and argues that one cannot place one’s hope in the future acts of future men: ‘I cannot count upon men I do not know.’ Nevertheless, Sartre adopted in this work, as a temporary and transitional step towards the position he would develop in the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), the very Kantian notion of the ‘kingdom of ends’. The Kingdom of Ends If I am in ‘good faith’ every act of mine ultimately involves the quest of freedom, freedom being the foundation of all values. But ‘I am obliged to will the liberty of others at the same time as mine’, and ‘nothing can be better for me unless it is better for all’. Sartre never quite explains why this is so, but the implication in Existentialism and Humanism is quite insistent. When men are committed to grasping and extending their freedom, they all tend toward one will. It is difficult to see how Sartre reaches this position except by a Kierkegaardian leap of faith. The ‘one will’ looks suspiciously like Kant’s Categorical Imperative, or Camus’s belief in an essential human nature. ‘We cannot decide a priori what it is that should be done’, says Sartre, but if men act in good faith we may hope to find that they make the same choice. Perhaps a normative human nature is, after all, to be found in the ‘essence’ which man creates in following through his ‘leap towards existence’. Sartre denies any standard of established human nature to which one may appeal as a guide, but posits ‘a human universality’ which ‘is being perpetually made’ and claims that ‘every purpose, however individual it may be, is of universal value’. But the modulation from ‘a man’ to ‘man’ still begs the question. Beauvoir’s early essays show that they had grappled with the question, and the position of Existentialism and Humanism was one they were both committed to. In The Ethics of Ambiguity she seemed unhappy with Hegel’s idea that ‘each consciousness seeks the death of the other’, and argued that such a response must be immediately negated by the thought that ‘if I were really everything there would be nothing beside me; the world would be empty … and I myself would be nothing’. In Pyrrhus et Cinéas she first offered the argument about freedom that Sartre confirmed in Existentialism and Humanism that every man needs the freedom of other men and, 12  It is discussed from differing standpoints—ranging from the outraged to the condescending—by Mary Warnock in her introduction to Being and Nothingness, and her book The Philosophy of Sartre (1965), by David Caute in his introduction to What is Literature?, by Peter Caws, in Sartre (1979), and throughout Max Charlesworth s The Existentialists and Jean-Paul Sartre.

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in a sense, always wants it, even though he may be a tyrant. The ‘kingdom of ends’ is in fact a constant of the Romantic and Existentialist tradition. If one chooses freedom one chooses an absolute and one chooses it for all: if one’s choice entails restriction for others, it is not freedom one is choosing. Blake announced this position in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell and it has remained the inbuilt corrective in the Romantic celebration of liberty, impulse and action. Blake’s a priori is the universal humanity, which we are and which we create: when we see clearly we see together. An act which hurts another is simply not an act: it is ‘hindrance’ of the universal man. Ends and Means If it is a choice between marginal comforts and basic rights and liberties, there can be no hesitation, but what if it is a matter of competing liberties? Whose freedom do I choose to serve? Beauvoir’s answer is strictly utilitarian. It may be rational, she decides, and in the interest of the greatest good of the greatest number, for a general to sacrifice a thousand civilians for ten specialist officers, or to sacrifice a few bourgeois for a member of the party. But—and this is her Existentialist proviso—it cannot be automatically justified by reference to history. One cannot, by saying, ‘Well, this is war’, put off the day when one’s acts must be morally justified in themselves. Mankind has always known martial conflict, and the class war also may never end. If one waits for universal peace, or universal socialism, as the condition in which it becomes absolutely wrong to kill, it will never become absolutely wrong. Moral choice will be postponed indefinitely. The future cannot be known: nor can we live in it or trust our salvation to it. It is within present concrete existence that we make the decisions which alone create the future. It is illogical to declare that the ends justify the means: ends can only be defined by the means chosen to promote them. Does communism serve man? And how do you balance ‘man’ against ‘men’? This was the problem which caused a breach of friendship between Camus and MerleauPonty on the one hand, and Sartre and Beauvoir on the other. In 1944 they had founded together with Raymond Aron the leftist journal Les Temps modernes. In the 1950s Sartre attacked Camus over the humanism of his work The Rebel and Merleau-Ponty over his critique of Marxism. Merleau-Ponty had originally been an apologist for Stalinist atrocities, but in Adventures of the Dialectic (1954) he renounced the party and called for non-violent social transformation.

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Revolutions are true as movements but false as regimes. From this arises the question whether there is not more future in a regime which does not claim to remake history from the ground up, but simply to change it, and whether it is not this regime we should seek, instead of entering once again into the circle of revolution.  (Adventures of the Dialectic, p. 92)

Camus’s version of this challenge is most vividly expressed in his play Les Justes (1949), about a group of Russian anarchists plotting an assassination. One character expresses the very Hegelian view that ‘I don’t love life, but justice, which is above life’. The distinctly Existentialist anarchist Kaliayev replies on Camus’s behalf: ‘for a far-off city of which I’m not at all certain, I will not strike down my brothers.’ In The Rebel, which is essentially an exploration of the ethics represented by Kaliayev—that is, the ethics of those who rebel on behalf of ‘concrete’ men, rather than mounting revolutions in the name of ‘history’—Camus asks: Does the end justify the means? That is possible. But what will justify the end? To that question, which historic thought leaves pending, rebellion replies: the means. (The Rebel, p. 256)

In The Ethics of Ambiguity Beauvoir assents to this, in broad terms. In practice means define ends. The end only comes into being through means, and it becomes compromised unless it ‘remains present’ and is ‘completely disclosed’ in the course of the enterprise. (The Ethics of Ambiguity, p. 125). What she cannot condone is the fallacy by which Marxists use ‘the revolution’ to justify unconditionally any crimes committed in its name. If you place the whole of the revolution in the balance, a particular human instance will always appear very light. Action must be justified both by the necessity of the act, and by the degree of retardation of the revolution that would ensue by not committing that act. Sartre’s Revolutionary Theory ‘Materialism and Revolution’, which appears in Literary and Philosophical Essays, is the first instalment of Sartre’s attempt to graft Existentialism onto Marxism. He sets out four principles for a revolutionary philosophy. First, man is ‘unjustifiable’, in that no special providence has brought about his existence. Second, any collective order established by man can be transcended in time by other orders. Third, the value system of any existing society tends to preserve the structure of that society. Fourth, such

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value systems can themselves be replaced by other systems which cannot be clearly predicted since they will be created by the efforts made to transcend the system which exists. In other words, it is illegitimate to direct at revolutionaries the objection that they have no blue­print of the future they wish to create. Clearly each of these points reaffirms a cardinal element in Existentialism, translating it into social terms. The new element in Sartre’s post-war thinking comes when he begins to define social existence as an extension of his hitherto individualist ontology. In the Critique of Dialectical Reason he defines two new terms to correspond to the pour-soi and en-soi in individual being. Praxis means purposeful activity, whether of the individual or the group, in the realisation of the project. The practico-inert corresponds to being-in-itself, and means the world of matter on which praxis works. So praxis is the project, collectively considered, and the practico-inert is the objective situation which is to be changed. The practico-inert includes the physical world, but also all that is conditioned and conditioning; social institutions—the inert husk of earlier praxis—values, and even language in as far as language appears to define possibilities and restrict human freedom. (In feminist and anti-racist praxis, for instance, the biases built into language have been a continuing target. ) Next he distinguishes between two terms which represent collective existences, the collective and the group. A collective is characterised by seriality, in which each individual is effectively solitary, and interchangeable. A nation, or an audience, or a bus queue is a collective. Each is ‘a plurality of isolations’ (Critique of Dialectical Reason, p. 256). It has a kind of unity, but that unity is defined only by the practicoinert of the bus route, and the conventions for its use, which includes a device for preventing scarcity (of seats) from causing social breakdown: people board the bus in the order in which they arrive at the bus stop. There is no common purpose (everyone has his own reason for wanting to catch the bus) and no sense of community: what matters is that there should be room for me, and that the bus should stop as little as possible before my stop. The group is a subject as the collective is an object: its con­sciousness has been raised by a reappraisal of the situation. Within it each member regards the other as an alter ego, their interests suddenly being fused into a community of ends.

Not only does the group enable us to achieve what none of us singly could do, but it also liberates us from otherness: it is existentially an end as well as a means. But sadly it cannot continue in existence once the crisis is past without varieties of coercion. Rituals of remembrance may help to prevent decay and division, but in practice

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what happens is that subjectivity is gradually subjected to what Sartre calls ‘fraternal terror’, which may take the form of actual violence, or may appear as more benign forms of social pressure and control. Sartre’s concession to Marxism is in regarding this stage with equanimity: in binding oneself by an oath to the rule of fraternal terror one is founding humanity. But in time what was once a group reverts to being a collective, and one generation’s praxis becomes the next’s practico-inert. Existentialism is necessarily concerned with the maximisation of human freedom, and with opposition to human tyranny, not merely in theory but in praxis. The Existentialist needs to liberate the oppressed, in order not to be part of the oppression: yet a forcible ‘liberation’ of those who are not ready for it, may be only a change of oppression. The harder and more legitimate task to raise consciousness so that those are enslaved become aware of their servitude, and aware that it is imposed by men, and not ‘by nature, or by the gods’. The Threefold Living Relation Sartre, though he pays lip service to the possibility of inter-subjectivity, and preaches a revolutionary praxis in his later work, more often suggests that I am aware of the other only as an alien freedom confronting mine. But, as indicated earlier, this is not true of Existentialism as a whole. For Jaspers existence is communication. Marcel insists that the authentic existent is disclosed and at the disposal of the other in ‘Availability’. Martin Buber’s philosophy is essentially an exploration of relation. Buber, while adopting the belief that man must become the Single One (that is, detach himself from ‘the they’ or das Man) insists that he does this for a further purpose: for the ‘perfect realisation of the Thou’. With Sartre he holds that our knowledge constitutes what we know—including other people—as an object. Our whole intellectual history, collectively and individually, indicates ‘a progressive augmentation of the world of It’. But of the two primary words in man’s relational syntax, ‘I-Thou’ and ‘I-It’, the word ‘I-Thou’ is existentially fundamental. ‘Thou’ is spoken with the whole being: only in a thou relation does the ‘I’ come into existence. Without the objectification with which we habitually deal with the world—or what Blake neatly called ‘the objecting intelligence’—man cannot live, ‘but he who lives with It alone is not a man’, and all real living ‘is meeting’ (Between Man and Man, p. 212; I and Thou, pp. 37, 11, 34). A man is rescued from the state of das Man not by singleness but ‘only by being bound up in genuine communion’. Buber’s central thesis is that man is defined by his possibility of achieving a

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‘threefold living relation’. Man relates first to the world and the physicalities existent within it; second to other men, both as individuals and as the many; and third, to the ‘mystery of being’ which he may encounter in the two former relations—and which philosophy calls the Absolute while religion calls it God. Now Buber tests the philosophies of Kierkegaard and Heidegger by applying this formula and finds them both wanting. What Buber regards as ‘an essential relation to things’ is a relation which regards them in their essential life and is turned towards them. An essential relation to one’s self, of course, is not possible, because an essential relation requires a real duality. A realised relation reaches a completion and a transfiguration: thus a relation to things becomes art; a relation to man, love. ‘Man is to be understood as the being who is capable of the threefold living relation and can raise every form of it to essentiality’ (Between Man and Man, p. 219) Without such relation living is possible, but as Jaspers says, ‘only in communication am I myself not merely living but fulfilling life’ (The Way to Wisdom, p. 26). By communication, however, Jaspers means something much more stringent than Buber’s term ‘dialogue’ or Marcel’s ‘availability’ may suggest at first sight. He means something closer in fact to what Blake called ‘spiritual war’, which lays the soul bare in wars of love, or Nietzsche’s ‘good war that hallows every cause’. H. J. Blackham pithily expresses Jasper’s view of communication: ‘in the non-violent striving with others for authentic personal existence … I am laid open to all possibilities, for it is an ardent strife, suspicious of all sentimentality and pity and complacency’ (Six Existentialist Thinkers, p. 53). As Blake said, ‘Opposition is true friendship.’ Existentialist meeting is based upon that premise, even when Sartre’s sense of the Other is rejected.

Biographies 1. SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris in 1908. Her father was a well-to-do businessman, cultured and somewhat agnostic, but as her mother was a devout Catholic, Beauvoir’s education began in a strict Catholic school. She later identified her father with the beginnings of her intellectual life, and her mother with spiritual, other-worldly influences. She recognised that this clear division between the secular, masculine, active world—to which she was drawn—and the feminine, spiritual domain, which she rejected, influenced her development. Realising at the age of fourteen that she did not believe in God, she began to question—as she would for the rest of her life—most of the values and mores associated with her upbringing. In 1928 she registered at the Sorbonne to do research on Leibnitz, and at the same time attended classes at the École Normale Supérieure, where she met Sartre. It was 1943 before her first novel was published, but she wrote throughout the 1930s, travelled, and in company with Sartre, considered her position on critical and philosophical matters. The outbreak of war and the experience of German occupation crystallised many of her own views on moral action, the necessity for commitment, the centrality of the idea of death, and other themes which are explored in her novels and Existentialist essays in the 1940s. In 1949 she published her major feminist work, The Second Sex. Her autobiography, which is also a history of her relationships and a record of cultural event in her times, appeared in four volumes, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958), The Prime of Life (1960), Force of Circumstance (1963), and All Said and Done (1972). In A Very Easy Death (1969) Beauvoir presented a remarkable analysis of her emotions and reactions during the death of her mother, from whom she had been estranged by her unconventional life. In Adieux: a Farewell to Sartre (1984) she commemorated the illness and death of Sartre. She died in 1986. According to one remarkable reinterpretation of the work of Sartre and Beauvoir, it was Beauvoir who, in her novel … really worked out the basic ideas that are explored in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness

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2. MARTIN HEIDEGGER Martin Heidegger was of Catholic peasant stock, and was born in 1889 in Messkirch in the German Black Forest. From early youth he read theology and philosophy, and there are traces of Heraclitus and Eckhart in his thinking. He became a lecturer in philosophy in Freiburg in 1915, having completed a thesis on medieval theology. There he developed under the guidance of the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl. On the strength of his brilliantly original teaching he was appointed in 1923 to the chair of philosophy at Marburg, where he published Being and Time in 1927. In 1929 he returned to Freiburg as Husserl’s successor, where he published a second major work, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1929), and in the same year the important inaugural lecture ‘What is Metaphysics’. Elected Rector in 1933, early in the Nazi period, he resigned this post in February 1934, before Hitler’s assumption of power, but continued teaching except when suspended by the Allies between 1945 and 1951. He has been criticised for acquiescence in Nazi policy, and for failure to defend the work of the ‘Non-Aryan’ Husserl, and certainly his brief record as Rector suggests an excessive (and perhaps naive) identification of the Nazi rhetoric of national renewal with his own existential creed of resoluteness. But it is also thought—though this has recently been challenged—that he attempted to prevent anti-Semitic acts, and that he resigned from his position rather than dismiss two anti-Nazi professors. The last thirty years of his life were spent in increasing solitude in a mountain hut in the Black Forest, teaching occasionally, and meditating on art and poetry, especially that of Friedrich Hölderlin. His Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry (1963) inaugurates this new direction in his life and thought, and brought poetry into philosophic consideration in an unprecedented degree. He died in Messkirch—his birthplace—in 1976. His complete works, which are expected to fill 57 volumes, include studies of Duns Scotus, Plato and Nietzsche.

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3. KARL JASPERS Karl Jaspers was born in Oldenburg in 1883. The son of a bank manager, he studied law to begin with, and then medicine, at Berlin, Gottingen and Heidelberg. All of the Existentialists have a particular interest in psychology, but Jaspers began his career with distinguished work in that field. In Heidelberg he worked in the psychiatric clinic as an assistant, and his reputation was first established by a major work in psychopathology, published in 1913. In 1921 he was appointed to the chair of philosophy, again at Heidelberg. Dismissed by the Nazis in 1937 he was reinstated in 1945. From 1948 until shortly before his death in 1969 he was Professor of Philosophy at Basel. In addition to his major three-volume work Philosophy (1932) and Reason and ‘Existenz’ (1935), and his studies of Nietzsche and Descartes (1936 and 1937), his output includes a number of more popular and accessible works, Man in the Modem Age (1931), The Philosophy of Existence (1938), The Perennial Scope of Philosophy (1948) and Way to Wisdom: an Introduction to Philosophy (1950). An early psychoanalytical study of Strindberg and van Gogh (1922) also considers Swedenborg and Hölderlin. In 1953 he produced a philosophical consideration of Leonardo da Vinci.

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4. SØREN KIERKEGAARD Born in Copenhagen in 1813, Kierkegaard was one of seven children of his father’s second marriage, and his career was deeply influenced by the melancholy circumstances of his childhood. His father’s first wife died childless in 1796, and Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard hurriedly married his servant. Their first child was born five months after the marriage, and the outwardly respectable citizen seems to have borne an inward guilt for the rest of his life, accusing himself of seducing the serving girl under his wife’s roof. Between 1819 and 1834 the mother and all except two of their children died, leaving the father with a deepening sense of retribution. While Kierkegaard had met with love and understanding from his father, he rebelled intellectually from the narrow variety of Protestantism which overshadowed his adolescence, and as a student threw himself into aesthetic interests and speculative thought. Physically unimpressive—he was short, and suffered from curvature of the spine, which gave him a hunch-backed appearance—Kierkegaard had outstanding conversational gifts, and a talent for dazzling and disconcerting people. On his father’s death, in 1838, he dutifully concluded his course of theological studies, and in 1840 presented his brilliant dissertation on Socratic Irony. In the same year he became engaged to a girl of seventeen, Regine Olsen, with whom he at first seemed confident of living a normal life. But he felt unable to either impose the sources of his melancholy, or the directions of his thought, on Regine, or to conceal them, and he broke off the engagement a year later, counterfeiting indifference in order to make the breach easier for her. This renunciation becomes a major theme of his introspective work. In 1841 he went to Germany to study Hegel under Schelling, but soon developed a critical stance towards the Hegelian view. For the rest of his life he remained in Copenhagen, engaged in a passionate critique of contemporary intellectual culture. His own works, in which he advocated and attempted a fusion of thought, feeling and existence, were published under ironical pseudonyms: Either-Or, edited by Victor Eremita; Fear and Trembling, by Johannes de Silentio; Concluding Unscientific Postscript, by Johannes Climacus; The Sickness unto Death, by Anti-Climacus. In 1848—the year of the Communist Manifesto—Kierkegaard experienced a second conversion to Christianity, but decided against entering the Church. His later work is almost exclusively devoted to a critique of the materialism and spiritual torpor of the Church, and he died in 1854, aged forty-two, completing a particularly incendiary series of pamphlets on this theme.

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5. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE Born near Leipzig in 1844, Nietzsche was the son of a Protestant pastor and court tutor. Although his father’s death, when Nietzsche was only five, reduced the family’s circumstances, the boy received a thorough schooling in the classics and the humanities at one of the best schools in Germany. As a schoolboy he immersed himself in the culture of early Greece, in modern German poetry (especially, Hölderlin and Goethe), and encountered English Romantic thought as filtered through the works of Emerson. His university studies at Leipzig, during which he first absorbed and then transcended the thought of Schopenhauer, were interrupted by military service. A riding accident left him with an injury to the chest, and he was invalided out of the army. After a period of convalescence, which he used for intense study and meditation, he returned to Leipzig briefly to complete his studies. His scholarly reputation was already such that he was offered a lectureship (in classics) at Basel, Switzerland, before he was awarded his doctorate and without completing a dissertation. In Basel he developed an intense friendship with the composer Richard Wagner and his wife Cosima. He taught in Basel from 1869 to 1879, and it was as Professor of Greek Philology that he wrote The Birth of Tragedy. By 1879 he was too ill to continue working, and in any case he had moved beyond strictly academic interests towards a critique of Western education and culture. Human, All-too-Human was produced in Basel, but during the next ten years he produced his major works moving from place to place, ill and solitary. Thus Spoke Zarathustra was written mainly in Rome and Nice, between 1833 and 1835. Migrating between Leipzig and Turin he produced Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Toward a Genealogy of Morals (1887), and The Twilight of the Idols (1888). In 1888 he mapped out a masterwork to be entitled The Transvaluation of all Values. This magnum opus was to have been in four volumes: 1. The Antichrist: an Attempt at a Critique of Christianity; 2. The Free Spirit: the Critique of Philosophy as a Nihilistic Movement; 3. The Immoralist: the Critique of Morality; 4. Dionysus: the Philosophy of the Eternal Return. But in Turin, in 1889, having published only the first of these, and written his idiosyncratic Ecce Homo, an intellectual autobiography, his years of ill health culminated in a paralytic stroke. From then on he suffered almost permanent mental derangement, requiring the constant attention of his mother and sister. In 1900 he died, at his sister’s home in Weimar.

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6. JEAN-PAUL SARTRE Sartre was born in 1905 into a prosperous and distinguished family; his childhood is described in his literary autobiography, Words (Les Mots). He was educated at lycées in La Rochelle and Paris, and studied philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. In 1934 he went to the Institut Francais in Berlin, and studied German philosophy—including Husserl. He returned to a teaching post in France in 1935, but in 1939 he joined the army. Taken prisoner in June 1940 he spent nine months as a prisoner of war in Germany, joining the French Resistance after his release in 1941, and remaining active until 1944. After the publication of his major work, Being and Nothingness, in 1943, he gave up teaching to concentrate on literary work. In 1945 he co-founded the cultural and political monthly Les Temps Modernes. His major philosophical works were Being and Nothingness, which is the primary text of French Existentialism, and the Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), in which Sartre attempts to graft his version of Existentialism on to what he later saw as the parent tree of Marxism. His philosophical movement from an individualist or ‘bourgeois humanist’ perspective, with its emphasis upon human freedom, towards a more Marxist sense that human beings are formed by social pressures, is reflected in the development of his many plays and novels (including the trilogy Roads to Freedom) away from studies of the introspective individual towards a broad social canvas. In the changing standpoints of the three literary biographies—of Baudelaire (1947), Genet (1952) and Flaubert (1966)—the last attempts a massive reconstruction of the way in which Flaubert’s psyche and literary craft are structured by his historical environment. Other works include The Psychology of Imagination (1936), Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1947) and What is Literature? (1948). Profoundly critical of the shortcomings of Western imperialism and of the repressive systems of eastern Europe, he remained— as an artist and a writer—committed to human liberation, identifying with student revolt in the 1960s, with the campaign against the Vietnam War (he participated in the unofficial ‘war crimes’ commission), and with the black liberation movement. In 1964 he refused the Nobel Prize for Literature. He died in 1980.

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A GLOSSARY OF EXISTENTIALIST TERMS Abandonment  The condition of man consequent upon the death of God, or his absence from creation. With the disappearance of God, says Sartre, there disappears also the ‘possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven’. Absurd, the  A descriptive term, not a pejorative one, denoting the lack of verifiable meaning or justification for one’s acts. For Sartre man’s existence and his projects are ‘absurd’. Absurdity does not justify indifference or inaction, but is the unalterable condition of one’s existence and one’s acts. Action  Not simply any act in itself, but an intentional self-projection towards chosen ends, involving transcendence, reflection and decision (see Projects). Aesthetic  The first of Kierkegaard’s three levels of existence. At best the term implies the immediacy of the childlike. At worst, detachment and irresponsibility, (see Ethical and Religious). Alienation  Estrangement, from the product of one’s labour (as in Marxism), but also from other men, from God (in a state of sin), or from oneself (by absorption in the ‘they’, q. v. ). Anguish  Translation of Sartre’s angoisse. Usually synonymous with dread, but connotes specifically the condition of action, i. e. , the particular dread of someone who acts knowing that his actions are justified only by his own decision, yet modify the being of the world (see Dread). Authenticity  Existence when Dasein is free of the hold of the ‘they’ (q. v. ). Authentic existence implies good faith, towards one’s facticity and one’s possibility, and resolute self-projection towards willed ends. Availability  Translates Marcel’s disponibilité. Being present to or at the disposal of the other. Such openness is fundamental to authenticity in Marcel’s account. Bad faith  Exploitation of the non-coincidence of being-in-itself (our facticity) and being-for-itself (our transcendent nihilating consciousness) in order to evade responsibility.

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Being-for-itself  Sartre’s être-pour-soi. The volatile, nihilating, transcending, anticipating consciousness. Being-for-others  Sartre’s être-pour-autrui. Essentially, the self as object of the Other, though Beauvoir seems to use the term less technically to imply ‘living for others’. Being-in-itself  Sartre’s être-en-soi. The self as object of the for-itself, and its original contingency. Being-in-itself-for-itself  The coincidence of for-itself and in-itself: the impossible ideal of human existence, which we call God. Being-in-the-world  Heidegger’s term for the way in which Dasein experiences being. Being-in-the-world comprises the experiencing subject, his ‘inhood’, and his subjectively constituted ‘worldhood’. Between  In Buber’s work, man’s existence is ‘between’ man and man, where I and Thou meet. Only in such meeting does the I exist. Care  Care is the ontological structure of Dasein’s being-in-the-world (see Concern and Solicitude). Choice  The title of Kierkegaard’s Either-Or stresses the concept of decisive choice, that in choosing something we reject something. Choice is necessary to existence and is in reality the choice of self. Existential choice, or decision, or engagement, determines the content of the personality, and posits one’s own good and evil. Communication  To Jaspers, communication between subjects is the condition of fulfilled existence. Comprehensive, the  Jaspers’s term das Umgreifende expresses a non-dualistic apprehension of the world as neither subject nor object but both: it can only be grasped symbolically, since thought involves breaking away from the comprehensive. It is something which we are, and in which we are. Concern  One of the expressions of ‘care’. Dasein is inextricably ‘concerned with’ the entities of his world, as things-at-hand or to-hand. Consciousness  ‘Consciousness is a being the nature of which is to be conscious of the nothingness of its being’ (Sartre, Being and Nothingness, p. 47). Dasein  Heidegger’s term for the person, meaning there-being. Man’s being is essentially transcendence, or a standing out into the world.

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Death  Variously described by Existentialists as the crowning absurdity, or as the most important of our possibilities. To Beauvoir, mortality is the very condition of action and of values. Death is what gives life its value. To Heidegger, an impassioned freedom-towards-death is a release from illusion and a fundamental trait of authenticity. Despair  Kierkegaard’s term for the disrelation between possibility and limitation, the finite and infinite, in the self. Many forms of despair, or not-being-oneself, are discussed in Kierkegaard’s The Sickness unto Death. Dread  In Kierkegaard’s account, dread is the vertiginous experience of freedom, a fear without an object. It can imply the presentiment of possibility, or simply the apprehension of nothingness at the heart of the self. It is a revelatory mood, central to all Existentialist accounts. The term anxiety (translating Angst) has the same connotations (see Joy). Eternal Recurrence  Nietzsche’s strange doctrine that as energy knows no diminution everything that has been must recur. From it he draws the challenging ethical standard: the task is to live so that could one could wish to perform the same actions an infinite number of times. Ethical, the  The second of Kierkegaard’s levels of existence, attained by one who has despaired and chosen the self. Unconcealed, consistent, self-projection in relation to chosen universals. Existenz  Etymologically, ‘existence’ derives from Latin existere which means to stand out. Only man can exist. As the English term ‘existence’ fails to convey this positive connotation (we speak of merely existing rather than living), some translators use the German spelling Existenz to convey the sense of personal being. Facticity  Subjective factuality: the necessary, inescapable, finite components of existence; the given situation into which we are thrown, in which we find ourselves, and to which our transcendence is anchored. Kierkegaard’s term ‘limitation’ has the same function (see Possibility). Falling  Heidegger’s falling, or Verfallen, denotes Dasein’s normal mode of tranquillized immersion in everydayness. Falling is flight from the ‘ownmost possibilities’ of Dasein into the world of the ‘they’, but without the moral implications of the Christian ‘fall’, or any implication that such fallenness follows an unfallen state. Freedom  Freedom is the meaning of consciousness. Sartrean man is ‘wholly and forever free’ even to the extent that what the Freudians call psychoses are to Sartre

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free projects of the self. We are bound to be free. The for-itself is free by its very constitution, but we must also choose freedom. Joy  Although the term is little used by Existentialists, Jaspers and Marcel imply (and Ricoeur makes the point explicit) that dread is only the underside of the real ontological mood which is—as it was to Schiller and the Romantics—joy, that is the feeling of belonging, or of experiencing (however fitfully) the comprehensive. Joy is the Romantic—and occasionally Existentialist—expression of what Spinoza called intellectual love. Kingdom of ends, the  The idea that a human universality is perpetually being made out of individual commitments, and that when one chooses liberty, for instance, one chooses it for all. Nothing can be better for the individual unless it is better for all. Sartre borrows the term from Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Man, das  See They, the. Nausea  A peculiarly Sartrean term, expressing the response of a Platonic temperament to the viscous factuality of existents. Phenomenology  Strictly, in Husserl’s work, the philosophical method of describing phenomena as they appear to consciousness, i. e. without inferring an essence behind the phenomenon. Essence, for Sartre, is what is revealed in the sum of phenomenological manifestations of the object. Possibility  Opposite of facticity. By possibilities are meant the concrete possibilities of the existent. Possibility is the most primordial characterisation of Dasein as a being-towards. Practico-inert, the  the world of matter on which praxis (see next) works in Satre’s theory of revolutionary group consciousness Praxis  Praxis is the group equivalent of being-for-itself; it means purposeful activity, whether of the individual or the group, in the realisation of the project. Project, the  Action, in the sense of a choice of ends. We project ourselves on our possibilities. The project is the continuing ground of one’s particular acts, but is perpetually modifiable (because one is bound to be free) and perpetually to be renewed. Religious, the  The goal of Kierkegaard’s system is to make the relation to the absolute the determinant of existence, even to the extent of suspending the ethical in fear and trembling. The vehicle of this relation is faith, and since faith is belief in what is contrary to reason, Kierkegaard uses the term ‘paradoxical religiousness’.

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Repetition  A term used by Kierkegaard to suggest existential renewal, involving a Wiederholung or fetching forward of the repeatable possibilities of existence. The past cannot be entered as past, but can be remade into future possibility. Resolute  The resoluteness of an authentic existent can be felt by others as a kind of solvent of ‘theyness’. Authentic existence is characterised by ‘anticipatory resoluteness’ or ‘the loyalty of existence to its own self’. Responsibility  Man is responsible for his acts, since his decisions are grounded in nothing. Even to obey is to choose and be responsible for one’s obedience. Man, having created the world and its values, is responsible for it too. Single one, the  The single one, or the individual, is ‘the category through which this age, all history, the human race, must pass’ (Kierkegaard). The task of the individual is to become subjective. The concrete individual—not the concrete universal—is the foundation of all truth to Sartre and Nietzsche also. To Buber, for whom the goal of individual being is community, it remains true that only individuals are capable of meeting. Solicitude  Heidegger’s term for the way Dasein’s being as care manifests itself in relation to other Dasein. Positive solicitude is, in Buber, the I-Thou relation. Sublimation  The task of Nietzsche’s Superman: a perpetual self-overcoming, or substitution of strength for weakness, on the road to the self. Superman, the  The Nietzschean single one, who overcomes the facticities of self and situation, creating his own good and evil, enjoying the dance of freedom. Temporality  A major theme in all Existentialist texts. Subjectively, the past is one’s ‘essence’ and facticity. The present is flight, or fallenness, or projection towards the what-is-to-be of the future. Since man is a being-towards, the future has existential primacy. The human for-itself ‘has to be its being, instead of simply being it’, says Sartre. To Kierkegaard, ‘the unification of the different stages of life in simultaneity is the task set for human beings.’ They, the  ‘The kind of being of everydayness’ (Heidegger). To exist as das Man (‘the one’, or ‘the they’), as a segment of the crowd, is to be unfree. Thrownness  Dasein is ‘thrown potentiality’ (Heidegger)—thrown into a particular facticity, thrown up against certain possibilities, including the ‘possibility’ of death. From the uncanniness (unheimlichkeit, or unhomeliness) of this condition we take flight into fallenness, in the illusory freedom of ‘the they’ rather than face our ‘own-

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most’ potentialities. Truth  Truth is subjectivity, according to Kierkegaard, and all Existentialist accounts concern themselves with what truth can mean for the subjective existent. The test of truth for Nietzsche is how far a given judgement furthers and maintains life. For Heidegger, truth is unconcealedness, a disclosure of being. To be in the truth, is to be present to what-is. Will-to-power, the  In Tillich’s handy formulation, Nietzsche’s will-to-power means ‘the drive of everything living to realise itself with increasing intensity and extensity’.

Recommended Reading Note on references: in view of the frequency of reference to primary works of Existentialism throughout this introduction, full details have not been given each time a work is referred to. In most cases the full title has been used. Where abbreviations have been used, these are self-explanatory short titles, for instance: Perennial Scope = The Perennial Scope of Philosophy; Point of View = The Point of View for My Work as an Author; The Way Back = The Way Back into the Ground of Metaphysics

RECOMMENDED EXISTENTIALIST TEXTS Beauvoir, Simone de. The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947), translated by Bernard Frechtman, Citadel Press, Secaucus, New Jersey, 1948. Beauvoir’s main exposition of Existentialism. Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), translated by J. O Brien, Random House, New York, 1955. Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings, edited by David Farrell Krell, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1978. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time (1927), translated by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1962. Heidegger, Martin. Introduction to Metaphysics (1953), translated by Ralph Manheim, Doubleday Anchor Books, New York, 1961. Jaspers, Karl. The Perennial Scope of Philosophy (1948), translated by Ralph Manheim, Archon Books, New York, 1968. Jaspers, Karl. The Philosophy of Existence (1937), translated by Richard F. Grabau, University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, 1972. Jaspers, Karl. Way to Wisdom (1950), translated by Ralph Manheim, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1967. Kierkegaard, Søren. Either-Or (1843), translated by D. F. Swenson and L. M. Swenson (Volume 1) and Walter Lowrie (Volume 2), Doubleday Anchor Books, New York, 1959. Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death (1843; 1949), translated by Walter Lowrie, Doubleday Anchor Books, New York, 1964. Marcel, Gabriel. Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary (1953), Collins (Fontana Library), London and Glasgow, 1965. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil (1886), translated by M. Cowan, H. Regnery Co. , Chicago, 1969. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals (1872; 1887), translated by F. Golffing, Doubleday Anchor Books, New York, 1956. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science (1882), translated by Walter Kaufmann, Random House, New York, 1974.

Existentialism 91 Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1885), translated by R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1961. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ (1888), translated by R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1968. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness (1943), translated by Hazel Barnes, Methuen, London, 1969. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Existentialism and Humanism (1945), translated by Philip Mairet, Methuen, London, 1948.

INTRODUCTIONS AND MORE SPECIALISED STUDIES Barnes, Hazel. Sartre, Quartet Books, London, 1974. Especially good as an introduction to Sartre as a writer. Barrett, William. Irrational Man, Doubleday Anchor Books, New York, 1962. Influential synthesis of the Existentialist tradition. Blackman, H. J. Six Existentialist Thinkers, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, third edition, 1961. Caws, Peter. Sartre (The Arguments of the Philosophers), Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1979. Very authoritative study. Charlesworth, Max. The Existentialists and Jean-Paul Sartre, George Prior Publishers, London, 1976. Lively book including several stimulating interviews. Emphasises the Marxist question. Fullbrook, Kate and Edward Fullbrook, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre: the remaking of a Twentieth-Century Legend, Basic Books (Harper-Collins), New York, 1994. Hannay, Alastair. Kierkegaard (The Arguments of the Philos­ophers), Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1982. Kaufmann, Walter, (ed.). Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, Meridian, New York, 1956. A useful anthology. Kaufmann, Walter. From Shakespeare to Existentialism, Doubleday Anchor Books, New York, revised edition, 1960. A stimulating and influential study of the subject (c. 450 pages). Keefe, Terry. Simone de Beauvoir: a Study of her Writings, Harrap, London, 1983. Lowrie, Walter. Kierkegaard, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1938. Standard life. ——. A Short Life of Kierkegaard (1942), Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1965. Macquarrie, John. Existentialism, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1973. Detailed and authoritative thematic approach (c. 250 pages). Murdoch, Iris. Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, Collins (Fontana Library), London and Glasgow, 1967. Schacht, Richard. Nietzsche (The Arguments of the Philosophers), Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1983. Steiner, George. Heidegger, Collins (Fontana Paperbacks), Glasgow, 1978. A lucid and engaged volume in the Fontana Modern Masters series. Warnock, Mary. Existentialism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1970. Useful on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty.

Existentialism 92 Warnock, Mary. The Philosophy of Sartre, Hutchinson & Co. , London, 1965. Wilson, Colin. The Outsider (1956), Pan Books, London, 1963. Remarkable synthesis of much in the Existentialist tradition.

OTHER WORKS CITED Beauvoir, Simone de. All Said and Done (1972), translated by Patrick O Brian, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1977. Memoirs. ——. The Blood of Others (1945), translated by Yvonne Moyse and Roger Senhouse, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1964. ——. Force of Circumstance (1963), translated by Richard Howard, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1968. Memoirs. ——. L invitée, Gallimard, Paris, 1943. Novel. ——. Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958), translated by James Kirkup, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1963. Memoirs. ——. The Prime of Life (1960), translated by Peter Green, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1965. Memoirs. ——. Pyrrhus et Cinéas, Gallimard, Paris, 1944. Beauvoir, Simone de The Second Sex (1949), translated and edited by H. M. Parshley, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1972. Buber, Martin. Between Man and Man (1936), translated by R. G. Smith, Collins (Fontana Library), London and Glasgow, 1961. ——. I and Thou (1926), translated by R. G. Smith, Edinburgh, 1937. Camus, Albert .The Outsider (1942), translated by Stuart Gilbert, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1961. ——. The Plague (1947), translated by Stuart Gilbert, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1960. ——. The Rebel (1951), translated by Anthony Bower, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1962. Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus (1833), Oxford University Press (World’s Classics Edition), Oxford, 1902. Coleridge, Samuel. Taylor Aids to Reflection (1825), G. Bell & Sons (Bohn s Edition), London, 1913. ——. Anima Poetae, edited by E. H. Coleridge, London, 1895. ——. The Friend (1818), in Collected Works, edited by B. Rooke, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London and New York, 2 vols, 1969. ——. Inquiring Spirit, edited by Kathleen Coburn, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1951. ——. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge edited by Kathleen Coburn, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1957. ——. The Philosophical Lectures of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, edited by Kathleen Coburn, Pilot Press, London, 1949. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from Underground (1864), translated by Andrew R. MacAndrew, New American Library, New York, 1961. Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man (1952), Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1965. Goethe, J. W. von. The Sorrows of Young Werther (1787), translated by Catherine Hutter, New American Library, New York, 1962.

Existentialism 93 Heidegger, Martin. Existence and Being (1949), edited by Werner Brock, Vision Press, London, third edition, 1968. Heidegger, Martin. ‘The Way Back into the Ground of Meta­physics’, in Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, Doubleday Anchor Books, New York, 1956. ——. What is Called Thinking? (1954), translated by F. D. Wieck and J. G. Gray, Harper & Row, New York, 1968. ——. What is Philosophy? (1956), translated by William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde, Twayne Publishers Inc. , New York, 1958, German/English text. Hölderlin, Friedrich. Hyperion (1799), translated by William R. Trask, New American Library, New York, 1965. Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations: an Introduction to Phenomenology, translated by Dorion Cairns, Martinus Nijkoff, The Hague, 1960. James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience (1901), Collins (Fontana Library), Glasgow, 1968. Jaspers, Karl. Philosophy (1932), translated by E. B. Ashton, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 3 vols, 1969–71. ——. Reason and Existenz (1935), translated by W. Earle, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1956. Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785), translated and edited by H. J. Paton, Harper & Row, New York, 1964. Kierkegaard, Søren. The Concept of Dread (1844), translated by Walter Lowrie, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1944. ——. The Concept of Irony (1841), translated by Lee M. Capel, Collins, London, 1966. ——. Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846), translated by D. F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1941. ——. Journals of Kierkegaard, 1834–1854, edited by Alexander Dru, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1939. ——. The Point of View for My Work as an Author: A Report to History (1848), translated by Walter Lowrie, edited by B. Nelson, Harper & Row, New York, 1962. ——. Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing (1846), translated by D. Steere, Collins (Fontana Books), London and Glasgow, 1961. ——. Repetition (1843), translated by Walter Lowrie, Harper & Row, New York, 1964. Marcel, Gabriel. The Philosophy of Existence (1947), Harvill Press, London, 1948. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The Phenomenology of Perception (1945), translated by C. Smith, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1962. Miller, J. H. The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-century Writers, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1963. Molina, Fernando. Existentialism as Philosophy, Prentice-Hall Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1962. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Complete Works, edited by Oscar Levy, Macmillan, London, 18 vols, 1903–13. ——. The Will to Power (1900) translated by Walter Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968. Ortega y Gasset, Jose. The Revolt of the Masses (1930), Unwin Books, London, 1961.

Existentialism 94 Sartre, Jean-Paul. Between Existentialism and Marxism, translated by John Matthews, NLB, London, 1974. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960), translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith, NLB, London, 1976. ——. The Flies (1943), translated by Stuart Gilbert in Altona and Other Plays, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1962. ——. Nausea (1938), translated by L. Alexander, New Directions, New York, 1959. ——. The Psychology of Imagination (1940), Citadel Press, New York, 1961. ——. Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (1939), translated by Philip Mairet, Methuen, London, 1981. ——. What is Literature? (1948), translated by Bernard Frechtman, Methuen, London, 1967. Schopenhauer, Artur. Essays and Aphorisms, selected from Parerga and Paralipomena (1851) and translated by R. J. Hollingdale, Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1970. ——. The World as Will and Idea (1819), translated by R. B. Haldane and J. Kemp, Kegan Paul, London, sixth edition, 3 vols, 1907. Tillich, Paul. The Courage to Be, Collins (Fontana Paperbacks), London and Glasgow, 1962. ——. Love, Power and Justice, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1954. Tolstoy, Leo The Death of Ivan Illych (1886), translated by Aylmer Maude, New American Library, New York, 1960. Wright, Richard Native Son (1940), Penguin Books, Harmondsworth, 1972.

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Online Resources In most cases only the excellent Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is really worth your time. This has entries for Buber: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/buber/ Beauvoir: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/beauvoir/ Kierkegaard: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/ Marcel: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marcel/ Nietzsche: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/nietzsche/ Sartre: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sartre/

Other Online Resources Heidegger The site called Ereignis (http://webcom.com/paf/ereignis.html ) has a page with links to texts: http://webcom.com/paf/hlinks/hh.html

Kierkegaard Try the Excellent Wikipedia Entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kierkegaard

Sartre Sartre Online has useful short pieces: http://www.geocities.com/sartresite/articles.html Sartre.org.uk coud be better designed, and has many inoperative links, but it is useful: http://www.sartre.org.uk

Humanities Insights The following Insights are available or forthcoming at: http://www.humanities-ebooks.co.uk/catalogue History The British Empire: Pomp, Power and Postcolonialism The Holocaust: Events, Motives, Legacy Methodism and Society Southern Africa

Literature Insights (by author) Chatwin: In Patagonia Conrad: The Secret Agent Eliot, George: Silas Marner Eliot, T S: ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ and The Waste Land Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury Gaskell, Mary Barton Hardy: Tess of the Durbervilles Heaney: Selected Poems Hopkins: Selected Poems Hughes: Selected Poems Lawrence: The Rainbow Lawrence: Sons and Lovers Lawrence: Women in Love Morrison: Beloved Shakespeare: Hamlet Shakespeare: Henry IV Shakespeare: Richard II Shakespeare: Richard III Shakespeare: The Tempest Shelley: Frankenstein Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads

Literature Insights (general) English Renaissance Drama: Theatre and Theatres in Shakespeare’s Time Fields of Agony: English Poetry and the First World War An Introduction to Critical Theory An Introduction to Rhetorical Terms

Philosophy Insights American Pragmatism Business Ethics Ethics Existentialism Formal Logic Heidegger Informal Logic and Critical Thinking Islamic Philosophy Marxism Meta-Ethics Philosophy of History Philosophy of Language Philosophy of Mind Philosophy of Religion Philosophy of Sport Sartre: Existentialism and Humanism Wittgenstein

General Titles An Inroduction to Feminist Theory An Introduction to Critical Theory An Introduction to Rhetorical Terms

Commissioned Titles Include Aesthetics Austen: Pride and Prejudice Blake: Songs of Innocence & Experience and The Marriage of Heaven & Hell Eliot: Four Quartets Fielding: Tom Jones Lawrence: Selected Poems Mental Causation Plato Plato’s Republic Renaissance Philosophy Shakespeare: Macbeth Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet Wonder