Situating Existentialism: Key Texts in Context 9780231519670

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situating existentialism

Situating Existentialism key texts in context

edited by j o n at h a n j u d a k e n a n d r o b e rt b e rn a s c o n i

c o l u m b i a u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s   

new york

columbia university press Publishers Since 1893 new york

chichester, west sussex

cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2012 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data   Situating existentialism : key texts in context / edited by Jonathan Judaken and Robert Bernasconi.    p. cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   isbn 978-0-231-14774-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-231-14775-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-231-51967-0 (e-book)   1.  Existentialism.  I.  Judaken, Jonathan, 1968–  II.  Bernasconi, Robert.   b819.s546 2012   142′.78—dc23 2012001709 Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

Contents



Introduction—1 Jonathan Judaken

part 1. (trans)national contexts 1. Russian Existentialism, or Existential Russianism—37 Val Vinokur 2. German Existentialism and the Persistence of Metaphysics: Weber, Jaspers, Heidegger—65 Peter E. Gordon 3. Sisyphus’s Progeny: Existentialism in France—89 Jonathan Judaken 4. Punching Through the Pasteboard Masks: American Existentialism—123 George Cotkin 5. Angst Across the Channel: Existentialism in Britain—145 Martin Woessner 6. Existentialisms in the Hispanic and Latin American Worlds: El Quixote and Its Existential Children—180 Eduardo Mendieta

part 2. existentialism and religion 7. Fear and Trembling and the Paradox of Christian Existentialism—211 George Pattison

vi—contents

8. Jewish Co-Existentialism: Being with the Other—237 Paul Mendes-Flohr 9. Camus the Unbeliever: Living Without God—256 Ronald Aronson

part 3. migrations 10. Anxiety and Secularization: Søren Kierkegaard and the TwentiethCentury Invention of Existentialism—279 Samuel Moyn 11. Rethinking the “Existential” Nietzsche in Germany: Löwith, Jaspers, Heidegger—305 Charles Bambach 12. Situating Frantz Fanon’s Account of Black Experience—336 Robert Bernasconi 13. Simone de Beauvoir in Her Times and Ours: The Second Sex and Its Legacy in French Feminist Thought—360 Debra Bergoffen 14. The “Letter on Humanism”: Reading Heidegger in France—386 Ethan Kleinberg List of Contributors—415 Index—419

situating existentialism

Introduction Jonathan Judaken A philosophizing that begins by casting light on the situation remains in flux because the situation is nothing but a ceaseless flow. . . . If I take the illumination of the situation for the starting point of philosophizing, I renounce objective explanations that would deduce existence from principles as one whole being. Instead each objective thought structure has its own function. Awaking to myself, in my situation, I raised the question of being. —Karl Jaspers, “Philosophizing Starts with Our Situation,” in Philosophy, vol. 1

Existentialism Is an Anti-Ism Situating Existentialism is a history of the process of systematizing and canonizing existentialism as a movement of thought. As such, it reconstructs a shared dialogue about the human condition in the form of a series of reception histories. But it does so in a somewhat disjointed set of frames, for the process of establishing existentialism as a distinctive brand of theorizing about the human predicament in modernity was welded together only in hindsight. One might assume that an overview of the history of existentialism would offer a definition of its subject at the outset. But existentialism, in principle, rejects a neat dictionary definition or formulation. It is not a consistent or systematic philosophy or approach to thought.1 If anything, existentialism defined itself against systems: systems of thought like Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s or “scientific” schemas like racism or positivism; systems of behavior like those of the mob mentality of the masses as in nationalism or

2—introduct i o n

the narrow norms of the bourgeoisie; or systems of production like those created by the industrial revolution. As summarized by Søren Kierkegaard, the thinker most consider to be the prime mover of existentialism: “A logical system can be given, an existential system is impossible.”2 Jean-Paul Sartre, existentialism’s most famous exponent, rejected the invitation to define existentialism: “It is in the nature of an intellectual quest to be undefined,” he wrote. “To name it and to define it is to wrap it up and tie the knot. What is left? A finished, already outdated mode of culture, something like a brand of soap, in other words an idea.”3 Moreover, as Marjorie Grene put it in a work that helped introduce existentialism to English readers, “the more fashionable a philosophy becomes, the more elusive is its definition.”4 Indeed, as Friedrich Nietzsche—one of the prophets of what emerged as existentialism—argues in On the Genealogy of Morals, “only that which has no history is definable.”5 Situating Existentialism seeks to reconstruct the history that has led to how existentialism has come to be defined, systematized, and canonized. So rather than a definition, we offer a description of existentialism. This description is historically informed, porous, and sensitive to national variation. That is, to describe existentialism is to reconstruct an interchange among a group of thinkers from different regions who came to share a vocabulary for naming a set of problems in the shared setting of modernity. Our approach is the only viable one given that the writers grouped together as existentialists offer no coherent creed or body of thought or doctrine. There is surely no clear party line. Neither is existentialism, as is so often claimed, reducible to an intellectual mood. In fact, among those thinkers generally lumped together and labeled “existentialists” there are profound differences on foundational issues: irreconcilable positions on God and religion; widely divergent views on politics; and oftentimes opposed outlooks regarding ethics. Albert Camus, for example, believed that God’s existence had little bearing on the human condition. In his notebooks, Camus remarked that “I often read that I am atheistic; I hear people speak of my atheism. Yet these words say nothing to me; for me they have no meaning. I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.”6 Martin Heidegger, in contrast, once famously claimed that “only a God can save us.”7 In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to say that much of modern theology in the Christian and Jewish traditions is a footnote to Kierkegaard, so influential was he on the thought of such Christian existentialists as Karl Barth, Rudolf Bultmann, Paul Tillich, and Dietrich

Introduction—3

Bonhoeffer and Jewish thinkers such as Martin Buber, Franz Rosenzweig, and Emmanuel Levinas. Kierkegaard also was a thoroughgoing critic of all collective movements, insisting that where the crowd goes, untruth reigns.8 In The Present Age, he warned against the dangers of modern politics launched in the name of the people or the public. On the other hand, politics became a cornerstone of Sartre’s philosophy. He maintained that existentialism “is precisely the opposite of quietism, since it declares that reality only exists in action” and, moreover, that “I cannot set my own freedom as a goal without also setting the freedom of others as a goal.” In his 1946 essay “Materialism and Revolution,” Sartre stated bluntly that “the philosophy of revolution” represents “the philosophy of man in the general sense.”9 As such, Sartre was a fellow traveler of communism, Third World radicalism, and Maoism—in short, the ambassador of theory to revolutionary politics throughout the postwar period. At the other extreme of the political spectrum, Heidegger—who profoundly influenced not only Sartre’s ideas but also much of existentialism—was a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party, which has posed a recurrent problem for those inspired by his thought. If there is no coherence on matters of religion or politics, there is also no unity when it comes to questions of ethics. A distinguishing feature of the existentialists’ ontological and ethical projects is the importance they give to alterity: the being of “the other.” But there were extensive variations in how the relationship between the self and other (both individually and collectively) was understood.10 For Sartre, “Hell is the other” (as Garcin, the protagonist of No Exit, famously proclaims), for others see us as we do not see ourselves. Sartre’s ontology reworked Hegel’s master–slave dialectic from his Phenomenology of Spirit in terms of the intersubjective dialectic of “the gaze” in such a way that relations with others were competitive by nature, an incessant struggle for recognition. For Gabriel Marcel, in contrast, “love as the breaking of the tension between the self and the other, appears to me to be what one might call the essential ontological datum.”11 Likewise for Martin Buber; in I and Thou, love is not a feeling but rather a relation: “Love does not cling to an I, as if the You were merely its ‘content’ or object; it is between I and You.”12 Karl Jaspers put this in a different way: “What I am, I can become only with the other—the act of opening myself to the other is at the same time, for the I, the act of realizing itself as a person.”13 So for Marcel, Jaspers, and Buber, unlike for Sartre, all relationships can move beyond seeing others as objects.

4—introduct i o n

When it comes to ethics per se, these differing notions of alterity entail differing stances on morality. In The Ethics of Ambiguity, Simone de Beauvoir rejected any form of absolutist ethics: there are no absolute values before they are embodied in action. The epigraph from Michel de Montaigne to de Beauvoir’s Ethics sums up her view: “Life in itself is neither good nor evil. It is the place of good and evil, according to what you make it.” Rather than seeking absolutes (or absolution), de Beauvoir called for us to engage in a process of “permanent liberation” because we live in “permanent tension,” always caught in ambiguity. As such, “morality resides in the painfulness of an indefinite questioning.”14 In Either/Or, Kierkegaard, like de Beauvoir and Sartre, emphasized the centrality of choice within the ethical sphere of life. In Fear and Trembling, however, he suggested that the universal dictums of ethics are transcended when it comes to the dictates of faith. He termed this “leap of faith” the “teleological suspension of the ethical.” In retelling the biblical narrative of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac, Kierkegaard insisted on how shaken we ought to be by Abraham’s acceptance of God’s commandment that he kill his only son as the paradigmatic example of faith. The reason Abraham should arouse fear and trembling is that his act entails obscuring the previously clear line between right and wrong, good and evil. These examples demonstrate that there is no accord between some of the most famous figures associated with existentialism on matters as fundamental as God, politics, and morality. Yet despite these immense differences, there is a certain existential lexicon that informs the shared themes one finds across a wide array of thinkers. Indeed, it is Kierkegaard’s terminology that makes him a founding figure, for he gave a new valence to a set of notions that were determinative for existentialism, including the variously translated Angest (rendered in English as angst, anxiety, anguish, or dread). But perhaps even more basic for the development of Existenzphilosophie was Kierkegaard’s revalorization of the term “Existenz” itself, especially in his Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Kierkegaard used the term to protest against Hegel’s encompassing Geistphilosophie, a comprehensive philosophical idealism “in which the individual disappeared like a wave in the sea. He [Kierkegaard] introduced existence as a specifically religious category, meaning by it the single, finite, responsible, simple, suffering and guilty creature, who has to make a decision in the face of God and who consequently is more interested in ethical questions and in salvation than in abstract speculations.”15

Introduction—5

Dostoevsky, in his turn, provided brooding novelistic jabs at liberalism and socialism; tirades against the prevailing Victorian ethos that underpinned the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie; rants on rationalism and reductionist scientism; and, perhaps most profoundly, reflections on the problem of theodicy. In contrast to both Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, Friedrich Nietzsche, the third major nineteenth-century precursor of existentialism, boldly declared that “God is dead.” Nietzsche went on to tackle the nihilist repercussions that stemmed from this declaration, radically rejecting the ramparts of religion and the absolutes of any metaphysical or epistemological system. Edmund Husserl, the father of modern phenomenology, was certainly no existentialist, but in the early twentieth century he enjoined philosophers to return “back to the things themselves.” This was a call to reflect on how phenomena are experienced by consciousness removed from the commonsensical and scientific understanding of them to something more primordial: how they appear to us in consciousness as a result of human intentionality. This entreaty had a profound impact on existentialism, which from Kierkegaard forward was critical of abstracting philosophy from the concrete concerns of human existence. Karl Jaspers, who left the normalizing confines of modern psychiatry, pushed his readers to examine life from the viewpoint of “limit situations” that involve suffering, struggle, guilt, and death. In these extreme circumstances, Jaspers claimed, individuals are pressed against the social conventions that encase them and forced to decide anew on the existential issues that define their lives. Following Jaspers, Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) introduced a technical vocabulary that sought a new way to formulate existential concerns within the philosophical tradition, introducing or reconsidering concepts (several of which are difficult to render in translation) like Dasein (human existence), Mitsein (Being-with-others), temporality, Beingin-the-world, Being-toward-death, and authenticity and inauthenticity. On the French side of the Rhine, a key term picked up by Camus from Kierke­ gaard was the notion of the absurd. For Camus it indicated the irreconcilability between our desire for rationality and order and the maddening contin­ gency of how things actually unfold in the world. Sartre, too, coined a number of concepts that expressed a set of ideas that other existentialists have pursued. These concepts include nausea, the visceral sense of the world’s haphazard nature; bad faith, or lying to yourself by refusing to assume responsibility for your freedom; and, as alluded to previously, a social ontology predicated on the gaze of others.

6—introduct i o n

These are some examples of what became a common vocabulary. Part of the history that we reconstruct in Situating Existentialism is how these terms or insights were shared and understood across a variety of otherwise quite different thinkers. As succinctly stated by William Barrett, whose Irrational Man helped introduce existentialism to America, what existentialists held in common were “such matters as anxiety, death, the conflict between the bogus and the genuine self, the faceless man of the masses, [and] the experience of the death of God.”16 In short, existentialists addressed the most fundamental concerns of human existence: suffering, loneliness, dread, guilt, conflict, spiritual emptiness, the absence of absolute values or universals, the fallibility of human reason, and the tragic impasses of the human condition. This shared terminology and set of themes cohered into points that queried the grounds of modern philosophy. When so much in modern thought seemed sterile and removed from ultimate issues, existentialists asked us to consider again an array of searching problems: Who am I? What is my purpose in existing? What does human existence mean? How should I live? How should I relate to others? Is there a God? Is there a relation between God’s existence (or not) and how one lives? Why is there evil in the world? These are questions that can unsettle individuals to the core of their being, awaken them from the somnambulism of their lives, and direct us all to assume responsibility to create meaning from our situation in the world. In responding to these questions, it is often claimed that existentialists begin with individualism: the solitary person living in the world. But this is untrue. Existentialism is plainly critical of Leibniz’s monads or liberalism’s abstract individual defined by universals (whether reason or rights) or romanticism’s solitary subject seeking connection with a greater whole. It would be more accurate to say that existentialism starts with the problem of subjectivity: the question of human nature and the critical examination of how selfhood is constructed. What existentialists came to share in common, Sartre famously averred, was that “existence precedes essence.” This has emerged as the bumper sticker for existentialism, and with good reason. By this, Sartre meant that the choices we make in the situations in which we find ourselves (where we are never alone) determine our essence. In other words, humans are not born with a pre-scripted personality or a preordained purpose or plan or a prefabricated essence conferred by God or nature or history. Instead, it is our actions that define our identity, and it is our values that inform our acts. Human beings are like artists who creatively fashion the projects that constitute the

Introduction—7

meanings of their existence. This is true even for religious existentialists like Nicolas Berdyaev, who provided an existential twist on Genesis 1:27. Berd­ yaev maintained, as would other religious existentialists, that if God created human beings in Her own image, then humans are creative entities like God and thus endowed by their creator with the capacity to choose their path in life. The Archimedean point for existentialism is thus the question, “Who am I?” In order to reply, we must first reject the predigested mores, rules, orders, and routines of the modern world, all of which divert our focus from making purposeful choices. Pursuing this thought in his Journal, Kierkegaard wrote: What I really need is to get clear about what I must do, not what I must know, except insofar as knowledge must precede every act. What matters is to find a purpose . . . the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for which I am willing to live and die. Of what use would it be to me to discover a so-called objective truth . . . constructing a world I did not live in but merely held up for others to see . . . if it had no deeper meaning for me and for my life?17 At twenty-three, Kierkegaard was asking the pivotal question: What should I do with my life, and how can it be purpose driven? In doing so, he shared with unbelievers and atheistic existentialists the assumption of individual responsibility for “becoming what I am.” If this assumption is valid, then it immediately poses the question of what criteria govern what choices we ought to make. As we have already sug­ gested, matters are murky here. Existentialists had no agreement on the solutions, but the whole assemblage of voices in the existential canon questioned the metaphysical underpinnings of ethics. Even so, they sought to establish an axiology, the study of values. And all of the existentialists were concerned about the problem of nihilism: they wondered whether the transformations that structured the modern world had eviscerated the sacred, and paved over the terra mundi, so that meaning and valuation were at best relative and at worst groundless. When they approached these concerns, existentialists did so in a new style. They were not driven to establish valid proofs or to systematize their convictions. Instead they sought to cultivate a clearing in life where posing these vital concerns came to the fore. Each reflected on how he or she could write in a way that would force readers to reevaluate staid convictions

8—introduct i o n

and spent solutions. George Pattison has itemized some of their differing modes of expression. These include “Kierkegaard’s own indirect communication, Dostoevsky’s dialogical art, Bultmann’s concern for a demythologized kerygma, Tillich’s doctrine of symbolism and his promotion of the visual arts, Berdyaev’s insistence on the aphoristic nature of philosophy, Buber’s retelling of Hasidic tales, Unamuno’s paradoxical prose and Marcel’s plays.”18 These were some of the stylistic signatures of thinkers whose desire was to spur their readers from complacency to comprehension. Doing so involved “philosophizing with a hammer,” as Nietzsche put it.19 What were to be smashed were the new idols worshipped by modern thought: most emphatically unbridled rationalism and its twin, the idol of progress. When Francis Bacon declared “knowledge is power” as the mantra of modernity, he did so as the herald of a new scientific method, believing it would lead to domination over nature and constant improvement of the human lot. Yet even though the natural and human sciences have led to vast collections of data about all aspects of life, the result has not been coherence, comprehension, and certainty so much as confusion, malaise, and perhaps a technical sophistry by which we seek to stave off the piercing predicaments faced in the night’s sleepless hours. Kierkegaard taught that, from the vantage point of existential concerns, “truth is subjectivity,” and “all essential knowledge relates to existence, or only such knowledge as has an essential relationship to existence is essential knowledge.”20 The progress stemming from political attempts at human liberation has led to greater independence but no less often to terror committed in the name of revolutionary violence, as Camus diagnosed in The Rebel.21 Even when turning from totalitarian regimes (which were Camus’s target) to the promises of liberalism and the neoliberal world order, we see that individuals today are more often mired in bureaucracy and commercialism than empowered by selfsufficiency and self-fulfillment. As Pattison notes, existentialists thus “questioned the view that the satisfaction of material needs and comforts and the fulfillment of political hopes, whether nationalistic or class based, could satisfy the human question for meaning.”22 Indeed, the tenor of the existentialists has been to refuse prevailing models of social and political change while holding firmly to what Camus called “rebellion.” The existential tendency has been to celebrate the rebel without a utopian belief in final solutions or the end of history and to waylay any politics of power that fails to recognize human frailty. So while existentialists offer no consistent creed, code, or common program, they do share a lingo tied to a set of modern problems: the question

Introduction—9

of subjectivity, how to forge a postmetaphysical ethics, how to ground truth in differing perspectives, how to theorize in ways that are not reducible to a constricting logic or mode of rationality, how to establish social systems that do not lead to crushing conformity or homogenizing uniformity, and how to communicate this in a way that speaks to others so that they pick up the hammer and begin to smash those elements that are stultifying their own lives. These themes, relentlessly pursued by those we have come to call existentialists, continue to have relevance for those who desire to break from the soul-constricting numbness of social norms and for those who are sickened by identifying worth with wealth or success with jobs, which are usually the iron cages of our bourgeois zoo. These concerns still resonate for those of us in search of individuality in a society saturated by mass media, for those of us ready to assume responsibility for a world where genocide and racism continue after Auschwitz and apartheid, for those of us who rebel against the absurdity of a world in which a few hundred of the richest people have more wealth than half of humanity. These concerns still speak to those of us in search of something transcendent after Darwin, after industrialization, and after the reduction of meaning to television sound bites and the diminution of communication to text messages. In short, existentialism remains germane because our very humanity, as Heidegger suggested, is such that humans are the beings that continue to ask: What is the meaning of my existence?

Existentialism Is a Modernism What “defined” existentialism, then, was less a shared school of thought than a shared situation. This situation was both discursive and material: dependent on a set of conversations about changes in the modern world. Summarily but not simply, it was a response to the atmosphere captured in T. S. Eliot’s famous poem “The Waste Land.” Like Eliot, existentialists asked: “What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow / Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only / A heap of broken images.”23 The broken world to which existentialism gave expression was the feeling that those who had lived through two world wars, totalitarianism, the Holocaust, and the atomic bomb felt in their bones: that traditional systems of thought and politics had crumbled in the trenches or the gas chambers or the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima. Existentialism was a quixotic

10—introduct i o n

howl in the night—about the extreme situations of modernity—that might yet open the ears of those who listened and yearned for a more humane existence. In saying this we can clarify some terms that help to explain the situation that existentialists spoke about. The modern world was shaped by the axial shift that followed in the wake of Columbus. The processes of modernization that followed from and buttressed this shift—the growth of the nation-state, urbanization, science as the primary mode of producing and legitimizing knowledge, secularization, and the bureaucratization of individual life—transformed modern existence. These changes were impelled by technological renovations based on the steam engine, which forever altered what people do, where they work, how they labor, who reaps the benefits, and how families are ordered. Harnessed to rail and then ships and airplanes, the steam engine brought about a revolution in transportation that shrank the planet and created the mechanical clock as the modern taskmaster that presides over every minute of our lives.24 Harnessed to modes of communication, the steam engine ushered in a mass-media revolution that created global megaphones: the rise of the mass press (itself made possible by the cable wire, the telephone, and the camera) followed by film, radio, television, and, today, the Internet and wireless communications. Modernity was the ontological outcome of these forces: the state of being that defined existence in the modern age. And the moderns were the artists and writers who expressed this new zeitgeist. The moderns forged modernism, which comprised the artistic movements in literature, architecture, visual art, and other cultural forms that responded to the processes of modernization. What these art forms shared was an assault on the mimetic model of representation that had characterized the West since the Renaissance—a model claiming that art ought to represent nature, that knowledge was a reflection of the laws of nature, and that aesthetic forms should strive for the harmony ostensibly found in nature. However, Einstein’s theory of relativity and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle questioned the Newtonian view of nature on which that model was based. Yet even before this new scientific picture of reality emerged, modernists were rejecting the objective certainty of nature. Freud and psychoanalysis critiqued the unity of consciousness, and the new discipline of sociology doubted the integration of modern society. All insisted on a multiplicity of frames of reference. Modernism suggested that reality could not be easily separated from its fictive construction and that modern identity was certainly not ontologically stable. Art forms, the moderns maintained, were

Introduction—11

a product of fictive habits whose formulas were outdated. Old structures and old themes needed to be overturned. Piece by piece, in every artistic field, every element of the old model gave way: “narrative, character, melody, tonality, structural continuity, thematic relation, form, content, meaning, purpose”—all were questioned and rethought.25 The different forms of modernism turned away from the external world to represent the modern psyche and often to reflect on the process of perception, representation, and its structures. The solidity of naturalism and realism in the arts consequently yielded to cubism, surrealism, and abstract expressionism. In the novel, the omniscient narrator gave way to the shifting viewpoints of multiple characters whose perspectives were as fractured as their streams of consciousness. Truth was a matter of conventions, reality ungraspable, and subjectivity malleable. Existentialists were a disunified group of moderns who were nonetheless kindred spirits in the endeavor to kindle a light in what Hannah Arendt termed the “dark times” of modernity.26 Existentialists became a major cultural force among the intellectual vanguard in the era of the two world wars, which W. H. Auden famously dubbed the “Age of Anxiety.”27 In the wake of Auschwitz and Hiroshima and in the long shadow of King Leopold’s ghost, existentialism—modernism’s philosophical discourse (even when this philosophy was advanced by literary, theatrical, or other art forms)—became among the most visible of the postwar cultural movements as the Iron Curtain descended. The Cold War was an epoch dominated by two power blocs and a binary system of thinking, dividing the world into absolutes between us and them, good and evil, freedom and tyranny. It was also a period during which the concrete of the German economic miracle and les trentes glorieuses, the thirty years of unparalleled economic growth in Europe following the Nuremberg Trials, covered over the ashes of the crematoria and the ruins of the atomic bomb. Existentialists—as did modernists in philosophy, literature, and theater— railed against burying our humanity beneath this dust cloud. French, Hispanic, African American, Jewish, and Christian existentialists were often dissonant voices in the midst of the freedom struggles of the colonized, women, homosexuals, and other outsiders that Ralph Ellison termed “invisible men.”28 Existentialism thus limned modernity and exposed its hollowness, revealing that it rested on a void. In reflecting on this nothingness, existentialists pulled up the anchors that ostensibly undergirded the European culture of high modernity.

12—introduct i o n

As a label for a set of tendencies found in the modern writers discussed so far, “existentialism” arrived as a global cultural phenomenon in October 1945 following Sartre’s famous lecture titled Existentialism Is a Humanism. Simone de Beauvoir recounted the moment: The origin of the term was contingent and capricious. It was in fact Gabriel Marcel who first applied the term to Sartre, in the course of a discussion with a group of Dominicans at Le Cerf. At the time Sartre rejected this definition of himself saying that he was indeed a philosopher of existence but that “Existentialism” did not mean anything. But subsequently, Sartre and I, and his followers, were described as being Existentialists so often that we stopped objecting to this definition of ourselves. Finally we even agreed to define ourselves as such. And just after the war ended Sartre gave a lecture which he entitled “Is Existentialism a Humanism?” which shows how completely he had adopted this definition himself by then.29 Sartre’s lecture and its subsequent publication came to define existentialism as it burst onto the world stage. The talk wove together the names of a set of thinkers whose work was now repackaged as existentialism, a postwar cultural fashion. Along with Sartre’s lecture, Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus was also much discussed and likewise carved out a legacy of precursors. In 1947, the best-selling book by the Catholic personalist Emmanuel Mounier, Introduction aux existentialismes, marked the construction of an existentialist canon. Mounier even offered a diagram of the existentialist “family tree” that shows how Socrates, St. Augustine, and the Stoics were harbingers of existentialism (see figure I.1). The Gallic version of existentialism thus stamped its seal of approval on the systemization of the collection of texts, figures, themes, concepts, and contexts that defined existentialism. But a German story about what was called Existenzphilosophie had already been produced by Fritz Heinemann in a 1929 book titled Neue Wege der Philosophie: Geist/Leben/Existenz: Eine Einführung in die Philsophie der Gegenwart (New paths of philosophy: Spirit/ life/existence: An introduction to contemporary philosophy).30 Heinemann argued that the philosophies of spirit (the Geistphilosophien of Hegelianism) and Lebensphilosophie (from the tradition of German romanticism, including Herder, Hamann, and Jacobi) were ceding place in contemporary thought to Existenzphilosophie, a term he coined to describe the approach of Jaspers and

Introduction—13

figure i.1 The Existentialist Tree. Reproduced from Emmanuel Mounier, Introduction aux existentialismes, © 1960 Éditions Denoël. Reproduced by permission.

Heidegger and that would also be applied to the work of Buber and Franz Rosenzweig.31 Heinemann’s book was not widely read, but his term and the interpretation of how the currents in modern German thought led to the development of Existenzphilosophie stuck. In the 1930s, Heinemann (who was Jewish) left Germany for Great Britain, where he continued to explain this new brand of

14—introduct i o n

philosophy. Eventually, his Existentialism and the Modern Predicament (1958) would be a widely read introduction in English. Heinemann ­maintained that Heidegger’s existential phenomenology was strongly influenced by Kierkegaard and was the basis for Heidegger’s critique of Husserl’s phenomenology. A decade after Heinemann, Jaspers—who had already written much in this vein and had also produced individual works on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche—published a book of lectures simply titled Existenzphilosophie (1938).32 These lectures captured aspects of Existenzphilosophie that were remixed with a French accent before World War II, integrating splices of Spanish and Russian thought as existentialism migrated to and from Paris and across the globe. Summing up the construction of existentialism as an “ism,” Walter Kaufmann wrote: “After the arrival of Sartre, a number of other writers who had not called themselves existentialists or been so labeled before 1945 became identified with this label and triumphed in hoc signo.”33

Situating Existentialism In spite of the preceding reconstruction of how existentialism was constituted, Situating Existentialism does not proceed as a linear, chronological review of existentialism from a retrospective viewpoint. This is not a work in which you will find a neat lineup that links one existentialist thinker to the next. Nor is it a book in which we discuss individual philosophers who communicated only with one another. In none of the chapters do individual master thinkers stand for a whole generation or a type of approach, as one might find in the Cambridge companion series devoted to major movements of thought. Instead, each chapter explores the key existentialists by situating their positions (socially, politically, culturally, and philosophically) and examines how peers responded to them. The discussion is framed within the context provided by the book’s three parts (national, religious, and migratory). It is precisely by situating existentialism in this way that each chapter can also discuss how existentialism still speaks to us today. The three parts of this volume form a triptych. Part 1 includes essays that consider the (trans)national frameworks for the development of existentialism, for it was often a national situation that circumscribed the contours of the conversations that encapsulated existentialism. Part 2 considers religion and existentialism; it includes chapters on Christians, Jews, and nonbelievers.

Introduction—15

Part 3 examines the national and religious borderlines that were crossed as existentialism was consolidated and canonized. It is important to bear the chapter template in mind while reading this book. Every chapter opens with a classic text in the existential canon that we suggest be read in tandem with the chapters: Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (chapter 1), Heidegger’s What Is Metaphysics? (chapter 2), Sartre’s Existentialism Is a Humanism (chapter 3), Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro” (chapter 4), Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (chapter 5), Miguel de Unamuno’s The Tragic Sense of Life (chapter 6), Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling (chapter 7), Buber’s I and Thou (chapter 8), Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus (chapter 9), Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety (chapter 10), Nietz­ sche’s riff on “the death of God” in The Gay Science (chapter 11), Frantz Fanon’s “The Lived Experience of the Black Man” in Black Skin, White Masks (chapter 12), de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (chapter 13), and Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” (chapter 14). Each contributor provides a fresh reading of these texts. They do so not only by viewing them as solitary works but also by setting them in the context they inhabited. This contextualization deepens our understanding of the flash points that established the history of existentialism, the production of some of its pivotal texts, and the subsequent reception of these ideas. However, the chapters also go beyond this exercise in intellectual history to explore a set of philosophical questions. The nature of the human subject and the problem of theodicy are taken up in Val Vinokur’s exploration of Dostoevsky’s role in Russian existentialism. Peter Gordon suggests that metaphysics persists within existentialism’s critique of essentialism, if the case of Heidegger is illustrative. In my reconsideration of the Christian existentialist challenge to Sartre and the Paris school, I discuss how Christian thinkers depicted as fallow the functionalist understanding of the relation to the other that Sartre articulated. George Cotkin examines how American intellectuals critiqued the narrowness of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism in their existentially tinged works, often while denying their allegiance to a European tradition that was ostensibly being surpassed by the rising American superpower. Martin Woessner reflects upon how existentialism challenged the dry academicism of the analytic tradition’s emphasis on logic and positivism. Eduardo Mendieta excavates from Cervantes’s Don Quixote a set of philosophical claims from which all philosophical modernisms could be elaborated in creative and powerful ways as an expression of being Hispanic and

16—introduct i o n

Latino in a world made by Columbus and remade by decolonization. Pattison’s overview of Christian existentialism proceeds by tracing how a number of thinkers take on the troubling theme of “the exception,” which is entailed by Kierke­gaard’s argument concerning the “teleological suspension of the ethical.” For Paul Mendes-Flohr, Jewish existentialism is an alternative tradition within existentialism because its focus on dialogue opens a trajectory of thought that is markedly different from the mainstream of Western philosophy. Samuel Moyn explicitly raises the issue of canonization and how it intersects with the problem of secularization. Charles Bambach, in his comments on the tradition of interpreting Nietzsche, argues that Nietzsche ought to be understood as a central pivot for the reconsideration of Western thought more generally, as claimed by Karl Löwith, Jaspers, and Heidegger. Robert Bernasconi’s reading of Fanon in dialogue with Sartre reveals that, although Fanon appreciated the critical project of the negritude writers, he ultimately explored an existential methodology that made his influential philosophy of race a novel approach to the shifting structures of racism in a post-Holocaust and postcolonial world. Debra Bergoffen provocatively claims that de Beauvoir’s Second Sex still speaks to us today not only as an analysis of patriarchy but also because it is grounded in the categories and claims of The Ethics of Ambiguity about the need to confront evil, which continue to provide insight into a host of contemporary issues (only one of which is gender oppression). Finally, Ethan Kleinberg’s overview of the three traditions of reading Heidegger in postwar France indicates why Levinas’s approach transcended both the existentialist and the antihumanist interpretation of Heidegger, offering simultaneously a critique of Western metaphysics and the opening to ethics that has preoccupied so many of the late Continental thinkers of note. Thus, as Jaspers suggests in this chapter’s epigraph, each of the following chapters first situates existentialism and then, from this situation, philosophizes. Before turning to a summary of the contents, a last point worth mentioning is that, although Situating Existentialism is addressed to those just beginning to explore existentialism, it seeks also to push the scholarly discussion forward. We hope that the result will challenge readers regardless of their familiarity with existentialism. Readers who have never been exposed to these ideas ought to find themselves tested: awakened to the possibility of ways of thinking that call into question what they take for granted—as natural, true, God-given, or essential to the order of things—by encountering a set of clear expositions of complex philosophical works. But each chapter also seeks to reconsider the interpretation of these foundational works of existentialism by

Introduction—17

reading them in dialogue within the wider tradition they share, whose full contours are less appreciated today than before. Part 1 is composed as a set of national contexts in which existentialism emerged as a centerpiece of cultural exchange. In each case it turns out that ideas, thinkers, themes, books, and eventually a shared vocabulary crossed borders and migrated in different directions that cannot be mapped to neat geographical boundaries. Existentialism was nomadic and exilic, and existential insights spurred new conversations in new settings. Existentialism was thus transnational. That being said, nation-states were a determining influence on the cultural map of European modernity, and this was also the case for existentialism. Interlocutors often shared a language and institutional zones of contact (publishers, journals, universities, conversational circles, cafés, bars) as well as generational frameworks of understanding. These frameworks are considered in the opening part of Situating Existentialism. Val Vinokur mulls over certain themes among the Russian novelists Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and how these themes were picked up by later epigones of Russian existentialism writing in France. Focusing on Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Vinokur unpacks how these Russian writers portrayed the cleaving of consciousness, so important to later existentialist thinkers, and raised questions about the meaning of life by dwelling on the issue of theodicy: how to sustain belief in God given the merciless evil that one encounters in the world. These themes are explored in terms of how they are woven into the work of Lev Shestov and Berdyaev as well as that of Camus, Sartre, and Levinas. Vinokur draws our attention to the architectural metaphors in Notes from Underground to show that this was the trope that Dostoevsky repeatedly employed to elucidate the questions that the underground man wanted to provoke. In a searing and sardonic rip on the values of Western culture, Dostoevsky’s character spits on the smarminess of the bourgeoisie and their Victorian verities. For the underground man, these are the vices of a consciousness unaware of how conformity leads to the deformation of character. Vinokur takes us on an architectural tour of the underside of consciousness, as characterized by Dostoevsky, in the name of a more profound examination of the life worth living. Dostoevsky’s and Tolstoy’s characters, Vinokur reveals, come to see how life can be valued after witnessing situations where children are the victims of the brute forces of nature or of brutal treatment by men. Thus Vinokur

18—introduct i o n

weaves together insights on how the theme of the torn subject is connected to a schism between the positions of Ivan and Alyosha in The Brothers Karamazov and between the skeptic about religion and the naïve believer—a typology Berdyaev referred to as the split between nihilists and apocalypsists. Vinokur’s reading is a powerful antidote to cavalier dismissals of either side, and it demonstrates why this schism spoke to the existentialist readers of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. In Germany, existentialism cohered not so much from the overlap between philosophy and literature but in dialogue with the sociology of modernity and modern psychology. In elucidating this trajectory, Peter Gordon’s chapter zeroes in on Heidegger’s inaugural lecture (“What Is Metaphysics?”) at the University of Marburg in order to illuminate his audacious challenge to the prevailing neo-Kantianism of academic philosophy. Yet Heidegger’s critique did not stop there, for he threw down a philosophical gauntlet to the dominance of science more generally and, by extension, to the instrumental rationality that he insisted was at the root of disenchantment within modernity. In establishing the precursor for this position, Gordon returns us to another seminal university lecture, “Science As a Vocation,” which was delivered in Munich by Max Weber in 1918. Weber sought to convey to those university students who came to hear his talk, many of them veterans of the bloody World War I trenches, that science “is a ‘vocation’ organized in special disciplines in the service of selfclarification and knowledge of interrelated facts. It is not the gift of grace of seers and prophets dispensing sacred values and revelations, nor does it partake of the contemplation of sages and philosophers about the meaning of the universe.”34 Weber was suggesting to those who heard the call of science that it demanded a certain stoical ethos, a renunciation of revelation and transcendence because the “iron cage” of modernity was ineluctable. In Gordon’s telling, much hinges on this famous Weberian phrase. Jaspers would pick it up and convert it to the cause of his properly existential formulations, translating Weber’s sociological observations into psychological terms that became the heartbeat of his Existenzphilosophie. In turn, Heidegger would take up Jaspers’s project, recognizing it as a new beginning for philosophy but also criticizing it for not going far enough.35 Gordon shows that the theory of anxiety—the centerpiece of Heidegger’s existential project in Being and Time—was “a radicalized and ontologized re-working of the psychological idea of the ‘limit-situation’ that Heidegger borrowed from Jaspers.”

Introduction—19

In reconstructing this pedigree, Gordon turns the tables on Heidegger by suggesting that, far from overcoming metaphysics, Heidegger remained entangled with it: he not only ascribes a certain essence to being human (as revealed in anxiety) but also reintroduces the transcendental subject as the core of that essence. Along the way, we learn much about the German legacy of Existenzphilosophie as a response to the stultifying strictures of modernity and about the quest to find an opening in thought that would allow the reclamation of authenticity in a cookie-cutter world. Although Jaspers and Heidegger were its two German master thinkers, Paris became the epicenter of existentialism in the postwar period. The thinkers of the Paris school of existentialists were the seismographers of an earthquake in Western thought. I map this tectonic shift from its locus classicus, Sartre’s statement in Existentialism Is a Humanism. More than any others, that text and Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus established the existential canon. Here were sewn together the names of Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky as well as the ideas of Nietzsche, Jaspers, and Heidegger—all in an idiom that echoed across the cultural landscape and that was exported from Paris around the world. The aftershocks of this movement were evident in the Marxist and Catholic camps, whose members were Sartre’s intellectual rivals. When they were not simply polemicizing against existentialism in scatological terms, Marxists tried to dismiss it as another form of bourgeois false consciousness. On the other hand, in perhaps the most underappreciated bit in the history of French existentialism, Catholics (who were already rethinking the Christian tradition while borrowing from the existential lexicon) posed powerful challenges to Sartre and, by extension, to Camus, de Beauvoir, and Maurice MerleauPonty. In newspaper articles, radio shows, and even film scripts—but most successfully in their plays, their novels, and their joint journal (Les temps mo­ dernes, which became the leading Left periodical)—the Paris school of existentialism came to define the intellectual debate of a generation. The chapter closes by tracing the lineage within French thought that was a precursor of the postwar generation’s discussions of subjectivity, freedom, morality, and the purpose of human existence. I thus sketch the antecedents and interlocutors among a clutch of writers and artists—the Paris school of existentialism—whose work came to characterize the most audacious and challenging claims of existentialism in the postwar period.

20—introduct i o n

The shock waves of existentialism emanated far beyond the shores of the Seine. Across the Atlantic, reports about existentialism appeared in such leading American magazines and journals as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and Partisan Review. Yet because it was rooted in American experience, the ­cultural mix that came to define existentialism in America was different from its French counterpart. Indeed, George Cotkin maintains that there were three periods of existential musing in America. Going back to the Colonial Period and through World War I, writers like Jonathan Edwards, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and William James reflected on the “drizzly November” of the American soul. The Great War was also a watershed moment for the appreciation first of Nietzsche and then of Kierkegaard, whose works washed ashore as major intellectual influences in the early twentieth century. It was the post-Hiroshima period that saw the flourishing of existentially inflected writing in America. Cotkin explores this dynamic in Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro” as a window into the broader landscape. In the essay, Mailer emphasized that the American existentialist came onto the scene after Hiroshima and Auschwitz, when everyone should already have internalized the threat of instant mass death but when few were cognizant of the “slow death of conformity” in postwar America. For Mailer, as for the Beat poets, an idealized version of the black hipster was the antidote to the stifling rigidity of burgeoning suburban conventionality. Existentialism in American literature was evident not only in writers like Mailer, Allan Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac but also in the work of groundbreaking African American novelists like Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin. In the American philosophical academy, however, existentialism was still an underground tradition. It raided the hallways of the dominant analytic tradition, making way for Barrett and for women like Grene and Hazel Barnes, each of whom became translators and systematizers of existentialism. They mixed American pragmatism with a meliorist sensibility that still insisted upon taking responsibility for the pressing moral and political questions Americans faced as the new dominant power in the Western world. Beyond the academy, the blossoming feminist movement (led by figures such as Betty Friedan) learned much from the likes of de Beauvoir about the structural and existential forces that conditioned women to accept their role as “the second sex,” and it encouraged women to remake their condition along more egalitarian lines. Existential psychoanalysis would also take hold; its jumping-off point was the work of Rollo May and Irvin Yallom. In

Introduction—21

addition, both Christian and Jewish theologians—especially in the work of Reinhold Niebuhr, Robert McAfee Brown, and Will Herberg—would transmit existential themes and the notable players to a new generation. By the 1960s, an existentially informed lexis was intrinsic to the student movement that assailed the American establishment from the barricades of antiwar activism, ultimately informing the counterculture and eventually pop culture itself. Such icons as Woody Allen might claim to have no direct relationship to existentialism, but his films are replete with dialogue based on the pages of Kierkegaard and Sartre. Existentialism never had quite the same attraction in England as in America. “Angst Across the Channel,” as Martin Woessner titles his chapter on existentialism in Great Britain, was greeted as much with bemusement as with serious deliberation. So the sensation of the London debut of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is a perfect port of entry for Woessner’s overview. Beckett’s play would become the most famous link between existentialism and the theater of the absurd. It was an enduring staging of the encounter with nothing, the void in a meaningless universe that appears to be abandoned by God-ot. Beckett’s protagonists tramp along nonetheless in the struggle to make meaning. The characters were snipped from vaudevillian types, and their dialogue ultimately goes nowhere but still manages to provide glosses on death, language, God, and providence. Beckett thus seamlessly merged the droll with the profound. In more formal terms, Woessner explains, existentialism was introduced to British philosophers by two German Jewish émigrés, Werner Brock and Heinemann. Restoring these forgotten cultural translators to the historical record helps us understand the transmission of the German philosophers of life and Existenz to the island off the continent, which thereby challenged the dominant analytic trends of logical positivism and empiricism. Outside the academy, however, it was the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch who popularized existentialism by introducing Sartre and the themes of the Paris school to British readers. Colin Wilson, along with the novelists and playwrights dubbed the Angry Young Men, rode this short-lived tide of enthusiasm. Their thematization of the alienated outsiders of British society would be picked up by R. D. Laing, who emerged as a countercultural icon by the mid-1960s after welding the existential critique of alienation to the powerful insights of the antipsychiatry movement. In tracing this impact, Woessner reveals that existentialism was given a robust sounding in ways that would affect British writers to the present day.

22—introduct i o n

Eduardo Mendieta’s chapter on existentialism in the Spanish tongue reveals a significantly longer, more robust, and influential tradition of existentialism than ever existed in English. In many respects, Hispanic and Latin American existentialism preceded the work of even the French and German existential tradition. The key source text for Hispanic and Latin American existentialists, Mendieta argues, was Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote. This is because El Quixote embodied four key philosophemes that made it a spur to the modern novel tout court and by extension to key themes that existentialists writing in Spanish would explore: a reflection on liberty and specifically the freedom to fashion the self; a consideration of the power of personal narrative to make and recreate the world (for what are we, after all, but the stories we tell about ourselves?); the establishment in El Quixote of the paradigm for what the Spanish philosopher Julián Marías called “the existentialist novel,” or “the type of novel in which we are not given characters or archetypes, but in which the personhood” of the characters are traced on the basis of the projects they undertake; and Don Quixote’s capturing of the limits of reason—the duplicity of revealed or enlightened truth in the face of the world’s absurdity. With such perspicacity, Cervantes’s Don Quixote anticipated Spanish existentialism and was a constant source for its leading expositors. Miguel de Unamuno offered its first philosophical articulation, most famously in The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations (1912). Unamuno had few direct followers, but José Ortega y Gasset (the leading figure of the so-called School of Madrid) was the inspiration for Spanish and Latin American philosophers who followed in his wake. Before Heidegger and Sartre, he had formulated a set of existential axioms that influenced his disciples. Summarizing his insights, Ortega y Gasset concluded that “we find that life is always personal, circumstantial, untransferable, and responsible.” By this he meant that, like the deeds of Don Quixote, life is a quest that is uniquely personal and undertaken in specific circumstances that are a check on freedom—which nonetheless is absolute, making our life a que hacer (a doing) that we alone are responsible for undertaking. Following these inroads, existentialism was articulated in Spain earlier than elsewhere and hence also was sooner integrated and superseded. As Latin American philosophy and literature came into its own, existential and phenomenological insights were fused to hermeneutics alongside such indigenous traditions as liberation philosophy and magical realism. For this rich mixture, still largely unknown and underexplored, Mendieta provides the map.

Introduction—23

Part 2 of the book turns from transnational frames to the issue of religion in the modern world. Religious existentialists are thoroughly marginalized by most treatments of existentialism per se, or they are treated in isolation as if they were of interest only to the religiously inclined. But religion proves to be a central pulse of existentialism—and not only for Kierkegaard, who is included in every existentialist’s pantheon. What distinguished religious existentialists from their liberal and conservative or orthodox religious counterparts was that, instead of ignoring the profound challenges to faith already evident by the nineteenth century, existentialists took them as starting blocks. The scientific revolution and the Enlightenment provided a basis for the rational critique of religion that made belief in revealed truth unconvincing or even unintelligible. Coupled with capitalism, the material world and the materialism of science became the new idols. In this context, institutionalized forms of religion were often bunkers of comfort and solace that insulated believers from the troubling questions of human existence. Religious existentialists argued that faith in such a world was and ought to be scandalous. Christianity, claimed Kierkegaard, demands that the Christian become a “witness to the truth,” someone whose life “is unacquainted with everything which is called enjoyment . . . experiencing inward conflicts . . . fear and trembling . . . trepidation . . . anguish of soul . . . agony of spirit.”36 Faith is not belief in the objective certainty of God. Quite to the contrary, wrote Kierkegaard, “faith is . . . the contradiction between inwardness’s infinite passion and the objective uncertainty. If I can grasp God objectively, I do not have faith.”37 Faith in the modern world means to live in “objective uncertainty.” This is the paradox of not only Christian but also Jewish existentialism. Pattison charts the Christian lineage beginning from the profound issues raised by Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. He focuses specifically on how Kierkegaard treated the problem of “the exception” to systems of universal ethics in his discussion of Abraham’s response to God’s call to sacrifice his son as a sign of faith. In doing so, Kierkegaard raised a nested set of dilemmas that were later taken up by Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. Thus the nineteenth century formed the backdrop for a Christian existential theology that Pattison explores most closely in the work of Paul Tillich and Berdyaev, showing that this nexus of concerns set the stage on which Christian theorists explored the possibility of faith in a world where God is invisible or absent. In such an absurd world, a “leap of faith” was required of Christian existentialists writing after Kierkegaard. For Jewish existentialists, in contrast, the pursuit of a dialogic relationship with the transcendent other (both human

24—introduct i o n

and divine) was the way to reorient thinking in the direction of fundamental questions. Both Buber and Rosenzweig rejected theological and philosophical speculation on timeless, universal essences in favor of the truths that emerge from the acts between subjects in a relationship. Paul Mendes-Flohr charts this “new thinking,” as Rosenzweig termed it, which emerged from consideration of Buber’s emphasis on the I–Thou (Ich und Du) encounter. For Buber and Rosenzweig, this “new thinking” correlated with the biblical encounter with God, which always amounted to a specific relationship involving individuals. “The Hebrew Bible,” Mendes-Flohr explains, “presents God—the Eternal One—not as an object of rational reflection but as an independent subject, the ‘I am,’ as a partner in dialogue. God addresses us in our individual, temporal existence, and within the reality we find ourselves. This ‘new thinking’ inspired subsequent Jewish thinkers.” Its themes were reflected in the work of the most important Jewish intellectuals of the twentieth century—including Franz Kafka, Chaim Soloveitchik, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Hans Jonas, and Levinas, among others—who pursued a form of the “Jewish co-existentialism” that Mendes-Flohr sketches. Thus religious faith was rearticulated in an existential direction by some of the most important Christian and Jewish theological and philosophical minds. But even for those existentialists who jettisoned the ballast of religion, how one responded to “living without God” was a significant concern. Ronald Aronson takes up this question via “Camus the nonbeliever,” for whom an overtly antagonistic view of religion might only result in the return of the repressed. For Aronson, there are deeper lessons to be learned from existentialism than the mere dismissal of God and religion, and these insights were first offered by the nineteenth-century precursors of existentialism—especially Nietzsche. Despite Nietzsche’s appropriation by fascists,38 Camus was one of his great champions. After all, it was Nietzsche who had announced the “death of God.” This meant, as Charles Guignon pithily states it, “that people have lost the ability to believe in a transcendent basis for values and belief . . . [and that] all the things people previously thought of as absolutes—the cosmic order, Platonic forms, divine will, Reason, History—have been shown to be human constructions, with no ultimate authority in telling us how to live our lives.”39 Along with Marx and Freud, Nietzsche was thus one of the “masters of suspicion” of religious dogma,40 lambasting religion’s otherworldliness and its resignation of the here-and-now in the name of the afterlife. Christianity was a “slave morality,” a philosophy of ressentiment induced by a sense of “bad conscience”

Introduction—25

whereby people are taught to become ashamed of their instincts and their embodiment, which are then redirected either internally or to the otherworldly. All of these intuitions would be picked up and developed by Sartre and de Beauvoir, who insisted that only an atheistic existentialism had the courage to assume responsibility for the creation of values at the heart of the human condition. Without God and religion, de Beauvoir argues, the moral burden that falls on each of us is even greater, for a “God can pardon, efface, and compensate. But if God does not exist, man’s faults are inexpiable.”41 Yet, Aronson maintains, it was Camus the nonbeliever who had the most sustained and nuanced engagement with religion. His chapter is an overview of its various permutations. From his earliest writings (such as Nuptials), Camus taught his readers—in powerful prose steeped in the joy of the body, life, and nature—to revel in the moment and the pleasures of the world. In such works as The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus enjoined what he called mésure, which consisted of “dwelling in the tension our limitations impose on us even while we rebel against them, and accepting the bitterness with which we experience these. Wisdom lies in accepting this bitterness as the human condition. Failing this, the other path beckoning is to go haywire—by seeking to take God’s place and hoping to dominate creation according to abstract ideas about what the world should look like.” Following upon the presentments of Dostoevsky, especially as addressed in The Demons, Camus in The Rebel diagnoses the guises that religion could assume even among nonbelievers. Revolutionary politics, he maintained, was a secularized form of messianism, replacing the sacred center of God with a utopian message no less likely to enslave than religion. Nietzsche had warned in The Gay Science that “God is dead; but given the way of men, there may still be caves for thousands of years in which his shadow will be shown.”42 Camus’s insight was to appreciate that any politics of salvation that sought final solutions to the messiness of finite and limited people would not only cause people to miss the warmth of the sun on their bodies by wallowing in the cave but may well result in people bashing their heads against its rocks before they were done. The chapters in part 3 discuss some of the transcultural migrations that forged existentialism as a school of thought. Samuel Moyn’s contribution is a Begriffsgeschichte: a history of the fate of Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety. Moyn’s study is neither a plodding detail of the publishing history of Kier­ kegaard’s text The Concept of Anxiety nor a simple commentary on this key existential category; rather, his chapter operates on three intertwined levels.

26—introduct i o n

First, he elucidates how the reaction to Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety reveals the unforeseen events involved in the establishment of the philosophical canon. Specifically, he shows how Kierkegaard, who made little splash in his own lifetime, would come to occupy a central place in the existential canon in the years straddling World War II. To trace the story of the concept of anxiety is thus to outline how Kierkegaard was invented as an existential philosopher—indeed, as the forebear of existentialism. Second, Moyn considers how the category of anxiety vacillated in meaning and significance when deployed in the works of various thinkers (Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Heidegger, Ludwig Binswanger, Shestov, Jean Wahl, and Sartre among them) and describes the contextual ambiance in which it was picked up and used, especially in the aftermath of World War I. A third aspect of Moyn’s account is assessing how Kierkegaard’s concept shifted from a theological to a secular terrain. In Kierkegaard’s text, anxiety was wedded to a theological consideration about the meaning of original sin. As the translation of Kierkegaard’s subtitle—A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin—makes plain, the work was concerned with the psychology of sin and the metaphysical freedom of the sinner. Kierkegaard’s concept was, for the most part, relegated to the backwaters of philosophy; “anxiety” did not become a key term until after the massive trauma of World War I and the subsequent widespread sense of civilization in crisis. Remaining within the realm of psychology, Moyn considers how first Sigmund Freud and then the forefather of existential psychoanalysis, Ludwig Binswanger, cogitated on anxiety as the dis-ease that comes with the contingency and freedom to define the self in modernity. This trajectory was reinforced by Heidegger, whose Being and Time fatefully reworked Kierkegaard’s concept by separating it from its theological and psychological framework and then inserting it into a work of philosophy focused on “fundamental ontology,” where its significance was secularized. Heidegger maintained that anxiety was a mood that opened human beings to cognizance of their being-in-the-world and ultimately their possible authenticity. In the 1930s, Shestov and Wahl—the two individuals most instrumental in introducing Kierkegaard to the world of French philosophy—feuded over whether anxiety could be separated from Kierkegaard’s theology. In the Gallic discussion, Sartre cut the Gordian knot and from the pieces tied together Kierkegaard’s emphasis on soul-searching freedom and Heidegger’s considerations of being and nothingness. The result gave rise to Sartre’s exis-

Introduction—27

tential subjectivity, wherein he contended that it is “in anxiety that freedom is, in its being, in question for itself.” With Sartre’s international celebrity, existential anxiety migrated around the world as a global theme. By the time it reached Cold War America, this anxiety was a free-floating social category, an expression of postwar cultural malaise. Resignation to cultural malaise was already at the center of Nietzsche’s philosophical concerns in the nineteenth century. Charles Bambach’s chapter, which can usefully be read in tandem with Gordon’s on German existentialism, considers the fate of Nietzsche in the canon. In commenting upon Nietzsche’s famous claim that “God is dead,” Bambach peels away layer upon layer of Nietzschean allusion to show that all of Western thought is at stake. In the process, the reader is taken on a journey through Western philosophy from bourgeois morality to the Enlightenment, from rationalism à la Leibniz to Christian theology, until we arrive at its base in Platonism. Bambach explains that “God is dead” is neither a theological statement nor an axiom of atheism. Instead, it is a statement about Western metaphysics, epistemology, and morality—not only in the sense of a system of ethics but also in the sense of conventional values. All these earlier endeavors, Nietzsche suggested, need to be rethought in light of the meaning of human existence. In the spirit of Diogenes’s cynicism, Nietzsche was calling for a philosophy that embraced amor fati, a love of one’s fate; this life-affirming form of creative critical thinking is why he was so embraced by Camus. Nietzsche believed that what contributed to the affirmation of life had power and perhaps even the capacity to transform all values. Anything that constrained this dynamic was weak or decadent and needed to be overturned, like the soil that would serve as the deity’s grave site. Bambach proceeds to enrich and enliven his reading of Nietzsche with the interwar commentaries of Löwith, Jaspers, and Heidegger, whose interpretations responded to how Nietzsche had been coopted to serve the ends of Nazism. These three thinkers ultimately consecrated Nietzsche not only as a proto-existentialist but also as a foundational figure in response to whom the stakes of the whole Western philosophical tradition were unearthed for reconsideration. Robert Bernasconi’s chapter considers another foundational figure for contemporary thought: Frantz Fanon, a central source for postcolonialism and for the critical philosophy of race. He explores Fanon against the backdrop of the French negritude writers Aimé Cesaire and Leopold Senghor via Fanon’s engagement with the work of Sartre. In doing so, he elucidates the power of Fanon’s existential phenomenological analysis of racism as a system.

28—introduct i o n

Bernasconi begins his careful tracing of the evolution of Fanon’s writing on race with his first published work, “The Lived Experience of the Black.” He suggests that, even though it mobilized a powerful critique of Sartre’s own writing on negritude in “Black Orpheus,” it was ultimately a failure. Bernasconi then takes us step-by-step through the rest of the Fanonian oeuvre—from Black Skin, White Masks to The Wretched of the Earth—seen as Fanon’s effort to formulate a response to the impasses of his earlier position and to racism more generally. Fanon’s seminal insight was to see racism interweaved with its institutionalized forms in colonialism, which meant that racism could be overcome only through a violent revolt against that system of oppression. In this, Fanon and Sartre walked parallel roads to freedom. Fanon’s path, Bernasconi explains, involved wrestling with a significant problem inherent to phenomenology: how to integrate the description of concrete experiences like racism, which is always situationally specific, with an account of formal structures that can empower others to recognize their own experiences in these accounts, thereby mobilizing them to join the journey to freedom. The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir’s account of patriarchy, is likewise not a work whose scope was confined to the outmoded gender inequities of the 1950s. As Debra Berghoffen explains, this is because de Beauvoir’s account was grounded in her previous book, The Ethics of Ambiguity, which fleshed out a response to Dostoevsky’s claim—that without God, anything is possible—by developing “a logic of freedom, reciprocity and responsibility that contests the terrors of a world ruled only by the authority of power.” In reading the claims of The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) side by side with The Second Sex (1949), written while de Beauvoir was traveling in the United States, Berghoffen locates these works as responses to the anti-Semitism of World War II, the patriarchy of the Cold War, the racism of Jim Crow America, and the exploitation of the colonial system. In thus situating de Beauvoir’s major works, Berghoffen is able to show how her analysis of oppression drew links between different dynamics of domination and contested the logics of subjugation in terms of an existential analytic that de Beauvoir claimed was the philosophy of her time. Berghoffen illustrates how the phenomenological, ethical, and political analyses of The Second Sex, much like the dilemmas of racism exposed by Fanon, “may be read as a way of capturing the particularities of women’s lives, of resisting the reifying powers of the myth of woman, without, however, abandoning the importance of the category woman for a politics of resistance.” Hence

Introduction—29

de Beauvoir’s existential phenomenology of the lived body of women, like Fanon’s account of the lived experience of blackness, captured a singularity that was paradoxically the basis for forms of solidarity. Having explicated how de Beauvoir understands the categories of freedom and oppression in existentialist terms that move between a psychic and a sociological phenomenology and also between an ethics and a politics, ­Berghoffen proceeds to establish de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex as the key work responded to and built upon by the different theoretical trajectories of postwar French feminists Monique Wittig, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva. Rather than emphasizing the disagreements among these feminist intellectuals, as is typically done, Berghoffen outlines a genealogy of postwar French feminism that interprets their critical voices as commentators on the tensions already signaled in de Beauvoir’s scrutiny of gender oppression, which created multiple avenues for feminist thought. Ethan Kleinberg traces a slightly different genealogy of postwar French philosophy by examining readings of Heidegger in France. The varying reception that Heidegger’s work received stemmed from alternative treatments of the ramifications of Heidegger’s affiliation with Nazism in the 1930s. Kleinberg shows that three differing conduits of Heidegger interpretation flourished before the 1960s. Although Heidegger was first introduced to the French by Levinas, who had studied with him in Freiburg in 1928 and 1929, the first sounding of the German master that had significant cultural resonance was in the seminar offered by Alexandre Kojève and attended by (among many others) Raymond Aron, Merleau-Ponty, the surrealist André Breton, and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. In charismatic tones, Kojève mixed his familiarity with Heidegger into his humanist and politicized elucidation of the work of Hegel, employing an existentialist phraseology to illuminate a philosophy that placed into the center of human history a subject in the throes of a conflict of consciousness. This presentation profoundly affected Aron and Merleau-Ponty, and their influence on Sartre would soon result in the popularization of an existentialist Heidegger. The anthropological and subjectivist existential rendering of Heidegger put forward by the Paris school would be called into question by Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism,” his response to Sartre’s Existentialism Is a Humanism. Written to Jean Beufret in the fall of 1946, in the “Letter” Heidegger interpreted his earlier work from the perspective of a turn in his thought (a Kehre) toward the themes of language, technology, and a critique of metaphysics. Heidegger stressed that subjectivity—even as explored by Sartre’s flipping of

30—introduct i o n

Descartes to suggest that “I am, therefore I think”—was the locus centrum of what continued to occlude Western thought. In doing so, Heidegger insisted that Sartre’s and de Beauvoir’s emphasis on the ethical implications of an existential analysis of ontology was just another way in which a purposive rationality foreclosed the thinking on Being that Heidegger’s destruktion of Western metaphysics sought to reevaluate. This antihumanist treatment of Heidegger would influence another line of postwar French thinkers. The third reading of Heidegger couples the consideration of Heidegger’s Nazi past together with his critique of Western metaphysics by reversing the hierarchy that Heidegger established between ontology and ethics. The work of Maurice Blanchot and especially that of Levinas came to place ethics prior to ontology, radicalizing the existentialist consideration of subjectivity by emphasizing how the other constituted the self. Doing so displaced the Cartesian ego cogito, decentering the subject in ways that would influence the poststructuralist generation of Heidegger’s readers: Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Jean-Luc Nancy, Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida. By the end of this volume, readers should appreciate that to situate existentialism in this way is to value not only the multiple routes that led to its crystallization but also the vistas in thought that it opened. At stake is the genealogy of existentialism itself, and we can now provide a retrospective view of existentialism’s family tree. Best appreciated as a weed—a wild plant growing where it might not be wanted and struggling for existence with what has been normatively sanctioned for cultivation—existentialism has planted the seeds for ways of being human that are nourished by a return to foundational issues. The fruits of its offspring are forms of life worth living. Its seeds are hereby placed in the hands of you, the reader.

Notes 1. David Cooper, Existentialism: A Reconstruction, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 8 and chapter 2, suggests that at the heart of existentialism is the effort to overcome the problem of alienation and, on this basis, excludes Camus (and much of existentialist literature) from the canon in the process of treating existentialism as a philosophically coherent school of thought. 2. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 109; based on the Swenson and Lowrie translation, I have modified the quotation.

Introduction—31

3. Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Vintage, 1968), xxxiii. 4. Marjorie Grene, Introduction to Existentialism (1948; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959), 1. 5. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1967), 80. 6. Albert Camus, Notebooks, 1951–1959 (New York: Ivan R. Dee, 2008), 112. 7. Martin Heidegger, “Der Spiegel Interview with Martin Heidegger,” trans. Lisa Harries, in Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers, ed. Gunther Neske and Emil Kettering (New York: Paragon, 1990), 41–66; originally published as “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten,” Der Spiegel (May 31, 1976): 193–219. The phrase “Only a god can still save us” is found on page 57 of the English version. 8. Søren Kierkegaard, “The Point of View for My Work As an Author,” in The Point of View, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), 106–12. 9. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 36–37, 49; Sartre, “Materialism and Revolution,” in Literary and Philosophical Essays [Situations I and II], trans. Annette Michelson (New York: Criterion, 1955), 237. 10. Paige Arthur emphasizes the importance of this shift in Sartre’s work in her Unfinished Projects: Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (London: Verso, 2010), chapter 1. 11. Gabriel Marcel, Being and Having: An Existentialist Diary (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 167. 12. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Scribner’s, 1970), 66. 13. Quoted in Max Charlesworth, The Existentialists and Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: St. Martin’s, 1976), 8. 14. Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman (1948; New York: Citadel, 1994), 133. 15. F. H. Heinemann, Existentialism and the Modern Predicament (New York: Harper, 1958), 2. 16. William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958; New York: Doubleday, 1962), 9. 17. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, vol. 5, Autobiographical Part One, 1829–1848, ed. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 34–45, dated August 1, 1835 (emphasis in original). 18. George Pattison, Anxious Angels: A Retrospective View of Religious Existentialism (New York: St. Martin’s, 1999), 6. 19. See Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols or How One Philosophizes with a Hammer, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1968).

32—introduct i o n

20. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968), 176. 21. Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage, 1956). 22. Pattison, Anxious Angels, 4. 23. T. S. Elliot, The Waste Land and Other Poems (New York: Harvest, 1930), 29–30. 24. For an overview on the links between changes in technology and culture between 1880 and World War I, see Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983). 25. Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View (New York: Ballantine, 1991), 392. 26. The concept of “dark times” was a key notion for Arendt. David Luban has skillfully explicated how for Arendt it was an epistemic and moral condition of modernity that defined the horizon in which her own interventions were to serve as illuminations. The term comes from Brecht’s poem “An Die Nachgeborenen,” in which he spoke of how wisdom and goodness have been ripped asunder in modernity— a time  of disorder, hunger, uprisings, and massacres. The poet railed against “old books” that encourage living a moderate life indifferent to horror and suffering. For Arendt, our “dark times” are such that traditional categories and moral frameworks, far from leading to understanding, may actually occlude comprehension. See David Luban, “Explaining Dark Times: Hannah Arendt’s Theory of Theory,” Social Research (Spring 1983): 214–48. 27. W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety (New York: Random House, 1946). 28. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1947; New York: Vintage, 1995). 29. de Beauvoir to Pierre Vacary, in Charlesworth, The Existentialists and Jean-Paul Sartre, 6. See the most famous version of this account in de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstances, trans. Richard Howard (1963; New York: Penguin, 1968), 45–46. 30. This paragraph is based on Walter Kaufmann, “The Reception of Existentialism in the United States,” in Existentialism, Religion, and Death (New York: New American Library, 1976), 90–119, especially 93–98. 31. In addition to Kaufmann, see Heinemann, Existentialism, 1 (where Heinemann indicates that he coined the term). 32. Karl Jaspers, Existenzphilosophie: Drei Vorlesungen Gehalten am Freien Deutschen Hochstift in Frankfurt a.m. September 1937 (1938; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1956); Jaspers, Philosophy of Existence, trans. Richard F. Grabau (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971). 33. Kaufmann, “Reception of Existentialism,” 115. 34. Max Weber, “Science As a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 129–56.

Introduction—33

35. See Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), 64. 36. Kierkegaaard’s Attack upon “Christendom,” 1854–1855, trans. Walter Lowrie (Prince­ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1944), 7. 37. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1941), 182 (translation altered). 38. For Nietzsche’s appropriation by fascism and Nazism, see Steven Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), especially chapter 8; Aschheim, “Nietzsche, Anti-Semitism and Mass Murder,” in Aschheim, Culture and Catastrophe (New York: New York University Press, 1996), chapter 4; and Jacob Golumb and Robert Wistrich, Nietzsche, Godfather of Fascism: On the Uses and Abuses of a Philosophy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002). 39. Charles Guignon, “Existentialism,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig (New York: Routledge, 1998), 493–94. 40. On the notion of the three masters of suspicion, see Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970), 32. On the influence of these masters on contemporary French thought, see Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 3. 41. de Beauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity, 15. 42. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), section 108, 167. 

1 (Trans)National Contexts

1

Russian Existentialism, or Existential Russianism Val Vinokur “How have Russian boys handled things up to now? . . . Take, for instance, some stinking tavern. . . . They’ve never seen each other before in their whole lives, and when they walk out of the tavern, they won’t see each other again for forty years. Well, then, what are they going to argue about, seizing this moment in the tavern? About none other than the universal questions: is there a God, is there immortality? And those who do not believe in God, well, they will talk about socialism and anarchism, about transforming the whole of mankind according to a new order, but it’s the same damned thing, the questions are all the same, only from the other end.” —Ivan Karamazov to his brother Alyosha, in Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

It is no accident that this book begins with the Russians. Walter Kaufmann’s classic anthology, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, claimed Notes from Underground as the founding text of existentialism.1 And the Russians always had a thing or two to tell the French about being worried about existence. After all, it was Russia (according to Freud) that exported the “death instinct” to the West, along with caviar and ballet.2 To be Russian is to fret about being—about being Russian or about not being Russian enough, about being human or about not being human enough. Emmanuel Levinas, a Jewish “Russian boy” who journeyed into the world of Continental thought, described the “philosophical problem . . . as the meaning of the human, as the search for the famous ‘meaning of life’—about which the Russian novelists ceaselessly wonder.”3

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To situate existentialism’s birth amidst the lay philosophy of Russian novelists reveals something basic about “the anxiety about being.” This anxiety is not just what remains after the death of God and the rise of scientific functionalism, as Nietzsche or Heidegger might have it, but is also the outcry of the modern isolated individual who needs answers. This is the egoism that makes possible the solipsism of the underground man, that permits Ivan’s rebellion against God in The Brothers Karamazov, and that informs Levin’s provisional “conversion” at the end of Anna Karenina. Accordingly, by beginning with Russian existentialism, we can recover a heritage that begins with the ancient problem of theodicy—of how to account for evil in a world created by a good, omniscient, and all-powerful deity—as it reemerges in its modern inflections within the individual struggling to reconcile private authenticity and public ethics. In this chapter we examine key moments from Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground and The Brothers Karamazov, as well as from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, in order to evoke a “Russian existentialism,” avant la lettre, that avoids the tendency to focus exclusively on Russian literary angst and instead attends to the range and complexity of the human “about which the Russian novelists ceaselessly wonder.” Along the way, we will revisit such “religious” Russian proto-existentialists and literary commentators as Nikolai Berdyaev and Lev Shestov and also locate Levinas within this broader tradition. I will engage throughout in a peculiar two-step, for my goal is to show both what may be specifically Russian about this approach and how this Russianness plumbs the depths of the human condition more broadly. This is the tension between Russian existentialism and existential “Russianism.”

I Am Free, I Am Not I: Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Split Consciousness, and Existential Freedom In Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky depicted what happens to the modern self when it embraces secular freedom: it discovers that it is split, that it does not identify with itself, and that its freedom is thereby a curse. Indeed, Sartre’s concepts of vertigo and anguish owe much to Dostoevsky’s idea of free consciousness as a doubling and a “sickness.” This is the agony of Sartre’s gambler—culled from the “letters of Dostoevsky”—when confronted with a roulette table after having resolved not to gamble. In Being and Nothingness, Sartre wrote:

Russian Existentialism, or Existential Russianism—39

I am not the self which I will be . . . because time separates me from it . . . [and] no actual existent can determine strictly what I am going to be. Yet as I am already what I will be . . . , I am the self which I will be, in the mode of not being it. . . . Anguish is precisely my consciousness of being my own future, in the mode of not-being. . . . Vertigo appears as the apprehension of this dependence. I approach the precipice, and my scrutiny is ­searching for myself in my very depths. . . . I play with my possibilities. . . . Indecision in its turn calls for decision. I abruptly put myself at a distance from the edge of the precipice and resume my way. [This is] “anguish in the face of the future.” There exists another: anguish in the face of the past. . . . What the gambler apprehends . . . is the permanent rupture in determinism; it is nothingness which separates him from himself; I should have liked so much not to gamble anymore; yesterday I even had a synthetic apprehension of the situation (threatening ruin, disappointment of my relatives) as forbidding me to play. . . . And now I suddenly perceive that my former understanding of the situation is no more than a memory of an idea, a memory of a feeling. . . . I am alone and naked before temptation as I was the day before. . . . Nothing prevents me from gambling.4 Gambling, of course, is itself a metaphor for the anguish and vertigo of indecision and decision, and it is absorbing for this very reason: gambling transfers the location of my possible choices and outcomes to a throw of the dice. The vertigo of arbitrary freedom—which Sartre elsewhere calls the “poisoned” freedom in Dostoevsky’s novels5—is resolved by the fall into obsession (unfreedom). As Nicholas Berdyaev noted, a “man obsessed is no longer free.”6 Beyond Dostoevsky’s gambling, one sees dédoublement and splitting in nearly every atom of his literary universe. Beginning with Golyadkin, the Petersburg petty clerk of his early second novel The Double, his heroes often seem little more than bundles of anguish and vertigo, forever arriving at Yogi Berra’s fork in the road and taking it. Golyadkin’s tendency to exhibit decisive indecision results in his fantastical cleavage into Golyadkin Senior and Golyadkin Junior, the latter an incarnation of a desired self that, unlike the original, knows how to fawn, ingratiate, connive, undermine, and manipulate (the necessary two-faced modes of late capitalist life). But it is in Notes from Underground that we find Dostoevsky’s first mature exposition of this theme without recourse to the fantastic—an exposition that relies on

40—(trans)nat i o n a l c o n t e x t s

architectural metaphors to situate consciousness in its murky and physical landscape. In Notes we will see that the architecture of the self is entangled in the architecture that surrounds it. The nearly two decades between The Double (1846) and Notes from Underground (1864) were eventful ones for Dostoevsky, to put it mildly. In 1859 he returned from a decade of hard labor and exile in Siberia, after a mock execution and last-minute commutation of an 1849 death sentence (by firing squad) for subversion—because of his membership in a liberal reading circle. The authorities were not aware that he also belonged to a radical splinter group of Petrashevsky’s Circle, led by Nikolai Speshnev, which had considered the use of violence. In Siberia, forced to live among the peasant “masses” that the liberal Petersburg milieu wished to rescue with Western ideas, Dostoevsky came to doubt the secular Romantic idealism of his youth. In the soul of the Russian convict, he saw an innate propensity for evil and an abiding contempt for the nobility (represented by political prisoners like him­ self), alongside a mysterious and profound capacity for human dignity. Ac­ cording to Shestov, when Dostoevsky returned to the capital: He soon began to notice that the life of freedom came more and more to resemble the life in the convict settlement, and that “the vast dome of the sky” which had seemed to him limitless when he was in prison now began to crush and to press on him as much as the barrack vaults had used to do; that the ideals which had sustained his fainting soul when he lived amongst the lowest dregs of humanity and shared their fate had not made a better man of him, nor liberated him, but on the contrary weighed him down and humiliated him as grievously as the chains of his prison. . . . Dostoevsky suddenly “saw” that the sky and the prison walls, ideals and chains are not contradictory to one another, as he had wished and thought formerly, when he still wished and thought like normal men.7 In other words, prison convinced Dostoevsky that the human condition itself is prisonlike. The period during which Notes was composed also marked the deaths of his brother and first wife, the closing by the authorities of two journals that he had founded, and the onset of a terrible gambling addiction and financial difficulties. Although this biographical context has inclined many, including Shestov, to identify the narrator of the Notes with Dostoevsky himself, one

Russian Existentialism, or Existential Russianism—41

should point out the absurdity of suggesting an equivalence not only between any author and narrator but especially between the author and this narrator, who is unable to identify even with himself! Furthermore, to treat Dostoevsky’s biography as the final “explanation” for this work would be to render the novel a mere idiosyncratic confession worthy only of being shelved in a cabinet of curiosities. It is typical to offer Tolstoy as a more “universal” antidote to Dostoevsky’s “twisted” portrayal of consciousness. Tolstoy himself mocked Dostoevsky’s treatment of evil as an external, cosmic drama instead of as an internal failure of reason in a mind beset by mundane stupefactions and intoxicants. Yet in 1881, when Tolstoy heard that Dostoevsky had died, he wept and described him as “the very, very closest, dearest and most necessary man to me.”8 Tolstoy and Dostoevsky were really chasing the same prey, one by tail and the other by snout: subjectivity, consciousness, and the architecture of the self. Perhaps Tolstoy finally confessed his love for Dostoevsky because he realized that, as the underground man puts it, “not only too much consciousness but even any consciousness at all is a sickness.”9 To be a self is to be sick of oneself—even though we may enjoy this sickness, as the underground man claims to do in his “pleasure of despair”:10 “It’s their sicknesses that everyone takes pride in, and I, perhaps, more than anyone.”11 I more than anyone: we will revisit the urgency of that boastful little coda. From Dostoevsky’s perspective in 1860s Petersburg, the splendid isolation of pleasant despair seemed more sensible than the disoriented progress of what Levinas would later call the “heroic conception of human destiny,”12 according to which the undivided self (and its “interests”) stakes its freedom against “being,” against the “obstacle”13 or “wall”14 of the world as it is given. In its dialectical heroism, however, the self is oblivious to its selfdivision. This oblivion characterizes what the underground man calls the “ingenuous man that I regard as the real, normal man, the way his tender mother—nature—herself wished to see him when she so kindly conceived him on earth”: Such a gentleman just lunges straight for his goal like an enraged bull, horns lowered, and maybe only a wall can stop him. (Incidentally: before a wall, these gentlemen—that is, ingenuous people and active figures—quite sincerely fold. For them, a wall is not a deflection, as it is, for example, for us, people who think and consequently do nothing; it is not a pretext for turning back, a pretext which our sort usually

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doesn’t believe in but is always very glad to have. No, they fold in all sincerity. For them a wall possesses something soothing, morally resolving and final, perhaps even something mystical.) I envy such a man to the point of extreme bile. He is stupid . . . but perhaps a normal man ought to be stupid.15 In the first of a series of architectural metaphors,16 Dostoevsky’s antihero posits the “wall” as the point at which the world says “No!” to my free choice. The normal person “sincerely folds” before this wall because he experiences it as the temporary limit of a world that is always in the process of being made in his image. In contrast, the “man of heightened consciousness” (or “our sort”), “who came . . . not from the bosom of nature but from a retort,” responds to this wall not like a man but like a “highly conscious mouse. . . . And, above all, it is he, he himself, who regards himself as a mouse; no one asks him to; and that is an important point.”17 The practical nature of the “wall” is very different for the mouse-man. Because the man of heightened consciousness is too neurotic to interact “normally” with “normal” people, for him the wall looms everywhere: the wall is a barrel-chested officer who bumps into him on Nevsky Prospect without acknowledging his existence; the wall is an insincere dinner invitation that he is supposed to turn down but accepts out of pride and sheer perversity; the wall is the fact that his rented room is so filthy he is embarrassed to receive a prostitute who had responded to his experimental love letter. And his mouse-like response to this ever reappearing wall is to burrow under it and to peak with envy and contempt through a crack in the baseboard. This passive, underground freedom arises because the mouse-man is merely externalizing the wall that is in him. Indeed, the underground man’s farcical adventures are all largely the spastic, hyperaware externalizations of an inward awkwardness that normal people deny or seek to circumvent by mastering social forms. To those who would object that the underground man is an exception to the human condition, he responds at the end of his confession with the following claim, which is central to Dostoevsky’s description of his fiction as a form of “higher” realism: I know you’ll probably get angry . . . , shout, stamp your feet: “Speak just for yourself and your miseries in the underground, and don’t go saying ‘we all.’” Excuse me, gentlemen, but I am not justifying myself

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with this allishness. As far as I am concerned, I have merely carried to an extreme in my life what you have not dared carry even halfway, and, what’s more, you’ve taken your cowardice for good sense, and found comfort in thus deceiving yourselves.18 This internal revolt is what Levinas refers to as “the escape”: “Escape . . . puts in question precisely this alleged peace-with-self, since it aspires to break the chains of the I to the self.”19 The agitation of Dostoevsky’s antihero precisely reflects the inability of idealism to escape being. This is why he is always lapsing from philosophical abstraction into increasingly concrete architectural metaphors: the wall, the Crystal Palace, the chicken coop, the underground. For if the specificity of a given place does not remind the idealist of the heaviness of being, then being there long enough surely will. By converting ideas into architecture, the underground man suggests that Western idealism and the idea of human progress are mere prejudices, European refinements that perhaps do not promise happiness and dignity to all.20 In his sardonic fashion the underground man asks: What if the Universal won’t have me? And let’s say it will, what then? What if I won’t have the Universal? The narrator expresses this paradox in an imaginary dialogue with a “reasonable” interlocutor, who introduces another key architectural metaphor: New economic relations will come, quite ready-made, and also calculated with mathematical precision, so that all possible questions will vanish in an instant, essentially because they will have been given all possible answers. Then the Crystal Palace will be built. . . . Of course, there’s no guaranteeing (this is me speaking now) that it won’t, for example, be terribly boring then (because what is there to do if everything’s calculated according to some little table?) . . . I . . . would not be the least bit surprised if suddenly, out of the blue, some gentleman of ignoble, or better, of retrograde and jeering physiognomy, should emerge, set his arms akimbo, and say to us all: “Well, gentlemen, why don’t we reduce all this reasonableness to dust with one good kick, for the sole purpose of sending all these logarithms to the devil and living once more according to our stupid will!”21 Western idealism and rationalism, with their reduction of human motives to various kinds of interests and “profit,” leave out what the underground man

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calls “one’s own caprice, however wild, . . . the most profitable profit, the omitted one, which does not fit into any classification, and because of which all systems and theories are constantly blown to the devil.”22 Such is sheer perversity, the pure hell of it. Dostoevsky builds an elaborate metaphor from the Crystal Palace, a vast structure of glass and cast iron that was built in London to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. The exhibition glorified the Industrial Revolution, and the palace was an aesthetic, commercial, political, and technical achievement—a secular paradise enclosing full-grown, living trees alongside the world’s first public restrooms. Like any escape artist, the narrator’s rejection of the Crystal Palace, to savor instead his “own caprice”23 underground, is by nature unstable. As an escape from being, it is nowhere. The underground man does not make the Crystal Palace disappear, and does not make it any less palatial, because such capricious negation is no substitute for the affirmative and collective dream that the Palace represents: Well, and perhaps I’m afraid of this edifice precisely because it is crystal and forever indestructible, and it will be impossible to put out one’s tongue at it even on the sly. Now look: if instead of a palace there is instead a chicken coop, and it starts to rain, I will perhaps get into the chicken coop to avoid a wetting, but all the same I will not take a chicken coop for a palace out of gratitude for its having kept me from the rain. You laugh, you even say that in that case it makes no difference—chicken coop or mansion. Yes, say I, if one were to live only so as not to get wet. But what’s to be done if I’ve taken it into my head that one does not live only for that, and that if one is to live, it had better be in a mansion?24 The Crystal Palace embodies the target of the underground man’s radical ques­ tions: bourgeois liberal progress and practicality, the entire mid-Victorian ethos.25 But that doesn’t mean he will accept something less. That is, even if the Universal is just some Western superstition, once he knows about it there is no substitute. The underground man resembles Milton’s Satan, who would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven but still dreams of climbing back to his native firmament. A dry chicken coop won’t replace a leaky palace. In the same way that William Blake and the Romantics sought to recast Milton’s Satan as an existential rebel, Shestov claims that Dostoevsky “rehabilitates the rights of the underground man,”26 which is to say the rights of

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tragic heroes, who are “all . . . egoists.”27 “The philosophy of tragedy is, in principle, hostile to the philosophy of commonplaceness. In those instances when commonplaceness says ‘the end’ and turns away, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche see the beginning and start to seek.”28 The underground man is not a tragic hero in the classical, Aristotelian sense; instead, his self-defeating paradoxicalism confers upon him a kind of dignity, a perverse and contrary individualism. But Shestov alludes to the redemptive irony at work here: “Perhaps the underground man was unjust to the ‘laws of nature’ when he said they offended him more than anything else! After all, those laws gave him—an insignificant, despised creature whom everyone had rejected—a proud sense of his human dignity and led him to the conviction that the entire world is worth no more than one underground man!”29 The wall of nature is really a canvas, a perfect surface for graffiti. If you “don’t believe” that the wall can stop you, you are nonetheless “glad to have” it, because it lets you hold forth, underground, in a purely discursive threshold realm beyond which infinite freedom is reduced to banal and finite action.30 Underground, a toothache is a source of pleasure because it is a pretext for moaning.

I Am Not I, and This Is Not My World: Theodicy and the Meaning of Life in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy Having considered how Dostoevsky portrays split consciousness and its ramifications in his Notes from Underground, let us now turn to the outside world as depicted by Russian existentialists; we take as examples The Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina. It is perhaps not surprising that the cloven underground self cleaves the world into an all-or-nothing proposition. Dostoevsky’s antiheroes, in their naked freedom and their sickness (the fruits of consciousness), challenge the world entire as if to say: Reveal yourself or disappear! Right now! Nothing short of an absolute and immediate answer to the human condition will do. Berdyaev’s classic typology of the bipolar Russian soul reflects this Dostoevskian tendency: Russians classify themselves as “apocalypsists” or “nihilists,” showing thereby that they are not comfortable in a temperate psychical climate. . . . From the opposed sides whence they are come, excess of religion as well as of atheism, apocalypsism and nihilism are equally destructive of culture and history that occupy a middle way. . . . “Nihilism

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has appeared among us because we are all nihilists,” wrote Dostoevsky in his diary, and it is this nihilism that he probed to the bottom, a nihilism . . . that is only an inverted apocalypsism.31 Nihilism is an “inverted apocalypsism” because the former is merely a despondent version of the latter: this compromised world, full of evil, must end one way or another—if not by the kingdom of God, then by human negation (passive or active). Such bipolar maximalism arises not from an irrational soul, as Shestov might suggest, but rather from an excess of reason, a desire for radical individual clarity at the expense of collective “reasonableness.” Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov calls this unreasonable starkness “Russianism.” As he explains: “Russian conversations on these subjects are all conducted as stupidly as possible. . . . The stupider, the more to the point. The stupider, the clearer. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while reason hedges and hides. Reason is a scoundrel, stupidity is direct and honest.”32 As we see in the epigraph to this chapter (from the same famous dialogue), it is Russianism that accounts for his blunt haste in this, his first real adult conversation with his younger brother Alyosha, who has been living in the local monastery as Father Zosima’s acolyte: “My task is to explain to you as quickly as possible my essence. . . . And therefore I declare that I accept God pure and simple . . . , but moreover I also accept his wisdom and his purpose, which are completely unknown to us; I believe in order, in the meaning of life, I believe in eternal harmony, in which we are all supposed to merge, I believe in the Word for whom the universe is yearning, and who himself was ‘with God,’ who himself is God, and so on, and so on and so forth to infinity. . . . And now imagine that in the final outcome I do not accept this world of God’s, I do not admit it at all, though it exists. It’s not God that I do not accept, it is this world of God’s, created by God, that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept. . . . I have a childlike conviction that all sufferings will be healed and smoothed over, that the whole offensive comedy of human contradictions will disappear like a pitiful mirage, a vile concoction of man’s Euclidean mind, feeble and puny as an atom . . . let all of this come true and be revealed, but I do not accept it and do not want to accept it! Let the parallel lines even meet before my own eyes: I shall look and say, yes, they meet, and still I will not accept it.”33

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Dostoevsky completed The Brothers Karamazov in 1880, a year before his death. He wrote it during a period of marital and financial stability, at the height of his esteem as an author and public figure welcome at the court of Alexander II and at Petersburg’s aristocratic salons (thirty thousand people would accompany his funeral procession in 1881). None of these favorable circumstances stopped him from writing yet another novel about murder (parricide this time), madness, faith, and nihilism that featured an underground voice (Ivan’s) even more compelling than the narrator’s in Notes. In my view, this is because (as before) these extremes, these violent questions, underscore a broader existential condition and not simply Dostoevsky’s special neuroses. Ivan admits that his existential Russianism is stupid. It would, after all, seem “stupid” to do as he does and orient one’s “essence” around the kinds of sensational limit cases with which he torments Alyosha: the torture and deaths of innocent children by Turkish soldiers, the Russian landowner who let his dogs loose on his serf ’s little boy—lurid tales culled from the popular press. But logic will not abide exceptions. Ivan’s “Euclidean mind” rejects a world in which such things happen and even more vehemently rejects any future harmony or theodicy that could excuse or explain such a world or that would promise future harmony in a world to come: “‘I don’t understand anything,’ Ivan went on as if in delirium, ‘and I no longer want to understand anything. I want to stick to the fact. I made up my mind long ago not to understand. If I wanted to understand something, I would immediately have to betray the fact.’”34 If the stubborn fact of innocent suffering children cannot be understood or accepted, then there is nothing else to understand or accept. “Why do [children] get thrown on the pile, to manure someone’s future harmony with themselves? I understand solidarity in sin among men; solidarity in retribution I also understand; but what solidarity in sin do little children have? . . . Some joker will say, perhaps, that in any case the child will grow up and have time enough to sin, but there’s this boy who didn’t grow up but was torn apart by dogs at the age of eight. . . . The mother . . . has no right to forgive the suffering of her child who was torn to pieces . . . even if the child himself were to forgive! . . . I don’t want harmony. . . . I’d rather remain with my unrequited suffering and my unrequited indignation, even if I am wrong. Besides, they have put too high a price on harmony; we can’t afford to pay so much for admission. . . . It’s not that I don’t accept God, Alyosha, I just most respectfully return him the ticket.”35

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Of course, Ivan won’t do anything about this except vow to “smash the cup” at the age of thirty, so as not to endure the pointlessness of a life lived too long or to become a debauched buffoon like his father Fyodor. Another of Dostoevsky’s characters (Kirillov in Demons) lives in the shadow of this doctrine of “logical suicide,” although, unlike Ivan, he views the free act of suicide as a heroic affirmation of human godhood and not simply rebellion. But just as Kirillov’s godlessness is deeply theological, so too does Ivan retain a sliver of apocalyptic hope in the midst of his nihilist rebellion before Alyosha. “Russian boys” will be boys, Ivan suggests, not only in their rebellion but also in their need for a hug—that childish belief that help will come just because you need it. The full implications of Ivan’s “returning the ticket” are left in the shadow realm of his notorious Cardinal Grand Inquisitor, his unwritten, paraphrased “poem” of sixteenth-century Seville, delivered gleefully with footnotes and flourishes to Alyosha in the tavern right after his “Russianist” confession. In conjuring this figure of a theocrat who resolves to “correct” Christ’s refusal of the three temptations in the wilderness by relieving human beings from the burden of God-given freedom,36 Ivan suggests one of the logical outcomes of his rebellion against any kind of theodicy: the secular fanaticism of the totalitarian. For if the evil in God’s world cannot be justified or accepted, then it falls to human authority to remake the world in man’s image. As Alyosha understands his brother’s relationship to his parable, the tragic ego must account for the whole world and become an Inquisitor (or its modern variant, a violent revolutionary) or die. However, Ivan wants neither to become a self-righteous tyrant nor to kill himself just yet, and he attributes his willingness to drag on until his thirtieth year to “the Karamazov force.”37 “Karamazovism” is typically characterized in the novel as baseness and depravity, an undifferentiating and teeming life force by which Fyodor Karamazov declares that he has never met an ugly woman, not even Stinking Lizaveta (mother of his bastard, Smerdyakov, who later murders him). But it is also the force that keeps Ivan alive, the force of and for the time being, which, in the absence of Berdyaev’s cultural middle, wends a path between “nihilism and apocalypsism.” I would even argue that Karamazovism is the force by which the Grand Inquisitor releases the returning Christ from the auto-da-fé after the latter responds to his accusations with a gentle kiss on his “bloodless, ninety-year-old lips.”38 When Alyosha offers Ivan the same kiss in response to his brother’s provocations, the latter rapturously cries, “Literary theft!” and concludes:

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“if, indeed, I hold out for the sticky little leaves, I shall love them only remembering you. It’s enough for me that you are here somewhere, and I shall not stop wanting to live. . . . I will also make you a promise: when I’m thirty and want ‘to smash the cup on the floor,’ then, wherever you may be, I will still come to talk things over with you once more.”39 The commonness of this plagiarized smooch is precisely what disrupts both the Inquisitor and Ivan’s binary “Russianism.” The gesture—gratuitous, forgiving, silly—deflates the urgency of the problem of theodicy, making light of the Inquisitor’s bloody earnestness and Ivan’s rebellion against God’s world. The kiss reminds one that not everything must be resolved and decided today.

Tolstoy’s Children, Dostoevsky’s Children—and Job’s Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, published when Dostoevsky began work on The Brothers Karamazov, explores a similar theme. Although the parallel plots of Tolstoy’s novel, which Dostoevsky deemed “flawless as a work of art,” trace how the sin of adultery distinguishes a “happy” family (Levin’s) from an “unhappy” one (Anna Karenina’s), ultimately both fictional strands warn against something similar to Ivan’s “Russianism”—against the kind of absolute rationalism one finds in the stream of consciousness that leads to Anna’s suicide. Unlike Ivan, whose fate is uncertain by the end of The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina succeeds in “returning the ticket” before Tolstoy’s novel ends. Anna’s Euclidean formula about the purpose of human reason first appears in a conversation she has with her sister-in-law, Dolly (Darya Alexandrovna— wife of Anna’s brother, the philandering Stiva Oblonsky), to clarify why she doesn’t want any more children with her lover, Vronsky. Anna explains: “Why have I been given reason, if I don’t use it so as not to bring unfortunate children into the world? . . . I would always feel guilty before these unfortunate children. . . . If they don’t exist, at least they won’t be unfortunate, and if they’re unfortunate, I alone am to blame.” These were the same arguments Darya Alexandrovna had produced for herself, but now she listened to them and could not understand them. “How can she be guilty before beings who don’t exist?” she wondered.

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And suddenly a thought came to her: could it be better in any possible case for her favorite, Grisha, if he had never existed? And it seemed so wild to her, so strange, that she shook her head to scatter this whirling confusion of mad thoughts.40 Indeed, Dolly did produce the “same arguments” for herself in the carriage on the way to Anna and Vronsky’s estate, when she recalled the cheerful response of a beautiful young peasant woman to the question of whether she had children: “I had one girl, but God freed me, I buried her during Lent. . . . Why be sorry? The old man has lots of grandchildren. Nothing but trouble. No work, no nothing. Just bondage.” This answer had seemed repulsive to Darya Alexandrovna, . . . but now she inadvertently recalled those words. Cynical as they were, there was some truth in them. . . . “Labour, suffering, ugly suffering, that last moment . . . then nursing, the sleepless nights. . . . Then the children’s illnesses, this eternal fear; then their upbringing, vile inclinations. . . . And on top of it all, the death of these same children.”41 After Dolly arrives at Anna and Vronsky’s and hears the same argument in Anna’s mouth, its logic seems incomprehensible in all of its Cartesian hubris. For how can one judge whether “beings who don’t exist” are better off for not existing and whether beings who do exist would be better off not having existed? In these characters’ deliberations about child rearing, with its travails monumental and banal, Tolstoy (much like Ivan Karamazov) raises the question of whether being or nothingness, frail hope or inevitable tragedy, best defines what it means to be human—and whether one has a choice in the matter. What Ivan, Anna, and Dolly reveal in the preceding passages is an intellectual rebellion against the very terms of the question, a rebellion that presumes one can reject a world that offers such an absurd choice. These characters straddle what Sartre calls the “divide” in each consciousness, which “includes in itself the consciousness both of being responsible for itself and of not being the cause of it’s own being.”42 In Ivan, Anna, and Dolly, the Cartesian consciousness responsible for itself is frustrated by the gratuitousness of consciousness and responds by assuming a negative responsibility for the entire world, revoking the rights of everything that exists. This is Mephisto’s “Eternal Emptiness,”

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which Goethe’s devil invokes when a chorus proclaims that Faust’s life is “over.” “Over!?” Mephisto retorts, “Over and pure nothing, it is all the same. Why have eternally creation, when all is subject to annihilation?”43 Why have children if they are to suffer and die? Why have anything if children are to suffer and die? These are the pressing questions of Tolstoy’s discussions about child rearing in Anna Karenina. The logic returns us to Ivan Karamazov’s rebellion against any harmony grown on the “manure” of dead children. Of course, Ivan’s rebellion is itself grown on the manure of dead children. But here it is crucial to note both the connection and the key difference between Ivan’s “suffering children” and those of Zosima and Alyosha— and indeed of Dostoevsky himself, who in 1878 lost his three-year-old son Alexei (Alyosha) to epilepsy, a condition the boy inherited from his father. In both cases, dead children signal the monstrousness of any theodicy. But in Ivan’s examples, children suffer because of human evil that God passively allows, while Zosima and Alyosha (and Dostoevsky) use the loss of children to confront the natural order that God supposedly sustains. As perplexing philosophical quandaries go, it may be easier to respond to the latter than the former. As Berdyaev argues, the “problem of evil and of wrongdoing is part and parcel of the problem of freedom. . . . If there were no freedom then God alone could be responsible for evil.”44 However, this only explains human evil—Ivan’s Turkish soldiers or Russian landowners torturing babies. Of course, Ivan would say (as his Grand Inquisitor does) that only a nasty God would burden us with such freedom. Berdyaev responds to such a conception of God by insisting that compulsory goodness is not goodness but slavery. This argument is taken to a level deeper, however, because neither Berdyaev nor Ivan contends—as Zosima and Alyosha do—with natural evil. Ivan’s limit cases inspire an easy and infectious fury: What should we do with the landowner who lets his hounds hunt down a child before his mother’s eyes? “Shoot him!” even the angelic Alyosha bursts out darkly.45 But even though you can shoot the landowner; you can’t shoot God—especially if God doesn’t exist, as Ivan’s rejection of theodicy suggests. Still, even if God gave the landowner the freedom with which to sin, wouldn’t it be more understandable to fault God (or “God’s world”) for the unmediated suffering of a child who dies of “natural” causes? Although Ivan is often pegged as an atheist, he is deliberately avoiding the label in his tavern talk with Alyosha because to reject God directly is already to accept the world as your own, which is to accept the futility and limits of a prolonged anger at the world. Confronted with such limits, you are less

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angry than simply bereft. You can only feel bereft over the death of a child you knew—not Ivan’s newspaper children but rather Ilyusha Snegiryov and Alexei, the fourth baby buried by Nastasia, the peasant woman who comes to Zosima for comfort. The way that Alyosha responds to Ilyusha Snegiryov’s death and Zosima to Alexei’s is the definitive response to Ivan’s rebellion. I would like to linger on these two exemplary episodes because the novel itself lingers on them, paradoxically, not to reject the world (as Ivan does) but instead to affirm it on a deeper basis. Here is the exchange between the pilgrim Nastasia and Father Zosima: “I grieve for my little [three-year-old] son, father, for my little son. He was the last little son left to us, we had four, Nikitushka and I, but our children didn’t stay, they didn’t stay. When I buried the first three, I wasn’t too sorry about them, but this last one I buried and I can’t forget him. . . . My soul is wasted over him. I look at his clothes, at his little shirt or his little boots, and start howling. . . . I’m through with [my husband], through, I’m through with everybody. And I don’t even want to see my house now.”46 When Zosima attempts to comfort her with platitudes about her son being in the ranks of the angels, she objects powerfully: “The same way my Nikitushka was comforting me, word for word. . . . I’d say, ‘where else can he be if not with the Lord God, only he isn’t here with us . . . he isn’t sitting here with us like before!’ . . . But he’s gone, dear father, he’s gone, and I’ll never hear him again! His little belt is here, but he’s gone, and I’ll never hear him again!” She took her boy’s little goldbraided belt from her bosom and, at the sight of it, began shaking with sobs. . . . “This,” said the elder, “is Rachel of old ‘weeping for her children, and she would not be comforted, because they are not’ [Jer. 31:15, Matt. 2:18]. . . . And do not be comforted, you should not be comforted, but weep. . . . And you will be filled with this great mother’s weeping for a long time, but in the end it will turn into quiet joy for you, and your ­bitter tears will become tears of quiet tenderness and the heart’s purification. . . . Only it is a sin for you to desert [your husband]. Go to your husband and take care of him. Your little boy will look down and see that you’ve abandoned his father, and will weep for both of you. . . . You see him now in your dreams and are tormented, but at home he will send you quiet dreams.”47

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Nastasia vows to return to her husband, telling Zosima: “You’ve touched my heart.” The elder finally reaches her not with theodicy or images of heaven (the stuff that repels Ivan) but rather with an acknowledgment of her inconsolability, an irreconcilability that must be allowed to evolve into something else—for example, into an urgent need to honor the dead by reestablishing a connection to the living (even to the world that allowed a child to die). It is, however, the life and death of Ilyusha (Ilyushechka) Snegiryov that constitute a Dostoevskian tour de force of mingled bathos and pathos, all of which Zosima’s “heir” Alyosha Karamazov must shape into an act of memory. Ilyusha is at the heart of the novel’s microcosmic subplot about the schoolboys that Alyosha befriends and mentors. Alyosha first encounters the boys as they are throwing stones at Ilyusha, who viciously bites Alyosha’s finger after he comes to his rescue. Alyosha soon learns that the boys had been teasing Ilyusha because Dmitry Karamazov (Ivan and Alyosha’s half-brother) had dragged his father Captain Snegiryov by his “whiskbroom” beard in the public square. By the end of the novel, Alyosha helps orchestrate a moving reconciliation between the boy and his friends as well as assistance for the boy’s family, but Ilyusha’s health worsens and he dies two days after Dmitry is sentenced (unjustly) for the murder of Fyodor Karamazov. Ilyushechka’s funeral and Alyosha’s impromptu eulogy, the “Speech at the Stone,” constitute the last chapter of the novel. The funeral itself is described in several pages of nearly unbearable naturalistic detail: When it came time to take leave of the dead and cover the coffin, [Captain Snegiryov] threw his arms around it as if to keep them from covering Ilyushechka, and began quickly, greedily, repeatedly kissing his dead boy on the mouth. . . . “Flowers for mama, flowers for mama! Mama’s feelings have been hurt!” he suddenly started exclaiming. . . . All the boys were crying . . . and though Smurov . . . was also crying terribly, he still managed, while almost running, to snatch up a piece of brick lying red on the snow-covered path and fling it at a flock of sparrows flying quickly by. He missed, of course, and went on running, crying. . . . [Captain Snegiryov] fell on the snow, struggling, screaming, sobbing, and began crying out: “Ilyushechka, dear fellow, dear old fellow!” Alyosha and Kolya set about lifting him up, pleading with him, persuading him. “Enough, captain, a brave man must endure,” Kolya mumbled. “And you’ll ruin the flowers,” Alyosha added, “and ‘mama’ is waiting for them, she’s sitting there crying because you didn’t give her any flowers from Ilyushechka this morning.”48

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In this scene, Alyosha turns the captain, as Zosima had turned Nastasia, back toward ethical attention to his spouse as an appropriate response to grief. It is striking that intense grief is essentially infantile, as Dostoevsky paints the scene. Indeed, Dostoevsky’s comic-pathetic tone in this chapter and the banal details he includes—Smurov throwing stones at sparrows while running and crying, the Snegiryovs squabbling over flowers—is what some readers have ascribed to Dostoevsky’s “cruel talent,” his dramatic emphasis on the painful comedy of scandal and travesty.49 But Dostoevsky also believed in a “wit that comes from deep feeling,” a compassionate laughter that could rescue the soul by loosening it from an intolerable present.50 After all, hysterical grief is infantile precisely because it is a feeling of being trapped in time, in a present experienced as pure loss. As such, Dostoevsky presents scene after scene of parents who see the traces of their child, like Snegiryoy who finds his dead child’s boots, wailing in inexhaustible and unassuageable sorrow. Once again, Alyosha actively manages this grief: “Let them cry it through,” [Alyosha] said to Kolya, “of course there’s no use trying to comfort them now. Let’s wait a minute and then go back. . . . He may get drunk. Just you and I will come, and that will be enough . . .; if we all come at once, we’ll remind them of everything again,” Alyosha advised. [Kolya replied,] “The landlady is setting the table for them now—for this memorial dinner or whatever. . . . It’s all so strange, Karamazov, such grief, and then pancakes all of a sudden— how unnatural it all is in our religion!”51 It is interesting that, at the end of Demons, Stepan Trofimovich’s “conversion” is also prefigured by a sudden eruption of pancakes at the tavern where he soon breathes his last. In each case, the sensual-mundane triggers an act of memory. In both cases, pancakes represent an end run around the intellectual thicket of theodicy precisely through their evocation of a happy part of childhood.

Pancakes, Cheap Happiness, Hope, Thinking Well, and the End of Theodicy Egoist rebellion against unacceptable suffering (like Ilyushechka’s death) is quickly exhausted and turns into a more complicated agony over how to

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honor the departed: what to do with the palpable loss and its traces, what to forget and what to remember and how to do so. Rejecting the world is easy: even God “regretted” (Gen. 6:6) his creation before destroying it by flood (which he will also regret). Far more difficult is the craft of selective memory, as ephemeral as the rainbow God devises to remind himself (not Noah) of his promise that he will never again annihilate the world in response to the evil that is innate to human freedom (Gen. 9:16). Alyosha invokes the power and fragility of such memory in his impromptu eulogy, delivered not by the grave in the churchyard but instead near the “heathenish stone” where Snegiryov had actually wanted to bury his son.52 In the “Speech at the Stone” that follows and concludes the novel, Alyosha accomplishes several rather subtle things. First, he includes himself and the boys in a shared responsibility for Ilyushechka’s fate. Second, he invokes a corollary responsibility: the obligation to aspire actively to one’s better memory, to the better “facts” of human nature. “‘Let us never forget how good we once felt here, all together, united by such good and kind feelings as made us, too, for the time that we loved the poor boy, perhaps better than we actually are, . . . that alone may serve some day for our salvation.’”53 The third thing the eulogy performs occurs as part of a dialogue with the boys: “Ah, dear children, dear friends, do not be afraid of life! How good life is when you do something good and rightful!” . . . “Karamazov!” cried Kolya, “can it really be true as religion says, that all shall rise from the dead, and come to life, and see one another again, and everyone, and Ilyushechka?” “Certainly we shall rise, certainly we shall see and gladly, joyfully tell one another all that has been,” Alyosha replied, half laughing, half in ecstasy. . . . “Well, and now let’s end our speeches and go to his memorial dinner. Don’t be disturbed that we’ll be eating pancakes. It’s an ancient, eternal thing, and there’s good in that too,” laughed Alyosha.54 Where Ivan Karamazov would find the arrival of the Kingdom of God an inadequate theodicy, pancakes suffice for Alyosha. It seems that, at least for that moment, Dostoevsky defeats Ivan and the underground man with comfort food. Camus’s ruminations on Dostoevsky conveyed how existentialists understood the Russian novelist, in his treatment of consciousness and theodicy, as a precursor to some of their own key themes. For Camus, Ivan was a

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tsar in indifference . . . by refusing to surrender the royal powers of the mind. To those, like his brother [Alyosha], who prove by their lives that it is essential to humiliate oneself in order to believe, he might reply that the condition is shameful. His key word is: “Everything is permitted,” with the appropriate shade of melancholy. Of course, like Nietzsche, the most famous of God’s assassins, he ends in madness. But this is a risk worth running, and, faced with such tragic ends, the essential impulse of the absurd mind is to ask: “What does that prove?”55 Indeed, what do madness or suicide “prove” in Dostoevsky’s case studies? The absurdist (or Shestov’s tragic egoist) would respond: all it proves is that there is an unbridgeable chasm between human truth and human need. Accordingly, even though Camus called Alyosha’s invocation of the immortality of the soul an example of Dostoevsky’s “stirring acquiescence, riddled with doubts, uncertain and ardent,” he described it also as man exchanging “his divinity for happiness” and declared that this ultimately makes Dostoevsky not an “absurdist . . . but [rather] an existentialist novelist.”56 By this Camus meant that Dostoevsky—unlike the absurdist, who lives (or dies) without offering a solution to the human problem of meaning—ends up accommodating necessity by responding to Kirillov and Ivan as Alyosha responds to Kolya: “existence is illusory and it is eternal.”57 In Camus’s reading, it is illusory because God is dead and it is eternal because, apparently, we cannot live without God. As Blaise Pascal famously quipped: “It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that he should not exist.” “Which is better—cheap happiness, or lofty suffering?” asked the underground man as he reflected on his excuses for letting his prospective love interest, the prostitute Liza, flee from his rented room after he deliberately insulted her by trying to pay—for she did not come to sleep with him for money but because he had tried to persuade her to leave her trade.58 He implies that setting up house with Liza would be cheap happiness, presumably for both of them, while his cruel insult will instill a lofty (and, he claims, true and thus “useful”) suffering—again, presumably in both of them. The question begs the insight that happiness is in fact always cheap, that is, prosaic. In Levinas’s phrase, “life is love of life”—fulfillment of the needs that life comprises is life’s joy.59 On the other hand, a suffering that is chosen (or useful) is always lofty in that it assumes that my suffering challenges some sort of universal meaning, which of course presupposes that universal meaning is possible.

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Alyosha peddles cheap happiness (the pancakes) precisely because it comes so dearly. Father Zosima, in his homily on memorable Biblical moments, expresses this paradox most clearly and painfully in a discussion of the unsatisfying, even monstrous, epilogue to the Book of Job: “God restores Job again, once more many years pass, and he has new children, different ones, and he loves them—Oh Lord, one thinks, ‘but how could he so love these new ones, when his former children are no more, when he has lost them? Remembering them, was it possible for him to be fully happy?’ . . . But it is possible, it is possible: the old grief, by a great mystery of human life, gradually passes into quiet tender joy; instead of young, ebullient blood comes a mild, serene old age.”60 Ivan Karamazov’s “ebullient blood” would have simmered over the loss of the first family, just as it probably simmers over his own sorry childhood spent as a ward in the homes of others. But just as the deaths of the beloved former children are a stubborn, unjustifiable fact, so too are the beloved new children: a reality as weird and common as the rising and setting of the sun. It is what Philip Hallie called the “lucid mystery” of goodness.61 What is to be done with this other kind of fact, the kind that probably would not appear in Ivan’s newspapers? Zosima’s “mild, serene old age” does not weigh one stubborn fact against the other (for that would be a crass sort of theodicy indeed) so much as it accepts the vital dynamic between regret and revolt, forgetting and remembering, acknowledging both evil and the banality of goodness.62 Camus discounted too quickly the possibility that such an affirmation partakes of the absurd. Alyosha’s invocation of eternity is split into the ridiculous (eating pancakes!) and the ethically transcendent (the memory of Ilyushechka as a unifying bond). Indeed, for French existentialists to ignore, rue, or misunderstand the religious (“humiliated”) end of the Russian equation, while drawing inspiration from the atheist (“intelligent”) end, was to fall into a false equilibrium. Kirillov’s “pistol rang out somewhere in Russia,” Camus wrote, “but the world continued to cherish its blind hopes.”63 If M. Kiriloff ’s “logical suicide” was toasted with anisette in a Left Bank café, then it too easily sloughs off the horns of Dostoevsky’s dilemma.64 For at least in the Russian context, God is less dead than constantly and necessarily forgotten. In such a context, “God” is basically a mnemonic device for responsibility and for the suspension of the all-negating rational ego. As a peasant explains to Levin near the end of Anna Karenina: “One man just lives for his own

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needs . . . , just to stuff his own belly, but Fokanych—he’s an upright old man. He lives for the soul. He remembers God.”65 And to remember God, one needs to have forgotten him. As Bernard Martin noted in his account of Shestov: “Later he was to make clear, in a great comment on the Psalmist’s cry, ‘Out of the depths, I called unto thee, O Lord’ [Ps. 130], the connection between the tragedies of existence and God: ‘What relationship is there between “the depths” and “Lord”? When there is neither depth, nor horror, nor despair, man does not see God and does not call to Him.’”66 The cliché about no atheists in foxholes signals the irrelevance of “belief ”: sometimes it feels like there is no God, and other times it feels like there is. The power of the lucid mystery—whereby a person (believer or not) doesn’t live simply to stuff his belly—relies on our absurd tendency to forget and then suddenly remember this power and call on it in moments of horror and despair, even when this call is not heard. Indeed, the lucid mystery finds its proof not just in kindness but also in grief, as mysterious as kindness. Grief feels fresh each time it is invoked, drawing its power from the shoddiness of our emotional memory. After all, if we remembered that we already grieved for something, why would we ever want to grieve for it again? Yet this is exactly what we do. This sort of sensitivity—the naive freshness of such forgetfulness—also permits us to relive simple ethical revelations again and again and to be hopeful for others when they do so. The Ivan Karamazov inside all of us bristles at such loose ends. Or, as explained by the shabby devil who visits Ivan shortly before his descent into brain fever: “I’m leading you alternately between belief and disbelief, and I have my own purpose in doing so. A new method, sir: when you’ve completely lost faith in me, then you’ll immediately start convincing me to my face that I am not a dream but a reality—I know you now; and then my goal will be achieved. And it is a noble goal. I will sow just a tiny seed of faith in you, and from it an oak will grow.”67 Ivan’s devil is a self-professed demon of uncertainty—uncertainty over whether one must engage the world materially or spiritually. Philip Hallie describes a similar Faustian struggle between two souls in the breast: one soul that sees evil as resulting from an imbalance of power that can be corrected only by an opposed power; another soul that responds to evil not with power but with hope and generosity. The first soul is nourished by truth—and the more impersonal, lucid, and objective the better. The second soul is fed by hope,

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which is intimate, personal, and based on the ability of each of us to shape a narrative that comforts. In the dialogue between Russian boys in the stinking tavern, the first soul is represented by Ivan and the second by Aloysha. Hallie refuses to reconcile these two incompatible souls: “We live off the bodies of others. This is the system we are part of, whether we like it or not. If we cannot learn to live and love in such a bloody, ambiguous world as this, we starve to death emotionally and cognitively, for we live with truth as necessarily as we live with high hopes.”68 The mess of both is needed. It is no accident that Hallie ultimately relies on storytelling—on a highly aestheticized truth seeking. Indeed, the open-endedness of literary art can be an honest and humane way of acknowledging our animal cruelty (living off the bodies of others) even as we cultivate and live out shared hopes for salvation. Thus the challenge for the second, hopeful soul is to stand firm in the bloody instability witnessed by the truth-seeking soul. Aesthetic activity (including critical dialogue) is a realm where it is possible to stand firm on shaky ground, and here again the Russian novels are often the right place to start looking—and perhaps a good place to return to after our journey into philosophy. Nietzsche, with his own brand of stark “Russianism,” proposed the following: What if . . . a demon were to steal after you in your loneliest loneliness and say to you: “This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you. . . . The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!” Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” . . . How well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?69 Nietzsche’s demon of eternal recurrence represents the idea that there is no other world or hereafter and that this world is just one cycle of an endless, tortured pattern of existence. But Nietzsche also suggested that this demon can be transformed by a “tremendous moment,” or by (in Alyosha’s words)

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“some good memory,” into an ethical impetus. I submit that this “tremendous moment” might simply be the ability to forget, even if only momentarily, that the world remains the world even after you have experienced the lucid mystery of goodness. What this suggests is that the philosophy of tragedy leads not to metaphysical transcendence or negation—both of which are still slaves to the being they hope to defeat—but instead to ethical transcendence. And because ethical transcendence has meaning and expression only as mundane justice and care, we return to the world of face-to-face relations so deliberately depicted by the Russian novelists. Existential Russianism thus leaves us between two limit cases: the dark and violent freedom characterized by the individual’s perverse need to escape the other-in-myself and an “insatiable compassion” toward the other-as-other.70 One experiences each case—be it self-nausea or infinite responsibility—“more than anyone.” From the underground man’s assertion that everyone takes pride in their sicknesses, “and I more than anyone,” Dostoevsky eventually arrived at the idea in The Brothers Karamazov—an idea Levinas later embraced as his own: “Each of us is guilty in everything before everyone, and I more than anyone.”71 In each case it is the “I more than anyone”—the literary, antiphilosophical coda—that reflects what it is like to have a self, a subjectivity irreducible and irreplaceable, whether it wallows in the mire or takes responsibility for the world as it exists and as it ought to be. This is the Russians’ gift to existentialism: recovery of the self amidst the collective mobilizations of modernity. It is a radical subjectivity, expressed well by Levin’s thoughts at the end of Anna Karenina: “It’s a secret that’s necessary and important for me alone and inexpressible in words. This new feeling hasn’t changed me, hasn’t made me happy or suddenly enlightened. . . . Nor was there any surprise. And faith or not faith—I don’t know what it is—but this new feeling has entered into me just as imperceptibly through suffering and has firmly lodged itself in my soul. I’ll get angry in the same way with the coachman Ivan, argue in the same way, speak my mind inappropriately, there will be the same wall between my soul’s holy of holies and other people, even my wife, I’ll accuse her in the same way of my own fear and then regret it, I’ll fail in the same way to understand with my reason why I pray, and yet I will pray—but my life now, my whole life, regardless of all that may happen to me, every minute of it, is not only not meaningless, as it was before, but has the unquestionable meaning of the good which it is in my power to put into it!”72

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As an epiphany, this is all so provisional and so hedged with caveats that Levin’s exclamation point seems farcical. But perhaps the caveats are the epiphany. Levin, whose “life was good but [whose] thinking was bad,”73 accepts that his world will forever exceed his thinking. And, somewhat paradoxically, this is really an acceptance of human freedom in all of its heady responsibility. Whether cogito ergo sum or Es denkt, it is always up to me to think well—up to me “more than anyone.” To think well, for Dostoevsky and Tolstoy alike, is to realize that even though pure consciousness is the royal realm of human freedom, it can also be a tyrant—a “sickness,” as the underground man calls it—when it is unmoored from the compromises demanded by everything else that calls the individual into question. Ivan Karamazov and the underground man are utterly enslaved by their boundless consciousness. To think well is to keep in mind that pure thought tends toward a limitlessness that is blind to any experience that would humiliate it. As Berdyaev reminds us, Russians did not have full recourse to the bourgeois culture of the West, where it seemed for a time the sovereign realms of the mind and the world could coexist in a historically evolving middle. During the twentieth century, it became clear that the West did not really have recourse to this middle, either. This is what existentialist readers of the Russian novel sensed in the stark and schismatic “Russianism” of a dialogue like the one between Ivan and Alyosha: that the torn subject— wrenched apart in utter loss or impossible decision, slipping on insupportable ground—can, absurdly, find support not in an impersonal idealism but in this very schism between rebellion and hope.

Notes The author wishes to thank Nick Paliocha for assistance with the literature review for this essay; Rose Réjouis, Liz Hynes, and Mia Bruner for help with revisions; and Jonathan Judaken for his editorial patience and encouragement. Parts of this essay draw on material originally written for “Levinas Underground: Dostoevsky, ‘De L’évasion’ and the Devil,” in Levinas Studies, vol. 5, ed. Peter Atterton (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 2010) and later revised and delivered as a lecture in my course “Fiction: An Introduction” at the New School on February 24, 2010. Many of these words were written while I was steeped in the fresh memory of my brother-in-law Emmanuel Réjouis (1970–2010) and his daughters, Kofie-Jade (2004– 2010) and Zenzie (2006–2010), all of whom perished in the earthquake that struck Haiti on January 12, 2010.

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1. Walter Kaufmann, ed., Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (Cleveland, Ohio: Meridian, 1963). It is interesting that Kaufmann—who, like others, avows that Dostoevsky was not an existentialist because of his Christianity—deliberately situates Dostoevsky (1821–1881) as the “best overture” for existentialism, right before his predecessor Kierkegaard (1813–1855); the rest of the anthology respects chronology (14). This chapter compensates for Kaufmann’s omission of the second (more literary) part of Notes from Underground from his anthology. 2. See James L. Rice, Freud’s Russia: National Identity in the Evolution of Psychoanalysis (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1993), 17–19. 3. Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, trans. Richard A. Cohen (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1985), 22. 4. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square, 1993), 68–70. 5. Sartre, “François Mauriac and Freedom,” trans. Annette Michelson, in Literary Essays (New York: Citadel Press, 1957), 9. 6. Nicholas Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, trans. Donald Attwater (1934; Cleveland, Ohio: Meridian, 1969), 81. 7. Lev Shestov, In Job’s Balances: On the Sources of the Elemental Truths, trans. Camilla Coventry and C. A. Macartney (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1975), 8, 10. 8. Leo Tolstoy, “Letter to Nikolai Strakhov,” February 1881, in Tolstoy’s Letters, vol. 2, ed. and trans. R. F. Christian (New York: Scribner’s, 1978), 320. 9. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1994), 7. 10. Ibid., 9. 11. Ibid., 7. 12. Levinas, On Escape: De l’évasion, trans. Betina Bergo (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 49. 13. Ibid., 50. 14. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, 8. 15. Ibid., 10. 16. A student once described the underground man as an existentialist Bob Vila. 17. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, 10–11. 18. Ibid., 129–30. 19. Levinas, On Escape, 55. 20. Levinas (On Escape, 56) formulates the problem of idealism like this: “What is the structure of this pure being? Does it have the universality Aristotle conferred on it? . . . On the contrary, is it nothing else than the mark of a certain civilization, firmly established in the fait accompli of being and incapable of getting out of it?” 21. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, 24–25. 22. Ibid., 25. 23. Ibid., 34. 24. Ibid., 35–36.

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25. The “indestructible” Crystal Palace, precursor of both Disney’s Epcot Center and the megamall, burned down in 1936. 26. Lev Shestov, “Dostoevsky and Nietzsche: The Philosophy of Tragedy [1903],” in Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche, trans. Spencer Roberts (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969), 239. 27. Ibid., 234. 28. Ibid., 320. 29. Ibid. 30. Berdyaev’s translator Donald Attwater renders podpolya, somewhat grandly, as “underworld.” However, he notes correctly that the word connotes “the space between the floor and the ground or between a floor and the ceiling beneath” (Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, 50n)—which is to say, a liminal crawlspace fit for vermin. 31. Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, 16–17. 32. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 236. 33. Ibid., 235–36. 34. Ibid., 243. 35. Ibid., 244, 245 (emphasis in original). For an apposite (joker’s?) theodicy, see Abu’l-Hasan al-Ash’ari (d. 936), cited by Fazlur Rahman, Islam, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 91: “Let us imagine a child and a grown-up person in Heaven who both died in the True Faith. The grown-up one, however, has a higher place in Heaven than the child. The child shall ask God: ‘Why did you give that man a higher place?’ ‘He has done many good works,’ God shall reply. Then the child shall say, ‘Why did you let me die so soon that I was prevented from doing good?’ God will answer, ‘I knew that you would grow up into a sinner; therefore, it was better that you should die a child.’ Thereupon a cry shall rise from those condemned to the depths of Hell, ‘Why, O Lord! did You not let us die before we became sinners?’” 36. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 260. 37. Ibid., 263. 38. Ibid., 262. 39. Ibid., 263–64. 40. Ibid., 638–39. 41. Ibid., 606–7. 42. Sartre, “Notebook 3: Dec. 7, 1939,” War Diaries, trans. Quintin Hoare (New York: Verso, 1985), 109. 43. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Anchor, 1962), Part Two, line 11603. 44. Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, 89. 45. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 243. 46. Ibid., 48–49. 47. Ibid., 49–50. 48. Ibid., 771–72 (translation altered).

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49. N. K. Mikhailovsky, “Zhestokii talant” [A Cruel Talent (1882)], in Dostoevskii v russkoi kritike (Moscow: Goslitizdat, 1956), 322. 50. See George Ivask, “Dostoevsky’s Wit,” The Russian Review 21 (1961): 154. As Ivask notes, in order “to enjoy the novels of Dostoevsky, the reader must surrender himself to the novelist’s mood with its counterplay of wit and pathos, and wit sometimes presented as pathos.” 51. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 773. 52. Ibid., 770. 53. Ibid., 774. 54. Ibid., 776. 55. Albert Camus, “The Absurd Man,” in Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Knopf, 1967), 109. 56. Camus, “The Absurd Man,” 111. 57. Ibid., 112 (emphasis in original). 58. Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, 128. 59. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1969), 115. 60. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 292. 61. Philip Hallie, In the Eye of the Hurricane: Tales of Good and Evil, Help and Harm (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1997), 5, 40. 62. Indeed, a great novel like The Brothers Karamazov reproduces this dynamic aesthetically, making us aware of how time splits both individual consciousness and the world into irreconcilable facts linked more by proximity than by causes. Both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky use fictional realism to do the kind of work that philosophy cannot do. 63. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 111. 64. See Ervin C. Brody, “Dostoevsky’s Presence in Camus’ Early Works,” Neohelicon 8 (1980/81): 77–118. 65. Tolstoy, Tolstoy’s Letters, 794. 66. Bernard Martin, “Introduction,” in Shestov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Nietzsche, xxx. 67. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 645. 68. Hallie, Eye of the Hurricane, 83. 69. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), aphorism #341. 70. Sonya Marmeladova looks with “insatiable compassion” on Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage, 1993), 318 (emphasis in original). For comment on this, see Levinas, “Signification and Sense,” in Humanism of the Other, trans. Nidra Poller (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 30. 71. Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 289. 72. Tolstoy, Tolstoy’s Letters, 816–17. 73. Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (New York: Penguin, 2002), 797.

2

German Existentialism and the Persistence of Metaphysics Weber, Jaspers, Heidegger Peter E. Gordon Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? —Friedrich Nietzsche, “The Madman,” in The Gay Science

Martin Heidegger was appointed to the chair in philosophy at Freiburg University in 1928 and delivered “What Is Metaphysics?” (his inaugural address) before the assembled faculty, in the main auditorium on Wednesday, July 24, 1929.1 At once dense and abstract, the lecture was and will surely remain one of the truly classic statements in the canon of European existentialism. Grappling with its themes is an immense challenge, but the task is made all the more difficult thanks to Heidegger’s scrupulous avoidance of any concrete references to his philosophical contemporaries, let alone any explicit appeal to the various sources that inspired his distinctive strain of existential ontology. Yet it is quickly apparent upon even an initial reading that the lecture sets forth a relentless and indeed global criticism of the factual or ontic sciences, or Wissenschaften. Briefly, the argument runs as follows. Heidegger faults the empirical sciences most of all for the way they fasten our attention on entities alone to such a degree that any further concerns are dismissed as being without meaning or consequence. This fixing of attention on merely objective entities

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reinforces a metaphysical prejudice according to which the world is understood to be composed of nothing other than the objects that are grasped through scientific inquiry. But this presumptuous attitude—according to which the cosmos contains merely entities and otherwise nothing—conspires to obscure the genuine possibility of our encounter as human beings with the nothing (das Nichts). As Heidegger explains, this encounter is given to us only when we are seized by an especially radical kind of anxiety such that we experience the “slipping away of beings as a whole.”2 It is only this encounter, as distinguished from any merely factual or scientific inquiry, that places the “questioner,” the human being itself, in question. The encounter thus reveals what Heidegger believes is an incorrigible if deeply unsettling truth about the human condition: our lack of metaphysical grounds. This argument is fraught with difficulty, and a complete understanding of its philosophical significance would necessarily involve a detailed review of the preparatory steps laid down in Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time (itself an unfinished work that was rushed into print in Husserl’s Yearbook for Philosophical Research in 1927 so that Heidegger could secure the Freiburg chair as Husserl’s successor). Nevertheless, among all the texts and lectures of the philosopher’s early years, “What Is Metaphysics?” is perhaps distinctive for the way it strips away doctrinal complications so as to focus on one of Heidegger’s more perplexing and controversial ideas—namely, the idea that anxiety is a privileged instrument for isolating what is most essential in human existence, the phenomenon Heidegger calls “uncanny” or “pure Dasein.”3 This idea is provocative chiefly because it looks very much like a remnant of metaphysical dogma, an a priori statement about the human being’s underlying reality, when it was ostensibly Heidegger’s intention to do away with metaphysics. It is this idea—let us call it the “metaphysical remnant” in Heidegger’s early philosophy—that I propose to examine here. To better comprehend how Heidegger came to this argument, it may be helpful to recall several of the details and contemporary debates that the lecture itself suppressed. My argument is that Heidegger’s lecture should be understood as a frontal assault on neo-Kantian theories of scientific knowledge. Ironically, however, it also borrowed from and radicalized the pathos of meaninglessness already implicit in Max Weber’s sociological portrait of disenchanted modernity. But Weber hardly allowed for the possibility of emancipation from what he called the steel-hard casing, or “iron cage,” of modernity. It was Karl Jaspers who was most responsible for transforming this metaphor of the iron cage into a

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psychological and existential theory. The theory of anxiety as revealing “pure” existence was thus, I shall argue, a radicalized and ontologized reworking of the psychological idea of the “limit-situation” that Heidegger borrowed from Jaspers. The lessons of this reconstruction are historical but also philosophical: once we have understood how Heidegger developed his critique of the sciences and his correlative notion of “nothing,” we may be prompted to ask if his conclusions are wholly warranted.

Weber and Disenchantment On November 7, 1917, the great sociologist Max Weber delivered his nowfamous address at Munich University on “Science As a Vocation” (Wissenschaft als Beruf) in which he instructed his audience, composed primarily of students, that the modern natural and social sciences could proffer no guidance in their quest for meaning.4 In former ages one might have believed that knowledge could secure for humanity a firmer grasp of divine truths, but this belief was now dispelled and scientists had to confess the grim truth articulated by Tolstoy: “Science is meaningless because it gives no answer to our question, the only question important for us: ‘What shall we do and how shall we live?’” To this Weber added his assent: “That science does not give an answer to this is indisputable. The only question that remains is the sense in which science gives ‘no’ answer, and whether or not science might yet be of some use to the one who puts the question correctly.”5 It was Weber’s ultimate lesson that academic scholarship in all of the various disciplines had no purpose other than the “self-clarification and knowledge of interrelated facts.” Science, he explained, “is not the gift of grace of seers and prophets dispensing sacred values and revelations, nor does it partake of the contemplation of sages and philosophers about the meaning of the universe. This, to be sure, is the inescapable condition of our historical situation. We cannot evade it so long as we remain true to ourselves.”6 The historical situation as Weber described it was the ultimate outcome of a millennium-long process of rationalization and world-disenchantment (die Entzauberung der Welt). But its more recent history, as explained in his 1904–5 sociological analysis of Protestantism and the capitalist spirit, was chiefly characterized by the emergence of instrumental rationality and the consequent dissolution of the religious idea of a calling (or Beruf) that had once furnished the explanatory ethic for the worldly asceticism of the early

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Calvinist merchant class. As capitalism advanced, Weber explained, it could dispense with the previously salient idea of a calling, without which labor now assumed the character of mindless compulsion: “The Puritan wanted to work in a calling,” Weber observed, “we are forced to do so.” The Protestant Richard Baxter’s conscientious yet inwardly redemptive attitude toward labor was now irrevocably lost: “In Baxter’s view,” wrote Weber, “the care for external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the ‘saint like a light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.’ But fate decreed that the cloak should become a shell as hard as steel [stahlhartes Gehäuse].”7 It is critical to note that Weber’s description of modernity as a meaningless mechanism seemed to follow logically from his conception of modern sociological research, for only the social scientist with sufficient strength could recognize the essential meaninglessness of the modern world. After all, the scientist was a person who could, in Weber’s phrase, “bear the fate of the times like a man.”8 But this very recognition was therefore a prerequisite for science: a scientist who mistook his subjective value interests or research criteria for objective truths about the cosmos would be unable to wield those criteria self-consciously and with “objectivity” (a term Weber used with great theoretical finesse). That is, he would fail to see them as contingent and subject-dependent tools for research. As Weber explained in his methodo­ logical essay on objectivity, it was the very essence and paradox of scientific objectivity that it demanded a recognition of the subjectivity of meaning.9 Modern science, Weber concluded, presupposed the disenchantment of the scientist’s own vision insofar as it required the fortitude to recognize that, in the modern world, no single meaning could any longer stake a claim to metaphysical reality. In this argument, one may discern Weber’s implicit conviction that scientific research requires its own attitudinal orientation or ethos, a grim determination to look unflinchingly into the abyss.10 In Weber’s image of the modern researcher we may discern the rudiments of what we might call proto-existentialism: the normative principle that the human being must resolve upon its own meanings in a cosmos in which God is dead and all metaphysical certainties have irrevocably collapsed. Of course, it is no small irony that warrant for this principle’s antifoundationalist and ultimately “irrationalist” ethic of resolution could be derived from a social theory whose neo-Kantian foundations were supposedly antipathetic to all forms of modern irrationalism.11 Weber may have seen the rise of instrumental rationality as a tragedy, given the attendant loss of objective meaning or depth. He would certainly have condemned the “irrationalism” of existential

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philosophy in the 1920s had he survived that long. However, Weber died in the early summer of 1920, just as interwar existentialism was born.

Jaspers and the Limit-Situation Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) was a Heidelberg-trained psychologist who transformed himself into a philosopher. Although his contemporaries esteemed him as the cofounder of “Existenz-philosophie” (a term Heidegger rejected), Jaspers would never altogether abandon his habit of interpreting philosophical theories as formalized expressions of psychological persona.12 In his early years at Heidelberg, he participated alongside intellectuals such as Georg Lukács, Georg Simmel, and Emil Lask in the Sunday soirées at the home of Max and Marianne Weber (a circle that Hannah Arendt joined in 1925 after she left Heidegger in Marburg to study with Jaspers).13 One can hardly exaggerate the singular importance of Max Weber’s example for Jaspers’ own intellectual development. In a 1957 autobiographical essay, Jaspers eulogized his late teacher’s “human greatness” and affirmed Weber’s influence throughout his philosophical writings.14 But Weber the man was also for Jaspers an emblematic persona whose very being seemed to embody the lessons of existentialism. In his 1921 commemorative address at Heidelberg, Jaspers eulogized Weber as “the existential philosopher incarnate.”15 Ten years later, Jaspers amplified these thoughts: “In his philosophizing human being [Weber] suffered at the limits of finitude,” Jaspers observed. “If in every objective sense, which he shattered by his own example, Max Weber came to shipwreck, this very shipwreck was a call to truth.” Indeed it was “shipwreck” (Scheitern) that revealed the essential truth of the human condition.16 Although Jaspers admitted that Weber had inspired his thinking as early as the General Psychopathology (1913), the references grew most pronounced only with the publication of Jaspers’ Psychology of Worldviews in 1919 and in the philosophical works that appeared over the decade to follow. Like Weber, and in close alliance with neo-Kantians at Heidelberg, Jaspers conceived of a worldview or Weltanschauung as a subjective value-orientation or psychological disposition that apparently served only as prerequisite for all human experience. The psychologistic idea, however, injected an element of contingency into what would otherwise seem a theory of a priori or transcendental conditions. In fact, Jaspers claimed, a worldview is always pathological to

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some degree, since its ultimate purpose is to furnish a defensive shield against the threats of external reality. Hence worldviews typically congeal into “housings” or Gehäusen that protect the human being within a necessarily delimited sphere of fortitude and quiet: “We cannot tolerate the infinite frenzy of all concepts, which relativize, and all forms of existence, which grow uncertain. Everything grows dizzy, and the consciousness of our own existence passes away.”17 It is a psychological fact about the human being, claimed Jaspers, that we find this condition unlivable. “There is an instinct in us that something or another must be ultimate and complete.” We accordingly seize upon the limitation of a housing by means of fundamental principles, dogmas, matters susceptible of proof, traditional dispositions, and absolute and generalized commands. These housings exhibit a tremendous diversity. But in all of them we can see a common strategy—that the human being cleaves to principles or rules that exhibit a formalistic and rational form: “rationalization” fortifies itself with whatever materials are at hand in erecting a “closed world-picture.”18 Jaspers’s idea of a rationalistic shell that protects the individual from metaphysical disorientation elaborated and transformed the famous Weberian image of a Gehäuse, or “steel-hard casing,” of instrumental reason, but the continuities should not be exaggerated. Jaspers’s concept is primarily individual and psychological; Weber’s serves as a characterization of socially coordinated economic rationalization, a generalized ethos from which there is little hope of escape. But this shift—from social objectivistic description to individual psychological diagnosis—afforded Jaspers the theoretical space to imagine an emancipatory possibility that Weber’s fatalism disallowed. In fact, it is this promise of existential emancipation that remains perhaps the most distinctive idea in all of Jaspers’s philosophy. In the Psychology of Worldviews, Jaspers argued that in certain experiences the individual is seized by the awareness that “there is nothing secure, no unquestionable absolute, no halting place at which every experience and thought is brought to a stand.” In this Grenzsituation or “limit-situation,” everything seems to flow and is caught in “a restless movement becoming questionable.”19 Jaspers explained that such limit-situations are typically intolerable and can seldom wrest the individual from the security of his indubitable convictions. The human being most typically lives in a mode of endless striving toward the realization of a carefully ranged hierarchy of values. Occasionally we may confront obstacles, but as a rule these are quickly dispatched and our values hastily reaffirmed. But in limit-situations—such as struggle, death,

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accident, and guilt—we experience an intensity of suffering and contradiction that permits us to recognize the possibility of a superior existence beyond our limits. In his monumental work from 1932, Philosophy, Jaspers concluded that only a “true shipwreck [echte Scheitern] to whose acceptance I am knowingly and without reservation open, can become a fulfilled cipher of Being.”20 The essential work of the limit-situation was to release the individual for something like a metaphysical self-knowledge, an idea Jaspers reconfirmed in his postwar philosophical study, Von der Wahrheit: “The deepest intimacy with reality is at the same time readiness for true shipwreck.”21 For these insights concerning the metaphysical lessons of the limit-situation, Jaspers clearly owed a great deal to Kierkegaard and to Nietzsche, both of whom furnished instruments for distinguishing the higher or more genuine self from its quotidian existence. For Kierkegaard it was via the traumatic and radically incommensurable encounter with God that true subjectivity first came into view, whereas for Nietzsche it was thanks only to the recognition of a divine absence that the self could affirm both its own power and the life-enhancing ethic of self-overcoming. Even so, both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche helped Jaspers to theorize the limit-situation as what we might call a principle of metaphysical individuation, a tool for breaking free from the otherwise stultifying effects of modernity. Both were intent on a confrontation with “the living process in man,” though they diverged sharply as to how this individuation was to be achieved: Kierkegaard found this individuation in subjective theism whereas Nietzsche located the path to individuation precisely in the subjective rejection of theism. Yet both were seeking what Jaspers called “the responsibility of the individual, the deepest individualistic sobriety . . . and honesty against all else within.”22 Some critics reacted with violent displeasure at Jaspers’s theory of the limit-situation because of its unapologetic appeal to the canons of philosophical irrationalism. The neo-Kantian philosopher Heinrich Rickert, who joined Jaspers at Heidelberg in 1916, seemed especially alarmed at what he considered to be Jaspers’s confused mixture of biological and psychological-existential insight in such passages as the following from the Psychology of Worldviews (as quoted by Rickert): “Just as the stalk of a plant, in order to live, requires a certain scaffold-building encasement in wood, so too does life-experience require rationality; but just as the wooden encasement finally takes life from the stalk and makes it into a mere apparatus, so too does the rational have the tendency to harden the soul itself into wood.” From Rickert’s neo-Kantian perspective such metaphorical reveries were a cause for philosophical alarm.

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Here, he declared, was “antirationalism of modern life-prophecy in its purest form.”23

Heidegger and Anxiety With the publication of Heidegger’s Being and Time in 1927, the theory of the limit-situation achieved a new level of philosophical sophistication. The psychologistic manner of argument that had so troubled Heinrich Rickert (who was, incidentally, Heidegger’s erstwhile teacher in Freiburg) was displaced in favor of a seemingly rigorous phenomenology that seized upon the human being not as a concatenation of biological facts but rather as an ontological structure defined in global terms as “care.” For his own inquiry into Being-toward-death, Heidegger made express mention of its Christian anthropological foundations in both Paul and Calvin—though he took care to acknowledge that his own theory bore its greatest debt to Jaspers’s Psychology of Worldviews and its phenomenon of the limit-situation, even as he disagreed with Jaspers’s argument by noting that the “fundamental significance” of the limit-situation phenomenon “lies beyond any typology of dispositions and world-pictures.”24 Notwithstanding this marked difference in method, Heidegger’s own conception of Being-toward-death clearly owes a great deal to Jaspers, and not just because the limit situation is marked by “anxiety” for one’s own ability to be. The deeper inheritance is metaphysical: like the limit-situation, Being-toward-death affords human existence a privileged and individuated understanding of its very own being. To appreciate the further consequences of this inheritance, we should first recall some of the basic contours of Heidegger’s argument in Being and Time. As Heidegger explained, the chief purpose of the book is to explore what he called the “sense of Being” or Seinssinn—that is, an understanding of the basic constitution of things as phenomena revealed to us in our experience. Heidegger distinguishes between ontic knowledge, which concerns our knowledge of a given entity’s facts or properties, from ontological knowledge (after the Greek word for being, on), which characterizes our understanding of an entity’s manner of Being. In Heidegger’s view, this ontological understanding is prerequisite for and indeed essential to ontic experience because, without some rudimentary sense of a given entity’s manner of being, that entity would not show up within our experience at all. And this rule applies to experience as a whole: without some understanding of the world’s manner of being,

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the world itself simply could not be given to us as a phenomenon. It is for this reason that, following Kant, Heidegger characterizes our sense of Being as a transcendental condition for any and all possible understanding. For it is only by virtue of this ontological understanding that one can make sense of one’s own existence and also of the world as a whole. Heidegger believed it to be a distinctive fact about human beings that we possess this ontological understanding as part of our essential endowment, and his essential task in Being and Time was to analyze this ontological understanding. But it is a peculiarity of our ontological knowledge that, because it serves as the constitutive framework for our everyday experience, we would fail to capture its characteristic meaning if we isolated it as a pure concept or a form of intuition. This is because human existence, or Dasein, is incorrigibly bound to its world. Indeed, as Heidegger said, Dasein just is “Being-in-the-world.”25 And because Dasein is Being-in-the-world, it follows that the analysis cannot proceed after the fashion of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology—that is, by bracketing out the existential factors so as to concentrate upon the acts of pure consciousness. The understanding of Being that accompanies our Being-in-the-world is already dispersed into our worldly manner of existence, and this manner of being exhibits its own “vague, average intelligibility.”26 Because this intelligibility is something that constitutes our own Being-in-the-world, we inhabit it as a feature of our own existence; it is therefore not the sort of thing we could take up for disengaged contemplation. In other words, it is not something we can ever get “in back of ” the way Husserl could get in back of existence so as to occupy the privileged position of a transcendental ego. Hence Heidegger claimed that his manner of phenomenological description would have to be not transcendental but hermeneutic—in other words, an inquiry into ontological understanding from within one’s own existence.27 As if this task were not a sufficient challenge, Heidegger introduced the further idea that, in its average everyday intelligibility, each Dasein grasps both the world and oneself in such a fashion as to obscure Dasein’s “ownmost” (eigenste) manner of being. The self of everyday existence is therefore inauthentic (uneigentlich) and must be distinguished from the manner by which Dasein understands itself in order to make that self-understanding wholly its own (eigens ergriffenen) or authentic (eigentlich).28 It is crucial to note that Heidegger resisted the inference that authenticity is metaphysically distinct from inauthenticity. Rather, authenticity is simply a different manner of understanding one’s own selfhood. As Heidegger explained: “Authentic

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Being-one’s Self does not rest upon an exceptional condition of the subject, a condition that has been detached from the ‘One’ [das Man]; it is rather an existentiell modification of the ‘One’—of the ‘One’ as an essential existentiale.”29 But such warnings coexist with further claims that underscore the degree to which everyday or inauthentic Dasein remains trapped in a certain misunderstanding of its own being. In fact, just a page earlier Heidegger had written that, “if Dasein discovers the world in its own way [eigens] . . . , if it discloses to itself its own authentic Being, then this discovery of the ‘world’ and this disclosure of Dasein are always accomplished as a clearing-away of concealments and obscurities, as a breaking up of the disguises with which Dasein bars its own way.”30 The distinction between inauthentic and authentic self-understanding remains a major stumbling block for even the most discerning readers of Heidegger’s early philosophy.31 The difficulty is that, on the one hand, Heidegger argued that Dasein is always inauthentic insofar as its immersion in a world of shared norms and practices determines its own manner of being; on the other hand, Heidegger suggested that somehow Dasein is able to arrive at a deeper understanding of its own manner of being and thereby achieves at least a modification of its average everydayness. The situation is made considerably more perplexing once Heidegger introduced the themes of anxiety and Being-toward-death in Division II, where he suggested that—in rare moments of radical anxiety, when we are confronted with the possibility of our own not-being—we are awakened to a deepened recognition of our ontological constitution. We hear this awakening as a call of conscience: To the extent that for Dasein, as care, its Being is an issue, it summons itself as the “they” which is factically falling, and summons itself from its uncanniness towards its potentiality-for-Being. The appeal calls back by calling forth: it calls Dasein forth to the possibility of taking over, in existing, even that thrown entity which it is; it calls Dasein back to its thrownness so as to understand this thrownness as the null basis which it has to take up into existence.32 The perplexity of such a passage is that it seems as if Dasein is confronted with a metaphysical fact: Dasein is called back to “understand” its own thrownness. But this appears to be just the sort of fact that might be viewed from the disengaged perspective of Cartesian epistemology, as if one’s own being were a merely present-at-hand or vorhanden entity brought forward for inspection:

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“Uncanniness brings this entity face to face with its undisguised nullity [vor seine unverstellte Nichtigkeit], which belongs to the possibility of its ownmost potentiality-for-Being.”33 Heidegger later developed this idea even further when he described how, through the awakening to an authentic understanding, Dasein finds it has already resolved upon a new manner of being. In and through this resoluteness, Dasein at last seems to understand itself on its own terms, as if it has at last cleared away the “concealments and obscurities” that formerly barred its way. Accordingly, Heidegger explained that resoluteness “is what first gives authentic transparency [Durchsichtigkeit] to Dasein.”34 But what could transparency mean for a being whose manner of being is a thrownness beyond all recuperation? From what position does Heidegger believe this clear and distinct vision of Dasein’s actual constitution could be achieved? Heidegger naturally denied that he had appealed illicitly to the vantage of metaphysics, and he was careful to note that the call of conscience “gives no information.”35 But we are still left with the conundrum that Heidegger’s language bears at the very least a prima facie resemblance to the discourse of traditional metaphysics, with all its attendant metaphors of concealment and transparency. In the coming years this apparent difficulty would grow only more pronounced.

What Is Metaphysics? When Heidegger delivered his lecture “What Is Metaphysics?” in 1929, the philosophical situation in Germany was radically different that it had been only a decade before. It would have seemed commonplace ten years earlier for philosophers to view science as the paradigm non plus ultra for secure and certain knowledge. The neo-Kantian movements in both Marburg and Southwestern Germany (Freiburg and Heidelberg) were united in their assumption that it was the chief task of philosophy to secure the transcendental principles marking out the spheres of legitimacy for all modes of scientific inquiry, including both the natural sciences and the social sciences.36 Meanwhile, within the discipline of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl’s 1911 manifesto issued the famous desideratum that philosophy should attain the status of a “rigorous science” (strenge Wissenschaft). The phenomenologist’s dictum—“to the things themselves”—remained the watchword for Husserl’s inner circle, even as rival trends in existentialism and life philosophy were beginning to challenge the older master’s authority.37

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By 1920 critics had observed what they called a “resurrection of metaphysics,” a diverse trend that signaled the near dissolution of both neo-Kantian and phenomenological orthodoxies by the decade’s end.38 The opening page of Being and Time marks an episode in this transformation. In reference to the “question of Being,” Heidegger writes: “we deem it progressive to give our approval to ‘metaphysics’ again.”39 It is therefore striking that problems identified as metaphysical play almost no overtly constructive role in Heidegger’s magnum opus. Questions about the nature and content of metaphysical inquiry become more explicit in his inaugural address at Freiburg.40 In light of the high prestige of the sciences only a decade before, what is most striking in the Freiburg address is its rather deflationary characterization of scientific understanding. Science strives to address only what is “essential in all things,” Heidegger averred; and insofar as science fixes its attention solely upon the “entities themselves,” it claims to possess “the first and last word.” One might detect in this formulation Heidegger’s dissent from Husserl’s idea that philosophy could achieve a truly scientific standing only if it could succeed in “bracketing” out all factors extrinsic to the phenomena (or “entities”) in question.41 But much of the language in this early portion of the essay also seems to recall Weber’s characterization of the scientific vocation as a freely chosen commitment to objectivity, a mode of factual inquiry that is pursued wholly for its own sake and irrespective of consequences. Weber had declared that “science . . . presupposes that what is yielded by scientific work is important in the sense that it is ‘worth being known.’”42 Similarly, Heidegger described the scientist’s dedicated attention to worldly fact as “a freely chosen stance of human existence.”43 The scientist adopts a stance of “impartiality” in “inquiring, determining, grounding,” so that “a peculiarly delineated submission to beings themselves obtains.”44 Furthermore, although science keeps its vision fixed squarely on the beings in question, its disposition eventually becomes the ground for “a proper though limited leadership in the whole of human existence.”45 Weber himself had suggested that science, when confronted with the ultimate questions of human meaning, can have no answer because such questions lie beyond its technical-rational expertise.46 Yet from Heidegger’s perspective, the refusal of science to confront questions beyond the domain of logic and instrumental rationality betrays an essential weakness. For even while the scientific attitude enjoys a certain preeminence, it remains deeply ignorant of its own metaphysical presuppositions: That from which every attitude takes its guidance are beings themselves—and nothing further. That with which the scientific confrontation

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in the irruption occurs are beings themselves—and beyond that nothing. But what is remarkable is that, precisely in the way scientific man secures to himself what is most properly his, he speaks of something different. What should be examined are beings only, and besides that— nothing; beings alone, and further—nothing; solely beings, and beyond that—nothing.47 The reiterative strategy in these lines—“this only and otherwise nothing”— seems calculated to leave an impression of thoughtless repetition, as if counting to infinity would be enough to gain knowledge of the infinite universe. The lesson is apparently that science is something like a modernist corruption of what the scholastic philosopher Nicholas de Cusa termed docta ignorantia, or learned ignorance: the sciences today so strongly fasten their attention on the facts before them that they altogether miss the metaphysical premise that warrants their self-imposed restriction—namely, that beyond these facts there is indeed nothing else. But objectivity therefore seems to presuppose the nothing it ignores: Science wants to know nothing about the nothing. But even so it is certain that when science tries to express its proper essence it calls upon the nothing for help. It has recourse to what it rejects. What duplicitous state of affairs reveals itself here? With this reflection on our existence at this moment as an existence determined by science we find ourselves enmeshed in a controversy. In the course of this controversy a question has already evolved. It only requires explicit formulation: How is it with the nothing?48 Heidegger was no doubt aware that the sudden intrusion of a metaphysical question about “the nothing” (das Nichts) would appear startling if not rashly opportunistic. It takes only a moment’s reflection to see that in his characterization of science as caring for nothing else than the entities in question, the word “nothing” is not a substantive phenomenon to be examined but merely an intensifier; in other words, it emphasizes that science is interested only in those entities. The phrases “besides that—nothing,” or “solely beings, and beyond that—nothing” could be rephrased effortlessly into sentences such as “science attends only to its predetermined sphere of entities.” But Heidegger lent the term “nothing” a darkly forbidding quality, which makes it more plausible to conclude his introductory comments with a question about the Nothing.

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If there is warrant for this transformation, then it lies in Heidegger’s assertion that “the nothing is more original than the ‘not’ and negation.”49 Thus Heidegger was aware that he had played what could appear to be little more than a linguistic trick by transforming a negation into a substantive. But his claim is exactly that we have recourse to negation as a logical instrument only because we have a prior experience of negation within our lives.50 This experience is admittedly rare. Our typical manner of Being-in-the-world is to fasten ourselves to entities that furnish the illusion of metaphysical grounding: “we cling to this or that particular being, precisely in our everyday preoccupations, as though we were completely abandoned to this or that region of beings.”51 Indeed it is our typical experience of the world that, even if we cannot comprehend all of what there is, we nonetheless remain immersed in our daily affairs in such a fashion that they cohere and seem to form a seamless and totalizing horizon. In the technical vocabulary of Being and Time, Heidegger characterized this as “average everydayness.”52 According to Heidegger, the apparent seamlessness of this everyday horizon is a metaphysical illusion, one that can be torn down in the exceptional circumstance that we are seized by a globalized mood (Stimmung) of radical anxiety. Most moods function simply as dispositions that guide us toward our coping with worldly entities, such that they facilitate rather than disrupt the coherence of everyday Being-in-the-world. But anxiety is different insofar as it interrupts the very habit of abandoning ourselves to a specific region of entities: In anxiety, we say, “one feels ill at ease [es ist einem un­heimlich].” What is “it” that makes “one” feel ill at ease? We cannot say what it is before which one feels ill at ease. As a whole it is so for him. All things and we ourselves sink into indifference. This, however, not in the sense of mere disappearance. Rather in this very receding things turn toward us. The receding of beings as a whole, closing in on us in anxiety, oppresses us. We can get no hold on things. In the slipping away of beings only this “no hold on things” comes over us and remains. Anxiety makes manifest the nothing.53 Following upon Jaspers’s analysis of the limit-situation, Heidegger found in anxiety an instrument of both destruction and revelation. Anxiety does destroy the meaningfulness of the everyday world and compels the individual to recognize that the world is not truly a home (the literal sense of Unheimlich-

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keit). Yet this experience is also revelatory in that its rending is total. Anxiety is not merely a flight from particular entities but rather a “bewildered calm” in the face of complete meaninglessness. Anxiety “leaves us hanging because it induces the slipping away of beings as a whole.”54 Hence there is quite literally nothing that has meaning, and we are reduced to a state of “hovering” in a meaningless void. Heidegger hastened to explain that, in such a situation, one can no longer speak coherently of an individuated selfhood because the integrity of the self was conditional upon the integrity of its world. “This implies that we ourselves—we who are in being—in the midst of beings slip away from ourselves. At bottom therefore it is not as though ‘you’ or ‘I’ feel ill at ease; rather it is this way for some ‘one.’ In the altogether unsettling experience of this hovering where there is nothing to hold onto, pure Da-sein is all that is still there.”55 This unusual phrase—“pure Dasein”—may strike us as a sign that Heidegger had ventured well beyond the familiar waters of existential analysis.56 It evokes once again the quasi-metaphysical notion, already evident in Division II from Being and Time, that Dasein could arrive at a condition of radical transparency or self-knowledge set free from its entanglement with its world. If Heidegger had remained true to his own restriction that authentic Dasein is merely a modification of everyday Dasein, then presumably the notion of pure existence would have been unintelligible. But Heidegger did not remain faithful to his own principles. Instead he gave himself license to inject into his philosophy the peculiar idea that anxiety alone fulfills the special and even metaphysical service of singling out the very essence of the human condition. Human existence, Heidegger concluded, is always existence in the midst of the void: “Dasein means: being held out into the nothing.”57 The very appearing of the world as a phenomenon is accordingly possible only if Dasein is there as the site within which entities can be disclosed. Dasein is therefore nothing less than the transcendental condition for the disclosure of the world: “Holding itself out into the nothing, Dasein is in each case already beyond beings as a whole. This being beyond beings we call transcendence.”58 This idea was later recast as the claim that Dasein, as the being for whom there is an understanding of Being, is therefore the clearing—the only site where entities can show up as phenomena at all.59 As Heidegger explained, this implies that Dasein’s transcendence is the condition for its having a world; indeed, it is the condition for our speaking intelligibly of Dasein’s Being-there at all. “If in the ground of its essence Dasein were not transcending, which now means, if it were not in advance

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holding itself out into the nothing, then it could never be related to beings nor even to itself. Without the original revelation of the nothing, no selfhood and no freedom.”60 However, this means that “human existence can relate to beings only if it holds itself out into the nothing.” Dasein’s “transcendence”—its “going-beyond-beings”—thus belongs to Dasein’s very essence. Yet because this “going beyond” is conventionally ascribed to metaphysics, it follows that metaphysics belongs to the “nature of man.” Metaphysics is “neither a division of academic philosophy nor a field of arbitrary notions. Metaphysics is the fundamental occurrence in our Dasein. It is that Dasein itself.”61 Heidegger concluded his lecture with the bold affirmation that Dasein’s transcendence is thus the condition for all knowledge, including scientific knowledge. Neo-Kantian theorists of science (such as Heinrich Rickert) who concerned themselves with working out the logic of the natural or the human sciences are mistaken because “the nothing” is the origin of logical negation rather than the other way around: “If the power of the intellect in the field of inquiry into the nothing and into Being is thus shattered, then the destiny of the reign of ‘logic’ in philosophy is thereby decided. The idea of ‘logic’ itself disintegrates in the turbulence of a more originary questioning.”62 Heidegger granted that “scientific existence” exhibits its very own manner of “simplicity and aptness” insofar as it devotes itself to examining entities within a predefined knowledge domain (such as history, biology, theology, or physics). But this devotion is also a mark of arrogance, since science “would like to dismiss the nothing with a lordly wave of the hand.”63 Yet Heidegger also showed that even scientific existence is possible—and, more importantly, it understands itself for what it is—only if it holds onto its awareness of the ­nothing: But in our inquiry concerning the nothing it has by now become manifest that scientific existence is possible only if in advance it holds itself out into the nothing. It understands itself for what it is only when it does not surrender the nothing. The presumed soberness of mind and superiority of science become laughable when it does not take the nothing seriously. Only because the nothing is manifest can science make beings themselves objects of investigation. Only if science exists on the base of metaphysics can it fulfill in ever-renewed ways its essential task, which is not to amass and classify bits of knowledge, but to disclose in ever-renewed fashion the entire expanse of truth in nature and history.64

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As noted at the beginning of this section, the entirety of Heidegger’s Freiburg address seems to have been directed against a certain conception of the sciences and a correlative conception of philosophy as itself a rigorous science (Husserl) or, at the very least, a transcendental critique whose purpose is to ground scientific claims to knowledge (Cohen, Rickert). It is therefore unsurprising that Heidegger declared, near the close of his address, that “no amount of scientific rigor [Strenge der Wissenschaft] attains to the seriousness of metaphysics.” And because metaphysics is the core discipline of all philosophy, Heidegger issued the final verdict that “philosophy can never be measured by the standard of the idea of science.”65

The Metaphysics of Meaninglessness “Science today,” observed Max Weber in his Munich address, “is a ‘vocation’ organized in special disciplines in the service of self-clarification and knowledge of interrelated facts. It is not the gift of grace of seers and prophets dispensing sacred values and revelations, nor does it partake of the contemplation of sages and philosophers about the meaning of the universe.”66 The mood was thick with disillusionment. Speaking in the immediate aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution and during the devastation of the war’s final year, Weber addressed himself to a mostly student assembly, members of Munich’s left-liberal Freistudentische Bund, alongside soldiers either recently returned or on furlough.67 He spoke of the limits of science, primarily warning his auditors that they should not hope to find in science a substitute for the theological or philosophical meanings it had displaced. Disenchantment, he claimed, was “the inescapable condition of our historical situation.”68 Implicit already in Weber’s idea of the scientific vocation was an ethic of stoic heroism, of strength in the face of the void. This call to strength no doubt fell on receptive ears and helped to nourish what Andreas Huyssen has diagnosed as the “cult of hardness and invulnerability” that emerged with particular vigor after the war’s traumas.69 But for Weber it was not the soldier but chiefly the scientist who was called on to cultivate an ethic of stoic calm. For even while science (broadly construed), or instrumental reason, was singularly responsible for having evacuated the cosmos of meaning, it was the scientist alone who had the fortitude to recognize the truth of our modern condition. Karl Jaspers was surely one thinker who read Weber’s theories concerning the disenchantment of the world as a call to take up the problem of

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­ odernity’s nihilism as a matter of urgent philosophical concern. The imm age of rationalization that informed Jasper’s existential philosophy bears a resemblance to Weber’s stahlhartes Gehäuse, but the Weberian concept speaks primarily to routinized socioeconomic behavior whereas, in Jaspers’s hands, it becomes a psychological and even biological imperative. The common thread is the notion that the individual is imprisoned in an instrumentalrationalist shell for which subjective meaning can offer only a provisional solace. Meaning is subjective, and human reality is otherwise meaningless. It is critical to note that this vision of scientific rationality was hardly inevitable; nor was it necessary to conclude that science yields only facts and otherwise reveals the void. This conclusion was largely the consequence of a neo-Kantian epistemology that drew a razor-sharp line between facts and significance. It was Jaspers’s ironic achievement that he borrowed what was essentially a neo-Kantian theory of science and injected it with a strong measure of irrationalist pathos. To be human, Jaspers maintained, is to live within rationalized boundaries, but genuine self-understanding requires recognition and transgression of these boundaries. A “limit-situation” accordingly affords the individual a glimpse of his own metaphysical reality, an insight that is the precondition for freedom. Heidegger’s concept of anxiety owes a strong and acknowledged debt to Jaspers’s limit-situation, although clearly it also has antecedents in Kierke­ gaard (as Samuel Moyn documents in his contribution to this volume). An important difference is that what Jaspers considered an anthropological fact became for Heidegger an ontological phenomenon for disclosing Dasein’s more authentic manner of being. But Heidegger retained, and perhaps even fortified, the notion that there is a higher truth to the human condition that can be revealed only in a rare moment of intense and typically mortal dread. Like Jaspers, Heidegger argued that the human being in its everyday affairs evades this higher truth because its revelation would be traumatic. Even the scientist who attends to the entities within a given sphere of inquiry does not wish to know about the “nothing” that lies just beyond his research. The scientific conception of reality thus provides a perfect illustration for how science, and instrumental reason more generally, conspires to obscure a proper understanding of the human condition. Weber concluded his Munich address by conceding that not everyone could withstand such greater knowledge: “To the person who cannot bear the fate of the times like a man,” he declared, “one must say: may he rather return silently, without the usual publicity build-up of renegades, but simply

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and plainly. The arms of the old churches are opened widely and compassionately for him.”70 Weber abstained from any explicit judgment concerning those who chose a religious return. But his words conveyed the harsh verdict that religion signified retreat, a refuge for those who lacked true courage. Weber did not mean for his verdict to become the groundwork for a new, post-Nietzschean ethic. But in the foregoing analysis I have tried to show how German existentialism would not have emerged as it did if it had not embraced something like the Weberian conception of modernity. The inher­ itance may strike us as deeply ironic, since Heidegger’s Freiburg address expressed disdain for what science might achieve. However, Heidegger’s own disclosure of human groundlessness depends upon a distinctive interpretation of science as having cleared the world of all its prior metaphysical supports.71 For it is only if one subscribes to the Weberian narrative of disen­ chantment that one would be prone to accept its image of contemporary meaninglessness. But this, too, is a metaphysical picture: the Nothing is the vacancy that remains after the death of God.

Notes 1. The German text was first published in December, some five months after it was delivered, by Friedrich Cohen Verlag (Bonn, 1929). For this essay I have taken all English quotations from the version found in Martin Heidegger, Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 82–96; quotations and parenthetical clarifications from the original German are from Heidegger, Wegmarken (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1967), 103–22. 2. Heidegger, Wegmarken, 90. 3. Ibid., 89. 4. Max Weber, “Wissenschaft als Beruf,” originally a speech given at Munich University in 1917 (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1919); quotation from “Science As a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 129–56. 5. Weber, “Science As a Vocation,” 143. 6. Ibid., 152. 7. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: And Other Writings, ed. and trans. Peter R. Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (New York: Penguin, 2002), 121. For an explanation of the phrase “casing hard as steel” and a corrective to Talcott Parsons’s more famous but less accurate rendering as “iron cage,” see the note on translation (Weber, The Protestant Ethic, lxix). Also see Baehr, “The ‘Iron Cage’ and the ‘Shell

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Hard as Steel’: Parsons, Weber, and the Stahlhartes Gehäuse Metaphor in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism,” History and Theory 40 (May 2001): 153–69. 8. Weber, “Science As a Vocation,” 155. 9. “The objective validity of all empirical knowledge rests exclusively upon the ordering of the given reality according to categories which are subjective in a specific sense, namely, in that they present the presuppositions of our knowledge and are based on the presupposition of the value of those truths which empirical knowledge alone is able to give us. The means available to our science offer nothing to those persons to whom this truth is of no value. It should be remembered that the belief in the value of scientific truth is the product of certain cultures and is not a product of man’s original nature.” Cited from Max Weber’s 1904 essay, “Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy,” in Weber, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, ed. Edward A. Shils and Henry A. Finch (New York: Free Press, 1949), 49–112. This was, in essence, the theory of social-scientific concept formation that Weber borrowed from his neo-Kantian colleagues Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert. 10. Tracy B. Strong diagnoses this attitude in “Max Weber and the Bourgeoisie,” in The Barbarism of Reason: Max Weber and the Twilight of Enlightenment, ed. Asher Horowitz and Terry Maley (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 113–38. 11. See, for example, Weber’s hostile remarks on modernist attempts to resurrect religion: “That science today is irreligious no one will doubt in his innermost being, even if he will not admit it to himself. Redemption from the rationalism and intellectualism of science is the fundamental presupposition of living in union with the divine. This, or something similar in meaning, is one of the fundamental watchwords one hears among German youth, whose feelings are attuned to religion or who crave religious experiences. They crave not only religious experience but experience as such. The only thing that is strange is the method that is now followed: the spheres of the irrational, the only spheres that intellectualism has not yet touched, are now raised into consciousness and put under its lens. For in practice this is where the modern intellectualist form of romantic irrationalism leads” (quoted from Weber, “Science As a Vocation,” 142–43). 12. For a biographical treatment see Suzanne Kirkbright, Karl Jaspers: A Biography—Navigations in Truth (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004). For a philosophical introduction see Chris Thornhill, Karl Jaspers: Politics and Metaphysics (London: Routledge, 2002) and Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Freedom and Karl Jaspers’ Philosophy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981). 13. For a summary of the Sunday circle see Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), 66. 14. Karl Jaspers, “Philosophical Autobiography,” in The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, ed. Paul Arthur Schlipp (New York: Tudor, 1957), 29. 15. Quoted from the commemorative address for Max Weber by Jaspers, in Rede bei der von der Heidelberger Studentenschaft am 17 Juli 1920 veranstalteten Trauerfeier (Tübingen: Mohr/Siebeck, 1920), 3.

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16. Jaspers, Max Weber: Deutsches Wesen im politischen Denken, im Forschen und Philosophieren (Oldenburg: Gerhard Stalling, 1932), 76. For a full inquiry into the importance of Weber’s persona for Jaspers and a host of later Weimar intellectuals, see the excellent dissertation by Joshua Derman, “From Charisma to Canonization: Max Weber in German Thought and Politics, 1920–1945,” Department of History, Princeton University, Princeton, N.J., 2008. 17. Jaspers, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1925), 229. 18. Ibid., 304–6. 19. Ibid., 229. 20. Jaspers, Philosophie, 3rd ed. (Berlin: Springer, 1956), Band III, Metaphysik, 225. 21. Jaspers, “Die tiefste Wirklichkeitsnähe ist zugleich die Bereitschaft zum wahren Scheitern,” in Jaspers, Von der Wahrheit (Munich: Piper, 1947), 529. 22. Jaspers, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, 255 (emphasis added). 23. Heinrich Rickert, “Psychologie der Weltanschauungen und Philosophie der Werte,” Logos. Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie der Kultur 9 (1920), Heft 1, 1–42. Rickert’s global condemnation of the movement appeared shortly thereafter: see Heinrich Rickert, Die Philosophie des Lebens; Darstellung und Kritik der philosophischen Modeströmungen unserer Zeit, 2nd ed. (Tübingen: Mohr, 1922). 24. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 11th ed. (1962; Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1967), 249; for English-language quotations I have consulted Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). Heidegger’s earliest published comments on Jaspers are in “Anmerkungung zu Karl Jaspers Psychologie der Weltanschauungen,” which appeared in Heidegger, Wegmarken, 1–44. A careful translation and commentary can be found in Theodore Kiesiel and Thomas Sheehan, eds., Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of His Early Occasional Writings, 1910–1927 (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 110–49. A careful comparative study is William D. Blattner, “Heidegger’s Debt to Jaspers’s Concept of the Limit Situation,” in Heidegger and Jaspers, ed. Alan M. Olson (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), 153–65. 25. Heidegger, Being and Time, 78. 26. Ibid., 125. 27. Ibid., 62. 28. “The Self of everyday Dasein is the ‘One-self ’ [das Man-selbst], which we distinguish from the authentic Self—that is, from the Self which has been taken hold of in its own way [eigens ergriffen]. As the One-self, the particular Dasein has been dispersed into the ‘One’ and must first find itself.” [“Das Selbst des alltäglichen Daseins ist das Man-selbst, das wir von dem eigentlichen, das heißt eigens ergriffenen Selbst unter­ scheiden. Als Man-selbst ist das jeweilige Dasein in das Man zerstreut und muß sich erst finden.”] Heidegger, Being and Time, 167; Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 129. For a thorough historical treatment of the genesis of this idea, see Michael E. Zimmerman,

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The Eclipse of the Self: The Development of Heidegger’s Concept of Authenticity (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981); also see the collected essays in Mark A. Wrathall, Jeff Malpas, and Hubert L. Dreyfus, eds., Heidegger, Authenticity, and Modernity: Essays in Honor of Hubert L. Dreyfus (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000). 29. “Das eigentliche Selbstsein beruht nicht auf einem von Man abgelösten Ausnahmezustand des Subjekts, sondern ist eine existenzielle Modifikation des Man als eines wesenhaften Existenzials.” Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 130; Heidegger, Being and Time, 168. 30. “Wenn das Dasein die Welt eigens entdeckt . . . , wenn es ihm selbst sein eigentliches Sein erschließt, dann vollzieht sich dieses Entdecken von ‘Welt’ und Erschließen von Dasein immer als Wegräumen der Verdeckungen und Verdunkelungen, als Zerbrechen der Verstellungen, mit denen sich das Dasein gegen es selbst abriegelt.” Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 129; Heidegger, Being and Time, 167. 31. See, for example, the lucid analysis by Hubert L. Dreyfus and Jane Rubin, “Kierkegaard, Division II, and Later Heidegger,” in Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s Being and Time Division I (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 283–340. 32. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 286–87; Heidegger, Being and Time, 333. 33. “In der Unheimlichkeit steht das Dasein ursprünglich mit sich selbst zusammen. Sie bringt dieses Seiende vor seine unverstellte Nichtigkeit, die zur Möglichkeit seines eigensten Seinkönnens gehört.” Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 286–87; Heidegger, Being and Time, 333. 34. “Das zu verstehen, gehört mit zu dem, was er erschließt, sofern die Entschlossenheit erst dem Dasein die eigentliche Durchsichtigkeit gibt.” Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 299; Heidegger, Being and Time, 345. 35. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 288–94; Heidegger, Being and Time, 334–40. 36. The best account of Heidegger’s relation to Southwestern neo-Kantianism is Charles Bambach, Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1995). 37. See Edmund Husserl, “Philosophie als strenge Wissenschaft,” Logos 1 (1911): 289–341. 38. Peter Wust, Die Auferstehung der Metaphysik (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1920); Heinrich Kerler, Die auferstandene Metaphysik: Eine Abrechnung, 2nd ed. (Ulm: Heinrich Kerler, 1921). For a summary of this broadscale transformation, see Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010). 39. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 2; Heidegger, Being and Time, 21. 40. It should be noted that Heidegger did offer a lecture course at Freiburg the following winter (1929/30) on “the fundamental concepts of metaphysics,” later published as The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. William McNeill and Nicholas Walker (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001).

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41. On the controversial question of Heidegger’s apparent dissent from the Husserlian ideal of scientific phenomenology, see (among others) Steven Galt Crowell, “Does the Husserl/Heidegger Feud Rest on a Mistake? An Essay on Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology,” Husserl Studies 18, no. 2 (2002): 123–40, and Thomas Sheehan, “Husserl and Heidegger: The Making and Unmaking of a Relationship,” in Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology and the Confrontation with Heidegger (1927–1931). Husserliana. Collected Works, vol. 6, ed. Thomas Sheehan and Richard E. Palmer (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), 1–34. For some general remarks on “bracketing” see Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1960), especially 339–41 and 361–63. 42. Weber, “Science As a Vocation,” 143. 43. Heidegger, Wegmarken, 83. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Weber, “Science As a Vocation,” 144. 47. Heidegger, Wegmarken, 84. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., 86. 50. “Nihilation will not submit to calculation in terms of annihilation and negation. The nothing itself nihilates” (Ibid., 90). 51. Ibid., 87. 52. For the definitions of “everydayness” and “averageness” see Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 44; Heidegger, Being and Time, 69. 53. Heidegger, Wegmarken, 88. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., 89. 56. The reader should note that, in his translation of the Freiburg lecture, McNeill retains Heidegger’s original hyphenation “Da-sein.” This is atypical; in Being and Time and other texts, Heidegger writes “Dasein” without hyphenation. 57. Heidegger, Wegmarken, 91. 58. Ibid. 59. For the idea of a clearing, the locus classicus is Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Heidegger, Pathmarks, trans. William A. McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 239–76. 60. Heidegger, Wegmarken, 91. 61. Ibid., 96. 62. Implicit in this phrase could also be Heidegger’s polemic against the neoKantian Hermann Cohen, whose Logic of Pure Knowledge set forth an idealistic theory of scientific inquiry based upon the principle that the mind generates its own theoret­ ical objects. This “principle of origins” may be the unspoken target when Heidegger suggests that “logic” itself dissolves in a “more original questioning.” For further

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clarification see Peter E. Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), chapter 1, “Toward Metaphysics: Cohen’s Opus Posthumum and the Origins of the New Thinking,” and especially 42–51. 63. Heidegger, Wegmarken, 95. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., 96. 66. Weber, “Science As a Vocation,” 152. 67. On the context of Weber’s speech, see the introductory remarks by David Owen and Tracy B. Strong in Weber, The Vocation Lectures: “Science As a Vocation,” “Politics As a Vocation,” trans. Rodney Livingstone (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 2004), especially xix; also see Guenther Roth and Wolfgang Schluchter, Max Weber’s Vision of History: Ethics and Methods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), especially “Excursus: The Question of the Dating of ‘Science As a Vocation’ and ‘Politics As a Vocation,’” 113–16. 68. Weber, “Science As a Vocation,” 152. 69. Andreas Huyssen, “Fortifying the Heart—Totally: Ernst Jünger’s Armored Texts,” in Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (New York: Routledge, 1995), 127–44, 132. 70. Weber, “Science As a Vocation,” 155. 71. For further discussion on Heidegger’s complex stance on the question of metaphysical realism as it pertains to modern science, see Peter E. Gordon, “Science, Realism, and the Unworlding of the World,” in The Blackwell Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, ed. Mark Wrathall and Hubert Dreyfus (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). For an account of Heideggerian authenticity as a response to atheism, see Gordon, “L’athéisme comme événement: L’anti-fondationalisme de Heidegger,” in Heidegger, le danger et la promesse (Paris: Editions KIMÉ, 2005).

3

Sisyphus’s Progeny Existentialism in France Jonathan Judaken A lecture on philosophy provokes a riot, with hundreds crowding in and thousands turned away. Books on philosophical problems preaching no cheap creed and offering no panacea but, on the contrary, so difficult as to require actual thinking sell like detective stories. Plays in which the action is a matter of words, not plot, and which offer a dialogue of reflection and ideas run for months and are attended by enthusiastic crowds. Analyses of the situation of man in the world, of the fundaments of human relationship, of Being and the Void not only give rise to a new literary movement but also figure as possible guides for a fresh political orientation. Philosophers become newspapermen, playwrights, novelists. . . . This is what is happening, from all reports, in Paris. —Hannah Arendt, “French Existentialism,” The Nation, February 23, 1946

Advertisements in Le monde, Le figaro, Combat, and Libération announced that Jean-Paul Sartre would pronounce on the topic, “Is Existentialism a Humanism?” on October 29, 1945. It was only two months after atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the mushroom clouds above the Pacific ushering in the age of instant mass death. It was just six months after Hitler’s suicide; the newsreels and photographs of concentration and death camps revealed the horror Nazism had wrought, captured in the mounds of bodies shunted into mass graves. The lecture followed shortly after the anniversary of the euphoric Liberation of Paris from the German Occupation (1940–44), times the French refer to simply as “the dark years.”1 The Club Maintenant, an institute set up after the Liberation by Jacques Calmy and Marc Beigbeder to provide “literary and intellectual stimulus,”

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­ rganized the lecture. It was a packed house that evening, charged with exo citement, the audience eager to find light in the darkness. People had crowded into the hall on the Left Bank of Paris to hear Sartre, the diminutive, bespectacled prophet who would be consecrated after the lecture as “the high priest of existentialism.”2 He spoke without notes, just his inimitable voice hammering out his theses. The written version of the talk is based on a stenographer’s transcript published by Éditions Nagel one year later—­sometimes to the regret of its author for allowing his complex philosophical ideas to be oversimplified.3 But the address was hailed as the highpoint of the cultural calendar. “This lecture,” writes Annie Cohen-Solal, “became one of the mythical moments of the postwar era, the first media event of its time, giving rise to the ‘Sartre phenomenon.’”4 Thereafter, photographers and journalists would pursue Sartre and Si­ mone de Beauvoir. The couple would become the embodiment of the key word in the title of his talk—“existentialism”—even as this lecture became the most famous statement of what defined this movement and moment in the history of ideas. Sartre, after all, had seized the occasion to frame the discussion in precisely these terms. After elucidating how Sartre characterized existentialism in his public lecture, this chapter situates Existentialism Is a Humanism in its cultural moment. It considers the response by his key intellectual rivals: Marxists and Catholics. The result of the debate that the talk occasioned was that “existentialism” became the buzzword du jour in Paris, constantly circling around certain key figures associated with a philosophical current in the process of being canonized but also with a body of literature, theater, art, and even a certain fashion sensibility. This process of sensationalizing existentialism in the popular press, along with a shared set of thematic concerns, came to distinguish the Paris school of existentialism. But if existentialism was given a clear place on the cultural map of postwar France by this lecture, it was because of a deep vein within French thought that Sartre and his cohort had mined. We will conclude, then, by examining the rich philosophical discussion that preceded the triumph of existentialism in postwar Paris and its ongoing relevance today.

Existentialism Is a Humanism L’existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism Is a Humanism) opens with Sartre saying that he has come to clear up the misconceptions about existen-

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tialism spread by Catholics and Marxists. These were the three ideological contenders for supremacy in postwar France, a philosophical tripartism that “mirrored the political tripartism of the coalition governments of the Fourth Republic.”5 Countering their charges, Sartre affirmed that existentialism was not a philosophy of “quietism and despair”; nor was it a “bourgeois philosophy” based on a rancid individualism, as the Marxists claimed. Neither was existentialism “sordid, suspicious, or base” and concerned only with “the dark side of human life,” as the Catholics maintained.6 “What, then, is ‘existentialism’?” Sartre asked.7 He thus posed the question that his response would evermore delineate, boiling it down to a series of unforgettable formulations: “existence precedes essence,” “man is condemned to be free,” “[man is] responsible for all men,” and “He must choose without reference to any preestablished values.” Sartre maintained that there were two kinds of existentialists: religious existentialists, who followed Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel and are exemplified by Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel; and existential atheists, who followed the footsteps of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. “What they have in common,” Sartre claimed, “is simply their belief that existence precedes essence.”8 What this entails is that there is no core to the human being that defines us—whether as a “rational biped,” as Aristotle declared, or as an eternal soul, as Christian thinkers would have it. Neither are we defined by an abstract “human nature,” as the philosophes of the Enlightenment would maintain; nor by “the indelible stamp of his lowly [animal] origin,” as Darwin contended; nor by our Oedipal complex, as Freud asserted; nor by our relation to the mode of production, as Marxists claimed. Existentialism is a categorical rejection of all these forms of determinism or essentialism. But if there is no essence to human nature, Sartre explained, “there is nonetheless a universal human condition.”9 All humans are born into a world that they did not create, into bodies that they did not choose, into a space they share with others; and all are destined to die. These are the universal conditions that structure our possibilities. Class, race, place, the body, and the gaze of the Other delimit our potential. Nonetheless, human beings choose how they respond to these constraints. Man is thus “condemned to be free: condemned, because he did not create himself, yet nonetheless free, because once cast into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” Human beings are therefore defined not by some constitutive essence but by the choices that they make.10

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Properly understood, this confers not a giddy liberty or individualistic hubris but instead what Saint John of the Cross termed the “dark night of the soul,” a profound self-reckoning. For its full apprehension demands that human beings are not only responsible for themselves but are also “responsible for all men.”11 Hence there is an unbearable lightness to being human, a hyperbolic responsibility that Karl Jaspers would call our “metaphysical guilt.”12 Referencing directly the patron saint of existential philosophy, Sartre writes, “This is the anguish Kierkegaard called the anguish of Abraham.”13 Most people respond to the human condition through evasion of one type or another, the various modalities of which Sartre analyzed as forms of “bad faith” (mauvaise foi). Here he picked up a theme running from Pascal’s notion of “divertissement” (distractions) in his Pensées to Kierkegaard’s discussion of the “aesthetic man” in Either/Or through Heidegger’s analysis of inauthenticity in Sein und Zeit (Being and Time). Sartre held that we occlude human choice by insisting that things have always been this way or that conditions of oppression or disempowerment are part of the natural order of things. Or we numb ourselves with mindless amusements, or food, or drugs, or work. Or we fall into what Heidegger described as “distantiality, averageness, and leveling down . . . idle talk . . . temptation, tranquillizing, alienation, and self-entangling.”14 We are in bad faith, Sartre insists, when we deny our own freedom or the freedom of an-other, treating them as an object. Indeed, the starting point of existentialism, Sartre noted, citing Dostoevsky, is the claim “If God does not exist, then everything is permissible.”15 But to say “everything is permissible” is not to say that everything ought to be permitted or that “anything goes.” To be clear, the heart of the human predicament is precisely to judge how and where to draw that line and, in particular, how to do so in the absence of absolute and unchanging moral laws. For Sartre’s atheistic existentialism, in fact, any assertion of a priori values is a form of bad faith because to invoke a determined axiology is to deny human freedom. Thus, the human condition is to live in a state of “abandonment” (as Heidegger put it) or “forlornness” (as Pascal had previously articulated it), since “even if God were to exist, it would make no difference.”16 In short, the human quandary is to live with the implications of Nietzsche’s claim that “God is dead.” This means embracing the notion that, like a god, each human is the inventor and creator of values. “Moral choice is like constructing a work of art,” declared Sartre. Ethics and art are both creative situations; they are like Picasso’s blank canvases, compositions that become what they are in the

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process of their production and with an outcome that is never arbitrary even though its final form is never predetermined.17 There is no sophomoric glee in inhabiting a world abandoned by God, a “broken world” as Gabriel Marcel would claim, an “ambiguous world” as Simone de Beauvoir would insist, a “dislocated world” as Maurice MerleauPonty would call it, or an “absurd” world, as Albert Camus would contend.18 But Sartre insisted on taking responsibility for the world. He concluded his argument as follows: Once a man realizes, in his state of abandonment, that it is he who imposes values, he can will but one thing: freedom as the foundation of all values. . . . And in thus willing freedom, we discover that it depends entirely on the freedom of others, and that the freedom of others depends on our own. . . . Consequently, when, operating on the level of complete authenticity, I have acknowledged that existence precedes essence, that man is a free being who, under any circumstances, can only ever will his freedom, I have at the same time acknowledged that I must will the freedom of others.19 Sartre’s message gathered the threads of what emerged as the existential canon: he knitted together the thoughts of Pascal and Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky, the ideas of Nietzsche, Jaspers, and Heidegger—and did so in an idiom that echoed across the cultural landscape in postwar Paris and, from there, resounded across the globe. The lexicon of the existential vocabulary was laid bare: angst, authenticity, contingency, existence versus essence, freedom, the human condition, responsibility.20 In establishing Sartre as the “pope of existentialism,” Existentialism Is a Humanism became the gospel of a new current that swept a Western world struggling to make meaning of the dark side of modernity exemplified by the Holocaust and Hiroshima.

Marxists and Catholics Retort Both Marxists and Catholics immediately launched into battle over the term “existentialism,” competing to brand the latest trend in intellectual chic. By late 1944, the coalition that had unified the Resistance was cracking. Marxist intellectuals began to attack Sartre because they saw him as a serious intellectual

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threat, especially for his appeal to youth and to the writers, journalists, teachers, and professors who were the main social base attracted to existentialism and for whose support the Communists were competing. Earliest to enter the fray was Roger Caillois; he was followed by a spate of others—including Henri Lefebvre, who accused existentialism of being a “‘war machine’ against Communism, an effort to enchant and mystify the young of France.”21 Publishing a full-length rebuff (entitled L’existentialisme) to Sartre’s work, Lefebvre maintained that “existentialism does not represent a ‘movement,’ [but is] barely a tiny group of stars and snobs” fostered by the publicity machine but ultimately resting on the incredible inconsistency of university philosophy (excuse me, of the official bourgeois scholasticism), the emptiness of the reigning spirituality, the moral decomposition of the so-called superior classes. . . . The existentialist scandal is nothing but verbosity. . . . [T]here is a morbidity, a neurotic element in it with infantile regression. Thus Sartre tells his tales. It is the magic and metaphysics of shit.22 Roger Garaudy denounced Sartre along similar lines: “Every class has the literature it deserves. The upper bourgeoisie in decay delights in the erotic obsessions of a Henry Miller or the intellectual fornications of Jean-Paul ­Sartre.”23 Another Marxist rip, Henri Mougin’s La sainte famille existentialiste, was less aggressive and contemptuous in tone than Caillois, Lefebvre, and Garaudy, but still it ultimately dismissed existentialism as the latest reworking of an idealist tradition that Mougin traced from Bergson to Breton. Sartre was like Peter Pan, a man who had lost his shadow: “shadows of Husserl, of Hamelin, of Brunschvicg, of Lachelier; shadows of Bergson, of Maurice Blondel, shadow of Kierkegaard; and why not the shadow of Pascal? . . . Others glimpse the shadow of the Devil. Perhaps, as well, the shadow of André Breton.”24 Mougin argued that, although Sartre sought to resolve the contradictions of the tradition of idealism indicated in this outline of names, when one “unstitched Sartre’s ontology” what shook out was another “tawdry, idealist garment,” another form of bourgeois idealism wrapped in the lexicon of a phenomenological existentialism whose contradictions could be resolved only by embracing dialectical materialism.25 It was Jean Kanapa who posthumously put together Mougin’s little book and whose own polemic, L’existentialisme n’est pas un humanisme, was the most effusive rant yet against existentialism as a “philosophical mystification.”

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Kanapa was a former student of Sartre’s and initially a big fan of his philosophy. He was actually supported by Sartre during the Vichy years and had a fling with de Beauvoir. When attracted to Stalinism, however, he turned upon the Holy Father. It was Kanapa who foisted the title of “pope” upon Sartre in order to condemn this “basket of crabs, this existentialist clique [chapelle].”26 Excoriating the whole existentialist camp, Kanapa wrote off each in turn with epithets rather than arguments: Heidegger was a “Hitlerian ideologue”; Lev Shestov and Nikolai Berdyaev were “logomachical mystics”; Marcel was a “bric-a-brac of mysticism, of paternalism and of exhibitionism” coupled with “Petainism”; thanks to Jean Wahl, the “‘official’ introducer,” existentialism had breached the gates of the University. And then there were the “existentialist-paragons,” including Camus, Sartre, and de Beauvoir, as well their “numerous epigones.”27 For Kanapa, refusing to accept Marxism consigned the whole filthy bunch to the dustbin of history, since “the existentialists, the liars, the enemies of the people, THE ENEMIES OF MAN” were nothing more than “ideologues in the service of the reactionary bourgeoisie.”28 For the Catholic intelligentsia the stakes were higher, since their battle was waged less out of political exigency than as a struggle over hearts and minds. Existentialism was annexing moral and philosophical territory close to their central concerns. For this reason, Catholic intellectuals sought to stand their ground against atheistic existentialism. There were two streams of this Catholic response. One was the somewhat predictable response of conservatives, who were shocked at the upending of established values. But left-oriented thinkers who were aligned with the Catholic resistance movements also hoped to stem the rapid advance of existentialism. So their reviews and newspapers carried hostile reactions, and “books appeared in a similar vein.”29 Jacques Maritain, the godfather of Catholic personalism and “the most widely known and most influential of contemporary Catholic philosophers,”30 brushed aside Sartre’s brand of existentialism in the name of his own Thomist existentialism. “This brief treatise on existence and the existent,” he wrote, throwing down the gauntlet in the opening line of his Court traité de l’existence et de l’existant (1947), “may be described as an essay on the existentialism of St. Thomas Aquinas.” Maritain considered Thomism “to be the only authentic existentialism.” Alluding to the popularity of the term “existentialism” in the period just after Sartre’s talk, he insisted that he was not “attempting to trick out Thomas Aquinas in a costume fashionable to our day”; he was instead “asserting a prior right” to the catchphrase of the moment.31

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Launching his critique, Maritain wrote that although Sartre’s “apocryphal existentialism” also places existence as primary, in so doing it abolishes all “intelligible nature or essence.”32 He consequently placed Sartre within a modernist tradition that he had long condemned: “This time it is the finite existence of subjects devoid of essence whom a primordial atheistic option flings into the chaos of slimy and disaggregated appearances that make up a radically irrational world.”33 Instead, contended Maritain, “my essence owes to my existence its very presence in the world, and . . . it owes its intelligibility to Existence in pure act.”34 So Sartrean existentialism was only the latest trend in an atheist tradition that ultimately could not provide either a metaphysics or an ethics, which Maritain proceeded to elucidate from the works of St. Thomas. Etienne Gilson, the renowned Thomist historian of philosophy, echoed and elaborated the argument laid down by Maritain. In L’être et l’essence (1948), Gilson began hammering home the claim that “Thomism is not another existential philosophy; it is the only one.”35 Thomist metaphysics was existential in its own right, Gilson maintained, and was “existentialism as it should be understood.”36 The key difference between Sartrean and Thomistic existentialism is that “the Thomists are concerned with the objective existence of all kinds of existents, [whereas] contemporary existentialists are concerned with human existence.” Exactly as Maritain had done, Arthur Cochrane argued, “on the basis of this existence-essence ontology, Gilson offers a critique of essentialism and contemporary existentialism. His thesis is that ‘just as essentialism is a philosophy of being minus existence, existentialism is a philosophy of existence minus being.’”37 Moreover, both essentialism and atheistic existentialism resulted in a desiccation of European philosophy that only Thomistic existentialism could adequately rescue. While no Thomist, the Catholic personalist Emmanuel Mounier, founder of the journal Esprit, offered the most sustained Catholic response to Sartre’s brand of existentialism. “With his team in Esprit and his network of supporters and associates,” writes Michael Kelly, “Emmanuel Mounier led the strongest of the Catholic ideologies in post-Liberation France, and occupied a vanguard position in the church’s spiritual and intellectual struggles against its ideological rivals [Marxism and existentialism].”38 In a series of articles that first appeared in Esprit between April and October 1946 and were later published in an oft-reprinted book, Introduction aux existentialismes (Existentialist Philosophies: An Introduction, 1947), Mounier sought to show what all existentialisms shared. More importantly, he sought to assess the shortcomings and blind spots of atheistic or phenomenological existentialism.

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His first move was to marginalize Sartre’s branch of existentialism in a living tree of existentialist inspiration whose roots were to be found in Socrates, the Stoics, St. Augustine, and St. Bernard, whose trunk was defined by Pascal and Kierkegaard, and whose bountiful branches included Bergson, Péguy, Barth, Buber, Berdyaev, Chestov, Soloviev, Marcel, Jaspers, and of course Mounier’s own philosophy of Personalism (see figure I.1 in the introduction to this volume). The atheistic branch from Nietzsche via phenomenology to Heidegger and Sartre was consequently out on a limb. By emphasizing the fecundity of Christian existentialism particularly, Mounier suggested it might “simply be said, then, that Existentialism is only another way of preaching Christianity.”39 Mounier’s book thus helped to create a genealogy for existentialism that emphasized its religious sources. Indeed, his family tree would have an enduring influence in the canonization of existentialism—even though it did not ultimately lop off the Sartrean branch. Mounier’s next move was to deal with existentialism thematically, which had the merit of allowing him to propose his own principles of coherence rather than emphasizing individual thinkers.40 What he developed in the process was a critical take on Sartrean existentialism. But he began in the spirit of comity. Mounier first explored a set of interrelated themes in contemporary existentialisms and identified their shared starting points. In seeking to shake human beings out of their complacency and their moral and metaphysical stupor, all existentialisms start with the contingency of being human and the impotence of reason to fully comprehend existence. Nonetheless, “all Existentialists believe in putting the burdens of the world and the fate of the world on the shoulders of man himself.”41 This disconnect entails “anguish,” a central notion “common to every member of the group extending from Pascal to Sartre.”42 The flip side of anxiety is that individuals must still make decisions, which (according to Kierkegaard) is the “privileged moment of existence.” The classic Socratic injunction “know thyself ” is thereby replaced by “choose for thyself ” as the central precept of human existence. All existentialists also concur that “truth is subjectivity,” as Kierkegaard famously put it. Therefore, they all renounce absolute truth and instead pursue the truths of a purpose-driven life. However, religious existentialism differs from the atheistic or phenomenological tradition in the role that it ascribes to estrangement or alienation in the human condition. “In place of the Tu es vere Deus absconditus [Verily, thou art the hidden God, which defines Christian existentialism], atheistic Existential philosophy sets up a Tu es vere homo absconditus [Verily, thou art

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the hidden man].”43 Man in search of God plays the central role in religious existentialism, whereas human alienation plays a key role in phenomenological existentialism. In the remaining chapters of his book Mounier indicated how Christian existentialism differed from the tradition of phenomenological existentialism on a whole set of other core issues as well: authenticity versus inauthenticity, balancing subjectivity and objectivity, and “the concept of otherperson-ness.” This last point is a vital difference. For Sartre, “conflict is the fundamental basis of being-for-another-person.” Mounier disagrees because Sartre’s “analysis assumes the exclusion of all other possible experiences, and claims to be the ne varietur account of being-for-another-person.”44 He offers instead the work of Gabriel Marcel as an alternative phenomenology of the gaze. For Marcel, “there is only another-person who exists. He haunts me.” But in Sartre’s dialectic of the gaze, “There can only be a sort of brotherhood of the damned in which each member is a stranger to everyone else and a stranger to himself as well—a stranger, and not another-person.”45 Against this depiction of the human condition by atheistic existentialism, Mounier calls for a “spirituality . . . revitalized and re-Existentialized,” attuned to an alternative conception of transcendence than phenomenological existentialism because it recognizes the infinite and the infinite transcendence of the Other before our-selves.46 As Michael Kelly summarizes it: “Sartre in his paranoia had disregarded the possibility of human relationships as a mutual enrichment in which shame, fear and hatred could be replaced by respect, fidelity and love. But [Mounier] added that only Christianity could show the way . . . with a divine inner transcendence.”47 Mounier hit home his conclusion most directly in his contribution to Pour et contre l’existentialisme: Grand débat (1948). As a result of the divergences he outlined, wrote Mounier, “Christian Existentialism and atheistic existentialism, and I attach this principally to Sartre, find those points [on which] its perspective becomes incompatible with the Christian perspective.”48

“The Existentialist Offensive” In part because of this public debate occasioned by Marxists and Catholics, Sartre’s existentialism ultimately defined both the popular and highbrow discussions. At the start of his lecture, Sartre admitted that existentialism had already become a succès de scandale, like surrealism that preceded it. “It has

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become fashionable,” he declared. “People like to call this musician or that painter an ‘existentialist.’ A columnist in Clarté goes by the pen name ‘The Existentialist.’” Rather than dampen public enthusiasm when he suggested that, properly understood, “it is strictly intended for specialists and philosophers,” Sartre’s Existentialism Is a Humanism amplified the popular craze because his talk synthesized the currents of the moment.49 Cultivating the existentialist myth quickly became a French export.50 “Now a second-class power,” Simone de Beauvoir wrote in her memoirs, “France was exalting her most characteristic national products with an eye on the export market: haute couture and littérature.”51 Sensational weeklies like Samedi-Soir conflated the two in a 1947 story on the café and nightclub life of the literary Left Bank, suggesting that the hipsters who congregated there were all “existentialists.”52 They illustrated the story with a tourist map, including all of the “must see” spots in Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The epicenter of existentialism, the magazine explained, was the square just outside of the Café des Deux Magots, opposite the Romanesque church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Today, it has been officially proclaimed the Place Jean-Paul Sartre—Simone de Beauvoir. A cluster of bookstores, publishing houses, galleries, and cafés surround it. It sits opposite the colorful Brasserie Lipp, with the Deux Magots forming the base of a triangle with the Art Deco elegance of the Café de Flore, where de Beauvoir and Sartre would often write and gather with comrades. The square is a short walk from the prestigious lycées, Henri IV and Louis le Grand, that Sartre had attended before his entrance into the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS). The ENS was the training ground of France’s intellectual elite, where he would meet as classmates Raymond Aron, George Canguilhem, and Paul Nizan. The diarist Jean Galtier-Boissière remarked that, after the Liberation, Saint-Germain-des-Prés became the pope of existentialism’s cathedral.53 In fact, Sartre moved into an apartment on Rue Bonapartre with a view of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés intersection. Given his popularity, working in his favorite cafés soon became impossible. He migrated to the basement bar of the Pont-Royal Hotel, down the street from his publisher, Gallimard. He was ensconced as an underground man because magazines like France-Dimanche, with over a million copies printed weekly, contained copiously illustrated stories describing in detail how he entered the Café de Flore “with his short steps, his head buried in the dirty wool of an unkempt jacket, its pockets bursting with books and papers, a Balzac novel from the public library under the arm . . . removing the scarves from his neck and . . . warmed by a few

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cognacs, the small pipe stuck in his sensual lips burning cheap tobacco . . . taking a two-bit pen from his briefcase . . . to scribble forty pages of manuscript.” Even the pipe or Gaullois cigarettes that he incessantly lit became emblems of the existentialist style. Samedi Soir went so far as to itemize the requisite apparel to fully fit the part, which over time would devolve into the clichéd black turtleneck as essential garb.54 Georges Dudognon, whose photographs captured some of the legendary scenes of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, would say later of existentialism, “nobody really knew what it was, apart from ­clothing.”55 “For style-conscious youth on the Left Bank,” writes Frances Morris, “Boris Vian was their Pied Piper and the young singer Juliette Gréco their voice.”56 After work, Sartre and his cohort enjoyed going to hear Gréco and Vian perform at the nightclubs and bars like Bal Nègre and Le Club Saint-Germain, which was burrowed into a cellar near the Café de Flore.57 The rhythm of existentialism was trumpeted by bebop jazz groups in clubs, like Le Méphisto, that Claude Roy in his memoirs called “an agitated meeting place of agitators”—the perfect ambiance for a group of people who “wanted to change the world during the daytime, and exchange ideas at night.”58 Vian was not only a musician but also a writer. In his first novel, L’ecume des jours (Froth on the Daydream), he parodied Sartre and existentialism, which seemed to be everywhere like froth on the ocean of French culture. One of his characters, Chick, was so obsessed with the philosopher “Jean-Sol Partre” that he spent all of his money and energy collecting Partre’s literature. Hoping to save him, his lover Alise tries to persuade Partre to stop publishing books. Another of his young characters wonders, “How many articles has Jean-Sol Partre written this last year? . . . At any rate, there wasn’t enough time for him to count them all before he got home.”59 This was the case because, in what de Beauvoir called the “existentialist offensive,” the second half of 1945 saw a flurry of existentialist projects reach fruition. Exploring the tensions of freedom and commitment, the first two volumes of Sartre’s trilogy of novels, Les chemins de la liberté (The Roads to Freedom: The Age of Reason and The Reprieve) appeared in September, along with de Beauvoir’s novel Le sang des autres (The Blood of Others). The latter was rapturously received, including by the American reviewer Richard McLaughlin, who called it “the fictional primer on existentialism we have been anxiously awaiting.”60 The following month, in the same week as

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Sartre’s lecture, de Beauvoir’s Les bouches inutiles (The Useless Mouths) opened at the Théâtre du Carrefour. The first issue of Les temps modernes (named after Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times) was also published in October. With its prestigious editorial board— including its founders (Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty) along with Aron, Michel Leiris, Albert Ollivier, and Jean Paulhan—it soon replaced the Nouvelle revue française, which had been discredited after collaborating during the Occupation.61 Its competitors for primacy as the leading independent left intellectual review were Europe, the unofficial monthly organ of the Comité National des Ecrivains (which was dominated by the Communists), and the Catholic personalist journal Esprit. Notwithstanding Albert Camus’s absence from its organizational team, Les temps modernes became the experimental laboratory for the main cohort of phenomenological existentialists in the Paris school.

Sartre and Camus: The Absurd, Nausea, and the Human Condition Camus had also been asked to join the editorial board, but he had chosen to remain apart, continuing as editor of the resistance newspaper Combat until it became a commercial venture in 1947. Interviewed in 1945, he insisted: “No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked. . . . Sartre is an existentialist, and the only book of ideas that I have published, The Myth of Sisyphus, was directed against the philosophers called existentialists.”62 Nonetheless, Camus was perennially perceived as one of the leaders of the Parisian existentialists. Part of the success of the existentialist offensive was attributable to the multiple genres in which the leading figures of the Paris school communicated. They wrote not only in journals but also in books; they wrote not only philosophical works but also literary ones. They spoke as well on the radio and wrote in newspapers, penned film scripts, and had great success in the theater. Sartre, Beauvoir, and Camus all had plays on stage in 1945 (No Exit, The Useless Mouths, Caligula). Written after a reading of Suetonius’ Twelve Caesars, the themes of Camus’s Caligula, as indicated by his introduction, reveal his proximity to Sartre at the time: “Caligula is the story of a superior suicide. It is the story of the most human and the most tragic of errors.

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Unfaithful to mankind through fidelity to himself, Caligula accepts death because he has understood that no one can save himself all alone and that one cannot be free at the expense of others.”63 The theme of suicide dealt with in dramatic form in Caligula would preoccupy Camus as a leitmotif for the burning questions that his early work explored. As the famous opening line of The Myth of Sisyphus bluntly stated: “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy . . . the meaning of life . . . the most urgent of questions.”64 Suicide was a bold way of opening onto Camus’s master concept, the absurd. Indeed, in his eulogy Sartre would pithily crown Camus a “Cartesian of the absurd.”65 Camus’s fictional exploration of the theme was developed in The Stranger. “In a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger,” wrote Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus. “His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.”66 What Camus wanted his readers to reflect upon is the question of how and why we go on living in a universe devoid of inherent meaning and purpose. Like Sartre, Camus set aside the issue of whether or not God exists. Regardless, we find ourselves in a world that is surely not rational, yet we crave order and reason. This is the absurd. We each have to forge a code of conduct and an explanation of life’s purpose in the disconnect and “discomfort in the face of man’s own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this ‘nausea’ as a writer of today [i.e., Sartre] calls it, is also the absurd.”67 But exactly as did Sartre, Camus insisted that “no code of ethics and no effort are justifiable a priori in the face of the cruel mathematics that command our condition.”68 Recognition of the absurdity of existence entails giving up on final solutions, promised lands, indeed all hope for unity, absolutes, closure, and universal reason. “The absurd is the contrary of hope,” Camus opined.69 Accordingly, rather than rejecting the conclusions of existential philosophy, Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus helped to identify its kindred spirits: “From Jaspers to Heidegger, from Kierkegaard to Chestov, from the phenomenologists to Scheler, on the logical plane and on the moral plane, a whole family of minds [are] related by . . . [starting] out from that indescribable universe where contradiction, antinomy, anguish, or impotence reigns.”70 Camus

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maintained that each of his existentialist precursors ultimately backed off from the starkest conclusions of the absurd, trying somehow to reconcile the rational impetus with the madness of the real world. Living in fidelity to the absurd, Camus enjoined, “means a total lack of hope (which is not the same as despair), a permanent rejection (which is not the same as renunciation), and a conscious dissatisfaction (which is not the same as juvenile anxiety).”71 The upshot of Camus’ response came at the conclusion of The Myth of Sisyphus, where he claimed that “Sisyphus is the absurd hero.”72 Camus’s immortal rendition of Sisyphus, doomed by the gods to perpetually push a rock up a mountain, was the ultimate icon of the human condition. “Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of mortals,” we are told, because “the workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. . . . Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent.”73 Sisyphus’ task is to take up his rock each day knowing it will never remain aloft the mountaintop. The task of beginning anew, moving on to the next burden, is unceasing. Nonetheless, Camus directed us to embrace the struggle, for “the struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”74 The cathartic conclusion of Camus’s protagonist Meursault in The Stranger ended on the same note as The Myth of Sisyphus. Even though he had been condemned to the guillotine, a tragic close to his “whole absurd life,” Meursault tells the reader in his last lines that he “had been happy.”75 In words of effusive praise, Sartre’s review of the novel elucidated Camus’s project as close to his own. Sartre maintained that the absurd defines nothing less than the schism “between man’s drive to attain the eternal and the finite nature of his existence.”76 This theme was not new in French literature. Pascal, for example, had “stressed that ‘the natural misfortune of our mortal and feeble condition is so wretched that when we consider it closely, nothing can console us.’” In making this connection with Pascal, Sartre maintained that Camus fit into a tradition of “French moralists whom Charles Andler has rightly called ‘Nietzsche’s precursors.’”77 Meursault’s story in The Stranger, Sartre explained, was a tale of a man born in exile but as such “also a man among men.”78 His life is lived as “a passion [play] of the absurd. The absurd man will not commit suicide; he wants to live without relinquishing any of his certainty, without a future, without hope, without illusion and without resignation, either. The absurd man asserts himself by revolting.”79 Although Camus inherited a French

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­ hilosophical tradition, his style was new to France. He borrowed less from p Kafka, as some suggested, and more from the American modernists like Hemingway: “Equally short sentences can be found in both texts,” wrote Sartre.80 But “despite the influence of German existentialists and American novelists,” the signature was French, “reminiscent of a tale by Voltaire.”81 Sartre’s commentary thus helped seal Camus’s reputation in the French pantheon of letters. It also established in perpetuity the connection between Camus’s book of ideas and his novel: “We could say that the aim of The Myth of Sisyphus is to convey the idea of the absurd, and that of The Stranger to convey the feeling.”82 Just as Sartre signaled the connections between Camus’s philosophy and his literature, Camus recognized the kinship between Sartre’s novel, La nausée (Nausea, 1938), and his thought in a review in the Alger républicain in October 1938. “A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images,” he declared at the opening of his review.83 Furthermore, the images of Sartre’s novel were “the most telling illustrations of the philosophy of anguish as summarized in the thought of Kierkegaard, Chestov, Jaspers, or Heidegger.”84 So in Camus’s review of Sartre, as with Sartre’s later commentary on Camus, we have the distillation of what would emerge as the core statements of their thought aligning with an emerging canon of existentialists. It is “the feeling that life is pointless” that “gives rise to anguish” Camus explained. Lucidity of this can lead to “disgust and revulsion and this revolt of the body is what is called nausea”85—the reflex experienced by Roquentin, the narrating consciousness of Sartre’s novel, who slowly becomes aware of his life’s meaning as his story unfolds. Even more so in Sartre’s short stories published in Le mur (The Wall, 1939) the following year, Camus wrote in a subsequent review, did Sartre “choose characters who have arrived at the limits of their selves, stumbling over absurdity they cannot overcome. The obstacle they come up against is their own lives, and I will go so far as to say that they do so through an excess of liberty.”86 Without a doubt, the point for Sartre was that “the reader too acquires that higher, absurd freedom which leads the characters to their own ends.”87 Camus’s statement pithily expressed the whole purpose of the Sartrean oeuvre. All of this mutual praise in print was written before the two men had ever met. That historic encounter took place at the opening night of Sartre’s play, Les mouches (The Flies) in June 1943, beginning a friendship and eventual quarrel that would define the intellectual and political debate of the next generation.88

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The Existential Drama: Theater, Art, and the Absurd Sartre’s play The Flies, like Camus’s novel and philosophical treatise, should be read in light of the situation in which they first appeared: during the experience of the German Occupation of France in World War II. Following the Nazi blitzkrieg in May–June 1940, France was divided into two main zones. In poet Fernand Gregh’s apposite phrase, France was severed into “une zone occupée et une zone préoccupée.”89 Hitler’s main concern was to make sure that, while he exploited the population materially, he had no problems on his western flank. His solution was to anaesthetize the people by propaganda and by means of a rich cultural life while utilizing the economy to fuel the German war machine. The German propaganda apparatus accordingly cooperated with French cultural elites who were keen to keep the culture industry cashing in and also with such cultural voices as Charles Maurras on the extreme Right, who initially celebrated the Vichy regime as a “divine surprise.” Sartre’s The Flies is a play from the period considered retrospectively as “Resistance theater,” an intellectual kin to the resistance journalism of Camus at Combat. But as The Flies makes evident, resistance to the Nazi jackboot was complicated. Just to have the play staged entailed advertising in the collaborationist press, performing in an Aryanized theater, and having it directed by someone (Charles Dullin) who was looked upon favorably by the German authorities. Yet by exploiting the allegorical and polysemic resonances of the play, Sartre sought to undermine some of the pillars of Vichy rhetoric—specifically, Vichy’s constant refrain that France’s defeat was a result of the Third Republic’s decadence, for which the French must now repent. In Sartre’s retelling of Aeschylus’s tale of Orestes, Aegisthus symbolizes the German usurper and Clytemnestra the French collaborators. But Sartre also wanted to dramatize the problem with fighting back, action that might result in German reprisals of fifty or a hundred people killed.90 Therefore, that Sartre’s protagonist, Orestes, kills not only Aegisthus but also Clytemnesta, symbolically stands for the French who killed Germans and their fellow Frenchmen in the struggle against the Occupation.91 Sartre’s most famous play, Huis clos (No Exit), was likewise first presented to the public during the German Occupation, but after a short run it would be restaged after the Liberation to huge acclaim. “I had wanted to dramatize certain aspects of existentialism,” Sartre later said of the theatrical production,

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without “forgetting the feeling I had had at the Stalag of living constantly and totally beneath the eyes of others, and the Hell which naturally set in under such circumstances.”92 This classic dramatic piece, originally called Les autres (The Others) and containing the justly famous line, “Hell is other people,” was written rapidly in August 1943. Originally it was to be directed by Camus, who was also to play the male lead. It places its three characters into the purgatory of facing others whose constant gaze shames them into confronting the choices they have made in life. The characters lived clouded in their own self-deception, the lies they told others, and their objectification of themselves and those around them. Yet by having to face one another with no escape, the characters gain lucidity about the bad faith that defines their lives. Sartre thus dramatized key aspects of the human condition he had explored abstractly in his most famous philosophical work, L’être et le néant (Being and Nothingness, 1943), and redacted in Existentialism Is a Humanism, keying in on how consciousness butts up against others and the absurdity of the world. The plays of de Beauvoir, Sartre, and Camus thus explored the absurdity of the human condition by rational means. The theater of the absurd would go a step further in depicting “the absurd with absurd means.”93 Radicalizing the themes explored by the existentialists, works like Jean Genet’s Les bonnes (The Maids), which debuted in 1947, shocked audiences not only with carnivalesque characters but also with the stylized staging of ritualized struggles between outcasts and their oppressors. However, the first major bombshell for the theater of the absurd was the success of Eugène Ionesco’s La cantatrice chauve (The Bald Soprano, 1950). “With its madcap, dislocated language and its nonsensical and non-sequitor humor,” writes Thomas Bishop, “La Cantatrice chauve forced onto the spectator a new perception of the modern world as grotesque and dehumanized, halfway between nightmare and farce, a world populated by interchangeable characters lacking depth and reality.”94 The work that would become the most enduring exemplar of the new style in theater was Samuel Beckett’s En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot, 1953).95 In the play, Beckett’s hobos find themselves by a tree along the road (of life) waiting to meet God-ot. They perform for the audience the brokenness of the world and the purposeless of existence. They ask questions of one another that consider the possibility of redemption, the nature of human beings, and why people often will their own oppression, only to console themselves through small talk and idle chatter. Well before Seinfeld’s first episode, Godot was a play in which “nothing” happened, and the point was that this was an allegory of life itself.

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In postwar Paris, existentialism had an impact not only on theater, literature, and philosophy but also on the visual arts. A group of artists (Wols, Jean Hélion, Germaine Richier, Jean Fautrier, Bram van Velde, and Alberto Giacometti) on the margins of the art world rose to prominence after the war in a symbiotic relationship with the Paris school of existentialists. Their friends, supporters, and collectors were mostly drawn from the novelists, playwrights, critics, and philosophers associated with the Parisian existentialists. It is no wonder that these artists resonated with the existentialists, for they “share a rich range of visual metaphors: of engulfing space, of the abyss, of viscosity; of human frailty, isolation, fear; of freedom, action and bodily engagement. That these are at the same time metaphors made familiar in the literature of existentialism and the absurd is the inescapable legacy of a free interchange of ideas and of the networks of friendship and interaction that bound the artists and writers of post-war Paris.”96 Recall that Sartre had already signaled, in Existentialism Is a Humanism, that there was a relationship between art and life. He had argued that life was like art and that people, like artists, must create meaning and shape the purpose of their being. Sartre’s celebration of artists was not only an analogy. He would use his renown to promote postwar French abstract art. Sartre’s first piece of writing on the sculptor and painter Giacometti, for example, was crafted to introduce a catalog of his show at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. Sartre makes it evident that he took Giacometti’s artistic project to be similar to his own: “these impressive works [are] always mediating between being and nothingness, always in the process of modification, perfection, destruction and renewal.”97 Giacometti had affected a “type of Copernican revolution” in sculpture, parallel to existentialism in philosophy, because he did not seek to mimetically glorify the human form (as popular Vichy sculptors like Aristide Maillol had done). Instead, he tried to capture the fleeting and fragile in the human condition. Giacometti’s aesthetic problem was “how to make a man out of stone without petrifying him.”98 As such he reintroduced figure into abstract art. But Giacometti’s figures were bodies “emerging from a concave mirror . . . from [places like] deportation camps . . . the emaciated martyrs of Buchenwald” who became representations of the impossibility of fixing human essence or the disastrous ramifications of trying to do so. Giacometti offers proof, wrote Sartre, “that man is not at first in order to be seen afterwards but that he is the being whose essence is in his existence for others.”99 In incorporating these turns of phrase, Sartre served at once as patron of the artist and to identify a shared philosophical horizon

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in which his work, along with that of Calder and Wols and other artists of the postwar world, helped shape a response to the desolated landscape of postwar Europe.

The Paris School’s Genealogy Because of its association with artists, the theater, film, novelists, photographers, and several philosophers besides Sartre, “existentialism” was a term that, by the fall of 1945, was applied not only to a prodigious collection of texts (literary, dramatic, visual, and philosophical) but also to a style of thought exemplified by Sartre, de Beauvoir, and those in their circle of influence. It was even a tag applied to a historically specific set of antibourgeois attitudes and to a taste in music, fashion, or cigarettes that were a sign of the bohemian avant-garde in Paris. Existentialism Is a Humanism constituted the embrace of that label by the core group of comrades around Sartre and de Beauvoir as well as by the cultural spaces that they now dominated in the Latin Quarter. Of course, the concerns about subjectivity, freedom, morality, and the purpose of human existence that the Parisian school of existentialists pondered did not emerge from a tabula rasa. They had precursors in the French philosophical and literary traditions; in fact, their ancestry goes back to the skeptical fideism of the sixteenth century.100 Their antecedents begin with Michel de Montaigne’s (1533–92) novel series of Essays that formed a self-portrait of his struggles with his own uncertainty while coming to terms with his concrete condition. Even René Descartes’s (1595–1650) famous cogito ergo sum, which established modern rationalism, was generated from a profound doubt. Most significant as a predecessor of French existentialism, however, was Descartes’s great critic Blaise Pascal (1623–62), who revolted against the “desolate and desiccated” verities of modern science and rationalism that Descartes sought to ground.101 Both were mathematical geniuses, but Pascal would insist upon distinguishing the mathematical from the intuitive mind: l’esprit de géometrie and l’esprit de finesse. The mathematical mind, like Descartes’s rationalism, “is defined precisely by its preoccupation with clear and distinct ideas, from which it is able to extract by deduction an infinite number of logical consequences. But . . . the intuitive mind . . . is so concrete and complex that it cannot be reduced to clear and distinct ideas.”102 There were two excesses, according to Pascal: “to exclude reason, [and] to admit only reason.”103

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Rather than navigating the world in the clarity of cold logic, individuals for Pascal must know their limits. Humans are feeble mortals, disinherited, and miserable; man is defined by “his nothingness, his forlornness, his inadequacy, his impotence and his emptiness.”104 Pascal’s portrait of the human condition is stark, and it was prophetic of the postwar world: “Let one imagine a number of men in chains, and all condemned to death, among whom some every day having their throats cut in the others’ sight, those who remain see their own condition in that of their fellows. . . . This is the image of the human condition.”105 In Pascal’s view, then, man’s condition consists of unease and disquiet provoked by the groundlessness of his being. Anticipating Sartre’s notion of “bad faith,” Pascal argued that human beings, in order to escape, pursue what he called divertissements or diversions of all sorts. But the happiness and pleasure so derived are fleeting. For Pascal, the apostle of Jansenism, God provides the sole salvation from this mortal coil—a worthy wager even for those bereft of a sense of grace, for ultimately faith comes with no rational assurance. Indeed, that is what makes faith different from belief, a point later developed by Kierkegaard. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) carried the baton of skepticism into the eighteenth century as a dissident voice in the Age of Reason, primarily articulated as a critique of inequality. His emphasis on “sentiment” was the basis for the self-discovery of freedom that would serve as the point of departure for romanticism and its post-Kantian emphasis on human volition.106 Maine de Biran (1766–1824) picked up this thread, which was later unleashed as the basis for a critique of positivism by his follower Félix Ravisson-Mollien (1813–1900). The key French figure of the late nineteenth century was Henri Bergson (1859–1941), who sharpened Pascal’s insightful differentiation of the esprit de géometrie and the esprit de finesse in his writing on time and duration. The internal experience of time, Bergson showed, was at odds with the calculative rationality of the clock, which could not measure individual experience. Bergson’s philosophy inserted the individual into a temporal flow, and this philosophic insistence would prove to be central for existentialism, which emphasized that humans were time-bound beings. The sketch of this genealogy makes evident that “the existential attitude begins,” as Robert Solomon wrote, “with a disoriented individual facing a confused world that she cannot accept. This disorientation and confusion is one of the by-products of the Renaissance, the Reformation, growth of science, the decline of Church authority, the French Revolution, the growth of

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mass militarism and technocracy, [and later] two world wars, the ‘triumph’ of capitalism, and the sudden onslaught of globalism.”107 It was the aftermath of the First World War, then known as the Great War, that gave rise to an age of deepened anxiety that led to a fundamental rethinking of the French and Western philosophical traditions. Three waves, in particular, “sent a ripple of anticipation through the intellectual world in Paris in the middle of the 1920s.”108 The first wave was the advent of the Philosophies circle.109 This équipe reconceptualized Marxist humanism as a response to the “crise de l’esprit” that followed World War I in France. In the process, it introduced the philosophical vanguard to German idealism, Hegel, and the work of the young Marx—and among his writings the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), which included his previously unknown work on alienation.110 As the renowned poet and critic Paul Valéry indicated in his 1919 article, “La crise de l’esprit,” the postwar world was characterized by a search for meaning, a drive for salvation, and a need for new structures. Its ultimate sensibility was inquiétude (disquiet).111 Disgusted by the world created by their fathers that had sent millions into the bloodletting of the trenches, the Philosophies circle sought to inject a “new mysticism” inspired by Pascal and Nietzsche into this cultural malaise. The first issue of the short-lived journal Philosophies came out in March 1924 and juxtaposed poetry, essays, and works of philosophy in a disordered coexistence. The content was indicative of the perceived chaos and crisis of civilization experienced by what Gertrude Stein called the “lost generation.” The heart of the Philosophies circle’s answer to the problem of inquietude was self-definition through action. Thus, in both the eclectic use of different genres and in content, the Philosophies group influenced existentialism.112 The second wave would flow from the pen of Gabriel Marcel, who in 1945 coined the term “existentialism” to define the philosophy of the Sartrean camp.113 The adjective existentielle was borrowed from the German and dates back to 1908, and the term existentialisme originated in 1925. However, not until Marcel’s epithet and Sartre’s lecture did the word become famous. There was much at stake for Marcel in (justifiably) insisting that he was the fons et origo of existentialism in France, and he did so in various biographical forays. As we have already seen in Mounier’s response to Sartre, Marcel was heralded as the pioneer of a specifically Christian (if not Catholic) form of existentialism that both anticipated and countered Sartre’s philosophy.114 Marcel is far less well known today, though his Journal métaphysique (Metaphysical Journal, 1927) was published the same year as Heidegger’s

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existential magnum opus, Sein und Zeit (Being and Time). Metaphysical Journal sought to register Marcel’s states of consciousness as a phenomenological experience. It also announced in disjointed fashion a set of themes that would characterize the following generation of phenomenological existentialists: the matter of bodily existence as a foundation of one’s being-in-the-world, the opposition between “being” and “having” that so preoccupied Sartre in Being and Nothingness, the idea of engagement (political commitment) as a fundamentally ethical way of being in the world, and the notion of intersubjectivity as a radical experience that ruptures the individual cogito.115 Like Camus, Sartre, and de Beauvoir, Marcel was not a philosopher only: he was also a dramatist, critic, and composer. Although he was never a systematic thinker—like so many other existentialists, he denounced systems of thought—his starting point was the metaphysical dis-ease of the modern age. Marcel claimed that modernity has made man a stranger to himself. “No longer able to define himself as a rational creature or a child of God . . . modern man exists, ill at ease, a problem to himself,” notes Sam Keen in his study of Marcel’s thought.116 The root cause of this malaise is that modernity reduces human beings to functional and utilitarian modes of thinking and being: one-dimensional men. “Life in a functionalized world becomes a process without a purpose, a utilization of means with no clearly defined end, a journey without a goal,” Keen writes in summarizing Marcel’s viewpoint. He continues: “In such a ‘broken world’ man is always prey to despair and nihilism.” Like Camus and Sartre, “Marcel recognizes that despair and suicide are always possible responses to the tragic world in which we find ourselves. . . . One of the chief tasks of philosophy is to challenge the adequacy of functional thought” in providing responses to the despair caused by instrumentality.117 This became the project of his intellectual itinerary. And Marcel believed that Sartre’s philosophy was implicated in its own reiteration of functionalism. Marcel made this charge in responding to Sartre’s Existentialism Is a Humanism in a January 1946 article entitled “Existentialism and Human Freedom.” Marcel, like the other Christian existentialists we have discussed, embraced many of Sartre’s premises but objected to the foundational starting points of his thought. In particular, Marcel complained that Sartre reduced the modes of relating to the Other to aspects of petrification. There is perhaps nothing more remarkable in the whole of Sartre’s work than his phenomenological study of the “other” as looking and of himself as exposed, pierced, bared, petrified by his Medusa-like stare. . . . We are here at the root of the diabolical argument which is developed

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in Huis clos . . . [where] each one of the characters in turn represents this terzo incommodo . . . each one is a torturer for the two others (a torturing Medusa); in fact, it is this “third” who constitutes their Hell.118 In so describing the human condition, for Marcel, Sartre had missed “the ontological mystery” at the heart of being: the sacred dimension of existence evident in the experience of love for the other, where one catches a glimpse of the falsity of the notion that a person is solely what she does. It is functionalism that reduces human intersubjectivity to an I–it relationship, and Marcel insists that Sartre’s philosophy heads for the same abyss, the result of Sartre’s “inability to grasp . . . our capacity to open ourselves to others.”119 In launching this critique, Marcel stood in a line of theistic existentialists—from Dostoevsky to Berdyaev, from Jaspers and Buber to Levinas—who picked up the thread of the wholly other in Kierkegaard’s existential theology. Indeed, the third wave that contributed to the foundation of the Paris school of existentialism was the revival of Kierkegaard and Hegel in the interwar period. A key personality in the “French Kierkegaard enthusiasm”120 of the 1930s, as well as in the establishment of a “French Hegel,”121 was Jean Wahl. Wahl passed the agrégation examination in the same year as his friend Marcel, and both came from Jewish families. In 1929, Wahl published Le malheur de la conscience dans la philosophie de Hegel, offering a Kierkegaardian twist to his reading of the German master. As Bruce Baugh has shown, there had already been some interest in Hegel’s philosophy in the 1920s. As a thinker who transcended the opposition of dreams and reality, Hegel stirred the Surrealists, and Marxists were drawn to Hegel as the source of modern dialectical thought. Charles Andler lectured on Hegel’s religious philosophy and his Phenomenology of Spirit at the Collège de France in 1928/29. Alain (pseudonym of Émile-Auguste Chartier) had taught courses on Hegel at the Lycée Henri IV from 1923 to 1928. These courses were attended by Jean Hyppolite and students from the École Normale, who clearly influenced Sartre: Aron, Lévi-Strauss, Nizan, Canguilhem, de Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty.122 It is significant that Alain’s interpretation of Hegel stressed the middle section of the Phenomenology—Hegel’s account of the unfolding of the stages of consciousness—and offered an existential and humanistic reading focused on the themes of becoming, action, the master–slave dialectic, and the unhappy consciousness.123 This last theme forms the center of Wahl’s book on Hegel, which introduced many to Hegel’s unpublished work and did so by spotlighting a torn

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consciousness as a new figure of subjectivity. Wahl’s pioneering work was followed by the famous lectures of two Russian Jewish émigré philosophers, Alexandre Koyré and Alexandre Kojève, given at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and attended by the whole coterie of rising stars of the next intellectual generation. The charismatic Kojève added his familiarity with the work of Marx, Husserl, and Heidegger to the brew, reworking the master– slave dialectic into an anthropological reading of Hegel that provided a revamped view of consciousness and the telos of human history.124 The result was that “from 1929 to 1960, Hegel was linked with Husserl and Heidegger. The French [philosophers] sought in all of them a way towards the ‘philosophy of the concrete’ that was the concern of Wahl and Gabriel Marcel, and which would deal with the existential problems of the individual: problems of decision, choice, and meaning, the real dilemmas of life itself.”125 These problems were at the very center of Kierkegaard’s philosophy, but his work was little known in France until the 1930s. “It is from this date forward,” notes Nelly Viallaneix, “that Kierkegaard’s renown really spread in France—just at the same time as France entered a ‘crisis’ not only economic but social and political in form. The anxiety of these années sombres, nourished by the rise of Nazism and the expectation of a new war, made the Kierkegaardian myth powerful. Translations and interpretations multiplied.”126 Especially important were works by the Russian Jewish immigrant Lev Shestov: Kierkegaard et la philosophie existentielle, which appeared in 1936; and the collection of Wahl’s “Kierkegaard studies,” which came out in 1938.127 At the Club Maintenant in 1946, Wahl delivered his own lectures that traced a short history of existentialism. Among those who attended the lectures were Berdyaev, Maurice de Gandillac, Georges Gurvitch, Levinas, Marcel, and Koyré. Wahl explained to the audience that the revolution brought about by “the philosophy of existence occurred when two German philosophers, Jaspers and Heidegger, translated the reflections of Kierkegaard into more intellectual terms” and when this in turn was translated into an original phraseology by “The Philosophical School of Paris, i.e., Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty.”128 Wahl’s short history of existentialism, which culminates in the Paris school of existentialism, thus brings us back full circle to Sartre’s lecture sponsored by the Club Maintenant. What emerged as “French existentialism” in retrospect was actually a transnational project rearticulated in a French idiom characterized by a set of philosophical and contextual concerns that came to

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be expressed in multiple genres. The Paris school of existentialism expressed a response to a historically specific moment that nonetheless continues to resonate today for those of us trying to make meaning in a broken world. In the aftermath of the Holocaust and the atomic bomb, in the shadow of totalitarian systems both political and philosophical, the Paris school of existentialism began a profound questioning of the grounds of the Western tradition enunciated in literature, art, and theater—and even in the style of dress or mode of being a couple, as exemplified by Sartre and de Beauvoir. De Beauvoir’s Le dieuxième sexe (The Second Sex, 1949) explored the ramifications of this antifoundationalism and anti-essentialism for the situation of “woman,” shaking to the core gender relations as they had been constituted in the history of the West. Likewise, Third World rebels from the negritude writers to Frantz Fanon exposed the essentialism at the core of racism, exclusionary nationalism, and imperialism. Sartre was only the most famous of a whole galaxy of existential Marxists during the Cold War who sought to revivify dogmatic class analyses with a more complex understanding of the constitution of human subjectivity and the structures within which we make history. For even though we are free, it is often in situations not of our own choosing. Thus we have seen that Sartre’s Existentialism Is a Humanism was both a point of departure, announcing existentialism on the world stage, and a destination. Sartre and the broader coterie of figures associated with existentialism in France tied together the antecedents of existential thinking. By this means they canonized the movement in the history of ideas by defining as roots the influences on their philosophy. Existential themes still remain our problems: the alienation of the human subject and the drive for authenticity, the subjectivity of truth, the ethics of our intersubjective relations, and the politics of our relation to the intercultural other. Most prescient was that, in Paris, the progeny of Sisyphus placed the leading of a purposeful life as the central philosophical question of our time.

Notes I am grateful to numerous colleagues at the University of Memphis who read and commented on an earlier draft of this chapter, including the History Department’s Brown Bag Research Forum, as well as Matthew Lexow, John Petry, Scott Marler, and especially Abraham Kriegel for their written suggestions. I am deeply appreciative for

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the corrections and recommendations of David Drake, whose expertise saved me from many silly errors and whose clarity as a writer helped me to improve my own prose. 1. The best synthetic account of the period is Julian Jackson, France: The Dark Years, 1940–1944 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 2. Bianca Lamblin, A Disgraceful Affair, trans. Julie Plovnick (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996). 3. As David Drake suggested to me in correspondence, Sartre perhaps worried not only that the lecture was reductive but also that he had introduced a moral dimension to existentialism that he had promised in his magnum opus, Being and Nothingness, but that he was still working on and had not yet fully developed. Sartre makes this claim on the last line of L’être et le néant: Essai d’ontologie phénoménologique (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 692; Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Washington Square, 1956): “All these questions, which refer us to a pure and not an accessory reflection, can find their reply only on the ethical plane. We shall devote to them a future work” (798). This effort to write an ethics on the basis of his phenomenological ontology appeared in his posthumously published Notebooks for an Ethics, trans. David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982) and in other unfinished treatises. On Sartre’s attitude toward Existentialism Is a Humanism, see Sartre par lui-même (Sartre by Himself), trans. Richard Seaver (New York: Urizen Books, 1978). See also Terry Keefe, “Sartre’s ‘Existentialism Is a Humanism,’” Philosophical Journal 9 (1972): 43–60, and A. E. Pilkington, “Sartre’s Existentialist Ethic,” French Studies 23 (1969): 38–48. 4. Annie Cohen-Solal, “Introduction,” in Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 11. On Sartre’s rise to public notoriety, see Ingrid Galster, ed., La naissance du “phénomène Sartre”: Raison d’un success, 1938–1945 (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2001). 5. Sarah Wilson, “Paris Post War: In Search of the Absolute,” in Frances Morris, ed., Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism (London: Tate Gallery, 1993), 25. Tripartisme refers to the period from 1945–47 when the three main parties—PCF (Parti Communiste Français), MRP (Mouvement Républicain Populaire), and SFIO (Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière)—shared power. For the connections between Sartre’s Existentialism Is a Humanism and the debate about humanism in this specific political context, see Edward Baring, “Humanist Pretensions: Catholics, Communists, and Sartre’s Struggle for Existentialism in Post-War France,” Modern Intellectual History 7, no. 3 (November 2010): 581–609. 6. Jean-Paul Sartre, L’existentialisme est un humanisme (1946; Paris: Nagel, 1963), 9–11; Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 17–18. 7. Sartre, L’existentialisme, 15; Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 20. 8. Sartre, L’existentialisme, 17; Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 20. 9. Sartre, L’existentialisme, 67; Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 42. 10. Sartre, L’existentialisme, 36–37; Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 29.

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11. Sartre, L’existentialisme, 24; Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 23. 12. Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Doubleday, 1948). 13. Sartre, L’existentialisme, 29; Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 25. 14. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 219–24. 15. Sartre, L’existentialisme, 36; Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 28–29. 16. Sartre, L’existentialisme, 95; Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 27, 53. 17. Sartre, L’existentialisme, 75; Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 45–46. 18. Gabriel Marcel, Le monde cassé (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1933); Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Citadel Press, 1948); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Humanism and Terror: An Essay on the Communist Problem, trans. John O’Neill (Boston: Beacon, 1947); Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Vintage, 1955). 19. Sartre, L’existentialisme, 83–84; Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 48–49. 20. For the full panoply of key concepts, see Haim Gordon, ed., Dictionary of Existentialism (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999). 21. The best recent treatment of the subject is by David Drake, “The ‘Anti-Existentialist Offensive’: The French Communist Party Against Sartre, 1944–1948,” Sartre Studies International 16, no. 1 (2010): 69–94. See also Roger Caillois, “Georges Politzer et la critique des mythes,” Action 20 (October 1944). Sartre already felt sufficiently attacked to publish “A propos de l’existentialisme: Mise au point,” Action (December 29, 1944), translated as “A More Precise Definition of Existentialism” in The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, vol. 2, Selected Prose, ed. Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, trans. Richard McCleary (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 155–60. Henri Lefebvre’s article was a rejoinder, “Existentialisme et Marxisme: Réponse à une mise au point,” Action 40 (June 8, 1945): 8; cited in Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), 110. Poster expertly lays out the attacks on Sartre in this period, and I have closely followed his account (109–25). For more on the communist assault on Sartre at the time, see the references in The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, vol. 1, A Biographical Life, ed. Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 107–8. 22. Henri Lefebvre, L’existentialisme (Paris: Éditions de Sagittaire, 1946), 13, 82. 23. Roger Garaudy, Une literature de fossoyeurs (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1947), 89; Garaudy, Literature of the Graveyard, trans. J. Bernstein (New York: International, 1948), 61. 24. Henri Mougin, La sainte famille existentialiste (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1947), 12. 25. Poster, Existential Marxism, 113. 26. Jean Kanapa, L’existentialisme n’est pas un humanisme (Paris: Éditions Sociales, 1947), 30.

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27. Kanapa, L’existentialisme, 25, 27, 28–29, 46, 50–1. In a footnote, Kanapa places Merleau-Ponty to one side because he understood the limits of existentialism and recognized “incompletely, the value of the Marxist solution” (51). As Drake communicated to me, in general the PCF went easier on Merleau-Ponty than Sartre because he was less popular and so less of a threat—and because, as Kanapa indicates, he had a better understanding of Marxism at the time. 28. Kanapa, L’existentialisme, 118–19. It is beyond the purview of this chapter to delineate all the twists and turns that Sartre would take in relation to the French Communist Party and Marxist thought over his lifetime. These are treated in detail in Poster, Existential Marxism, and Poster, Sartre’s Marxism (London: Pluto, 1979); see also Ian H. Birchall, Sartre Against Stalinism (New York: Berghahn, 2004). 29. Michael Kelly, Pioneer of the Catholic Revival: The Ideas and Influence of Emmanuel Mounier (London: Sheed & Ward, 1979), 136. 30. Will Herberg, ed. Four Existentialist Theologians (New York: Doubleday, 1958), 27. 31. Jacques Maritain, Court traité de l’existence et de l’existant (1947; Paris: Hartmann, 1964), 9; Maritain, Existence and the Existent, trans. Lewis Galantière and Gerald Phelan (New York: Pantheon, 1948), 1. 32. Maritain, Court traité, 15; Maritain, Existence and the Existent, 5. 33. Maritain, Court traité, 16; Maritain, Existence and the Existent, 5. For his rejection of a modernist line of thought, see Maritain, Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau (New York: Crowell, 1970). 34. Maritain, Court traité, 18; Maritain, Existence and the Existent, 7. 35. Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas (New York: Random House, 1956), 368. Cited in William Earle, James M. Edie, and John Wild, eds., Christianity and Existentialism (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1963). 36. Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1952), 167. Cited in Arthur C. Cochrane, The Existentialists and God: Being and the Being of God in the Thought of Sören Kierkegaard, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger, Jean Paul Sartre, Paul Tillich, Etienne Gilson, Karl Barth (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1956). 37. Cochrane, Existentialists and God, 101. 38. Kelly, Catholic Revival, 118. 39. Emmanuel Mounier, Introduction aux existentialismes (1946; Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 10; Mounier, Existentialist Philosophies: An Introduction, trans. Eric Blow (London: Rockliff, 1948), 4. 40. Kelly, Catholic Revival, 138. 41. Mounier, Introduction aux existentialismes, 143; Mounier, Existentialist Philosophies, 97. 42. Mounier, Introduction aux existentialismes, 51; Mounier, Existentialist Philosophies, 32.

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43. Mounier, Introduction aux existentialismes, 64–65; Mounier, Existentialist Philosophies, 41. 44. Mounier, Introduction aux existentialismes, 119–20; Mounier, Existentialist Philosophies, 77, 80. 45. Mounier, Introduction aux existentialismes, 132; Mounier, Existentialist Philosophies, 89. 46. Mounier, Introduction aux existentialismes, 183; Mounier, Existentialist Philosophies, 116. 47. Kelly, Catholic Revival, 141. 48. Mounier, Pour et contre l’existentialisme: Grand débat (Paris: Atlas, 1948), 138. This book was a distillation of the great debate in France at the time about existentialism, featuring a Marxist dismissal by Roger Vailland, a defense of existentialism by those close to Sartre (e.g., J. B. Pontalis, Pouillon, and Jeanson), a chapter by Julien Benda, and Mounier’s précis of his larger argument in Introduction aux existentialismes. 49. Sartre, L’existentialisme, 16; Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 20. 50. On the exporting of French culture in the postwar period, see Herbert Lüthy, “The French Intellectuals,” in The Intellectuals: A Controversial Portrait, ed. George B. De Huszar (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960), 444–58. 51. Simone de Beauvoir, Force of Circumstance (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), 46 (translation altered). 52. Herbert Lottman, The Left Bank: Writers, Artists, and Politics from the Popular Front to the Cold War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), 233. 53. Ibid. 54. For a campy version of existentialist style, see Simon Doonan, Eccentric Glamour: Creating an Insanely More Fabulous You (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008), chapter 1. Doonan argues that there are three varieties of eccentric glamour: the socialite, the gypsy, and the existentialist. He also claims that there are different modes of existentialist haute couture, including “the existentialist gamine,” “the rive gauche existentialist,” “the existentialist garçonne,” and “the existentialist ghoul.” 55. Cited in Valérie Marin La Meslée, “Instantanés de Saint-Germain-des-Près,” Magazine Littéraire 320 (April 1994): 40. 56. Frances Morris, “Introduction,” in Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism, ed. Frances Morris (London: Tate Gallery, 1993), 18. 57. Boris Vian published a memoir to the “existentialist cave” entitled Tabou: Texte souvenir sur la naissance d’une cave existentialiste. See also Vian’s Manuel de Saint-Germain-des-Près (Paris: Chêne, 1974). 58. Cited in Lottman, The Left Bank, 239. 59. Boris Vian, Froth on the Daydream, trans. Stanley Chapman (London: Rapp & Carroll, 1967), 27. 60. Cited in Joseph Mahon, Existentialism, Feminism and Simone de Beauvoir (London: Macmillan, 1997), 18.

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61. In France, the Nouvelle revue française was the most important literary and critical journal of the first part of the twentieth century until editorial control was turned over to the fascist writer Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, in exchange for which the Gallimard publishing house was allowed to remain in business during the German Occupation. 62. Les nouvelles litteraires (November 15, 1945), reprinted in Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, ed. Philip Thody (New York: Knopf, 1968), 345, 348. 63. Camus, “Authors Preface,” in Camus, Caligula and Three Other Plays, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Knopf, 1958), v–vi. 64. Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe: Essai sur l’absurde (Paris: Gallimard, 1942); Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 3, 4. 65. Sartre, “Albert Camus,” in Situations, vol. 4 (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 127; Sartre, “Camus,” in Situations, trans. Benita Eisler (New York: Fawcett, 1985), 80. 66. Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe, 18; Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 5. 67. Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe, 29; Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 11. 68. Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe, 30; Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 12. 69. Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe, 54; Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 26. 70. Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe, 39; Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 18. 71. Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe, 49–50; Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 23. 72. Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe, 162; Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 89. 73. Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe, 164; Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 90. 74. Camus, Le mythe de Sisyphe, 166; Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 91. 75. Camus, L’étranger (1942; Paris: Gallimard, 1952), 171; Camus, The Stranger, trans. Matthew Ward (New York: Vintage, 1988), 121, 123. 76. Sartre’s essay, “Explication de L’étranger,” was originally published in Cahiers du sud (February 1943) and then reprinted in Situations, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 100. See also “A Commentary on The Stranger,” in Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, 74. 77. Sartre, “Explication,” 101; Sartre, “Commentary on The Stranger,” 75. 78. Sartre, “Explication,” 103; Sartre, “Commentary on The Stranger,” 77. 79. Sartre, “Explication,” 103; Sartre, “Commentary on The Stranger,” 78. 80. Sartre, “Explication,” 113; Sartre, “Commentary on The Stranger,” 89. 81. Sartre, “Explication,” 121; Sartre, “Commentary on The Stranger,” 98. 82. Sartre, “Explication,” 110; Sartre, “Commentary on The Stranger,” 85. 83. Camus, “On Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée,” in Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, trans. Ellen Conroy Kenney (New York: Knopf, 1968), 200. 84. Ibid. 85. Ibid., 201. 86. Camus, “On Sartre’s Le Mur and Other Stories,” in Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, 204. 87. Ibid., 205.

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88. On this relationship and on the conflict that emerged between the two writers, see Ronald Aronson, Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004) and Sartre and Camus: A Historic Confrontation, ed. and trans. David A. Sprintzen and Adrian van den Hoven (New York: Humanity Books, 2004). 89. Frederic Spotts, The Shameful Peace: How French Artists and Intellectuals Survived the Nazi Occupation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 17. 90. There are many examples of the brutality of German reprisals for acts of resistance. For perhaps the most famous example, see Sarah Farmer’s Martyred Village: Commemorating the 1944 Massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). See also Tzvetan Todorov, A French Tragedy: Scenes of Civil War, Summer 1944 (Hanover, Mass.: University Press of New England, 1996). 91. The complexities of “resistance theater” and of how the audience understood The Flies is more nuanced than I can describe here. See Jonathan Judaken, “Intellectuals, Culture and the Vichy Years: Re-appraisals and New Perspectives,” Contemporary French Civilization 31, no.2 (Fall 2007): 99–101; this is the special issue, edited by Denis Provencher and Andrew Sabonet, on “France, 1940–1944: The Ambiguous Legacy.” For an overview on how the play was reviewed in the press during the Occupation, see Ingrid Galster, ed., Sartre devant la press d’Occupation: Le dossier critique des ‘Mouches’ et ‘Huis clos’ (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005). 92. Cited in The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, vol. 1, A Bibliographical Life, ed. Michel Contat and Michel Rybalka, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 98. “The Stalag” referred to the German prisoner-ofwar camp where Sartre was interned from June 1940 to March 1941, an experience shared by 1.8 million Frenchmen. 93. Thomas Bishop, “The Theater of the Absurd,” in A New History of French Literature, ed. Denis Hollier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 1010. 94. Ibid., 1009. 95. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in Two Acts, trans. Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1954). 96. Morris, Paris Post War, 23. 97. Sartre, “La recherche de l’absolu,” Les temps modernes 3, no. 28 (1948): 1153–63; Sartre, “The Search for the Absolute,” trans. Wade Baskin, in Essays in Aesthetics (New York: Books for Libraries, 1963), 85. 98. Sartre, “Search for the Absolute,” 84. 99. Ibid., 90. 100. I found the genealogy outlined by James Giles to be helpful here. See his French Existentialism: Consciousness, Ethics, and Relations with Others (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 10. 101. William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958; New York: Doubleday, 1962), 111.

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102. Ibid., 114. 103. Blaise Pascal, Pensées (Paris: Garnier, 1957), 75; text is from the Bunschvicg edition with an introduction by Ch.-M Des Granges. Cited by Catharine Savage Brosman, Existential Fiction (Farmington Hills, Mich.: Gale, 2000), 38. 104. Cited in Barrett, Irrational Man, 112–13. 105. Pascal, Pensées, 108. Cited in Brosman, Existential Fiction, 40. 106. On the role of Kant’s influence on Romanticism, see Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 68–78. For the relationship to Maine de Biran, see 97. 107. Robert Solomon, “Introduction,” in Solomon, Existentialism, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), xi. 108. Christian Delacampagne, “The Paris School of Existentialism,” in The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 78. 109. On the Philosophies circle, see Bud Burkhard, French Marxism Between the Wars: Henri Lefebvre and the “Philosophies” (New York: Humanity Books, 2000). 110. For the centrality of alienation as a problematic in existentialism, see David E. Cooper, Existentialism: A Reconstruction, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 111. Paul Valéry, “La crise de l’esprit,” Nouvelle revue française 71 (August 1919). 112. On this point, see Lefebvre, L’existentialisme, Part 1, “Pourquoi je fus existentaliste (1925) et comment je suis devenu marxiste,” especially 8–66. 113. In Force of Circumstances, de Beauvoir wrote: “During a discussion organized during the summer by the Cerf publishing house—in other words, by the Dominicans—Sartre had refused to allow Gabriel Marcel to apply this adjective to him: ‘My philosophy is a philosophy of existence; I don’t even know what Existentialism is. . . . But our protests were vain. In the end, we took the epithet that everyone used for us and used it for our own purposes” (45–46). 114. See, for example, the commemorative book on Marcel’s work edited by Etienne Gilson, Existentialisme Chrétien (Paris: Plon, 1947) and specifically Marcel’s own contribution, “Regard en arrière.” 115. On these themes, see Pierre Trotignon, Les philosophes français d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), 69–70. 116. Sam Keen, Gabriel Marcel (Richmond, Va.: John Knox, 1967), 9. 117. Keen, Marcel, 10. 118. Marcel, “Existence and Human Freedom,” in The Philosophy of Existentialism (New York: Citadel, 1956), 71, 72, 73. 119. Marcel, Philosophy of Existentialism, 100. 120. The phrase is from Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas Between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), 168. 121. See Bruce Baugh, French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 2003).

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122. Baugh, French Hegel, 14. 123. Ibid., 183n32. 124. On Kojeve’s Hegel seminar, see Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott-Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Poster, Existential Marxism; Jacques d’Hondt, Hegel et Hégélianisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1982); Michael S. Roth, Knowing and History; Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988); Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); and Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927–1961 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), 49–110. 125. Baugh, French Hegel, 176. 126. Nelly Viallaneix, “Lectures françaises,” in Bibliotheca Kierkegaardiania, vol. 8, The Legacy and Interpretation of Kierkegaard, ed. Niels and Marie Thulstrup (Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1981), 108–9. See also Moyn, Origins, 168–72. 127. Lev Shestov, Kierkegaard et la philosophie existentielle: (Vox clamantis in deserto), trans. Tatiana Rageot and Boris de Schloezer (Paris: Vrin, 1936); Jean Wahl, Études kierkegaardiennes (Paris: Aubier, 1938). 128. Wahl, A Short History of Existentialism, trans. Forrest Williams and Stanley Maron (New York: Philosophical Library, 1949), 9, 2.

4

Punching Through the Pasteboard Masks American Existentialism George Cotkin Maybe man is nothing in particular. . . . Maybe that’s the terror of it. Man may be just anything at all. —Richard Wright, The Outsider

Mailer’s Existential Fisticuffs Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro” (1957) assaults its readers with existentially tinged racial fantasies of violence and liberation. In the piece, Mailer sought to celebrate a new figure—“the American existentialist,” otherwise referred to as “the hipster.” Pursuing his version of existential man, Mailer followed along a trail that Sartre had already blazed. Mailer intended by his bold embrace of criminal acts and a revolutionary cultural style to trump Sartre. Sartre had talked about the necessity of the novelist entering into a discourse with the era. Mailer proclaimed his desire to bring about “a revolution in the consciousness of our time,” as evidenced by his peculiar existentialism in “The White Negro.”1 By the mid-1950s, and well into the 1960s, Mailer’s mind and writing were punch-drunk with existentialism. He produced what he referred to as “an existential film,”2 wrote three existential novels, and in essays (one 1972 collection was titled Existential Errands) spouted about how existential rhythms

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sounded in his work. Never one to kowtow to his contemporaries, Mailer made it clear that he was influenced less by Sartre and French existentialists than by his own musings on existentialism and by his reading of Kierkegaard. As we shall see, Mailer was hardly atypical among American thinkers and artists in embracing existentialism and in viewing African Americans as living under the tyranny of violence that, oddly, translated into a particular form of existential freedom. For instance, photographer and contemporary Robert Frank shared this vision. In his photographic journey through the heart and mind of America, The Americans (1959), Frank—who had supped at the table of European existentialism—showed white Americans as living constrained and inauthentic existences. The specter of death and despair hovered close to his photographs, but only African Americans, it appeared, were capable of transcending that condition by embracing life in all of its sorrow and joy.3 Black writers Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright, for example, were existentialists who highlighted (albeit with less romanticism) the realities of African Americans and who also sought to maintain their independence from precursors and European movements. But Mailer took existential ideas and rode them into a land of violence and metaphysics that became their own ends. Mailer employed existential terms to express his Manichean vision of a transcendent battle between the forces of good and the powers of evil. His essential theology viewed God as a force for good but existing in a weakened state. To confront evil through acts of passion and daring became Mailer’s way of strengthening God and the dominion of freedom. Mailer joined this conflict, in the name of existential freedom, against what he considered to be the cancer of middle-class complacency, confidence, and comfort. Bourgeois society was repressed and asexual, on the brink of annihilation by nuclear war, yet unwilling to face such existential realities.4 He raged against the spiritual emptiness of white Americans who, in his view, worshipped at the empty covenant of commercial culture and belief in progress. They wanted, more than anything else, to be comfortable in their bland and predictable anticommunist politics—even to the point of a willingness to become totalitarians. Mailer found these desires insipid and absurd: insipid because, like first mate Starbuck in Melville’s Moby-Dick, it avoided the depths of existence; absurd because it refused to grapple with atomic destruction. This constituted an existential crisis of how to overcome spiritual death. The warriors that Mailer chose for his side in this apocalyptic struggle were African American hipsters.5 Mailer’s existential hero, unveiled in “The White Negro,” was the psychopathic rebel crying out for freedom and orgasm, exemplified by the pimps,

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pushers, and punks who occupied the demimonde of Mailer’s unrealistic version of black existence.6 In racist America, black pimps and pushers were existential rebels rejecting bourgeois notions of morality and, most importantly, living with an existential awareness of contingency and death. Aware that at any time the police or racists could strip him of his limited freedom, the black hipster lived in the moment and on a cool quest for transcendence—through drugs, uninhibited sex, criminal behavior, or the jarring rhythms of jazz.7 Even “overcivilized” whites, such as Mailer himself, could embrace the language and reality of the black hipster. This “new breed of adventurers,” according to Mailer, “drifted out at night looking for action with a black man’s code to fit their facts.”8 Mailer’s general description might apply to the Beat movement emerging in this period, headed by Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. After all, Kerouac subscribed to a primitivism whereby blacks were freer with their emotions than were whites. He longed, at times, to be black. Ginsberg’s fevered poetry of the period, especially in his monumental work, Howl (1956), shared Mailer’s disdain for bourgeois society: “the narcotic tobacco haze of Capitalism.” The enemy for Ginsberg was “Moloch,” the personification of “the heavy judger,” the forces of destruction, and “Robot apartments! Invisible suburbs! skeleton treasures!” The force of Moloch turned individuals toward madness and drove them to insane asylums or to violence against themselves. In contrast to the pacific Beat, the hipster of Mailer’s mind was able to transform inner violence into outward bursts of violence in the name of existential liberation.9 White hipsters were aware, to the very core of their being, of the realities of nuclear annihilation, totalitarian repression, and cancerous conformity. They rebelled and gained their existential freedom—even if it came only in momentary swells—by haunting jazz clubs, seeking profound sexual orgasms, and taunting the bourgeoisie. Indeed, for Mailer, the white “hipster had absorbed the existentialist synapses of the Negro.”10 In perhaps the most fevered, outrageous moment in the essay, Mailer evoked the murder of a “candy-store keeper” beaten to death by “two strong eighteen-year old hoodlums.” Rejecting this as a case of cowardice or insanity or base criminality, Mailer averred that the psychopathic killers were actually gaining an outlet for pent-up repressions. Indeed, such murder demands a form of “courage,” even when the victim is weak, because the killers have attacked “an institution”—they have assaulted “private property” and, in the process, challenged “the unknown.”11 Good thing, for Mailer, that his essay was subtitled “Superficial Reflections on the Hipster.”

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In much of his writing, Mailer stressed his existentialism and how an existential sensibility is opposed to the emerging totalitarian reality. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead (1948) is a tale of combat in the Pacific. Commanding officer Cummings is a totalitarian with a sadistic streak. He represents the emergence of modern bureaucracy. He orders soldiers to engage in an absurd attack upon Japanese positions, necessitating a horrible climb up a mountain. Led by the almost Nietzschean will of Sergeant Croft, the men scale the peak despite tremendous obstacles. But the sublime absurdity of this endeavor is revealed when the reader learns that the climb occurred after the Japanese had been defeated. War, like much of life, is contingent and without meaning. We rise above it through acts of the will, like Croft’s.12 Mailer also took some of Kierkegaard’s existential imperatives in unheard of directions. Mailer found the Kierkegaardian “Knight of Faith” to be someone whose acts cannot be judged, whose willingness to sit close to the devil may be as much a sign of salvation as of sin. In Mailer’s upside-down existential world, freedom existed and was to be cherished, but it lacked an ethics. Thus, in his novel The Deer Park (1959), Marion Faye is a hipster whose acts of violence lead to his growth as a person, even as they also make him something of a saint of sin. Challenging social mores and recognizing death as the boundary situation, Faye is the existential hipster personified. Mailer’s existential turn, like much of his life, flirted with chaos and absurdity. His vision of African Americans in the 1950s was terribly limited and was essentially a projection of his own needs and wishes for them to be existential heroes. Hardworking, churchgoing, and hopeful blacks were banished from his vision. But the imperative in Mailer remained existential to its core—to rebel against the narrowness of bourgeois culture, to recognize the proximity of destruction in the nuclear age, and to engage existence passionately.

American Existentialism? Sartre and other French existentialists would probably have judged Mailer an anomaly because the United States, they maintained, was the most unlikely place for existentialism to take root. They considered Americans to be naively optimistic, worshippers of consumerism, and blithely unaware of evil and tragedy. Anguish, anxiety, and dread—the coin of the realm for existentialism—was alien currency for Americans. Sartre argued: “In general, evil is not an American concept. . . . There is no pessimism in America regarding human nature and social organization.”13

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Yet we will show that, from the founding of America, dreams of success have commingled with fears of failure. Optimism has been peppered with pessimism. Mailer’s concerns with an authentic life were hardly the exception, for he was but one of many Americans to drink deeply from the well of an existential sensibility. There have been three distinct periods of existential musing in the United States. Indeed, given that an existential perspective is part of the human condi­ tion (think here of Job in the Bible), we can find existential thoughts going back to the Colonial period. But the first wave of European existential thinking arrived upon America’s shores just before the First World War, when Nietzsche’s work enjoyed a brief vogue. The existential religious writings of Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard became popular in the 1920s and remained a significant source for many American intellectuals well into the 1950s. The third wave of existentialism came after the Second World War, when the vogue for French existentialism paraded itself in popular maga­ zines such as Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue and in more serious intellectual venues such as Partisan Review. Two facts should be kept in mind about the American form of existentialism. First, most Americans were loath to identify themselves with the French proponents of existentialism. A large part of the reason for this is that, after the Second World War, many American intellectuals viewed themselves (and their nation) as stepping out from under the domination of European thought and culture. Americans were still drawn, as if by habit, to the latest in European intellectual fashions, but they worked hard to announce that their existentially tinged writing and thought, if not original to them, was rooted in the human condition or in American soil deeply enough to be independent of the French variety. Second, there were also political judgments involved. In the Cold War years, Americans felt that they had achieved a certain amount of political maturity. With the end of their age of innocence—days when they might have flocked to the banner of utopian movements such as communism—Americans regarded the French existentialists as philosophically mature but politically naive. Is there, then, an American existentialism distinct from other types? Certainly the range of existential thought in America—from nihilist to religious to atheist—has affinities with the dominant thought in European circles. But American writers (notwithstanding Mailer’s bombast) have perhaps shown a greater willingness to meld existentialist anxiety and tragedy with pragmatic liberalism. This means that, for many American thinkers, the dark side of existential anguish is necessary but only a first step toward the brighter light of “existential humanism,” as Hazel Barnes phrased it.14

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Hazel Barnes’s Existential Humanism Thus, in contrast to Mailer, Barnes wanted an existentialism that fit better with the meliorist, pragmatist tradition of American philosophy. A woman trained in the classics with a Ph.D. from Yale University, Barnes faced a world that did not seem to be her oyster. She ended up teaching various courses and was looked upon with derision by her male colleagues in philosophy, who did not believe that women should pursue such knowledge—especially as it increasingly traveled along the narrow ledge of the analytic revolution. In the long run, however, this exclusion of Barnes proved to be valuable. For her and for various other female philosophers (most notably, Marjorie Grene), existentialism was an arena in which they could display philosophical acumen without raising the hackles of their analytic colleagues. Barnes came to existentialism quite by chance. She recalled responding to a question about existentialism after teaching a class at the University of Toledo in 1948. “What is this existentialism,” the student asked, “that everyone is talking about?” Barnes replied, with more assurance than she possessed, “it seemed to me to be a somewhat sensational attitude toward life and a philosophy of defeatism and despair.” But like any good teacher, she was dissatisfied with this second-hand, surface explanation. She visited the library to read the texts of existentialism, and she found that they “spoke to my condition.”15 After that encounter with existentialism, Barnes came to translate much of Sartre’s major works, to write various books and articles on existentialism, and to do as much as anyone else in America—not least through her own television show on existentialism—to bring the work and thought of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir to an American audience. At the same time, she sought to calm the violent effusions of existentialists such as Sartre and to express existential freedom as a doctrine of responsibility. With Mailer and Sartre, Barnes recognized that we are cast adrift in a meaningless universe. Nonetheless, we wring meaning out of our experience. But Barnes’s ethical conclusion was closer to de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity (1948), the work of Camus, and to American reformism. Each ­individual was free; ethics were nonfoundational; truth was something made, not given. Yet in our own freedom we recognize the freedom of others. This necessitates a burden of responsibility and respect for others. In contrast to Sartre’s famous formulation of Hell being others, Barnesian existentialism sought community while rejecting the complacency of convention. In her many works on existentialism and in her role as the translator of Sartre for

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Americans, Barnes confronted the “existential paradox” of how to act in response to the knowledge that if “everyone is free” then “everyone is totally responsible.” In doing so, Barnes’s “humanistic existentialism” borrowed from the American pragmatist tradition, especially as outlined by philosopher and psychologist William James. For James, pragmatism confronted a universe that was contingent to the core: the individual must navigate this tragic, often absurd world by a combination of habit and hypothesis, always rejecting absolutist perspectives in favor of the recognition that truth is something that happens to an idea.16

Post–Second World War American Existentialism That paradox was recognized not only by Barnes but also by many other postwar intellectuals with an existential notion of the tragic sense of life. Death and disappointment are always on the menu of existence.17 To sup at the table of utopian and absolute philosophies and politics is to deceive oneself and to head in the direction of totalitarianism. This existential sensibility in the postwar years had great appeal across political lines. Anticommunist crusader Whittaker Chambers was drawn to Kierkegaard and a religious existentialism as he attempted to demonstrate the folly and danger of communism. At the same time, Chambers sought to emphasize the limits of human comprehension. We lived—he liked to argue, in Kierkegaardian and Calvinistic terms— in a fallen state, robbed of knowledge of the divine plan. Chambers phrased it thus: “Between Man’s purpose in time and God’s purpose in eternity, there is an infinite difference in quality.”18 Activist liberals such as theologian Reinhold Niebuhr and historian Arthur M. Schlesinger could accept this formulation, whether taken as literal or metaphorical. In his key text, The Vital Center (1948), Schlesinger quoted from Kierkegaard: “Anxiety . . . is the dizziness of freedom”; for Schlesinger, such “anxiety is the official emotion of our time.” Existentialism would serve as “perhaps the most radical attempt to grapple with the implications of this anxiety” by pushing the notion that we make choices and are responsible for them. Thus, Schlesinger and Niebuhr advocated existential tragedy as a corrective to naive utopianism, urging Americans toward a vital center of politics and thought. For these authors, existentialism in its best form recognized the difficulties faced by modern men and women but rebelled against the simplistic solutions of totalitarianism. Instead, their existentialism—by remaining

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open to the plurality of experience and to its chaotic core—preached moderation and creativity.19 Philosophers such as John Wild at Harvard and William Barrett at New York University used existential ideas to reject the dry analytical turn that had come to dominate academic philosophy. Existentialism, in their view, asked significant questions about the meaning of existence, the complexity of action, and the ethics of responsibility. Moreover, in the midst of the struggle against Soviet totalitarianism, only the nay-saying antiabsolutism of existentialism—with its stress on freedom and openness to possibility—promised a philosophy that fit well with traditional American values. Wild argued that if analytic distinctions were “bankrupt” and unable to enthuse Americans with a sense of purpose, then existentialism with its emphasis on choice and freedom could serve as a weapon in the Cold War against the Soviet Union.20 Although existentialism was employed by many in the Cold War era to support American hegemony, it could also serve as a language of liberation at home. After all, Betty Friedan was a careful reader of de Beauvoir not only on feminism but also on existentialism. Friedan employed existential ideas as a foundation for her call for the liberation of women. She shared Mailer’s criticisms of bourgeois society and of its ability to induce a “coma” in its citizens. In her best-selling work, The Feminine Mystique (1963), Friedan contended that women had for too long been imprisoned by the false “warm brightness of home” and conformity in the roles that were assigned to them. These roles were inauthentic and unnecessary; women needed the freedom to develop their own potential in their own manner. Echoing the words of de Beauvoir’s classic feminist text The Second Sex (1949), Friedan exclaimed: women want to be “in the service of a human purpose larger than themselves,” one that allows them to achieve “self-realization” outside the “concentration camp” walls of motherhood and home.21

Psychological and Religious Existentialism Existentialism entered with especial sweep into the realms of psychology and theology. Postwar American psychology was largely based either on Freudian models (emphasizing the unconscious and repression) or on a psychology of adjustment. In the hands of Rollo May, the emphasis differed. In his book, The Meaning of Anxiety (1950), May sought to understand the nature of postwar angst and concluded that, although it was part and parcel

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of ­modernization, it was also exacerbated by Cold War tensions. Indeed, he ended up treating anxiety essentially as an ontological condition created, in part, by the existential reality of death. Once anxiety, despair, and inauthenticity were recognized as sapping the individual of psychological well-being, then the key became channeling anxiety into more useful ends. Out of despair came the existential leap into acceptance of the human condition, the freedom of the will, and our responsibility to create ourselves. This brand of existential psychology continued long into the twentieth century thanks to the many works of Irvin Yallom. Famous for his central text on group therapy, Yallom was deeply influenced by European existentialism and even wrote a novel about Nietzsche. In his many well-wrought case histories, Yallom showed that at the core of his clients’ depression and anxiety was an unwillingness to face the existential reality of mortality. Beginning with Existential Psychotherapy (1980) and most recently in Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death (2008), Yallom has popularized his therapy of getting clients and readers to wrap their consciousness around the reality and “terror” of their own deaths as an initial step toward fuller existence.22 Theologians also turned to existentialism in the Cold War era. Surely, in a period when the potential for nuclear annihilation loomed large and with the ashes from the Holocaust still burning, overly optimistic religious ideals were in need of revision. For theologians as varied as Reinhold Niebuhr, Robert McAfee Brown, and Will Herberg, existentialism promised a deeper religious sensibility because of its emphasis on mortality. Herberg was the most interesting of the group, moving from away from his Marxist past to declare himself a born-again Jew. Like the existential psychologists, he recognized the crisis of the human condition and the historical moment. However, Herberg maintained that only a return to the religious hardihood of the Old Testament—with its recognition of “the tragic absurdity of existence” and the dark shadow of death—was appropriate religious fodder for the times. He became a major popularizer in the United States of these ideas through his own writings and also in his reader, Four Existentialist Theologians: Jacques Maritain, Nicolas Berdayaev, Martin Buber and Paul Tillich (1958).23

African American Existentialism Well before Mailer or Friedan arrived on the scene, the African American writers Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright maintained that existentialism

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bequeathed them a worldview that was by turns universal, individualistic, and communal. To these black writers, existentialism spoke of liberation by rejecting staid traditions and conventions. They came to existentialism at an opportune moment. In the 1930s, both Wright and Ellison had been active with the Communist Party movement in the United States. This was hardly surprising, given that the Party opposed Southern racism and also served as one of the few organizations that allowed black writers a forum. Wright and Ellison both came to realize, however, that their voices had to be muffled in accordance with Party imperatives. As writers they wanted the freedom to be creative, and in existentialism they found a movement and a language that served their purposes.24 If values are created rather than divinely given, then conventions of Jim Crow racism were merely artificial constructs. All men and women, black and white, lived under the shadow of their mortality. For Ellison in particular, existential ideals culled from Europeans (such as Unamuno and Malraux) were strikingly akin to blues music, which also was anchored in a sense of tragedy and contingency. “There is an existential tradition within American Negro life,” wrote Ellison, “that comes out of the blues and spirituals.” Yet with this recognition that life was often a “downright and dirty shame” came transcendence, even if temporary. And as African Americans cast off self-deception in an existential quest for authenticity, they would “triumph” over the “chaos” of existence and racism.25 Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), which won the National Book Award, was thoroughly existential in its presumptions. The main character lives too long in bad faith, playing a role. He is ignored by white society, and black society seeks to consign him to its narrow contours. When the hard edge of existence finally shakes him from his doldrums, the protagonist becomes a rebel, assuming various personas as he navigates through the chaos of existence. In keeping with Ellison’s views about music, Invisible Man resonates with jazz rhythms and blues stories. The invisible man will listen to these tunes and, in time, existential commitment and responsibility will weigh heavily upon him. He is forced to retreat into his subterranean lair—content to be an exile, a man on the periphery of existence. Eventually, however, he decides that his hibernation from life must end. Chastened by his experiences, he decides to reenter the world convinced that his experiences as a black man are, to a degree, shared by others: “Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”26

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Richard Wright also chronicled the painful effect of racism on the psyche in both his novel Native Son (1940) and memoir Black Boy (1945). He had experienced racism on a personal, gut level. Born in the South and condemned, in theory, to a life without success or status, he managed to overcome expectations. Before he finally fled from American racism for exile in France, Wright had become good friends in New York with de Beauvoir and fully conversant with the key texts in French, Russian, and Kierkegaardian existentialism. He believed that existentialism helped him both to understand racism and to transcend it. But much like Ellison, Wright contended that life as a black American was better preparation for him to be an existentialist than was his reading of existentialist authors. As Wright once explained to C. L. R. James: “everything that he read in Kierkegaard he had known before” through his experiences as a black man in racist America.27 Wright viewed the tragedy of the human condition as being shared by blacks and whites, although he recognized that the reality of racism dealt a particularly crushing blow to blacks. Thus, his most explicitly existentialist novel, The Outsider (1953), played with themes of race and universalism, freedom and responsibility. This work brought together aspects of his appreciation of Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment and his concept of the “underground man.” At the same time, Wright’s novel bore similarities to Sartre’s The Chips Are Down, a work about what one might do with a second chance at life and love. In addition, Wright organized The Outsider to reflect his appreciation for categories that he found in Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Dread (translated by Walter Lowrie), his “almost constant companion.” From this work Wright structured his own novel, opening with Book I (entitled “Dread”) and quoting from Kierkegaard in an epigraph: “Dread is an alien power which lays hold of an individual, and yet one cannot tear oneself away, nor has one a will to do so; for one fears what one desires.” From Dread to Despair the novel will travel before ending with Decision—a most religious and existential journey, indeed.28 In a nutshell, Wright’s protagonist in The Outsider is a going-nowhere postal worker aptly named Cross Damon. Damon grabs at his chance for a new existence when a train that he is riding crashes. He allows himself to be presumed dead, and he assumes—for the first time in his life—a sense of absolute freedom. As he moves through the worlds of Communist politics and bohemianism, he finds freedom a heady brew and jettisons any real sense of solidarity with others. Yet after he falls in love and in the moments before

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his death, he comes to the realization that he has blown it. Freedom demands responsibility; one cannot love without commitment to ideals and to others. In his final words, after an assassin’s bullet has felled him, Damon recognizes the absurdity of existence but also the responsibility for us to seek solidarity and meaning: “man is all we’ve got.”29 Thus, for African American intellectuals like Ellison and Wright—as well as for Martin Luther King Jr. (whose dissertation was on existential theology and who captured existential tones in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”) and for James Baldwin—existentialism was a doctrine that transcended racial classifications. Its emphasis on the human condition suggested to them an essential equality: all men and women were thrown into the world and all faced the same, ultimate death sentence. Tied with religious ideals and the language of the Declaration of Independence, existentialism became a central intellectual weapon in the fight for racial equality and understanding.

Existentialism Before the Fact Wright and Ellison wisely observed that the human condition evokes for some an existential awareness. This means that, although existentialism as a re­latively coherent philosophy came to America after the Second World War, it was already contained in the very sinews of life. Thus it is hardly surprising to read vivid existential musings in sermons of the Puritan divine Jonathan Edwards or in the poetry of Emily Dickinson or Stephen Crane. The nineteenth century, as Michael Lesy observes, was saturated with death. In contexts like the Civil War, infant mortality, and other daily curses, how could Americans be only optimistic? Instead, late-night existential thoughts haunted their most sober, open moments. Both Sartre and Albert Camus read Melville’s Moby-Dick as an ur-text in the existential tradition. For isn’t that novel about a quest for meaning, about how to punch through the “pasteboard masks” and enter the depths “to a little lower layer” of meaning? Is an individual’s life valid without such a journey? Here Melville, just before the age of Darwinism, is engaged in a classic “quarrel with God.” Given the misery that inflicts the innocent as well as the guilty, how can God exist—or claim to be all-powerful, all-knowing, and good? Moreover, for Melville the existentialist before the fact, if there be a God then Melville has a quarrel to pick with Him.30 Before the French existentialists came ashore, American film noir—based on the novels of such writers as James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, and

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Raymond Chandler—also reflected an existential sensibility that is in the American grain. Far from being steeped in optimism, film noir projects a nightmare world of deceit and death. The detective becomes, in many ways, existential man personified. A seeker after truth, no less than Ahab, the existential detective looks hard at existence and finds meaning only in temporary truths, not in comforting absolutes. In the famous noir film, D.O.A. (1949), a man is poisoned and discovers that he has but twenty-four hours left to live. This obviously puts his life into a new and sharpened perspective. He becomes as determined as Ahab to find out why he has been targeted for death. He discovers that his death was a matter of contingency; he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Nothing more, nothing less.31 Consider also the existential crisis contained in the story about Flitcraft, which was embedded within the text of Hammett’s noir classic, The Maltese Falcon (1930) but omitted from the 1941 film version. In this story, told by Sam Spade, a man named Flitcraft suddenly disappears. His wife engages Spade to track him down. Eventually he does, and then he listens to Flitcraft’s existential tale. One day, walking down the street past a construction site, a beam hurtles down and lands just in front of him. Following this near-death experience, Flitcraft decides that he needs to escape from his dull existence. The event made him feel as if “somebody had taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.” But after a few years of drifting around in search of something authentic, Flitcraft retreats. Spade discovers that Flitcraft has remarried (to someone similar to his previous wife) and lives an existence not dissimilar to his earlier one. The moral of this story is that Flitcraft had “adjusted himself ” to a world where beams could end your life in a moment but he later “adjusted himself to them not falling.” As Spade, Hammett, and other existential thinkers in America often noted, freedom in its fullest sense could be, as Marjorie Grene put it, “dreadful.”32 So it is hardly surprising, then, that both Camus and Sartre would find in American noir novels and films a set of insights that mirrored their own.

Kierkegaard in America Long before film noir, the initial form of European existentialism that drifted ashore in America in the early twentieth century was beholden to Nietzsche’s work, especially his emphasis on the task of the individual to impose order on the chaos of existence.33 However, of greater influence on the ­development

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of existentialism in America before and immediately after the Second World War was the work of Danish existentialist Søren Kierkegaard. Thanks to the yeoman translating efforts of David Swenson and the explications of clergyman Walter Lowrie, by the 1920s American intellectuals participated in a strenuous consideration of Kierkegaardian ideals. For Lowrie and his comrades in the movement for a reinvigorated religious consciousness, Kierke­ gaardian existentialism promised much. The First World War, that orgy of organized destruction, had tempered the formerly serene confidence that human destructiveness and sin were sunk deep in the past of humankind. Darwinism, too, had humbled many American theologians. Faced with Darwinism’s universe of chaos, they retreated into a theology that accepted evolution but that made it logical and progressive. “Nature red of tooth and claw” had been replaced by a vision of directed evolutionary progress.34 In a similar fashion, the conventional Christianity of the late Victorian and early modernist era had, in Lowrie’s view, settled into a rather tepid affair; most Americans went to church once a week and lived a conventionally moral life. This was insufficient, Lowrie thundered. Religion must arise from the depths of uncertainty and tragedy, from a reckoning with our finitude and with God’s absolute power and distance. Out of anxiety might come the absurd but welcome reality of grace through salvation, which Lowrie called “comforted despair.”35 In the aftermath of the Second World War, the age of the atomic bomb, and the Cold War, Kierkegaard became a patron saint for many American intellectuals and artists. Kierkegaardian tragedy, whether infused with religious grace or deep despair, became part of the intellectual and artistic conversation in America. Thornton Wilder’s plays and novels revolved around Kierke­ gaardian moments of emptiness and despair. However, Wilder suggested that, rather than wallowing in such dark thoughts, we confront them when “the sun rises. The facts are the same . . . but the sunlight gives them a meaning.”36 Poet W. H. Auden, in addition to editing a book of Kierkegaard’s writings, mused about how human beings are separated from one another. For Auden, modern men and women have “lost the key to / The garden gate.” This modern self had the “taste of untruth.” For Auden, truth and commu­ nity could arise only from an existential, religious leap of faith.37 By the late 1940s, Kierkegaardian existentialism coexisted in America with the existential presence and works of Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus. American popular periodicals were as much interested in the café lifestyles of Sartre and de Beauvoir as in their ideas; at least at first. Yet thanks to an

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avalanche of scholarly and popular expositions of French and German existentialist thought, existential ideas were readily available and commonly discussed in American culture by the early 1950s. Translations of Sartre and de Beauvoir tumbled from the presses, culminating in 1956 with Hazel Barnes’s translation of Sartre’s opus, L’être et le néant (Being and Nothingness). Prince­ ton philosopher Walter Kaufmann’s wide-ranging anthology of texts, Existentialism from Nietzsche to Sartre, also appeared in 1956. The influence of existentialism by the mid-1950s could also be gauged by how references to it in American culture presumed prior knowledge. Funny Face, a 1957 film starring Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn, poked fun at French existentialist pretensions while reveling in the excitement of the bohemian lifestyle. Poet Delmore Schwartz summed up existentialism as follows: “Existentialism means that no one else can take a bath for you.”38 However, American intellectuals did not bow down to the politics of French existentialists no matter how much they shared a general philosophical sensibility. America’s leading intellectual community, gathered around the journal Partisan Review, was initially enthusiastic about French existentialism. Yet learning more about Sartre and de Beauvoir’s view of the Soviet Union and about their tastes in literature (e.g., appreciation for Steinbeck and Cain) led the New York intellectuals to part company with the more radical French existentialists. After all, U.S. intellectuals wanted to join existential criticism and fiction to the theme of an emerging “American century” and not to be constrained as a mere appurtenance of the French existentialists. So despite their shared sense of tragedy, of the nature of the human condition, and of the intellectuals’ role, the French and the New York intellectuals remained at odds.39 Nonetheless, by the 1960s, the pump had been primed for a new generation of intellectuals. Accessible texts, a general embrace of the existential sensibility, and many courses for a generation of college students brought forth a fervid appreciation for existentialism. Indeed, if the New Left generation could be said to have embraced any particular set of ideas, then those ideas were existentialist. In their concerns with authenticity and freedom, the New Left generation was existential. While jailed in the South for his work organizing black voters, Southern Non-Violence Coordinating Committee leader Robert Moses found meaning in Camus’s texts. He employed Camus’s metaphor in explaining American racism as a plague. His existentialism began with the presumption of the boundary situation of our demise, but Moses emphasized that everyone must learn “how you’re going to live” through the commitments that you are willing to make.40

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Early members of Students for a Democratic Society pored over Sartre’s writings on the nature of anti-Semitism, on colonialism and revolution, and on the nature of commitment. Tom Hayden was hardly atypical in his embrace of existentialism and revolution. But as he reflected back on his days of ultraleftism—when he celebrated the use of violence to effect political change—Hayden admitted mistakes. He had veered from Camus’s distinction between rebellion and revolution. For Camus, one should become neither executioner nor victim. Hayden deeply regretted that “genuine rebellion” had fallen victim to “mad revolt.”41

The Waning of Existentialism In America, much as in Europe, existentialism seemed to be somewhat played out by the mid-1970s. To be sure, it remained a regular feature in university philosophy and comparative literature classes. Kaufmann’s anthology of existentialism barreled through edition after edition, always remaining in print. But American thinkers, like their European colleagues, began to question the existential emphasis on human freedom. They found it lacking in cognizance of larger forces that might define culture, society, and hence the individual. Beginning with the conference at Johns Hopkins University in 1966, ideas associated with French structuralism began to move some American academics away from existentialism. Instead of looking for meaning in the actions of the individual, academics in a host of disciplines discovered how language defined consciousness and how individuals are not so much the architect of their own freedom as they are defined by conventions that exist outside of their own skins. The turn was from existentialist freedom to the prison house of language.42 It is therefore not surprising that these decades saw the rise to prominence of Martin Heidegger’s existentialism. As Hannah Arendt (his former student) had explained to Americans as far back as 1946, Heidegger’s emphasis on man’s “rootlessness”—on the sense of “thrownness” and the “being and nothingness” of the self—fit well into emerging postmodernist theories about identity.43 The work of Michel Foucault, which beginning in the 1970s became immensely popular among American academics, appeared initially as a major challenge to existentialist premises. He stressed how structures of thought defined the subject and indicated how freedom was limited to existing modes

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of discourse. He also demonstrated how institutions caught the “individual” (itself an historical construction) in a vise grip. Modernity was viewed as employing a new range of modes to exercise control; indeed, under the regime of modernity, the individual came to accept discipline without its being imposed from above. In the final years of his life, however, Foucault began to reexamine the potential of the subject to be free, to exercise choice, and to create a self in terms that were closer to Sartre’s existentialism that he would earlier have imagined possible.44

Existentialism’s Afterlife No matter how much influence structuralism and post-structuralism enjoyed in America during the 1980s, existentialism remained compelling and ubiquitous. For many, it was a palliative, as it always had been, against conformity and inauthenticity—themes that figured in the popular film Reality Bites (1994). How could it be otherwise in the days of “Star Wars” nuclear weapons systems and a culture so empty that seemed to be predicated solely on pursuing pleasure and acquiring wealth? Like Ellison’s underground and invisible man, existentialism came up from below to speak to this culture of complacency. In some ways, one of the more consistently existentialist American artists since the 1970s has been filmmaker Woody Allen. Although he claims never to have read the key texts of existentialism with any care, his short stories and films abound in existential references. In perhaps his most telling film from this viewpoint, Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989), Allen brings his existential concerns to the forefront. The film weaves a host of different personal stories together. One of them concerns a Holocaust survivor who has become an advocate for the optimistic embrace of life. Suddenly, without any apparent reason or logic, he decides that life is not worth living and kills himself. The key character in the film is a successful ophthalmologist who is under extreme pressure from his mistress to break from his marriage. This he will not do. As her threats to reveal the relationship to his wife escalate and as his world begins to unravel, he learns that he can have the mistress killed by making a simple phone call and a cash payment. At first, the very notion of taking her life appalls every fiber of his essential decency. But faced with his world being torn down by his one-time paramour, he decides to have her killed. His

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anguish is deep. The murder raises questions about the existence of God and the nature of punishment. After a period of grieving and a desire to admit to the crime, the ophthalmologist awakens one sunny morning and realizes that there is no God, no punishment, and certainly no justice. The film, of course, is no simple celebration of such a happy nihilism. Rather, it suggests that even if there is no essential logic to the universe and no compelling order to the chaos, we should take responsibility for our actions before horrible consequences ensue and we should take pleasure in the simple, ordinary rhythms of love and commitment to others.

Existential Lessons for Today Our world of the twenty-first century is pock marked by meaninglessness, absurdity, and violence masked by the languages of certitude and obfuscation. Americans, perhaps more than ever, cling to certainty whether it comes from fundamentalist religion or from their own gut feelings. Reducing the world to black-and-white distinctions, especially in an age of terrorism both at home and abroad, makes freedom—the responsibility of the individual to choose—seem quite “dreadful.” If such is indeed our condition, then existentialist truth telling is more needed than ever. Even Mailer recognized that we live too often with the cancer of complacency and inauthenticity. If there is an American existentialist tradition, as this chapter suggests, then it is anchored in the recognition that life, behind the pasteboard masks, is meaningless, absurd, and contingent. But one must not—as the invisible man and other figures come to realize—rest comfortably in this ultimately empty abode. Rather, armed with this knowledge, the individual must recognize that freedom and meaning are things that we must strive to achieve; this is the essence of Barnes’s call for a “humanistic existentialism.” Existentialism muddies the waters of morality by recognizing, with Sartre, that we exist in a world populated by other wills that often seek dominance over our own. Given this reality, the American existentialist is required to recognize the complexity of situations instead of reducing them to preordered categories. This does make for moments of uncertainty, but they are inherent in the human condition. Only after that uncertainty is confronted fully can we choose a course of action. Even if that action, in a tragic world, is doomed by contingent circumstances to fail, it was nonetheless arrived at in good faith.

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Moreover, existentialism teaches us that the individual is far from alone in inhabiting an existential situation. By striving with others and accepting responsibility—by recognizing how one’s own freedom is linked to that of others—the realm of freedom is expanded for all. Hell is not others, as in Sartre’s mistaken formulation. Rather, hell is being cut off from human solidarity, from striving for goals that will bring into being more freedom for everyone. If such are the essentials of the American existentialist tradition, a tradition with affinities to American pragmatism, then we may reasonably assume that it will find itself resurrected in this age of fantasy and self-deceit.

Notes 1. “The White Negro” can be most easily found in Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself (1959; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992), 337–75. On Mailer and existentialism, see George Cotkin, “Norman Mailer’s Existential Errand,” in Cotkin, Existential America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 184–209. Mailer’s call for a “revolution in the consciousness” of his time is in “First Advertisement for Myself,” in Mailer, Advertisements, 17. 2. John Wild, The Challenge of Existentialism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1955), 90. 3. See Cotkin, “Robert Frank’s Existential Vision,” in Cotkin, Existential America, 210–21. See also Robert Frank, The Americans (New York: Scalo, 1988). 4. Mailer, “The White Negro,” 338–39. 5. Ibid., 343–46. 6. Ibid., 341. 7. Ibid., 356–57. 8. Ibid., 341. 9. Alan Ginsberg, “Howl,” in Ginsberg, Collected Poems, 1947–1980 (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 126–27. 10. Mailer, “The White Negro,” 341. 11. Ibid., 346–47. 12. Mailer, The Naked and the Dead (New York: Modern Library, 1948), 660. See also “Existential Aesthetics,” interview with Laura Adams (1975) in Conversations with Norman Mailer, ed. J. Michael Lennon (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988), 213. Existential manliness and primitivism were Mailer’s responses to a perceived period of impotency in American life. On this issue, see K. A. Cuordileone, “Politics in an Age of Anxiety: Cold War Political Cultures and the Crisis in American Masculinity, 1949–1960,” Journal of American History 87 (September 2000): 515–45.

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13. Jean-Paul Sartre, “A European Declaration of Independence,” Commentary (January 1950): 413; Simone de Beauvoir, “An Existentialist Looks at Americans,” New York Times Magazine (May 25, 1947): 52. 14. Hazel Barnes, The Literature of Possibility: A Study of Humanistic Existentialism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1959). 15. Cotkin, Existential America, 151–52. 16. Barnes, Literature of Possibility, 81. Her major work on existentialism was An Existentialist Ethics (New York: Knopf, 1967). On James as an existentialist, see Cotkin, William James, Public Philosopher (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). 17. On the tragic among American intellectuals, see Richard Wightman Fox, “Tragedy, Responsibility, and the American Intellectual, 1925–1950,” in Lewis Mumford: Public Intellectual, ed. Thomas P. Hughes and Agatha C. Hughes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 323–38. 18. Whittaker Chambers, Witness (New York: Random House, 1952), 85. 19. Arthur Schlesinger, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (1949; New York: DaCapo, 1988), 52. On Niebuhr, see Cotkin, Existential America, 61–66. For similar assertions about the anxiety of the age and how totalitarianism responded to it, see the popular work by psychologist Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety (New York: Ronald Press, 1950) and Will Herberg, Judaism and Modern Man: An Interpretation of Jewish Religion (New York: Farrar, Straus & Young, 1951). 20. Wild, Challenge of Existentialism, 183–84. On American philosophy and existentialism, see Ann Fulton, Apostles of Sartre: Existentialism in America, 1945–1963 (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1999). 21. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963; New York: Norton, 1997), 79, 319– 26. See also Sandra Dijkstra, “Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan: The Politics of Omission,” Feminist Studies 6 (Summer, 1980): 290–303. 22. May, Meaning of Anxiety; Irvin Yallom, Existential Psychotherapy (New York: Basic Books, 1980); Yallom, Staring at the Sun: Overcoming the Terror of Death (New York: Jossey-Bass, 2008). 23. Herberg, Judaism and Modern Man, 9; Herberg, Four Existentialist Theologians (New York: Doubleday, 1958). 24. On the literary politics involved with this break, see William J. Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left: African-American Writing and Communism Between the Wars (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999) and the rather unfavorable view of Ellison’s choices in Jerry Gafio Watts, Heroism and the Black Intellectual: Ralph Ellison, Politics, and Afro-American Intellectual Life (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). For Wright’s position, see his contribution to The God That Failed: Six Studies in Communism (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1950), 121–66. 25. Ralph Ellison, “Interview with Alan Geller,” in The Black American Writer: Fiction, ed. C. W. E. Bigsby (DeLand, Fla.: Everett/Edwards, 1969), vol. I, 167; Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 1995), 22 (emphasis in original).

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26. Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: Modern Library, 1992), 572. 27. C. L. R. James, “Black Studies and the Contemporary Student,” in James, At the Rendezvous of Victory: Selected Writings (London: Allison & Busby, 1984), 196. 28. On the novel, see Cotkin, Existential America, 167–75. 29. Richard Wright, The Outsider (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 585. 30. Albert Camus, “Herman Melville,” in Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, trans. Ellen Conroy Kennedy (New York: Vintage, 1970), 288–94. Melville, Moby-Dick (1852; New York: Library of America, 1983), 967. For a passionate examination of Melville and the question of God, see Lawrence Thompson, Melville’s Quarrel with God (Prince­ ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1952). 31. On this dark side, see Gordon Theisen, Staying Up Much Too Late: Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks and the Dark Side of the American Psyche (New York: Thomas Dunne, 2006). 32. Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon (New York: Vintage, 1984), 71–72; Marjorie Grene, Dreadful Freedom: A Critique of Existentialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948). 33. On Nietzsche in America, see Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, “Conventional Iconoclasm: The Cultural Work of the Nietzsche Image in Twentieth-Century America,” Journal of American History 93 (December 2006): 728–54. 34. On this, see Cotkin, Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture, 1880– 1900 (New York: Twayne, 1990), chapter 1. 35. Walter Lowrie, Our Concern with the Theology of Crisis (Boston: Meador, 1932), 109. Joined with Kierkegaard’s perspective was the work of Karl Barth, on whom see William R. Hutchinson, The Modernist Impulse in American Protestantism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 288–302. 36. Thornton Wilder, “The Alcestiad,” in Wilder, The Collected Short Plays of Thornton Wilder, ed. A. Tappan Wilder (New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1998), act II, 177. 37. W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety (New York: Random House, 1946), 50, 7. See also Auden, ed., The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963). 38. Delmore Schwartz, “Does Existentialism Still Exist?” Partisan Review 12 (December 1948): 1361. 39. Cotkin, Existential America, 105–33. 40. Quoted in Charles Marsh, God’s Long Summer: Stories of Faith and Civil Rights (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 48; Jack Newfield, A Prophetic Minority (New York: New American Library, 1966), 73. See also Eric R. Burner, And Gently He Shall Lead Them: Robert Parris Moses and Civil Rights in Mississippi (New York: New York University Press, 1994). 41. Tom Hayden, Reunion: A Memoir (New York: Collier, 1988), 77. See also Doug Rossinow, The Politics of Authenticity: Liberalism, Christianity, and the New Left in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

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42. J. David Hoeveler, Jr., The Postmodernist Turn: American Thought and Culture in the 1970s (New York: Twayne, 1996). 43. Hannah Arendt, “What Is Existential Philosophy?” in Arendt: Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace), 163–87. 44. The literature on Foucault is immense, but most helpful is Eric Paras, Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge (New York: Other Press, 2006).

5

Angst Across the Channel Existentialism in Britain Martin Woessner I’m quite intoxicated by all this. The intellectual fumes are strangely mixed, very strong, overpowering. —Iris Murdoch to David Hicks, March 1945 It is difficult to describe accurately the early introduction of Existentialism, and particularly the philosophy of Sartre, to the English-speaking world in its historical context, but it is perhaps worth recalling it. —Mary Warnock, A Memoir: People and Places

When Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot had its English-language premiere at the Arts Theatre Club in London on August 3, 1955, few were prepared for the avalanche of interest this seemingly obscure play would unleash. Originally composed in French by an Irish expatriate, and dripping with what seemed to be a decidedly continental pathos, Godot was an unlikely blockbuster. But a blockbuster was what it quickly became. According to the director of the Arts Theatre production, a young Peter Hall, it did not take long for “Godot mania” to grip London. Equal parts condemnation, bafflement, praise, and satire went into the craze, of course, but the resulting mixture, stirred further by positive reviews from prominent critics like Kenneth Tynan, ensured that seats would be filled for a long time to come.1 Commentators were quick to see such sweeping public interest as a cultural turning point. “No new play on the London stage has had a more unexpected and exciting success in recent years,” wrote G. S. Fraser in the Times Literary Supplement upon the publication of Godot in English.2 Whether one viewed Beckett’s creation as bleak or funny, indecent or liberating, it captured—like

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all great theater—its moment in time with eerie exactitude. Fraser, for one, thought it tapped into the “liberal uncertainty” that defined the “prevailing mood of modern Western Europe.”3 The American philosopher and cultural critic William Barrett agreed. Writing in his bestselling book Irrational Man only a few years later, he suggested that when a play like Godot “runs for more than sixteen months to packed houses in the capitals of Europe, we can only conclude that something is at work in the European mind against which its traditions cannot wholly guard it and which it will have to live through to the bitter end.”4 As with the bleak and terrifying paintings of Francis Bacon— who, like Beckett, was Dublin-born—Godot charted new and disturbing territory.5 Barrett was convinced that Godot represented a thorough interrogation of the existential void: it was “a play in which Nothingness circulates through every line from beginning to end.”6 For him, such frank examinations of human existence unified modern art and modern philosophy, thereby illuminating the current moment. From Hemingway to Heidegger, the Nothing—the void at the heart of individual existence, the empty space left behind by an absent God (so similar to “Godot”)—was all that was worth talking about. Why any of this should have appealed to London audiences was a source of bafflement for some and a cause for serious concern for others. Little has changed. Waiting for Godot, as one reviewer famously quipped, is a play “in which nothing happens, twice.”7 Yet it has resonated with audiences in places far and wide, both geographically and psychically. In Paris, London, San Quentin, and, more recently, post-Katrina New Orleans, Beckett’s most famous play has struck a chord.8 Vladimir and Estragon, the protagonists of the play, are simultaneously everybody and nobody all at once. They wear bowlers, but we are not sure if they are tramps or clowns. All we know is that they are—as the minimal stage directions dictate—on a country road, by a tree, in the evening. The ostensible plot of the play is easy enough to recount. Vladimir and Estragon, who refer to each other (either affectionately or sarcastically, we cannot be sure) as Didi and Gogo, are waiting to meet Godot. The exact time and nature of their appointment is unclear, and there is the possibility that Godot has already come and gone or, indeed, that he will not come at all. In the meantime, Vladimir and Estragon, whose attempts to occupy themselves while waiting for Godot result only in more inaction, are joined by two more characters, Pozzo and Lucky. If Vladimir and Estragon’s repartee is a classic example of vaudeville cross-talk, their interactions with Pozzo and Lucky take the art form to a whole new level:

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Estragon: [timidly, to Pozzo] You’re not Mr. Godot, Sir? Pozzo: [terrifying voice] I am Pozzo! [Silence.] Does that name mean nothing to you? [Silence.] I say does that name mean nothing to you? Vladimir and Estragon look at each other questioningly. Estragon: [pretending to search] Bozzo . . . Bozzo . . . Vladimir: [ditto] Pozzo . . . Pozzo . . . Pozzo: PPPOZZZO! Estragon: Ah! Pozzo . . . let me see . . . Pozzo . . . Vladimir: Is it Pozzo or Bozzo? Estragon: Pozzo . . . no . . . I’m afraid I . . . no . . . I don’t seem to . . . Pozzo advances threateningly. Vladimir: [conciliating] I knew a family called Gozzo. The mother had the clap.9 Pozzo and Lucky play the roles of master and slave, with the former rather cruelly controlling the actions of the former, but like Vladimir and Estragon they are without direction. Toward the end of the first act, Estragon admits: “Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!”10 The play is about waiting, but a particular kind of waiting. Vladimir and Estragon wait without purpose. There is no specific reason for their waiting, just as there is no specific reason for their appointment with Godot. When a boy finally arrives at the end of the first act to announce that Godot will not come that night, “but surely tomorrow,” we get the sense that this waiting game has gone on for some time—and furthermore that it will continue indefinitely.11 The author of Waiting for Godot famously resisted all attempts to wrestle from him an authoritative interpretation of the play. When Beckett eventually took in the inaugural London production, the theater critic Harold Hobson informed him that there was much debate about the play’s meaning. Asked for his opinion on the matter, Beckett replied, “I take no sides about that.”12 He was most reticent about any philosophical overtones the play might have: “One cannot speak anymore of being, one must speak only of the mess. When Heidegger and Sartre speak of a contrast between being and existence, they may be right. I don’t know, but their language is too philosophical for me. I am not a philosopher. One can only speak of what is in front of him, and that now is simply the mess.”13 Nevertheless, despite Beckett’s reticence, philosophical interpretations of Godot abounded in the years following its premieres in both French and En­ glish. It was received as an existentialist work because the intellectual climate

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of the times was existentialist. Godot appeared, as one recent commentator put it, “particularly congruent with the tenets of existentialism.”14 As characters thrown into their situation without history, purpose, or plan, Vladimir and Estragon seemed to be perfect reflections of the culture of the absurd. Their struggles with the seeming meaninglessness of existence reflect the works of Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus, but with all the distortions of a fun-house mirror. Like heroic existentialists, they resolve to act but their best efforts result in nothing, spoiling any heroism on their part. As Estragon puts it at one point: “We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?”15 Impressions are all they can manage. Far from depicting resolute action in the face of the absurd, Vladimir and Estragon are patron saints of stasis. In representing the futility of commitment, they actually deny the heroic individualism and “decisionistic” calls for action found in the writings of Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus. Nothingness spurs these writers into action, but Vladimir and Estragon can come up with no more than a passing moment of resolve: Vladimir: Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! [Pause. Vehemently.] Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed. Not indeed that we are personally needed. Others would meet the case equally well, if not better. To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! Let us represent worthily for once the foul brood to which a cruel fate consigned us! What do you say? [Estragon says nothing.] It is true that when with folded arms we weigh the pros and cons we are no less a credit to our species. The tiger bounds to the help of his congeners without the least reflection, or else he slinks away into the depths of the thickets. But that is not the question. What are we doing here, that is the question. And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer. Yes, in this immense confusion one thing alone is clear. We are waiting for Godot to come— Estragon: Ah! Pozzo: Help! Vladimir: Or for night to fall. [Pause.] We have kept our appointment and that’s an end to that. We are not saints, but we have kept our appointment. How many people can boast as much? Estragon: Billions.16

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The stirring call to action passes quickly into comic futility. Vladimir and Estragon are no better than the rest of us. Sadly, they are also no worse. Waiting for Godot may very well be about the meaning of existence and nothingness. But it could also be about nothing more than two tramps passing the time on a country road. The play simultaneously invites and resists overinterpretation, which is one reason it has enjoyed such a profound afterlife far beyond Paris and London. But to appreciate its origins, we must return to these cities and to the culture of existentialism present at the time in both places. As an investigation into how existentialism was received, constructed, and reconstructed in Britain, this chapter looks behind and beyond Godot’s London premiere to detail the peculiar cultural cross-pollination that made existentialism possible across the English Channel. We begin with the introduction of existentialism into British philosophy by two German-Jewish émigrés, Werner Brock and F. H. Heinemann. This is followed by an examination of the pioneering work of the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, who introduced Sartre to English audiences both academic and popular in the 1950s. The last section of the chapter charts the wider cultural reception of existentialism in Britain via the works of such popular authors as Colin Wilson and R. D. Laing. From Oxford philosophy to the rise and fall of the novelists and playwrights dubbed the Angry Young Men, existentialism profoundly shaped British thought and culture in the years following the Second World War. Some of its effects, especially in the realm of academic philosophy, can still be seen and felt today.

The Existentialist International Like most things continental, many Britons deemed existentialism a foreign contagion after the Second World War. In 1947 the Oxford don H. R. TrevorRoper, writing for the New York Times, dismissed existentialism as “an irrational philosophy of defeat.” Once “very fashionable in conquered France,” it had also taken root, he feared, in conquered Germany. Its popularity did not bode well, in Trevor-Roper’s opinion, for the country’s recovery—especially since existentialism, like Nazism, was little more than “a philosophy of nihilism.”17 Such fears dominated the early discussion of existentialism in Britain, a place that had supposedly resisted the siren call of nihilism just as it had held off Nazism. But verdicts such as Trevor-Roper’s, which helped to instill what Stefan Collini has labeled a postwar “British exceptionalism,” obscure

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the long and often profound engagement with both the philosophy and the culture of existentialism across the Channel, an engagement that both predated and outlived the immediate aftermath of World War II.18 In fact, existentialism had a significant (if not always easy) reception in the United Kingdom. Especially if we look beyond the narrow confines of academic philosophy, we find that, as the case of Godot indicates, its reception was more than just “lukewarm.”19 This cross-Channel reception was at times quite hot, and it should not only be included in wider discussions of the historical legacy of existentialism but also help us reframe that legacy along decidedly international, if not transnational, lines. As Collini suggests, somewhat despite himself, the “general cultural reputation” of existentialism did include Britain.20 Furthermore, Britain’s existential moment played an important role in the history of British philosophy’s growing cosmopolitanism, if only as a kind of message in a bottle sent forth into a time (like ours) when a narrowly conceived analytic philosophy is beginning to lose its luster. When examining the inter- or transnational nature of existentialism, Godot is a good place to begin—even though the play, like Beckett, was not really existentialist in the strict sense of the term. As S. E. Gontarski has argued, Beckett’s most famous play “has been a plural, bicultural, international work from its inception.”21 It is neither wholly Irish nor French nor English but rather some amalgam of these; its origins are simultaneously nowhere and everywhere. According to literary critic Pascale Casanova, Beckett followed his idol James Joyce and sought to foster a literary modernism whose “aesthetic of autonomy” would call into question such facile categorizations of literature as either national or foreign.22 Indeed, for Beckett as well as for his fellow modernists in literature and the arts, it was aesthetic/linguistic experimentation that mattered most—far more than any nationalist pedigree. Like modernism, existentialism did not recognize borders, as the chapters in this volume demonstrate.23 Its transnational canon was created ex post facto and was based loosely upon the work of thinkers from different cultures and countries.24 As a result, existentialism carried no singular, organic pedigree. Nevertheless, given the belated interest in it displayed by British readers, the commonplace assumption at the time was that existentialism somehow remained too foreign and too continental for English-language readers. At least that is what some of the intellectual émigrés fleeing Hitler’s Europe initially thought. Werner Brock, who was Heidegger’s assistant in Freiburg until Gleichschaltung legislation went into effect and forced him out of the position, was

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among the many observers who saw something peculiarly and essentially Germanic in existentialism. For Brock—who brought some of the earliest news of existentialism to English audiences via a series of lectures on contemporary German philosophy in May 1934 at Bedford College, University of London—the kind of existential philosophy dominant in Germany at the time had to be viewed as a by-product of “the lack of political unity” and of “the fact that the character of the German people had not been formed by one national ideal.”25 In other words, the German philosophy of the day, thanks to the peculiarities of German political history, played a political-cultural role more profound and perhaps more dangerous than philosophy did in Britain. Contemporary German philosophy was a crucial source, perhaps the only source, of a unified national culture. Although Brock provided a synoptic overview—giving due credit to the works of Edmund Husserl (Heidegger’s mentor and the founder of phenomenology), Wilhem Dilthey, and Max Weber—he focused primarily on the philosophers of “life” and “Existenz” such as Georg Simmel and Max Scheler, who (alongside Jaspers and Heidegger) had done the most to chart the effects of modernization on this national culture. These latter thinkers, influenced as they were by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, eventually led the fight against what they perceived as the most dangerous aspect of the modern world: the rise and dominance of science over philosophy. If it was true that Germans looked to philosophy for their political unity, as Brock suggested, then the gradual displacement of philosophy by science over the course of the nineteenth century meant that Germans were losing touch with themselves. In Brock’s estimation, the most compelling of contemporary German philosophers, like his mentor Heidegger, sought “to raise philosophy again to a height which in the nineteenth century, the age of science, it seemed to have lost for ever.”26 In an age dominated by “technique,” “economic processes,” “the state,” and increasingly the agitation of “peoples outside of Europe,” Brock thought that philosophy’s only option was a return to the very foundations of thinking itself.27 After “the collapse of Hegel’s philosophy” and the subsequent rise of the “autonomous sciences,” philosophers of life and Existenz sought to return philosophy from the stultifying objectivity of the sciences to the vibrancy of lived experience.28 Toward this end, they emphasized (as had Kierkegaard and Nietzsche) the importance of choice, mortality, individualism, and concrete reality.29 These were topics little discussed by the Fachphilosoph, the philosopher-as-specialist who modeled himself after the scientist, toiling away at a thoroughly positivist research program.30 It

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is not clear, though, whether philosophers outside of Germany shared such sentiments. Brock concluded his lectures with a summary statement of contemporary philosophy’s prewar quandary: In short, will it be the task of future philosophy to interpret existence in a more universal sense and so once more give strength and significance to human life, as it did in Greece and in earlier modern times? Or will it manifest itself in a humbler, though certainly not unimportant manner, through the minute investigation of specialized problems propounded by isolated schools? That is the question which, in the future, must be decided for philosophy.31 It is worth noting the decisionism embedded in Brock’s summation. His scholarly overview was clearly no specialist’s itemization; rather, it participated directly in existentialism’s vanguard attempt to rethink the grounds of philosophy itself. In suggesting that a choice had to be made between two kinds of philosophizing and by generalizing the German case into a more universal theme, Brock was not only giving an account of existentialism but also embodying it. Kierkegaard’s religious either/or had become the contemporary thinker’s choice between either Fachphilosophie or existential philosophy. There is a twofold irony at work behind Brock’s lecture. Brock’s former mentor Heidegger at this time busily translating his philosophical work into the language of the new Nazi regime (a task he clearly modeled on the ancient Greek experience, speaking, as he often did, of a special Greco-­Germanic spiritual mission). At the same time, philosophers in Britain were busily retreating into the very specialization against which Brock had forewarned.32 Whether via the mathematical and logical work of Bertrand Russell, the positivism of the Vienna Circle (which was introduced to English readers in 1936 by A. J. Ayer’s Language, Truth, and Logic and by the early writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein), or the rise of the “ordinary language” philosophy of G. E. Moore, J. L. Austin, Gilbert Ryle, and the later Wittgenstein, philosophers across the Channel were more often than not drawn to linguistic rather than political dilemmas.33 All these various currents would flow into what eventually became known as “Oxford philosophy,” which Ernest Gellner described as the apotheosis of close-minded specialization—the purview of linguistic analysts who hid behind “the cloak of a spurious neutrality.”34

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The existentialist gauntlet thrown down by Werner Brock in 1934 may have failed to stir linguistic philosophers at Oxford and Cambridge from the early years of their specialist’s slumber, but it anticipated the events that would come to define not just postwar philosophical history but cultural history as well. Here, too, it was a Jewish émigré from Hitler’s Europe who lead the way. Like Brock, F. H. Heinemann came to existentialism with an impressive pedigree. As he put it, he was at hand for every stage of its modern development: he witnessed its “rise” in Germany, “its transplantation to France, and its recent reception in the Anglo-Saxon world.” He even considered himself to be the first to coin the term “Existenzphilosophie” in 1929.35 Indeed, Heinemann’s book, Neue Wege der Philosophie, was one of the first synthetic accounts of the existential turn in German philosophy.36 But before he could follow through with his initial study, Heinemann (like Brock) was forced into exile, dismissed from his post at the University of Frankfurt in 1933. He taught briefly in the Netherlands and at the Sorbonne in Paris before landing a position at Manchester College, Oxford.37 While in England, Heinemann wrote frequently for the journal Philosophy, providing regular updates on philosophical happenings in Germany and elsewhere on the continent. Between 1934 and 1964 he published some twentysix articles, reviews, and surveys in the periodical, offering commentaries on new developments in the study of metaphysics, the philosophy of science, the philosophy of history, and the theory of values. Prior to the war, he was among the first in England to take seriously the claims of such Existenz philosophers as Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger. Like Brock, Heinemann believed that, for reasons of historical specificity, German thinkers were simply more attuned to the cultural crisis that existentialism addressed: “German philosophers have been much more impressed than the English by the fact that life, art, and science,” he wrote in 1939, “have lost their original meaning, that they become more and more meaningless.”38 As a refugee, Heinemann was no propagandist for the political excesses rationalized by Heidegger— and others like him—as the only proper response to this crisis of meaning. Like Heidegger, however, he did see the rise of Nazism as somehow predestined by the epoch of meaninglessness. In an article on “Nihilism in Germany,” written during the first months of the Second World War, Heinemann explained the rise of National Socialism as nothing less than the Hegelian synthesis of the most radical political ideologies of the day: Bolshevism and Fascism. That Nazism arose in

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Germany meant only that the Germans were ahead of the curve when it came to experiencing the full impact of the intellectual and spiritual rupture that these political programs reflected. He suggested that in Germany the “crisis of man is reaching its catastrophic end.”39 Convinced that it was the world’s “fate to pass through a period of nihilism,” Heinemann thought that that the German mind, “which had an innate predisposition towards nihilism,” was a kind of bellwether in this regard.40 It led the way forward, if only in a negative sense. Yet the English, he warned, were just as susceptible to nihilistic tendencies. In any case, it was not at all clear that Heinemann wanted the English to resist the inevitable confrontation with nihilism, for it was only after passing through this stage that the next epoch in the history of European civilization could be prepared: “The nihilistic phase of European civilization does indicate that it has to undergo an intensive change. An old system of values has to be repealed by a new one. But there is no reason for despair. On the contrary, the future of mankind demands categorically a new and stable foundation for those values without which mankind cannot live.”41 Was Nazism then a necessary evil? Heinemann seemed to be suggesting so.42 He was convinced that German philosophical development reflected the cultural crises, political ruptures, and revolutions of the day. Clearly, in a period of world-historical instability, philosophy could not go on as usual. But in fact it did. Not until after the war—after the “crisis of man” had been resolved by American industrial might, British perseverance, and Soviet fortitude on the eastern front—did Britons begin to delve into existentialism in any serious and sustained way. To do so, they had to overcome the entrenched wisdom of the analytic philosophy in ascendance not only at Oxford but in America, too.43 By the time Heinemann published Existentialism and the Modern Predicament in 1953, he was compelled to offer his synthetic interpretation of existentialism as, among other things, a lifeline for “all those who, dissatisfied with a merely linguistic approach to philosophical problems, are looking for an alternative.” Insofar as existentialism did not reduce everything to mere linguistic problems and sought instead to address the concrete realities of existence in the modern world, it offered a clear alternative to the “Logical Positivists, Logical Empiricists, Scientific Empiricists, or Analysts,” for whom “the pre-eminence of the technician is paramount.”44 Revisiting some of his earlier comments in “Nihilism in Germany,” Heinemann portrayed existentialism as “one of the essential forms of West European philosophy in the age of European collapse.”45 This assessment may seem to echo Trevor-Roper’s portrayal of existentialism as an

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“irrational philosophy of defeat,” but it is pitched as something positive, an honest attempt to address adequately or, better, “to overcome the alienation of man”—a topic of little interest to the Fachphilosophisch analysts.46 That existentialism arose in Western Europe did not, in Heinemann’s opinion, limit the scope of its applicability. One of the defining features of his argument is its insistence that existentialism is a legitimate response to the contradictions of the modern age—contradictions which may have been felt earliest in Germany, Italy, and France but were not limited to those countries. The Second World War resolved some of these contradictions on the level of political ideology (at the very least, it resulted in a standoff between communism and liberal democracy), but it did not eradicate the problem at a social or a cultural level. For Heinemann, the war made the problem of alienation more profound, not less. Thanks to the crisis of religion and the rise of industrial technology, modern man was now more alienated than ever.47 To make matters worse, philosophy—the discipline entrusted with such problems as alienation—was increasingly retreating into the realm of technical specialization, which only exacerbated such pressing concerns. In fact, Heinemann heralded existentialism as a pathway out of the “predominance of analysis.”48 Perhaps it was time, he insinuated, “to analyse the analysers.”49 Existentialism was important precisely because its chief thinkers addressed “concrete problems of primary importance which are not discussed by analytic science and by analytic philosophy.” Existentialism turned the focus away from language and back to “the existence of human persons.”50 If figures including Kierkegaard, Husserl, Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre, Marcel, and Berdyaev were important (and each of them warranted a separate chapter in Heinemann’s study), then it was for that reason most of all. The only problem with this list, of course, was that it included not a single individual from the British Isles.

The Novelist As Philosopher and the Philosopher As Novelist The basis of Heinemann’s book was a series of lectures he delivered at ­Oxford—a noteworthy historical detail for several reasons. For one, by the early 1950s Oxford had become the bastion of linguistic philosophy, the very place where the concrete problems of politics, technology, and social alienation were declared out of bounds and unworthy of philosophical inquiry— at least according to Gellner’s later assessment. But Oxford was also a place

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where, thanks to inventive and unique figures such as the young Iris Murdoch, alternative modes of philosophizing began to flourish, if only at the margins. Indeed, Murdoch, like so many others of her generation, came to existentialism not through the tutorial but far away from it. In her case, it was while working for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Committee (UNRAA) after leaving Oxford that Murdoch came into contact with existential ideas.51 Significantly, those ideas that she found intoxicating (as the epigraph for this chapter demonstrates) were expressed not solely in the form of philosophical treatises but also in novels, plays, and other aesthetically oriented formats. Although we might find traces of Murdoch’s initial enthusiasm for existentialism in her early readings of the novels of Beckett (Murphy was a particular favorite), one of the principle sources behind her exposure to French existentialism was Raymond Queneau, whose Pierrot mon ami also found a special place in Murdoch’s early pantheon of influences.52 In fact, it was her conversations and correspondence with Queneau that won her over to the new perspective, perhaps without her even realizing it. Queneau—who had connections to the Surrealists, the existentialists, and the neo-Hegelians of the interwar years (he was the editor of Alexandre Kojève’s famous lectures on Hegel during the thirties, lectures attended by everyone from Sartre and Queneau to Georges Bataille, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Lacan, and even Raymond Aron)—had his finger on the pulse of just about everything that was happening in francophone philosophy at the time.53 Whereas émigrés such as Brock and Heinemann emphasized the Germanic legacy of existentialism, offering genealogies that stretched from Kierkegaard through Nietzsche up to Jaspers and Heidegger, Murdoch looked directly to the more recent writings coming from Paris. After the war, Heinemann had tried to maintain a distinction between German Existenz philosophy and French existentialism, no doubt because the latter was seemingly more aesthetic than philosophical. But Murdoch felt no such compunctions, and she eagerly read the novels alongside the philosophy. What Murdoch did have in common with Brock and Heinemann was a firm belief that existentialism’s most laudable feature was its refusal to hand over the most important aspects of the philosophical pursuit—namely, life and how to live it—to the linguistic games of the analysts. “For me,” she declared in a journal she kept at the time, “philosophical problems are the problems of my own life.”54 Of course, in the immediate postwar years it was Sartre who cornered the market on all things existential, but the vogue for these new ideas spread

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far and wide. While working for the UNRAA, Murdoch had a chance to visit the continent and experience the excitement first hand: she met Sartre in Brussels and talked about Kierkegaard in Austria with Queneau. She also started to reconsider the limitations of her Oxford training. In a war-torn and reconstructing Europe she saw, in a direct and immediate way, the exigencies of life itself, and she came away from the experience convinced of Sartre’s immediate and powerful relevance. According to her biographer, Peter Conradi, Murdoch felt that Sartre’s “moral philosophy was exactly what Oxford philosophy needed to have injected in its veins to rejuvenate it.”55 Murdoch began this process upon returning to England in 1948, but the results—much like her commitment to existentialism itself—were ambiguous. As the sociologist of ideas Randall Collins describes it in his massive The Sociology of Philosophies, existentialism is a “philosophical-literary hybrid.”56 Consequently, in order to follow Sartre’s introduction into postwar English culture, we must examine his work on both a philosophical and a literary level. Murdoch is a perfect case in point. After her work with the UNRAA, she continued her studies at Cambridge; there she toyed with the idea of writing a thesis on Husserl, the founder of phenomenology—a philosophical method that was, of course, tremendously important for the work of both Heidegger and Sartre.57 But rather than start at the beginning, with Husserl, Murdoch instead opted to focus on the aesthetic tumult of the current moment. In other words, she started straight away with Sartre, and she read his literary work as closely as she did his philosophical treatises. In Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, one of the earliest English-language examinations of the whole of Sartre’s intellectual corpus, Murdoch made it clear that existentialism was as relevant as any philosophical movement could be: “To understand Jean-Paul Sartre is to understand something important about the present time.”58 Part of existentialism’s relevance stems from Sartre’s use of the novel as a form of philosophical expression. “The novel, after all, is itself a product of this post-Hegelian era,” Murdoch suggested: The novelist proper is, in his way, a sort of phenomenologist. He has implicitly understood, what the philosopher has grasped less clearly, that human reason is not a single unitary gadget the nature of which could be discovered once and for all. The novelist has had his eye fixed on what we do, and not on what we ought to do or must be presumed to do. He has a natural gift: that blessed freedom from rationalism which the academic thinker achieves, if at all, by a precarious discipline.59

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Murdoch made essentially the same claim in one of her earliest essays devoted to existentialism, “The Existentialist Political Myth,” which was published a year earlier. In that piece she attempted two things: to herald the existentialist’s effort to address lived experience, which was often achieved via recourse to the novelist’s tools, and to demonstrate that existentialism did not differ drastically from the pursuits of the Oxford philosophers—her teachers and later her colleagues. In Murdoch’s opinion, what Marxists, existentialists, and English logicians (or logical analysts) have in common is a non-dualistic patience with phenomena. What we are all working upon, it might be said, is le monde vécu, the lived world, what is actually experienced, thought of as itself being the real, and carrying its own truth criteria with it—and not as being the reflection or mental shadow of some other separate mode of being which lies behind it in static parallel. This is the revolution in philosophic method which is showing us its different faces at the present time. It is a move, one might notice, which brings the activity of the philosopher in some ways closer to that of the novelist. The novelist is, par excellence, the unprejudiced describer of le monde vécu—and it is not surprising that a great novelist, such as Tolstoy, found out long ago things which Sartre and Professor Ryle are now offering to us in a philosophical form.60 It was a sentiment that animated Murdoch’s earliest engagements with existentialism and foreshadowed the shape that her own career would take. In time, she became both a distinguished philosopher and an accomplished novelist.61 Given her interest in absorbing the novelist’s talents into the philosophical discussions of the day—of following through on the “rapprochement of literature and philosophy” that she found in the writings of Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir—Murdoch naturally approached Sartre as a novelist first and as a philosopher second.62 Still, as part of her attempt to rejuvenate the moral thinking of Oxford analysts, Murdoch had to convince her philosophical peers that Sartre’s concerns were not so far removed from their own. Toward this end, she argued that the distinct parallels between Gilbert Ryle’s The Concept of Mind and Sartre’s Being and Nothingness were more telling than their disparities.63 In Murdoch’s opinion, what separated Ryle and Sartre was not so much any technical opposition—both were contemptuous of traditional Cartesian

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rationalism—but rather a marked difference in tone or style. As Murdoch put it, “The ‘world’ of the Concept of Mind is the world in which people play cricket, cook cakes, make simple decisions, remember their childhood and go to the circus; not the world in which they commit sins, fall in love, say prayers, or join the Communist Party.”64 Murdoch, who had joined the Communist Party some years prior, felt that what existentialism had going for it most of all was a sense of moral urgency that was all but nonexistent in the English academy. It was not that the existentialists said anything that English philosophers could not have—or had not already—discovered on their own; it was simply that they were more invested, more concerned about it. The existential philosophers were, to use Sartrean concepts popular at the time, more engaged or “committed.”65 Although she expressed a good many reservations about the limitations of Sartre’s philosophical work, in the end Murdoch remained an admirer of the ethical urgency bubbling beneath its surface. Sartre’s “philosophy is not just a piece of irresponsible romanticism,” she explained; “it is the expression of a last ditch attachment to the value of the individual.”66 Elsewhere she lauded existentialism as “an expression of passionate and sincere desire to keep to the middle way, to preserve the values of an innocent and vital individualism.” Even if it all turned out to be no more than a “tragic delusion,” it was a necessary one.67 Murdoch spent the rest of the 1950s exploring this “innocent and vital individualism,” since she was convinced that academic English philosophy had abandoned it (as people like Brock and Heinemann had warned) for the exhaustive study of language. It was an uphill battle. There was a period in which British philosophers were in dialogue with contemporary continental thought. After all, Ryle had reviewed Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (a book that Ryle would lend Murdoch twenty years later) somewhat favorably in Mind in 1929. But that time was long past.68 As Mary Warnock, who went on to write about existentialism herself, remembered it: “there was a deep hostility to the very idea of ‘continental philosophy’ in Oxford and Cambridge in the 1950s.”69 Indeed, if we accept Thomas L. Akehurst’s account, by this time British philosophy saw nothing but “political evil” in continental thought—perhaps because figures like Ryle and Ayer, who both worked in military intelligence while serving with the Royal Welsh Guards, were continuing the war effort by other means. In their works, logical analysis was akin to antifascism.70 When it was not being linked to Nazism and fascism, existentialism was simply ignored or avoided—just as A. J. Ayer’s famous postwar essay, “The

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Claims of Philosophy,” had recommended.71 In a report on “The Teaching of Philosophy in the United Kingdom,” a contribution to a UNESCO volume examining philosophical education in cultures around the globe, none other than Donald MacKinnon (Murdoch’s own beloved Oxford tutor, then at the University of Aberdeen) admitted that “philosophers should do more than they are doing to alleviate and illuminate perplexity” in the anxious, atomic age. But he thought it foolish to advocate “embracing,” as he put it, “the wilder moods of existentialism.”72 What Murdoch continued to herald as existentialism’s “invention of fresh moral concepts” went unrecognized and underappreciated by her academic colleagues.73 As moral philosopher R. M. Hare put it some years later to a visiting Ved Mehta, then a staff writer on assignment for the New Yorker, “most of the philosophers at Oxford were not much interested in moral philosophy. For that sort of philosophy one had to go to the Continent and to Existentialism.”74 In his A Hundred Years of Philosophy, which sought to survey the main currents of British thought at mid-century (the first edition appeared in 1957), John Passmore dealt with existentialism in a brief postscript, as if it were a mere afterthought. In including existentialism at all, he thought himself generous: if “I were to make no reference whatsoever to existentialism,” he wrote, I could not justly be rebuked. For one thing, it has been quite without influence on the main trends in contemporary British philosophy; for another thing, in so far as it has been discussed, existentialism has been taken seriously as a stimulus to ethico-religious thinking, rather than as metaphysics. Professional philosophers, for the most part, dismiss it with a contemptuous shrug.75 According to Passmore, existentialism penetrated no further than “the periphery of British philosophical consciousness” and, to many British philosophers, represented only “Continental excess and rankness.”76 Passmore’s views notwithstanding, there were connections to be made between existentialism and English philosophy, and Murdoch was quick to point them out. She found common cause not only between the existentialists and people like Ryle, as we have already seen, but also with the conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott, among others. “It may be a long way” from Oakeshott’s “attack on rationalism to Camus’ recommendation of the absurd life,” she wrote in “The Existentialist Political Myth,” “but it is down the same road.”77

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Insofar as it turned away from the questions of existence, which were simultaneously moral and political, British philosophical education (as Murdoch argued in a 1958 essay) could only “starve the moral imagination of the young.”78 “We require, in addition to our ‘science’,” she maintained, “a social analysis which is both detailed and frank in its moral orientation.”79 These comments are from “A House of Theory,” an essay first published in an edited volume (entitled Conviction) that gathered together a number of responses by academics and intellectuals addressing the current state and possible future of the political Left in Britain. Murdoch’s contribution, in which Stefan Collini detects a degree of “Sartre envy,” is the high-water mark of her existentialist influence.80 Although the moral urgency of existentialism continued to animate her philosophical work, she began to voice more reservations about the limits of its ethical worldview in the years following “A House of Theory.” By the 1960s Murdoch would go so far as to “argue that existentialism is not, and cannot by tinkering be made, the philosophy we need.”81 Iris Murdoch was always a fiercely independent thinker. Her work, especially by the late 1950s, was already in search of what Justin Broackes calls a “third path” in moral thought, a path between analysis and continental existentialism.82 However, this path took her increasingly farther away from the kind of debates that Oxford philosophy was sponsoring. By the time her explicit critique of existentialism appeared in The Sovereignty of Good (1970), Murdoch had come to see the literary realm as a more fruitful site for moral reflection. As she stated in “The Idea of Perfection”: “the most essential and fundamental aspect of culture is the study of literature, since this is an education in how to picture human situations. We are men and we are moral agents before we are scientists, and the place of science in human life must be discussed in words.”83 Attempting to step away from the decisionism that defined the existentialist and analytic moral traditions, both of which overemphasized choice and will, Murdoch turned to literature as the place where morality could be viewed as part of the texture of everyday life.84 From this perspective, the novel gives a truer account of moral existence than does the philosophical treatise.85 In opposing decisionism and voluntarism, Murdoch was a more nuanced moral thinker than even Sartre. She was also better at using literature to illuminate ethical life. Whereas Sartre’s characters are philosophical stand-ins that serve mainly as examples of different courses of action, Murdoch properly realizes that ethics, like life, is about more than just action: it is about worlds of interpersonal connectedness.86 Insofar as fiction sketches out these complex webs, allowing us as readers to inhabit them, it widens our

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moral scope. Sartre colonizes literature with philosophy; Murdoch expands philosophy by incorporating literature.

Outsiders and the Cultural Politics of Alienation As Murdoch toiled away at a moral philosophy that might do justice to the texture of everyday life, writing novels all the while, a number of voices from beyond the academy were busily attempting to shake up British culture in a similar way. They, too, turned to literature. Conviction, in which Murdoch’s “A House of Theory” was first published, was in fact a response to a book published a year earlier under the title Declaration.87 With contributions from such young writers as Lindsay Anderson, Kenneth Tynan, John Osborne, Doris Lessing, and John Wain, the book was offered as a kind of generational manifesto calling for precisely the sort of warm-bodied, literary response to the world that Murdoch found lacking at Oxford. Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, which had taken the London theater world by storm a year after Godot, epitomized the movement: it was youthful, brash, grittily realistic, and—perhaps most shocking of all at the time—rather contemptuous of polite class distinctions. Its protagonist, Jimmy, sounded a lot like other new characters to be found on the stages of London or in the pages of paperbacks at the time. The authors of these creations were quickly labeled “Angry Young Men” by the popular press, a misnomer not only because they had more to offer than anger but also because their number included women, such as Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch herself. In fact, Kenneth Allsop, who gets some credit for making the “Angry Young Men” moniker stick, devoted a number of pages to Murdoch in his book The Angry Decade, which surveyed the scene in 1957 and was published in 1958.88 It was not Murdoch the philosopher who interested Allsop so much as Murdoch the novelist. By 1957 Murdoch had already published three novels— Under the Net (1954), The Flight from the Enchanter (1956), and The Sandcastle (1957)—and was well on her way to completing a fourth, The Bell (1958). At the time, Under the Net seemed like a natural bridge to the heady world of Continental thought and culture; some reviewers dismissed it, on precisely those grounds, as being somehow not British enough. Its protagonist, the tellingly Irish Jake Donaghue, was a bohemian trying to make it as a writer in London. He was busy translating the latest French novels, a gig that, needless to say, ensured that the life of the mind would be accompanied by an

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empty belly and an empty wallet. But did Jake’s familiarity with the works of Beckett and Queneau really make him too foreign? Allsop, to his credit, saw through such reductive and jingoistic readings. Just because she had read Kafka and knew Sartre was no cause to invalidate Murdoch’s work. Responding to Maurice Richardson, who had complained of the “affectations caused by modern European influences and attitudes” in Murdoch’s work, Allsop rejected “the almost Kiplingesque view that from behind the moat of the Channel our island race lives inviolate, immune from the neuroses and contingencies that panic the foreigners of those distant shores, an outlook that is in accord with neither NATO nor the fashion-market.”89 In fact, what is most striking about Under the Net is, like the works of Osborne and Amis, just how very British it is. It may not have replicated Ryle’s world of “cricket” and “simple decisions” that Murdoch had lampooned in the Sartre book, but it was a world of pubs and good humor—something the novels and plays of the Angry Young Men had but that most Continental existentialism lacked. Under the Net is most of all a funny book, far less sullen and morose than Sartre’s Nausea (despite its moments of satire) or Camus’s The Stranger. Its comedy suggests that it is far more indebted to Queneau— to whom, after all, the book was dedicated—and to Beckett. Thanks to its picaresque qualities, Under the Net is also of a piece with the work of Kingsley Amis and others of the new generation. Though perhaps more enthralled with the idea of being an intellectual than is Amis’s own picaresque hero, Jim Dixon (who in Lucky Jim famously burns all the bridges that might lead him back to a thoroughly average academic career), Jake Donaghue nonetheless overcomes his own existential crisis and manages to have a good time while at it.90 Sartre’s Roquentin turns ever inward, more and more disgusted with the world around him, but Jake, over the course of Murdoch’s romp of a novel, emerges out of his solipsism to embrace the world of others.91 Jake is the anti-Roquentin, and Under the Net is, in effect, the anti-Nausea. There is a notably affirmative quality to Murdoch’s novel that is lacking in Sartre’s, a quality captured in Jake’s interior monologue during the book’s dénouement: I felt neither happy nor sad, only rather unreal, like a man shut in a glass. Events stream past us like these crowds and the face of each is seen only for a minute. What is urgent is not urgent for ever but only ephemerally. All work and all love, the search for wealth and fame, the search for truth, like life itself, are made up of moments which pass and

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become nothing. Yet through this shaft of nothings we drive onward with that miraculous vitality that creates our precarious habitations in the past and the future. So we live.92 Thus at the novel’s end we find Jake living, ready to get a job and, at long last, a place to live near Hampstead Heath. Perhaps the most prominent member of the so-called Angry Young Men was Colin Wilson, a working-class autodidact who wrote the most talkedabout philosophical treatise of the decade while himself without a home, camping out in Hampstead Heath. The Outsider was the kind of book that Jake Donaghue would have written: rambling, seemingly profound, and most of all urgent. Like Jake’s own confessional publication, The Silencer, it sought to say something insightful about pressing existential matters. But whereas The Silencer was “a quiet flop,” The Outsider was an instant bestseller.93 Astounding sales numbers rarely correlate to long-term relevance. Even at half a century’s remove, critics have not been kind to The Outsider. Stefan Collini has said that if Wilson “was, briefly, British ‘philosophy’s’ greatest star, he was, in a longer perspective, one of British culture’s greatest mistakes.”94 As Jonathan Rée has explained, “in terms of market success, coverage in the high-brow weeklies, and fame in the popular media, it completely outclassed the competition.”95 But “English philosophical culture must have been in a sorry state if such a clumsy book could be acclaimed by the literary and intellectual elite.”96 In hindsight, we can say that the key to the book’s success was its crossover appeal; according to Collini, Wilson was able to dominate the popular press because he “linked philosophy and literature.”97 But we should view the crossover phenomenon not only in terms of genres but also in terms of markets, for The Outsider was important as a culturally commodified public event and not just as a text. Who was an Outsider? In Wilson’s account, the Outsider (always capitalized) was a kind of unhappy soul—someone who, because they fully felt the sheer contingency of modern existence, had trouble fitting in with everyday norms. But the Outsider’s discomfort was not the result of mere maladjustment; it was also a signal, Wilson thought, of the incompleteness of society itself. Still, Wilson’s Outsider was not the resolutely political, pacifist, and ultimately antipatriarchal figure introduced almost twenty years earlier in Virginia Woolf ’s Three Guineas.98 Looking back at the work from a half-century’s remove, Wilson explained that the Outsider was “a kind of evolutionary ‘throw-forward’—the opposite

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of a throw-back—to a more evolved form of man.”99 Taking his examples from literature, philosophy, and the arts, Wilson held up everybody from Blake and Dostoevsky to Camus and Van Gogh as representative “throwforwards,” leading the way toward society’s next great leap. Not all Outsiders were existentialists, but just about every existentialist was, for Wilson, an Outsider. What they had in common was an irreducibly singular revulsion of all things worldly. Their insight cut them off from society; whence their “Outsider” status. The irony, of course, is that the Outsider was soon to become the ultimate Insider. The Outsider sold out its first printing in a single day, thanks in part to glowing reviews in the popular press but perhaps more so to the fabrication of a media spectacle. As Wilson himself recalled, the “absurd publicity reached a kind of frenzy”—not because the content of the book had stirred so many people but because Wilson’s story was packaged by the media alongside it, something that happened to Osborne and Amis as well.100 In Wilson, Britain at last had its very own, native-born Sartre or, as Jonathan Rée called him, “a home-grown existentialist.”101 Wilson was even better than Sartre for the popular press because he was no Parisian, café-sitting intellectual. As Wilson proudly recalls in his memoir, Cyril Connolly compared The Outsider to the work of Sartre and said “that on the whole he preferred me.”102 Wilson was stolid, from Leicester, and had worked on The Outsider while essentially homeless. Rather than pay rent, he camped where he could at night and spent his days reading and writing at the British Museum. This sleeping-bag intellectual, such a far cry from Sartre, nevertheless benefited from the Satrean vogue. Wilson was the quintessential Angry Young Man. The Outsider was fuzzy philosophy, but its popularly packaged pseudophilosophical insight tapped a seemingly endless vein of fascination, which goes to show that there can be no clear and easy lines drawn between the time’s cultural and philosophical ferment.103 Indeed, what emerged from the novels of the “Angry” years was not a coherent philosophical program but an array of existentialist characters, all embodying the somewhat quixotic attempt to make something of themselves while exploring a little of the wider world. Like Wilson, they were malcontents: “in their search for social readjustment, there is discernible in all of these characters a vague discontent, sometimes anger, and a yearning for some person or set of circumstances beyond their reach.”104 As Dale Salwak reminds us, it was not uncommon for these characters to serve as stand-ins for the authors who created them: “some reviewers even confused the characters with the authors themselves.”105

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It was easy for Wilson to be confused with a character in the fictional work of Amis, Osborne, or Murdoch because he not only wrote about outsiders but also saw himself as one.106 His work had running throughout it a particularly prominent cri de coeur. In Religion and the Rebel, his sequel to The Outsider, Wilson included a lengthy autobiographical note that all but heralded himself as the representative Outsider of the current moment—as somebody who might, like the figures in his previous work, nudge civilization toward its next great leap.107 The defining feature of the age, as Wilson saw it, was a “lack of spiritual tension in a materially prosperous civilization,” which made him sound like a late-blooming Kierkegaardian.108 It certainly put him in line with the swell of Christian existentialism at the time. Theology was the opening through which existentialism made profound inroads in Britain in the 1950s, picking up where the earlier, interwar explosion of interest in Kierkegaard left off.109 According to Broackes, a key factor in Murdoch’s turn away from academic philosophy was her discovery of Simone Weil, whose Catholic Platonism piqued her interest in faith and mysticism. At about the same time, a Scottish theologian for the London-based Student Christian Movement Press was at last translating Heidegger into English. John Macquarrie had come to Heidegger via the work of Rudolf Bultmann, about whom he had written extensively in his thesis (published in 1955 as An Existentialist Theology: A Comparison of Heidegger and Bultmann).110 The SCM Press’s translation of Sein und Zeit, which Macquarrie completed with the help of American philosopher Edward Robinson, was published in 1962 and was picked up shortly thereafter by Harper & Row in the United States. The religious discussion in Britain thus became an important way station in the international dissemination of Heidegger’s work—but only over the objections of an unlikely opponent, F. H. Heinemann. Heinemann, who had urged his English-language readers to take seriously the existential thought that emanated from the Kierkegaardian and Nietzschean European tradition, told Harper & Row editors in 1958 that “Heidegger’s mentality” was simply too “different from the Anglo-American mentality.”111 If Wilson is representative of the Anglo-American mentality, then perhaps—at the time, at least—Heinemann was right. After all, Wilson had dismissed Kierkegaard in a mere ten pages as a “lopsided, tragic figure.”112 Such quick summations were the hallmark of his work, and it was not long before the technique was applied to his own writings. Thus did the popular press, which had feted him only a few years prior, begin to dismiss Wilson, especially because of passages like this:

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The Outsider could be compared to a man who has been hypnotized, and lowered into a cage full of apes. The hypnosis prevents him from understanding why he finds the apes disgusting and stupid. He only knows that he detests them. He believes he is an ape too. His solution lies in deliberately fighting the hypnosis, in telling himself: I am not an ape; I must be something more than an ape. A difficult matter if his hypnosis—his conditioning as an ape—inclines him to give up the struggle and become a ‘member of the simian race’ and a good citizen of the ape community.113 Implicit in this image—the kind of image for which Wilson would later be lampooned—is Wilson’s understanding of the Outsider as a sane person in an otherwise insane society. The Outsider was “the one man who knows he is sick in a civilization that doesn’t know it is sick.”114 Despite its flaws, The Outsider struck a cultural nerve and its style, if not its substance, spilled over into areas other than the arts. The Glasgow-born psychiatrist R. D. Laing was one of the many who was impressed by the book’s success, so much so that he tried to replicate its formula in a book he was then composing on the topic of schizophrenia.115 When it appeared in 1960, Laing’s The Divided Self made considerable waves in the cultural sphere, waves that dramatically increased in both force and frequency when the book was republished five years later in a popular Penguin paperback edition.116 Laing was convinced that the current “methods of clinical psychiatry and psychopathology” were blocking any meaningful study and interpretation of schizophrenia. Only what he called an “existential-phenomenological method” could penetrate the experience, if not the meaning, of madness.117 Far from being a medical condition, schizophrenia was, for Laing, an experience of the world that revealed as much about the current state of the world itself as it did about the schizophrenic. Laing’s schizophrenics, like Wilson’s Outsiders, were social bellwethers. The Divided Self was an investigation of alienation, a condition that, given the book’s popularity, seemed to be widespread. Alienation was a theme with which Laing was familiar both from his studies and his experience as a practicing clinician. In Glasgow he frequented an intellectual circle that devoured and discussed the works of figures ranging from Tillich and Heidegger to Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir. In fact, one of Laing’s first published works was a study of Tillich’s theory of anxiety.118 Having matured in an intellectual climate removed from the philosophical cultures that were dominant at

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Oxbridge, Laing was able to channel the existentialist insights of figures like Heidegger and Sartre into a critique of the positivist tradition in modern psychiatry, which saw in all forms of madness only a sickness to be cured or quarantined, not an experience to be investigated, interpreted, or otherwise explored. Given the omnipresent signs of alienation in postwar Britain (he referenced both Waiting for Godot and the paintings of Francis Bacon as cultural examples), Laing felt that the “ontological insecurity” experienced by the schizophrenic was part of a more far-reaching cultural phenomenon.119 The Divided Self was largely a critique of the mental health profession from within the boundaries of psychiatry. Laing’s next book, The Politics of Experience, represented both a radicalization of its predecessor’s argument and an expansion of its scope. In the seven or so years between the publication of these two books, Laing had a made a name for himself in London as a revolutionary critic of contemporary psychiatry, an advocate of alternative forms of psychiatric care and treatment, and a philosophical guru of the growing counterculture. Far from being the experience of a few isolated individuals— of schizophrenics or Outsiders—Laing began to see alienation as the defining feature of the day: “No one can begin to think, feel, or act now except from the starting point of his or her own alienation.” And, more provocatively: “We are all murderers and prostitutes—no matter to what culture, society, class, nation, we belong, no matter how normal, moral, or mature we take ourselves to be.”120 Wilson’s Outsiders were, by and large, few and far between. In contrast, Laing’s alienated schizophrenics were seemingly everywhere. Aligning himself with a notable list of authors who had recognized the all-consuming importance of alienation—including “Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Tillich, and Sartre”—Laing, in The Politics of Experience, went so far as to valorize schizophrenia as somehow revelatory: it was “one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break through the cracks in our all-too-closed minds.”121 He even suggested that there was “no such ‘condition’ as ‘schizophrenia,’” that schizophrenia was only a “social fact and the social fact a political event.”122 In suggesting that schizophrenia was not a clinical condition but rather a societal label meant to stigmatize and negate all those who refused to conform, Laing was aligning himself with a broader political and countercultural movement, one that saw in madness not individual diagnoses but a wider, societal dysfunction.123 Convinced that a “revolution” was underway “in relation to sanity and madness, both inside and outside psychiatry,” Laing was

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eager to replace the “clinical point of view” with one more firmly rooted in the “existential and social” circumstances of the day.124 Consequently, he made connections with the New Left, publishing an essay (later incorporated into The Politics of Experience) entitled “What Is Schizophrenia?” in the New Left Review in 1964.125 Kingsley Hall—the short-lived experiment in nonhierarchical residential treatment for schizophrenics that Laing helped to launch in the East End—became, in the words of Laing’s biographer, “a hallowed shrine of the counter-culture movement.”126 Laing was also invited to share the stage with Herbert Marcuse, Allen Ginsberg, and Stokely Carmichael, among others, at the Dialectics of Liberation Conference that was held north of London in July 1967. Dropping acid with Timothy Leary (and many of his patients) only further enhanced his countercultural reputation. Like Wilson before him, Laing was in the right place at the right time. His work coincided with a number of other radical reinterpretations of madness that appeared amidst wider social and geopolitical unrest in the 1960s. What Laing’s South African colleague David Cooper later termed the “antipsychiatry” movement included everyone from the American sociologist Erving Goffman and the Budapest-born psychiatrist Thomas Szasz to the French theorists Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari.127 The antipsychiatry movement was, as this list suggests, a diverse and eclectic one. According to Nick Crossley, it “absorbed a great deal from other critical discourse in play at the time, from phenomenology, Sartre and Marcuse to Bob Dylan.”128 But the convergence of projects and interests did not last long. As with Colin Wilson, the intellectual and cultural constellation that made R. D. Laing’s fame possible quickly disintegrated. By the mid-1970s, both his work and that of the antipsychiatry movement were losing steam.129

Existential Legacies Laing’s murderers and prostitutes were a long way from Wilson’s apes and Brock’s boring Fachphilosophen, but some of the same anxieties about the effects of modern technological society on inner life can be traced in all three texts. What all of them share is, at root, a critique of positivism. Yet more importantly, they all worry about what used to be called the human condition. What should be the role of philosophy in the modern world? Was there a place for ethics in contemporary thought? In the wake of scientism, total war, and the retreat of religious faith, where and how should intellectuals—let

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alone whole societies—find meaning? Insofar as existentialism gave voice to these anxieties (and insofar as it could not be reduced to the works of Laing, Wilson, or Brock), it proved influential. Existentialism brought philosophy back into the realm of lived experience. And as anxieties about philosophy’s relation to life continue to resurface in today’s supposedly post-postmodern age, existentialism continues to be, as it always hoped to be, immediately relevant. Existentialism may very well have been an irrational philosophy of defeat, as some in Britain feared. But for a time at least, it resonated across the Channel. The career of Iris Murdoch may not have been typical, but it does invalidate the common assumption that existentialism never made a dent in British thought and culture. Like Brock and Heinemann before her, Murdoch took seriously the notion that philosophy was a way of life: its tasks could not be reduced to the logical analysis of language, and its relevance could not be relegated to the tutorial or the seminar alone. Her legacy can be traced in some of the most important attempts to bridge the divide between the Continental and analytic philosophical traditions, especially insofar as she resisted the simplistic existentialist individualisms of people like Wilson and the wilder moments of countercultural excess detectable in the work of figures like Laing. One can easily detect the impact of Murdoch’s sober and ecumenical approach to philosophy in the writings of Richard Rorty, Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, and John McDowell—all of whom have tried, in their individual ways, to bridge the gap between so-called analytic and Continental thought. The first step in this process is to view the philosopher not as a specialist detached from the world but instead as a human being immersed in it. “The trouble with philosophy,” according to Stephen Mulhall, a current proponent of the postanalytic perspective at Oxford, is that philosophers seem to have an almost inveterate tendency to forget that they’re human beings too. For perfectly understandable reasons, philosophers—not specifically, but including analytic philosophers—tend to forget that they are situated human beings, that they are inheritors of a particular tradition, a particular historical and cultural context, and they’re responding to questions and deploying methods that themselves have a history of a more or less interesting kind.130 In this plea there are residues of Murdoch’s mid-century writings on existentialism.131 There are also glimmers of what might very well be a new philosophical future for which we, like Vladimir and Estragon, can only wait.

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Notes For their comments, criticisms, and recommendations, I would like to thank Robert Bernasconi, Sarah Burns, Marlene Clark, George Cotkin, Joel Isaac, Jonathan Judaken, Greg Lucas, Eduardo Mendieta, Samuel Moyn, Roy Scranton, and Richard ­Wolin. 1. In his memoirs, Sir Peter Hall wrote that positive reviews by influential theater critics Kenneth Tynan and Harold Hobson enabled Godot to thrive in London: “Hobson saved Godot. The play quickly became the talking point of London and then an international success. It featured in cartoons and radio programs as well as newspaper articles.” Hall, Making an Exhibition of Myself (1993; London: Oberon, 2000), 117. 2. G. S. Fraser, “Review of Waiting for Godot,” Times Literary Supplement (February 2, 1956). 3. Ibid. 4. William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (1958; New York: Anchor Books, 1990), 63. 5. See, for example, the 2009 “Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective” at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, which originated at the Tate Gallery in London. The exhibition makes clear that Bacon’s earlier work reflected and refracted the existentialist mood of the time. 6. Barrett, Irrational Man, 63. 7. Vivian Mercier, “The Uneventful Event,” Irish Times (February 18, 1956): 6. 8. On San Quentin, see Martin Esslin, “The Search for the Self,” in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987), 23–40. On New Orleans, see Holland Cotter, “A Broken City. A Tree. Evening,” New York Times (December 2, 2007). 9. Samuel Beckett, En attendant/Waiting for Godot: A Tragicomedy in 2 Acts, A Bilingual Edition, translated from the Original French Text by the Author (1952, 1954; New York: Grove, 2006), 69. 10. Ibid., 137. 11. Ibid., 171. 12. Quoted in Lois Gordon, Reading Godot (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), 44. 13. Quoted in Gordon, Reading Godot, 1. 14. William Hutchings, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: A Reference Guide (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2005), 54. 15. Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 245. 16. Beckett, Waiting for Godot, 289. 17. H. R. Trevor-Roper, “The Strange Vacuum That Is Germany,” New York Times (July 6, 1947).

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18. Stefan Collini, Absent Minds: Intellectuals in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 137. 19. Paul S. MacDonald, “Existentialism,” in Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy, ed. Anthony Grayling, Andrew Pyle, and Naomi Goulder (London: Thoemmes Continuum, 2006), 1045. 20. Collini, Absent Minds, 397. 21. S. E. Gontarski, “The Plurality of Godot: An Introduction,” in Beckett, Waiting for Godot, v. 22. Pascale Casanova, Samuel Beckett: Anatomy of a Literary Revolution, introduction by Terry Eagleton, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2006), 42. See also Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004). 23. On the links between modernism and existentialism, see Hayden White’s description of existentialism as “the modernist philosophy,” in “The Aim of Interpretation is to Create Perplexity in the Face of the Real: Hayden White in Conversation with Erlend Rogne,” History and Theory 48 (February 2009): 69. 24. As scholars have shown, a series of Kierkegaard revivals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries went a long way toward establishing the existentialist canon. See, for instance, Samuel Moyn, “Transcendence, Morality and History: Emmanuel Levinas and the Discovery of Søren Kierkegaard in Interwar France,” Yale French Studies 104 (Fall 2003): 22–54. For a different perspective, see George Cotkin’s Existential America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). The definitive reception study of Kierkegaard up to the twentieth century is Habib C. Malik, Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of His Thought (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1997). 25. Werner Brock, An Introduction to Contemporary German Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), xv. 26. Ibid., 117. 27. Ibid., 118–19. 28. Ibid., 93. 29. Ibid., 84–85. 30. Ibid., 48. 31. Ibid., 120. 32. This language is readily apparent in Heidegger’s much-discussed Rektoratsrede of 1933, a text that Brock tellingly warns might be “misinterpreted by those who have not an adequate understanding of his true philosophy” (133). In fact, Brock’s discretion concerning what is often taken to be Heidegger’s most avowedly political addresses in support of the National Socialist revolution is misleading. As Charles Bambach, among others, has demonstrated, “from the rectorial pronouncements of May 1933 un­­ til Heidegger’s Spiegel interview of 1966 and beyond, this myth of Graeco-Germanic rootedness functions as a kind of hermeneutical cipher for Heidegger’s encrypted

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utterances concerning art, technology, poetry, politics, nihilism, the history of philosophy, and the destiny of the West.” Charles Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003), 113. 33. A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth, and Logic (London: Victor Gollancz, 1936). 34. Ernest Gellner, Words and Things: A Critical Account of Linguistic Philosophy and a Study in Ideology, with an introduction by Bertrand Russell (London: Victor Gollancz, 1963), 157. “The view that philosophy must be formal, second-order, that it cannot provide substantive guidance in any topic, receives a kind of unofficial support from the social position of the modern academic philosopher—a man commissioned by society to teach a recognised subject and at the same time without any source to tap the truths he should teach: he is credited with no special faculties or insights, provided with no revealed truth, no experimental technique and to region of the world to observe. He may well feel predisposed by what one may call the Argument from Impotence to accept the view that philosophy must be formal, that it makes no difference, that it leaves everything as it is. Many professional philosophers—particularly amongst those who have embraced Wittgensteinian Linguistic Philosophy—are alienated from natural and social science (and hence from the exciting areas of intellectual advance), and are not deeply or originally involved in substantive moral, political and social issues” (152–53). 35. F. H. Heinemann, Existentialism and the Modern Predicament (New York: Harper & Row, 1953), 1. 36. Heinemann, Neue Wege der Philosophie: Geist, Leben, Existenz (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1929). 37. Information on Heinemann can be found in Peter Eli Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 26n60. 38. Heinemann, “Philosophy in Germany: Metaphysics,” Philosophy 14, no. 55 (July 1939): 345. 39. Heinemann, “Nihilism in Germany,” Philosophy 15, no. 57 (January 1940): 81. 40. Ibid., 81, 82. 41. Ibid., 83. 42. It is worth pointing out that, at about this time, Leo Strauss also suggested that German nihilism may have a positive side. Like Heinemann, the nominal subject of Strauss’s address was the publication of Hermann Rauschning’s Die Revolution de Nihilismus (Zürich: Europa Verlag, 1938). See Strauss, “German Nihilism,” ed. David Janssens and Daniel Tanguay, Interpretation 26, no. 3 (Spring 1999): 333–78. On the ambiguities of Strauss’s critique of “German nihilism,” see William H. F. Altman, “Leo Strauss on ‘German Nihilism’: Learning the Art of Writing,” Journal of the History of Ideas 68, no. 4 (October 2007): 587–612. 43. In fact, as Bruce Kuklick has shown, analytic philosophy was an AngloAmerican concoction brought about by an exchange of philosophical ideas between

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Harvard and Oxford from the mid-1930s up until the early 1970s, with Americans W. V. O. Quine and Nelson Goodman playing instrumental roles. See Kuklick, “Harvard and Oxford, 1946–1975,” in A History of Philosophy in America, 1720–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 243–58. 44. Heinemann, Existentialism and the Modern Predicament (New York: Harper, 1953), 21. 45. Ibid., 3. 46. Ibid., 13. 47. Many of these same issues would resurface more dramatically in the famous debate between C. P. Snow and F. R. Leavis in the early sixties. See Guy Ortolano, The Two Cultures Controversy: Science, Literature and Cultural Politics in Postwar Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 48. Heinemann, Existentialism and the Modern Predicament, 170. 49. Ibid., 171. 50. Ibid., 172. 51. Valerie Purton, An Iris Murdoch Chronology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 33. Murdoch signed up not long after at the D-day invasions of 1944, transferring from the Treasury (where she had earlier secured a position). 52. Purton, Iris Murdoch Chronology, 11. See also Peter J. Conradi, Iris Murdoch: A Life (New York: Norton, 2001), 168. In fact, Murdoch would go on to translate the book privately. 53. See Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, assembled by Raymond Queneau, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols Jr. (1969; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980). The original French edition of this text was published by Gallimard in 1947. See also Mark Poster, Existential Marxism in Postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser (Princeton, N.J.: Prince­ ton University Press, 1975); Michael Roth, Knowing and History: Appropriations of Hegel in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988); and Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 54. Quoted in Conradi, Iris Murdoch, 269. 55. Conradi, Iris Murdoch, 216. 56. Randall Collins, The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1998), 770. 57. Purton, Iris Murdoch Chronology, 48. 58. Iris Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (London: Bowes & Bowes: 1965), 7. 59. Ibid., 8. 60. Murdoch, “The Existentialist Political Myth,” in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi, foreword by George Steiner (New York: Penguin, 1998), 131.

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61. See, for example, “The Novelist as Metaphysician” and “The Existentialist Hero,” talks originally broadcast on the BBC in March 1950, collected in Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, 101–15. 62. Murdoch, “Novelist as Metaphysician,” 101. 63. Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, 8. See also Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (London: Hutchinson, 1949). 64. Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, 35. 65. See Sartre’s What is Literature?, trans. Bernard Frechtman (London: Metheun, 1950). For the broader context of the English reception of this text, see Ken Hirschkop, “Culture, Class and Education,” in The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, eds. Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 455–73. 66. Murdoch, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, 69. 67. Murdoch, “Existentialist Political Myth,” 144, 145. 68. Ryle, “Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit,” reprinted in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays, ed. Michael Murray (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1978), 64; the review was originally published in Mind 38 (1929): 355–70. For more on Ryle’s relation to Heidegger, see Murray, “Heidegger and Ryle: Two Versions of Phenomenology,” in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy, 271–90. On Ryle lending his copy of Sein und Zeit to Murdoch, see Conradi, Iris Murdoch, 303. 69. Mary Warnock, A Memoir: People and Places (London: Duckworth, 2000), 91. Warnock claims (23–24) to have written on existentialism for commercial reasons only (which is perhaps backhanded proof of existentialism’s wider success in the 1960s). See also Warnock, Existentialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970). 70. Thomas L. Akehurst, “The Nazi Tradition: The Analytic Critique of Continental Philosophy in Mid-Century Britain,” History of European Ideas 34 (2008): 550, 555–56. 71. Ayer, “The Claims of Philosophy” (1947), reprinted in Ayer, The Meaning of Life and Other Essays, ed. Ted Honderich (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1990). 72. Donald MacKinnon, “The Teaching of Philosophy in the United Kingdom,” in The Teaching of Philosophy: An International Enquiry of UNESCO (Paris: UNESCO, 1953), 121. On MacKinnon and Murdoch see Conradi, Iris Murdoch. 73. Murdoch, “Existentialist Bite,” in Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, 152. 74. Ved Mehta, Fly and Fly-Bottle: Encounters with British Intellectuals (1961; New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 51. 75. John Passmore, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (1957; London: Duckworth, 1962), 459. 76. Ibid. 77. Murdoch, “Existentialist Political Myth,” 136. 78. Murdoch, “A House of Theory,” in Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, 181.

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79. Ibid. 80. Collini, Absent Minds, 161. Murdoch’s essay was influential not only in Britain but also in the United States. As James Miller points out, it shaped Tom Hayden’s thinking around the time that he was drafting the Port Huron Statement of the Students for a Democratic Society. See Miller, Democracy in the Streets: From Port Huron to the Siege of Chicago, with a new preface by the author (1987; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 93. 81. Murdoch, “On ‘God’ and ‘Good’,” in The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970), 46. The essay first appeared in The Anatomy of Knowledge, ed. Marjorie Grene (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1969). 82. Justin Broackes, “Introduction,” in Iris Murdoch, Philosopher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). I thank Professor Broackes for making this manuscript available to me. 83. Murdoch, “The Idea of Perfection,” in Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, 34. This essay first appeared in the literary Yale Review in 1964. In her 1978 conversation with Bryan Magee, “Literature and Philosophy,” Murdoch similarly declared that “language itself is moral medium, almost all uses of language convey value. This is one reason why we are almost always morally active. Life is soaked in the moral, literature is soaked in the moral. . . . Value is only artificially and with difficulty expelled from language for scientific purposes.” In Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, 27. 84. Murdoch, “Idea of Perfection,” 37: “The moral life, on this view, is something that goes on continuously, not something that is switched off in between the occurrence of explicit moral choices. What happens in between such choices is indeed what is crucial.” This line of argument—which influenced such thinkers as Richard Rorty, John McDowell, Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond, Martha Nussbaum, and Charles Taylor—actually has origins in Murdoch’s reading of Simone Weil: see Broackes, “Introduction.” On Murdoch’s influence, see Conradi, Iris Murdoch, 303. See also Murdoch’s essays “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited” (1959) and “Against Dryness” (1961), collected in Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, 261–95. 85. On philosophy and literature in relation to moral life, see Martin Woessner, “Coetzee’s Critique of Reason,” in J. M. Coetzee and Ethics: Philosophical Perspectives on Literature, ed. Anton Leist and Peter Singer (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 223–47. 86. Murdoch addressed many of these issues in her famous 1970 essay, “Existen­ tialists and Mystics,” collected in Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, 221–34. 87. Tom Maschler, ed., Declaration (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1957). 88. Kenneth Allsop, The Angry Decade: A Survey of the Cultural Revolt of the Nineteen-Fifties (1958; London: Peter Owen, 1964). 89. Allsop, The Angry Decade, 100. 90. Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (London: Gollancz, 1954)

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91. Conradi makes this argument in Iris Murdoch, 270–71. Marije Altorf, in her Iris Murdoch and the Art of Imagining (London: Contiuum, 2008), also suggests that “Murdoch attempts to return to this world, which Sartre found nauseating” (57). 92. Murdoch, Under the Net (1954; New York: Penguin, 1977), 244. 93. Ibid., 67. 94. Collini, Absent Minds, 415. 95. Jonathan Rée, “English Philosophy in the Fifties,” Radical Philosophy 65 (Autumn 1993): 3. 96. Ibid., 5. 97. Collini, Absent Minds, 420. 98. For Woolf ’s radical notion of the “Society of Outsiders,” see Three Guineas, annotated and with an introduction by Jane Marcus (1938; New York: Harcourt, 2006), 126, 134, 141. 99. Colin Wilson, The Angry Years: The Rise and Fall of the Angry Young Men (London: Robson, 2007), 15. 100. Ibid., 20. 101. Rée, “English Philosophy,” 5. 102. Wilson, The Angry Years, 19. 103. On this point, see in particular George Cotkin, Existential America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 104. Dale Salwak, “The ‘Angry’ Decade and After,” in Brian W. Shaffer, A Companion to the British and Irish Novel, 1945–2000 (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005), 24. 105. Salwak, “The ‘Angry’ Decade,” 27. 106. On this point and on how Wilson “turned his outsiderness into a fungible commodity,” see Martin Jay, “Still Sleeping Rough: Colin Wilson’s The Outsider at Fifty,” Salmagundi 155/156 (Summer/Fall 2007): 3–12, quote on 11. 107. Colin Wilson, Religion and the Rebel (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), 1–38. To maintain this image, Wilson naturally had to reject offers like the one from Murdoch herself to get him into Oxford on scholarship. See Wilson, The Angry Years, 18. 108. Wilson, Religion and the Rebel, 1. 109. See, for example, Walter Lowrie, “How Kierkegaard Got into English,” in Kierkegaard, Repetition, ed. W. Lowrie (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1941), 177–212. 110. John Macquarrie, An Existentialist Theology: A Comparison of Heidegger and Bultmann (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1955). On the history of the Student Christian Movement, see Robin Boyd, The Witness of the Student Christian Movement: Church Ahead of the Church (London: SPCK Press, 2007). 111. “Heidegger/Sein Und Zeit,” Oxford 10/12/58, correspondence related to Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, offices of HarperCollins in San Francisco. The memo is a correspondence between Hugh Van Dusen and Mel Arnold, who while in Oxford

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spoke with Heinemann about the prospects for translating Sein und Zeit into English. I thank John Loudon for making these materials available to me. I discuss this topic at greater length in Woessner, Heidegger in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 112. Wilson, Religion and the Rebel, 241. 113. Ibid., 40. 114. Wilson, The Outsider (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1956), 20. 115. John Clay, RD Laing: A Divided Self (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1996), 59: “When Colin Wilson’s book, The Outsider, a study of alienation, came out in May 1956 and achieved phenomenal success, he read it avidly and vowed to try to emulate it.” 116. Clay, RD Laing, 117. 117. R. D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity and Madness (1960; London: Tavistock, 1969), 16. 118. Laing, “An Examination of Tillich’s Theory of Anxiety and Neurosis,” British Journal of Medical Psychology 30 (1957): 88–91. 119. Laing, Divided Self, 42, 40. 120. Laing, The Politics of Experience (New York: Pantheon, 1967), xiv. 121. Ibid., 90. 122. Ibid., 83. 123. Part of the reason for this change in perspective was a newfound appreciation for Sartre’s later (more Marxist) work, which Laing introduced to British audiences in a book coauthored with David Cooper, Reason & Violence: A Decade of Sartre’s Philosophy, 1950–1960, with a foreword by Jean-Paul Sartre (London: Tavistock, 1964). 124. Laing and Cooper, Reason & Violence, 81. 125. Laing, “What is Schizophrenia?” New Left Review 28 (November/December 1964). 126. Clay, RD Laing, 131. 127. See Cooper, Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry (London: Tavistock, 1967); Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situations of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (1961; Chicago: Aldine, 1962); Thomas Szasz, The Myth of Mental Illness: Foundations of a Theory of Personal Conduct (New York: Harper & Row, 1961); Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (1961; New York: Pantheon, 1965); and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, with a preface by Michel Foucault, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (1972; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). For additional background, see Zbigniew Kotowicz, R.D. Laing and the Paths of Anti-Psychiatry (New York: Routledge, 1997), and Daniel Burston, The Wing of Madness: The Life and Work of R. D. Laing (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). 128. Nick Crossley, Contesting Psychiatry: Social Movements in Mental Health (London: Routledge, 2006), 124.

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129. Ibid., 121. For a critique of Laing and the antipsychiatry movement more generally, see Peter Sedgwick, Psycho Politics: Laing, Foucault, Goffman, Szasz and the Future of Mass Psychaitry (New York: Harper & Row, 1982). 130. Stephen Mulhall, “Post-Analytic Philosophy,” in Julian Baggini and Jeremy Stangroom, eds., New British Philosophy: The Interviews (London: Routledge, 2002), 249. 131. In fact, Mulhall is a keen reader of Murdoch. See, for example, his “‘All the World Must Be “Religious”’: Iris Murdoch’s Ontological Arguments,” in Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment, ed. Anne Rowe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 23–34.

6

Existentialisms in the Hispanic and Latin American Worlds El Quixote and Its Existential Children Eduardo Mendieta

Existentialism is the quintessential philosophy of modernity. At the center of all existentialist thinking is the inescapably free subject who must make herself in a world bereft of meaning. Yet the obduracy of this world is determined by the limits of a circumstance that is traced by the freedom of others. I am thrown into the world, condemned to freedom, and what I encounter are always other freedoms. God is useless, for my freedom is never breached by a sovereignty that reigns by granting absolute freedom. I am born unfinished and have nothing but a vacuum at the core of my being. I become what I make of myself. I have nothing but what I make. I am nothing but become my own story. I am a project. History sets the terms because it is what I, we, have made, but it does not determine the outcome. I am and must become, but I can do so only with others, or against others. Freedom, indeterminacy, self-making, others, meaning to be made, not discovered— these are the key themes, notions, insights of existentialist thinking. Existentialism is the philosophical expression of modern humanity’s selfunderstanding in an age in which the meaningless of the world has become

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even more extreme and as our power to create and destroy have grown in disproportion to our ability to deliberate on how to guide that power. When did such self-understanding begin to dawn? When did we have the first glimpses that modern humanity would have to become existentialist to appreciate its metaphysical freedom? Is it possible that existentialism was already prefigured in the first glimmers of creativity that inaugurated the modern world? When we look at the history of existentialism in the Hispanic and Latin American literary, intellectual, and philosophical worlds, we discover the disquieting answers to these questions. Just as Christopher Colon stands at the birth of the modern world with his “discovery” of the New World, Miguel de Cervantes stands at the birth of the modern intellectual world with his Don Quixote. As Milan Kundera puts it, “for me, the founder of the Modern Era is not only Descartes but also Cervantes.”1 Paraphrasing the Heideggerian complaint about the forgetfulness of being, Kundera notes that “with Cervantes a great European art took shape that is nothing other than the investigation of this forgotten being.” By “forgotten being” Kundera means the free human being who must narrate herself in existence. Kundera goes on to add: “Indeed, all the great existential themes Heidegger analyzes in Being and Time–considering them to have been neglected by all earlier European philosophy–had been unveiled, displayed, illuminated by four centuries of the European novel.”2 With this, Kundera anticipates one of the key theses of this chapter. In order to understand existentialism tout court, we must understand the centrality of the novel to modern culture. In order to understand this centrality and above all fecundity of the novel for modern humans, we must understand the privileged place Miguel de Cervantes occupies as the father of the modern novel; in particular, we have to understand how Don Quixote has been at the crossroads of every major novelistic breakthrough that has kept the European novel changing and ever attentive to the existential needs of transforming humanity. In order to understand how existentialism was both anticipated and variously articulated by Spanish and Latin American philosophers, we must understand how Don Quixote has been the central point of reference for most (if not all) of their philosophical speculation. More emphatically, we cannot dissociate the development of Hispanic and Latin American existentialism from the ways in which Cervantes’s Don Quixote has been read and reread by Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American writers, intellectuals, and philosophers. Before reviewing some precursors of existentialist thought in the Spanish world, I shall briefly discuss some of the key themes in El Quixote that have

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made it such a generative philosophical, existentialist, and novelistic text. Then I will focus (with no pretension of exhaustiveness) on a group of key figures in the Hispanic and Latin American philosophical worlds. At best, a text such as this can offer some incisive readings, provocations, and invitations. At the very least, this chapter should make it patently clear that existentialism—as well as phenomenology and phenomenological hermeneutics— have been at the heart of both Hispanic and Latin American thought for at least the last century. The pioneering contributions of figures like Miguel de Unamuno, José Ortega y Gasset, Julián Marías, Carlos Astrada, Augusto Salazar Bondy, Samuel Ramos, Leopoldo Zea, Luis Villoro, and many others need to be properly acknowledged. In some cases these writers addressed existential themes much earlier than their French, British, Italian, and U.S. counterparts had, and they also produced some of the most original appropriations of existentialist notions.

El Quixote, Existential Hero, and the Novel As Meta-Narrative El ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha,3 or The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, was published in two parts. The first appeared in 1605 and the second in 1614. Miguel de Cervantes died in 1616, the same year as William Shakespeare. Cervantes’s story is relatively simple, but its telling is masterful. An older man—a voracious reader of medieval stories of knightly heroism, romances, and chivalry—goes mad and thinks he is an Hidalgo, a knight. He sets out on a series of quests to vanquish injustice and to right wrongs. He recruits a Sancho Panza to be his faithful squire. The story thus revolves around the voyages of a mad man who quests for justice in a world that has become disenchanted, crass, materialistic, and devoid of honor and dignity. But more than its plot, a novel consists of its telling and the devices used to tell it. We discover that an Arab historian wrote the story we are reading. Additionally, it is a story that was translated orally by an anonymous Moor so that Cervantes could write it down. Cervantes himself figures in the story as the author of La galatea, one of the books found in the library of Alonso Quixano (Quijano, in the modernized spelling), who has gone mad and become Don Quixote (I.VI). In the second part, Don Quixote returns to discover that a book has been published that tells of his adventures. Also in 1614, one Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda (a pseudonym) published a pirate

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sequel. Cervantes incorporates this act of banditry and uses it as part of the narrative. Don Quixote has now become a reader of his own story, and he sets out to correct the narrative. So Don Quixote is not only the story of someone who has gone mad because of reading too much, it’s also a story that we are not sure who is writing. Who is the author? Whose story is it? After returning to his town after his many defeats, Don Quixote falls ill. Cervantes is ambiguous about Don Quixote’s illness. Did he fall ill because all mortal beings must perish (“como las cosas humanas no son eternas”)4 and so the end had to come, or was it because of the deep sadness and melancholy into which he had fallen at seeing himself defeated? (II.LXXIV) Don Quixote falls asleep with a fever and later awakens to his “libre y claro” (free and clear) “juicio” (judgment). He falls asleep Don Quixote and awakens Don Alonso Quijano. He had lived in madness to defeat injustice and had died defeated by the disappointments of human iniquity. Every major writer and literary critic, and many a philosopher, have acknowledged and celebrated the originality and enduring novelty of El Qui­ xote. Patricia Finch and John J. Allen chronicle the numerous and memorable engagements with Don Quixote from John Locke, Samuel Johnson, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Flaubert, Goethe, Lukàcs, and Nabokov to Borges, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, and (as already noted) Kundera.5 In this impressive chronicle of Quixotisms, Finch and Allen also note that every literary age from the seventeenth century onward has managed to discover some new device, theme, and philosophemes in Don Quixote to inspire their own writing. For our purposes I will highlight only four Quixotisms, or philosophemes that are central to El Quixote. First, it is a book about free humans and the imponderable liberty in which we all find ourselves. Mario Vargas Llosa, in his presentation of the IV centenary edition of Don Quixote, argues that the Quixote is a “hymn to liberty” and refers us to part II, chapter 58, where Cervantes writes (speaking through Don Quixote): “Freedom, Sancho, is one of the most precious gifts bestowed by heaven on man; no treasures that the earth contain and the sea conceals can compare with it; for freedom, as for honour, men can and should risk their lives and, in contrast, captivity is the worst evil that can befall them.”6 Vargas Llosa observes that this is a particularly important pronouncement because it comes after Don Quixote and Sancho have departed from the Castle where he has been hosted by anonymous Duques. Thus Don Quixote praises freedom against the background of the medieval world of feudalism,

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servitude, and despotism. For Quixote, freedom is not just about what one has (or does not owe to someone else) but also the freedom to think and believe as one sees fit. It is this freedom that is the foundation of a just social order. Although Vargas Llosa reads Cervantes’s hymn to freedom in terms of a celebration of what Isaiah Berlin called “negative freedom,” it is clear that the freedom celebrated in the figure of the Hidalgo—who is, after all, a fictitious character pieced together from other fictions—is the freedom to fashion one’s self. Don Quixote is the ur-individualist, the epitome of the existential hero, who sets out to create and to re-create himself ad novo. Roberto González Echevarría, the great literary critic of Latin American literature, captures this dimension of El Quixote aptly when he writes (in his introduction to the Penguin edition): “Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra’s masterpiece has endured because it focuses on literature’s foremost appeal: to become another, to leave a typically embattled self for another closer to one’s desires and aspirations.”7 Second, El Quixote is a novel whose most central theme is precisely the issue of narrativity. It is a book about fiction and about the power of fiction to conjure worlds. It seeks to establish that how we tell something is far more important than what may actually have happened. The Quijote exemplifies the incalculable power of fiction. But perhaps most importantly, Cervantes is celebrating the power of fiction to help fashion selves. It could therefore be argued that El Quixote is the first novel to demonstrate and argue that selves are textures woven from stories that can be told and retold. Throughout El Quixote we are never sure who our hidalgo with the sad countenance is: is he Don Alonso Quijano the Good, who has gone mad; or is he Don Quixote, who affirms his identity as the honorable and cunning hidalgo who must defend his honor against usurpations of the masked author Avellaneda? Is Don Quixote Cervantes’s story, or is it simply an apocryphal story that has come to us through two acts of translation? The self consists of diverse layers of stories. We are the stories we tell, not just about the world but also about ourselves. Still, even as El Quixote affirms the power of narrativity to help us fashion our selves—selves that are less embattled and perhaps closer, as Echevarría puts it, to our desires and aspirations—both Don Alonso and Don Quixote are given a moral gravitas that prevents El Quixote from slipping into moral nihilism. Here we follow Anthony J. Cascardi’s excellent analysis of Don Qui­ xote in The Bounds of Reason: Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Flaubert,8 where he offers an ethical reading of Don Quixote that runs counter to postmodern readings,

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which seek to sacrifice Don Quixote’s moral integrity to the dissolution of selfhood in the acids of perspectivism and narrativity. It’s true that we are the stories we tell, but these stories are guided by certain key principles. And even as Don Quixote manages to weave every misadventure into the scripts of his stories, he never loses sight of his honor and integrity. Cascardi writes: Of him it could be said what Marx challenged in his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, that he is not content simply to interpret the world; he knows that the time has come to change it, regardless of the fact that the project be hopeless and thankless. Seen in this way, the Qui­ xote raises serious doubts about the conventional notion that a novelistic character is someone who is unique and inimitable, someone who knows himself subjectively, as Descartes did. Self-knowledge and personal identity in Cervantes’s novel at least are not founded on the fruits of a mind’s project of pure enquiry but on the ethical and moral bases of character and role.9 As we will see, this moral dimension of fiction and the ethical import of narrativity make El Quixote an indispensable point of departure for the narrative exploration and experimentation with moral selfhood. The third Quixotism is that, when Cervantes created the hidalgo with the sad countenance, he established a role model for the possibilities of psychological, moral, personal, philosophical, and historical exploration in and through a novel. Kundera remarks that, as a literary form, “the novel is the imaginary paradise of individuals.”10 El Quixote is the first map of such a paradise. However, Cervantes’s creation made clear that a novel can be a means to explore the depths of the “infinity of the soul” as well as the richness of the real, historical world in which individuals live and die. The novel’s capacity to explore the layers of a person’s mental, psychological, and moral makeup renders it a most apropos literary device for a philosophical orientation that focuses on the free individual. In fact, in the early 1940s the Spanish philosopher Julián Marías coined the expression “the existentialist or personal novel”11 to refer to the type of novel in which we are not given characters or archetypes; instead, the personhood or moral contours of a person are traced and the fullness of a person in the making, the person as project, are explored. The novel is not an epic, the unfolding of an already closed story, but rather a story of the moral formation

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of an individual whose freedom is reflected in the openness of the story itself. Newness, inconclusiveness, and possibility are the marks of an existentialist novel. A novel is always a discovery that transforms the reader. Unamuno captured well the dimension of Don Quixote that has made it the favorite literary device of existentialists when he wrote: And I would like to tell you, reader, how a novel is made: how you make a novel, and how you yourself must make your own novel. When the inward man, the intra-man, becomes a reader, a contemplator, he must make himself, if he is among the truly quick, a reader and a contemplator of the character he is making and creating as he reads. He must, in short, be a contemplator, a mediator of his own works. When the inward man, the intra-man (who is more divine than the transor super-man of Nietzsche), transforms himself into a reader, he also makes himself author, that is, actor.12 It is worth emphasizing that Cervantes had already urged what Unamuno calls on us to do as readers. Don Quixote is both the extreme reader and writer: he reads and creates his own story, which is why Franz Kafka and Jorge Luis Borges wrote parables about characters who write their authors. Finally, we come to the fourth aspect of El Quixote that has made it an indispensable point of reference for discussions about reason, the limits of reason, the hazards of reason, or what Goya coyly called “el sueño de la razon” (the dream of reason, a phrase that he completed with “produces monsters”)13—namely, the praise of madness. For Goya, the dream of reason results in the hell of inhuman brutality that he depicted so hauntingly in his “Caprichos” series; for Goya, as for Pascal, it would be madness not to be mad when one considers the misery that reason produces. Michel Foucault begins his magisterial History of Madness with an analysis of the transformation of madness in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by disaggregating the differences and similarities among Cervantes, Shakespeare, and the theater of Jean de Rotrou and Tristan l’Hermite. With these writers, Foucault discerns a shift from the medieval and Renaissance views of madness to the birth of the modern experience of madness. With Cervantes and Shakespeare, madness had ceased to an “eschatological figure,”14 a cipher of punishment and the opposite of reason. Indeed, Don Quixote could hardly be farther from the malignant madmen of the middle ages. He is a “good” madman, to play on Cervantes’s nickname for Don Alonso Quijano. He goes mad out of

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goodness, and even in madness Don Quixote remains good, a noble figure fighting the world’s injustices for the sake of the oppressed and poor. Carlos Fuentes, in what is surely one of the most brilliant readings of Don Quixote, suggests that the book is Erasmian in inspiration and spirit.15 Fuentes argues that there are three key Erasmian themes running through Don Quixote: “the duality of truth, the illusion of appearances, and the praise of folly.” For Fuentes, Don Quixote is a novelistic counterpart of Erasmus’s In Praise of Folly. As with Erasmus, madness serves as a critique of the absolutist claims of both revealed or enlightened reason. Reason that accepts only its own reasoning can become despotic and impose its own madness. By praising madness, Erasmus speaks an urgent warning, and Cervantes echoes it. Fuentes put it most felicitously thus: let me [Fuentes’ hypothetical dialogue is between reason and itself] not become another absolute, such as faith was in the past, for I will then lose the reason of my reason. The Erasmian folly is a doubly ironical operation: it detaches the fool, simultaneously, from the false absolutes and the imposed verities of the Medieval order; yet it casts an immense doubt on reason itself. Pascal would write one day: “Les hommes sont si nécessairement fous que ce serait être fou par autre de folie de n’être pas fou [Men are so necessarily mad that it would be by another twist of madness not to be mad].”16 To which Fuentes adds: “This Pascalian turn of the screw of reason is precisely what Erasmus is driving at: if reason is to be reasonable, not its opposite, but its critical complement; if the individual is to assert himself, then he must do so with an ironical conscience of his own ego, or he will founder in solipsism and pride.”17 For Cervantes, as a good Erasmian, madness, and the quixotic folly of a sad hidalgo are in the service of reason, the reason that guides an individual’s pursuit of personal freedom. For Fuentes, however, this praise of folly—as embodied in the most endearing of madman—serves to humble reason in terms of what he calls the critique of reading.

Spanish Existentialism: From Unamuno to the School of Madrid Cervantes’s Don Quixote may have anticipated Spanish existentialism, but it was Miguel de Unamuno who gave it its first philosophical articulation.

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Unamuno might well be considered the Spanish Kierkegaard, but he surely is not the Spanish Nietzsche—as much as both criticized the deformed rationalism of the nineteenth century. These comparisons help us place Unamuno on the intellectual map, but they do no justice to the originality of his thinking. In contrast to Kierkegaard, Unamuno was without question one of the most unique of Spanish Catholics, for his views on God and the quest for self-creation of each human vis-à-vis religious faith bordered on heresy.18 In contrast to Nietzsche, he was neither an irrationalist nor an atheist, even though he railed against reason and celebrated passion. For Unamuno, reason was more than just a necessary lie; it also expressed a vital need. The point is not to install reason as a master of subordinated passions. Akin to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Unamuno adamantly rejected the seducements and security of systems and of boxed rationalisms as well as the easy banisters of genres and schools. At the center of his thinking is the human of “carne y hueso”—the human of flesh and blood—who must live against death, despite death, and in the shadow of death. There was no way that scholastic treatises or the didactic and pedagogical devices to which philosophy had been reduced during the nineteenth century could address the needs of flesh-and-blood humans, in Unamuno’s recurring phrase. Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) is the key representative of what is called the 1898 generation, which lived through Spain’s defeat by the United States in the Caribbean and the Pacific, ending Spain’s reign as a European colonial power.19 This was the lowest point in the history of a nation that had once been a great empire but now faced its European counterparts from the most humble of positions. Perhaps not unlike Cervantes, positioned between the Medieval and Renaissance periods, Unamuno was situated between the age of European empires and the birth of genocidal nationalisms. He was one who saw what was coming and sought to warn us of the impending disasters. Unamuno studied philosophy and classic languages. He taught ancient Greek at the University of Salamanca, but it is clear that he was just at home in Latin. His earliest works were explorations of the meaning of Spanish culture and Catholicism as inheritors of the values of ancient Greek and Roman culture. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Unamuno was not only an avid and charismatic teacher but also a public intellectual. He was a frequent contributor to national newspapers and intellectual venues. Most of Unamuno’s “philosophical” books were compilations of articles and columns for magazines, journals, and newspapers. This was by design, not accident. In this regard, he was similar to Ortega y Gasset, whose books were also the result of a vigorous and continuous public engagement.

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As a professor of Greek, Unamuno approached the question of human existence from the standpoint of the creativity of language.20 If life is a creative quest, then this quest takes its first form in language. Before the perspicacious etymological explorations of Ortega y Gasset and Heidegger established a base for philosophical reflection, Unamuno had already begun to peel away the layers of human existence by excavating the surface of linguistic sedimentation. For him, in fact, “all philosophy was essentially philology.”21 Thus both the historicity and the futurity of human existence are first given expression in language. According to Unamuno, “a language, in effect, is a potential philosophy. . . . Platonism is the Greek language which speaks through Plato, developing in him its ancient metaphors.”22 Language is the will to create and also to be immersed in a history. Language is creation, which makes it more than simply a device of convention or a prison house of structures, grammars, and strictures. In contrast to the stucturalist view of language, Unamuno offers a contemporary interpretation of imago dei, the Judeo-Christian doctrine affirming that humans were created in the image of God. As God brought the universe into existence by speaking it, humans create themselves and their world through the word. “With the word, like God, the man / forges and carves his reality of idea.”23 Note that Words was the title of Jean-Paul Sartre’s autobiography. If Unamuno had written one, he could have just as well titled it Palabras or El verbo (the word that as verb is a doing and not merely a telling or describing). Unamuno is probably best known for The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations (1912), which does not resemble customary philosophical treatises but is nevertheless one of the most philosophical and distinctly existentialist texts of contemporary literature. At the center of this text is an exploration of what gives the book its title: the tragic sense of life. This tragic sense is but the ineluctable realization that “consciousness is a disease.”24 Consciousness is a disease because it reveals to humans their mortality. We have to die, and our existence is dominated by grappling with this fact. We are doomed to die, yet every fiber of our being strives to persevere. Therefore, human life is full of tragedy, despair, and contradiction but also passion, love, and, above all, “creative” hope. The human of “flesh and bone” is imbued with this tragic sense of life yet creates a world despite her mortality. We create against despair. We create by hoping. Hope takes the form of belief, a faith in someone or something. Belief and hope are more fundamental than what Unamuno calls reason. Reasons are simply that, “reasons”—in other words, prevarications, excuses, and post facto fabrications. Reasons are not truths. Only our mortality, anguish, and despair reveal truth to us. “For to live is one thing and to

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know is another . . . there may be such an opposition between the two that we may say that everything rational is, not only irrational, but antirational, and everything rational is anti-vital. And there in lies the basis for the tragic sense of life.”25 Unamuno then amends this thought: “Everything vital is irrational, and everything rational is anti-vital, for reason is essentially skeptical.”26 Reason is anti-vital because it leads to the kind of skepticism that neutralizes our will to believe, to hope, and to will creatively in the face of incommensurable odds. For according to Unamuno, we want to live forever: to survive as what we have made ourselves into. Death reveals God to us, and with him the yearning for eternal life. We believe in God because we have faith in our eternal salvation. We live in “fear and trembling,” in anguish and despair, and the more we immerse ourselves in these feelings the more human we become. The reason is that anguish and despair both reveal possibilities to us. We should neither evade nor obfuscate with, in Alain Guy’s words, “anonymous intellectualism or vain optimism . . . philosophy has as a mission to express ceaselessly the mortifying experience of anguish and even despair. We should not use cunning before the cruel enigma of our destiny.”27 For these experiences generate what Unamuno calls “heroic hope, absurd hope, mad hope.”28 It is thus from such anguish and despair that, against the skepticism of calculated rational possibilities, we create by having faith. “Faith is the creative power in man.”29 Unamuno expands this thought: “Faith, then, if not a creative faculty, is the flowering of the will and its work is to create.”30 If God did not exist, then we would create him through our faith. It is this belief that led Unamuno to make some claims that brought him to the door of heresy. “In a certain sense, faith creates its object. And faith in God consists in creating God, and, since it is God who gives us faith in Him, God is continually creating Himself in us. . . . The power of creating God in our image and likeness, of personalizing the Universe, simply means that we carry God within us, as substance of that for which we hope, and that God is continuously creating us in his own image and likeness.”31 Earlier, Unamuno had articulated this thought as follows: “God and man mutually create one another, in effect. God creates or reveals Himself in man, and man creates himself in God. God is His own maker—Deus ipse se fecit, says Lactantius—and we may say that He is continually creating Himself in man and being created by man.”32 At the center of Unamuno’s deliberately unsystematic philosophizing is the figure of this creature that creates and is created. “The man makes himself in making his work and the work makes itself in making the man. The

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creation makes God the creator, and God the Creator makes creation, the universe.”33 The motto of Unamuno’s existentialism, then, is homo ipse se fecit. Before The Tragic Sense of Life in 1912, Unamuno had published The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho in 1905, a book that went through many editions and expansions.34 It is easily demonstrated that Unamuno’s existentialism is first articulated in this book, which consists of a chapter-by-chapter exegesis of Don Quixote along with Unamuno’s philosophical commentary. In this work, written in the shadow of Spain’s defeat in 1898, Unamuno set out to read Don Quixote as expressing and embodying the philosophy of what he called the soul of the Spanish people. This soul is marked by a profound tragedy that expresses, according to Unamuno, the conflict between the “world as the reason of science exhibits it to us and the world as we wish it to be, as our religious faith tells us it is.” Quixotism, which expresses this struggle and conflict, is “nothing but the most desperate phase of the struggle of the Middle Ages against their offspring, the Renaissance.”35 Quixote refuses to surrender to the world of technology that leaves the world bereft of ethics, nobility, justice, and love. His madness is sublime because it allows him to see the world with a purified conscience. His madness becomes the means for the sanctification of his act. Through his madness Quixote become a saint.36 Don Quixote’s madness is the will to create, to make a world by our own lights rather than in accordance with the dictates of pecuniary reason. For Unamuno, Quixotism is the most enduring expression of the Spanish soul, preserving for Europe (and the world) an insight into the essential mortality of humans and the creative power of their hoping against despair. The images and representations of Don Quixote and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, paint for us the image of an idealist: “Don Quixote must be painted with faith, above all with the faith that comes from a quixotic idealism, fount of all truly real creation, an idealism that in the end compels all Sanchos, no matter how little they like it, to follow behind. Don Quixote must be painted with the faith that creates the unseen, in the firm belief that Don Quixote exists and lives and acts, in the same way those marvelous ‘primitive’ painters believed in the life of the saints and angels they painted.”37 In this beatification of Don Quixote, Unamuno is not propounding a mad Übermensch whom we all must follow. Everyone should strive for sublime madness, the hopeful and passionate idealism that drives Don Quijano the Good to venture forth to right wrongs—but also to be faithful believers, to be quarrelsome yet devoted companions, to be good Sanchos. There are

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no Quixotes without Sanchos, and no Sanchos without Quixotes. As Unamuno put it: “a good Quixotist has to be a Sanchopanzist as well.”38 But what is celebrated in both Quixote and Sancho is their madness, a madness that leads them to create worlds and to redeem themselves. Unamuno, in a fascinating essay on “Don Quixote-Bolivar,” quotes what are allegedly some of Simon Bolivar’s last words: “The three greatest fools of History have been Jesus Christ, Don Quixote . . . and me.” To this Unamuno adds: “He put himself among the redeemers.”39 Madness—that is, to believe against reason, to believe precisely because doing so is absurd—leads to the creation and redemption of the world. This is why Don Quixote is a saint, and Unamuno thought that his own philosophy boiled down to meditating on the religion of Quixotism.40 After the “tragic vitalism” of Unamuno, José Ortega y Gasset’s “ratiovitalism”41 has been the most important Spanish philosophical movement of the twentieth century.42 In contrast to Unamuno, who cannot be said to have produced any followers, Gasset influenced several generation of students in Spain, Latin America, and even the United States. But like Unamuno, Gasset did not produce systematic philosophical works—although his complete work filled twelve thick volumes. Most of his philosophizing took the form of essays and lecture manuscripts, which were expanded and edited for inclusion in books. Gasset’s influence came from his teaching and his editorial work in the Revista de Occidente, which he founded in 1923 and remained in publication until 1936. This journal, which also became its own imprint, was without doubt one of the most important venues for the diffusion of fin de siècle philosophy throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Most of the earliest translations of works from German, French, and Italian appeared in Revista de Occidente. Many of Gasset’s essays were first published there, as well as the work of those from what Marías christened the School of Madrid.43 Gasset anticipated many of the key themes later found in Heidegger and Sartre when in 1914 he published one of his few (but unquestionably most famous) books, Meditations on Quixote.44 It could be argued that Gasset is neglected today as a precursor of phenomenology and existentialism because by the time Heidegger, Sartre, Camus, and Marcel arrived on the scene, Gasset, Marías, Gaos, and other members of the School of Madrid had already digested and transcended existentialism.45 Gasset and many of his followers moved on to what he called vital and historical reason, or ratiovitalism, anticipating not only the later developments of Sartre and Merleu-Ponty with respect to Marxism but also the transformation of existential solipsism into a

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materialist social philosophy and a historical phenomenology of reason. Leopoldo Zea showed clearly that the life of the existentialist movement in the Hispanic world was brief and weak precisely because most Latin American and Spanish philosophers in the late 1930s and 1940s had already assimilated it into Ortegism, as we shall discuss in more detail.46 Ortega y Gasset’s early philosophy has been given the name circumstantialism, or perspectivism,47 because at the core of his early work (as evidenced, at least, in his Meditations on Quixote) is the notion of the “I” that is to be attained both within and outside of the circumstances in which this “I” finds itself. As he famously put it: “I am myself plus my circumstance, and if I do not save it, I cannot save myself.”48 However, this “I” is always an accomplishment, a task, a quehacer, a doing. It is a ceaseless task that is carried out in the doing of the world that conforms our “circumstance”: that which is around us and establishes the limit of our world. We only reach our full capacity when we acquire “complete consciousness” of our “circumstance”49 because, as Ortega later argued, the circumscribing world is all we have: it is our accomplishment and history. We are the world that is our history, for it is the product of our action. Humans have nothing: no substance, no essence. They are their history; they are what they have made. As Gasset put it in a text from the late 1930s: Man is a substantial emigrant on a pilgrimage of being, and it is accordingly meaningless to set limits to what he is capable of being. In this initial illimitableness of possibilities that characterizes one who has no nature there stands out only one fixed, pre-established, and given line by which he may chart his course, only one limit: the past. The experiments already made with life narrow man’s future. If we do not know what he is going to be, we know what he is not going to be. Man lives in view of the past. Man, in a word, no nature; what he has is . . . history. Expressed differently: what nature is to things, history, res gestae, is to man.50 Because humans reach their fullest potential only by becoming fully aware of their “circumstance,” they likewise attain to their fullest potential only by achieving their selfhood. The “I” is itself an accomplishment via means of what Gasset calls ensimismarse (using a term that has no direct analogue in English but means to turn toward oneself or to make oneself into a self)51— that is, a process by means of which the “I” turns toward itself and thus claims

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itself. In fact, Gasset argues that there could be no world (as a circumstance) absent this ability of the human being to turn inward and thereby claim a place within itself: “the world is the whole of exteriority, the absolute without, which can have no other without beyond itself. The only possible without to this without is, precisely, a within, an intus, the inwardness of man, his self, which is principally made of ideas.”52 It is by turning from within ourselves to the world and back that we accomplish our history. Our existence is this ceaseless doing, un hacer. “Man practices science as he practices patience, as he attends to his affairs [hacienda], as he practices poetry, politics, business, makes journeys, makes love, makes believe, marks time, and above all, man conjures up illusions.”53 In this passage, the italicized words are all expressed in Spanish as cognates or variations of the verb hacer. Human existence is a having to do, for “this life that is given us is not given us ready-made. Instead every one of us has to make it for himself, each his own. This life that is given us is given empty, and man has to keep filling it for himself, occupying it. Such is our occupation. This is not the case with the stone, the plant, the animal.”54 Ortega y Gasset summarized his philosophical position vis-à-vis the basic tenets of existentialism in a series of lectures that he gave in the late 1930s and early 1940s (these were later gathered together under the title Man and People). He contended, first, that human life is always personal; it is always and only mine. Second, this life is an accomplishment, a quest that must be achieved out of a particular circumstance. Thus, human existence is circumstantial. Third, this circumstantiality does not establish a fate but rather offers possibilities. We face our circumstance absolutely free. Since we must do and since our life is a doing (que hacer), we are forced to be free. Finally, life does not have the mathematical property of commutation. Life, existence, cannot be transferred. In Gasset’s words: “If we put together these attributes . . . we find that life is always personal, circumstantial, untransferable, and responsible.”55 Ortega y Gasset’s work reached its level of influence because he managed to become the center of the school of Madrid. To this group belonged Manuel García Morente, Fernando Vela, Xavier Zubiri, José Gaos, Luis Recaséns Siches, María Zambrano, Antonio Rodríguez Huéscar, Manuel Granell, José Ferrater Mora, José A. Maravall, Luis Díez del Corral, Alfonso G. Valdecasas, Salvador Lissarrague, Paulino Garagorri, Pedro Laín Entralgo, José Luis Aranguren, and Julián Marías.56 Many of these philosophers became transterrados—transplanted, not uprooted (desterrados)—in Latin America and the United States because of Franco’s dictatorship, and many of them became Latin Americans not only by passport but also by philosophical vocation.

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From among this large group I shall briefly discuss Julián Marías; he was one of Ortega’s closest and most faithful disciples, and he was also the most prolific, systematic, and insightful concerning Ortega’s philosophical contribution and how it relates to Don Quixote. Marías published several volumes in which he set out to offer a systematic overview of Ortega’s work that both preserved and surveyed his philosophical genius.57 But just as importantly for our purposes, Marías remedied a major oversight of his teacher: the notable absence of an engagement with Miguel de Unamuno. It was in his philosophical study of Unamuno that Marías developed a theory of the existential novel, which in his view was pioneered by Unamuno.58 Furthermore, and in marked contrast to most contemporary philosophers, Marías developed a sophisticated analysis—of philosophy’s relationship to genre and style—in which he extends his insights to explain Unamuno’s deliberate selection of the existential novel (over the philosophical treatise) to explore the radical issue of human existence.59 With Marías, then, existentialism as a Spanish philosophical movement and as a philosophical literary style reached its highest expression. Yet it is through Marías that existentialism and phenomenology also became the Ortegian position of a vital, historical reason that is a form of hermeneutical historicism.

Latin American Existentialisms: From the Critique of Positivism to Magical Realism The reception and creative appropriation of both phenomenology and existentialism throughout the Latin American continent began as early as the 1920s, especially in Mexico and Argentina, whose faculty were trained in Germany, France, and Louvain. Additionally, with the widespread diffusion of Revista de Occidente and its imprint, Latin American philosophers and intellectuals were speedily informed about the latest philosophical developments in European philosophy. In the 1930s, the flood of Spanish transterrados and other European exiles ensured a continuity between (and integration of) Spanish and Latin American approaches that quickly superseded Continental existentialism. At least four other factors must be considered as we try to appreciate the unique character of Latin American existentialisms. First, most of these intellectuals and philosophers sought, at the turn of the twentieth century, to view matters from an “American” perspective and to consider a distinctly

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“American”—what was lo suyo, its own—not simply as a form of cultural affirmation but also in response to the widespread sense that European culture had entered a profound crisis. Philosophers turned away from Europe, which in their assessment was mired in the miasma of spiritual, political, and especially cultural decadence. This judgment would only be confirmed with the explosions of World War I and World War II. Second, the Mexican Revolution of 1910 had profound repercussions throughout Latin America. This revolution involved more than a campaign against the criollo bourgeois oligarchies on behalf of the mestizo and indigenous populations of Mexico; it was also a revolution of ideas. The revolution was an ideological rejection of Porfirian positivism and an affirmation of the political, cultural, and economic ideals corresponding to the social and ethnic reality of Mexico. Vasconcelos’s philosophy of mestizaje and the cosmic race, as well as the birth of a new form of indigenismo, were philosophical and cultural expressions of a new cultural identity given license by the revolution of 1910. Third, precisely because of the effects of the Mexican Revolution, which included the growing sense of national independence throughout the Latin American nations, there began a widespread educational reform that sought to bring Latin American universities up to a par with European universities. A process of secularization, professionalization, and expansion took place, thus creating the institutional conditions for the rise of a highly educated intellectual elite that would quickly begin the process of translating, commenting, assimilating, and critiquing the latest philosophical productions from Europe and from other countries in Latin America. One could compare the effects that exiles from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy had on the United States to the effects that Spanish transterrados had on Latin American philosophical production—with the difference that the Spanish exiles arrived a decade earlier. Fourth, we must note the postcolonial and neocolonial fragmentation of Latin America, whose countries’ historical antecedents orient them either to Spain, England, Portugal, or Germany. The result was a series of national trends and schools that are beyond the scope of this chapter to overview. We can therefore discuss only a few key existential figures from different national philosophical traditions and cannot hope to be in any way systematic or comprehensive.60 One could argue that—because it evolved from nineteenth-century geopolitical markers reflecting the varied imperial designs of the United States, England, Spain, and France—Latin America become a palimpsest of different nations claiming different cultural identities on the

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barely dismantled foundations of colonial inheritances and institutions.61 This means that Latin American philosophical production has, by and large, followed national rather than Continental imperatives. The relative isolation of the young nations (and the often bellicose enmity among them) explains why there has been little intracontinental sharing of ideas. Hence Europe, and later the United States, was the Gran Central of philosophical exchange in Latin America. We begin with the Argentinean reception: Carlos Astrada (1894–1970) was one of the first philosophers to teach phenomenology and existentialism in Argentina.62 He studied in Germany between the wars and was a student and friend of Martin Heidegger’s. He attended the seminars of Husserl and Nicolai Hartmann, and he was also a friend of Max Scheler. From the 1930s through the early 1950s, Astrada published a series of pioneering works on existentialism inspired by Heidegger’s thinking. In 1931 he published El juego existencial; this was followed in 1936 by Idealismo fenomenológico y metafísica existencial, which set out to differentiate between Husserlian phenomenology and Heideggerian existential analytics. He was also an early translator of Heidegger, co-translating his What Is Metaphysics? and What Is Called Thinking? The early 1950s saw publication of Astrada’s The Existential Revolution (1952), in which he undertook to develop a humanism of freedom that led him to Marxism. Most of his work from then until his death was an engagement with historical materialism. Nonetheless, like most Latin American existential philosophers, Astrada used the tools of phenomenology and existentialism; these were employed in his exploration of Argentinean identity, the still influential reflection El mito gaucho (1948). What is noteworthy is how Astrada’s trajectory is similar to that of Herbert Marcuse, who also sought to synthesize the tools of phenomenology and existentialism with Marxism. Astrada’s questioning “who are we as Argentines?” strongly echoes “What does it mean to be a German Jew?” From Brazil it is important to mention Vicente Ferreira da Silva (1916– 1963), who is without question the best-known Brazilian existentialist. He studied law and mathematics, and his early work is on mathematical logic, but during the early 1940s he turned to issues of human existence, the philosophy of culture, and existentialism. He began to lecture on Sartre in 1946. During this existentialist period he published Ensaios filosóficos (1948) and Exegese da açao (1949), both of which are collections of journal and newspaper articles, as well as the 1953 books Idéias para um novo conceito do homem and Teleología e antihumanismo.

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From Peru one would have to mention Alberto Wagner de Reyna (1915– 2006) of Lima, who studied with Hartmann in Berlin and with Heidegger in Freiburg in the 1930s. De Reyna’s thought reflected his Catholic orientation, and his notable work was his doctoral thesis, “Heidegger’s Fundamental Ontology: Its Motives and Significance” (1938). The dissemination of his ideas was mostly carried out in the form of articles, many of which are still not collected. His compatriot Francisco Miró Quesada (born 1918) should also be mentioned for his work as a translator of German phenomenology and because he provided one of the earliest—and, in the view of many, one of the most systematic and perspicacious—overviews of the phenomenological moment: El sentido del movimiento fenomenologico (1941). Quesada, despite his extensive work on what is called analytic philosophy, has also been one of the key philosophers in the development of a distinctly Latin American philosophy. He wrote two texts that remain indispensable in the task of understanding the genesis and growth of this autochthonous philosophy: Despertar y proyecto de filosofar latinoamericano (1974) and Proyecto y realización del filosofar latinoamericano (1981). Yet another Peruvian philosopher worthy of discussion is Augusto Salazar Bondy (1925–1974), a student of Gaos in Mexico who also wrote and taught existentialism. The existentialist and later Gaosian influences in his thought would be decisive for what is surely his most lasting contribution: ¿Existe una filosofía de nuestra América? (1969), a work that combines existentialist and Marxist themes. From among the Mexicans we must begin with Antonio Caso (1883–1946), who was trained as a civil engineer and thus can be considered a philosophical autodidact. Even so, his influence on the development of twentieth-century Mexican philosophy is incalculable.63 Along with José Vasconcelos and other young intellectuals, in 1908 Caso founded the famous Ateneo de la Juventud, a group that was devoted to the study of the latest philosophical thinking and that pushed for educational reform to take seriously the teaching of philosophy at the university level. Caso also founded the faculty of philosophy within the Universidad Nacional de México. His influence was primarily through his teaching. He was one of the first to teach and write on both phenomenology and existentialism in Mexico. He wrote El acto ideatorio (Las esencias y los valores) and La filosofía de Husserl, both published in 1934. They were later jointly re-edited and expanded into El acto ideatorio y la filosofía de Husserl (1946). Caso also published Positivismo, neopositivismo y fenomenología (1941) and La existencia como economía, como desinterés y como caridad (1943), in which he develops his own interpretation of phenomenology and applies it to social and cultural questions.

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Another key figure of this early part of the development of phenomenology and existentialism in Mexico was Samuel Ramos (1897–1959), a student of Caso and a collaborator of Vasconcelos in the Mexican Ministry of Education. He lived in France and Italy, and his early work was heavily indebted to Dilthey, Scheler, Hartman, and Heidegger. Yet his own oeuvre went in the direction of philosophical anthropology. In 1940 he published Hacia un nuevo humanismo: Programa de una antropología filosófica and Filosofía de la vida artística. In them, he combined his philosophical anthropology with aesthetic and cultural preoccupations. In 1943 he published Historia de la filosofía en México, a book that was an inspiration for later generations of Mexican and Latin American philosophers. However, perhaps his most famous work— and the one with the widest impact—is El perfil del hombre y la cultura en México (1934), a work that brought together existential themes with social psychology and cultural critique. In this book Ramos articulated the then scandalous thesis that what marked the character of the Mexican was a sense of inferiority that expressed itself in a violent and insecure machismo and the imperative to ape everything European. These views were later appropriated and expanded by Octavio Paz in The Labyrinth of Solitude (1947), a book whose cultural influence throughout Latin America paralleled the influence in Europe of works by Oswald Spengler and Sigmund Freud. An intermediate but no less influential philosopher was José Gaos, who had been a student of Ortega y Gasset and had been part of the School of Madrid. In the late 1930s he arrived in Mexico, where he remained until his death. His autobiographical writings are a moving manifesto to his profound gratitude to the Mexican people for their hospitality. Gaos confessed that he was a Mexican-Spanish philosopher, not simply one exiled but a transterrado (transplanted), who above all philosophized in Spanish. We thus have complete license to study him as a Mexican philosopher. He began a translation of Heidegger’s Being and Time into Spanish in 1933 with the help of Zubiri, who had recently returned from Heidegger’s Freiburg seminars. The translation was finished in 1947 and used in his seminars, but it was not published until 1951.64 His introduction to the translation was published simultaneously as a separate book. Gaos also translated Dewey, Dilthey, Hegel, Kant, and Kierkegaard, among others. Although he was extremely prolific, like Caso his influence was communicated through his dedicated pedagogy, as attested by the nineteen thick volumes of his collected works published by UNAM (the university press of the Universidad Autonóma de México). Most historians of Mexican philosophy agree that Gaos professionalized the teaching of philosophy within the Mexican university.65 His students went on to become

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the key philosophers of the second half of the twentieth century. As Gaos distanced himself from Ortega y Gasset’s views to develop his own philosophical perspective, he also developed a critique of existentialism that influenced how existentialism and phenomenology were combined with historicism, especially in the tradition of Dilthey, as well as philosophical anthropology, in line with Scheler. Thus, in a 1943 text, Gaos identified the contradictions between existentialism and essentialism, which in his view were two irreconcilable dialectical poles that had to be superseded with a historical understanding of human existence.66 A group of Gaos’s students, hoping to revive the tradition of the Caso’s Ateneo de la Juventud, founded a group that sought to diffuse philosophy and make it relevant to the nation’s cultural life. This is the Hiperión group, named after the Greek god of light, Hyperion. Some of its members were Leopoldo Zea, Emilio Uranga, Jorge Portilla, Ricardo Guerra, Joaquin Sanchez Macgregor, Salvador Reyes Nevarez, Fausto Vega, and Luis Villoro.67 Of this group we have only enough space to quickly foreground Emilio Uranga, whose 1952 book El análisis del ser mexicano was one of the most original appropriations of Heidegger to develop a hermeneutical-ontological understanding of Mexican being. However, it may have followed too closely (for widespread acceptance) in the steps of Samuel Ramos, who saw Mexican being and existence from the negative standpoint, as an insufficiency vis-à-vis the fullness of European being. In 1950 Luis Villoro published Los grandes momentos del indigenism en México, his philosophical analysis of Mexican being that went beyond comparisons to the European cultures that some had sought to mimic. Villoro focused on distance and negation: the indigenous sources of its culture and ethnicity. He identified three stages of the development of indigenismo—a distinctive Latin American intellectual movement that addresses the indigenous sources of Latin American culture—by utilizing, as he declared in a prologue to the second edition, “existentialism and a certain Hegelianism that was linked to it; to these basic influences was added Marxism, the study of which was only beginning then.”68 Villoro later abandoned some of his earlier existentialist and culturalist tendencies and embraced an analytic style of philosophizing focused on political philosophy. His work, however, continues to focus on questions of indigenismo and the challenges of cultural, ethnoracial, and religious pluralism for democracy. Yet without question the Hyperion group member with the most influence—not only in Mexico but throughout Latin American—was Leo­ poldo Zea, who educated several generations of students and left a massive

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conglomeration of philosophical studies in Mexico and the Americas. Among his most important works are En torno a una filosofia Americana (1945), La filosofia como compromiso y otros ensayos (1952), Conciencia y posibilidad del mexicano (1952), and América como conciencia (1953). Some of his best work on Mexican and Latin American philosophy as a project of liberation was edited in La filosofia como compromiso de liberacion (1991). Zea merits mention among other propagators and appropriators of existentialism because in his case it is evident how phenomenology, existentialism, and hermeneutics were synthesized to develop a philosophical analysis of “lo mexicano” and “lo Americano.” His synthesis of these currents was so thorough that Zea gave birth to the intellectual movement of “Latinamericanism.”69 I have named only a few of the many original Latin American philosophers who, beginning in the second decade of the twentieth century, undertook a productive dialogue with the work of the Spanish existentialists Unamuno and Gasset and with the work of Dilthey, Husserl, Jaspers, Heidegger, Gadamer, Ricoeur, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Marcel. It remains to be noted that the work of the “Americanists” and the “Latinamericanists” (Ramos, Uranga, Villoro, Zea) were influenced directly and expressly by Unamuno’s and Gasset’s efforts to read the character of the Spanish soul through—and to decipher a philosophy in—Cervantes’s Don Quixote. It is no exaggeration to claim that the works of the “Latinamericanists” were Latin American variations on the quixotic investigations of the pioneers of European existentialism. As with Unamuno and Gasset, the tools of phenomenological existentialism and historicist hermeneutics were directed to an engaged, passionate, and urgent understanding of Latin American being and culture. In contrast to Europe and the United States, which experienced existentialism as a vital intellectual and cultural movement in the 1950s and 1960s,70 these currents and philosophical positions had already been assimilated and superseded in Latin America by the 1940s and 1950s. Existentialism became of mostly academic interest, to be eclipsed by Marxism and Latinamericanism (in the line inaugurated by Zea) as well as the development of a sui generis Latin American philosophical current: liberation philosophy. Like the early Latin American existentialism, liberation philosophy synthesizes and synergizes a focus on the individual that is balanced with an understanding that no individuals exist outside cultural and national experiences and histories. Like many of the pioneering Latin American existentialists, liberation philosophers also combine a focus on the fashioning of individuals with a concern for the historical and material conditions under which individuals determine

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their freedom, fashioning their unique and irreplaceable selves. More generally, a distinctive characteristic of Spanish and Latin American existentialisms and phenomenology is how early they integrated the pioneers, and their work should be considered on par with figures like Camus, Marcel, Sartre, and even Heidegger in developing their respective versions of existentialist and phenomenological thematics. At the very least, the Spanish and Latin American existentialists should be studied as an alternate but no less generative appropriation of the tradition. Even as existentialism and phenomenology ceased to be of direct cultural relevance during the second half of the twentieth century in Spain and Latin America, the quixotic sources of Hispanic and Latin American existentialism continued to have enduring impact—but outside academic and professional philosophy. Here I reference the literary production of Jorge Luis Borges and the magical realists, Alejandro Carpentier and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. What Cervantes was for Unamuno and Gasset, Borges has become for a new generation of Latin American and Latino philosophers.71 What is noteworthy and perhaps not unexpected is that Borges was one of the most original readers and appropriators of Cervantes’s work. At the heart of Borges’s philosophical fictions is the attempt to expand and reappropriate Cervantes’s prodigiously generative meta-philosophical devices. It is no accident that one of Borges’s most hallucinating, sublimely ironic, and philosophically precocious stories is his “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” and that one of the essays most revelatory about Borges’s own techniques is “Partial Magic in Quixote.”72 In inaugurating the modern novel, Cervantes also gave birth to the novel as a self-reflexive literary device. Don Quixote is a work of fiction but also a metanarrative. This is what Borges has recovered in his concise meta-narratives. At the heart of this meta-narrative reflexivity is the will to immerse oneself in the power of the imagination without succumbing to its bewitchment. As Fuentes has put it, the Quixote is a critique of reading that always returns us to the distinction between reality and fiction. Borges returns us to this moment in which fiction itself must break the spell of its own magic lest we succumb to the power of imagination. With Carpentier and Marquez, Borgesian readers of El Quixote, reality is transfigured so as to reveal its own magic, but these authors never let us forget that fiction is something different from reality.73 La Mancha and Don Alonso may have transfigured into Macondo and colonel Aurelio Buendia by way of Pierre Menard—who is Borges, Carpentier, and Marquez writing Cervantes. What allows this tradition to continue to be generative is the quixotic hero, whom Vargas Llosa has called the “recalcitrant

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individualist and the insolent libertarian.”74 The Oxford English Dictionary defines quixotic as someone who is “naively idealistic, unrealistic, impracticable, unpredictable, capricious, whimsical.” Vargas Llosa, in turn, defines it as: “audacious, effusive, idealistic, visionary, heroic. But also meddlesome, humorless, and suspicious of reality.”75 To be quixotic, in short, is to be an existentialist: the quixotic hero of modernity who refuses to subordinate the human to either history, nature, God, or reason. This quixotic hero is the “I” that must be achieved through a ceaseless performance of the freedom to which we are condemned. May we never cease to be seduced by Don Quixote and Sancho.

Notes 1. Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel, trans. Linda Asher (London: Farber & Farber, 1988), 4. See also Kundera’s introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Don Quixote, trans. Charles Jarvis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), v–x. 2. Kundera, Art of the Novel, 4–5. 3. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha, IV centenary edition (Madrid: Real Academia Española, 2004). When I quote from the Spanish it will be from this (the most authoritative) edition. When I quote in English, I will specify which translation is being quoted. When making references to chapters, I will use the customary convention of denoting the first (or second) part followed by a period and the chapter, all in roman numerals. Thus I.XI denotes part one, chapter eleven. 4. Cervantes, Don Quijote, 1099. 5. Patricia Finch and John J. Allen, “Don Quijote Across the Centuries,” in Cervantes, Don Quijote, ed. Diana De Armas Wilson, trans. Burton Raffel (New York: Norton, 1998), 767–74. See also Edwin Williamson, ed., Cervantes and the Modernists: The Question of Influence (London: Tamesis, 1994), and Roberto González Echevarría, ed., Cervantes’ Don Quixote: A Casebook (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). 6. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de la Mancha, trans. John Rutherford, with an introduction by Roberto González Echevarría (New York: Penguin, 2001), 873. 7. Ibid., vii. 8. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. 9. Anthony J. Cascardi, “Personal Identity in Don Quixote,” in Cervantes, Don Quijote (1998), 792. 10. Kundera, Art of the Novel, 161. 11. Julián Marías, Miguel de Unamuno (1942; Madrid: Editorial Espasa-Calpe, 1950).

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12. Miguel de Unamuno, “How to Make a Novel,” in Novela/Nivola, translated with an introduction by Anthony Kerrigan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), 466–67. 13. Goya’s famous painting from 1799, which is part of his caprichos series, is titled after the inscription in the painting itself: “El sueño de la razon produce monstros.” In Spanish, “sueño” can mean both “sleep” and “dream.” An alternative translation of Goya’s inscription is “the dream of reason produces monsters.” Cervantes makes productive use of this ambiguity. 14. Michel Foucault, History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy and Jean Khalfa (London: Routledge, 2006), 41. 15. Carlos Fuentes, Cervantes o la crítica de la lectura (Alcala de Henares: Centro de Estudios Cervantinos, 1994). A section of this set of lectures appears as the introduction to the Modern Library edition of Don Quixote, trans. Tobia Smollett (New York: Modern Library, 2001), vii–xxvii. I will quote from this translation. 16. Blaise Pascal, Pensées and Other Philosophical Writings, trans. Honor Levi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 9. 17. Fuentes, “Introduction,” in Don Quixote, trans. Tobia Smollett, vii. 18. See in particular chapter 8, “From God to God,” in Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Nations, trans. Anthony Kerrigan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972). 19. For biographical details see José Gaos, ed., Antologia del pensamiento de lengua Española en la edad contemporanea (Mexico City: Laberinto, Editorial Seneca, 1945), 53. See also Martin Nozick, Miguel de Unamuno: The Agony of Belief (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971). 20. See José Huertas-Jourda, The Existentialism of Miguel de Unamuno (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1963), chapter 1, “Unamuno’s Theory of Language.” See also José Ferrater Mora, Three Spanish Philosophers: Unamuno, Ortega, and Ferrater Mora (Albany: SUNY Press, 2003), 75–82. 21. Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life, 337. 22. Ibid., 336. 23. Unamuno, quoted in Huertas-Jourda, Existentialism of Miguel de Unamuno, 5. 24. Unamuno, Tragic Sense of Life, 22. 25. Ibid., 39. 26. Ibid., 101. 27. Alain Guy, Historia de la filosofía Española (Barcelona: Anthropos. Editorial del Hombre, 1985), 279. 28. Unamuno, Essays and Soliloquies, trans. J. E. Crawford Flitch (New York: Knopf, 1925), 119. 29. Ibid., 210. 30. Ibid., 211. 31. Ibid.

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32. Ibid., 186. 33. Ibid., vii. This sentence was written in 1924, as part of the author’s preface to the anthology prepared by Flitch, the editor and translator. 34. Princeton University Press, under the Bollingen Series, published Unamuno’s selected works in seven volumes. Volume three is superlative because it contains The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho in addition to essays and other texts. For this reason, the English translation has the different and perhaps more faithful title Our Lord Don Quixote: The Life of Don Quixote and Sancho and Related Essays, trans. Anthony Kerrigan (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967). 35. Unamuno, Essays and Soliloquies, 117. These quotes are from an essay from 1912 entitled “The Religion of Quixotism.” 36. Unamuno, Our Lord Don Quixote, 331. 37. Ibid., 353. 38. Ibid., 462. 39. Ibid., 398. 40. Unamuno, Essays and Soliloquies, viii. 41. For a discussion of this term see Ferrater Mora, Three Spanish Philosophers, 157–64. 42. For a concise discussion see Guy, Historia de la filosofía Española, 287–302. 43. Julián Marías, History of Philosophy (New York: Dover, 1967), 462–68. See also Marías, La escuela de Madrid (Buenos Airies: Emecé Editores, 1959). 44. José Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Quixote, trans. Evelyn Rugg and Diego Marin (New York: Norton, 1961). The English edition is based on Marías’s edition and commentary. 45. See the outstanding study by John T. Graham, A Pragmatist Philosophy of Life in Ortega y Gasset (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994), especially the bibliographical essay that chronicles the reception of Ortega’s work throughout the world and the supplemental notes that discuss Ortega’s relationship to other philosophers such as Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and others. 46. Leopoldo Zea, La filosofía en México, 2 vols. (1947; Mexico City: Editorial Ibero-Mexicana, 1955), especially vol. 2, 150–59. 47. See Ferrater Mora, Three Spanish Philosophers, 145–56. 48. Ortega y Gasset, Meditations on Quixote, 45. 49. Ibid., 41. 50. Ortega y Gasset, History as a System and Other Essays Toward a Philosophy of History, trans. Helen Weyl (New York: Norton, 1961), 216–17 (emphasis in original). 51. Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture and Literature, trans. Helen Weyl (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1968). See the essay “The Self and Other” (which was originally a lecture given in 1939), especially 180–81. 52. Ortega y Gasset, Dehumanization of Art, 181.

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53. Ortega y Gasset, Man and People, trans. Willard R. Trask (New York: Norton, 1957), 55. This book is based on a series of lectures delivered in Argentina, Spain, and Germany. 54. Ibid., 43. 55. Ibid., 58–59. 56. Marías, History of Philosophy, 443. 57. See Guy, Historia de la filosofía Española, 302–7. 58. Marías, Miguel de Unamuno. 59. I am thinking here of his Philosophy As Dramatic Theory, trans. James Parsons (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971), which compiles some of his essays on the literary dimensions of philosophy. See especially chapters 1 and 2. Most of these essays are from his Nuevos ensayos de filosofía, 2nd expanded ed. (Madrid: Ediciones Revista de Occidente, 1968). 60. I know of only one attempt to offer a Continental overview of both phenomenology and existentialism throughout the entire Latin American and Caribbean continent: Clara Alicia Jalif de Bertranou, “La fenomenología y la filosofía existencial,” in El pensamiento filosofico Latinoamericano, del Caribe y “Latino” (1300–2000): Historia, corrientes, temas y filósofos, ed. Enrique Dussel, Eduardo Mendieta, and Carmen Bohórquez (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 2009), 278–318. I have also relied on the exhaustive documentation in Carlos Beorlegui, Historia del pensamiento filosófico latinoamericano: Una búsqueda incesante de la identidad (Bilbao: Universidad de Deusto, 2004). 61. See Walter Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2005), and Eduardo Mendieta, “The Emperor’s Map: Latin American Criticisms of Globalism,” Rethinking Globalism, ed. Manfred B. Steger (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 231–42. 62. For some of the following sketches I have relied on Jorge J. E. Gracia and Elizabeth Millán-Zaibert, eds., Latin America Philosophy: For the 21st Century (Amherst, N.Y.: Prometheus, 2003). This is an excellent anthology and includes excerpts from some of the figures I will discuss that are prefaced by biographical sketches. Note that a more recent volume has been published that provides the most comprehensive overview ever of Latin American philosophy, trends, currents, issues, and periods in addition to biographical sketches of the most important Latin American philosophers: Dussel, Mendieta, and Bohórquez, El pensamiento filosofico Latinoamericano. This volume is 1,100 pages long. 63. See Zea, La filosofía en México, vol. 1, 61–70. 64. José Gaos, Introducción a “El ser y el tiempo” de Martin Heidegger (1951; Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993). 65. See Luis Villoro, En México, entre libros: Pensadores del siglo XX (Mexico City: El Colegio Nacional y Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1995), 77–81. 66. See “Existencialismo y Esencialismo,” in Gaos, La filosofía de la filosofía (Barcelona: Editorial Crítica, 1989), 151–68. See also Gaos’s analysis of existentialism

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in Historia de nuestra idea del mundo (Mexico City: El Colegio de México y Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1973), lecture 16, “Existentialism.” This book is based on his 1966/67 lectures. 67. For an overview of the Hyperion group and how it became a major interpreter and appropriator of existentialist philosophy, see the excellent article by Carlos Alberto Sanchez, “Heidegger in Mexico: Emilio Uranga’s Ontological Hermeneutics,” Continental Philosophy Review 40, no. 4 (2008): 441–61; and Alberto Sanchez, “From Ortega y Gasset to Mexican Existentialism: Toward a Philosophic Conception of Chicano Identity,” Southwest Philosophical Studies 25 (2007): 49–61. 68. Luis Villoro, Los grandes momentos del indigenism en México (1950; Mexico City: El Colegio de México, El Colegio Nacional, y Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1987), 7–8. 69. See my discussion of “Latinamericanism” in Mendieta, Global Fragments: Globalizations, Latinamericanism, and Critical Theory (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007). 70. See William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existentialist Philosophy (1958; New York: Anchor, 1990). 71. See, for instance, Jorge J. E. Gracia, “Borges’s ‘Pierre Menard’: Philosophy or Literature,” in Literary Philosophers: Borges, Calvino, Eco, ed. Jorge J. E. Gracia, Carolyn Korsmeyer, and Rodolph Gasché (New York: Routledge, 2002), 85–107. 72. See Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths (New York: Penguin, 1970). 73. See Edwin Williamson, “The Quixotic Roots of Magic Realism: History and Fiction from Alejo Carpentier to Gabriel García Márquez,” in Williamson, Cervantes and the Modernists, 103–20. 74. Mario Vargas Llosa, “Four Centuries of Don Quixote,” in Vargas Llosa, Wellsprings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 1–25, quote on 24. 75. Ibid., 22.

2 Existentialism and Religion

7

Fear and Trembling and the Paradox of Christian Existentialism George Pattison

If existentialism is identified with the atheistic existentialism of Sartre, then to speak of Christian existentialism would seem to be a contradiction in terms. Thus, when Catholic apologists such as Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain sought to recapture the vocabulary of “existence” for Christian theology, they did so by opposing the Sartrean disjunction of essence and existence and invoking scholasticism’s definition of God as that being whose essence is to exist, a definition rendered in the Thomist affirmation of “He Who Is” as the most appropriate of the divine names.1 Although this seemed to suggest a certain transcendence of existence over essence, these apologists remained committed to the view that, nevertheless, a certain determinate content is present in the knowledge of God. And if that were true of God then it was a fortiori true of creatures, which had been created by God according to their specific essences. The prioritizing of existence is not—and cannot be—such as to break loose from essence in the way Sartre’s renowned formulation that “existence precedes essence” seems to require.

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Such apologetic responses by no means exhaust the possible forms of Christian existentialism, and by the mid-twentieth century we find a considerable variety of what might better be called Christian existentialisms (plural). These included the Catholic existentialism of Gabriel Marcel (1889–1973)2 and the Orthodox Nicholas Berdyaev (1874–1948)3 as well as the better-known Protestant existentialist theologies of Paul Tillich (1886–1965)4 and Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976).5 Nor is this list exhaustive: from the 1930s through to the 1960s and beyond, many key figures of modern theology reflected an existentialist tendency or influence even if they could not be described as “existentialist” in any definite sense. Examples include Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906–1945)6 and the “death of God” theologians,7 not to mention the singularly unclassifiable figure of Simone Weil.8 Judaism, of course, offered its own religious versions of existentialism, some of which (notably those of Buber and Rosenzweig) had a strong influence on Christian thinkers. But what did it mean to be a “Christian existentialist”? Even among those just listed as existentialist theologians, it is hard to speak of more than a shared mood or a set of common sources. There are, for example, fundamental differences between Tillich and Bultmann on the relationship between philosophy and theology, between Marcel and Berdyaev on ontology, and between Bultmann and Tillich on the possibilities of knowing God outside a specific relation to Christian preaching. In referring to these thinkers as the “anxious angels” of modern theology, I have elsewhere described them as “critics of closure, masters of suspicion, experimenters in new modes of communication and utopists who cannot believe in utopia . . . believers who have internalized the disbelief of their age,” adding that “none of this defines a position or a school in any narrow sense.”9 But they are united by another factor: their relation to a number of key nineteenth-century sources, most notably Schelling, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche. Of these thinkers, it is probably Kierkegaard who does the most to give a specific shape to Christian existentialism (at least in its academic form), and it is from Kierkegaard that such central concepts as anxiety, repetition, the moment of vision, despair, and being-toward-death derive their distinctively existentialist meaning—as does the term “existence” itself.10 This chapter therefore takes a theme from Kierkegaard and tests its resonance with subsequent existentialist thought (both religious and nonreligious) in order to tease out what it might mean to speak of a “Christian” existentialism and what the limits of such a Christian existentialism might be. The theme is that of the “exception,” which is expressed in its sharpest and

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most familiar form in Fear and Trembling. One of modern European philosophy’s most debated, multileveled, and polyphonic texts, this book is (among its many provoking features) almost impossible to categorize. Is it a work of philosophy or of theology or literature? What is the significance of its subtitle, Dialectical Lyric? And what are we to make of Kierkegaard’s claim not to have written it at all, ascribing authorship instead to the odd pseudonym Johannes “de silentio”?11 Noting such questions but leaving them unanswered in this chapter, we turn next to the theme of “the exception” as it is stated in Fear and Trembling.

Fear and Trembling “Faith is indeed this paradox: that the individual is higher than the universal.” So wrote Kierkegaard (or Kierkegaard’s pseudonym, Johannes “de silentio”) as part of a programmatic statement in Fear and Trembling.12 The text focuses on the predicament of Abraham, called by God to sacrifice his son Isaac.13 As Kierkegaard/Johannes understood it (although he repeatedly averred that he cannot understand Abraham), if faith is not the paradox that the individual is higher than the universal, “then Abraham is lost and there never has been such a thing as faith in the world.”14 Since Abraham is the father of faith and since his faith will be definitive for all who are believers, his spiritual heirs, this is a matter of more than merely historic importance. In Fear and Trembling the question of the universal is dealt with largely in terms of its role in ethics. Kierkegaard well knew that the relationship between the individual and the universal was not solely an ethical question and had wider implications for the whole relationship between faith and philosophy. In the contemporary Hegelian philosophy of religion with which he was familiar, the individual was viewed as the bearer of the universal truth of humanity as such, which entailed seeing the individual as defined by reason. Kierkegaard addressed this broader issue in such works as Concluding Unscientific Postscript, but in Fear and Trembling it is the ethical aspect of this relationship that is at the fore. Of course, Kierkegaard remained mindful of this wider horizon, and we will look for evidence of this in Fear and Trembling. We also show its importance for examining the relations between Kierke­ gaard and various twentieth-century existentialisms. In another boldly programmatic statement, Kierkegaard/Johannes asserted that “the ethical is as such the universal, and, as the universal, that

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which is valid for everyone.”15 Consequently, “as soon as the individual seeks to make himself in his individuality [a measure of] validity over against the universal, he sins and can only again reconcile himself with the universal by acknowledging this.”16 Of course, such a definition of ethics—the Kantian background is patent—is eminently contestable, but we need not be Kantians to feel its force. Criminal law does not normally admit exceptions without a good reason—which is to say that they are not, ultimately, exceptions. Yet by defining faith as the elevation of the individual above the universal, Kierke­ gaard seemed also to be setting it on a collision course with the ethical: What, on this basis, can be the difference between a person of faith and a sinner, a believer and a criminal? But why did Kierkegaard/Johannes think that the individual becoming the exception—by placing himself above the universal obligations of the ethical, a maneuver called the “teleological suspension of the ethical”—is a necessary feature of Abrahamic faith? The reason is that Abraham is called upon by God to break one of the most fundamental of all moral obligations: not to kill. What Abraham is called to do is, simply, murder and of an especially abhorrent kind: the murder of one’s own child. Of course, there are several familiar exceptions to the prohibition on murder: most human societies allow the collective to suspend this prohibition in cases of war or criminal proceedings.17 Kierkegaard/Johannes himself makes much of the case of Agamemnon, called to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia in order to obtain a favorable wind for the Greek fleet assembled to attack Troy. But that is precisely the difference from the case of Abraham, who has no “in order to” other than the voice of God that he alone can hear. We may not be able to comprehend Agamemnon’s willingness to sacrifice his daughter, but in his own time and place there were socially and politically acceptable reasons for his actions. So it was, too, in the other familiar examples cited by Kierkegaard: Jephthah and Brutus.18 In contrast to Agamemnon, Jephthah, and Brutus, Abraham can appeal to no higher cause, and it is entirely on the basis of a private and incommunicable trust in a voice that only he can hear that he sets out to commit murder. The point is underlined when we consider that Abraham lived prior to God’s giving the Law to Moses; Kierkegaard himself did not emphasize this, but it is central to Paul’s choice of Abraham as the “father of faith.” Abraham also lived before the existence of a people of Israel, so there is no religious, tribal, or other political law that might justify his actions. There is no supraindividual example to which he could appeal (as later believers could appeal to him). Kierkegaard describes Abraham’s suspension of the ethical as lack-

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ing even the intrinsic intelligibility of a human reason; it is, in and of itself, inscrutable. Abraham’s relation to the absolute is itself an absolute without qualification and, as such, is inexplicable. His purpose is entirely private and incommunicable. There are further levels of paradox that Kierkegaard/Johannes found in the figure of Abraham, whose story is retold in at least five different versions.19 These primarily concern Abraham’s “absurd” conviction that—even though God was now calling on him to kill the son through whom he was to have become the father of many nations—that promise would nevertheless be fulfilled, through Isaac, in this world. For Johannes/Kierkegaard, this is what distinguishes a true Abrahamic knight of faith from a “knight of resignation.” The latter would kill Isaac if ordered to do so but would no longer expect the promise to be fulfilled. A knight of resignation is prepared to renounce everything for God, but in so doing he expects nothing back and resigns himself to a life of worldly unhappiness. A knight of faith renounces everything, truly renounces it, yet in the same breath and “by the power of the absurd” believes that all that he has renounced will return to him and that he will find happiness in the world. This is a “movement of infinity” so consummate that in its return to earth “there is not a single second in which [an onlooker] might guess at anything other.”20 A knight of faith does not sigh, raise his eyes to heaven, or set his mouth grimly as he submits to the divine will—ways of behaving that indicate to any bystanders just how great a hero of faith he is. Such histrionics are compatible with resignation, but faith keeps to itself. Of course, it will then be difficult to tell who among us are knights of faith. Such a knight could, as Kierkegaard/Johannes genially suggested, look just like a tax official, a petit bourgeois taking a Sunday stroll and enjoying the life of the crowd; his faith may have no higher proof than his ability to talk jovially about building projects to which he has no means of giving effect. There is not a sign, not a hint of any relation to the absolute that would be incommensurable with his everyday, nineteenth-century life. Abraham’s case is paradigmatic, but it will not likely bear much resemblance to a trial of faith that anyone else will be called upon to undergo. Abraham is not only unprecedented but also inimitable. Abraham’s exceptional status is not only a matter of ethics; it is also applicable to other ways in which the individual represents or embodies the universally human. Whether in its idealistic versions or in its materialist reworking by Feuerbach, the prevailing consensus of Kierkegaard’s time was that the individual was also the bearer of universal values, either as a spiritual

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being defined by reason or through participating in the humanity of all people. However, the Abraham of Kierkegaard/Johannes seems to break the link between individual and universal in both directions. As one whose action is based solely on the inscrutable and incommunicable will of God, Abraham not only stands outside reason but also places himself outside the material body of humanity, defying his obligations to future generations—obligations rooted in his role as their potential ancestor. Abraham’s action not only breaks the bonds implicit in the process of sexual reproduction, but he is also praised in Fear and Trembling for being the “hero” whose action redeems humanity from what is otherwise a meaningless cycle of birth and death (a cycle that, in, for example, Feuerbach’s materialist terms, is irredeemable). Kierkegaard/Johannes offered a “Eulogy on Abraham” that opens as follows: If a human being did not have an eternal consciousness, if underlying everything there were only a wild, fermenting power that writhing in dark passions produced everything, be it significant or insignificant, if a vast, never appeased emptiness hid beneath everything, what would life then be but despair? If such were the situation, if there were no sacred bond that knit humankind together, if one generation emerged after another like forest foliage, if one generation succeeded one another like the singing of birds in the forest, if a generation passed through the world as a ship through the sea, as wind through the desert, an unthinking and unproductive performance, if an eternal oblivion, perpetually hungry, lurked for its prey and there were no power strong enough to wrench that away from it—how empty and devoid of consolation life would be!21 This passage directly challenges the Feuerbachian view that a purely materialist conception of humanity would be capable of fulfilling the human longing for a meaningful existence. The one true universal that such a material conception is able to offer is here seen as the certainty of death. Therefore, Kierkegaard/Johannes concluded, “Precisely for that reason it is not so, and just as God created man and woman, so he created the hero and the poet or orator.”22 Abraham, then, is the hero whose action gives a shape and meaning to existence that cannot be derived from a purely material account of human needs and possibilities. To put it in terms of an early essay by Georg Lukács, it was a gesture aimed at redeeming life from formless chaos.23 As such it

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also addresses the challenge articulated in Repetition, a book published by Kierkegaard on the same day as Fear and Trembling. There, Constantin Constantius (another Kierkegaardian pseudonym) concludes that there is indeed nothing in life but continuous flux without any order, pattern, or form. On such a view, form really does founder against life and life runs only towards death. Read against the background of Kantian ethics, Abraham’s action suspends ethical universality. Read against the background of a materialist humanism, it is a gesture against the sole universal certainty of death. Fear and Trembling is not merely an essay on a troubling but essentially marginal question of moral philosophy: it is a probing of the very possibility of meaningful existence.24 It is crucial that we note that, despite the widespread assumption in the secondary literature that Kierkegaard declares Abraham to be the father of faith and a justified exception, there is much—including the repeated declarations of its pseudonymous author that he does not understand Abraham and that he is only a poet—that might make us question whether things are that straightforward. For example, the biblical story is retold in manifold variants (some of which suggest a clear deviation from the heroic view of Abraham). Also, if it is Kierkegaard’s and not merely Johannes’s view that we seek to discern, then we should recognize that Kierkegaard himself seems to have distanced himself from the model of faith depicted in Fear and Trembling. He had already stated elsewhere that love, not “fear and trembling,” is the prime mover of Christian existence. Moreover, in a set of religious discourses published on the same day as Fear and Trembling (two of which are on the theme of love), he contrasted Abraham’s obedience with the freedom of an apostle and also invokes the Abraham who did not simply obey God but who, when God revealed his intention to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, dissuaded him from doing so. Such factors confirm the view that what is perhaps most important in Fear and Trembling is not its answer but instead its troubling questions. Putting it like this, I hope, avoids a possible wrong inference from these comments—namely, that Kierkegaard retreats from the radical position of Abraham in favor of some easier option. But this is so only if living by the rule of love (and by the freedom that dares to interrogate God’s destructive purposes) are deemed easier than simple obedience to an inner prompting. If Kierkegaard’s own trajectory takes him beyond Abraham (despite all his polemics against those who claim to go beyond Abraham in a purely intellectual way), then this is not because, as Lev Shestov eloquently contended,25 he was intimidated by the demands of ethics but rather because

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the scenario of the morally exceptional act illuminates only a limited aspect of the human situation.

The Exception in Dostoevsky and Nietzsche The question of “the exception” was common to many of the thinkers, writers, and artists of the nineteenth century. It was evident in the work of Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, who would, of course, be named with Kierkegaard as precursors of the twentieth century’s existentialism.26 The theme is found in several of Dostoevsky’s novels but is most obvious in Crime and Punishment. Rodion Raskolnikov, its central character, is obsessed with the question of what it would take to absolve oneself from the universal moral prohibition against murder. In the very first words we overhear him muttering to himself, he says (without saying what the “thing” is): “I want to attempt such a thing, and at the same time I’m afraid of such trifles!” [namely, the fear of meeting his landlady to whom he owes rent]. . . . “Hm . . . yes . . . man has it all in his hands, and it all slips through his fingers from sheer cowardice. . . . That is an axiom. . . . I wonder, what are people most afraid of? A new step, their own new word, that’s what they’re most afraid of.”27 There is nothing to stop us from taking a new step or speaking our new word—except ourselves, suggests Raskolnikov. Readers must wait another sixty pages to learn just what this “thing” is that Raskolnikov wants to do, and even then it is by accident. Raskolnikov overhears another young student proposing exactly the same idea: that the life of a well-known local pawnbroker, Alyona Ivanovna, is eminently expendable for the sake of the good that her money could do to others. As the student puts it: “On the one hand you have a stupid, meaningless, worthless, wicked, sick old crone, no good to anyone. . . . On the other hand, you have fresh young forces that are being wasted for lack of support, and that by the thousands and that everywhere! . . . Kill her and take her money, so that afterwards with its help you can devote yourself to the service of all mankind and the common cause: what do you think, wouldn’t

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thousands of good deeds make up for one tiny little crime? For one life, thousands of lives saved from decay and corruption. One death for hundreds of lives—it’s simple arithmetic!”28 Of course, in those terms, the deed is not conceived as an exception in an absolute sense. It is “simple arithmetic,” a deduction within a utilitarian moral calculus set to determining the greatest good for the greatest number. One man must die for the people, and one might surmise (cynically or not) that this is perhaps human society’s most universal rule of accounting.29 This seems to be the territory of Agamemnon, Jephthah, and Brutus, but such an act would be in clear breach of existing laws and so the perpetrator would have to bear the responsibility of making himself the exception. Although he is acting for the greater social good, society itself does not endorse his calculations; he must therefore act solely on the basis of his own conviction. Raskolnikov himself proves to be a spokesman for this more radical understanding of what such a murder would involve. Prior to the start of the novel, he had published an article in which he had “‘suggested that an “extraordinary” man has the right . . . that is, not an official right, but his own right, to allow his conscience to . . . step over certain obstacles, and then only in the event that the fulfillment of his idea—sometimes perhaps salutary for the whole of mankind—calls for it.’”30 Moreover, all the lawgivers and founders of mankind, starting from the most ancient and going on to the Lycurguses, the Solons, the Muhammads, the Napoleons, and so forth, . . . all of them to a man were criminals, from the fact alone that in giving a new law they thereby violated the old one, held sacred by society and passed down from their fathers, and they certainly did not stop at shedding blood either, if it happened that blood (sometimes quite innocent and shed valiantly for the ancient law) could help them.31 Such murder is justified because, as Raskolnikov further explains, mankind can be divided into two main groups, the extraordinary and the ordinary, such that “those who have the gift or talent of speaking a new word in their environment” therefore have greater rights than the merely ordinary whose lives are exhausted in “the reproduction of their own kind.”32 In killing the pawnbroker, Raskolnikov attempts to be such an extraordinary man. But he fails. At one level he fails because he botches the job, killing

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the innocent simpleton Elizaveta as well as the evil crone, not managing to find the pawnbroker’s hoard, wasting what money he does take, and drawing suspicion to himself with a plainly psychosomatic fever and fainting fits. Yet his failure can also be seen as the workings of his better self, his memories of church and scripture, and the love shown him by Sonia/Sophia, the prostitute/evangelist who—in reading aloud to him the story about the raising of Lazarus—gives a point of reference for the ultimate confession that enables us to see Raskolnikov’s deed not as failure or defeat but as a step to resurrection. Such an interpretation is hinted at in Raskolnikov’s dream of a childhood scene in which he and his father are going to church for a twice-yearly memorial service for his grandmother; on the way, they witness a drunken peasant beating his poor old horse to death. At the sight of this the boy Raskolnikov rushes forward. “With a shout, he tears through the crowd to the gray horse, throws his arms around her dead, bleeding muzzle, and kisses it, kisses her eyes and mouth. . . . Then he suddenly jumps up and in a frenzy flies at Mikolka with his little fists.”33 On a Christian reading of the novel, that Raskolnikov fails is not because he is unable to be “the exception” he has fantasized about but rather because the compassion he experiences so powerfully in the dream is, finally, stronger than his intellect—a compassion that makes no distinction between ordinary and extraordinary men. This return to a common, universal humanity is rebirth and resurrection: the discovery of humanity in himself. Raskolnikov does not seem to pose the issue of “the exception” with quite the precision of Fear and Trembling. In their subtly different ways, both Raskolnikov and the student in the bar have arguments seeking to justify the exception (something that Fear and Trembling declines to offer). To the extent that Raskolnikov is indeed “saved” (although this is problematic in the novel itself), it is by reconnecting with universal human life. Yet Dostoevsky’s treatment of “the exception” has other, more difficult forms. These include the so-called demonic exceptions that willfully place themselves above social, religious, and moral laws without any clear aim in view. Demons assembles a whole cast of such would-be exceptions. A number of them have one or another political rationale for rejecting conventional norms, but there are others whose motivation is more opaque. Most mysterious is the unfathomable and Antichrist-like figure of Nikolai Stavrogin, a man who has no clear ideological plan but—by consistently refusing to choose the good and acting in arbitrary and unpredictable ways—wastes his

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exceptional gifts of person, mind, and charisma. All that drives him, it seems, is the unfocused and undirected prompting of his own will. But even Stavrogin, awesome as he is to the small universe of those in his field of influence, cannot be the prince of darkness that some would have him be, and his suicide is more hopeless than heroic. So, too, is that of another “demon,” Kirillov, who believes that by a voluntary and unmotivated suicide he might make of himself the “man-God” who would demonstrate humanity’s power to overcome its deepest fear. It is Kirillov who perhaps comes closest to anticipating Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch (overman) and his role in bringing about the death of God. This is how Kirillov explains his view: “If there is God, then the will is all his, and I cannot get out of his will. If not, the will is all mine, and it is my duty to proclaim self-will.” “Self-will? And why is it your duty?” “Because the will has become all mine. Can it be that no one on the whole planet, having ended God and believed in self-will, dares to proclaim self-will as the fullest point? It’s as if a poor man received an inheritance, got scared, and doesn’t dare go near the bag, thinking he’s too weak to own it. I want to proclaim self-will. I may be the only one, but I’ll do it. . . . To recognize that there is no God, and not to recognize that you have become God, is an absurdity, otherwise you must necessarily kill yourself. Once you recognize it, you are king, and you will not kill yourself but will live in the chiefest glory. But one, the one who is first, must necessarily kill himself, otherwise who will begin and prove it?”34 Kirillov has a “purpose,” but it is not the limited social purpose of a utilitarian murder: it is what we might call the infinite purpose of enacting the death of God and freeing humanity to assert the absoluteness of its own self-will. Yet just as with both Stavrogin and Raskolnikov, his attempt to become the exception fails, ending in the grotesque scene of losing his nerve before killing himself in a way that seems more accidental and hysterical than willed.35 However, it was Ivan Karamazov who gave Dostoevsky’s would-be exceptions a slogan under which to assemble: “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.”36 In the absence of a God, each person has the right not only to follow whatever laws he decides but even to regard his own actions as promulgating new laws. Sartre called Ivan’s slogan “existentialism’s point of departure,”37 yet he observed that being abandoned to oneself in this way

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is anguishing and that most do not have the courage to accept the consequences. This seems to be the case with Dostoevsky’s exceptions: each succumbs—in suicide, madness, or despair—to the realization that he cannot be his own maker, his own legislator. Each discovers in his own painful, dark way that the ambition of radical autonomy is unfulfillable. Their assertion of God’s nonexistence and of the absence of all moral restraints is checked by religious and moral imperatives beyond their control. Dostoevsky did not offer these antiheroes an easy way out from this impasse. However, he offered them a way back along a path whose compelling signposts are such Christian concepts as repentance, conversion, and forgiveness. But where, exactly, will this way back lead them? A religious skeptic might suppose that Dostoevsky wanted to lead them back to the Church. Although it does seem that he pointed readers toward Christian faith, Dostoevsky was deeply aware of the ambiguity of ecclesiastical forms. Nowhere is this more strongly evidenced than in the legend of the Grand Inquisitor, a story narrated by Ivan Karamazov. In this story Jesus returns to earth and, more particularly, to Seville at the height of the Inquisition. Placed under arrest, he is harangued by the Grand Inquisitor, who charges him with having failed the great test offered by the temptation in the wilderness. When Satan tempted him to turn the stones into bread and he responded with the words that “man does not live by bread alone,” he contradicted one of the most basic needs of human beings, who will always (the Inquisitor said) follow those who give them earthly bread. “But you did not want to deprive man of freedom and rejected the offer, for what sort of freedom is it, you reasoned, if obedience is bought with loaves of bread?”38 Widening the charge the Inquisitor continues: There is nothing more seductive for man than the freedom of his conscience, but there is nothing more tormenting either. And so, instead of a firm foundation for appeasing human conscience once and for all, you chose everything that was unusual, enigmatic, and indefinite, you chose everything that was beyond man’s strength, and thereby acted as if you did not love them at all . . . instead of taking over men’s freedom, you increased it and forever burdened the kingdom of the human soul with its torments.39 People do not want freedom but instead want “miracle, mystery, and authority,” the Inquisitor continued, something to which they can bow down to, someone who will take the burden of decision making from them and teach

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them right and wrong. And this, the Inquisitor says, is what “we” have done, saying that “we rejected you and followed him.”40 It is not to Christianity, then, but to Christ that Dostoevsky is urging his readers to return: to the Christ who refused the temptations of earthly bread and power and offered salvation on the exclusive terms of freely given love. This Christ, then, negates not only the absolute freedom proclaimed by would-be exceptions but also the plans of those who view their extraordinary status as a license to treat other human beings as mere instruments in their dreams of power. Christ’s freedom seeks only the freedom of those to whom it is proclaimed. Nietzsche was known to be a reader of Dostoevsky. He knew Dostoevsky’s arguments against the possibility of the extraordinary man, but he did not accept them. In effect, what Ivan Karamazov proposed as a hypothesis—“if God does not exist”— Nietzsche took as a fact: “God is dead.” Once this is realized, it’s no longer so much that we may become our own legislators as that we must do so. Anticipating Sartre, Nietzsche recognized the magnitude of this challenge. In declaring the death of God, his madman asked: “How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife—who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of the deed too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of it?”41 The force of such questions is sensed in the way that parts I, II, and III of Thus Spoke Zarathustra are attentive to the extreme difficulty of becoming the overman proclaimed in the early pages. The Prologue tells the story of a tightrope walker falling to his death, and this is offered as a warning to all those who might wish to give birth to stars. Moreover, Zarathustra is realist enough to contemplate that the future will more likely be inhabited by the “last men,” who have pragmatically renounced such ambitions, than by the overmen who aim their arrows beyond humanity as we have known it. Becoming the overman will never be merely a matter of gift, talent, or natural endowment. To leap over the conventions of humanity will always require choice, decision, and responsibility. We cannot become overmen by

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chance, and the decision required of us will, by definition, stretch our powers to breaking point. Appearances notwithstanding, Nietzsche’s overman is not so remote from Kierkegaard’s Abraham. For, like Abraham, the overman’s essence is based solely and exclusively on his response to the choices he faces. In a sensitive essay that is fully attentive to both the differences between and the commonalities of the two authors, Bernard Zelechow comments that Starting from divergent perspectives Kierkegaard and Nietzsche arrive at an amazingly similar understanding of what it means to become a person and the dilemma of personhood. Although the language of God and the language of post-atheism are opposed, Nietzsche and Kierke­ gaard often find themselves making use of the same violent, dramatic speech to convey the agony and fear and trembling which result from a self-conscious acknowledgement of personhood . . . [both] have identified the individual as the madman either in relation to Kierkegaard’s universal or the herd in Nietzsche’s terminology. . . . The madman and the individual are unintelligible to their fellows. They are aliens in society.42 Pondering such possible convergences, we have reason to question the influential story of the relationship between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche that can be traced back to George Brandes, the literary theorist of the modernist breakthrough who had the distinction of writing the first monographs on both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Kierkegaard, Brandes said, was like a Columbus who had discovered a new world but who persisted in believing that what he had discovered were the Indies. Thus, Kierkegaard discovered a world beyond Christian morality but believed that he was merely offering a new and more radical account of traditional faith. Nietzsche knew that he had stepped onto the shores of a truly new world, even though (unlike some later Nietzscheans) he was rarely foolish enough to claim to have mapped it. Kierkegaard offered us Abraham; Nietzsche proclaimed the overman. But is there a straightforward story line of progressive, secular enlightenment linking these three nineteenth-century precursors of existentialism? Is the coming of the overman a simple fact of history, like the coming of the classless society in some of the more mechanistic versions of scientific socialism? Surely Nietzsche himself didn’t think so. Zarathustra, too, knows quite a lot about fear and trembling, even if it is his own infinite possibilities and not an external God that make him tremble. And is it simply “bad faith” or

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inauthenticity to find (as Kierkegaard hinted indirectly and Dostoevsky more or less explicitly proclaimed) that, after any experiment with trying to be the exception, human beings will turn back to love?43 Would the world of the overman be such a brave new world? Would it really be a world at all? And has the old world of faith, humility, and compassion truly ceased to be a creative and renovating power in human life? It is questions such as these that drive the religious existentialism of the twentieth century and not merely (as some critics allege) the apologetic impulse to make religion more relevant by recasting it in the idiom of the dominant philosophy of the day. A theology does not become “existentialist” simply by adopting the methods or conclusions of Heideggerian or Sartrean phenomenology, nor just by accepting some common doctrine, such as the absolute singularity of the individual. Rather, an existentialist theology is characterized by the less readily definable commitment to working through the consequences of a vision in which individuals have lost their traditional ontological, moral, and religious signposts while not surrendering the possibility of love and hope. This certainly involves the theological existentialist (who in this respect is like the secular existentialist) in affirming individuals’ entire responsibility for being as and who they are, but it also involves a commitment to understand that responsibility to include responsibility for and to others—to other humans and, ultimately, to God. All this transpires within the limits of a life in time that is bounded by certain death. Thus conceived, it is tempting to summarize the existentialist theologian’s task in the words ascribed to the ancient Rabbi Hillel: “If I am not for myself, who is? But if I am only for myself, who am I? And if not now, when?” That such theology seeks to respond to the negatives of secular existentialism with affirmations about love, hope, and God does not make it inauthentic or insipid. The question is simply whether such affirmations have descended from some sort of heaven of transcendent values or instead carry the conviction of having been worked out in the fear and trembling and anxiety of existence. Hence we now turn to some examples that reveal something of what this Christian, theological “Yes” might mean.

Christian Existentialisms We have seen that although Fear and Trembling is most obviously focused on the ethical aspect of the relationship between the individual and the universal,

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it also implicitly addresses the issues raised for the individual by participation in the life of a common humanity defined by its mortality. Yet the confrontation with this most basic of human realities also allows a certain theological reanimation of an older tradition in which God is identified with Being-Itself or Being as such, the God who names himself: “I am that I am.” That ontological language was not simply the outcome of metaphysical reflection. In Augustine, Anselm, and on through subsequent Christian theology, existence in a fallen world was experienced as a kind of continuous falling away from the plenitude of original being toward final nothingness. A God capable of redeeming us from eternal death would have to be self-same and unchanging, and it was just such a God that this theology proclaimed: “Here is this eternity, which has become our refuge so that in it and in order to remain there we flee from the mutability of time here below,” wrote Augustine.44 But whether it uses the religious language of resurrection or the ontological language of being, can theology resolve existential negation into a believing affirmation without falsifying everything about the experience of that negation? In this section I shall look mainly at two figures who sought (in very different ways) this resolution in critical conversation with contemporary existentialists and who were deeply shaped by their reading of the nineteenthcentury precursors of existentialism. Of all those identifiable as Christian existentialists, Paul Tillich was the one who probably gained most prominence in the English-speaking world in the 1950s and 1960s. But unlike many who are called existentialists, Tillich continued to use the language of traditional ontology, which he believed was expressive of basic human experiences. The metaphysical question of being, he stated, “is produced by the ‘shock of non-being’ . . . [that] points to a state of mind in which the mind is thrown out of its normal balance, shaken in its structure.”45 And, as Tillich made clear elsewhere, this “shock of nonbeing” is most forcefully experienced in the encounter with death—not only the individual’s own death, as in Kierkegaard’s discourse “At a Graveside” or in Heideggerian Being-toward-death, but also the collective death he encountered in the mass killings of the First World War and the sequence of historical traumas that followed. The reflex of this “shock,” Tillich suggested, is not merely the theoretical question of being but the existential quest for being, a striving to assert one’s existence despite the threat of non-being—whether that is manifested directly as death or as the collapse of the structures of meaning that customarily intervene between our social selves and our existential nothingness. In

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these terms, this is a question not simply of being but of existence. For existence, as Tillich put it, has an “ecstatic” quality in the literal sense of ek-stasis, standing-out-of. This is because it “stands out of ” the encompassing power of non-being in an anxious and courageous act of self-affirmation. Or, as Tillich also expressed it, being experienced in this way is not simply being but “the new being”: being renewed and reaffirmed in the light of—and despite the shock of—non-being. It is this “new being” that is revealed in the historical existence of Jesus as the Christ. Faith itself is therefore no longer a matter of believing in the existence of God as an item of metaphysical knowledge but instead consists of living out a renewed relation to one’s own being. Yet precisely because a prerequisite of such faith is the “shaking of the foundations”46 of being by the shock of non-being, this faith will be experienced as given to us from beyond our own powers. This is why, Tillich argued, we need something like the revelation of the new being that occurred in Jesus as the Christ. We shall return to how Tillich understood this event of revelation and to how it could save those shaken by the “encounter with nothingness,”47 but first note how this is also connected with the crisis of moral law that, according to Tillich, is a further aspect of the shaking of the foundations. Tillich often described the dialectic of modern thought in terms of the interrelationship between heteronomy, autonomy, and what he called “theonomy.” He believed that a salient feature of modernity is the aspiration toward autonomy—in other words, to become an independent and responsible moral agent. Against this aspiration, Christianity has all too often reacted by invoking the power of heteronomy, or the subjection of individual choices to the law of another (in the Catholic context to the Church, in the Protestant context to the Bible). Tillich, who agreed with the charge that his own life could be described as an endless struggle against the Grand Inquisitor, affirmed the legitimacy of the autonomous intellectual, moral, and political conscience in its opposition to the heteronomy of Church and State. However, he did not believe that autonomous agency was capable of establishing a firm basis for individual or social existence. We may be free to choose our own values, but we are not free to invent them—much less to invent our own being. The pursuit of autonomy in modern societies has therefore led to a hollowing out of substantial values, a weakening of social bonds, and the emptiness of a purely scientific and technical approach to reality. Lacking a substantial ground in itself, such a society is prone to random and destructive upsurges of irrationalism and of appeals to prerational powers of race, nation,

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and will (most obviously, in Tillich’s own experience, in the rise of European fascism). The same can occur in individual life: a person who develops their autonomous reason at the expense of their natural spontaneity will be laid open to violent manifestations of the return of the repressed. This is why, in Tillich’s terminology, the quest for autonomy must come to be grounded in theonomy, the law and power of God—not as a heteronomous power stemming from some external authority (such as Church or Bible) but rather as experienced directly by the self as its own ground and goal. Again, faith is not a matter of believing in being but instead of being grasped by the power of being itself in such a way as to overcome the affliction of nothingness and to open to the self in which being finds its ground or “depth-dimension,” as Tillich characteristically called it. This approach has clear applications to the sphere of ethics (although that was not a primary focus of Tillich’s own thought). Secular ethics is determined by the requirement of autonomy, so Tillich defended it against ecclesiastical heteronomy. However, as he put it, the moral imperative concerns only the form of the moral demand—in other words, that regardless of which moral choices I make, I make them freely as a free and autonomous agent. By itself, the moral imperative can never determine the content of my choice. If morality is not to end in merely abstract and empty gestures of free selfassertion, then it must derive its content from elsewhere (i.e., from God). However—and we should bear Abraham in mind when considering these words—Tillich did not view the will of God as an external will imposed upon us, an arbitrary law laid down by a heavenly tyrant who is strange to our essential nature and therefore whom we resist justifiably from the point of view of our essential nature. The “Will of God” for us is precisely our being with all its potentialities, our created nature declared as very good by God. . . . For us the “Will of God” . . . is not a strange voice that demands our obedience, but the “silent voice” of our own nature as man, and as man with an individual character.48 Yet we have seen that this nature is not accessible to us in an immediate or unproblematic way. With regard to our moral choices we remain within the general ontological situation according to which we can only win through to self-affirmation (here: theonomy), by passing through the trial of faith induced by the shock of non-being. This is not a matter of individually applying

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a universal moral law but, in contrast, of taking upon ourselves the anxietygenerating responsibility for our own actions. Even though this seems to resemble the situation of Abraham and perhaps of the Sartrean self, it was importantly qualified in one further respect by Tillich. Namely, moral action cannot be determined by external moral law. It is the result of the “silent voice” of the individual; we might call it conscience, but it is also love. The exigency of love does not provide us with a set of ready-made answers to moral questions. It does mean that, when considering a given moral decision, the individual is not alone with God but is with God in responsibility toward the other. Love “liberates us from the bondage to absolute ethical traditions, to conventional morals, and to authorities that claim to know the right decisions”;49 even so, it also is intrinsically oriented toward the good of the other and must seriously qualify any rhetoric of self-assertion on the part of exceptional, extraordinary, or über-individuals. In this regard Tillich was surely close to Kierkegaard, who could say that love was more fundamental than fear and trembling, and to Dostoevsky’s plea for universal compassion. Whether this is a softer option than the difficult path of atheism proclaimed by Sartre, it is the path that a decidedly Christian existentialism would almost certainly take. As a Christian theologian, Tillich argued that the supreme symbol in which the possibility of love is revealed to us, and revealed in such a way that we are able to experience it as our own “new being,” is the life of Jesus believed in as the Christ. Yet in Tillich’s view, Jesus becomes the Christ not by virtue of any metaphysical attributes ascribed to him by traditional teaching but by the courage with which he lives his own existence. Only in this way can his life be symbolically expressive of the struggle that each of us also faces. Thus, in the sermon “Universal Salvation,” Tillich described Jesus as becoming the Savior through his courageous self-giving in death. As this event is portrayed in the gospels, it is a story not just of moral courage but of ontological transformation. Tillich accepted this, but he radically reinterpreted what this ontological transformation means. As he noted, the darkening of the sun and the earthquake that accompanied the death of Jesus symbolically reveal that this man in this act projected himself beyond whatever possibilities of existence the world of nature can give to human beings. Similarly, the tearing of the veil of the Temple revealed that he stepped beyond what is given and what can be known through conventional religious forms of life. This death is therefore a judgment on the possibilities of nature and religion alike to determine the meaning of existence: “Since the hour when Jesus uttered a loud cry and

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breathed his last and the rocks were split, the earth ceased to be the foundation of what we build on her. Only insofar as it had a deeper ground can it stand; only insofar as it is rooted in the same foundation in which the cross is rooted, can it last.”50 And this latter foundation is exactly the courageous existential act in which, as Tillich went on to say, “one man in whom God was present without limit committed his spirit into his father’s hands.”51 It is this utter and entire self-surrender of Jesus that (still speaking in the symbolic language of religious myth) brings about a new situation for human beings, since now “the earth not only ceases to be the solid ground of life; she also ceases to be the lasting cave of death. Resurrection is not something added to the death of Him who is the Christ; but it is implied in his death. . . . No longer is the universe subjected to the law of death or of birth. It is subjected to a higher law, to the law of life out of death.”52 Such a surrender and such a resurrection, we may say, can be understood as strongly analogous to the double movement of faith of Kierkegaard’s Abraham. Both for Jesus himself and for those who find in the story of his death and resurrection a symbolic expression of their own inner crisis of selfhood, it is, as for Abraham, an event that can be lived through only by the individual as individual. Nicholas Berdyaev was an older contemporary of Tillich’s who was strongly influenced by Schelling and especially Dostoevsky. Berdyaev was already on the path to developing a proto-existentialism in the early 1920s, and he subsequently developed his thought in dialogue with German and French versions of existentialism. However, one of the clear differences between his thought and that of Tillich is that Berdyaev entirely rejects the language of ontology. He does so chiefly on the grounds that any ontology compromises human freedom and is a form of slavery. In Slavery and Freedom, “the slavery of man to Being” is the first of the forms of slavery that Berdyaev discussed, followed by the slavery of man to God, nature, society, culture, and individualism. These forms are then further explored in terms of specific examples such as the state, war, money, and sexuality. As he put it: “One must choose between two philosophies, the philosophy which acknowledges the primacy of being over freedom and the philosophy which recognizes the supremacy of freedom over being.”53 Any philosophy that understands itself as personalistic, he added, will always choose the latter. Like Kierkegaard’s existing individual, Berdyaev’s “personality” cannot be understood in terms of any preexistent ontological framework. However,

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this does not lead him to conclude that human beings are the creators of their own values. The human person is creative—and Berdyaev can celebrate human creativity in a way that comes close to that of the self-producing aesthetic existence of Nietzsche’s overman—but we are creative because we are made in the image and likeness of a creative God. Far from human freedom meaning the rejection of God, freedom is in fact the condition of a true “Godrelationship.” This, Berdyaev believes, is the lesson of Dostoevsky’s novels: “those of his characters who deny [the freedom of the human spirit] deny God, and inversely.” This is because “a world in which goodness and righteousness reign by compulsion, whose harmony is ensured by undeniable necessity, is a godless world, a rationalized mechanism, and to reject God and human liberty is to push the world in that direction.”54 This is most forcefully expressed in Dostoevsky’s legend of the Grand Inquisitor. At the same time, however, freedom is tragic because all who accept and affirm themselves on the grounds of freedom discover also their conflicts with the world of necessity (including the laws of nature as well as the human Grand Inquisitors) that binds us to suffering and death. This freedom makes each of us an “exception” since it cannot be understood—nor can its creative action be justified—by reference to any universal concepts or norms. Berdyaev’s insistence on the priority of freedom does not lead him to deny the possibility of relations between persons. On the contrary, just as freedom establishes the possibility of the God-relationship, so does it establish the possibility of love. The issue is not one of subjectivity versus objectivity but of I and thou—and only for persons is a relation of I and thou possible. The person is not to be identified with the individual, since people are personal by virtue of their ability to form relationships with others. Above all, this has consequences for the understanding of death: there is, Berdyaev writes, “a servitude from which no Utopia or social organization can liberate [man]— and that is the ultimate power of death.” However, “to achieve communion is to have no fear of death; it is to feel that the power of love is stronger than that of death.”55 Ultimately, we are personal not as individuals but in and through our participation—in love—in a transhistorical community that, for Berdyaev, fulfills Christian hopes for the resurrection life of heaven. The means of this participation is by what he calls “creatively transforming memory,” which carries forward into eternal life not that which is dead in the past but what is alive, not that which is static in the past but what is dynamic.

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This spiritual memory reminds man, engulfed in his historical time . . . that in the past there lived concrete beings, living personalities, with whom we ought in existential time to have a link no less than with those who are living now. Society is always a society not only of the living but also of the dead; and this memory of the dead . . . is a creative dynamic memory. The last word belongs not to death but to resurrection.56 Once more, Berdyaev finds this idea in Dostoevsky, for whom, he says, faith in God, human love (both love of neighbor and erotic love), and “the affirmation of eternity”57 are mutually reinforcing. It seems we have come a long way from Kierkegaard’s Abraham. However, like Abraham, the person who is the goal of Berdyaev’s Christian humanism is who he is by virtue of liberating himself from the universal—whether manifested as ethics or as ontology—and living solely according to the exigencies of freedom. Although this may destine its proponents to encounter the tragic face of existence, they are sustained not by happy visions of a compensatory hereafter but instead by the “creatively transforming memory” of the eternal community of love—what Kierkegaard might well have called a paradoxical faith in the power of the absurd. Tillich famously held fast to the systematic ambitions of idealist philosophy and theology,58 but Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Berdyaev were all aware that their argued positions could neither be established by conventional methods of philosophical or theological argumentation nor be communicated in a standard, textbook way. Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship, Dostoevsky’s novelistic art, and Berdyaev’s aphoristic and polemical style were all self-consciously directed toward undercutting or outmaneuvering the forms and conventional ways of representing issues of religious belief. Whether they are persuasive generally and, more particularly, in presenting Christian love as an alternative to existential despair that is more than a conventionally superficial “happy ending,” can be decided only after a much more extensive reflection on their writings than is possible here. All that an introduction such as this can achieve is to stake out the claims that have been made. Whether—and how—a theological existentialism could be lived (and, of course, how it might be lived in a world far different from either the nineteenth or the mid-twentieth century) are questions that require a closer reading of these authors as well as a more fundamental reflection on existence itself.

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Notes 1. This is, of course, the name that God gives himself in Exodus 3:14, “I am that I am”—at least in the standard translation traditions, which are reflected not only in the Vulgate but also in the King James Bible. More recent scholarship has called this into question, but that is another story. 2. Although he was a philosopher working in a secular university system, Marcel’s thought expressed an avowed Christian viewpoint. He also developed this view in his many plays. The most comprehensive introduction to his thought is the two-volume edition of his Gifford Lectures: Gabriel Marcel, The Mystery of Being (London: Harvill, 1950 and 1951). 3. Berdyaev worked in a number of independent and rather informal educational institutions in Russia and, after 1922 (following his expulsion from the Soviet Union), in the West. The last two decades of his life were spent in Paris, where he had contacts with many contemporary philosophers and theologians. 4. Tillich will be discussed further in what follows. He was closely associated with the early Frankfurt school during the interwar years but left Germany after Hitler came to power. Tillich rapidly developed a second career in the United States, promoting a dialogue between Christianity and contemporary thought and culture. 5. Although mostly working in New Testament studies, Bultmann’s use of Heidegger to interpret the New Testament in an existential and “demythologized” way sparked one of the major theological controversies of the postwar era. See Bultmann, Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, ed. Hans-Werner Bartsch, trans. Reginald Fuller (London: SPCK, 1972). 6. Bonhoeffer was executed by the Hitler regime. The radical, postreligious version of Christianity that he had been developing in his prison notebooks had a massive impact on subsequent Protestant theology. 7. See, for example, Thomas Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). 8. See, for example, Simone Petrément, Simone Weil: A Life (New York: Pantheon, 1976). Weil is variously read as a mystic and a political philosopher. 9. George Pattison, Anxious Angels: A Retrospective View of Religious Existentialism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 6–7. For further reading on Christian existentialism, see Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959); John Macquarrie, An Existentialist Theology: A Comparison of Heidegger and Bultmann (London: SCM Press, 1955); Walter Kaufmann, Existentialism, Religion and Death (New York: Touchstone, 1976); and Stewart R. Sutherland, Faith and Ambiguity (London: SCM Press, 1984). 10. See, for example, Werner Brock, Contemporary German Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935).

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11. Although this pseudonym is often referred to in the secondary literature as Johannes “de Silentio” (by analogy with, e.g., Joseph de Maistre), it is clear from the typography of the original Danish edition that Kierkegaard does not intend “de silentio” to be read as a family name. The forename Johannes is printed in the then standard Gothic type, and “de silentio” printed in bold Latin type with a lower case “s” at the start of “silentio.” We know that Kierkegaard went to some trouble when choosing his typeface, and—whatever we decide is at stake here—it is important not to muddy the waters unduly by departing from Kierkegaard’s text in our very first interpretative move! Sometimes the name is anglicized into “John of Silence,” and Zelechow (see note 42) refers to the author simply as “John.” But even though there are material textual issues to be addressed here, this is not the place for an extensive discussion either of this pseudonym or of Kierkegaard’s strategy of pseudonymity in general. These issues have, of course, been much discussed in the secondary literature. See, for example, Roger Poole, Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993), and George Pattison, Kierkegaard: The Aesthetic and the Religious (London: SCM Press, 1998), xv–xxii, 63–94. 12. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling and Repetition, trans. Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1983), 55 (translation altered). We should not presume that Kierkegaard/Johannes is actually setting out to do more than draw attention to these questions, profiling and sharpening them—rather than, for example, to answer them. 13. Although the Jewish and specifically Haggadic quality of Kierkegaard’s way of reading the Bible has been remarked by several commentators, it is striking that, as Jerome Gellmann has shown, Jewish interpretation typically (though not universally) focuses not on Abraham but on Isaac and that this focus itself reflects Kierkegaard’s Paulist/ Lutheran inheritance. See Gellmann, Abraham! Abraham! (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). 14. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 55 (translation altered). 15. Ibid., 54 (translation altered). 16. Ibid. 17. Carl Schmitt woefully misquoted Kierkegaard in support of the State’s teleological right qua “exception” to suspend the universality of ethics. See Schmitt, Politische Theologie (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2004), 21. 18. On Jephthah see Judges 11. 19. See Jolita Pons, Stealing a Gift: Kierkegaard’s Pseudonyms and the Bible (New York: Fordham University Press, 2004), 71–85. 20. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 41 (translation altered). 21. Ibid., 15. 22. Ibid. 23. Georg Lukacs, Soul and Form, trans. Anna Bostock (1910; London: Merlin, 1971), 28–41.

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24. Other discussions of death by Kierkegaard may be found in Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Prince­ton University Press, 1992), and the “upbuilding” discourse “At a Graveside,” in Kierkegaard, Upbuilding Spirits on Imagined Occasions, trans. Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993). 25. See Lev Chestov, Kierkegaard et la philosophie existentielle (Paris: Vrin, 1972). 26. Dostoevsky did not know of Kierkegaard, although similarities between them have been noted since the nineteenth century. Nietzsche knew of Kierkegaard through George Brandes and had plans to read him but never did. 27. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London: Vintage, 1993), 3–4. 28. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, 65. 29. Shortly before the appearance of Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky had explored the issues involved in reducing human relations to mathematically calculable forces in his Notes from Underground. There, however, the eponymous “underground man” offers no alternative to the prospect of a future society planned on rational statistical lines other than the intuition that, sooner or later, someone would come along who would simply reject it simply because he didn’t want anything to do with it. Dostoevsky imagines such a one, standing arms akimbo, and saying to his contemporaries: “‘Well, gentlemen, why don’t we reduce all this reasonableness to dust with one good kick, for the sole purpose of sending all these logarithms to the devil and living once more according to our own stupid will!’” Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London: Vintage, 1993), 25. 30. Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment, 259. 31. Ibid., 260. 32. Ibid. 33. Ibid., 59. 34. Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London: Everyman, 2000), 617–19. 35. The Idiot provides another difficult (and very different) version of the Dostoevskyan exception. 36. Although one might add that, from the would-be exception’s point of view, it follows that he is not actually an exception because, if God does not exist, then everything is permitted and, as they mostly agree (or, at least, assert), God does not exist—therefore there are no laws, no norms, and no universals. 37. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialisme est un humanisme (Paris: Nagel, 1970), 36. 38. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (London: Vintage, 1992), 252. 39. Ibid., 254–55. 40. Ibid., 258.

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41. Frederick Nietzsche, The Joyful Wisdom, trans. Thomas Common (London: Foulis, 1910), 168. I have used this older translation because it captures the poetry of this whole passage extremely well. 42. Bernard Zelechow, “Fear and Trembling and Joyful Wisdom—The Same Book; a Look at Metaphoric Communication,” in History of European Ideas 12, no. 1 (1990): 97–98. 43. To anyone familiar with Crime and Punishment, the story of Nietzsche’s own collapse into madness is thought-provoking to say the least. As described by Ronald Hayman: “On the morning of 3 January Nietzsche had just left his lodgings when he saw a cab-driver beating his horse in the Piazza Carlo Alberto. Tearfully, the philosopher flung his arms around the animal’s neck, and then collapsed.” Hayman, Nietzsche: A Critical Life (London: Phoenix, 1980), 334–35. Whether the horse fell first or Nietzsche dragged it down with him is unclear, but his sister’s invention of a fall from a balcony occasioned by a stroke was plainly revisionist and adroitly evaded the possibility that Nietzsche, having proclaimed the pitiless supremacy of the coming overman, was, in the end, overwhelmed by a compassion too great to be mastered. Perhaps the mingling of biography with philosophy is always likely to be suspect, but if each of Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche bears more than a passing resemblance to a character from their own works—if each is in some way his own laboratory of philosophical fiction—then such speculation may not be merely idle. Mayakovksy’s poem, “Better Relations to Horses,” is also worth pondering in this connection. 44. Quoted in Emilie zum Brunn, St. Augustine: Being and Nothingness (New York: Paragon, 1988), 105. 45. Tillich, Systematic Theology (Welwyn: Nisbet, 1968), vol. I, 126. 46. The Shaking of the Foundations is the title of one of Tillich’s best-known collection of sermons. 47. Encounter with Nothingness is the title of a book by Helmut Kuhn. A popular introduction to existentialism, it is alluded to by Tillich in Systematic Theology, vol. I, 210. 48. Tillich, Morality and Beyond (London: Routledge, 1964), 24. 49. Ibid., 43. 50. Tillich, The New Being (New York: Scribner’s, 1955), 178. 51. Ibid., 178–79. 52. Ibid., 178. 53. Nikolai Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom, trans. R. M. French (London: Bles, 1943), 76. 54. Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, trans. Donald Atwater (New York: Meridian, 1957), 87. 55. Berdyaev, Solitude and Society, trans. George Reavey (London: Bles, 1938), 150. 56. Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom, 111. 57. Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, 132. 58. Although we might consider his extremely successful sermons as partly demonstrating his sense for questions of communication.

8

Jewish Co-Existentialism Being with the Other Paul Mendes-Flohr Alles wirkliche Leben ist Begegnung. (All actual life is encounter.) —Martin Buber, Ich und Du (I and Thou)

Martin Buber’s I and Thou A distinctive Jewish school of existentialism is most widely associated with Martin Buber (1878–1965) and his philosophy of dialogue. Introduced in 1923 with the original German publication of I and Thou (Ich und Du), his concept of dialogue or the I–Thou relation has exercised a seminal influence extending far beyond Jewish philosophical circles. Written with a nigh-musical cadence, evocative inflections, and aphoristic formulations, this relatively thin volume has with some justification been characterized as a philosophical poem. Indeed, Buber explicitly rejected the traditional form of philosophical discourse. He regarded the function of philosophical thinking to be that of deixis, pointing, rather than apodeixis, demonstration. Accordingly, he viewed cognition to be primarily recognition and viewed discursive knowledge as but rational acknowledgment.1 He therefore resisted all attempts to classify his teaching, even as a species of existentialism. “I have no teaching. I only point to something. I point to reality, to point to something

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in reality that had not or had too little been seen. I take him who listens to me by the hand and lead him to the window. I open the window and point to what is outside. I have no teaching, but I carry on a conversation.”2 What he points to is a “truth” that all human beings experience—an experience so fundamental to everyday life that it often simply eludes the philosopher’s gaze.3 Buber refers to this experience as an I–Thou meeting or encounter. Unfortunately, the term Thou, which was employed in the first translation of Buber’s Ich und Du into English, obscures the everyday quality of the encounter he sought to highlight.4 The original German, Du, is the second-person singular pronoun used informally in ordinary speech; in contrast to the old English Thou, there is nothing sacerdotal, formal, or archaic about it. In contemporary German, the pronoun Du is differentiated from the formal second-person pronoun Sie; one would not use Du when addressing a stranger, a casual acquaintance, or individuals (such as a teacher or certainly a professor) with whom one has a formal relationship. Thus Du is reserved for the most familiar of relations—for example, between parents and their children, and among others with whom one is intimately bonded. The emotional and indeed existential valence attached to the Du form of address is illustrated by the friendship between Buber and Franz Rosenzweig. By American standards they were good friends, yet they addressed one another as Sie. It was only after many years of close collaboration on various projects that Rosenzweig hesitantly asked Buber permission to address him as Du.5 (Not surprisingly, German has a verb to express this special linguistic act: duzen.) Upon receiving Buber’s confirmation that they had indeed reached the point in their relation in which they were “ready” to address one another as Du, Rosenzweig—now addressing Buber with the familiar pronoun—replied, “In my heart I will continue to say Sie.”6 In other words, his respect and esteem for his friend would not diminish just because their relation had graduated to the vaunted stage that marks a close, intimate friendship. Thus, the title of Buber’s book has a far more quotidian resonance in German than in English: Ich und Du (I and You). His book comes to probe the extensive existential significance of addressing another with the familiar pronoun. As an existential phenomenology of duzen, Buber’s I and Thou is an exploration of the mutual trust that is achieved and marked by this familiar address. An image enjoined by the philosopher Karl Jaspers to capture a similar concern illustrates what Buber had in mind. Humans, Jaspers observed, tend to devise various strategies to protect themselves from the threat

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of being misunderstood and abused by others. Jaspers likened these strategies to the protective shell of a snail; with utmost caution the snail would peer out of its shell, only to slip back swiftly into it with the slightest shadow of a threat. The snail feels itself safely sequestered from the outside world as long as it remains within its shell, but the sense of security so attained means that the snail remains isolated and alone. Analogously, the shells we humans devise—the way we present ourselves to others, our postures of power and control or detachment—may protect us from the “slings and arrows” of life’s outrageous fortunes, but they also serve to isolate our innermost selves from others. In an I–Thou relation—when two individuals genuinely address one another with the familiar Du—the requisite trust has been established for them to exit their respective shells and meet one another in mutual confirmation of their unprotected, innermost beings: Man wishes to be confirmed in his being by man, and wishes to have a presence in the being of the other. The human person needs confirmation because man as man needs it. An animal does not need to be confirmed, for it is what it is unquestionably. It is different with man: sent forth from the natural domain of species into the hazard of the solitary category, surrounded by the air of a chaos which came into being with him, secretly and bashfully he watches for a Yes which allows him to be and which can come to him only from one human person to another.7 It is significant that restrictions on using the informal pronoun Du do not apply to God, the Eternal Thou. Thus, though God may be the exalted ruler of the universe, one turns to Her with the intimate, familiar address. For as Buber noted, God is the ontological ground of trust—trust that the created order is not intrinsically hostile to human existence. Accordingly, the biblical term for faith (‘emunah) means precisely trust, confidence in God’s benevolent presence.8 God is the Eternal Thou, the Thou that is always present—a presence that is refracted through and sustains all I–Thou encounters. The term presence (Gegenwart in German) also had a special valence for Buber. It connotes waiting (warten) over against (gegen) one, or waiting for a confirming response from another human being. This response need not be a verbal Du, of course; it simply requires that one be utterly present to the other who awaits a confirming response. “Love is the responsibility of an I for a Thou”—love is a response to the Gegenwart of the other, the hidden Thou, that desires to exit its shell. Of course, feelings accompany love, but they do

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not constitute it. “Feelings dwell in man; but man dwells in love. This is no metaphor; but the actual truth. Love does not cling to the I in such a way as to have Thou as its ‘content,’ its object; but love is between I and Thou.”9 In Buber’s parlance, objects belong to the world of It as distinguished from the realm of Thou. Gegenwart, the waiting-over-against one, is contrasted with Gegenstand, the German term for object: that which standsover-against-one to be scientifically analyzed or simply used. The It-world is what Kant referred to as the phenomenal world (die Erscheinungswelt), the world that appears (erscheint) to us through our five senses. Knowledge of the world of sensate experience (Erfahrung) is constituted by the principle of individuation, the a priori transcendental categories of time and space that allow us to apprehend distinct temporal and spatial objects. But as Buber learned from Arthur Schopenhauer, the principium individuationis also means that, qua objects of sensate perception, humans are also caught in the web of individuation, condemned to isolation and separation.10 Placed in the grid of time and space, humans are rendered objects among objects. “For wherever there is something there is another something; every It borders on other Its.”11 Sensate experience provides but surface knowledge of the other, casting each under a “spell of isolation”12 that precludes acknowledging the other as Thou, “that being which is not I,”13 and whose subjective reality cannot be apprehended by the objective coordinates of time and space and hence cannot be placed within a comparative matrix by which one could navigate the world of It: We are told that man experiences (erfahre) his world. What does that mean? Man goes over (befährt) the surfaces of things and experiences (erfährt) them. He brings back from them knowledge of their condition—an experience (Erfahrung). He experiences what there is to things. But it is not experiences alone that bring the world to man. For what they bring him is only a world that consists of It and It and It, or He and He and She and She and It. I experience (erfahre) something.14 But life unfolds also in realms beyond the one of sensate experience. The meaning of existence is not vouchsafed with the knowledge one has of the phenomenal world, the world of It. “The life of human being does not exist merely in the sphere of goal-directed verbs. It does not consist merely of activities that have something for their object. I perceive something. I feel something. I think something. The life of human being does not consist

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merely of all this and its like. All this and its like is the basis of the realm of It. But the realm of You (Du) has another basis.”15 That basis Buber called encounter (Begegnung), in which an I meets the Thou of another, “the ontic and primal otherness of the other.”16 To meet the Thou of the other, one must be present to the other and also allow the other to meet one as a Thou. Thus the encounter is dialogical and enjoys an existential mutuality. To be sure, opening one’s self to the other entails risk—a risk that is twofold: (i) being present to the other requires that one abandon one’s “armor” and open oneself to the possibility that the other will not respond in kind;17 (ii) one must be prepared to meet a Thou, a being who is not only other than one’s self but “often frighteningly other, and other than expected.”18 But it is only by crossing “the narrow ridge”19 of dialogue that humans may overcome their mutual isolation and break through the protective shell hiding their authentic selves. Every human being, Buber affirmed, is unique. Indeed, when the Hasidic master Rabbi Zusya was asked by his disciples whether, in the world to come, he would be able to declare that he was like Moses, he replied that, in fact, he would be asked why he was not Rabbi Zusya.20 To be truly oneself is the gift of dialogue.21 Dialogue, then, is a relation one enters into by an existential decision and commitment to realize a truth that is not contained by conceptual knowledge of the phenomenal world. It is rather, as Rosenzweig would put it, the making true (Bewährung) in one’s “actual life.”22 Toward this end, Buber emphasized in an implicit critique of Schopenhauer and his mystically inclined disciples, “one does not have to strip away the world of the senses as the world of appearance. There is no world of appearance, there is only the world. . . . Only the spell of separation needs to be broken.”23 What has to be surrendered is not the I, “as most mystics suppose,” for the I “is indispensable for any relationship,” which always presupposes an I and a You. “What has to be given up is not the I but the false drive for self-affirmation which impels one to be free from the unreliable, unsolid, unlasting, unpredictable, dangerous world of relation into the having of things.”24

Franz Rosenzweig’s “New Thinking” Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929) shared Buber’s dissatisfaction with the limits of philosophical rationalism, which (as he put it) had dominated the European cognitive landscape from Ionia to Jena—that is, from the pre-Socratics

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until Hegel and his votaries. Rosenzweig therefore called for a “New Thinking” that would be grounded in existential principles: In the New Thinking, the method of speech replaces the method of thinking maintained in all earlier philosophies. Thinking is timeless and wants to be timeless. With one stroke it would establish thousands of connections. . . . Speech is bound to time and nourished by time, and it neither can nor wants to abandon this element. . . . In the old philosophy, “thinking” means thinking for no one else and speaking to no one else (and here, if you prefer, you may substitute “everyone” or the well-known “all the world” for “no one”). But “speaking” means speaking to some one . . . . And this some one is always quite a definite some one, and he has not merely ears, like “all the world,” but also a mouth.25 Thus the point of departure for this New Thinking is the existence of the thinker and of the specific individual one addresses.26 Whereas the “old thinking”—the classical mode of contemplative, logical philosophical reasoning— seeks to illuminate timeless, universally necessary truths that are independent of the specifics of time and place, the New Thinking is bound to the contingent, to particular situations and particular individuals. By its very nature, traditional philosophy does not concern itself with the life story of an individual; the questions attendant to the existential singularity of an individual are beyond the ken and interest of philosophy. With its focus on what is universally and objectively valid, philosophy is not interested in the date of one’s birth or death, nor in the birth date of one’s children and their prospective, inevitable death—the contingent realities that engage an individual’s deepest, most personal concerns. Or as Rosenzweig put it with disarming simplicity: philosophy does not, cannot constitutionally, address itself to a single living individual who has a first and last name. Yet one’s being and individual existence is determined by the fact that one does indeed have a first and last name. Viewed from this perspective, “the human being in the utter singularity of his individuality, in his being as determined by a first and last name (in seinem durch Vor- und Zuname festgelegten Sein), stepped out of the world which knew itself as the [rationally] conceivable world, out of the All of philosophy.”27 Death is but the ultimate signature of one’s singularity. One’s death is experienced by anticipation and by the realization that one dies utterly alone, even if blessed with friends and family. It is in the light of this brute existential

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fact that we must live our lives as single, finite beings. And it is precisely in light of this existential fact that Rosenzweig concluded his principal work, The Star of Redemption (Der Stern der Erlösung, 1921) with the buoyant declaration ‘Into life’ (ins Leben). Fully cognizant of our finitude, we are to journey into life. Philosophy may help survey the path, to chart the terrain and topography we encounter along the way, but alas it cannot relieve us of the existential anxieties engendered by our singularity. Since time immemorial, philosophy (Eastern and Western alike) has recommended that we transcend these concerns by splitting our selves into two: a body and a soul. One should focus on the soul as the true center of one’s being—on one’s ontos, which bears the imprint and thus promise of eternity— and ignore our transitory bodies that indeed are destined to perish. Modern, post-Enlightenment philosophers have offered a twist to this division by suggesting that one transcend one’s finite self by identifying with humanity. Rosenzweig regarded Kant’s ethical doctrines as most representative of this view. One may, indeed, gain a glimpse of immortality as a postulate of practical reason when one transcends one’s self and disregards the promptings of one’s own inclinations and concerns in order to heed the categorical imperative and therefore act on behalf of rational humanity and the universal ideal of an ethical community. Within these parameters, the particularities of the em-bodied self are left out, abstracted into irrelevant (perhaps even obstructive) and irrational contingencies. With reference to the Kantian discourse, Rosenzweig spoke of the metaethical self, the self not comprehended by the universal compass of the practical reason.28 But the self invariably protests. When it posits an ontological distinction between body and soul, howsoever expressed, philosophy denies “the fears of the earth.”29 Philosophy “bears us over the grave which yawns at our feet with every step. It lets the body be prey to the abyss, but the free soul flutters away over it. Why should philosophy be concerned if the fear of death [which bespeaks the self ’s consciousness of its singularity] knows nothing of such a dichotomy between body and soul, if it roars Me! Me! Me!, if it wants nothing to do with relegating fear onto a mere ‘body’?”30 In contrast to philosophy, the New Thinking—which for Rosenzweig had its ultimate roots in the biblical concept of divine revelation—cannot concede a division of body and soul, or of a self abstracted from the particularities of one’s lived life. Divine revelation, Rosenzweig maintained, addresses one’s earthly anxieties: one’s meta-ethical self enmeshed in the existential, often petty and banal, but nonetheless ever pressing realities of one’s utterly

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singular, em-bodied life. In revelation, God addresses each and every one of us by our first and last name, acknowledges the particularities of our finitude, of our finite, em-bodied existence in particular distinctive bodies bracketed by particular distinctive biographies. Addressing the singularity of a particular existence, revelation does not address the universal ontos that one happens to inhabit or share; instead it addresses one with a first and last name, as one who has a particular date of birth and (yet to be determined) death, and it addresses one who dwells in a particular body and whose heart palpitates with distinctive earthly fears and hopes. In this respect, revelation is love. As such, it is analogous and homologous with mundane love, of the love of one human being for another as exemplified in the biblical book of the Song of Songs—regarded by Rosenzweig as “the core book of revelation”—the celebration of the erotic love between a man and a woman. We love one another as em-bodied in our particularities, whence the biblical lovers’ unabashed adoration of the other’s body, the aroma of the other’s skin, the quality of the other’s voice. Because it is emphatically particular, love is perforce sensuous—and, as the author of the Song of Songs exclaimed, is thus “as strong as death” (Song of Songs 7:8).31 Love does not conquer death or eliminate it. Indeed, as a rabbinic Midrash alluded to by Rosenzweig noted, death is the crown of creation (Breshit Raba, 31A).32 But even as death marks the dénouement of life, it is also “the ineradicable stamp of [our] creatureliness”33 and as such sets the spiritual horizons of life and the promise of divine and human love. Unlike other creatures, humans are conscious of the prospect of their inevitable death. As the Psalmist observed, we walk in the shadow of death, of our own and of others who are dear to us. The dark shadows of death denote the anticipated “has been” or past perfect of human existence. But in contrast to death, love is utterly in the present. Hence, “love which knows solely the present, which lives on the present, pines for the present—it challenges death”34—not death in general but death in particular, of one’s own and of those who are dear to one. Hence, Rosenzweig concluded, “the keystone of the somber arch of creation [that is, our death, the pinnacle of our singularity] becomes the cornerstone of the bright house of revelation. For the soul, revelation means the experience of a present (Erlebnis einer Gegenwart).”35 So it is for divine and human love. Love lives in the present tense, death points to the past perfect. Love signals an undivided attentiveness to the present and the presence of an other. In love one beholds the other undeflected by considerations of time, of past

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or future; in love one draws the other out of the undifferentiated multitude of humanity and joyfully embraces the other’s particularity. Love thus neutralizes the existential sting of our finitude. That is why love—human and divine—is, indeed, the crown of creation. As Rosenzweig commented: The created death of the creature portends the revelation of a life, which is above the creaturely level. For each created thing, death is the very consummator of its entire materiality. It removes creation imperceptibly into the past, and thus turns it into the tacit, permanent prediction of the miracle of its renewal [through love]. That is why, on the sixth day, it was not said that it was “good,” but rather “behold, very good!” “Very,” so our sages teach, “very”—that is death.36 Echoing the “very good” of creation, the Song of Songs proclaims love, divine and human, and thereby redeems one from the dread of death, the ultimate seal of our creaturely finitude.37

Jewish Co-Existentialism: From Kafka to Levinas Buber and Rosenzweig set the thematic horizons for much of twentieth-century Jewish thought, which has drawn upon the existentialist perspectives they introduced to explore and revalorize the spiritual significance of Judaism for a Jewry traumatized by the collapse of the promise of the Enlightenment and liberalism—or if not the collapse, then serious and far-reaching doubts about the premises of this promise—in the wake of the two world wars. Yet the origins of Jewish Existentialism may be said to lie far deeper in the Jewish experience of modernity. Three years before the outbreak of the First World War, Buber noted “the terrifying ambivalence, the boundless despair, the infinite longing and the pathetic inner chaos of many of today’s Jews.”38 Through the good offices of the European Enlightenment and its ideals of tolerance, the walls of the ghetto—which had restricted the Jews not only to residential enclosures but also to cultural and spiritual seclusion—were torn down. As the ghetto’s denizens rushed out to embrace the opportunities afforded them by their liberation from enforced isolation, they adopted European secular culture. We should note that the Jews “did not enter modern European society [as did their Christian hosts] in a long process of ‘endogenous’ gestation and growth, but rather plunged into it as the ghetto

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walls were breached, with a bang, though not without prolonged whimpers.”39 The Jews’ often exuberant embrace of the new culture was accompanied by far-reaching cognitive and axiological dislocations consequent to the sudden exposure of their inherited culture to competing systems of knowledge and value. The torments of the modern Jew are given perhaps no more poignant expression than by Franz Kafka (1883–1924), the existentialist novelist. Although his writings are emblematic of a more general modern condition, they also seem to reflect a particular Jewish twist to the sense of existential estrangement and dislocation of post-Enlightenment urban, bureaucratized society. With palpable autobiographical strokes, he depicted in a diary entry the torments of modern, deracinated Jews who have lost their spiritual moorings: “Their hind legs are still stuck to their father’s Judaism and their forelegs unable to find new ground.”40 Thus modern Jews find themselves torn between the enduring bonds of guilt-laden filial loyalties to a spiritually desiccated Judaism and the pull of the modern world, in which they have not found a secure and fully welcoming home. Critics have thus read Kafka’s fiction, which did not explicitly broach Jewish concerns, as allegories of the modern Jews’ existential agonies. Upon reading Kafka’s The Castle, Rosenzweig discerned a more fundamental Jewish religious sensibility, exclaiming: “I have never read a book that reminded me so much of the Bible as The Castle”—the quest for a God who often seems to be absent.41 Even Jews who have remained unambiguously rooted in their traditions have felt the crisis of modernity and have taken recourse in employing existential concepts, inspired in part by Buber and Rosenzweig, to secure their faith. The writings of Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik (1903–1993) are replete with existential themes. Arguably one of the most esteemed Talmudic scholars of his generation, Soloveitchik spoke of the loneliness of the man of faith within the modern, secular world. His loneliness is profoundly existential and, precisely because he is a man of faith, beholden to the commanding will of God. In a world that is oriented to instrumental knowledge—Buber’s world of It—he realizes that his faith is profoundly out of step with the cognitive and practical concerns of the contemporary world. Hence the man of faith “looks upon himself as a stranger in modern society which is technically minded, self-centered, and self-loving . . . scoring honor upon honor, piling up victory upon victory, reaching for the distant galaxies, and seeing in the here-andnow sensible world the only manifestation of being.”42

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Accordingly, Rabbi Soloveitchik asked: “What can a man of faith like myself, living by a doctrine which has no technical potential, by a [biblicalrabbinic] law which cannot be tested in the laboratory, steadfast in his loyalty to an eschatological vision, whose fulfillment cannot be predicated with any degree of probability, let alone certainty . . . what can such a man say to a functional utilitarian society which is saeculum-oriented?”43 But Soloveitchik, echoing Rosenzweig’s comment on Kafka, took solace in the fact that an existential loneliness is woven into “the very experience of faith itself.” Indeed, “the man of faith has been a solitary figure throughout the ages.” To be at odds with the world, to suffer an inexorable estrangement from its quotidian realities, is the “unalterable destiny” of the man of faith. Yet Soloveitchik professed: “In my ‘desolate, howling solitude’ I experience a growing awareness that, to paraphrase Plotinus’ apothegm about prayer, this service to which I, a lonely and solitary individual, am committed is wanted and gracefully accepted by God in His transcendental loneliness and numinous solitude.”44 The believing Jew thus heroically accepts his or her destiny— “which is an ‘objective’ awareness rather than a subjective feeling”45—and, by virtue of the normative discipline of the halakhah (rabbinic law), marshals the confidence to transcend the chaos and ultimate absurdity of one’s everyday mundane existence. With similar poetic strokes but in a less systematic fashion, Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) also probed the existential texture of traditional Jewish faith. In contrast to Soloveitchik’s focus on the spiritual virtues of the halakhic ethos, Heschel directed his attention to the mystical and ethical pathos of the pious Jew. As a scion of venerable Hasidic families, he was drawn to explore the more celebratory devotional expressions of Jewish faith. Judaism, he explained, teaches one to remember “that life is a celebration or can be a celebration. One of the most important things is to teach man how to celebrate” despite the often manifest absurdity of existence.46 From this perspective, Heschel drew upon the lexicon of existentialism to portray the Jewish religious consciousness, which he argued was grounded not in metaphysical and theological conceptions of God but rather in an acute awareness of the divine presence. Through a phenomenological analysis of this primal religious sensibility that he held informs not only Judaism but in some basic sense all religions, theistic and otherwise, Heschel sought to “rediscover the questions”47 to which religion in general is an answer. These questions bear on “the ultimate problem of human existence”—namely, the meaning of life.48 What answers does Judaism give to this universal existential question?

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“There is meaning beyond the mystery,” and holiness (as enjoined by biblical law and ethical concerns) “conquers absurdity.” Indeed, “without holiness we sink into absurdity. God is the meaning beyond absurdity.”49 Beholden to embracing God’s ritual law and ethical commandments, the Jew necessarily approaches God through a “leap of action” while the existential questions of life and faith continue unabated. Paradoxically, the meaning one finds in the life of holiness “is a challenge to all answers.” Jewish spirituality and religious imagination unfold in the dialectical tension of a life lived between “these two poles,”50 a life committed to the sanctification of life and the unending questioning of its meaning. These existential questions gained a new urgency during the dark years of the Holocaust. As Hitler’s Satanic vision began to take root in Nazi Germany, a Jewish student of Heidegger, Hans Jonas (1903–1993) published a study on Gnosticism that was then viewed as an aberrant and antiquated religious movement but that he presented as anticipating the modern human condition. What intrigued him “about this wild offshoot of thought originating in early Christianity and late antiquity, one that was so utterly and completely mythologically encoded,” he recalled years later, was the “voices from within, for which Heidegger’s existential analysis [Daseinsanalyse], but also the intellectual climate of the time in general, had sharpened my ears.”51 Employing categories from his mentor’s Being and Time (1927)—Geworfenheit (the state of being thrown into the void of existence), Verfallenheit (fallenness), Verlorensein (abandonment), and Grundbefindlichkeit der Angst (fundamental disposition to dread)—Jonas sought to identify the Un-Heimlichkeit (the uncanny feeling of homelessness) that informed the mythological world of Gnosticism in all its multifarious variants. Shortly after its publication in 1934, Jonas’s monograph was banned (as were all other books authored by Jews) by Nazi decree. Its distribution was restricted to the Jewish public with which it found a unique resonance. The scholar of Jewish philosophy and mysticism Alexander Altmann (1906–1987) recalled picking up by chance a copy of Jonas’s Gnosis und spätantiker Geist52 in the bookstore of the Berlin Jewish center. As he began to read the volume, he was immediately enthralled by its description of a distant world that somehow seemed utterly familiar. Altmann was gripped by a powerful feeling of identification with the Gnostic perception of the human existential situation as a condition of being “thrown into” a hostile world governed by arbitrary, demonic forces. Jonas’s description of the Gnostic experience evoked his own and Jewry’s experience in Nazi Germany.53

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It was this very experience that prompted Jonas to reassess his adherence to Heidegger’s existentialism. Painfully baffled by his mentor’s support of National Socialism, he gradually came to believe that the explanation of Heidegger’s enthusiastic embrace of Hitler was precisely what had initially fascinated him and other students of the “magician of Messkirch”: the iconoclastic philosopher’s radical deconstruction of the ontological presuppositions of Western philosophy with regard to the transcendent, autonomous subject— and thus also of Western humanism’s ethical foundations. Discerning an inherent nihilistic dialectic in Heidegger’s existentialism, he now questioned the very project. This conclusion, as he later noted, “went together with what I realized to be an essential feature of the Gnostic agitation at the beginning of the Christian age, which also contained a strongly nihilistic element.”54 Traumatized by Heidegger’s adherence to Nazism, Jonas observed: The falling in line of the profoundest thinker of the times with the thundering march of the brown battalions appeared to me as a catastrophic debacle of philosophy, as world-historical disgrace, as a bankruptcy of philosophical thought. At that time, I harbored the idea that philosophy is supposed to protect against such a thing, that it should save one’s mind from it. Indeed, I was even convinced that the engagement with the highest, most important things ennobles the spirit of man and also improves the soul. And now I recognized that philosophy obviously did not do this, did not protect this thinker from going astray and paying tribute to Hitler, and that . . . [his philosophy] even predisposed him to do so. . . . That the most significant, most original philosophical thinker of my time collaborated here, that was an enormous blow for me—not only personally, but in the sense of an event in the history of philosophy itself that had to be taken seriously.55 In response to Heidegger’s failure to provide an ethical perspective enabling one to resist Hitler’s diabolic fantasies, Jonas developed what may be called an anti-existentialism or, perhaps more accurately, a post-Existenz philosophy. While retaining Heidegger’s focus on Being-toward-death (Sein zum Tode), he sought to repair, in Peter Gordon’s felicitous phrase, “the ethical gap in his [Heidegger’s] ontology.”56 Jonas presented his ethics of responsibility as overcoming the neo-Gnostic sensibilities, and attendant “flight from the world” (Weltflucht),57 fostered by existentialism’s resignation to a putatively indifferent and soulless universe. For Jonas, nature and humanity were not

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necessarily at odds. Much like Rosenzweig, he rejected the “idealist prejudices of the philosophical tradition” that looked askance at the corporeality of humanity.58 Humankind and nature are organically one, and humans should view themselves as an integral part of nature. Given this nondualistic perspective, human beings need no longer view themselves as being in “metaphysical isolation.”59 Without denying the irresolvable ambiguities of a human existence buffeted by contingency and mortality, Jonas enjoins us to affirm life by evoking the biblical-Judaic principle that calls upon humans to assume responsibility for God’s created order.60 Therefore, humans are shepherds not merely of Being (as Heidegger would have it) but also of beings; indeed, as the Bible bids us, we are our “brother’s keeper.”61 Jonas’s determination to revise Heidegger’s ontology in light of the Holocaust was shared by another former Jewish Heidegger acolyte, Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995). He, too, discerned an intrinsic affinity between Heidegger’s philosophy and the nihilistic neopaganism sponsored by National Socialism. Levinas faulted Heidegger’s radical immanence, which he contrasted to a Judaic ethic that demands the self remain open to the material and existential imploring of a transcendent other, a fellow human being in distress.62 As a response to the other, ethics precedes ontology. Levinas contrasts what he regards as the antihumanist tendency of Western culture, which masquerades as liberty but which is actually bereft of responsibility for the other and uninterested in the biblical concept (especially as elaborated by the rabbinic tradition) of a “difficult liberty.”63 Paradoxically, the Jew attains transcendence and thus liberty by living under God’s law, which requires ethical and social responsibility for the other. In adhering to the biblical ethic, as Levinas observed with oblique reference to Heidegger, one discovers a fellow human being before Being. We have thus seen how a distinctive Jewish trend within existentialism initially associated with Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig came to shape the key Jewish thinkers of the twentieth century. Rejecting the philosophia perennis, the via regia of Greek philosophy, and the quest for eternal essences that hitherto dominated Western thought, they called for a “New Thinking.” For Rosenzweig and Buber and for other Jewish existentialists, the primary epistemological organon is no longer reason but speech: the act (which can, in fact, transcend language) by which a particular individual is addressed by a particular someone and, in turn, addresses, that someone. Should the two participants in this exchange meet as two autonomous subjects, their meeting

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is to be celebrated as an I–Thou meeting, a dialogical encounter. What the Greeks called “truth” unfolds in this dialogue. Truth is thus not beyond space and time; to the contrary, truth is refracted through and nurtured by the here and now of individual existence. The New Thinking, they contended, resonates with the biblical conception of truth. The Hebrew Bible presents God— the Eternal One—not as an object of rational reflection but as an independent subject, the “I am,” as a partner in dialogue. God addresses us in our individual, temporal existence and through the reality within which we find ourselves. This New Thinking inspired subsequent Jewish thinkers, and its themes were reflected in the works of Kafka, Soloveitchik, Heschel, Jonas, and Levinas.

Notes 1. See Fritz Kaufmann, “Martin Buber’s Philosophy of Religion,” in The Philosophy of Martin Buber (Library of Living Philosophers, vol. 12), ed. Paul A. Schlipp and Maurice Friedman (La Salle, Ill.: Open Court and London: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 206. It is significant that Buber entitled one of his books simply Hinweise—Pointings. Buber, Hinweise: Gesammelte Essays (Zurich: Manesse Verlag, 1953); Buber, Pointing the Way. Collected Essays, trans. Maurice Friedman (New York: Schocken, 1957). 2. Buber, “Replies to My Critics,” in Philosophy of Martin Buber, 693. On Buber’s own assessment of the relation of his philosophy of dialogue to existentialism, see note 23. 3. “Although it is the basic relationship in the life of each [person] with all existing being, it was barely paid attention to. It had to be pointed out; it had to be shown forth in the foundation of existence. A neglected, obscured, primal reality was to be made visible. The thinking, the teaching had to be determined by the task of pointing.” Buber, “Replies to My Critics,” 692–93. 4. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1937). On the problem of how to render Du in the context of Buber’s book, see Kaufmann’s “Prologue” to his translation of Buber, I and Thou (New York: Scribner’s, 1970), 14–15; see also Pamela Vermes, Buber on God and the Perfect Man (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1980), 3. Both Kaufmann and Vermes contend that Smith’s rendering of Du as Thou—which he did in consultation with Buber—obscures the humanistic character of Buber’s work and misleads the reader, in Vermes’s words, to believe that it is concerned with “I” and “God” (ibid.). But Buber did argue that the “Eternal Thou” addresses one in every dialogic address; hence, when one addresses that other as a Thou one is also responding to the divine call. The humanistic and religious are conterminous for Buber. “If I myself should designate something as the ‘the central

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portion of my life work,’ [it would be] the one basic insight that has led me not to only to the study of the Bible, and to the study of Hasidism, but also to an independent philosophical position: that the I–Thou relation to God and the I–Thou relation to one’s fellow man are at bottom related to each other. This being related to each other is . . . the central portion of the dialogical reality that has ever more disclosed itself to me.” Buber, Philosophical Interrogations, ed. Sydney and Beatrice Rome (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 99. 5. To mark the occasion of completing corrections for proofs of the German translation of the Book of Genesis that he undertook together with Buber, Rosenzweig sent Buber (on September 21, 1925) a poem in which asked permission to address Buber with the informal, intimate Du. 6. Letter dated September 29, 1925, from Rosenzweig to Buber, The Letters of Martin Buber, ed. Nahum N. Glatzer and Paul Mendes-Flohr (New York: Schocken, 1991), 334. 7. Buber, Knowledge of Man. Selected Essays, trans. M. Friedman and R. G. Smith (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 71. 8. On Buber’s reading of biblical faith (‘emunah) as truth, see Buber, Two Types of Faith, trans. Norman P. Goldhawk (London: Routledge, 1951). 9. Buber, I and Thou, 66. Dialogue is not synonymous with love, however. “I know no one who has succeeded in loving every man he met. Even Jesus obviously loved of ‘sinners’ only the loose, lovable sinners, sinners against the Law; not those who were settled and loyal to their inheritance and sinned against him and his message. Yet to the latter as to the former he stood in a direct [dialogic] relation. Dialogic is not to be identified with love. But love without dialogic, without real outgoing to the other, reaching to the other, and companying with the other, the love remaining with itself— this is called Lucifer.” Buber, “Dialogue,” in Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. R. G. Smith, with an introduction by Maurice Friedman (New York: Macmillan, 1965), 21. 10. On Buber and Schopenhauer, see Paul Mendes-Flohr, From Mysticism to Dialogue: Martin Buber’s Transformation of German Social Thought (Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 50–53. 11. Buber, I and Thou, 55. 12. Ibid., 125. 13. Buber, “What Is Man?” in Buber, Between Man and Man, 166. 14. Buber, I and Thou, 55; Buber, Ich und Du (Cologne: Jakob Hegner, 1962), 11. 15. Buber I and Thou, 54. 16. Buber, “Dialogue,” 45. The Thou of the other is not to be construed as an inner, noumenal self—a supposed “deeper” spiritual core—that is somehow hidden behind by its phenomenal manifestation. In the I–Thou relation, the other—the Thou—is confirmed as a whole. 17. Buber, “Dialogue,” 10. 18. Buber “What Is Man?,” 166.

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19. Ibid., 184. 20. See Buber, Tales of the Hasidism: The Early Masters, trans. Olga Marx (New York: Schocken, 1947), 251. 21. Buber did not wish to imply that one owes the fullness of one’s self to one’s partner but rather to “the relation to him. Only in the relation is he my Thou; outside of the relation between us this Thou does not exist. . . . Neither is my Thou identical with I of the other nor is his Thou with my I. . . . [T]he I of the I–Thou relationship . . . I owe to saying Thou, not to the person to whom I say Thou.” Buber, “Replies to My Critics,” 697. Accordingly, Buber spoke of the dialogic meeting as taking place in the sphere of the Between (das Zwischen; more precisely, das Zwischenmenschliche). Although not tangible, the Between has an ontic, objective status and therefore is not to be understood in psychological terms. Indeed, although reluctant to cast his teaching in what he regarded to be the unnecessarily obscuring categories of academic philosophy, he characterized the principle of dialogue as das Ontologie des Zwischenmenlichen—the ontology of the between. Buber, “Elemente des Zwischenmenschlichen,” in Buber, Schriften über das dialogische Prinzip (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1954), 290. 22. Franz Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking,” in Franz Rosenzweig: His Life and Thought, presented by Nahum N. Glatzer (New York: Schocken, 1953). “Man finds truth to be true only when he stands its test (sie bewährt).” Buber, “The Question of the Single One,” in Buber, Between Man and Man, 82. In this context, Buber cited Kierkegaard: “What I speak of is something simple and straightforward—the truth of the Single One exists only in his producing it himself in action.” 23. Buber, I and Thou, 125. Buber acknowledged that, prior to the crystallization of the principle of dialogue, he was also given to a mystical overcoming of the principium individuationis. 24. Buber, I and Thou, 126. Despite the patent affinities of his thought to existentialism, Buber believed it to be a qualified affiliation. “The principle [of dialogue] is to be regarded as existential only insofar as it is necessarily realized in the sphere of existence of the person. . . . ‘Philosophy of existence’ appears to me an imprecise, unsteady concept. I have never included myself in such, but feel myself as standing perhaps between an existential thinking in Kierkegaard’s sense and something entirely different, something which is still out of sight. The dialogical principle presupposes existence, to be sure, but not a self-contained principle of existence. It is rather, as it seems to me, summoned to call in question every self-sufficient principle of existence in that it posits in ontological unconditionality the essential presence of the other. I welcome every philosophy of existence that leaves open the door leading to otherness; but I know none that opens it far enough.” Buber, Philosophical Interrogations, 22–23. 25. Rosenzweig, “The New Thinking,” 199–200. 26. Buber makes a similar point via the example of Kierkegaard, who “was no reformer, again and again he emphasized that he had no ‘authority’ from above; he was

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only a Christian thinker, but he was of all thinkers the one who most forcibly indicated that thought cannot authorize itself but is authorized only out of the existence of the thinking man.” Buber, “What Is Man,” 161. 27. Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Schocken, 1930), vol. 1, 16; Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William Hallo (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1970), 10 (translation altered). 28. Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 10–11, 63–82. 29. Ibid., 3. 30. Ibid. 31. Cited in Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption,156. 32. Cited without source reference in Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 155. 33. Ibid., 156. 34. Ibid., 156–57. 35. Ibid., 157; Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung, vol. 2, 89. 36. Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 155. 37. While noting that “the starting point of [Rosenzweig’s] thinking coincides with existentialism,” Nahum N. Glatzer observed that he “frees the individual from his isolation; in relating himself to his fellow-man, to the world around him and to God, man’s life becomes meaningful. His individual soul, unique and irreducible, participates in the dialogue with other elements that constitute reality. Thus man’s existence is truly co-existence.” Hence, if one “desires an ‘ism’ to cover Rosenzweig’s thought, then, for argument’s sake, it may be called co-existentialism.” N. N. Glatzer, “Introduction,” in Rosenzweig, Understanding the Sick and the Healthy. A View of the World, Man, and God, trans. T. Luckman, ed. N. N. Glatzer (New York: Noonday, 1953), 15. On the parallels between Rosenzweig’s and Heidegger’s critique of traditional philosophy, see Peter Eli Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Jewish and German Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). Franz Rosenzweig’s “name will always be remembered when informed people speak of existentialism”; Leo Strauss, “An Introduction to Heideggerian Existentialism,” in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. Thomas Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 28. 38. Martin Buber, “The Renewal of Judaism” (1911), in Buber, On Judaism, ed. N. N. Glatzer, trans. Eva Jospe (New York: Schocken,1967), 39. 39. R. J. Werblowsky, Beyond Tradition and Modernity: Changing Religions in a Changing World (London: University of London and Athlone Press, 1976), 42. 40. Franz Kafka, entry for December 4, 1911, Tägebücher, ed. H. G. Koch et al. (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2002), 311. 41. Rosenzweig, His Life and Thought, 160. 42. Joseph Soloveitchik, “The Lonely Man of Faith,” Tradition 7 (1964/65): 7. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., 4. 45. Ibid., 6.

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46. A. J. Heschel, “Reflections on Being a Jew.” Based on “Conversation with A. J. Heschel,” produced by the Public Affairs Department of NBC News with The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1973, in N. N. Glatzer, ed., Modern Jewish Thought: A Source Book (New York: Schocken, 1977), 205. 47. Heschel, God in Search of Man (New York: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, 1956), 3. 48. Heschel “Reflections,” 204. 49. Ibid. 50. Ibid. 51. Hans Jonas, Wissenschaft als persönliches Erlebnis (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987), 16; cited in Christian Wiese, The Life and Thought of Hans Jonas: Jewish Dimensions, trans. Jeffrey Grossman and Christian Wiese (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2007), 95. 52. Jonas, Gnonsis und spätantiker Geist. Erster Teil. Die mythologische Gnosis. Mit einer Einleitung zur Geschichte und Methodologie der Forschung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1934). See in particular part 1:9, “Das Geworfensein,” 106–9; cf. Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginning of Christianity (Boston: Beacon, 1958). 53. Paul Mendes-Flohr, “Theologian Before the Abyss,” Introduction to Alexander Altmann, The Meaning of Jewish Existence: Theological Essays: 1930–1939 (Hanover, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 1991), xlv. 54. Jonas, “Heidegger’s Resoluteness and Resolve: An Interview,” in Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, ed. Günter Neske and Emil Kettering (New York: Paragon, 1990), 203. 55. Jonas, Errinerungen. Based on conversations with Rachel Salamander, ed. with epilogue by Christian Wiese (Frankfurt: Insel, 2003), 299–300. Cited in Wiese, Life and Thought, 90–91. 56. Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger, 10. 57. Micha Brumlick, “Revolte wider die Weltflucht. Zum Tode des Philosohophen Hans Jonas,” Frankfurter Rundschau (February 8, 1993): 8. 58. Jonas, Wissenschaft als persönliches Erlebnis, 20. 59. Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (New York: Harper & Row, 1966), ix. 60. See Jonas, “Matter, Mind, and Creation: Cosmological Evidence and Cosmogonic Speculation,” in Jonas, Mortality and Morality: A Search for God after Auschwitz, ed. Lawrence Vogel (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 165–97. 61. Jonas, “Heidegger and Theology,” Review of Metaphysics 18 (1964): 239. 62. See Samuel Moyn, “Judaism Against Paganism. Emmanuel Levinas’s Response to Heidegger and Nazism in the 1930s,” History and Memory 10, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 25–58. 63. See Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Liberty: Essays on Judaism, trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990).

9

Camus the Unbeliever Living Without God Ronald Aronson

Albert Camus, a master of unforgettable images in his fiction and philosophy, left us none more striking than that of Sisyphus. Condemned to forever roll his rock up the hill only to see it roll back down, then to descend and begin again, Sisyphus incarnates a twentieth- (and now twenty-first-) century sense of life’s absurdity, its “futility and hopeless labor.”1 Yet there is something triumphant in his endless effort, his intense consciousness. He is the absurd hero: “His scorn of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing nothing.”2 Sisyphus lives out the core message of the book bearing his name: there is no God, this life is all there is, and we must live without appeal. Life is without consolation. We live with “the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it.”3 We must remain fully conscious that we are condemned to die. Despite recent efforts to claim Camus for religion—no less a sign of the times in America than recent efforts to claim Einstein and Freud for religion4—Camus was one of the twentieth century’s great unbelievers. Not

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because he set out—as did the “New Atheists” Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens—to critique religion or to disprove the existence of God. Nothing could have been further from his mind. He rarely took an openly antagonistic posture towards religion. In fact, as we see in the character of Father Paneloux in La peste (The Plague), or in Camus’s discussion of Christianity and the death penalty in his essay on capital punishment, or in his dignified effort to find common ground with a group of Dominicans in 1945, Camus was as capable of showing appreciation and understanding toward religious impulses and beliefs as he was of mocking them, which he did in the figure of the priest vainly seeking to minister to Meursault in L’étranger (The Stranger).5 However, it would distort Camus’s life and outlook to interpret his interest as indicating that he was, in the words of one author, “secretly religious” or that he showed a “hunger for religion.”6 Of course there are some who cannot help seeing Camus as a “Christian humanist.”7 Those who think along these lines tend to divide the world in two, seeing only convinced atheists on the one hand and, on the other, those people of the spirit who are, consciously or not, searching for God.8 Camus was neither. As he confided to his notebooks on November 1, 1954: “I often read that I am atheistic; I hear people speak of my atheism. Yet these words say nothing to me; for me they have no meaning. I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.”9 As we move farther from the man and his times, it is tempting to discuss the theme of “Camus and religion”—because of Meursault’s enraged dismissal of the priest in The Stranger, the ambiguous death and ultimate irrelevance of Father Paneloux in The Plague, the disturbing character of the tongueless missionary priest in the story “Le renégat” (“The Renegade”), and the fact that the godless in L’homme revolté (The Rebel) are nonetheless driven to play God. But it is much more difficult, and certainly less popular, to remain true to Camus by discussing the more fundamental theme of Camus and disbelief, or, to put it more precisely, Camus’s explorations of a world without God. To follow him in this direction, which is the purpose of this chapter, is to appreciate that he is one of the most significant, provocative, and contemp­­orary twentieth-century writers for today’s atheists, agnostics, secular humanists, skeptics, secularists, and freethinkers. He is among the greatest explorers of what it means to live without religion. Camus’s work provides frameworks, insights, challenges, and encouragement for those who have chosen or are choosing to live without God. In this respect, his writings are surprisingly more than a match for the work of his onetime friend Jean-Paul Sartre,

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whose atheism is widely known. It is humility, consistency, and honesty as a nonbeliever that marks Camus’s works, as well as the exploration throughout his career of the issues raised by being an unbeliever—one who refused to substitute what he regarded as “ersatz religions” while working to articulate his own uniquely secular alternative. Indeed, this is perhaps Camus’s most unappreciated legacy: he thought a great deal about the postreligious human situation brought about by the modern world, and he did so openly and honestly. Camus left us several answers, challenging questions, and an awareness of fundamental tensions, but he never wavered from his insistence that we are, as he says of the metaphysical rebel, “frustrated by the universe (frustré par la création).”10 This frustration is caused, according to Camus, by the inevitable gap between our demand for order and meaning and our inability to overcome the fact that the human condition is ultimately without order and meaning. Absurdity is not a property of the universe itself but rather of our relationship to it: we want what it cannot provide. In these ways Camus, as Hazel Barnes knew, definitely shared in the great modern mode of thinking that goes by the name “existentialist,” no matter how he himself rejected the label and instead used “absurdist” when speaking of himself.11

Nineteenth-Century Precursors A sensible way to begin our discussion is by connecting Camus with the nineteenth-century precursors of existentialism. Recall that the overall mood and outlook of Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche dissented sharply from their nineteenth-century environment and its optimistic heritage of Enlightenment rationalism. Such thinkers as Frederick the Great, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, and Charles Darwin were all (in one way or another) devoted to human progress and to advancing democracy, science, education, socialism, or all of these at once. This entailed struggling against the role of superstition and irrationality in human life. Indeed, the Enlightenment thinkers—and those following in their wake—tended to see religion as one of the major obstacles to human betterment. Accordingly, they were anticlerical if not antireligious. By the 1880s Robert Ingersoll, America’s greatest unbeliever, was knitting together enlightenment, progress, and irreligion in ringing prose: “Forward, oh sublime army of progress, forward until law is justice, forward until igno-

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rance is unknown, forward while there is a spiritual or temporal throne, forward until superstition is a forgotten dream, forward until the world is free, forward until human reason, clothed in the purple of authority, is king of kings.”12 His prescription for overcoming religion could have come straight from Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity: “The first step toward progress is for man to cease to be the slave of the creatures of his creation.”13 With their optimism about science, rationality, and human political and social development, such thinkers could not be further from Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and his concern for “authenticity,” Dostoevsky’s underground man, or Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. These authors demonstrated a mood of outsiderness, a suspicion of reason, a concern for the fate of individuals in opposition to the masses, and a discomfort with the way the world was headed. Yet whereas Nietzsche rocked the world of ideas with his 1882 proclamation in The Gay Science that “God is dead,” Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky placed religion at the core of what would come to be called their existentialism. Dostoevsky’s greatest novels, for example, are built on powerful contrasts between nonbelievers—like Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment and the revolutionaries of The Demons, who live in a world of desiccated reason that spirals beyond human restraint—and believers who, like Alyosha, integrate feeling, experience, reason, and faith. Religious belief and experience, for Dostoevsky as for Kierkegaard, is far less a matter of authority or ritual than of the individual’s most nourishing and deeply personal experience of God. Both Camus and Sartre dropped God from the equation, along with the naive providential view of progress, but still hung on to the pursuit of a passionate life worth living, a goal they inherited from their existential precursors.

Sartre’s Atheism Writing in 1951, after the destruction of the Nazi state that had used and celebrated Nietzsche, Camus proclaimed himself as an “advocate” of Nietzsche. Not only did Camus devote a fascinating chapter in The Rebel14 to Nietzsche, but the chapter was first published in Les temps modernes, a periodical whose editor was his friend, the famous existentialist atheist Sartre. This coincidence suggests that when we consider Camus, it is impossible to avoid seeing him in relation to the omnipresent figure of Sartre. Consider the disproportionate attention given to Sartre in a compilation, published in the United States, entitled The Republic of Silence (1947).

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Its title came from Sartre’s article on the Resistance, which was written just after the Liberation. In the collection, Sartre is mistakenly introduced as having been “fearless and active in the underground”; however, the inclusion of Camus was anonymous—as the unnamed author of an underground document from the actual struggle against the Occupation.15 The true story is that Camus played a significant role as editor of the clandestine Combat during 1944 and that, after winding up the short-lived group Socialisme et liberté in the fall of 1940, Sartre wrote a few articles in Resistance publications and attended a few meetings. “The Republic of Silence” showed that, by September 1944, Sartre had not only a philosophical understanding of the meaning of the Resistance but also a remarkable sense of how to position himself in postLiberation France. Thus, along with Camus, Sartre became one of the two great postwar voices of the Resistance in France.16 Neither man believed in God, but his remarkable capacity for self-promotion made Sartre the atheist’s few sharp public remarks a lightning rod for controversy—even as Camus the agnostic’s thoughtful deliberations raised few eyebrows. Although both men reflected on what it means to live in a godless universe, atheism became part of Sartre’s scandalous fame. Yet living without God was actually a far more vital theme for Camus. Sartre’s direct contribution was to talk in a provocatively clear and simple way, as millions of college freshman have learned, about being free and responsible without God. In his famous “Is Existentialism a Humanism?” lecture at the Paris Club Maintenant on October 29, 1945, Sartre tightly linked existentialism and atheism. “Existentialism is nothing else but an attempt to draw the full conclusions from a consistently atheistic position.” Humans, he said, are not constructed according to some divine plan, handed their meaning from on high, or required to live according to divine prescription. Thus, “if God does not exist, there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man.”17 Existentialism is explained precisely in relation to Sartre’s denial of God’s existence. “There is no human nature, because there is no God to conceive it. Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be, after this thrust toward existence. Man is nothing else but what he makes of himself.” Several themes are thus swiftly connected: God’s nonexistence, human freedom, the absence of any pre-given meaning of life, and the need to invent oneself afresh at every moment. Sartre makes

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clear the underlying basis for this chain of argument: Man “is responsible for everything he does.”18 Sartre’s provocative formulations would certainly contribute to his celebrity, making him perhaps “the most famous atheist of the twentieth century.”19 They encouraged the public to equate existentialism and atheism, promoting the widespread sense that the absence of God and the heroic philosophy of freedom and self-creation are one and the same. L’être et le néant (Being and Nothingness, 1943) was a focused and sober description of key themes concerning the nature of being; it explored the human “God-project” of trying to integrate the radically distinct ontological planes of being-in-itself and being-for-itself. While assuming that God did not exist, Sartre explored some of the meanings of God in human life. Consciousness, he argued, seeks to remove the world’s independence and otherness in order to recognize itself in the world. The human goal is “the in-itself-for-itself, consciousness become substance, substance become the cause of itself, the Man-God.”20 Therefore, “the best way to conceive of the fundamental project of human reality is to say that man is the being whose project is to be God.”21 But we fail, and God is the perpetual image of our goal and our frustration. As an “essay in phenomenological ontology,” Sartre’s Being and Nothingness leaned heavily on Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger but scarcely mentioned the names and ideas of existentialist forebears concerned with religion, such as Kierkegaard (mentioned four times), Nietzsche (twice), and Dostoevsky (not at all). But now, before a popular audience at the height of what Simone de Beauvoir described as their “existentialist offensive,” Sartre stressed the most controversial implications of his philosophy—notably, those that clearly distinguished it from Marxism and religion. Sartre pushed his argument to the limit: The existentialist . . . thinks it very distressing that God does not exist, because all possibility of finding values in a heaven of ideas disappears along with Him; there can no longer be a priori Good, since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it. Nowhere is it written that the Good exists, that we must be honest, that we must not lie; because the fact is that we are on a plane where there are only men. Dostoyevsky said, “If God didn’t exist, everything would be possible.” That is the very starting point of existentialism. Indeed, everything is permissible if God does not exist, and as a result man is forlorn, because neither within him nor without does he find anything to cling to.22

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In fact, Dostoevsky did not say exactly this in The Brothers Karamazov. The idea is mentioned in a reflection by Smerdyakov to Ivan on what the latter had taught him: “everything is permitted . . . because if there’s no infinite God, then there’s no virtue either, and no need of it at all.”23 Sartre exaggerates Dostoevsky’s claim in order to sharpen, and then embrace, what he regards as his own fundamental challenge to conventional wisdom: no God = no universal morality. Sartre’s categorical denial of the basis of traditional morality was actually a philosophically demanding starting point; it was the beginning of an exploration that would occupy him the rest of his life and to his very last words.24 Such claims were central to the “existentialist offensive,” as demonstrated by Simone de Beauvoir in The Ethics of Ambiguity (published two years after Sartre’s lecture). There she defends and clarifies Sartre’s argument, removing its most disturbing implications, and keeps the argument going. Of course existentialism is neither immoral nor amoral; rather, its ethics and morality are not the conventional kinds imposed from on high that give people recipes for living. Beauvoir adds a key theme of existential ethics to the argument. Without God and religion, our human moral burden is, if anything, greater: “A God can pardon, efface, and compensate. But if God does not exist, man’s fault’s are inexpiable.”25 If Sartre’s lecture was designed to reach a wide public then he certainly succeeded, since the little book that followed, Existentialism Is a Humanism, sold millions of copies in dozens of languages and, two generations later, continues to be the world’s most common introduction to existentialism. Sartre’s talent for touching a nerve was demonstrated a continent away and a dozen years later by the fact that Norman Mailer, a writer sympathetic to Sartre in many ways, could not swallow his atheism. In his famous 1957 essay “The White Negro,” Mailer proudly fused existentialism, anticonformism, African American marginality, orgasm, living in the moment, jazz, and even the philosophy of the psychopath into a single sociocultural stance: the hipster. But he drew the line at Sartre’s atheism, because “to be a real existentialist (Sartre admittedly to the contrary) one must be religious.” Sartre’s too rational and undialectical mistake was to see “death as emptiness,” leading him to wish for “nothing but more life.”26 Mailer championed instead a kind of hip mysticism deeply connected with the anticipation of death, leading to “a muted cool religious revival,” one that is “exciting, disturbing, nightmarish perhaps.” And this was no momentary reaction by Mailer. As one of

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two Americans writing for the special issue of Libération celebrating Sartre’s hundredth birthday in 2005, he chose to focus on “Sartre’s God Problem” (i.e., his “misguided atheism”)—as if this were Sartre’s signature intellectual contribution and main error.27 However, it is important to note that Sartre had another side, one that was less polemical, less attention seeking, and entirely capable of making fine and subtle distinctions. In the 1945 lecture, for example, Sartre disavowed being a typical atheist, dismissing any interest in exhausting himself “in demonstrations of the non-existence of God.” In fact, he indicated near the beginning that there are two kinds of existentialists, Christians (he identified Gabriel Marcel and Karl Jaspers, both of whom were Catholics) and atheists. Sartre’s point was less about religion than to assert that “even if God did exist that would change nothing.”28 Believers and nonbelievers alike must face the real problem: we are free, alone, responsible for our own existence, and without excuses for how our lives turn out. Here Sartre would no doubt find common cause with much in Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche. Sartre the atheist would never simply dismiss the belief in God. Before and after his groundbreaking lecture, he undertook serious explorations of the nature and roots of religion. Therefore, any close study of Sartre and religion (or of Sartre and atheism) must situate his 1945 lecture in a lifelong exploration that began with his complex analyses two years earlier in Being and Nothingness and included the wartime play Les mouches (The Flies), which featured Jupiter (Zeus) and his Vichy-like oppressive use of religion. It would also be necessary to explore Sartre’s 1963 autobiographical remarks about religion in Les mots (The Words), including the boy’s dramatic moment of challenging God. The very next year saw his UNESCO lecture on Kierkegaard. There he spoke of the Dane’s effort to escape the universalizing trap set by Hegel for all subsequent thinkers by asserting his individuality and embracing God. This essay, dense and rich, is both an admirably sympathetic reading of Kierke­ gaard and an important effort to further clarify the religious impulse.29 All of this suggests that much more needs to be written on the topic of Sartre, atheism, and religion—but in an atmosphere free from the polemics Sartre inevitably generated. A balanced picture would describe his atheism, his continuing interest in religion, his understanding of its political, psychological, and philosophical meanings, his treatment of religious thinkers, his efforts to understand his own irreligion, and his end-of-life reflections with Benny Lévy on messianic Judaism.30

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Camus’s Unbelief: Nuptials Camus’s first major effort to clarify what it is like to live without God appears in Noces (Nuptials), published in Algeria in 1938. This series of lyrical essays and sketches contains poetic reflections describing a consciousness reveling in the world, a body delighting in nature, the individual’s immersion in sheer physicality. These characteristic Camusean literary expressions appear alongside an extended meditation on ultimate questions—especially the meaning of life in the face of death. In this, Camus opposes two attitudes. The first is the religion-rooted fear of pleasure with its finger-wagging warnings about pride, its concern for one’s immortal soul, its hope for an afterlife, its resignation in the face of life, and its preoccupation with God. To this conventional religious perspective Camus opposed an outlook that is sometimes mistak­ enly called “pagan.” It was, in fact, a sophisticated, reflective, and disillusioned rejection of resignation—in place of which he offers the word revolt—and a determination to be fully alive in the present. It is striking that the crucial common mistake Camus wishes to single out and avoid is hope, and Nuptials contains both an argument against hope and an evocation of his sense of the alternative. Camus begins with Nietzsche’s discussion of Pandora’s box in Human, All Too Human. When Pandora is led by her curiosity to open the box that Zeus has given her, she releases all the evils into the world except one—hope—which alone does not escape before Pandora hastily closes the lid. Humans then come to see hope as their greatest good even though Zeus, knowing better, meant it as the greatest of evils: the reason humans let themselves continue to be tormented.31 Camus takes Nietzsche to mean that hope is disastrous for humans because it encourages living for a life beyond this life. Any chance at happiness—here, now, in this life, in the present—entails abandoning hope for an afterlife, demands no longer looking beyond this world, asks us to stop thinking about life after death. For Camus, wisdom begins with the “conscious certainty of a death without hope.”32 It means first of all rejecting “the delusions of hope”33 and refusing to hide from the inevitability of our own death. In other words, “there is no superhuman happiness, no eternity outside of the curve of the days. . . . I can see no point in the happiness of angels.”34 There is nothing but this world, this life, the present. “Between this sky and the faces turned toward it there is nothing on which to hang a mythology, a literature, an ethic, or a religion—only stones, flesh, stars, and those truths the hand can touch.”35

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But this “only” is precisely the point. It is by accepting the bitterness contained in our frustrated “longing to endure” and our irresolvable “awareness of death” that we are able to open ourselves to life’s riches. “I do not want to believe that this life is the gateway to another life. For me it is a closed door.”36 And this insight is intimately connected with obstinately refusing “all the ‘later on’s’ of this world” and laying claim to “my present wealth.” As Camus said: “The world is beautiful, and outside there is no salvation.”37 In accepting the fundamental bitterness of death and in being “stripped of all hope,” one most intensely appreciates what one has and one knows: “To feel one’s ties to a land, one’s love for certain men, there is always a place where the heart can find rest—these are already many certainties for one man’s life.”38 So the sensuous and lyrical side of these essays is much more than argument. It is a demonstration of what life means and feels like to the young unbeliever Camus. As we read, we can almost see and touch what he is describing. This dazzling passage from “Noces à Tipasa” (“Nuptials at Tipasa”), speaks for itself and deserves to be quoted at length: In a moment, when I throw myself down among the absinthe plants to bring their scent into my body, I shall know, appearances to the contrary, that I am fulfilling a truth which is the sun’s and which will also be my death’s. In a sense, it is indeed my life that I am staking here, a life that tastes of warm stone, that is full of the signs of the sea and the rising song of the crickets. The breeze is cool and the sky blue. I love this life with abandon and wish to speak of it boldly: it makes me proud of my human condition. Yet people have often told me: there’s nothing to be proud of. Yes, there is: this sun, this sea, my heart leaping with youth, the salt taste of my body and this vast landscape in which tenderness and glory merge in blue and yellow. It is to conquer this that I need my strength and my resources. Everything here leaves me intact, I surrender nothing of myself, and don no mask: learning patiently and arduously how to live is enough for me, well worth all their arts of living.39

The Myth of Sisyphus “There is only one really serious philosophical question,” Camus says, “and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that.”

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The certainty of our death becomes part of a larger theme: life has no meaning. This is a conclusion of the “absurd sensibility”—which Camus insists is “an intellectual malady”40 rather than a philosophy, a metaphysic, or a belief. His concern about “the most urgent of questions” is less a theoretical one than it is the life-and-death question of whether and how to live, taking as a given that religion offers no answer. Le mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus) seeks to describe “the elusive feeling of absurdity” in our lives and to point out themes that “run through all literatures and all philosophies.” He begins doing so with an implicit reference to Sartre’s novel, Nausea, which describes the protagonist Antoine Roquentin’s discovery of absurdity. As Camus presents it, “the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday and Sunday according to the same rhythm.”41 This continues until one becomes conscious, and senses the absurd. Camus continues sketching other experiences of absurdity, until he arrives at death. The conclusion of this “absurd reasoning” is a series of categorical assertions addressed to “the intelligence” about the inevitable frustration of the human desire to know the world and to be at home in it. What then is absurdity? For Camus absurdity is not a property of the world as such but instead is an essential feature of our relationship with the world. We long to know what on the deepest level is unknowable, just as we seek to escape death. But we must die. In this emphasis he contrasts sharply with Sartre, the unnamed “writer of today” whose novel he cites approvingly for its descriptions of absurdity. Unlike Sartre, Camus builds an entire worldview on his sense that absurdity is an unsurpassable relationship between two dimensions at the center of human experience. He sees an inevitable divorce between human consciousness, with its “wild longing for clarity,” and the “unreasonable silence of the world.”42 The world is irrational, which means that our efforts to understand it lead nowhere. The Camusean alternative is to live without religion and without other forms of escape but with integrity, in “revolt” and defiance, maintaining the tension intrinsic to human life. Since “the most obvious absurdity” is death, Camus urges us to “die unreconciled and not of one’s own free will.”43 He urges a life without consolation—indeed, a life characterized by lucidity and by acute consciousness of and rebellion against its mortality and its limits. Camus’s tone, ideas, and style are reminiscent of Nietzsche, the one philosopher he refers to with full agreement. “God is dead” is of course their common starting point, but so is the determination to confront unpleasant

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truths and write against received wisdom. That being said, Camus argued against the specific philosophical current with which Nietzsche is often linked as a precursor and to which he himself is closest: existentialism. The Myth of Sisyphus is explicitly written against the existentialists Chestov, Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and Heidegger and also against the phenomenology of Husserl. Camus did share with these authors a common starting point: in one way or another, they all testify to the absurdity of the human condition. But Camus rejected what he regarded as their ultimate escapism and irrationality: “they deify what crushes them and find reason to hope in what impoverishes them. That forced hope is religious in all of them.”44 Like Camus, most existentialist writers took as starting points both the separation between consciousness and the world and the world’s ultimate irrationality. Then each thinker, as if to evade his initial insight, cheated and made a leap that sought to evade the limits of the human condition by turning to the transcendent—in most cases, by appealing to God. Yet even if we avoid such escapist efforts and continue to live without irrational appeals, the desire to escape is built into our consciousness and is therefore part of our humanity. We are unable to free ourselves from “this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion.”45 But it is urgent that we not give in to these impulses. In contrast with existentialism, “the absurd is lucid reason noting its limits.”46 Thus we come to Sisyphus. After he has managed to push the rock to the top, it of course comes tumbling down again, confirming the ultimate futility of his project. And he trudges down after it once again. This “is the hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks towards the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.” Why use the words “superior” (supérieur) and “stronger” (plus fort) when he has no hope of succeeding the next time? The reason is that, although a sense of tragedy “crowns his victory,” “Sisyphus, proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his descent.”47 This, then, is the conclusion of “absurd reasoning”: choosing to live fully consciously in the face of our fate, tragically aware of the bitterness of our being. Full consciousness, refusing to submit, and keeping on: these are the answers Camus gives to his question about suicide and constitute his alternative to a belief in God. This, he is saying, is how a life without ultimate meaning can be made worth living. It is a triumph to live a life fully aware of its limits while striving against them. As Camus made clear in Nuptials, life’s pleasures

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are inseparable from a keen awareness of these limits. Living with death but without appeal to God, Sisyphus accepts this fate and so embraces it. “All Sisyphus’s silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is his thing.”48 Lucidly living the human condition, tragedy and all, Sisyphus “knows himself to be the master of his days.” Camus claimed that, by becoming conscious of his condition, Sisyphus takes ownership of it. Thus Sisyphus reshapes his fate into a condition of “wholly human origin.” It may be that “wholly” is an exaggeration—after all, death is “inevitable and despicable”— but by acknowledging this, Sisyphus consciously endures what is imposed on him, thus making it into his own end. In the same way, Meursault, protagonist of The Stranger, comes to consciousness in that book’s second part after committing the inexplicable murder that ends the book’s first part. He has lived his existence from one moment to the next and without much awareness, but at his trial and while awaiting execution he becomes like Sisyphus, an absurd hero fully conscious of himself and his terrible fate. “Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.”49 It is not that discovering the absurd leads necessarily to happiness. Rather, acknowledging the absurd means also accepting human frailty, developing an awareness of our limitations, and recognizing that we cannot help wishing to go beyond what is possible. These are all tokens of being fully alive. “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”50 By the end of The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus has amplified the point proposed in Nuptials into a philosophy of the absurd: happiness requires living without God or religion. It means living sensuously and intensely in the present and being fully alive; to this is coupled Sisyphus’s tragic, lucid, and defiant consciousness, his sense of limits, his bitterness, his determination to keep on, and his refusal of any form of consolation. Like Nietzsche, Camus called upon readers to “say yes to life,” embracing life “even in its strangest and most painful episodes.”51 It is a matter of living as completely as possible at every moment, of being no less aware of the negative than the positive—of feeling pain as well as joy, not shunning any experience.

The Rebel The beginning of The Rebel makes the transition to an entirely new subject and form of discourse. Suicide was a main theme in the “age of negation” that

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Camus inhabited ten years earlier; but now, in the “age of ideologies,” Camus turned to the issue of murder. He is concerned not with crimes of passion but with “logical murder,” “slave camps under the flag of freedom, massacres justified by philanthropy or by a taste for the superhuman,” all of which “cripple judgment.”52 Yet whether or not this was a radical change in interests (indeed, the two “ages” were virtually contemporaneous), for Camus The Myth of Sisyphus leads directly to The Rebel: the absurdist reasoning that rules out suicide logically rules out murder. “Murder cannot be made coherent when suicide is not considered coherent.”53 The Rebel was one of the most original and probing efforts to understand how the great modern impulse to freedom produced totalitarian societies. In it, Camus insisted that the abstract, authoritarian, apocalyptic revolutionary—the person who would transform the world as if according to a science, as if in obedience to the laws of history and pretending to be governed by objective necessity—is at once thoroughly modern and enlightened, fully Western, and rooted in a religious attitude. So Marxism, as Camus described it here, was not about social change; it was nothing less (and nothing more) than a revolt that “attempts to annex all creation.”54 Camus’s anticommunist agenda skewed and shaped The Rebel. Starting with his initial equation of communism and murder, Camus deduced revolutions from ideas and states of spirit without closely analyzing movements or events, giving no role to material needs or structures of oppression. Instead, after describing the rebel at the start of the book, Camus treated struggles for social justice mostly as metaphysically inspired attempts to replace “the reign of grace by the reign of justice.”55 Thus revolutions are, in essence, forms of secular liturgy. Revolutionary assertions of human dignity become little more than efforts to overthrow God. However, these weaknesses of Camus’s own sweepingly abstract thinking cannot be separated from the book’s strengths. The powerful and historically oriented insight of The Rebel is that the impulse for emancipation can take on a religious cast: a desire to replace God and turn to organized, rational murder. Camus remained consistent here with his earlier abandonment of salvation, transcendence, redemption, or transformation. He took such religious thinking to be the ultimate root of the revolutionary impulse. Camus began his analysis with “revolt,” which he gave the status of a primary datum of human experience (much like the Cartesian cogito taken by Sartre as his own point of departure). Camus first expressed this directly under the inspiration of his encounter with Being and Nothingness.56 In The

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Rebel, Camus described revolt in terms similar to the for-itself ’s activity in negating the in-itself—as a primary, irreducible, and irrefutable starting point— and stressed that revolt creates values, dignity, and above all solidarity. These concerns suggest a deep connection with the rebellion against absurdity, as described by Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus, whereby we rebel against our own mortality and the universe’s meaninglessness and incoherence. In The Rebel, revolt reaches beyond these impulses and protests against the world’s injustice to take a further step: “I revolt, therefore we are.”57 This we becomes the subject of The Rebel. But what does this “therefore” mean? How does the individual’s experience of absurdity, and the rebellion against it, produce (much less entail) a sense of injustice and solidarity? Scholars disagree on whether the shift to we represents an entirely new philosophy or is continuous with The Myth of Sis­ yphus (i.e., whether there is, respectively, a leap or a transition), and they are not helped by Camus’s nearly total lack of explanation for moving from the individual confronting absurdity to that individual’s social belonging. Certainly the transformation can be explained biographically. Camus had always been a political activist but spoke of taking a new intellectual step beginning with his experience as a member of the Resistance. This new viewpoint was expressed artistically in The Plague, a novel in which collective action is taken against the evil that threatens a community. As Camus himself later said, “If there is an evolution from The Stranger to The Plague, it has gone in the direction of solidarity and participation.”58 This line of reflection culminated in the transition from The Myth of Sisyphus to The Rebel: Camus applied the philosophy of the absurd in new, social directions and thereby answered new, historical questions. In adding this social dimension to his thought, Camus further developed his notion of rebellion and came to contrast it with revolution, which he took as being advocated by the Communist Party. Applying his general philosophical themes directly to politics in the years immediately after the Liberation of France in 1944, Camus concluded that the Communists were guilty of evading life’s absurdity. In The Rebel, he described them using similar terms to those he had used in The Myth of Sisyphus to describe religious and philosophical evasions. In a book so charged with political meaning, Camus makes no explicitly political arguments or revelations and presents little in the way of actual social analysis or concrete historical study. Instead, The Rebel is a historically framed philosophical and literary essay about underlying civilizational ideas and attitudes. Camus felt that it was urgent to critically examine these in a

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world in which calculated murder had become common. Validating revolt as a vital starting point, Camus criticized politics aimed at building a utopian future, affirming once more that life should be lived in the present and the sensuous world; he then explored the history of postreligious and nihilistic intellectual and literary movements. Camus also attacked political violence by contrasting it with limits and solidarity; and he ended the book by articulating the metaphysical role of art and a “self-limiting” radical politics. His essay concludes with a vision of Mediterranean moderation that he obviously hoped would be stirring and lyrical, binding the reader to his insights. Camus was uncompromising in his insistence that communism’s appeal and negative aspects both sprang from the same irrepressible human impulse. Revolution emerges when revolt seeks to ignore the limits built into human life. By “an inevitable logic of nihilism,” Communism climaxes the modern trend to deify man and to transform and unify the world. Today’s revolutions yield to the blind impulse, originally described in The Myth of Sisyphus, “to demand order in the midst of chaos, and unity in the very heart of the ephemeral”59—as does the rebel who becomes a revolutionary and kills and then justifies murder as legitimate. During the French Revolution, the pursuit of absolute justice was announced in one decisive step: the killing of the king. This naturally obliterated the original life-affirming, self-affirming, and solidaristic purpose of revolt. Camus’s “history of European pride” reached back to the Greeks and early Christianity before moving on to the Marquis de Sade, romanticism, dandyism, The Brothers Karamazov, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, surrealism, the Nazis, and the Bolsheviks. Camus spoke of revolt as increasing its force over time and turning into an ever more desperate nihilism, overthrowing God and substituting man, wielding power more and more brutally. Historical revolt, which is rooted in metaphysical revolt, leads to revolutions that seek to eliminate absurdity by taking total control over the world. Murder is their central tool, and communism is the contemporary expression of this Western sickness. Because The Rebel claimed to describe the attitude that lay behind the evil features of contemporary revolutionary politics, it became a major political event. Readers could hardly miss his description of how the impulse for emancipation turned into organized, rational murder as the rebel-becomerevolutionary attempted to order an absurd universe. In presenting this message, Camus sought not so much to critique Stalinism as its apologists. His specific targets were intellectuals attracted to communism—as he himself had

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been in the past. In applying his absurdist ideas and insights to politics, The Rebel often seems to have an arbitrary and eccentric quality; Camus developed and deployed his own intellectual armamentarium to explain what he regarded as the increasingly organized but inevitably catastrophic refusals to face, accept, and live with absurdity. Yet even today the book remains a unique worldview—a coherent and original structure of premise, mood, description, philosophy, history, and even prejudice. The Rebel thus deepens and extends Camus’s understanding of what it is like to live in a godless universe. In addition to his earlier stress on death and absurdity as essential components of that universe, he has added an emphasis on its injustice. But in the slightly older Camus—he was not even forty when The Rebel appeared—the path to avoid is no longer as simple and straightforward as the one of religiously inspired hope, which keeps us from living in the present and experiencing the world’s delights, or of the existentialists’ betrayal of their initial insight into absurdity. “When the throne of God is overturned, the rebel realizes that it is now his own responsibility to create the justice, the order, and the unity that he sought in vain within his own condition, and in this way to justify the fall of God. Then begins the desperate effort to create, at the price of crime and murder if necessary, the dominion of man.”60 In other words, one of the attitudes underlying totalitarianism and its “terrible consequences”—and Camus specifically had in mind communism’s most deadly aspects—is the effort to take God’s place. Moreover, he regarded this revolutionary drive not only as a vice to be opposed by an attitude of rebellion but, more significantly, as an essential direction of the Western spirit that stemmed from its entire world of culture, thought, and feeling. We may seem to have strayed far from our starting point: the continuing vitality of Camus’s insights for atheists, agnostics, and secular humanists. But look again. Consider first the self-selected terrain of The Rebel: the terrestrial religiosity of the cults of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, and the twentieth century’s one hundred million lives lost in wars, massacres, death camps, and work camps. Then cast an eye over today’s explosive world and its holy wars, provoked or led by religious fundamentalists of all religions and denominations. In this we must include (in case the reference not only to Muslims but also to Christians, Hindus, and Jews need be made explicit) the thirst for Armageddon among so many in America; the sense of religious righteousness accompanying the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; and the ungodly dystopia being imposed by Israelis on what remains of Palestine. I am sure

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that Camus would see and decry the religious impulse in these instances no less than in the ones he explored. He was drawn to diagnose what he saw as the most significant issue of fifty years ago, yet his efforts have a remarkable ring even today. Camus’s youthful explorations of sensuousness and living in the present lead to the high-stakes discussions in The Rebel along the most interesting of paths: probing the deep reasons for humanity’s inability to live on this earth, for this earth, in the present. The Rebel explores the consequences of what turns out to be only an apparent abandonment of religion. Camus was saying that even dead and dethroned, God remains very much in the picture, and humanity refuses the bittersweet happiness of Nuptials and of Sisyphus. Humanity refuses to accept death, and this in turn leads to efforts at transcendence and salvation through death. In a world populated by fundamentalist warriors run amok, Camus—and the atheistic, existentialist tradition of which he was a part—have important things to tell us about becoming sane and strong enough to accept our place on this planet within our limits. He does not have all the answers nor even a coherent philosophy; in fact, he would have rejected the very notion. Although a leftist, he tended to ignore the exploitation to which most of the world was subjected, and his theories (but not his own individual life activity) are often blind to socioeconomic injustice. But the particular type of bitterness he commended remains, fifty years later, a good starting point. Those who struggle with such issues today have much to learn from him.61

Notes 1. Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (New York: Vintage, 1991), 119. 2. Ibid., 120. 3. Ibid., 54. 4. Statements of major irreligious figures such as Einstein and Freud are combed for possible defections to religion, allowing bridges to be built between their wholly unconventional relations to traditional religion and “faith” as a desirable posture. Take Sigmund Freud, for example, who was a convinced atheist. Because he sought to appreciate religion’s historical role in the development of human consciousness, the New York Times Magazine titled an article on this topic, by Mark Edmunson, “Defender of the Faith?” (September 9, 2007; http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/09/ magazine/09wwln-lede-t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin). An example of Edmundson’s assimilation of Freud to religion: “In his last book, written when he was

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old and ill, suffering badly from cancer of the jaw, Freud offers another perspective on faith. He argues that Judaism helped free humanity from bondage to the immediate empirical world, opening up fresh possibilities for human thought and action. He also suggests that faith in God facilitated a turn toward the life within, helping to make a rich life of introspection possible.” Albert Einstein, on the other hand, totally rejected the concept of a personal God and therefore all traditional forms of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as well as all notions of prayer, God intervening in human affairs, and an afterlife. He also rejected atheism. He had a rather vague faith in a rational spirit lying at the origin of the universe and without which our efforts to understand it would make no sense; he also expressed a profound sense of awe about the universe. These he regarded as “religious” feelings. But not in any traditional sense: “The main source of the presentday conflicts between the spheres of religion and of science lies in this concept of a personal God.” See Walter Isaacson, “Einstein and Faith,” Newsweek (April 5, 2007), http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1607298,00.html; from Isaacson, Einstein (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007). 5. Albert Camus, “The Unbeliever and Christians” and “Reflections on the Guillotine,” Resistance, Rebellion, and Death (New York: Vintage , 1974); Camus, The Stranger (New York: Vintage, 1961). 6. James Wood, “Albert Camus and the Minister,” New Republic (November 8, 1999): 89–96. 7. Unaccountably, even the French publisher of the French edition of Ronald Aronson, Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), could not resist referring, on the back cover, to Camus’s “humanisme chrétien” (Christian humanism). See Aronson, Camus et Sartre: Amitié et combat (Paris: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 8. Many American surveys seem interested in “belief in God” no matter how different are the forms, intensity, or content of belief. One example: “More than nine-in-ten adults (92%) say they believe in God or a universal spirit.” Pew American Religious Landscape Study, http://religions.pewforum.org/pdf/report2religious-landscape -study-chapter-1.pdf. This is a particularly skewed way to formulate the enormous diversity in beliefs, especially when one considers that this survey reports only 60 percent of Americans claiming to believe (to any degree of conviction and daily practice) in a traditional Jewish, Christian, or Muslim personal God. 9. Camus, Notebooks 1951–1959 (New York: Ivan R. Dee, 2008), 112. 10. Camus, The Rebel (New York: Vintage, 1991), 23. 11. Conversation with Hazel Barnes, May 2002. 12. Robert Ingersoll, quoted in Ronald Aronson, Living Without God: New Directions for Atheists, Agnostics, Secularists, and the Undecided (Berkeley, Calif.: Counterpoint, 2008), 26.

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13. Ibid. 14. Camus, The Rebel, 65–80. 15. See A. J. Liebling, ed., The Republic of Silence (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1947). 16. In shaping a political-intellectual project, Sartre had far greater success than Camus, who was frustrated in trying to influence the political direction of postwar France. Although Camus had a dozen years of political experience and Sartre was just starting to find his bearings in politics, his postwar pronouncements typically rang out with more confidence than Camus’s. Ironically, one of these—Sartre’s very first effort at political writing—was a redraft of a text by Camus; see Aronson, Camus and Sartre, 101. 17. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Citadel, 1957), 15. 18. Ibid., 23. 19. Peter Kreeft, “The Pillars of Unbelief—Sartre,” http://www.peterkreeft.com/ topics-more/pillars_sartre.htm. 20. Ibid., 575. 21. Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), 566. 22. Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions, 22. 23. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880; New York: Bantam, 2002), 632. 24. For a discussion see Thomas C. Anderson, Sartre’s Two Ethics: From Authenticity to Integral Humanity (LaSalle, Ill.: Open Court, 1993). 25. Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), 15. 26. Norman Mailer, “The White Negro,” Dissent (Fall 1957), http://www.dissent magazine.org/online.php?id=26. 27. Translated into English as Norman Mailer, “On Sartre’s God Problem,” The Nation (May 19, 2005), http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050606/mailerhttp://www .thenation.com/doc/2005060 6/mailer. 28. Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions, 51. 29. Sartre, “Kierkegaard: The Singular Universal,” in Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism (New York: Pantheon, 1975). 30. See, for example, Anderson, Sartre’s Two Ethics; Ronald Santoni, “Sartre’s Adolescent Rejection of God,” Philosophy Today (Spring 1993); Stuart Z. Charmé, “Revisting Sartre on the Question of Religion,” Continental Philosophy Review 33 (2000): 1–26. 31. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (1878; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 58. 32. Camus, “Nuptials,” in Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays (New York: Vintage, 1970), 76.

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33. Ibid., 74. 34. Ibid., 90. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 76. 37. Ibid., 103 38. Ibid., 90. 39. Ibid., 69. 40. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 2. 41. Ibid., 12–13. 42. Ibid., 21, 28. 43. Ibid., 59, 55. 44. Ibid., 24. 45. Ibid., 51. 46. Ibid., 49. 47. Ibid., 121. 48. Ibid., 123. 49. Ibid., 122. 50. Ibid., 123. 51. Nietzsche, “What I Owe to the Ancients,” in Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, #5, http://www.handprint.com/SC/ NIE/GotDamer.html. 52. Camus, The Rebel, 4. 53. Ibid., 6. 54. Ibid., 103. 55. Ibid., 56. 56. In his brief essay entitled “Remarque sur la révolte” in Essais (1945; Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 1682–97, Camus mentioned Being and Nothingness twice while first laying out his idea of revolt. His Notebooks also refer to his reading it in November 1943 (91). 57. Camus, The Rebel, 22. 58. Camus, “Revolte et servitude,” in Camus, Essais, 758. 59. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 10. 60. Camus, The Rebel, 25. 61. My own efforts are deeply indebted to Camus. See Aronson, Living Without God.

3  Migrations

10

Anxiety and Secularization Søren Kierkegaard and the Twentieth-Century Invention of Existentialism Samuel Moyn

The renown of Danish existentialist Søren Kierkegaard is one of the most compelling proofs there is of how the canon of philosophy is constantly reinvented as time passes—a process that collective forces and historical contingencies rule and that personal brilliance and textual power can do startlingly little to affect by themselves. At the dawn of the twentieth century, none of the standard histories of philosophy—except one by Harald Høff­ ding, who was (predictably enough) then the main Danish thinker of European note—stopped at Kierkegaard’s tomb in their tours of the graveyard of thought, and then only briefly.1 At that time, more than half a century after his death, there were few texts by Kierkegaard, and fewer studies of them, in major languages. Yet by around 1950 a revolution in thought and culture made Kierkegaard (along with Marx, likewise absent as a philosopher before) both the agents and beneficiaries of the dissolution of German Idealism and the thinkers who with Friedrich Nietzsche represented the cutting edge. A wonderful and influential book like Karl Löwith’s Von Hegel bis Nietzsche

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(From Hegel to Nietzsche, 1941), to take only one obvious example, accorded Kierkegaard a pivotal role in the unfolding of philosophy.2 The vagaries of the translation and reception of philosophy, especially in a case like Kierkegaard’s where they so clearly mattered, are important topics in their own right and deserve attention in any attempt at “situating existentialism.” But despite the current revival of interest in philosophical reception, its students often simply accumulate the facts of each case, descending into trivia instead of pondering their interpretive significance. At its most interesting, the history of the circulation of texts and of commentary on thinkers provides an opportunity to examine how philosophy is remade over time in its always mutual relations with cultural ambiance. In what follows, I investigate as a specimen the invention of anxiety: the separation of this central concept of Kierkegaard’s psychology from his corpus and the secularization of its meaning from his originally theistic framework. To do so is necessarily to review and to contemplate, even if only briefly, the byways and stages of the percolation of Kierkegaard’s texts and themes in European and then American thought. When first published in 1844, under the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis, The Concept of Anxiety appeared in half the usual print run for Kierkegaard’s books—a mere 250 copies!—and was totally ignored, even in comparison with his mostly surreptitious other publications. Yet even though the uncommonly forbidding book itself never became a bestseller, its central psychological concept, as Louis Dupré observes, eventually became “one of the principal categories through which our epoch has come to understand itself.”3 Much like the larger trajectory of existentialism, anxiety drifted—as it made its way in the world—from the sacred to the secular. But for those who inherited that revolution, it is easy to treat the secularization of anxiety as more obvious than it actually is, which neglects the innovative creation of interpretive possibilities that were not there at the start. The separation and secularization of anxiety required astonishing philosophical creativity in specific cultural and political contexts. The fortunes of anxiety thus provide a useful case study, both epoch-making in its own right and exemplary of kindred events, in the adventures of concepts.

An Unnoticed Classic When Kierkegaard introduced anxiety in his book (the term figured little in his philosophy otherwise), he did so in an explicit and thoroughgoing

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theological context. The speculative and proto-phenomenological psychology of sin is the framework in which he theorized it. The etymological prototypes of anxiety in its modern forms (Angest in Danish, angoisse in French, Angst in German and sometimes English) meant the physical experience of contraction of the chest, heart, or lungs. Kierkegaard himself pointed out that the Greeks did not understand it as a spiritual phenomenon. It was Christianity that both brought anxiety to the world and—though how early on is open to dispute—promised also to relieve it. The Gospel of John offered this Christian reassurance: “In the world you shall have anxiety [thlipsis in Greek, with “anxiety” used by Martin Luther in his German translation in 1522 and in French at least as early at 1744]: but have confidence, I have overcome the world” (16:33). Modern thinkers, too, would correlate anxiety with their depictions of being in the world. Anxiety, Kierkegaard wrote influentially, is different from fear because it has no definite object. However, in reaching his famous definition of anxiety as “freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility,” he never lost sight of his initial insistence that anxiety was related to the dogmatic notion of sin—in particular, original sin. It might be tempting to interpret original sin, known in Danish and some other languages as “inherited” sin, as an almost biological phenomenon, acquired by Adam’s fall and passed insensibly from one generation to the next. Kierkegaard’s main purpose in The Concept of Anxiety was to combat that interpretation as an affront to the human freedom to choose evil (and, later, the saving alternative to evil). Though Adam may have been the first sinner, Kierkegaard began the book by arguing that this founder of humanity was no different than his descendants, who—like Adam—chose sin on the basis of innocence rather than sinfulness.4 Strictly speaking, the move that any person makes from innocence to sinfulness is unintelligible in Kierkegaard’s Christian view. Even the “psychology” he offered could not understand sin, though it could help define the conditions of its possibility. And this, Kierkegaard argued, is where the concept of anxiety is so crucial. When God prohibited Adam from eating the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, Adam “must have had knowledge of freedom” even if he did not yet know good and evil. In other words, Adam must already have known that he could do what God said not to do, and it was precisely this consciousness—of liberty of action—that fomented anxiety. “The prohibition,” Kierkegaard explained, “induces in him anxiety, for the prohibition awakens in him freedom’s possibility.” In this sense, every man is like Adam: bringing sin into the world all on his own, and living his life

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in a universe of choice and potential salvation.5 Immanuel Kant, in his own reading of the Genesis story, had optimistically interpreted humanity’s apparent sin as the inadvertent discovery of freedom, which the historical process would allow to accumulate collectively and triumphantly over time. For Kierkegaard, however, no man transcends Adam’s confrontation with freedom as the possibility of sin. History does not affect the basic human possibilities, including the experience of anxiety before free choice.6 Although there were many other analyses in The Concept of Anxiety, its main respondents focused on Kierkegaard’s claim that “anxiety and nothing always correspond to each other.” Actuality—this or that choice—is something, whereas possibility—to be able to make a choice—is nothing. Just what sort of nothingness corresponded to anxiety would remain controversial throughout the history of existentialism. (Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre, for instance, disagreed strongly on this matter as well as on whether Kierkegaard understood his own insight.) Yet for Kierkegaard, the possibility that man can act one way rather than another continues to induce anxiety, however buried in consciousness, even after the fall has acquainted him with good and evil. For “no matter how deep an individual has sunk, he can still sink deeper; this ‘can’ is the object of anxiety.” But anxiety would also have further “work” to do, Kierkegaard recorded, in allaying consciousness of sin; it might even motivate a headlong flight into the arms of repentance. Earlier pagan ethics had hoped to master anxiety about the future through oracular insight into fate, and Judaism did so through sacrificially placating the lawful judge; but only Christianity offered a (partial) remedy for this sickness.7 “When salvation is posited,” Kierkegaard maintained early in the book, “anxiety, together with possibility, is left behind. This does not mean that anxiety is annihilated, but that when rightly used it plays another role.” In his brief concluding chapter, Kierkegaard similarly argued that “he who has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.” If never facing anxiety was one way to perish, then so was succumbing to it. Appealing to his other works, Kierkegaard presented the leap of faith—in which the deceptive finitude of other ends than God is given up—as the sole alternative. The personal and experiential adventure to locate this choice is difficult and certainly dangerous, for if anxiety “does not lead him to faith but away from faith, then he is lost.” Nevertheless, if properly and productively used as an incitement to faith, “anxiety will eradicate precisely what it brings forth itself.”8 For Kierkegaard, anxiety thus had just the productive role in the econ­ omy of religious hardship and relief that Jesus had promised according to the

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Gospel of John: anxiety in the world pointed to peace beyond it. One may therefore wonder if only the promise of a life beyond it made anxiety in the world intelligible, or if only a metaphysical scheme situating humanity between animality and divinity could make anxiety both a problem and a solution. If so, then one could hardly avoid the impression that a specifically Christian anthropology dictated everything about Kierkegaard’s theory of anxiety: “If a human being were a beast or an angel,” Kierkegaard insisted, “he could not be in anxiety.” Yet Kierkegaard’s brilliant modern rendition emphasized that initially it is in the profundities of subjective existence, not in otherworldly circumstances, that this drama of sin and salvation unfolds. Perhaps this emphasis already constituted a partial secularization. In any case, it was also in this world—and ultimately as a feature of secular experience—that the reception of The Concept of Anxiety transpired.9

Toward Philosophical Centrality It was only through Danish intercessors who were rather skeptical about their countryman, scattered partisans (including translators) who were as idiosyncratic as they were enthusiastic, and German philosophers with their own agendas that Kierkegaard became known to global thought. As Habib Malik shows in his erudite survey of Kierkegaard’s reception through the beginning of World War I, Kierkegaard’s early fate (besides Danish readings and misreadings) was to have his philosophy subordinated to his life story as its alleged key. The main offender in founding this tradition of biographical reduction was the once internationally renowned Danish man of letters Georg Brandes—also a decisive figure in the discovery of Nietzsche—in his book on Kierkegaard and in a variety of surveys.10 Separated from Either/Or for independent circulation at an early date, Kierkegaard’s “Diary of a Seducer,” by far his most widely read writing for many decades, compounded the tendency to draw attention away from the more difficult and essential precincts of his thought. Although the biographical connection remained powerful, anxiety did not much figure in the more philosophical early readings of the Danish thinker available elsewhere in Europe. Høffding’s own important reading of Kierkegaard (which, unlike his textbook, circulated only in German) is an important case in point.11 Instead, it was thanks to the eccentric preacher Christoph Schrempf that Kierkegaardian anxiety had even an opening for reception. Schrempf—

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frequently denounced for the poor quality of his translations but even so the essential conduit of Kierkegaard’s thought to Germany—originally published his partial rendering of The Concept of Anxiety together with other writings in 1890 as Zur Psychologie der Sünde, der Bekehrung, und des Glaubens (On the Psychology of Sin, Conversion, and Belief). It was, in fact, his first translation of Kierkegaard’s work. It is revealing that, in his lengthy and self-involved introduction to the work (the year before he had dramatically and publicly broken with his religious calling), Schrempf insisted on the Christian purposes of the book—dedicated as it was to clarifying the status of original sin—and strove to integrate it within an overall reading of Kierkegaard’s life and works. But the concept of anxiety was to have a very different fate, both philosophically and culturally. It was more than twenty years later, in 1912, that Schrempf ’s translation of the anxiety study was finally republished as a freestanding volume, part of what became (in the years straddling World War I) a full-scale edition of the Dane’s works published by Eugen Diederichs, which had immense consequences for European thought.12 In the decade immediately preceding World War I, a few intellectuals of note in German-speaking lands began to engage with Kierkegaard: Franz Kafka, Georg Lukács, and Rainer Maria Rilke, for example. However, it is difficult to identify any specific attention to anxiety as a theme in these percolations—until Theodor Haecker came onto the scene. A southern German, Haecker’s Kierkegaardianism had a noteworthy impact owing to his involvement with the Austrian journal Der Brenner and its circle.13 Writing in 1913, Haecker credited Kierkegaard with an extraordinary Christian psychology that the rationalist tradition could never reach. “Why,” Haecker asked of Kierkegaard’s anxiety study, “has modern philosophy simply ignored such important discoveries, as if they had never been made; why does the discipline move so ploddingly?”14 Such affirmations notwithstanding, there is little evidence that Kierkegaardian anxiety had much of an impact on European thought even after the terrible destruction of World War I. Then Martin Heidegger, a reader of Haecker, changed everything. It is well known that anxiety plays a crucial role in Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), but it has seldom been recognized that, in the founding of existentialism proper, Heidegger was apparently the first to give anxiety particular philosophical attention. And when he did so, it was precisely in the direction of separation and secularization of Kierkegaard’s long-marginal theme. As with many other features of his work, Heidegger’s move was not anticipated—not even by the entire Kierkegaard reception up to that point,

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though by 1927 Kierkegaard’s thought had been given much wider play. This historical fact, and not just Heidegger’s brilliance and originality, is what makes his intervention so important. The theologian Karl Barth, who took what had been minor interest in the Dane to a whole new level after World War I in his Römerbrief (Epistle to the Romans, 1918, 1921), dwelled primarily on Kierkegaard’s insistent arguments against the organized churches, and even religion itself, as forms of a neopagan reduction of God’s transcendence. Anxiety figured little, if at all, in Barth’s readings.15 Meanwhile, a contemporaneous “existentialist” engagement with Kierkegaard—Karl Jaspers’s Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (Psychology of Worldviews, 1919)—occasionally quoted Kierkegaard’s study of anxiety but did not even mention the concept. (Like his predecessors, Jaspers strove to unify Kierkegaard’s “doctrine,” emphasizing the self as a synthesis and the demonic from the relevant volume of the Schrempf edition.)16 Although he had previously read some Kierkegaard in the prewar Der Brenner, it was clearly Jaspers’s study that sparked Heidegger’s serious interest in the Dane—in the more general context of Heidegger’s “Lutheran” years of the early 1920s. In fact, in a 1920 letter to his student Löwith that discussed Jaspers’s book, Heidegger insisted that “what is of importance in Kierkegaard must be appropriated anew, but in a strict critique that grows out of our own situation. Blind appropriation is the greatest seduction.”17 Five years later, in his lectures on The History of the Concept of Time, Heidegger argued that Kierkegaard’s “reflections on anxiety . . . suffer from the basic deficiency of not really seeing the conceptual, existential structure of Dasein, so that anxiety then becomes a psychological problem.”18 In Being and Time itself, Heidegger praised Kierkegaard as “the man who has gone farthest in analyzing the phenomenon of anxiety.” But he did so as part of a footnote explaining that his predecessor brought a Christian theological tradition to its conclusions. Taking his generosity only so far, Heidegger allowed that anxiety “came within the purview” of Christian theology “ontically and even (though within very narrow limits) ontologically.”19 But this still meant that, even in Kierkegaard’s advanced rendition, the precedent of theology was more in need of being surpassed than heeded. Given its preoccupation with such inner experiences as “faith, sin, love and repentance,” theology at its best acknowledged and scrutinized—even more so than strictly philosophical traditions—moods like anxiety. But Heidegger now argued that such moods needed to become a philosophical rather than theological topic. Kierkegaard, whatever his insights, had reached anxiety in particular

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“again in the theological context of a ‘psychological’ exposition of original sin.”20 Just as in 1920, Heidegger in Being and Time thus explicitly understood his relationship to Kierkegaardian anxiety as one of necessary transplantation. What this involved, despite the many obvious similarities, was a genuinely radical alteration of the original intellectual setting of Kierkegaard’s theory of anxiety. To be sure, Heidegger could have more clearly acknowledged his intellectual debt to Kierkegaard, which began with their common stress on the phenomenology of moods. Likewise, the distinction between fear and anxiety is spelled out by Heidegger in familiar terms that echo his predecessor. There is also the obvious parallel between Kierkegaard’s argument that anxiety is freedom and Heidegger’s own formulation that “anxiety discloses Dasein as Being-possible . . . that is, its Being-free for the freedom of choosing itself and taking hold of itself.”21 Still it must be noted that, at least officially, Heidegger embeds these similarities within a completely different philosophical framework—one that emphasizes the importance of anxiety for what he called “fundamental ontology.” In short, Heidegger’s book claimed that philosophy had forgotten the question of Being itself, which his “existential” analytic of human being is intended to help approach anew. In particular, Heidegger introduced anxiety as one of the neglected “fundamental moods” and, specifically, as the one likeliest to allow his analysis to “go beyond the special task of an existentially a priori anthropology.” It could serve in this capacity, he argued, because through anxiety “the structural totality of the being we seek” can “come to light in an elemental way.”22 It was on these grounds, and nothing like the theological premises of Kierkegaard’s original book, that Heidegger launched his analyses of anxiety in section 40 of Being and Time, leading to his famous conclusion: “That in the face of which one has anxiety is being in the world itself.”23 The parallel conceptual history of anxiety in psychoanalytic precincts makes the importance of Heidegger’s intervention even plainer. It is interesting that anxiety as a psychological category, though not unknown before Sigmund Freud, had been gingerly distinguished by him in the years just before the invention of psychoanalysis. Freud’s approach to anxiety, typically for his thinking in that era, was deeply positivistic and indeed physicalistic: anxiety was simply another form of transformed libido, aroused excitation of bodily pleasure that had been prevented from satiation and both repressed and transformed into generalized phobia.24 In his post–World War I renewal of psychoanalytic theory, Freud rethought anxiety in particular and

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c­ oncluded, in Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety (1926) that he now believed “it was anxiety that produced repression and not, as I formerly believed, repression which produced anxiety.”25 In other words, anxiety was not simply a secondary effect of the transformation of primary eroticism. Yet Freud confessed that he was mystified by what caused anxiety, and it was not until the creation of “existential psychoanalysis” that anxiety began to be theorized as a disease of contingency and freedom—though nearly always detached from Kierkegaard’s other doctrines and his religious purposes. The most influential early figure in this approach, the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger, had argued in the early 1920s against grounding the therapeutic practices of psychoanalysis on positivistic foundations. (Jaspers also had started in psychiatry, but he rejected psychoanalysis and then chose philosophy over medicine.) Upon the publication of Being and Time, Binswanger found that it provided the alternative he had been seeking—in part because he felt the book’s picture of anxiety provided a theory of motivation that explained the sorts of self-imposed debilitation he found in his clinical work.26 In his case report on Lola Voss, for instance, Binswanger explicitly credited Kierkegaard for “his ground-breaking investigations of anxiety” and viewed these as properly extended in Heidegger’s ontology.27 The main and in any case only partial exception to Heidegger’s role in providing to “existential” psychoanalysis a de-theologized notion of anxiety is the rendition of the concept in Oskar Pfister’s Das Christentum und die Angst (Christianity and Fear, 1944). A Swiss pastor and early champion of psychoanalysis, Pfister is chiefly remembered as Freud’s essential correspondent on the theme of religion. During World War II, Pfister published his massive study proposing a fusion of the Christian and psychoanalytic diagnoses of and remedies for anxiety.28 He accorded a place of honor to Kierkegaard for his early contribution to the subject, but Pfister was impressed enough by Freud’s worries about the complicity of religious strictures in the creation of neurosis to call for the “hygiene” of Christianity to cleanse it of its promotion of excessive and often debilitating anxiety about sin. Indeed, he singled out Kierkegaard for being as much a reflection of this culture as a guide for escaping it. The Concept of Anxiety, Pfister wrote, “is full of keen observations which are not wholly invalidated by an abundance of mis-statements drawn from Kierkegaard’s own anxiety neurosis.”29 But Pfister gave the bulk of his study over to comparing different sects of Christianity in terms of discovering the proper emphasis on faith and love as an alternative to the role of anxiety in the life of the soul. Jesus, Pfister felt, had done his utmost both to

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recognize anxiety and to heal it, although followers who built churches in his name too frequently added to the burden instead of relieving it. So much for Kierkegaard’s theory of the religiously productive role of anxiety in the spiritual life. Pfister was an exceptional and marginal figure, not only in the history of existential psychoanalysis but also in the larger reception of anxiety. For most other thinkers, the outcome of the former was the separation and secularization of the latter, and in this they followed (knowingly or not) Heidegger’s example. Despite Kierkegaard’s acknowledged importance, to take a prominent later case, the dominant pattern of presuming that his insights had been fully cashed out by Heidegger was followed by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan when he devoted his seminar to anxiety in 1962/63.30 Later on, such separation and secularization could occur without the key intermediary. When postwar American existential psychologist Rollo May argued for the direct applicability of Kierkegaard to psychoanalytic concerns (and when he later remembered comparing Freud and Kierkegaard on anxiety and concluding that “Kierkegaard was describing exactly what my fellow patients and I were going through”), he was making a connection that Heidegger—whom he did not mention—had made historically possible.31

French Kierkegaard Before proceeding to the French and American receptions of Kierkegaard, it is worthwhile to reflect on the deeper causes of his gradual rise to fame. Clearly, the accidental facts of translation are part of the picture. Translation was often the outcome of a personal odyssey, and much could be written on the tradition (which continued long into the twentieth century) of learning Danish solely to read Kierkegaard in the original. But clearly these facts are insufficient by themselves. Some explanation is needed for the otherwise unbelievable simultaneity of Freud’s rethinking of anxiety—there is no evidence that Kierkegaard had any effect on him—and Heidegger’s appropriation of anxiety. The political and cultural context helps provide this explanation. Undoubtedly, the disaster of World War I is the most proximate cause explaining why the central European lands, brought low by defeat, wished to make Kierkegaard an icon. “If we were to write a history of his fame,” Hannah Arendt observed of Kierkegaard in 1932,

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only the last fifteen years would concern us, but in those years his fame has spread with amazing speed. This fame rests on more than the discovery and belated appreciation of a great man who was wrongly neglected in his own time. We are not just making amends for not having done him justice earlier. Kierkegaard speaks with a contemporary voice; he speaks for an entire generation that is not reading him out of historical interest but for intensely personal reasons: mea res agitur [this thing concerns me].32 The collective and historical factors that from era to era make particular authors seem personally decisive may be difficult to isolate with certainty, but their role is incontestable. And in Kierkegaard’s vivid case, though he himself emphasized the ineffable particularity of individual experience, such factors had unusual force. The “French Kierkegaard” that was created long before Lacan’s time provides extra confirmation of this truth. Over the years, the translation of Kierkegaard into French had been spotty and often corrupt, especially in comparison with Germany. There were scattered and fragmentary translations, as well as interpretive essays by Victor Basch and Henri Delacroix, before World War I. But it was not until 1932 (when the Diederichs complete works in Germany had been finished for nearly a decade) that a complete rendering of any one of Kierkegaard’s many books appeared in France. The first was The Sickness unto Death, translated by Jean Gâteau and Knud Ferlov (who also translated The Concept of Anxiety three years later). A complete edition of Kierkegaard’s works in French appeared only after World War II.33 It was thus in the 1930s that, as Nelly Viallaneix observes, “everything changed” in Kierkegaard’s trajectory from a cipher to an icon. It was then, Viallaneix remarks, “that Kierkegaard’s renown really spread in France—just at the same time as France entered a ‘crisis’ not only economic but social and political in form. The anxiety of these années sombres, nourished by the rise of Nazism and the expectation of a new war, made the Kierkegaardian myth powerful. Translations and interpretations multiplied.”34 In short, the kind of context that had made Kierkegaard (like Barth, for that matter) so popular a decade earlier in a defeated Germany now came to a France wracked by depression and increasing political and social polarization, at first prior to and thus largely independently of the importation of Heidegger’s thought. With due allowance for the salient differences between the two moments, it

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is nonetheless true that the political upheaval of these years helped foster, for many, a cultural mood so favorable to the same Kierkegaardian interest and enthusiasm on the German scene a decade earlier. And just as in Germany, the secularization of anxiety occurred also in France. This was due primarily to the colossally important thinker Jean Wahl, who was (not coincidentally) the first French Kierkegaardian to be influenced by Heidegger’s intermediation. A leading professor when most contributors to the invention of existentialism were outside the academy, Wahl wrote the long preface to a second and rival translation by P.-H. Tisseau of The Concept of Anxiety that also appeared in 1935. It is remarkable that, like Brandes, the two earliest domesticators of Kierkegaard in France were both Jews; however, Wahl’s very different colleague, the Russian Lev Shestov (sojourning in Paris after fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution), made far more of this fact than Wahl did. Three years later, Wahl reprinted his introduction, along with his other reflections on and promotions of his hero, in his epochal Études Kierkegaardiennes (Kierkegaardian Studies). This volume introduced the concept of anxiety with a high level of interpretive professionalism and laid the groundwork for Wahl’s constructive project: the secularization of anxiety.35 In fact, among the principal importers of Kierkegaard in 1930s France, the viability of secularization was the topic of a contentious feud. Shestov determined early on that Wahl’s secular and philosophical appropriation had to be rejected, root and branch. “Something needs to be said so that Wahl’s ‘interpretation’ is not unopposed,” Shestov complained in conversation with his Romanian disciple Benjamin Fondane.36 When Shestov’s own articles did not interrupt Wahl’s professorial and secularizing appropriation, Fondane—in a remarkably malicious review article—stormily upbraided Wahl for attempting to sever Kierkegaard’s thought from theology, as when Wahl saw fit to praise Kierkegaard “even if the religious that he describes does not correspond to any reality.”37 In this debate among Jews about the meaning of Kierkegaard’s Christian knighthood, Wahl responded politely but firmly that he wanted to choose the way of rational philosophy and not irrational faith of the kind Shestov saw Kierkegaard insisting on.38 In his introduction to The Concept of Anxiety, Wahl drew on and imported some of the burgeoning academic literature—most notably the Swede Torsten Bohlin’s rich contextualization of the book in nineteenth-century philosophy and the German theologian Emanuel Hirsch’s pioneering scholarship—and also stressed the autonomy of Kierkegaard’s project from Heidegger’s (whose introduction to French circles should also be credited to

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Wahl).39 “For Kierkegaard, anxiety is a psychological feature and stems from a nothingness in the soul [esprit],” Wahl contended. “For Heidegger, anxiety is linked to a cosmic fact, to the absolute nothingness from which existence stands out. This is Heidegger’s point of originality—even in his theory of anxiety, which at first glance seems entirely inspired by Kierkegaard.” Unlike Heidegger, Kierkegaard insisted that “true ethics . . . can only be built on the basis of dogma.”40 Yet in his own version of Heidegger’s appropriation, Wahl felt the existential transit from unreflective anxiety to an embrace of the transcendent other—which had once been described in religious terms—could (and should) be restated in secular terms. Two years later, Wahl staged a philosophical summit where he posed for common discussion whether (as he put it) the existentialist follower of Kierkegaard could “completely deliver [himself] from the theological elements of Kierkegaardian thought.” Not everyone accepted the importance of this question. Another Kierkegaardian, the Swiss Protestant and personalist thinker Denis de Rougemont, bluntly rejected it: “But why,” he asked, “purify philosophy of theology? . . . For myself, I cannot conceive of any concrete relation with transcendence that lacked the touch of the divine or the sacred.”41 But Wahl’s search for a nontheological rendition of the outcome of anxiety was deeply impressive to others (including Wahl’s close friend, Emmanuel Levinas). It gave French thought a homegrown version of the deChristianized and worldly interpretation of the psychology of anxiety, one that had been extricated from its original framework of the psychology of sinful freedom.42 Thus, when Jean-Paul Sartre later turned to his own, more famous reprocessing of anxiety in L’être et le néant (Being and Nothingness, 1943), he did so in the tracks of others. Whereas separation and secularization were conjoined in Heidegger’s view, Wahl’s earlier French rendition remained comparatively faithful to Kierkegaard’s role of anxiety in the search for transcendence. Of course, like Wahl, Sartre had no use for Kierkegaard’s theological purposes. When he first read The Concept of Anxiety, in mid-December 1939, Sartre wrote to Simone de Beauvoir that “there are countless things [in the book] but they are underneath a rather irritating theological cover.”43 However, Sartre’s interpretation of anxiety turned out to be more appropriative than simply finding the secular kernel beneath this irritating cover. In his journals, Sartre recorded his decision to intervene, in a new way, in precisely the trajectory of thought reconstructed so far. Having read Kierkegaard after Heidegger, Sartre wrote:

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The influence upon Heidegger is clear: use of the stock phrase ‘to be anxious about nothing’ is found word for word in Being and Time. But it’s true that for Heidegger anxiety is anxiety-at-nothingness (Néant), which is not nothing (Rien) but, as Wahl says, “a cosmic fact, . . . from which existence stands out.” Whereas, for Kierkegaard, it’s a question of “a psychological feature and stems from a nothingness in the soul.” This nothing, in short, is possibility. Possibility that is nothing as yet, since man in the state of innocence does not yet know of what it’s a possibility. But it’s there, nevertheless, as a sign of freedom. . . . Anxiety at nothingness with Heidegger? Anxiety of freedom, with Kierkegaard? In my view it’s one and the same thing, for freedom is the apparition of nothingness in the world. . . . I’ll examine on some other occasion how these characteristics of freedom are simply those of consciousness. [For] anxiety is indeed the experience of nothingness, hence it isn’t a psychological phenomenon. It’s an existential structure of human reality, it’s simply freedom becoming conscious of itself as being its own nothingness.44 In many ways, this neglected passage encapsulates the central mode of thinking that drove the peculiarities of Sartrean existentialism. Sartre’s humanist and subjectivist rendition of existentialism bypassed Heidegger’s concerns with the question of Being—not least in his appropriation of anxiety.45 Instead, Sartre highlighted the abyss of nothingness for the freely choosing self who seeks identity despite the absence of criteria for choice (and in a world of similarly situated others). His very first reaction to The Concept of Anxiety presages his application of the concept to the analyses of everyday activity for which he became famous: “If Kierkegaard is right to call ‘the possibility of freedom’ anxiety, it’s not without a touch of anxiety that I discovered once again yesterday morning that I was entirely free to break the piece of bread which the waitress had placed beside me.”46 In Being and Nothingness, Sartre wrote: “It is in anxiety”—Kierkegaardian angoisse, typically translated for Sartrean purposes as anguish—“that man gets the consciousness of his freedom. . . . It is in anxiety that freedom is, in its being, in question for itself.” This famous nontheological description of what Kierkegaard had treated as a psychological presupposition of sin still serves, for Sartre, as the deepest lesson of the analysis of being. “Kierkegaard describing anxiety in the face of what one lacks characterizes it as anxiety in the face of freedom. But Heidegger, whom we know to have been greatly influenced by Kierkegaard,

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considers anxiety instead as the apprehension of nothingness,” Sartre continued, citing Wahl again. “These two descriptions of anxiety do not appear to us contradictory; on the contrary the one implies the other. . . . Freedom, which manifests itself through anguish, is characterized by a constantly renewed obligation to remake the Self which designates a free being.”47 Thus, directly in line with his immediate reactions to Kierkegaard, Sartre purported in Being and Nothingness to cut through the alternatives as Wahl had laid them out. One might contend, therefore, that Sartre’s secularization of anxiety went much further than his separation of it from Kierkegaard’s psychologistic account—in particular, because Sartre misunderstood the radicalism of Heidegger’s move from ontic to ontological anxiety. At the same time, Sartre certainly did detach the concept from the search for transcendence that Wahl had tried to restate in secular terms. No longer a potentially useful tool in the path to faith or even secular “transcendence,” anxiety for Sartre—abetted if necessary by existential psychoanalysis, for whose creation he also called— prompted the discovery and embrace of difficult freedom in the world. Of course, there also developed a tradition of religious existentialism, in some precincts of which anxiety appeared in terms more faithful to Kierkegaard’s original arguments. But along with Sartre’s secularized and separated vision of anxiety, Albert Camus’s syncretic and essayistic depictions of absurd freedom—especially in The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)—confirmed the main drift of Kierkegaard’s concept.48

The Age of Anxiety in America The American case forces a parallel conclusion. After all, among the most striking ironies in the history of anxiety is that, when it came to America, it did so sponsored by those more faithful to the religious framework of Kierkegaard’s original analysis—who nevertheless lost control over the concept almost immediately. As masterfully reconstructed by George Cotkin, the creation of an “existential America” in its Kierkegaardian registers was due to two Christians who made his promotion their tireless cause. One, David Swenson, was a Swede teaching in the Midwest, where Scandinavian immigration had allowed for some quite early discussions of Kierkegaard’s thought; the other, Walter Lowrie, was a Princeton cleric who traced his first enthusiasm for Barth’s thought back to the Danish source and then decided “to put the name of Soren Kierkegaard in the mouth of every American!”49

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The manic work of these two individuals led to the publication of a flood of Kierkegaard’s works in the ten years after 1936. The anxiety book appeared relatively late, thirty years after the complete German edition and ten after the French: Kierkegaard’s English (and Catholic) enthusiast Alexander Dru had planned to translate it for a long time but ceded that right to Lowrie after a decade of delay, when service in World War II finally forced his hand. Thus it was, as Lowrie put it in his introduction of the English-language Concept of Dread (1944), that “one of the first books S.K. wrote” ended up being “published so near the end in the English edition.” (The choice of “dread” for Angest had been made as far back as the first English renderings of selections of Kierkegaard published in 1923, and Lowrie followed it.)50 Beyond the translation, however, the crucial intermediary for the cultural salience of the concept of anxiety in particular—it seems likely that few read the forbidding book itself—was W. H. Auden, coincidentally then returning to faith and beginning his American period. Having become one of the earliest readers and promoters of the new translations, in 1947 Auden published his “baroque eclogue,” The Age of Anxiety, which a young Leonard Bernstein turned into an opera two years later. Auden also edited a widely circulated selection of Kierkegaard’s thought in which anxiety figured prominently.51 In spite of the inclinations of Lowrie and others to affiliate with the religious purposes of Kierkegaard, their paradoxical success was to unleash anxiety as a cultural diagnosis, unmoored not just from its original context of formulation but also from much theoretical finesse yet remarkably powerful and intuitive, straight across the Western world. It was hard in these years—with Paul Tillich’s thought being the main exception worth mentioning—to find much serious independent or innovative philosophical attention to anxiety, even as Kierkegaard and other existentialists were conscripted into a canon that spawned an academic field.52 Of the novel uses of anxiety in America, perhaps the most obvious were political: the concept began to serve some figures as the deepest element in the explanation of totalitarianism. Auden’s friend Arendt, who had been reading Kierkegaard since a young age, did not appeal to him specifically in her book on the subject, though one can argue that he is there. But in 1953 the political scientist Franz Neumann—in one of the first scholarly citations of The Concept of Anxiety in the English language—wrote that “anxiety . . . and the need for identification of the isolated human being are the psychological processes which permit the total annihilation of freedom in totalitarianism.”53 The next year, in his last intellectual work before his untimely death,

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Neumann expanded this analysis to suggest that such anxiety, which superimposed generalized paranoia on specific fears, had already resulted in (and could lead to further) political catastrophe.54 For a onetime Frankfurt school figure like Neumann as well as for others, worries about the political consequences of anxiety also figured in interpretations of liberal countries. In an age of the “lonely crowd,” David Riesman and his colleagues argued (without specifically mentioning Kierkegaard) that the new, “other-directed” personality was susceptible to conformism, and perhaps to control, because he lived a life of anxiety about the sources of his own identity and sought validation outside.55 Although some political critics found uses for anxiety within a larger explanatory scheme whereby the experience results in submission not to God but to society, others were put off by the Kierkegaardian vogue because of its religious and apparently conservative implications. No doubt the most interesting example here is the liberal political theorist Judith N. Shklar, whose neglected After Utopia (1957) remains perhaps the most lasting critique of existentialist politics—not for its extremist affiliations but for its individualistic fatalism. For Shklar, the widespread preference for Kierkegaardian abstention from or pessimism about politics—whether or not faithful to Kierkegaard himself—arose from the faulty premise that these were the only alternatives to Hegelian and Marxist justifications of communist terror.56 At the very least, she was right that it was not obvious how to build a progressive theory of politics on Kierkegaardian foundations. Sartre, of course, struggled long and hard to weld Marxism to existentialism. In fact, he began this project in his celebrated talk “Existentialism Is a Humanism” (1945) with the striking claim that a philosophy built around the acceptance of anxiety could never have demobilizing or quietistic implications. The anxious man, he con­ tended, “cannot help but be aware of his own full and profound responsibility.” Indeed, Sartre went so far as to state that anxiety “is not a screen that separates us from action, but a condition of action itself.”57 It seems there was no end to the uses of anxiety as a cultural diagnosis in the postwar years, and anxiety was indeed experienced by wide swaths of the Western population. Given the contemporary fusion of all existentialist currents into a sea of Angst, the project of conceptual genealogy drowns in evidence, leaving the less precise soundings of cultural history of the emotions as our only viable option. Recent studies have clearly shown, for example, that the specific fear of nuclear holocaust played an important role in generating a vast wave of free-floating anxiety.58 In America, according

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to Margot Henricksen, a culture of “civil defense” prompted the widespread grappling—both pathological and normal—with anxiety.59 Charles Frankel, a Columbia University philosopher, added the era’s unsettling anticolonialism, escalating technology, and insufficient confidence to the list of sources of malaise in his denunciation of the “contemporary cult of anxiety.”60 Frank Biess details how, on the Continent and especially in Germany, the highly generalized atmosphere of Angst came to be inflected by specific memories of recent catastrophe.61 Sometimes, analysts of Angst in Germany and in general found useful tools in Kierkegaard—most notably in Arnold Künzli’s booklength presentation of “anxiety as a Western illness.”62 Even then, authors customarily moved far afield from Kierkegaard’s original scheme.

Concluding Thoughts: Dissemination and Secularization All these considerations raise once again the question of how to interpret the itinerary of anxiety in its largest context. Given the controversy today around the notion of “secularization,” perhaps the best way to end this chapter is by reflecting on how different theories of secularization in general might lead to different interpretations of the secularization of anxiety in particular. A first approach, for example, argues that the apparently straightforward contrast between religion and secularity is overdrawn, with Christianity making room in its own culture and doctrines for the autonomy of the worldly. It is striking that—unlike the Gospel of John, which promised to “overcome the world”—Kierkegaard’s religious psychology, and especially his concept of anxiety, has made an outsized contribution to the analysis of secular experiences, even though Kierkegaard’s ultimate intent was to point beyond them. From this perspective, Heidegger’s move seems to extend, not contradict, Kierkegaard’s insight into the philosophical relevance of secular anxiety. In this vein one might mention that, in his companion psychological study The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard—as if anticipating that his “dogmatic” approach in The Concept of Anxiety might mislead—pursued the problem of despair phenomenologically, reaching his religious conclusions through a methodological procedure whose starting point is the secular data that presumably inheres in all of humankind’s experience. In short, Kierke­ gaard himself was not above deploying such categories as anxiety for a new secular world.

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A different school of thought holds that religion is hard to separate from secularity not because the former makes room for the latter, as just described, but rather because the latter can never be free of the former. In this view, secularization involves what T. E. Hulme called “spilt religion,” in which old religious themes are given a superficially nontheological gloss that fails to truly extricate them from the framework in which they were born. In this view, anxiety—an originally religious emotion—can never transcend its religious implications. And in spite of the arguments given previously, it is hard to deny the power of that allegation when applied to anxiety, no matter how strenuously Heidegger and Sartre struggled to make it a fundamental mood of secular man. From the start, Heidegger in particular has faced the allegation that he merely presented an improvisation on Christian anthropology whose point was to provide a Christian reading of the human situation precisely in the name of transcending it. Not three years before Being and Time, Heidegger was still deeply embedded in a Christian framework, as evidenced by his reflections at that time on Lutheran sin. Camus famously defined existentialism as “sin without God,” to which one might be tempted to reply that there is no such thing.63 Still another school, defining secularization as true break with the religious past, might find—in the secularization of anxiety—a genuine departure (or the start of one) from religion. A noteworthy fact is the apparent decline of anxiety in the contemporary world following its earlier, extraordinary prominence as both a theoretical problem and a cultural symptom. In current philosophical commentary, it is striking how peripheral anxiety has become as a theme of reflection or a locus for interpreting existentialism as a movement or Heidegger as a thinker. For example, in the construction by Hubert Dreyfus (and his followers) of the “American” Heidegger, anxiety has little place in estimating what purposes the study of Heidegger might now serve in the dialogue with dominant currents of contemporary philosophy of mind that this school has sought.64 But anxiety’s salience has been as much on the wane in the public sphere as in the academic one, whether as personal symptom, cultural illness, or political threat. This obvious fact might lead one to propose that anxiety’s brief and spectacular surge, in the period roughly between the end of World War I and the aftermath of World War II, reflected not a false but an incomplete secularization. According to this view, the attempts, by Heidegger above all, to free anxiety from its originally religious framework may well have been a continuation in secular guise of

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a fundamentally religious image of the human situation. But thereafter, the precipitous decline of religion’s prominence—at least in Europe and among American intellectuals—has led not to the further secularization of anxiety but instead to its theoretical marginalization. All the same, one would be deeply mistaken to rule out the continuing viability of anxiety as a category in philosophical or cultural analysis. From another perspective, anxiety has not disappeared but has been transformed, both conceptually and socially, since its Cold War acme and classic forms. As early as 1962, the existential psychoanalyst Medard Boss noticed a subtle change in the patients he saw, for whom discovering the sources of pathology in anxiety no longer seemed the main task. “At the present time anxiety and guilt are . . . threatening to sink still more out of sight beneath a cold, glazed façade of a vacuous ennui and behind an icy wall made up of inconsolable feelings of the utter meaninglessness of life,” Boss wrote; “the neurosis of the void is the neurosis of the immediate future.”65 The instability of meaning and contingency that for Kierkegaard (and, indeed, for Heidegger) had to be inferred with difficulty from anxiety—and whose recognition was the first step to overcoming it—had somehow become the presenting symptom. In recent decades, however, others have welcomed a form of existence based on Kierkegaard’s epochal discovery of “freedom’s possibility” in The Concept of Anxiety, finding ways to live in the void of anxiety that Kierkegaard hoped would lead away from the world. That it need not be read for its breakthrough diagnosis to penetrate common awareness, and that its religious cure is often rejected, simply provide more evidence of the book’s enduring legacy.

Notes 1. The 1894 Danish study first appeared in German in 1895–1896. In 1900, it appeared in English for the first time as Harald Høffding, A History of Modern Philosophy: A Sketch of the History of Philosophy from the Close of the Renaissance to Our Own Day, 2 vols., trans. B. E. Meyer (New York: Macmillan, 1900), vol. 2, 285–89 for the Kierkegaard passage. In 1906–1908, it was finally published in French. 2. Karl Löwith, Von Hegel bis Nietzsche (Zurich: Europa, 1941), in English as From Hegel to Nietzsche: The Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Thought, trans. David E. Green (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1964). “We can recall a time when the period between the death of Hegel and the return to Kant after 1860 was considered more or less a vacuum in German philosophy,” Leo Strauss commented, in a piece

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on Löwith’s book: “That time has passed: since the end of the [First] World War, full justice has been done to the historical importance of . . . Kierkegaard and Marx.” Leo Strauss, “Review,” Social Research 8, no. 1/4 (1941): 513; reprinted in Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1959), 268. 3. Louis Dupré, “Of Time and Eternity,” in International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 8, The Concept of Anxiety, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1985), 111–32, 111. 4. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, trans. Reidar Thomte (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), 42, 32–33. For a range of commentaries, see David Coe, Angst and the Abyss: The Hermeneutics of Nothingness (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1985); Arne Grøn, The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, trans. Jeanette B. L. Knox (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2008); Kresten Nordentoft, Kierkegaard’s Psychology, trans. Bruce Kirmsse (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1978); George Pattison, The Philosophy of Kierkegaard (Ithaca, N.Y.: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2005), chapter 2; and Perkins, International Kierkegaard Commentary. 5. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 21–22, 44. Kierkegaard repeatedly strove to ward off the allegation that he was propounding a Pelagian view of man’s potential freedom from sin, and he justified the dogma of the inheritance of sin by arguing that such propagated “sinfulness moves in quantitative categories, whereas sin constantly enters by the qualitative leap of the individual.” Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 47, chapter 2. 6. See Immanuel Kant, “Conjectural Beginnings of Human History,” in Kant, On History, ed. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957). For an excellent contemporary presentation of Kierkegaard’s relationship to Kant and German idealism on sin and freedom, see Michelle Kosch, Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), especially 210–16. 7. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 96, 113, 91–92. 8. Ibid., 54, 155, 159. 9. Ibid., 155. 10. See Georg Brandes, Sören Kierkegaard: Ein literarischer Charakterbild (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1879), which did not appear in other major languages. Habib C. Malik, Receiving Søren Kierkegaard: The Early Impact and Transmission of His Thought (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1997), 284. Also of use are Niels Thulstrup and M. Mikulová Thulstrup, The Legacy and Interpretation of Kierkegaard (Biblioteca Kierkegaardiana, vol. 8) (Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1981). The Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2001 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2001) includes The Concept of Anxiety as well as essays on its various national receptions. 11. Höffding, Sören Kierkegaard als Philosoph (Stuttgart: Frommann, 1896), which focused chiefly on the stages from the aesthetic to the religious.

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12. In the Gesammelte Werke version, Schrempf updated his translation and restored the expurgations; he also dropped his earlier essay and added a brief “Nachwort” that offered an overview of the book. 13. See Malik, Receiving Søren Kierkegaard, chapter 8, and Allan Janik, “Haecker, Kierkegaard, and the Early Brenner,” in Perkins, International Kierkegaard Commentary, vol. 14, Two Ages (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1984). 14. Theodor Haecker, Sören Kierkegaard und die Philosophie der Innerlichkeit (Munich: J. F. Schreiber, 1913), 33–34. 15. See Karl Barth, “Mein Verhältnis zu Sören Kierkegaard,” Orbis Litterarum 18, no. 3/4 (1963): 97–100, and Egon Brinkschmidt, Sören Kierkegaard und Karl Barth (Neukirchen: Neukirchener, 1971). 16. Karl Jaspers, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (Berlin: Springer, 1919), 370–80 (“Referat Kierkegaards”). On Kierkegaard’s role in Jaspers’ later Existenz-Philosophie, see Jean Wahl, “Notes on Some Relations of Jaspers to Kierkegaard and Heidegger,” in The Philosophy of Karl Jaspers, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (New York: Tudor, 1957), 393–400. 17. Letter of September 13, 1920, “To Karl Löwith on His Philosophical Identity,” in Becoming Heidegger: On the Trail of His Early Occasional Writings, ed. Theodore Kisiel and Thomas Sheehan (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 98. See also Heidegger, “Critical Comments on Karl Jaspers’s Psychology of Worldviews,” in Kisiel and Sheehan, Becoming Heidegger, 110–40. According to Kisiel, Heidegger first analyzed Angst during his courses in 1923/24. See Kisiel, The Genesis of Heidegger’s Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), appendix D, 490. 18. Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kisiel (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1985), 292 (translation of Angst changed from “fear” to “anxiety”). 19. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 11th ed. (1962; Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1967), 190n4; Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 492. However, in a later footnote he indicted Kierkegaard because “the existential problematic was . . . alien to him” to the extent that “there is more to be learned philosophically from his ‘edifying’ writings than from his theoretical ones—with the exception of his treatise on the concept of anxiety” (Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 235n6; Heidegger, Being and Time, 494). 20. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 190n4; Heidegger, Being and Time, 492. 21. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 188; Heidegger, Being and Time, 232. There is a parallel analysis of anxiety from two years later in Heidegger’s “What Is Metaphysics?” in Pathmarks, trans. William McNeill (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 88–93. On the moods in the preface to The Concept of Anxiety in light of Heidegger’s later theory, see Vincent A. McCarthy, The Phenomenology of Moods in Kierkegaard (Boston: Nijhoff, 1978). For an excellent broader analysis of the role that Kierkegaard’s discussion of time in The Concept of Anxiety and elsewhere (via Jaspers, in this case)

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played in Being and Time, especially in the transition to Division II, see Otto Pöggeler, “Destruction and Moment,” in Reading Heidegger from the Start, ed. Theodore Kisiel and John van Buren (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1994), 137–56, especially 142–47. 22. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 182–83; Heidegger, Being and Time, 226–27. 23. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 186; Heidegger, Being and Time, 230 (emphasis in original). 24. Sigmund Freud, “On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia Under the Description ‘Anxiety Neurosis,’” Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, 24 vols. (London: Hogarth, 1953–1974), vol. 3, 87–120. See also A. C. Oerlemans, The Development of Freud’s Conception of Anxiety (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1949). 25. Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety, in Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 20, 108–9. 26. See Gerald N. Izenberg, The Existentialist Critique of Freud: The Crisis of Autonomy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976), especially chapter 2. The book is a neglected masterpiece on the history of psychoanalysis and existentialism, and—for my purposes here—includes intermittent consideration of the role of anxiety in the theoretical refoundation of Freud’s thought (25–26 and notes thereon, 100–4, 208–10, and elsewhere). 27. Ludwig Binswanger, Being-in-the-World: Selected Papers, trans. Jacob Needleman (New York: Basic Books, 1963), 297. 28. On Pfister’s relationship with Freud, see Peter Gay, A Godless Jew: Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987), 73–86. 29. Oskar Pfister, Christianity and Fear: A Study in History and in the Psychology and Hygiene of Religion, trans. W. H. Johnston (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 46–47 (translation of Angst changed from “fear” to “anxiety”). 30. Jacques Lacan, Le séminaire X: L’angoisse (Paris: Seuil, 2004), and Roberto Harari, Lacan’s Seminar on Anxiety: An Introduction (New York: Other Press, 2001). 31. Rollo May, The Meaning of Anxiety (New York: Ronald Press, 1950), 32–51; May, The Discovery of Being: Writings in Existential Psychotherapy (New York: Norton, 1983), 14 (original’s italics omitted). 32. Hannah Arendt, “Søren Kierkegaard,” Frankfurter Zeitung (January 29, 1932), reprinted in Kierkegaard, Essays in Understanding, 1930–1954, ed. Jerome Kohn, trans. Robert and Rita Kimber (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1993), 43–49, quote on 44. 33. Henri Delacroix, “Søren Kierkegaard,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 8, no. 4 (1900): 451–84; Victor Basch, “Un individualiste religieux, Søren Kierkegaard,” Grande revue (1903): 281–320. 34. I mean “French Kierkegaard” by analogy with the work of Bruce Baugh, French Hegel: From Surrealism to Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 2003). Nelly Viallaneix, “Lectures françaises,” in Thulstrup and Thulstrup, Legacy and Interpretation,

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102–20, quote on 108–9. Additional literature is cited in the earlier study from which I draw here: Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas Between Revelation and Ethics (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), chapter 5. 35. See Lev Shestov, Kierkegaard et la philosophie existentielle (Vox clamantis in deserto) (Paris: J. Vrin, 1936), chapter 7, “Anxiety.” 36. Benjamin Fondane, Rencontres avec Léon Chestov (Paris: Plasma, 1982), 83. 37. Fondane, “Héraclite le pauvre; ou, nécessité de Kierkegaard,” Cahiers du sud 22, no. 177 (November 1935): 762. 38. Wahl, “À propos de Kierkegaard,” Cahiers du sud 22, no. 178 (December 1935): 861–62. 39. I mention this because Bohlin’s lengthy investigation remains richly helpful on the nineteenth-century context of Kierkegaardian anxiety. Torsten Bohlin, Kierkegaards dogmatische Anschauung in ihrem geschichtlichen Zusammenhänge, trans. Ilse Meyer-Lune (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1927), 72–208. Hirsch, who became the most eminent German scholar of Kierkegaard and replaced Schrempf ’s defective edition over time, was also an ardent partisan of the Nazi movement. See Emanuel Hirsch, Kierkegaard-Studien, 3 vols. (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1930–1933), and Robert P. Ericksen, Theologians Under Hitler (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985), chapter 4. 40. Wahl, “Introduction,” in Kierkegaard, Le concept d’angoisse, trans. P.-H. Tisseau (Paris: Alcan, 1935), 1–38, quotes on 10n and 7. 41. Bulletin de la société française de philosophie 37, no. 5 (October–December 1937): 162, 204. 42. See Moyn, Origins of the Other, chapter 5. 43. Jean-Paul Sartre, Lettres au Castor et quelques autres, ed. Simone de Beauvoir, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), vol. 1, 491. I use my own translation in preference to the version in Witness to My Life: The Letters of Jean-Paul Sartre to Simone de Beauvoir, 1926–1939, trans. Lee Fahnestock and Norman McAfee (New York: Scribner’s, 1992), 413. 44. Sartre, The War Diaries (November 1939/March 1940), trans. Quentin Hoare (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 132 (with my Wahl translations from above inserted, footnotes dropped, and angoisse translated as “anxiety”). 45. See, among others, Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927–1961 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005). 46. Sartre, War Diaries, 124–25. 47. Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Pocket Books, 1966), 65, 72. Sartre did not address Kierkegaard in his own right until much later, in his “The Singular Universal,” at a famous UNESCO commemoration published as Kierkegaard vivant (Paris: Gallimard, 1966); his essay appears in English in Sartre, Between Existentialism and Marxism, trans. John Mathews (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 141–69.

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48. Camus called Kierkegaard “of all [existentialists] the most engaging” while presenting Heidegger’s theory of anxiety in a single paragraph, but Shestov—whom Camus described as “wonderfully monotonous”—may have influenced him the most. Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus,” in The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. Justin O’Brien (New York: Knopf, 1955), 22–28, quote on 24. 49. On these figures, see George Cotkin, Existential America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), quote on 43, and more generally chapter 3 on importation and translation and chapter 4 on the American “age of anxiety,” from which I draw in what follows. 50. The earliest translation is Selections from the Writings of Kierkegaard, trans. L. M. Hollander (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1923). See Walter Lowrie, “Translator’s Preface,” in Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1944), v–x, quotes on v and ix–x. 51. W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (New York: Random House, 1947); Auden, ed., The Living Thoughts of Kierkegaard (New York: McKay, 1952), chapter 5. For comment, see Edward Mendelson, Later Auden (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999), 129–38, 153–54, 158–59, and elsewhere. 52. The postwar books for and against existentialism by various authors—including Marjorie Glicksman Grene, who wrote her dissertation on existentialism at Harvard University in 1935, traveled to Denmark to immerse herself in Kierkegaard, and then published Dreadful Freedom: A Critique of Existentialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948) a decade later—give anxiety much independent attention. For Tillich on anxiety, see especially Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1952). Compare Ronald Grimsley, “‘Dread’ as a Philosophical Concept,” Philosophical Quarterly 6, no. 24 (July 1956): 245–55, with Fred Berthold Jr., The Fear of God: The Role of Anxiety in Recent Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1959). 53. Franz L. Neumann, “The Concept of Political Freedom,” Columbia Law Review 53, no. 7 (November 1953): 921; Susannah Young-Ah Gottlieb, Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in Hannah Arendt and W. H. Auden (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003). 54. Neumann, Angst und Politik: Vortrag gehalten an der Freien Universität Berlin (Tübingen: Mohr, 1954), translated into English as “Anxiety and Politics,” in Neumann, The Democratic and the Authoritarian State: Essays in Political and Legal Theory, ed. Herbert Marcuse (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1957), 270–300. 55. David Riesman et al., The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1950); Corey Robin, Fear: The History of a Political Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), chapter 3, “Anxiety.” 56. Judith N. Shklar, After Utopia: The Decline of Political Faith (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957). 57. Sartre, Existentialism Is a Humanism, ed. John Kulka, trans. Carol Macomber (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 25, 27.

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58. Joanna Bourke has argued that the distinction between fear and anxiety is of no use in cultural history, but this seems like a premature judgment that may overlook one of the main harvests of existential philosophy. See Joanna Bourke, “Fear and Anxiety: Writing About Emotion in Modern History,” History Workshop Journal 55 (Spring 2003): 111–33, and Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History (London: Virago, 2005), 189–92. 59. Margot A. Henricksen, Dr. Strangelove’s America: Society and Culture in the Atomic Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), chapter 3. 60. See the title piece in Charles Frankel, The Love of Anxiety and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 73–94, quote on 76. 61. See Frank Biess, “Hope, Fear, and Resentment: Toward a History of Postwar Emotions,” in Frank Biess and Robert Moeller, eds., Histories of the Aftermath: The Legacies of the Second World War in Comparative European Perspective (New York: Berghahn, 2010). 62. Arnold Künzli, Die Angst als abendländische Krankheit; dargestellt am Leben und Denken Sören Kierkegaards (Zurich: Rascher, 1948). In French circles, see Marcel Eck, L’homme et l’angoisse (Paris: Fayard, 1964) and its Kierkegaardian point of departure. 63. Camus, Myth of Sisyphus, 40. See Heidegger, “The Problem of Sin in Luther,” in Kisiel and Sheehan, Becoming Heidegger, 187–95. For one of a great many interpretations of Heidegger in the suggested direction, see Samuel Moyn and Azzan Yadin, “The Creaturely Limits of Knowledge: Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, and Weimar Theological Pessimism,” in The Weimar Moment: Liberalism, Political Theology, and Law, ed. Leonard V. Kaplan and Rudy Koshar (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, forthcoming). 64. In his classic commentary on Being and Time, Dreyfus left in the shadows what he called “the ‘existentialist’ side of Heidegger’s thought, which focuses on anxiety,” not least because it “was, for good reasons, later abandoned by Heidegger himself.” Hubert Dreyfus, Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s “Being and Time,” Division I (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), vii; compare 176–81 with the appendix on “Kierkegaard, Division II, and Later Heidegger” written with Jane Rubin, his student. On Dreyfus’s Heidegger in the American context, see Martin Woessner, Heidegger in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), chapter 6. 65. Medard Boss, “Anxiety, Guilt and Psychotherapeutic Liberation,” Review of Existential Psychology and Psychiatry 2, no. 3 (September 1962): 174.

11

Rethinking the “Existential” Nietzsche in Germany Löwith, Jaspers, Heidegger Charles Bambach

Nietzsche as “Event” In an idiom from his philosophical autobiography Ecce Homo that betrays the marks of both prophecy and irony, Nietzsche proclaims: “I am a destiny.” “My truth is dreadful,” he writes. “I am by far the most terrible human being there has ever been.” As the herald of this dreadful truth, Nietzsche positions himself as the thinker of both ascent and decline, the one who prepares “a decision evoked against everything that until now has been believed in, demanded, sanctified.” “Have I been understood?” Nietzsche asks. “The unmasking of Christian morality is an event [Ereignis] without equal, a real catastrophe. He who enlightens us about it is a force majeure, a destiny—he breaks the history of humankind in two.”1 Ecce Homo serves notice to a distracted, unheeding Europe that the very foundations of its metaphysical and moral order are tottering and on the brink of collapse—“in plain terms: the old truth is coming to an end.” With an almost oracular prescience Nietzsche

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recognizes the significance of his own achievement even if it took the length of a generation before its impact would be truly acknowledged. For the better part of two decades, Nietzsche’s work was taken up enthusiastically by writers, poets, aesthetes, bohemians, and members of the Youth Movement and was put to an extraordinary range of purposes against the middle-class order of the new century. Yet it was not until the Great War, when 150,000 copies of Thus Spoke Zarathustra were distributed to troops at the front, that Nietzsche would become a phenomenon.2 As the German social theorist Werner Sombart put it: “The war of 1914 is Nietzsche’s war.”3 The thinker in whose name a new history of humanity would need to be written would now take center stage as the prophet of a steeled will and a warrior’s hardness. In the name of such masculine virtues as heroism, sacrifice, courage, and martial will, Nietzsche would be conscripted as the prophet of a German destiny marked by violent destruction and mythic rebirth. As the Great War ended, Nietzsche’s role in scripting the German future was underscored in the work of such cultural theorists as Oswald Spengler, Thomas Mann, and Ernst Bertram, who all interpreted him as the prophet of a new German awakening. For the postwar generation, Nietzsche came to signify a realm of myth that had earlier been associated with names such as Luther, Goethe, Bismarck, and Wagner. As Karl Löwith put it, “the development of Germany is impossible to understand without the last German philosopher. His influence was and is boundless within the boundaries of Germany.” Other nations can never fully grasp this influence, Löwith went on to say, because “the essence of what draws the Germans to Nietzsche is so foreign to them. He is, like Luther, a specifically German event [Ereignis]—radical and fateful.”4 As the cultural prophet of German destiny, Nietzsche functioned as the heroic philosopher of the will who bequeathed to the German Volk a mythic outline for its renewal and transfiguration. On both the right and left—in the writings of Marxists like Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch or National Socialists like Alfred Baeumler and Alfred Rosenberg—Nietzsche became a figure for the projected hopes of revolutionary social change. However, the first serious philosophical engagement with Nietzsche does not occur until after 1918 with the influence of philosophical anthropology and Lebensphilosophie that developed from the work of Max Scheler, Georg Simmel, and especially Karl Jaspers. Jaspers’s The Psychology of Worldviews (1919) transformed the central questions of life philosophy into a philosophy of existence (Existenzphilosophie) that focused on the “limit situations” of suffering, struggle, death, ­contingency, and guilt.5 In these limit situations, Jaspers claimed, the human being is

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pressed against the boundaries of conventional life structures governed by theoretical reason and is forced to decide about fundamental issues of existential concern. Jaspers enlisted Nietzsche here as a thinker who explored these existential limit situations in all their radicality as a way of struggling against the reification of worldviews. In so doing, he set the stage for the development of an Existenzphilosophie as a philosophy of concrete human existence with its roots in Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. The young Heidegger drafted a review of this work, “Comments on Karl Jaspers’ Psychology of Worldviews” (1919–1921), that would unfold Jaspers’ notion of existence to mean the factical enactment of the “I am” as “a way of being that belongs to the being of the I.”6 Later Heidegger would extend his understanding of this factical interpretation of existence in his magnum opus, Being and Time (1927), which initiated a radical shift within German philosophy that led to a generational preoccupation with questions of existence as being singular, concrete, and situational. One year after the publication of Being and Time, Heidegger’s student Karl Löwith published his Habilitationsschrift; it was entitled Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen (1928) and proffered a philosophical anthropology with existential implications for communal life.7 In 1929 Fritz Heinemann published a general survey of contemporary German philosophy, Neue Wege der Philosophie, that attempted to provide a critical account of this shift within German thought from life philosophy to a philosophy of existence.8 Heinemann included a chapter on Nietzsche that situated him as a critical figure in this shift. During the 1930s, this conception of an “existential” Nietzsche would be refashioned in the most egregious way by National Socialist philosophers such as Alfred Baeumler and Alfred Rosenberg, who sought to exploit Nietzsche’s notion of “great politics” for their own ideological purposes. During this period, Jaspers, Heidegger, and Löwith each produced major works that focused specifically on Nietzsche and challenged the standard Nazi portrayal of him as the philosopher of heroic will and primal Germanism. However, the repression exercised by Nazi control at the universities, within the publishing world, and within German culture at large meant that the impact of these works would not be truly felt until the 1950s, when the “existential Nietzsche” exploded upon the postwar German philosophical scene. In this chapter I shall explore the interpretations of Jaspers, Heidegger, and Löwith as a way of understanding this “existential” image of Nietzsche that was later to become so popular in the United States (Walter Kaufmann)

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and France (Gabriel Marcel, Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre) and that dominated the postwar image of Nietzsche to an extraordinary extent. Jaspers, Heidegger, and Löwith—each in quite distinct ways—put forward devastating critiques of the myth promulgated by Nazi ideologues of a Nietzsche committed to a new communal ideal of the German Volk as a “master race” that would cleanse modern Europe of its decadent slave morality. Moreover, these writers repudiated the popular conception of Nietzsche as a prophet, cultural critic, or aphorist. Instead they each focused on a philosophical interpretation of Nietzsche as a thinker who, in Löwith’s words, prepared a “fateful decision” for modern existence: the death of God.9 For Löwith, the death of God needed to be grasped as the “great event” (Ereignis) that proclaims nihilism as the destiny of Europe, the event that divided history into two halves. For Jaspers, too, “Nietzsche expressed the historical situation of the epoch in one phrase: God is dead.”10 This pronouncement heralded a new sense of historical destiny that delivered the “shock to Western philosophizing whose final meaning cannot yet be measured.” Jaspers added, “as to what this destiny really is, the question remains open today.” This sense of an open-ended, vital interrogation demands “a perpetual putting everything to the question without which we would sink back into the more or less crude platitudes of a self-satisfaction that does not think radically.” For Jaspers this became the basis for a new kind of “existential thinking” that required the individual to decide how to live in the wake of the death of God. Heidegger would likewise interpret Nietzsche’s proclamation of the death of God as an “event” that ushered in “the beginning of a new age,” the epoch of European nihilism whose historical significance can be discerned only through retracing the history of metaphysics.11 Yet before addressing the question of how Nietzsche came to be read as an “existentialist” in postwar Germany, we must first consider Nietzsche’s own interpretation of the death of God and the coming of nihilism—especially because it became so decisive in the work of Löwith, Jaspers, and Heidegger.

“The Death of God” and the Madman In 1882 Nietzsche published The Gay Science (Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft), an important text in the Nietzsche canon because the conclusion of this work is our first introduction to the figure of Zarathustra and the thought of eternal recurrence. It is also in this work (especially aphorism #125, “The Madman”),

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where Nietzsche announces for the first time that “God is dead.” Prominent Nietzsche commentator Wiebrecht Ries argues that this aphorism, quite apart from its literary-poetic character or its place within the history of atheistic doctrine, belongs to “the history of metaphysics.”12 Moreover, he claims, “the parable of the madman can be read as the central text of the philosophy of history of our century.”13 Nietzsche’s phrase “the death of God” is often cited but seldom understood. Nietzsche himself considered it to be a literal turning point in the history of the West, the doorway that would close off one epoch in the history of metaphysics and open another. It functioned for him as die Mitte (the center or middle) that mediates (vermittelt) the tension between the twilight of the gods as mere idols (Götzendämmerung) and the dawn (Morgenröte) of a new era of joyful godlessness. Given its centrality I offer a fuller reading of the madman text, which is reprinted here. THE MADMAN—Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the market place, and cried incessantly: “I seek God! I seek God!”—As many of those who did not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. Has he got lost? asked one. Did he lose his way like a child? asked another. Or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Has he gone on a voyage? emigrated?—Thus they yelled and laughed. The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. “Whither is God?” he cried; “I will tell you. We have killed him— you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. “How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What

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water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whoever is born after us—for the sake of this deed he will belong to a higher history than all history hitherto.” Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out. “I have come too early,” he said then; “my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard. This deed is still more distant from them than most distant stars—and yet they have done it themselves!”14 The language of this parable is unusual. It is one of the most dramatic pieces of writing in Nietzsche’s entire corpus. The text offers rich poetic im­ agery with allegorical allusions and it does so in a narrative voice that is difficult to identify. Who speaks here? And who is addressed? Who is the madman? What is their relation to Nietzsche? Questions abound—as they should, since persistent questioning marks the language of the text. All told, in an aphorism extending just over one page, thirty-one questions are posed. Given this predominantly interrogative mode of writing, it is hardly surprising that the voice of the narrator—and of the madman—are marked by an unrelenting ambiguity. Nothing remains certain except the fact that God is dead. Everything else can be questioned; everything else remains perplexing. Perhaps most perplexing of all is the identity of the narrator. He does not speak in the authoritative tone of the scientist or scholar who lays out propositions and assertions; instead, he speaks directly to his listeners in a familiar voice while employing the second-person plural in the German: “Habt ihr nicht . . . gehört? (“Have y’all not . . . heard?”) Much like the madman, his question makes both a claim and a demand upon his audience. As for the madman, he, too, walks a tightrope of ambiguity cloaked in allusion and mask. To understand what lies behind this mask, we must reflect on the young Nietzsche’s training as a classical philologist and on his reading of ancient history and philosophy. In the late 1860s, Nietzsche published three papers on the work of the ancient Greek historian of philosophy Diogenes Laertius

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(second–third century CE), who authored Lives of Eminent Philosophers.15 Another prominent concern of the young Nietzsche was the work of the Greek Cynics, especially the thought of Diogenes of Sinope (ca. 400–323 BCE). In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche alludes to the story told by Diogenes Laertius about a bystander who asked Plato: “What sort of man do you consider Diogenes to be?” Plato replied: “A Socrates gone mad.”16 This is the same Diogenes who in the Lives is described as having “lit a lantern in broad daylight and said: ‘I seek man’ [anthropon zeto].” In “The Wanderer and His Shadow,” composed less than two years before the madman parable, Nietzsche writes: “The modern Diogenes—before one seeks man one must have found the lantern. Will it have to be the lantern of the Cynic?”17 The parallels between Nietzsche’s madman and Diogenes of Sinope are thus unmistakable. But we still need to pursue the question of why Nietzsche chose as his madman a modern Diogenes to light a lantern in broad daylight in order to seek God. One characteristic of the Cynics was to philosophize in the agora, the marketplace, the site of economic activity where things of value were exchanged. As the crossroads between convention itself (nomos) and the practices of the household (oikos), the marketplace served as the bastion of economic values, the place where values themselves were established and contested. Diogenes Laertius related the story of how the young Diogenes devalued the established coinage (nomisma) of Sinope by counterfeiting it and was then sent into exile. However, the original Greek phrase he uses, to nomisma, can also be translated as “established custom, opinion or belief ” and is etymologically related to nomisis, which designates “belief about the deity.”18 Diogenes was known in antiquity as a philosopher skilled in the art of subversion, a thinker who would provoke established opinion by challenging its underlying presuppositions. A “homeless exile” and “wanderer” (Diogenes Laertius VI, 38), Diogenes considered himself a kosmopolites ( a “cosmopolitan” man or “citizen of the world”) (VI, 63), someone at home in the cosmos— that is, never at home in the world of convention or nomos but only in the realm of physis, what Nietzsche would later term “will to power.” As a philosopher who prized freedom of thinking above all else, Diogenes was not afraid of scandalizing the public marketplace and engaged in shameful behavior as a way of radically provoking others. This art of shamelessness (anaideia), of extending and violating the shibboleths of the marketplace by outrageous and sometimes lewd behavior, served as a way of countering the abstractions of Platonic theory and morality by literally embodying the animal ­dimension in human being.19 Nietzsche’s Gay Science takes up Diogenes’s embodied

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wisdom by embracing the corporeal philosophy of the “free spirit” (Diogenesian autarchy), the “wanderer” and “good European” (kosmopolites) who, like Diogenes, is bent on “reversing the currently respected values in all realms of human activity” to the point of “shamelessness.”20 Nietzsche’s Diogenesian madman brings his lantern into the marketplace in broad daylight not “to seek man” but to seek a God who has fled, a deus absconditus. In reversing Diogenes’s search, however, Nietzsche’s madman ironically points back to his predecessor’s original search in that his own pursuit of a lost God leads him to reprise Diogenes’s pursuit of authentic human existence. But again the narrative logic of the search draws on the historical example of Diogenes and his attempts to counterfeit the currency of Sinope. On this reading, the proclamation “God is dead” can be interpreted as an announcement that the theological-metaphysical currency of Western culture is counterfeit. The gold standard has lost its value; the moneylenders who ply their trade in the marketplace have been unmasked as forgers. And who is responsible for this devaluation of the highest values? None other than “you and I,” the madman declares. What is at stake here in Nietzsche’s parable is a terrible will to truth that refuses to accept the false coinage of the Christian realm, an earnest and profoundly serious will that takes on the mantle of the Cynic’s sharp wit. Here the madman adopts an ambiguous tone that provokes laughter and ridicule even as it turns such comic laughter against its listeners, implicating them in the very scandal from which their aloof derision seeks to insulate them. Against the backdrop of Cynicism, we can see how the madman’s announcement of God’s death has less to do with atheism or the argument about the existence of God than it does with the existential concerns of the human being. Nietzsche makes this all too clear in a late aphorism from The Gay Science: Insofar as we reject Christian interpretation and condemn its “meaning” as counterfeit [Falschmünzerei], what comes at us immediately in a terrifying way is the Schopenhaueran question: Does existence have any meaning at all? A few centuries will be needed before this question can ever be heard completely and in its full depth.21 In his book On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche links the counterfeiting of the highest values with the “History of European Nihilism” against which he undertakes an “Attempt at a Transvaluation of All Values”:

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Everywhere else where spirit today is at work in a rigorous, powerful way without any counterfeiting, it now completely lacks an ideal—the popular expression for this abstinence is “atheism”—except for its will to truth. . . . All great things bring about their own demise through an act of self-annulment: that is the law of life, the law of necessary “selfovercoming” in the essence of life . . . . In this way, Christianity as a dogma perished on its own morality; in the same way Christianity as morality must also now perish—we stand on the threshold of this event [Ereignis].”22 Against this background we can now read The Gay Science aphorism #125 as a recuperation of Diogenesian parody and satire that comes together as a polemic against the canons of Christian morality that dominate the West. Much as Diogenes donned the mask of a “mad Socrates” to caricature what he saw to be the madness of Plato’s philosophy, Nietzsche apes the madman in order to expose the madness not only of Christian morality but also of the Enlightenment atheism that imagines itself to be free of the superstitions of Christian belief. By pushing this madness to its limits, Diogenes sought to devalue the otherworldly values of Plato and revalue the world of physis. In attempting such a revaluation Diogenes situated himself at the threshold of an epochal transformation—the death of the tragic, pre-Socratic world and the birth of Platonic-Christian metaphysics. As he brings forth his lantern into the light of the bright morning sun, Nietzsche’s madman positions himself at the threshold of another epochal transvaluation: a break with Christian morality and the affirmation of a Dionysian will to life that seeks to justify all that is. In the spirit of honoring the importance of the threshold for his proposed transvaluation of all values, Nietzsche entitles book IV of The Gay Science “Sanctus Januarius”—a tribute to the Roman deity Janus, god of doors, entrances, and thresholds.23 At the threshold of his epoch, Nietzsche seeks to pronounce a cosmodicy that justifies (dike) all that is, one that overthrows the traditional Christian-Leibnizian theodicy with God at its center. Yet once he proclaims the death of God, the madman realizes “I come too early . . . my time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way.” To effect the transvaluation will require time. Searching alone will not suffice. Rather, the very tradition of searching itself must be reversed. In the Republic (618c) Plato embarks upon a “search” for justice that ­becomes paradigmatic for Western thought. The Greek zetesis can mean “seeking” or “searching for” but also “inquiry, investigation, especially of a

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philosophic nature” as well as “a judicial inquiry.”24 By bringing a lantern to the midday agora in search of “man,” Diogenes was both mocking Platonic zetesis as well as initiating a radically zetetic gesture of his own by way of a reversal. In searching for God, Nietzsche’s lantern-carrying madman transforms Diogenes’ search and upends the whole tradition of Platonic zetesis that has shaped the discipline of philosophy in the West—namely, a search for justice as the highest virtue of the soul in accord with the transcendent Idea. Moreover, like Diogenes, he challenges the Platonic claim that “the only valid currency (nomisma) for which things should be exchanged is wisdom” that functions as “true virtue” (Phaedo 69a-b). As Diogenes’s strategy of counterfeiting undermines and devalues the Platonic currency of the highest values, so too does Nietzsche’s. In effect, the madman’s search for a dead God forces the complacent bystanders to confront “the whole counterfeiting [Falschmünzerei] of transcendence and the beyond.”25 Hence Nietzsche can declare: “My philosophy [is] an inverted Platonism.”26 The madman’s search, like that of Diogenes, is not simply a call for discovery or for knowledge; it is also an inquiry that insists “all things are at risk”: A new degree of culture would in a moment throw the whole system of human pursuits into an upheaval. Now if such thinkers are dangerous it is of course clear why our academic thinkers are harmless. . . . They inspire no terror, they unhinge nothing at all; and of all their bustle and endeavoring one could raise the same objection as Diogenes when someone praised the philosopher to him: “How can he be considered great since he has been a philosopher so long and has never yet disturbed anyone?” Indeed, that ought to be the epitaph of all university philosophy: “It never disturbed anyone.”27 What the madman risks in proclaiming the death of God, besides the mockery and derision of the “enlightened” bystanders, is the validity of the highest currency in the marketplace. This Diogenes redux brings his lantern to shed light on the scandal of Enlightenment itself. With a Cynic’s ear for parody he alludes to the Western table of values and the validity of its currency: the sea—which stands for the infinitude of God; the horizon—which serves as the limit to human knowledge and the boundary of the knowable world; and the sun—whose place in Platonic philosophy (as the symbol of the Good) and in Ptolemaic astronomy (as the center of the cosmos) shaped both Western philosophy and science.

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But the madman finds that this conventional currency is counterfeit; its metaphysics posits a “true” world that is naught but a “fable” and its ethics underwrites values that prove injurious to life. Hence, whereas bystanders can laugh and congratulate themselves for not believing in God, the madman cannot proceed so easily. He recognizes through his own anti-Platonic zetesis that these bystanders have not yet grasped the nihilistic consequences of the death of God—that, without the Platonic Sun guiding its moral solar system, they now face a “long, dense succession of demolition, destruction, downfall, upheaval that now stands ahead.” The center collapses, “the aim is lacking; ‘why’ finds no answer.” From the optic of this nihilistic vision we discover that “since Copernicus the human being has been rolling from the center toward X.”28 Despite their entrenched and conventional atheism, the “event” of the death of God “has not yet reached the ears” of the bystanders. The “deed” of deicide “is still more remote to them than the remotest stars—and yet they have done it themselves!” In offering his funeral oration for the slain deity, the madman counters the Platonic legacy of metaphysics with the Diogenesian tradition of satire. But he also draws on another anti-Platonist from antiquity, the Greek historian Thucydides. One of the high points of Thucydides’s monumental History of the Peloponnesian War is the view of Athens laid out by Pericles in his “Funeral Oration” in Book Two. There Pericles proudly declares that one of the fundamental tenets of the greatness of Athens is that its citizens “keep to the law”: “we obey the laws themselves, especially those . . . unwritten laws which it is an acknowledged shame to break.”29 In embracing nomos (law, convention) as the heart of the Athenian polis, Pericles idealizes what he takes to be the source of Athenian values. Yet master ironist that he is, Thucydides undermines this vision by following it immediately with a discussion of the plague (physis) that clinically describes the breakdown of civic law and “the beginnings of a state of unprecedented lawlessness [anomia].” Following this Thucydidean insight into the power of physis over convention-driven nomos, Nietzsche delivers a funeral oration for God that deems all conventional values (nomoi) as counterfeit currency (nomisma). For him, the dead God—like a counterfeit coin—simply no longer has any power to sustain its value. As the murderers of all murderers, how do we face up to our deed? “How does such a one console himself? How does he purify himself? Must he himself not become the most powerful and holiest of poets?”30 The task posed by the Diogenesian lantern bearer exceeds the limits of idealized convention. We must first be just to all things, affirming the justice

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of what physis brings with a Thucydidean-Cynical intensity that allows us to embrace what fate and chance (tyche) provide. Nietzsche coined a phrase for this most Thucydidean affirmation of physis: he called it amor fati (“love of fate”).31 Only that individual who can accept this love will be in a position to create new values that overturn the counterfeit metaphysics of the beyond. This is the genuine goal of the Diogenesian search for “man”: for a poet-creator who can not only overturn conventional values but also transform them via “a transvaluation of all values.” Hence it is hardly surprising to discover that, in his original draft of the madman parable, it was Zarathustra who served as the lantern-bearer: “One day Zarathustra lit a lantern in the bright morning, ran around the marketplace and cried: “I seek God! I seek God!”32 It is at this juncture in the history of the West that the madman/Diogenes/ Zarathustra proclaim an end to the ontological frame of a world that threatens to break asunder. “God is dead”—not merely the traditional God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob but also Pascal’s “God of the philosophers,” the God who functioned as the axiological center of Western values.33 Given this terrifying void in the cosmos, how are we to carry on? We can no longer escape the remorselessness of our situation: “Nihilism stands at the door.” How are we to react to this epochal event? The significance of this Nietzschean diagnosis and demand upon Western thought was profound. Philosophy itself would be turned on its head, and the conventional frame of philosophical questioning would be assaulted with renewed fervor. Now epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, and axiology would be rethought as questions about the meaning of human existence. With Diogenes’s candor and wit, Nietzsche would bring his lantern into the marketplace of philosophical exchange and initiate a zetetic search for der Übermensch. In Nietzsche’s scheme, der Übermensch designates that singular figure capable of initiating a transvaluation of all values, of shifting across (über) the divide between one epoch of theistic metaphysics and another of Dionysian affirmation and amor fati. To find this man, Nietzsche claims, one must become “the modern Diogenes.”34 Hence, he wrote in Ecce Homo that “cynicism [is] the highest thing that can be obtained on earth” and to Georg Brandes that Ecce Homo presents a “cynicism that will become world-historical.”35 All too often, the meaning of the death of God has been read in terms of the history of atheism or as a cultural critique of European bourgeois morality. Yet a closer look at the Cynical roots of Nietzsche’s madman parable show us how deeply committed Nietzsche was to understanding the cosmos in terms of the power of physis itself as that which grants justice to all that

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lives in terms of its strength and weakness, its creativity and decadence. This is what is truly at stake in Nietzsche’s landmark project of a “transvaluation of all values” that favored naked will to power (physis) over cultural convention (nomos) as the genuine expression of life force. In his madman parable that “splits the history of humanity into two parts,” Nietzsche became the “destiny” he professed himself to be. The effect of that destiny would shape the way his philosophical legacy would be reconstructed in the years after the Great War, as he became the “philosopher of existence” who determined the philosophical situation of modernity.

Karl Löwith: Nietzsche As Anthropological Existentialist Karl Löwith (1897-1973) was a young gymnasium student in Munich when he encountered Nietzsche for the first time. Caught up in the excitement of his generation, he read Thus Spoke Zarathustra as a call for authentic existence and as a “lure for the life of danger.”36 This Nietzschean longing for authentic existence led Löwith to abandon his comfortable bourgeois life and volunteer as an infantryman in the Great War, which he saw as “an opportunity to live and die more intensely.” Löwith returned from the war, received a military honor for having been wounded, studied at Freiburg with Heidegger, and then moved to Munich, where he wrote his doctoral dissertation on Nietzsche. With the National Socialist takeover in 1933, Löwith’s position as a lecturer in Marburg was threatened and so he emigrated to Rome in 1934 on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship. It was these experiences as a war veteran and as a Jewish émigré that helped to shape his decisive work from 1935, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same. Forced out of his position as a Marburg Privatdozent on racial grounds, Löwith was lucky to find a German publisher. Soon thereafter all Jewish scholars were prohibited from publishing by order of Das Amt Rosenberg, the Nazi commission on cultural affairs. Given this repressive political climate, it is hardly surprising that Löwith’s book fell on deaf ears in Germany when originally published. When Löwith finally returned to Germany in 1953 (after years of exile in Italy, Japan, and the United States), he arranged with Kohlhammer in Stuttgart to print a second edition (1956) that explicitly addressed the political implications that had been disguised in the original work. Löwith’s portrait of Nietzsche emerged as a critique of the reigning Nietzschebild in Weimar: of Nietzsche as a cultural prophet (Oswald Spengler,

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Ernst Bertram, Rudolph Pannwitz) or mystical aesthete (Stefan George, Friedrich Gundolf, Kurt Hildebrandt). But it also challenged the vision of Nietzsche as a “heroic nihilist” and martial philosopher of racial self-assertion that was put forward by the Nazi ideologue Alfred Baeumler, one of the most significant Nietzsche commentators of the 1930s. Besides his popular book Nietzsche: Philosoph und Politiker (1931), Baeumler edited two separate versions of Nietzsche’s Werke and two collections of aphorisms, and he also served on the advisory board of the Nietzsche Commission that was planning the definitive scholarly edition of Nietzsche’s Nachlass. Baeumler stressed that Nietzsche had often been misinterpreted—largely due to the way his work was organized and edited—and that only by a thoroughgoing revision of the Nachlass could Nietzsche’s genuine message be uncovered. Baeumler found this message in the political dimension of Nietzsche’s doctrine of will to power, which for Baeumler heralded a Nordic-masculineheroic form of racial dominion. On the basis of Nietzsche’s philosophy of will, which Baeumler redefined as a “philosophy of politics,” he attempted to rethink will to power in explicitly statist terms and “to ground the state in race.”37 This political reading of will to power convinced Baeumler that the thought of eternal recurrence “is without importance for Nietzsche’s system . . . and has no connection to the fundamental thought of will to power.”38 Against Baeumler’s crudely political reading based on questionable editorial practices, Löwith’s Nietzsche’s Philosophy set out to offer an interpretation that challenges not only the skewed ideological excesses of Baeumler’s work but also its one-sided endorsement of will to power as the essence of Nietzsche’s corpus.39 Whereas Baeumler joined in the generational cliché claiming that “Nietzsche has never been a mere theoretician, but is always an ‘existential thinker,’” Löwith sought to focus precisely on the question of existence in Nietzsche’s work.40 In doing so, he underscored that “the teaching of eternal recurrence”—and not will to power—“is the core of Nietzsche’s whole philosophy.” For Löwith, Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence functions as an existential imperative. It forces us to confront the meaninglessness and goallessness of existence and to affirm existence in spite of its nihilistic character. Adopting such a comportment enables us to say, with Zarathustra: “Was that—life? For Zarathustra’s sake, very well then! Once more!”41 In this sense it serves as an existential injunction to will the world as an eternally selfwilling will to power, whereby the self ’s will comes to affirm the very order of being itself. Such a will commands us through its own “categorical

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i­mperative: live in every moment so that you could will that moment back again over and over.”42 As such, it functions as Nietzsche’s most powerful response to the death of God and its resulting nihilism: “Let us think this thought in its most terrible form: existence as it is, without meaning or aim, yet recurring inevitably without any finale of nothingness: ‘the eternal recurrence.’ This is the most extreme form of nihilism: the nothing (the “meaningless”), eternally.”43 It is here, in the existential confrontation with the nihilism of modernity, that Löwith finds the most powerful challenge to Baeumler’s Nazified interpretation. Because Baeumler read will to power as a heroic “will to battle” and with an eye toward racial selection and dominion, he missed the genuinely existential meaning of Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence. His singular attention on the Volk and the hero gave him little appreciation for the tragic dimension of Nietzsche’s thinking. But Löwith sees in the notion of amor fati a will that wills what must be. In affirming the necessity of physis and its cosmic order, the human being overcomes its own arbitrary and contingent existence. This yea-saying dimension of existence offers a way into what Löwith terms Nietzsche’s “experimental philosophy.”44 Yet Löwith argues that the great symbols of this yea saying—Dionysus and eternal recurrence—are both riddled with deep ambiguity. For Löwith, the thought of eternal recurrence harbors within itself a fundamental contradiction. On the one hand, it teaches that there can be meaning for human existence if we will the eternal cycle of being. On the other, “it also teaches the exact opposite: a revolving of the natural world in itself, a revolving that is just as selfless as it is goalless, and that includes human life. The cosmic meaning clashes with the anthropological meaning, so that the one contradicts the other.”45 Yet this inner conflict between the cosmological and anthropological implications of eternal recurrence reveals for Löwith a twofold conflict marked by self-contradiction, one that extends beyond Nietzsche to the history of the West: the conflict between Greek philosophy and Christian theology. Nietzsche founders on the thought of eternal recurrence, Löwith argues, because he attempts to reconcile the morally indifferent accidents of generation and destruction in Anaximander’s cosmos with an anthropological doctrine of willing necessity that serves only as an ersatz form of Christian morality. In other words, Nietzsche’s attempt to resurrect the ancient Heraclitean notion of eternal return proved unworkable because it betrayed its pagan roots for a neo-Christian/Kantian form of ethics that depended on

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human decision making and responsibility. Hence, for Löwith, Nietzsche shows himself to be wholly un-Greek and deeply committed to a secularized form of Christian eschatology that masks itself in the garb of neopaganism. So even as he sought to retrieve antiquity, Nietzsche remained caught in a Christian form of modern nihilism. To buttress his critique, Löwith points to a number of contradictions: Zarathustra is a mere countergospel; Nietzsche poses as an Antichrist; Dionysian affirmation remains “essentially Christian by being anti-Christian”; and the purported “transvaluation of all values” reenacts the early Christian revolt against antiquity’s highest values. Nietzsche’s whole philosophy “was so thoroughly Christian and modern that only one thing preoccupied him: the thought of the future and the will to create it.” Moreover, Nietzsche’s emphasis on the priority of the future, and on the need for wil­ ling it, indicated a radically modern understanding of Christian temporality and metaphysics. No Greek was concerned with man’s distant future. . . . The Greeks felt awe and reverence for faith; Nietzsche makes the superhuman effort to will and to love it. Thus he was unable to develop his vision as a supreme and objective order, as the Greeks did, but introduced it as a subjective ethical imperative. The theory of eternal recurrence becomes with him a practical device and a “hammer,” to pound into man the idea of an absolute responsibility, substituting that sense of responsibility that was alive as long as men lived in the presence of God and the expectation of the last judgment.46 In the end, Löwith claims, the experience of the death of God and its resulting nihilism proved too much for Nietzsche. Try as he might, his liberation from nihilism—namely, as the willing of eternal recurrence—had a deeper connection to Kant’s ethics than to Anaximander’s physis. Eternal recurrence proved nothing more than “an ersatz form of religion from the standpoint of atheism.”47 It attempted to compensate for the loss of Christian belief in immortality by granting meaning to the will’s own subjective decision making, thus undermining the Heraclitean notion of a will-less cosmos whose workings exceeded human volition. If he sought to become a Heraclitean prophet or “the last disciple of Dionysus,” he failed; in truth, the reality of Nietzsche’s bourgeois, all too bourgeois, existence was far less “dangerous.” Nietzsche revealed himself to be nothing less than “a fateful,

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theologically-burdened, classical Über-philologist” who expressed the historical contradictions of his own world.48 Despite his criticisms, Löwith revealed to his contemporaries a “new” Nietzsche, one who was more than a poet, aesthete, prophet, or mystagogue. Löwith read Nietzsche, rather, as “the philosopher of our time who is as much timely as untimely,” “a European fate” who grappled with the fundamental existential question of modernity: “what meaning does human existence have in the whole of being?”49 The deeper meaning of Nietzsche’s work for Löwith was to confront the “event” of God’s death as the shadow of nihilism that was cast on European culture. Unlike any of his contemporaries, Nietzsche posed the question of the meaning of this event not merely as a cosmological occurrence, within a “supreme and objective order” of the world, but as an anthropological challenge that constituted an “ethical imperative” for the human being to redeem its own existence here and now. What distinguished Löwith’s approach was to focus on this challenge as a call for existential meaning and to craft such meaning in the confrontation between the human being and a world without God. Löwith’s anthropological existentialism would be decisive for a whole generation of Nietzsche readers even as it offered them an alternative to the existential reading of Nietzsche advocated by Karl Jaspers.

Karl Jaspers: Nietzsche As Transcendental Existentialist Perhaps no one has played as significant a role in shaping the “existential” interpretation of Nietzsche as Jaspers. As early as 1931 Jaspers claimed that “Nietzsche took the road towards existence-philosophy,” and in Reason and Existence (1935) Jaspers came to see Nietzsche’s thinking as “the condition of authentic Existenz” that reflects the turbulence of the modern age and its loss of faith in foundations, a form of “modernity somersaulting over itself.”50 In his extended study Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophizing (1936), Jaspers interpreted Nietzsche through the lens of his own existential concerns, foremost among which was the understanding of existence as an experience of freedom marked by the limit-situations of suffering, guilt, and death. By genuinely experiencing the finitude of existence we come to understand our own historicity, which stands in immediate relation to our striving for transcendence—what Jaspers terms “the encompassing” (das Umgreifende).

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It is this paradoxical tension between the limits of our factical existence in the world and our striving for the indeterminable transcendence of the encompassing that defines our existential situation. Like Levinas, Jaspers re­ jected any notion of a closed Hegelian system that can be understood as a metaphysical totality. Instead, he pointed toward the notion of infinite being that transcends our limits and discloses that which is beyond us—that which can never be directly known but only read through “ciphers,” signs, or symbols that allow transcendence to be recognized even if it eludes our grasp. These ciphers can take the form of existential experience in our encounters with nature (standing on a mountain top), art (Caspar David Friedrich’s apocalyptic “Monk by the Sea”), myth (Odysseus’s journeys), or religion (mystery of divine incarnation) or in confronting our own death. It is in terms of these existential themes that Jaspers turned to Nietzsche. For Jaspers, to genuinely exist meant to open ourselves to transcendence, to trace the ciphers of the encompassing that go beyond the immanence of the world we inhabit. As a way of grasping existence in its most authentic form, Jaspers focused on the Nietzschean notion of the “death of God” as a way of coming to terms with the nihilism of modernity. Not only is the death of God a “frightful event” that helps to crystallize Nietzsche’s thinking, but in Jaspers’s view it is also the governing impulse in that thinking, “the principle of principles—the one to which all the others are subservient.”51 As part of his exploration he cited Nietzsche’s comment from The Will to Power: “The time has come when we have to pay for having been Christians for two thousand years: we are losing the stabilizing force by virtue of which we lived; we are lost for a while. . . . Now everything is false through and through.”52 In the wake of God’s death, all values lose their anchor and the center collapses. Yet for Jaspers the nihilism that results from this collapse has a positive significance: it calls into question all metaphysical systems of totality, universality, and timeless validity. Instead, a new sense of existential historicity emerges, one that forces the individual to confront the depths of temporal being as having no validity in itself and that also demands “the possibility of decision” in the face of existential uncertainty.53 In a world where “nothing is true and everything is permitted,” where ambiguity reigns and nihilism stands at the door, Jaspers finds in Nietzsche the possibilities for transcendence that affirm human freedom. On Jaspers’s reading, then, we need to understand Nietzsche’s godlessness as “the increasing agitation of the search for God that perhaps no longer understands itself.” In other words, despite all appearances that Nietzsche

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rejects the God of the metaphysical tradition, “even there Nietzsche maintains a remarkable proximity to Christianity.” Thus Jaspers claimed that, “in spite of Nietzsche’s attempt to avoid transcendence by rejecting belief in God and substituting for it pure this-worldliness, in reality he is constantly impelled towards transcendence.” It is this underlying impulse toward transcendence that shapes Jaspers’s overall interpretation of Nietzsche’s work. Throughout his 1936 study Jaspers repeatedly emphasized the centrality of transcendence in Nietzsche’s thinking. He read Nietzsche’s ideal of the Übermensch, his doctrines of eternal recurrence and will to power, and his unrelenting affirmation of life and this-worldliness all as “substitutes for transcendence”—substitutes, however, that ultimately fail. Jaspers asserted that the doctrine of eternal recurrence, then, “is first of all a means for expressing fundamental existential experiences,” a kind of theodicy of existence that constitutes a “new ethical imperative.” But whereas Kant’s categorical imperative strove for universal validity, Nietzsche’s ethical imperative strove for a radi­cally individualist affirmation of experience in the moment. In this sense, Jaspers argued, Nietzsche “came to regard being thrown back upon one’s own historicity in the Dasein of this moment as the ground of the truth of Existenz.”54 Nietzsche’s thought experiment failed, according to Jaspers, because it “never truly relates to determinate, individual being within the world” but instead aims at transcendence itself. This reading of Nietzsche focused less on specific doctrines and their significance within a Nietzschean “system” than on developing a new understanding of Nietzsche’s “philosophizing” as a way to open up endless possibilities for thought. It is this “openness” to being and the affirmation of the path of thinking that Jaspers found as the existential challenge of Nietzsche’s work: “the meaning of Nietzsche’s thinking cannot lie in any fixed positions, only in the communication of movement, which opens ways to press onward. In other words, the meaning of his thinking lies more in the way it is received than in its objective content.” Jaspers concluded that “what is required of those who would penetrate Nietzsche’s thought is an authentically trustworthy inner voice” that demands an extraordinary freedom. In the end, “everything is up to us. The truth is only that which Nietzsche brings forth from out of ourselves.”55 Jaspers’s contributions from the 1930s—The Spiritual Situation of the Age (1931), Reason and Existence (1935), and Nietzsche (1936)—succeeded in establishing the philosophical basis for Nietzsche’s axial status, along with Kierkegaard, as one of the founders of existentialism. By foregrounding freedom, decision, and self-determination as ways of confronting nihilism and by

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underscoring the significance of limit-situations such as despair for achieving authentic existence, Jaspers came to define Nietzsche’s position within the existential canon. Hence, despite the “shipwreck” of Nietzsche’s life—its constant confrontation with illness, suffering, madness, and ultimately death— Jaspers found indications in it of a striving for transcendence given that, in his logic, “the non-being that reveals itself in shipwreck is the being of transcendence.”56 For Jaspers, then, Nietzsche’s genuine philosophical striving must be grasped as a yearning for transcendence, insofar as “where thinking does not transcend, there is no philosophy.” Jaspers’s coupling of existential despair and philosophical transcendence had a decisive impact on how Nietzsche would be received in the years after World War II. Often overlooked, however, is the decidedly political aspect of this interpretation in its original, 1936 form. In light of the Nazi occupation, Jaspers (whose wife was Jewish and who lived under the constant threat of being sent to a concentration camp) viewed his Nietzsche book as a call for transcendence against the limit-situation of despair in the face of his imminent deportation and extermination. In the preface to the book’s 1946 edition, Jaspers explicitly states that his work was “intended to marshal against the National Socialists the world of thought of the man whom they proclaimed as their own philosopher.”57 Still, Jaspers’s vision of Nietzsche as the existential philosopher of transcendence did not pass without criticism. Karl Löwith argued that Jaspers had missed Nietzsche’s essential meaning of the death of God and its consequences by twisting Nietzsche’s thought toward transcendence while ignoring the radically immanent world of Nietzschean will to power. Moreover, by interpreting the doctrine of eternal recurrence as a mere “cipher” of transcendence, rather than as an affirmation of an “original and final will to the ‘ring of the world’—in opposition to Christian transcendence,” Jaspers had “totally relativized” Nietzsche’s thought.58 Ultimately, Löwith claimed, by projecting onto Nietzsche’s thought a Kantian metaphysics that organized all being into a tripartite scheme of “God-Man-World,” Jaspers had transformed Nietzsche into an epigone of bourgeois Christian conformity. As a result, “what is explosive in Nietzsche’s philosophy exhausts itself in Jaspers . . . and is robbed of its historical impact.” Because Jaspers committed himself to the notion that genuine philosophizing is possible only in the space of “interiority”—the Weberian realm of Puritan conscience and vocation—he wound up reading Nietzsche in terms of the bourgeois “ethic of responsibility” that prizes most

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highly an intellectual and spiritual “duty to truth,” as Jaspers put it in Nietzsche and Christianity.59 Perhaps the most devastating critique of Jaspers’s work came from Heidegger in his Nietzsche lectures of 1940. There Heidegger criticizes Jaspers for “‘relativizing’ Nietzsche’s decisive insights,” which he claims are not mere “personal opinions, but rather necessities of Western metaphysics.”60 Heidegger goes on to fault Jaspers for failing to understand the significance of eternal recurrence for Nietzsche’s thought and especially for avoiding the question of its essential relation to the notion of will to power. Because Jaspers approaches Nietzsche from an “existential subjectivism with a theological-Christian gloss, he neither recognizes nor prepares a decision concerning Nietzsche himself within the history of the truth of being.” Instead, Jaspers offers only a “moralizing psychology of human existence.”61 Heidegger’s final judgment on Jaspers’s interpretation of Nietzsche is both laconic and brutal: “The fundamental fault of K. Jaspers’ Nietzsche is that he would write such a book at all.”

Martin Heidegger: Nietzsche Within the History of Being Only months after Jaspers’s book appeared in 1936, Heidegger began a series of lectures on Nietzsche at the University of Freiburg that would, over the next eight years, redefine the very terms and questions of Nietzsche interpretation in the twentieth century.62 Heidegger’s approach, like that of both Jaspers and Löwith, acknowledged the centrality of the madman parable for understanding Nietzsche’s entire project. But whereas those two continued to focus on the death of God as initiating a crisis of nihilism and a call for a transvaluation of all values, Heidegger went beyond them to read Nietzsche as a thinker who belonged within the history of Western metaphysics as its “end.” As early as 1932 Heidegger had maintained that “Nietzsche has not been understood even today. His fate is the fundamental happening of our history.”63 On Heidegger’s reading, Nietzsche would become a key figure in both narrating and negotiating “the history of metaphysics [as] the essential ground of all history.” Hence, Heidegger’s analysis focused not only on the historical significance of Nietzsche for Western metaphysics but, more critically, on his metaphysical significance for Western history. In other words, Heidegger was interested in more than a mere revision of Nietzsche’s

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position within German academic philosophy; he sought an understanding of modern Germany’s significance within the history of the West that was based on a metaphysical interpretation of Nietzsche. As he put it in his 1939 lecture, “The Will to Power as Knowledge”: Nietzsche . . . is the last metaphysician of the West. The age whose consummation unfolds in his thought, the modern age, is a final age. This means an age in which at some point and in some way the historical decision arises as to whether this final age is the conclusion of Western history or the counterpart to an other beginning. To go the length of Nietzsche’s path of thinking to the will to power means to catch sight of this historical decision.64 Perhaps none of Heidegger’s Nietzsche lectures expressed the meaning of this “historical decision” as powerfully as “Nietzsche’s Word: God is Dead” (1943). The “Nietzsche’s Word” essay reshaped the focus of Jaspers, Löwith, and their generation on questions of “existential subjectivism” while interpreting Nietzsche within an ontological narrative about the history of the West. In Heidegger’s view, the madman’s pronouncement of the death of God is less “an opinion of Nietzsche” or a “personal attitude” about atheism than a word that “speaks of the destiny (Geschick) of two millennia of Western history.”65 This word signifies more than the end of the Christian deity’s “effective power”; it also points to the loss of belief in the suprasensory world of Platonic ideas that founded Western ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. In this sense, the death of God needs to be understood both as an ontological and a theological event; it expresses the failure and collapse of the reigning center of both Platonic metaphysics (the Ideas as the truest beings) and Paulist morality (God as ultimate moral arbiter). In thus reading the history of the West “ontotheologically,” Heidegger came to identify nihilism as nothing less than “the fundamental movement of the history of the West,” since each epoch of Western history after Plato had brought about the self-devaluation of the highest values. Heidegger’s history of nihilism traced this collapse of the authority of God and the attempts at establishing new “authorities”: in conscience (Luther), reason (Kant), progress (Condorcet), happiness (Mill), civilization (Schweitzer/worldview philosophy), and creativity (bourgeois aesthetics)—even if, on Heidegger’s reading, “creativity ultimately passes over into a business enterprise” that is appropriated by the metaphysics of the technological age.

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Drawing on Nietzsche’s analysis of nihilism as the cultural crisis of modernity, Heidegger shifted ground and read it in terms of an overarching history of being with roots in ancient Greece. Like Nietzsche, Heidegger found in the earliest thinkers of the tradition—especially Anaximander and Heraclitus—the source for a profound transformation and deconstruction of the project of modernity. In Nietzsche’s attempt to overturn Platonism and the metaphysics of the “true world,” Heidegger found the outlines for a way of conceiving Western history as the history of being. For Plato, genuine being is something constant and permanent: the suprasensory world of the immutable Forms. Yet in so considering being as a permanent presence—as that which eternally undergirds the appearance in the true world of the supersensuous sun—Plato privileged unhiddenness over hiddenness. Plato thereby neglected the originary pre-Socratic insight into the essence of truth as aletheia: the constant play/struggle between concealment (lethe) and its other (a), unconcealment. By forgetting the first beginning of Greek philosophy, Plato initiated a long history of metaphysical oblivion that cast its shadow over Western thought—a beginning, Heidegger claimed, that “is the hidden source of the destiny [Geschick] of the West. Had this beginning not safeguarded [verwahrte] what has been . . . the being of beings would not now hold sway from the essence of modern technology.”66 Heidegger’s overarching history of being owes much to Nietzsche’s insight into the anti-metaphysical initiatives of pre-Socratic thought and culture. Much more powerfully than either Jaspers or Löwith, Heidegger saw in the pre-Socratics not only a forgotten arche for Western metaphysics but also a source for leaping ahead to an “other” beginning for the West. Following Nietzsche, Heidegger thought that this commencement could serve as a source of “recovery from” (Verwindung) Western metaphysics, whose remission might be enabled by retrieving the concealed possibilities that remain dormant in the first beginning. Indeed, Heidegger’s notorious commitment to National Socialism needs to be read within and against this Nietzschean commitment to the early Greeks. As he began the Nietzsche lectures in 1936, Heidegger sought to work through the guiding question of Western metaphysics—the question of being—by confronting Nietzsche’s thought as a guide to questioning itself. At this time Heidegger was still committed to his belief in National Socialism as Germany’s best hope for a way out of the nihilism of modern technology. After 1938, however, Heidegger underwent a shift in thinking and broke with the institutional forms of National Socialist thought, even relying on

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Nietzsche as a guide for this break.67 By 1940, however, Heidegger began to see Nietzsche as merely a forerunner of the fallen and inessential versions of National Socialism: ones that had succumbed to the metaphysics of will to power and technological dominion over the earth. As a result, Nietzsche was transformed from a primordial Greek thinker who vehemently opposed Romanism (the ruthless and calculative metaphysics of will, dominion, and technological control) to one who is utterly un-Greek and wholly Roman. In his 1940 lectures on “European Nihilism,” Heidegger read Nietzsche as a Roman thinker whose “metaphysics of will to power conforms only to Roman culture and Machiavelli’s The Prince.”68 Heidegger eventually held that, despite Nietzsche’s claims to having “inverted Platonism” and opposed metaphysics, he remained deeply entangled in the very metaphysics he opposed. By continuing to foster a philosophy grounded in will to power as the positing of new values that will initiate a transvaluation of all values, Nietzsche remained captive to the metaphysics of subjectivity that he sought to overcome. In “The Word of Nietzsche,” Heidegger put it this way: “as a mere countermovement, [Nietzsche’s philosophy] necessarily remains—as does everything ‘anti-’—held fast in the essence of that over against which it moves.” In other words, in spite of Nietzsche’s assertion that “my philosophy is inverted Platonism,” Heidegger interpreted that philosophy as the final culmination of Platonism, a Platonism that refused to recognize itself as caught within the self-same metaphysics of presence that shaped Western thought.69 For Heidegger, then, Plato and Nietzsche came to serve as the beginning and end of Western metaphysics. Yet as “the last metaphysician” Nietzsche points to a “historical decision . . . as to whether this final age is the termination of Western history or the counterpart to another beginning.” According to Heidegger, this decision “between the supremacy and power of beings and the originary sway of being” would adjudicate the proper relation between the “first” and the “other” beginning as a way of twisting free from the metaphysics of technological will to power. Perhaps the most daring and original part of Heidegger’s Nietzsche interpretation is this steadfast attempt to read Nietzsche’s will to power as the epochal will to domination that transforms all beings by placing (stellen) them within a certain frame of designated aims and ends. As a gathering (Ge) of such placements into a predesigned “enframing,” the Ge-stell places all entities before the modern subject as available resources on constant standing reserve, as that which we can represent (vorstellen), produce (herstellen),

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adjust (einstellen), install (aufstellen), order (bestellen), transpose (verstellen), or distort (entstellen). For Heidegger, the reign of the Ge-stell expresses an ontological condition of modernity caught in the metaphysics of will to power and exposed (ausgestellt) to the “danger” of a profound oblivion about being. As primary examples of such oblivion, Heidegger characterized the reigning forms of Nietzschean social criticism and philosophy put forward by Ernst Jünger, José Ortega y Gasset, and Jaspers as inadequate to the task of thinking through the ontological consequences of Nietzsche’s thinking. All of those contemporary styles of thinking “remain thoughtless,” Heidegger argued, as long as they fail “to think on the place of habitation proper to the human being’s essence and to experience that place within the truth of being.”70 In this turn to a discourse on “habitation,” “dwelling,” and “abode” (Aufenthalt), Heidegger embarked on a reading of German identity within the history of the West that departs radically from Nietzsche, whose antipathy to nationalism (which he described as “atavistic fits of patriotism” and an unhealthy “clinging to the soil”) is well known.71 In this sense we can see how Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche through the lens of a politicized history of Being was all too tendentious. As insightful as his overall reading of Nietzsche proved to be—especially his decision to read will to power and eternal recurrence as “belonging essentially together”—Heidegger continued to appropriate Nietzsche for his own advocacy of the German homeland as the site for the transition to an other beginning. Heidegger’s Nietzsche dramatically changed the way his generation read the philosopher of eternal return. His privileging of Nietzsche’s Nachlass over the published work; his critique of the subjectivist focus on psychology, biography, and values; his bold decision to reread the genealogy of morality in terms of a history of being; and his ontological focus on technology as a way of grasping the Nietzschean critique of nihilism—all these interpretive gambits decisively altered the hermeneutic landscape of Nietzsche’s reception in Germany for more than a generation. Clearly, Heidegger’s Nietzschebild has had a much more significant effect philosophically than the work of either Jaspers or Löwith, and it is difficult to read Nietzsche today without acknowledging the influence of Heidegger on the palimpsest of all later Nietzsche interpretation. But Heidegger always tailored the reading of Nietzsche to his own ontological narrative about the history of the West and conveniently elided those aspects of Nietzsche’s corpus that did not conform to his vision of the German future—especially Nietzsche’s ideal of “the Good European” who opposed

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the mythic bonds of blood and soil. In spite of these limitations, Heidegger’s “Nietzsche” confronts us as a thinker who challenges us to think. What matters above all else for Heidegger is to take up Nietzsche’s call for thinking so that we may think with him as well as against him. Heidegger did hope that this critical dialogue might “prepare a transition” to an other beginning whereby “through Nietzsche’s thinking the whole of Western thinking is appropriated [angeeignet] in its proper truth.”72 In thus taking up the challenge of Nietzsche’s thinking as an “event” (Ereignis) within Western history that reveals to us a hidden history of being, Heidegger transformed Nietzsche’s work into a confrontation with all of Western history. That Heidegger’s own motivations for engaging in such a confrontation are fraught with both insight and danger should give us pause. To help navigate this danger, when reading Heidegger it is imperative that we recall his own pronouncement on Nietzsche: “we cannot get around the necessity of first finding [him] in order that we may then lose him.” Heidegger’s bold ontological interpretation of Nietzsche dramatically altered the interpretive landscape of the Nietzsche reception in Germany. Heidegger now shifted the earlier existential focus of Löwith and Jaspers on questions of subjectivity, ethical imperatives, and self-overcoming to the wider backdrop of the history of metaphysics and to Nietzsche’s philosophy as a turning point within the history of being. Questions about destiny would no longer be grasped solely within an anthropocentric framework derived from the humanist tradition. On the contrary, Heidegger sought to dismantle the very framework of humanism in order to emphasize the Geschick or “destiny” of being. Here Heidegger’s analysis stressed the necessity of rethinking the very notion of existence as something that could not be adequately addressed within the subjectivist thought structures of the old existentialism. By turning to questions about language, dwelling, technology, and the “clearing” of being, Heidegger helped to shift the existentialist focus of Löwith and Jaspers in a way that proved decisive for the next generation—especially for the French reception of Nietzsche in Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, and others. In thinking of the death of God and the madman parable as part of “the ‘inner logic’ of Western history” rather than as an existential decision for an anthropological subject, Heidegger succeeded in deconstructing the whole edifice of existential philosophy in Europe.73 Whether or not we agree with Heidegger, in reading Nietzsche today we are left to grapple with the implications of this bold initiative within the history of philosophy, an initiative

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whose own political legacy remains one of the most difficult moments in the long reception of Nietzsche within modern Europe. Yet perhaps the echo of the mad Diogenes found in Nietzsche’s parable about the death of God can serve as a way of critiquing Heidegger’s own excursus into the world of National Socialist machination. Nietzsche’s ideal of philosophy as a form of therapeia, as a mode of providing a cure for the diseases of modern culture, drew on Diogenes’s practice of living life kata physin (according to nature). For Diogenes and his followers, the practice of Cynicism became a way of reshaping human nature, of experiencing the healing properties of physis in all its rhythmic play and force. Even more powerfully than the existential interpretations of Löwith and Jaspers, Diogenes sought to live a life of existential intensity that found the measure of individual existence within the harmonic movements of the kosmos. If we can learn anything from Nietzsche’s deep affinity with Diogenean Cynicism, it is perhaps that any possibility for existential meaning needs to be performed, not theorized, and requires that we change existing values before creating new ones. Such a stance affirms the need to devalue the reigning currency in the marketplace and deconstruct the world of convention so that we might confront the problem of human existence in all its radicality— not as a question about knowledge or theory but as an existential encounter with the counterfeit currencies that shape our lives. If there is an “existential” Nietzsche to be found on the palimpsest of Western philosophy, then perhaps we can uncover him there in the marketplace beneath the bright morning sun, carrying his lantern and searching amidst the rabble’s palaver for traces of authentic human life.

Notes 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 143–50, 137 (translation altered); Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980), vol. 6, 365–73, 354. 2. Steven Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 135. 3. Werner Sombart, Händler und Helden (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1915), 53. 4. Karl Löwith, Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986), 6. 5. Karl Jaspers, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (Munich: Piper, 1985).

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6. Martin Heidegger, Supplements, ed. John van Buren (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 71–103; Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 9, Wegmarken (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1976), 1–44. 7. Löwith, Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen (Munich: Drei Masken, 1928). 8. Fritz Heinemann, Neue Wege der Philosophie (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1929), xix. 9. Löwith, Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 204; Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 3–4. 10. Jaspers, Reason and Existence (New York: Noonday, 1955), 30, 24, 129, 37 (translation altered); Jaspers, Vernunft und Existenz (Bremen: Storm, 1947), 15, 11, 104, 22. 11. Heidegger, Nietzsche’s Nihilism (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), 5; Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 48, 3–4. 12. Wiebrecht Ries, Nietzsches Werke (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2008), 87. 13. Henning Ottmann, ed., Nietzsche Handbuch (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000), 114. 14. Nietzsche, The Gay Science (New York: Random House, 1974), 178–80 (emphasis in original); Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 3, 480–82. 15. Nietzsche, Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari, Abteilung II, vol. 1, Philologische Schriften, 1867–1873 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1982), 75–245. 16. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 69; Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 1, 93; Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers (London: Heinemann, 1972), book VI, chapter 54 and chapter 41. 17. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 311 (translation altered); Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 2, 553. 18. Henry Lidell and Robert Scott, Greek-English Lexicon (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940), 1178; Diogenes Laertius, Lives, book VI, 20–21. 19. Peter Sloterdijk, Kritik der zynischen Vernunft (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), 208 alludes to the Cynics’ practices of “farting, pissing, shitting, [and] masturbating in the Athenian marketplace.” 20. Marie-Odile Goulet-Caze, “Cynicism,” in Greek Thought, ed. J. Brunschwig and G. E. R. Loyd (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 843–57. 21. Nietzsche, The Gay Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 219 (translation altered; emphasis in original); Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 3, 600. On counterfeiting and God see Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 5, 223–24, 409. 22. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 125–27 (translation altered; emphasis in original); Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 5, 409–10.

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23. “Januarius”, “Janus,” in Der Kleine Pauly, vol. 2 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1979), 1311–14. 24. Lidell and Scott, Greek-English Lexicon, 635. 25. Nietzsche, Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, 256; Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 6, 43. 26. Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 7, 199. 27. Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 193 (translation altered; emphasis in original); Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 1, 426–27. 28. Nietzsche, The Will to Power (New York: Random House, 1968), 8–9; Nietzsche, Der Wille zur Macht (Stuttgart: Kröner, 1930), 8–10; Nietzsche, Gay Science (2001 Cambridge edition, to which all subsequent citations refer), 120, 199; Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 3, 482, 573. 29. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War (Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 145, 155. 30. Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 9, 590. 31. Nietzsche, Gay Science, 157; Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 3, 521; cf. ibid., vol. 13, 492. 32. Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 14, 256. 33. Blaise Pascal, “Memorial,” in Pascal, Pensees (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 178. 34. Nietzsche, All Too Human, 310; Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 2, 553. 35. Nietzsche, Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, 103, 150; Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 6, 302, 373; Nietzsche, Kritische Sämtliche Briefe, ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986), vol. 8, 482. 36. Löwith, Leben in Deutschland, 1. 37. Alfred Baeumler, Studien zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte (Berlin: Junker & Dünnhaupt, 1937), 292. 38. Baeumler, Nietzsche: Philosoph und Politiker (Leipzig: Reclam, 1931), 80. 39. Baeumler, Studien zur Geistesgeschichte, 280. 40. Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Eternal Recurrence, 187; Löwith, Nietzsches Philosophie der ewigen Wiederkehr des Gleichen (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1956), 192. 41. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (London: Penguin, 1969), 326 (emphasis in original); Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 4, 396. 42. Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy, 85 (emphasis in original); Löwith, Nietzsches Philosophie, 89. 43. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 35–36 (emphasis in original); Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 12, 213. 44. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 536; Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy, 4, 59; Löwith, Nietzsches Philosophie, 10, 63.

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45. Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy, 60; Löwith, Nietzsches Philosophie, 64. 46. Löwith, Meaning in History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 219– 21; Löwith, Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1953), 201–4. 47. Löwith, Nietzsche: Sämtliche Schriften VI (Stuttgart: Metzler: 1986), 70; see also Löwith, From Hegel to Nietzsche (New York: Anchor, 1964), 369. 48. Karl Löwith’s letter of July 13, 1935, to Leo Strauss, published in Independent Journal of Philosophy 5/6 (1988): 187; Löwith, Meaning in History, 221; Löwith, Welt­ geschichte und Heilsgeschehen, 203–4. 49. Löwith, Sämtliche Schriften VI, 386; Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy, 4; Löwith, Nietzsches Philosophie, 10. 50. Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age (New York: Anchor, 1957), 176; Jaspers, Reason and Existence, 30–31 (translation altered); Jaspers, Vernunft und Existenz, 15. 51. Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of his Philosophical Activity (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1965), 429; Jaspers, Nietzsche: Einführung in das Ver­ ständnis seines Philosophierens (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1950), 426. 52. Nietzsche, Will to Power, 20; Nietzsche, Wille zur Macht, 24; Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Introduction, 243; Jaspers, Nietzsche: Einführung, 246. 53. Jaspers, Reason and Existence, 62; Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Introduction, 227, 434– 35; Jaspers, Nietzsche: Einführung, 232, 432–33. 54. Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Introduction, 359, 366, 431; Jaspers, Nietzsche: Einführung, 356, 364, 428. 55. Jaspers, Nietzsche and Christianity (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1963), 99, 104 (translation altered); Jaspers, Aneignung und Polemik (Munich: Piper, 1968), 384, 388. 56. Jaspers, Philosophie (Berlin: Springer, 1932), vol. 3, 234, vol. 1, 39. 57. Jaspers, Nietzsche: An Introduction, xiii; Jaspers, Nietzsche: Einführung, 6. 58. Löwith, Nietzsche’s Philosophy, 222–23 (translation altered); Löwith, Nietzsches Philosophie, 220–21. 59. Jaspers, Nietzsche and Christianity, 104; Jaspers, Aneignung und Polemik, 387. 60. Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 48, 28. 61. Ibid., vol. 42, 26. 62. Ibid., vol. 6.1, vol. 6.2, vol. 43, vol. 44, vol. 46, vol. 47, vol. 48, vol. 50, vol. 87, vol. 5, 209–67. 63. Unpublished lecture from Heidegger in 1932, Der Anfang der abendländischen Philosophie, in the Herbert Marcuse Archiv, Stadt- und Universitätsbibliothek, Frankfurt am Main, #0029.01, 9; this will eventually appear as volume 35 of Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe. Heidegger, Nietzsche’s Nihilism, 149; Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 48, 268. 64. Heidegger, Nietzsche’s Will to Power As Knowledge and As Metaphysics (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 8; Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 47, 8. 65. Heidegger, “Nietzsche’s Word: God Is Dead,” in The Question Concerning Technology (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 58, 62, 64; Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 5,

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213, 218, 220; Heidegger, Nietzsche’s Nihilism, 210; Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 6.2, 314. 66. Heidegger, Early Greek Thinking (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), 76; Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 7, 232. 67. For a fuller analysis of Heidegger’s relation to National Socialism, see Charles Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2003). 68. Heidegger, Nietzsche’s Nihilism, 165; Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 48, 297; Heidegger, Question Concerning Technology, 61; Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 5, 217. 69. Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 7, 199; Heidegger, Nietzsche’s Will to Power, 8; Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 47, 8. 70. Heidegger, Question Concerning Technology, 66; Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 5, 222; Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 20–21; Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 53, 23–24. 71. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 132; Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 5, 180. 72. Heidegger, What Is Called Thinking? (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 52–53, 75; Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 8, 55, 81. 73. Heidegger, Question Concerning Technology, 67; Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 5, 225.

12

Situating Frantz Fanon’s Account of Black Experience Robert Bernasconi

In 1952, when Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks was published, a new era was already beginning in the discussion of race.1 For the first time in more than 150 years, the dominant discourse about race was no longer under the dark shadow of racial science. It was now governed by a growing recognition of the evils of racism. One sees this most notably in the UNESCO declaration on race, which was authored primarily by Ashley Montagu yet with the signatures of other anthropologists (most notably Claude LéviStrauss and E. Franklin Frazier) attached. Together they called for “an ethic of universal brotherhood.”2 Initially, the political consensus in the West against racism arose more in response to Nazi racial policy than to colonialism or to segregation and apartheid. By contrast, the Holocaust was invisible—with the exception of one outrageously dismissive comment—in Fanon’s book, which must be seen against the background of Aimé Césaire’s powerful indictment of the West in Discourse on Colonialism.3 Black Skin, White Masks is the defining text of what today is called the Critical Philosophy of Race. Indeed, existential philosophy is arguably

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nowhere more alive than in the Africana existential philosophy that is evident in such thinkers as Lewis Gordon, Paget Henry, Donna-Dale Marcano, and Kathryn Gines, among others.4 What gives Black Skin, White Masks its iconic status is that it is much more than the application of existentialist philosophy to the study of antiblack racism. It is an original work of philosophy in its own right that moves beyond the responses to racism provided by the previous generation of black authors, which included Aimé as well as Suzanne Césaire and Léopold Sédar Senghor. This becomes more apparent the further we move beyond Fanon’s account of his experience and focus instead on what he sought to demonstrate on its basis. This shift—and what makes it legitimate—is the focus of this chapter, which explains what moves Fanon’s existentialism from the realm of personal testimony to a philosophy with strong political implications.

The Problem of Generating an Existentialist Political Philosophy Fanon was trained in medicine. He knew that it was important to diagnose a problem, but having done so, he was not satisfied with addressing merely the symptoms. Rather, his focus was on a cure in the sense of a long-term solution. This led him to look beyond the immediate situation in which he found himself to the structures that governed that situation. He located the main source of the racism he encountered in colonialism. But it was not just his drive to create a world free of colonialism that explains why he has such a prominent place within postcolonial studies. It was also his understanding of how colonialism is much more than a system of government; it is a psychological condition and an economic system, some features of which survived the end of colonialism as a political system. In this chapter I seek to demonstrate how Fanon recognized in Sartre’s early existential philosophy of the late 1940s the resources for this task, resources that could also be turned against Sartre himself. In this way Fanon anticipated developments that Sartre independently introduced into his mature dialectical philosophy that culminated in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, leading to the remarkable convergence between these two thinkers and Fanon’s request that Sartre write a Preface to The Wretched of the Earth.5 The question is inevitably raised of how Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, written for such a different time and situation, could have the relevance that contemporary theorists still attribute to it. Part of the answer to that question

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lies in the sheer power of Fanon’s language as he describes the difficulties he faced navigating amid French antiblack racism. But because Fanon thematized the problem of “speaking from experience” to those whose experiences are very different, he anticipated the need also for a theoretical explanation of how an existentialist philosophy could continue to speak beyond its original context: it is the problem of how a philosophy that defines the human being in terms of its concrete situation can transcend the particularity of any given situation and thereby speak in general terms to a broad audience. This is not a problem we impose on Fanon but rather one that he himself introduced at the start of the book. He announced the problem near the end of the introduction to Black Skin, White Masks by apparently conceding everything to those who might want to challenge the relevance of his account to anyone from a different place or time. With disarming directness he indicated that his observations and conclusions were valid only for the Antilles.6 In fact, so far as we know, his personal experience in the Caribbean was limited to Martinique.7 However, immediately after introducing this restriction to the Antilles he added the phrase “at least regarding the Blacks on their home turf [chez lui].”8 The qualification is crucial because within a few pages, at the beginning of a discussion of the relation between black Antilleans and the French language that was highly context dependent, he announced that he would subsequently lift the restriction: “we shall enlarge the scope of our description and going beyond the Antilles [to] include all colonized people.”9 Fanon had, in effect, begun the book with the kind of announcement that medieval scholastics would have prefaced using the Latin tag videtur quod non (it seems that not . . .). By raising this problem in all seriousness in the introduction only to dismiss it later, Fanon was inviting the reader to think of the problem of context, the situational problem, as one of the frames that directs the book’s philosophical agenda. In existentialist philosophy, this attempt—to write from experience in such a way that others who have not shared that experience can nevertheless recognize something of themselves in the account—frequently takes the form of a complex negotiation between concrete descriptions and the formal structures they are said to exemplify.10 This strategy is based on the conviction that one can recognize one’s own experience in other people’s descriptions of their experience without being blind to the differences. However, the problem is exaggerated to the degree that existentialist philosophy strives to translate its concrete descriptions based on individual testimony into a political program that is also concrete. The problem becomes even more acute when one takes

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into account the focus of existentialist philosophy on identities. This focus is in large part because identities, especially racial identities, often shift as one moves from place to place, exacerbating the problem of generalization. For example, someone who is seen as black in the United States might be seen as white in Africa and differently again in countries like Brazil, where skin color is perceived more in terms of a continuum than in terms of the dichotomy between white and black. We will see that Fanon’s own experience of shifting identities within Martinique shaped his understanding of race. I shall begin by examining what was perhaps Fanon’s most classically existentialist piece of writing, “The Lived Experience of the Black,” where he identified his situation in terms of the experience of antiblack racism and calculated its cost at the levels of the psyche and of society. After following some of those same themes through other parts of Black Skin, White Masks, I will explore Fanon’s profound sympathy toward North African Arabs as a prelude to examining his approach to the politics of race within the fight against colonialism. In the final section I will show how Fanon’s focus on the Third World’s battle against colonialism led him, in The Wretched of the Earth, to move beyond the concept of a “situation” to that of a “system” in an effort to formulate an existentialist political philosophy.

Situating Fanon’s “The Lived Experience of the Black” and His Debate with Sartre In May 1951, the publication in Esprit of “The Lived Experience of the Black” launched Fanon’s brief but explosive publishing career when he was still only twenty-five years old.11 There is no indication in the essay itself, or elsewhere in the issue of Esprit, that Fanon planned to include it in Black Skin, White Masks or even that he planned to write a book at all.12 Fanon’s essay was the lead article of a special issue on “The Lament of the Black” (La plainte du noir). The title of the issue was taken from another essay in the same volume by the psychoanalyst Octave Mannoni, whom Fanon would criticize in Black Skin, White Masks for failing to understand colonialism.13 In fact, of the six writers included in “The Lament of the Black,” Fanon was the only black author!14 Fanon’s essay does end in a lament. Its final enigmatic lines read: “Irresponsible, straddling Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep.”15 This sentiment is atypical of the kind of hope for the future that Fanon came to

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represent, howsoever appropriate these lines are for the issue of the journal in which they first appeared. If it can be confirmed that Fanon wrote “The Lived Experience of the Black” independently of the rest of Black Skin, White Masks, then one must see that this, his first essay, was for all its brilliance a failure—at least in terms of formulating an effective response to racism. This recognition allows one to see that the book to which this chapter is devoted was written as an attempt to turn that defeat into victory. It also means that Fanon understood his book not only as being influenced by Richard Wright (another great black existentialist) but also as a response to him, because this lament comes fast on the heels of a reference to Richard Wright’s Native Son, which had been published in French in 1947 under the title Un enfant du pays. Wright’s Bigger Thomas, like Chester Himes’s Bob Jones from If He Hollers Let Him Go (to which Fanon also refers), acts against himself by submitting to a situation others have put him in. The genesis of Black Skin, White Masks is unclear.16 It seems that Fanon, who was a student in Lyon at the time, had intended to submit it as his dissertation for a degree in legal medicine and psychiatry before being warned against doing so.17 It has been suggested that Fanon’s supervisor, Michel Colin, was able to help him publish his work in Esprit because his brother-in-law, Jean-Marie Domenach, was the deputy editor.18 The story has some plausibility not least because Esprit was, on the face of it, an unlikely choice of journal for Fanon. In spite of the critique of Sartre and the negritude movement in the essay, Les temps modernes or the prominent Black journal Presence africaine would have seemed more appropriate destinations for “The Lived Experience of the Black.” Esprit was founded in 1932 by Emmanuel Mounier. It was marked from the outset by his particular brand of Christian personalism, which rejected socialism for its overemphasis on economics and instead looked to Christianity to break with “the established order.”19 At the end of 1947, Mounier and Domenach joined with Camus, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and de Beauvoir to publish in Esprit an appeal for a third way that avoided “bloc politics”; however, even though Merleau-Ponty signed the text, he did not allow it to be published in Les temps modernes for fear of offending the communists.20 Mounier (who died in 1952) had no such qualms, as he sought to negotiate a way for Christians to oppose the governing order without appearing to side with communism. Therefore, the contingencies of publication notwithstanding, Fanon’s choice of Esprit for this and two subsequent essays might also be read as a statement that he, like Mounier, wanted to avoid taking the side of either the capitalist West or the communist East in the Cold War.

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The opening pages of “The Lived Experience of the Black” are devoted to a description of what happens when one leaves home: “As long as the black remains on his home turf (chez lui), except for petty internal quarrels, he will not have to experience his being for others.”21 Fanon was clearly alluding to these lines when, in a stipulation he would later withdraw, he wrote in the introduction that the observation and conclusions in Black Skin, White Masks were valid only for Antillean blacks who remained on their “home turf.” In the introduction he also explained that “The Lived Experience of the Black” was an account of “the Negro confronted with his race.”22 His race was his being for others. The starting point of the essay is clear: it is the white gaze that confronts the Negro with his or her race. Only when Fanon arrived in France was he reduced to his color by the brutally simple racist gaze that said “Look! A Negro!”23 Unlike the Jew in Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew, who was overdetermined from the inside,24 Fanon realized as a result of this experience that he was overdetermined from the outside: “I am a slave not to the ‘idea’ others have of me but to my appearance.”25 This had also been the experience of the previous generation of black intellectuals, including Aimé Césaire from Martinique and Léopold Senghor from Senegal.26 Yet it was Césaire’s and Senghor’s responses to the experience of French antiblack racism that Fanon examined in this essay and found wanting. Whether with Senghor (who embraced African rhythms as an alternative to reason) or with Césaire (who took up the argument for African civilization), every hand Fanon played was a losing hand: in those terms, every seeming victory would be snatched away from him. The strategies of these negritude writers were flawed. Adopting those strategies would simply amount to playing into the hands of Negro stereotypes. It seemed that white people always found some way to put him back into what they considered his place to be. In the introduction to Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon explained that the chapter on “the lived experience” of blacks related the desperate efforts of a Negro bent on “discovering the meaning of black identity.”27 He knew very well that this was, in the first instance, a matter of discovery and not of choice. There is a widespread view today, especially in the United States, that each of us has something like a right to determine our own identity. Nonetheless, and even though nobody has the right to address other people in ways that are offensive to them, it is impossible to legislate how others see us. Social identities are a result of a complex social negotiation. For all Sartre’s focus on one’s choice of oneself, he located race at the level of facticity, not freedom, and Fanon followed him in this.28 One’s choice of oneself takes place within

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a social context of which one is so fundamentally a part that any attempt to differentiate oneself from it is pointless. But that means that one’s choice of oneself is a choice of one’s situation, which is why Sartre’s philosophy of freedom leads directly to a political philosophy dedicated to transforming the world. This is the upshot of Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew, which argues that, because “the situation of the Jew is such that everything he does turns against him,” the only solution to anti-Semitism is a socialist revolution.29 Fanon similarly advocated a change in the social structure as the only way to rid the world of racism.30 By 1952, Fanon already had an implicit understanding of the dialectic of race relations in an oppressive society. He explained that white civilization and European culture imposed an existential deviation on blacks: the socalled black soul was a white construction.31 But this represents only one side of the negotiation. In the book’s fourth chapter, which is devoted to Mannoni, Fanon explicitly drew on Sartre’s famous remark that “it is the anti-Semite who makes the Jew” and used it as a basis for proclaiming “it is the racist who creates the inferiorised.”32 Racists have an idea of those they consider to be inferior that owes little (or nothing) to reality. However, it is not only racists who construct a racial idea of others. In “Black Orpheus,” a long preface Sartre contributed to Léopold Senghor’s Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie négre et malgache de langue Française (an anthology of black poets writing in the French language),33 the negritude movement was presented as one stage in a dialectic that would lead to a socialist revolution. Fanon complained that Sartre, by looking beyond the moment toward a postracial society, had destroyed black enthusiasm.34 In “Black Orpheus” Sartre drew on the negritude poets in attempting to frame an existentialist account of race that took account of the new situation in which whites found themselves after the Second World War as a result of the clamor from the colonized for an end to colonialism. According to Sartre, white people were experiencing the shock of having the gaze reversed and were finding themselves called upon to justify themselves to blacks.35 White privilege being questioned by a revolutionary movement of which the negritude poets were part of the vanguard.36 At this time, Sartre understood “the situation of the black” more in terms of capitalism than colonialism, and partly on that basis he sought to promote an alliance between blacks and the European working class.37 Matters only got worse when he judged that blacks were better equipped than white workers to transform themselves in the way that would be necessary if they were to be united.

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Fanon vehemently rejected Sartre’s suggestion that negritude must renounce itself in favor of a future universalism that is accomplished not through race consciousness but instead through the class struggle.38 There is some evidence that Fanon would not have been unsympathetic to such a course of action as a way of responding to a situation in the name of freedom from oppression.39 However, he believed that such action should not be arrived at on the basis of a crude Marxist dialectic. Thus Fanon’s accusation is in large measure that Sartre in “Black Orpheus” was not existentialist enough, that he had succumbed to Hegelianism and as a result had intellectualized black existence.40 Yet this criticism of Sartre must be weighed against the praise that Fanon lavished on those pages of Anti-Semite and Jew where Sartre described how the anti-Semite makes the Jew.41 Sartre’s claim provided a model for Fanon, who wanted to do for negrophobia what Sartre had done for anti-Semitism.42 Sartre’s intellectualization of black existence in “Black Orpheus” went even further when he identified two strands within the poetry contained in Senghor’s anthology that he presented as complementary. On the one hand was an “objective negritude” (associated primarily with Senghor) by which blacks sought—on the basis of the customs, arts, songs, and dances of the African population—to recognize in themselves “certain objectively established traits of the African civilization.”43 On the other hand was a more subjective approach to negritude (which Sartre associated with Césaire) that was more directly opposed to Europe and colonization.44 However, because Sartre saw Césaire as creating negritude though his poetry and thereby making it visible, he viewed Césaire and Senghor as being united in a single task that could be understood in existentialist terms. Negritude was a way of existing. It was “the Negro’s being-in-the-world.”45 Sartre had sought to read the negritude movement as a political movement, but he had accomplished this only by imposing a false unity on it and by subordinating it to the class struggle. In response, Fanon sought to focus on the struggle against colonialism. Because that was also the trajectory that Sartre would take, it brought them into greater proximity.

The Ambiguity of Black Experience Fanon’s first task in responding to Sartre was to challenge the false unity that the French philosopher had imposed on the negritude movement.

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Contrasting two poems from Senghor’s anthology, one by Jacques Roumain and the other by David Diop, he wrote “there is not one Negro—there are many black men.”46 It was also an objection Fanon leveled against Senghor.47 But he did not conclude that there is no black experience, only that “the black experience is ambiguous.”48 The term “ambiguity” plays a significant role in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness and in Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity, but Fanon’s choice of this word was probably influenced more by Merleau-Ponty, with whom he had studied in Lyons. In any event, part of what Fanon seems to have meant is that, within the given situation, the so-called black experience did not set out a clear course of action that one could label authentic. In other words, black experience was not definitive beyond bringing Blacks together in the knowledge that they shared both a certain facticity and the goal of finding their freedom in transcending the situation. Blacks must become aware of “the possibility of existence.” This will lead them to choose action “with respect to the source of the conflict, i.e., the social structure.”49 That being said, there may be another, more precise meaning of the ambiguity of black existence. For all his objections to Sartre’s “Black Orpheus,” it is noteworthy that Fanon did not hesitate to defend the essay against the criticisms of Gabriel d’Arbousier in the militant Marxist journal La nouvelle critique. According to d’Arbousier, Sartre had failed to observe that Senghor’s anthology of negritude poetry detached the cultural issue from the historical and social reality of each country and from the national characteristics and different conditions imposed on each of them by imperialist oppression.50 Fanon was not unsympathetic to the underlying insight. He conceded that “the truth is that the black race is dispersed and is no longer unified. . . . The black man has a homeland and takes his place within a union or a commonwealth.”51 In other words, the “ambiguity” in the universal situation of blacks arises because, in addition to being black, they are also French, English, Martinican, or Tanganyikan. It is the same existential dilemma that W. E. B. Du Bois announced when, in “The Conservation of Races” (another major source of inspiration for Critical Philosophy of Race), he asked: “What after all, am I? Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both?”52 Fanon recognized that d’Arbousier’s objection could also be applied to him and to every existential phenomenology of racial experience that would henceforth be trapped in the situation from which it had been written. At the phenomenal level of description there are an infinite number of perspectives that correspond to the different cultural or national situations in which blacks

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find themselves as a result of the diasporas created by the slave trade. Fanon’s response is that this problem can be resolved at the level of concrete existence. After employing the word “evidence,” which in the phenomenological literature is loaded with significance as an answer to skepticism, he wrote: “wherever he goes, a black man remains a black man.”53 Recalling his stipulation at the beginning of the book that he wanted to restrict himself to the situation he inhabited, the Antilles, he explained to Sartre’s Marxist critic that dialectics got the upper hand: “we have been forced to see that the Antillean is above all a black man.”54 And so, to the question of how he would justify his theory that both highlighted and transcended a specific context, Fanon’s initial response was to emphasize the experience of antiblack racism. It led him to recognize a bond shaped by an experience that blacks share in a racist context that whites can never know directly. That is the gulf expressed by the sentence “Jean-Paul Sartre forgets that the Black suffers in his body quite differently from the White.”55 But this response was on the passive level, and Fanon sought to move beyond that. Indeed, he would have to because the account given in “The Lived Experience of the Black” could be read as implying that it was this gaze that gave unity to blacks, thereby making that unity contingent on entry into a predominantly white society like France.56 That outcome would limit the political efficacy of his ideas, as they would no longer readily apply to blacks at home in the colonies. In order to show how Fanon moved beyond this account, I shall explore the following claim: “It is the White man who creates the Negro. But it is the Negro who creates negritude.”57 It sounds like an answer to the Sartrean account of the gaze as the basis for racial identity. But if this is the case, then it is a more subtle response than first appears, because Fanon would almost certainly have remembered that in “Black Orpheus” Sartre had proclaimed Césaire to be the creator of negritude: “Césaire’s words do not describe negritude, they do not designate it, they do not copy it from the outside like a painter with a model: they create it.”58 To understand the significance of this phrase—“it is the Negro who creates negritude”—it must be read in the context of Fanon’s “Algeria Unveiled.” Its appearance in that essay is at first sight anomalous. This is the only reference to the Negro and negritude in an essay that is otherwise devoted to the Algerian struggle and in particular the role of women in it, with specific reference to wearing of the veil. Fanon started from the general law that the people’s ways of clothing themselves “constitute the most distinctive form

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of a society’s uniqueness.”59 Even a minor modification can call for radical reassessment.60 The change Fanon was concerned with in this context is that brought about by the arrival of the colonialist: the veiled woman frustrates the colonialists’ desire to see, and it confronts them with a gaze that sees without being seen.61 The Sartrean echoes are unmistakable, but Fanon’s point is that the presence of the colonizer transforms the meaning of the veil from a traditional aspect of Islamic culture to an expression of nationalist resistance. Not surprisingly, the colonial occupiers’ offensive against the veil contributed to making it the site around which the people’s will to survive was organized. Fanon described this as a the law of the psychology of colonization, and it is in the specific context of formulating that law that Fanon insisted that the Negro creates negritude.62 Here Fanon was emphasizing a dialectic by which one’s response to any situation cannot be predetermined. Everything depends on the reading of the situation, which is why the terms one employs to establish its character are so crucial—although in some cases they are already set by those to whom one is opposed, as is the case with antiblack racism and indeed all racism.

The Situation of North African Arabs During the two years when Fanon was writing both Black Skin, White Masks and his dissertation, he was working as a resident in a psychiatric hospital near Dijon. His experience there led him to write “The North African Syndrome,” which was, like “The Lived Experience of the Black,” published in Esprit. It appeared in February 1952 in a section on “The North African Proletariat in France.”63 This second essay should be read in conjunction with Black Skin, White Masks, although the two are seldom closely associated. The essay addressed the disregard shown to Arabs from North Africa when they found themselves within the French medical system. Insofar as the Arabs were outsiders, Fanon could claim to recognize their problems as similar to those that he had faced in coming to France. But on this occasion Fanon wrote simply as an observer and did not even mark his own position as someone who had experienced anything similar. Indeed, it seems that for rhetorical effect Fanon may have intended his white readers to assume that the essay’s author was white. “The North African Syndrome” is a remarkable attempt to expose and counter racism. By ventriloquizing racism, it seems that Fanon attempted to

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solicit the sympathy of white readers—only to frustrate them later by shaming them into acknowledging their complicity in an evil system. As with “The Lived Experience of the Black,” there is also a strong existentialist flavor to the essay: human beings never cease questioning themselves; racism reduces a human being to a thing; the racist is in bad faith.64 However, “situation” in this essay is not deployed as the existential-ontological concept developed by Jaspers, Heidegger, or Sartre. Heidegger, for example, declares that the situation is revealed only when resoluteness opens up the possibilities of existence; this is to be distinguished from what he calls “the general situation,” where one sees only the most obvious opportunities.65 In contrast, Fanon’s use here of the concept of situation adopts Heinrich Meng’s notion as described in an essay by Stern on psychosomatic medicine: “One must try to find out what Meng calls his ‘situation,’ that is to say, his relations with his associates, his occupations and preoccupations, his sexuality, his sense of security or of insecurity, the dangers that threaten him; and we may add also his evolution, the story of his life. One must make a ‘situational diagnosis.’”66 Whereas for existential philosophers the situation belongs to the human being as the world inhabited, Meng reduced the situation to a catalogue of features within that world. But Fanon used this catalogue to expose the ignorance of the French about the lives of the North African Arabs who were in their midst. Each of these lives was “a daily death.”67 It was the impoverished situation that the colonized face at home that led them to try to make a life in metropolitan France, but in the process the Arabs were deprived of the very substance of their affectivity.68 That is why, at the end of the essay, Fanon called on his readers to accept responsibility for a situation that the colonizing power perpetuates: “if YOU do not sacrifice the man that is in you so that the man who is on this earth shall be more than a body, more than a Mohammed, by what conjurer’s trick will I have to acquire the certainty that you, too, are worthy of my love?”69 As in Black Skin, White Masks, the focus shifts from those who at first glance are seen as the problem—the Arabs or the blacks—to the underlying structure. Fanon had been to North Africa as a French soldier during the Second World War and he had found it impossible to make contact with the North Africans. He was surprised to learn at that time that the North Africans detested people of color.70 But instead of dismissing them for this, he reached out to them and devoted his final years to liberating the Algerians without ever forgetting the struggle of Martinicans. This means that, even as he was writing Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon recognized that he could not limit

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himself to speaking only for those who identified with him. In other words, he had to transcend the identity politics responsible for dividing the oppressed into different constituencies. The struggle against this system united him with those who, in another context, had disregarded him. This helped him move beyond race—as the decisive identity in terms of which he understood himself—to a higher solidarity. Increasingly he saw the colonial system as decisive: one was either for it or against it. This placed him in solidarity with the Arabs, and he devoted the remainder of his life to their struggle for independence in Algeria.

Rewriting His Personal Narrative: Race in the Colonial Context In February 1955, once again in Esprit, Fanon published “Antilleans and Africans,” an essay that provides an invaluable but too often neglected key to Fanon’s thinking on race.71 This essay fulfilled the idea, announced in Black Skin, White Masks, that he might one day write about the differences between the Negroes of the Antilles and the Negroes of Africa.72 It lays out in detail “the truth” (already announced by Black Skin, White Masks) that, because the Negro race is dispersed, it can no longer claim unity. However, it does much more than this.73 Fanon chose this occasion to revise the personal narrative he had provided in “The Lived Experience of the Black,” since it suggested that he had not experienced racism until he left Martinique for France. The narrative presented in that essay is usually taken to be autobiographical, and Fanon did nothing in the essay to dispel that impression. However, in the 1955 essay he explained that the same kind of racism he had described in 1951, as if he had first experienced in France, had in fact already become familiar to him when France came to Martinique during the Second World War. Because France had been defeated by the Germans, the island of Martinique had become the temporary home of a large number of French sailors,74 who brought with them the antiblack gaze. At the same time, Aimé Césaire—whose formative experience of racism had actually been in France—was back in Martinique proclaiming that it was “fine and good to be a Negro.” With the election that followed the Liberation of France, there was a growth in political consciousness that led to the birth of a proletariat in Martinique that came to be characterized by the phrase “a systematized Negro.”75

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By modifying his autobiography in “The Lived Experience of the Black,” Fanon was simply aligning his story with that of the previous generation of black intellectuals in order to disqualify any simplistic appropriation of their antidote to this racism. Since the first reviews of Black Skin, White Masks there have been perceptive criticisms of Fanon’s failure to engage directly with a number of the previous generation of black intellectuals who came to France and described their experiences there.76 Nevertheless, one should not underestimate the sense in which he was deliberately distancing himself from their analyses in ways that some commentators did not fully appreciate. He saw more deeply than his predecessors how the existentialist philosophy of race led to an investigation of the structure of colonialism. It is true that Fanon most forcefully supported the struggle against colonialism in the essays written after Black Skin, White Masks. But already in that book Fanon went beyond racism to highlight the colonial situation, and much of its fourth chapter is devoted to showing that Mannoni did not understand it.77 His focus on colonialism led him to a deeper understanding of the bonds forged between oppressed people by explicitly integrating economic factors into the equation. France’s colonial wars deepened that insight. Fanon wrote “The Lived Experience of the Black” during the French IndoChina War, which was fought in what would become Vietnam by the French Far East Expeditionary Corps. This “dirty war” lasted from December 1946 to July 1954.78 As soon as that war ended, the Algerian war began; it lasted from November 1954 until 1962, by which time Fanon had already died. This period tends to be remembered (at least in Europe and North America) in terms of the Cold War and the West’s resolve to ward off communism. It was also a period during which, in many parts of the world, the violence of the West as well as its antidemocratic character and reactionary racism were on full display. The other main feature of Fanon’s work that differentiated him from the previous generation of black intellectuals was his approach to the concept of race. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon observed that Europeans would be surprised to learn that, as late as 1940, no Antillean found it possible to think of himself as a Negro.79 The reader of the essay “Antilleans and Africans” would know the reason for that precise date because it announced the arrival of the French navy.80 The main thrust of “Antilleans and Africans” was to show how the introduction from outside of a racist, antiblack gaze had helped the Antilleans abandon the falsehood that allowed them to look

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down on Africans. Before the Second World War, Martinicans separated themselves from Africans along racial lines: “The Antillean was a black, but the Negro was in Africa.”81 But the same people who had acted white in 1939 were now learning how to be Africans, with the implication that this was an equally false identification for them to make.82 According to Fanon, the Martinicans had abandoned one falsehood to embrace another. One could legitimately talk about the white race and the Negro race, but only if one recognized “that questions of race are but a superstructure, a mantle, an obscure ideological emanation concealing an economic reality.” He offered for proof the fact that “a Negro worker will be on the side of the mulatto worker against the middle-class Negro.”83 In Martinique, racial divisions were sometimes less salient than class differences. “White” and “Negro” were racial terms that should be differentiated from the terms one might use to describe such “peoples” as the Antilleans and the Africans. Indeed, the Antilleans and the Africans had their own separate worlds. But there is no Negro world because there is nothing left after one has subtracted the different cultural influences that differentiate, for example, the Antilleans from the Africans. Fanon made a similar point in the wake of the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists held in Rome in 1959, when he explained that African Americans, like other people of African descent, had been in danger of taking a false path by racializing themselves in the specific sense of putting their efforts into proving the existence of an African culture. He suggested, however, that by the late 1950s they recognized that their “existential problems” differed from those of Africans: “The only common denominator between the blacks from Chicago and the Nigerians or Tanganyikans was that they all defined themselves in relation to the whites.”84 This was at the level of a sociological observation, but it was not where his analysis stopped. Focus on the colonial context led Fanon away from the myth of a “first encounter” with racism through the white gaze—regardless of whether that gaze was first met on a train in France or near the harbor at Fort-de-France. He had already begun to develop a counternarrative in the first chapter of Black Skin, White Masks, in which he described how schooling in Martinique imposed a racialized being for others. And in chapter six he highlighted the racism of comic books and children’s stories irrespective of whether they included white people. Indeed, in “The Lived Experience of the Black” itself, Fanon wrote: “In the twentieth century the black on his home turf is oblivious of the moment when his inferiority is determined by the Other.”85 This

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means that any such account of one’s first encounter with racism is a fabrication because one is born into a society already permeated by it. For this reason, the analysis had to move beyond an account of experience to the forces that shaped that experience.

Beyond the Situation: Racism As System Fanon’s focus on colonialism led him beyond the concept of situation to the concept of system. Sartre made a parallel journey during the same period. The difference between a situation and a system was established by Sartre in his review for Les temps modernes of Albert Memmi’s classic work, The Colonizer and the Colonized. The review was added to subsequent editions of the book as a preface.86 As “an Arab Jew” in Tunisia, Memmi was well positioned to describe the remorseless logic that forced everyone in the colonies to be either one of the colonizers or one of the colonized: “I was a sort of half-breed of colonization, understanding everyone because I belonged to no one.”87 Like Fanon, Memmi surely knew that the concrete character of his experience was its strength. Paradoxically, by highlighting his life in North Africa he was able to transcend the limits of that situation, thereby justifying the more general terms of the discussion. When in 1982 he tried to offer a more general theory of racism, the result was arguably less powerful.88 In The Colonizer and the Colonized Memmi echoed Sartre—as, for example, when he wrote that “the colonial situation fabricates the colonized as it fabricates the colonizers.”89 But Sartre considered the formulation, like the diagnosis, to be incomplete: “he [Memmi] sees a situation where I see a system.”90 Or, as Sartre put it in the Critique of Dialectical Reason, the colonized are “produced by the colonial system.”91 Fanon offered a similar formulation in his essay “On Violence,” which became the famous first chapter of The Wretched of the Earth: he confirmed that he still accepted the lesson of AntiSemite and Jew that the oppressor makes the oppressed, but now he explicitly linked this capacity to the power of the system. “It is the colonist who made and who continues to make the colonized. The colonist derives his truth, that is his wealth, from the colonial system.”92 Whereas the notion of situation threatens to isolate and particularize, the idea of system emphasizes interconnectedness and totalizes. The notion of system has often been seen as anathema to existentialism, especially since many see the beginnings of existentialism in Kierkegaard’s revolt against the

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Hegelian system, but one should not view the prominence of this word in late Sartre as a sign of his departure from one of the fundamental insights of existentialism. He did not mean “a system of thoughts,”93 and neither did he abandon the existentialist quest for the concrete that had motivated him from the outset. In the Critique, dialectical reason was his route to the concrete and he sought intelligibility there.94 Indeed, the notion of system was presumed to serve that purpose in part, compensating for the danger that an account of some particular situation might abstract from the larger economic and political issues that actually determine it. The richness of the accounts of racism to be found in both Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason and Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth derives partly from how they use this larger perspective to highlight the character of institutional racism: racism is a system.95 For Sartre this development was sustained by his conviction that Marxism and existentialism could be reconciled. Fanon did not embrace Marxism in this way, although he did write that, in the context of the colonial problem, Marxist analyses needed to be “slightly stretched.”96 Neither of them abandoned their existentialist understanding of racism for a Marxist approach. Instead, they looked to Marxism, broadly conceived, for assistance in enriching the account that each had already proposed. I have argued in this chapter that Fanon’s account of lived experience in his first publication was not the straightforward autobiographical testimony that it presents itself to be. Just as “‘The North African Syndrome’” was something of a ruse—given that Fanon concealed his racial identity and ventriloquized a certain racism in order to trap his readers—so in “The Lived Experience of the Black” he told the story of the previous generation of black intellectuals in France partly to show that it led only to tears and lamentation. This critique of his predecessors also served as a critique of the Sartre of “Black Orpheus” who, writing from the ignorance that derives from not having personally suffered from racial oppression, had relied too heavily on descriptions provided by the negritude poets and sought to systematize their ideas. The critique also indicates limitations to which some writers—in particular, those who follow Fanon in recording their own experiences of racism but who do not go much further—should be more attentive. Such testimonies are important to understanding racism and setting priorities that combat racism, but Fanon’s own descriptions of racism at the individual level demonstrate that this approach can end only in tears. According to Fanon, it was only when accounting for racism as a system that the diagnosis became politically efficacious.

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Taken as a whole, Fanon’s writings can be understood as an attempt to challenge the racism inscribed in the structures of colonialism. Although he took as his starting point his personal experience of racism, he tried to go beyond the situation to show a certain systemic racism at work. This meant he had to negotiate the difficulty of moving from a concrete description of an experience rooted in a specific context to a broader perspective that could shape a political solidarity. Although I have not dwelled on it here, Fanon saw that perspective as beginning in counterviolence against the violence of racism: “Solidarity among tribes, among villages and at the national level is fist discernible in the growing number of blows dealt to the enemy.”97 The problem of racism does not admit of a once-and-for-all theoretical solution. Rather, it must be encountered again and again in the consciousness of every reader sensitive enough to engage with the matter at hand. This is why Fanon challenged the readers of Black Skin, White Masks by insisting that his observations were confined to a precise context and subsequently lifting that restriction: only insofar as it is lifted does existential philosophy open the path to a struggle against oppression that transcends situations, thereby indicating the ways in which we are all implicated. How we respond to that recognition explains why reading Fanon is to face the challenge of the question: Am I worthy of being loved? That is the question Fanon posed to all his readers, whatever their color; and so far as he was concerned, they answered it by determining with whom they were ready to show solidarity.

Notes 1. Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Seuil, 1975), trans. Richard Philcox; Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 2008). There have been at least three different editions of the French text and two different translations. The first French edition had a preface by Francis Jeanson, who subsequently added a postscript to another edition. For some time, however, the French edition has not included either of the two texts by Jeanson, which is true also of both English translations. I am not convinced that the new translation by Richard Philcox is much of an improvement on the first by Charles Lam Markman that appeared from the same publishers in 1967, and for that reason I will sometimes propose an alternative translation without marking it explicitly. 2. UNESCO, “Text of the Statement of 1950,” in The Race Concept: Results of an Inquiry (Paris: UNESCO, 1952), 103.

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3. Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris: Editions Réclamé, 1950); trans. Joan Pinkham; Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972). Of the Jews, Fanon unfortunately wrote: “They have been hunted, exterminated, but these are just minor episodes in the family history.” Fanon, Peau noire, 93; Fanon, Black Skin, 95. Fanon made the same point in somewhat less contentious language in Pour la revolution africaine (Paris: Maspero, 1964), 40, 192, 198; Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove, 1969), 33, 166, 171. 4. See Lewis Gordon, Existentia africana (New York: Routledge, 2000), and Paget Henry, Caliban’s Reason (New York: Routledge, 2000). For Donna-Dale Marcano, Kathryn Gines, Anika Maaza Mann, and Emily Lee, see Maria del Guadalupe Davidson, Kathryn T. Gines, and Donna-Dale L. Marcano, eds., Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2010). 5. Annie Cohen-Solal, Sartre: 1905–1985 (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 555; Cohen-Solal, Sartre: A Life, trans. Anna Cancogni (London: Heinemann, 1987), 433. 6. Fanon, Peau noire, 11; Fanon, Black Skin, xviii. 7. As far as we know, he never even went to nearby Guadeloupe. David Macey, Frantz Fanon (New York: Picador, 2000), 29. However, he did spend a few weeks in Dominica in 1943; see Macey, Frantz Fanon, 89. 8. Fanon, Peau noire, 11; Fanon, Black Skin, xviii. 9. Fanon, Peau noire, 14; Fanon, Black Skin, 2. 10. This is an inheritance from the tradition of phenomenological philosophy associated with Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and adopted by such French existential philosophers as Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and (if one is willing to extend that label to him) Emmanuel Levinas. 11. Fanon, “L’expérience vécue du Noir,” Espirit 19, no. 179 (May 1951): 657–79. Fanon made a few relatively minor changes to this version when he included it in Black Skin, White Masks. A translation of this original version by Valentine Moulard can be found in Robert Bernasconi, ed., Race (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 184–201. 12. We do not know when Fanon first conceived of Black Skin, White Masks, but it was apparently written between 1951 and 1952. See Alice Cherki, Frantz Fanon: Portrait (Paris: Seuil, 2000), 43; Cherki, Frantz Fanon: A Portrait, trans. Nadia Benubid (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 24. 13. Fanon, Peau noire, 67–87; Fanon, Black Skin, 64–88. 14. The issue also included a translation of J. F. Powers’s story “The Trouble” from The Prince of Darkness, Paule Verdet’s reflections on Louisiana, Graham Greene’s essay on the electoral campaign in Liberia, and Louis T. Achille’s essay on Negro spirituals. 15. Fanon, Peau noire, 114; Fanon, Black Skin, 119. 16. Macey wrote that “Peau noire had been rejected as an academic dissertation” and elsewhere that it had been “angrily rejected before he was able to submit it by

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an outraged Professor Dechaume on the predictable grounds that it defied all known academic and scientific conventions.” See Macey, Frantz Fanon, 155, 138. In fact, Fanon wrote: “When I began this book I thought of submitting it as my thesis. And then the dialectic required that I develop my position further.” See Fanon, Peau noire, 39; Fanon, Black Skin, 30–31. Fanon made it clear that the work was abandoned as a dissertation long before it was completed or had reached its final form. We should beware of claims that Fanon wrote the book much earlier. Fanon acknowledged that “this book should have been written three years ago” (Peau noire, 6; Black Skin, xiii) but did not say it was written three years ago, although Mannoni (who also incorrectly claims credit for the title) claimed that he had. Octave Mannoni, “Fanon: la Passion et le talent,” Sans frontiére (February 1982): 57. 17. Macey, Frantz Fanon, 155. 18. Cherki suggests this. However, because she is talking about Fanon’s February 1952 essay in Esprit, her version must be modified before it can be believed—not least because Domenach would have been deputy editor (not editor-in-chief) at the time. Cherki, Frantz Fanon: Portrait, 31n24; Cherki, Fanon: A Portrait, 225n24. 19. “Rupture entre l’ordre chrétien et le désordre établi” was the title of the special issue of Esprit issued in March 1933. For a helpful study of the foundation of the journal, see R. William Rauch Jr., Politics and Belief in Contemporary France. Emmanuel Mounier and Christian Democracy, 1932–1950 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972), 52–97. For an appreciation of Mounier, see Paul Ricoeur, “Emmanuel Mounier: A Personalist Philosopher,” in History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbey (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1965), 133–61. Fanon cited Mounier’s book on Africa, L’éveil de l’afrique noire, twice in Black Skin, White Masks (Peau noire, 43, 180; Black Skin, 36, 97). 20. Herbert R. Lottman, The Left Bank. Writers, Artists, and Politics from the Popular Front to the Cold War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982), 277. 21. Fanon, Peau noire, 88; Fanon, Black Skin, 89. 22. Fanon, Peau noire, 10; Fanon, Black Skin, xvii. 23. Fanon, Peau noire, 88; Fanon, Black Skin, 89 24. Jean-Paul Sartre, Réflexions sur la question juive (Paris: Gallimard, 1989), 115; Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George J. Becker (New York: Schocken, 1976), 95. 25. Fanon, Peau noire, 92; Fanon, Black Skin, 95. 26. See, for example, Janet G. Vaillant, Black, French and African: A Life of Léopold Sédar Senghor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 87–116. This description did not begin with them; see, for example, Paulette Nardal, who wrote: “Race Consciousness among certain Antilleans had already been awakened as a result of leaving their small native lands.” Nardal, “The Awakening of Race Consciousness,” in Bernasconi, Race, 107. 27. Fanon, Peau noire, 11; Fanon, Black Skin, xviii.

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28. Fanon, Peau noire, 35–36; Fanon, Black Skin, 27. See Bernasconi, “Can Race Be Thought in Terms of Facticity? A Reconsideration of Sartre’s and Fanon’s Existential Theories of Race,” in Rethinking Facticity, ed. François Raffoul and Eric Nelson (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2008), 195–213. 29. Sartre, Réflexions, 171, 182; Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 141, 150. 30. Fanon, Peau noire, 66; Fanon, Black Skin, 73. 31. Fanon, Peau noire, 11; Fanon, Black Skin, xviii. 32. Sartre, Réflexions, 84; Sartre, Anti-Semite and Jew, 69; Fanon, Peau noire, 75; Fanon, Black Skin, 73. 33. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Orphée noir,” in Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie négre et malgache de langue française, ed. Léopold Sédar-Senghor (Paris: Presses Universitaries de France, 1948), ix–xliv; Sartre, “Black Orpheus,” trans. John MacCombie, in Bernas­ coni, Race, 115–42. 34. Fanon, Peau noire, 109; Fanon, Black Skin, 113. There is no need here to explore the intricacies of Fanon’s critique of Sartre in “The Lived Experience of the Black,” about which I have already written at greater length elsewhere. For example, see Bernasconi, “‘The European Knows and Does Not Know’: Fanon’s Response to Sartre,” in Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, ed. Max Silverman (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2005), 100–11, and Bernasconi, “On Needing Not to Know and Forgetting What One Never Knew: The Epistemology of Ignorance in Fanon’s Critique of Sartre,” in Race and the Epistemologies of Ignorance, ed. Nancy Tuana and Shannon Sullivan (Albany: SUNY Press, 2007), 237–39. I focus on Fanon’s relation to Sartre, rather than Sartre’s relation to Fanon, in part because we do not know when Sartre first read Fanon. David Macey’s suggestion—that it was not until Fanon submitted a powerful essay on Algeria’s European minority to Les temps mo­ dernes in the middle of 1959—is certainly plausible; see Macey, Frantz Fanon, 452. That essay was published in a section of the journal entitled “Exposés,” but it was not one of Fanon’s more philosophical contributions. Fanon, L’an V de la revolution algérienne (Paris: Francois Maspero, 1964), 141–60; Fanon, Studies in Dying Colonialism, trans. Haakon Chevalier (New York: Grove, 1965), 147–78. 35. Sartre, “Orphée noir,” ix–xi; Sartre, “Black Orpheus,” 115–16. 36. Sartre, “Orphée noir,” xi; Sartre, “Black Orpheus,” 117. 37. Sartre, “Orphée noir,” xxiii; Sartre, “Black Orpheus,” 125. 38. Sartre, “Orphée noir,” xlii; Sartre, “Black Orpheus,” 138. 39. See Fanon, Peau noir, 160, 181–82; Fanon, Black Skin, 174, 199. 40. Fanon, Peau noir, 108; Fanon, Black Skin, 112–13. 41. Fanon, Peau noir, 146; Fanon, Black Skin, 158. 42. Fanon, Peau noir, 130; Fanon, Black Skin, 138. 43. Sartre, “Orphée noir,” xv; Sartre, “Black Orpheus,” 179. 44. Sartre, “Orphée noir,” xxvii; Sartre, “Black Orpheus,” 127.

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45. Sartre, “Orphée noir,” xxix; Sartre, Black Orpheus,” 129. 46. Fanon, Peau noire, 110; Fanon, Black Skin, 115. Homi Bhabha writes of this sentence: “This is emphatically not a post-modern celebration of pluralistic identities”; Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 238. Bhabha is correct that there is an unfortunate tendency to find “post-modernism” where there is none, but whatever Bhabha is denying, Fanon is surely making the point that one should not associate any identity—and certainly not this one—with a single model to which others of that identity are supposed to conform. 47. Fanon, Peau noir, 103; Fanon, Black Skin, 106–7. 48. Fanon, Peau noir, 110; Fanon, Black Skin, 115. 49. Fanon, Peau noir, 80–81; Fanon, Black Skin, 80. 50. Fanon, Peau noire, 134; Fanon, Black Skin, 150. See Gabriel d’Arbousier, “Une dangereuse mystification: La théorie de la negritude,” La nouvelle critique (June 1949): 38–39. 51. Fanon, Peau noir, 140; Fanon, Black Skin, 150. 52. W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, The Conservation of Races (American Negro Academy Occasional Papers, no. 2) (Washington, D.C.: American Negro Academy, 1947), 11. Photomechanically reproduced in The American Negro Academy Occasional Papers (New York: Arno, 1969). See Bernasconi, “‘Our Duty to Conserve’: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Philosophy of History in Context,” South Atlantic Quarterly 108, no. 3 (Summer 2009): 530–31. 53. Fanon, Peau noire, 140; Fanon, Black Skin, 150 (emphasis in original). 54. Fanon, Peau noire, 139; Fanon, Black Skin, 150. 55. Fanon, Peau noire, 112; Fanon, Black Skin, 117. 56. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his own philosophy, pursued a similar path in which the gaze was placed in a broader context of system and praxis. See Donna-Dale Marcano, “Sartre and the Social Construction of Race,” in Race and Racism in Continental Philosophy, ed. Robert Bernasconi with Sybol Cook (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003), 224. 57. Fanon, L’an V, 27; Fanon, Dying Colonialism, 47. 58. Sartre, “Orphée noir,” xxviii; Sartre, “Black Orpheus,” 128. 59. Fanon, L’an V, 13; Fanon, Dying Colonialism, 35. 60. Fanon, L’an V, 20–21; Fanon, Dying Colonialism, 41–42. 61. Fanon, L’an V, 23; Fanon, Dying Colonialism, 44. 62. Fanon, L’an V, 26; Fanon, Dying Colonialism, 47. 63. Fanon, “Le ‘syndrome nord africain,’” Esprit 20, no. 2 (1952): 248–57. Reprinted in Fanon, Pour la revolution africaine, 13–24; Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 3–16. The essay was addressed to whites, and its publication was accompanied by two editorial comments—the need for which confirms its controversial character. 64. Fanon, Pour la revolution africaine, 13, 24, 45; Fanton, Toward the African Revolution, 3, 14, and 15.

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65. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1953), 299–300; Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967), 346. Karl Jaspers introduced the philosophical concept of situation earlier, but it was less clearly demarcated from the ordinary notion of situation in his Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (Berlin: Julius Springer, 1919), 8. 66. Quoted in Fanon, Pour la revolution africaine, 20; Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 10. From E. Stern, “Médecine psychosomatique,” Psyché: Revue internationale des sciences de l’homme de et de la psychanalyse (1949): 128. 67. Fanon, Pour la revolution africaine, 23; Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 13. 68. Fanon, Pour la revolution africaine, 25; Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 15. 69. Fanon, Pour la revolution africaine, 25; Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 16. 70. Fanon, Peau noire, 83; Fanon, Black Skin, 82–83. 71. Fanon, “Antillais et Africains,” Esprit 23 (February 1955): 261–69. Reprinted in Fanon, Pour la révolution africaine, 27–36; Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 17–27. 72. Fanon, Peau noire, 11; Fanon, Black Skin, xviii. 73. Fanon, Peau noire, 139–40; Fanon, Black Skin, 150. 74. Fanon estimated the number at ten thousand, although this may be high by a factor of four (according to Macey, Frantz Fanon, 81). He did not leave Martinique as a soldier until March 1944 (ibid., 91). 75. Fanon, Pour la revolution africaine, 34; Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 24. 76. In his review of Black Skin, White Masks, Léonard Sainville observed that Fanon avoided any detailed discussion of what might legitimately be understood as his prewar predecessors—most notably, Légitime defense. Sainville, “Le noir antillais devant la literature,” Les lettres françaises 1 (August 1952): 3. See also Jim House, “Colonial Racisms in the ‘Métropole’: Reading Peau noire, masques blancs in Context,” in Silverman, Frantz Fanon’s, 46–73. 77. Fanon, Peau noire, 67, 76; Fanon, Black Skin, 64, 74. 78. It was called the “dirty” war owing to the Henri Martin affair in 1950, in which a sailor who distributed leaflets against the war was imprisoned until massive protests forced his release. See Sartre, L’affaire Henri Martin (Paris: Gallimard, 1953). 79. Fanon, Peau noire, 124; Fanon, Black Skin, 131. 80. See Emmanuel Hansen, “Frantz Fanon: Portrait of a Revolutionary,” in Rethinking Fanon, ed. Nigel C. Gibson (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 1999), 55–57. 81. Fanon, Pour la revolution africaine, 31; Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 21 (translation altered). 82. Fanon, Pour la revolution africaine, 36; Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 27. 83. Fanon, Pour la revolution africaine, 28–31; Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 18–21. 84. Fanon, Les damnés de la terre (Paris: Gallimard, 1991), 261; Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove, 2004), 153.

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85. Fanon, Peau noire, 89; Fanon, Black Skin, 90. 86. Albert Memmi, Portrait du colonisé (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 23–29; Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, trans. Howard Greenfeld (Boston: Beacon, 1965), xxi–xxix. What tends to be known as “Sartre’s preface” first appeared as a book review of the 1957 edition published by Buchet/Chastel. See Les temps modernes 137/138 (July/ August 1957): 289–92. It was first included in Memmi’s book in 1961. 87. Memmi, Portrait du colonisé, 29; Memmi, Colonizer and the Colonized, xvi. 88. Memmi, Le racisme (Paris: Gallimard, 1994); Memmi, Racism, trans. Steve Martinot (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000). 89. Memmi, Portrait du colonisé, 80; Memmi, Colonizer and the Colonized, 56 (translation altered). 90. Sartre, Situations V (Paris: Gallimard, 1964), 53; Sartre, Colonialism and Neocolonialism, trans. Azzedine Haddour et al. (London: Routledge, 2001), 51. Memmi seemed not to understand this critique—nor the Critique, as is clear from the preface he wrote in 1973: “What separates me from Sartre is the importance which the objective conditions of oppression have for me.” See Memmi, L’homme dominé (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 66; Memmi, Dominated Man (New York: Orion, 1968), 86. 91. Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 819; Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (London: Verso, 1976), 739. For a recent study of Sartre’s relation to colonialism, see Paige Arthur, Unfinished Projects. Decolonization and the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (London: Verso, 2010). The importance of Sartre’s Critique for the understanding of race and of racism is most clearly demonstrated by Donna-Dale Marcano in “Sartre and the Social Construction of Race,” in Bernasconi, Race and Racism, 214–26. 92. Fanon, Les damnés, 66; Fanon, Wretched, 2 (emphasis in original). 93. Sartre, Critique, 406; Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 300. 94. Sartre, Critique, 753, 767; Sartre, Critique of Dialectical Reason, 671, 685. 95. See Bernasconi, “Racism Is a System,” in The Cambridge Companion to Existentialism, ed. Steven Crowell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming). 96. Fanon, Les damnés, 70; Fanon, Wretched, 5. 97. Fanon, Les damnés, 171; Fanon, Wretched, 84.

13

Simone de Beauvoir in Her Times and Ours The Second Sex and Its Legacy in French Feminist Thought Debra Bergoffen

It is impossible to know where Simone de Beauvoir’s thinking would have gone had she been spared the depravation and fright of living in Nazi-occupied Paris. What we do know is that coming face-to-face with forces of injustice beyond her control gave a new urgency to the questions of evil and the other. Beauvoir spoke of the war as creating an existential rupture in time and spoke of herself as having undergone a conversion.1 She could no longer afford the luxury of focusing on her own happiness and pleasure. The question of oppression became a pressing concern. One cannot refuse to take a stand; one is either a collaborator or not. In writing The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir took her stance. She identified herself as an existentialist and identified existentialism as the philosophy of her times because it is the only philosophy that takes the question of evil seriously.2 It is the only philosophy prepared to counter Dostoevsky’s claim that, without God, everything is permissible. Existentialism, in arguing that we live in a world that cannot look to God for redemption, argues that because we are alone we are unconditionally responsible for the condition of

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the world. Taking these existential truths as her point of departure for The Ethics of Ambiguity, Beauvoir developed a logic of freedom, reciprocity, and responsibility that contests the terrors of a world ruled only by the authority of power. In speaking for the possibility of an ethics of freedom and responsibility to a world traumatized by the atrocities of two world wars, The Ethics of Ambiguity spoke to and for its times. The relationship between The Second Sex and its times was more complicated. Beauvoir tells us that she hesitated to write this book. With so much ink spilled over the subject of feminism and so many quarrels surrounding it, perhaps it would be better to remain silent.3 Yet she wrote. Why? Because in much of the world the oppression of women was accepted and acceptable. Because the abstract equality accorded to women in some of the world had done nothing to erase their concrete inequality.4 Because feminists continued to repeat old assertions and complaints: They either claimed that women were superior to men or maintained that women were equal to men or blamed social, economic, and political conditions for women’s inferiority. Beauvoir wrote The Second Sex to reframe feminist debates—to find new ways of understanding women’s situation.5 She wrote it to describe the world from a woman’s perspective so that we might see the difficulties women confront in their aspirations to become full members of the human race.6 In speaking of and to a world already aware of the Fascist, communist, and capitalist faces of evil, The Ethics of Ambiguity was well received. In speaking of and to a world where women’s issues were considered irritating and trivial, The Second Sex took time to find its audience. Some say that time is still coming. Noting the publication dates of The Ethics of Ambiguity (1947) and The Second Sex (1949) and the similar categories at work in their analyses, we can discern the ways that Beauvoir’s confrontation with the atrocities of World War II and the ideologies of the Cold War prepared her to confront the injustices of patriarchy. Further, if we note that, while writing The Second Sex, Beauvoir was traveling in the United States, where she encountered the legacies of American slavery (recounted in America Day by Day, published in 1948), then we can see that her references to slavery in The Second Sex were neither ahistorical nor abstract. Traveling in the American South, Beauvoir was thrown into a world structured by racism. She found herself unwillingly wearing the oppressor’s shoes. Unlike her experience with anti-Semitism in World War II, where living under the oppression of the Nazi occupation meant she lived in solidarity with the Jews, in the American South she was viewed as an agent of racism. In America she experienced the ways that the realities of racism

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degraded her as well as those it oppressed. Already in the process of interrogating the ways that the systems of patriarchy exploit women, Beauvoir’s American experience opened her to the insight that patriarchy, in its oppression of women, also dehumanized men. Thus, although The Second Sex insists that demands for freedom must be made by women in the name of women, it also makes it clear that a world without a “second” sex would be liberating for both women and men. When Time magazine named The Second Sex as one of the hundred most influential books of the twentieth century, it signaled that the ethics born from Beauvoir’s World War II experiences continue to be relevant today; for if The Second Sex still speaks to us, it is because the ethical insights that ground it remain valid. To understand the continued force of this book, and especially its place in contemporary French feminist discussions, we need to understand that the issues it raises, the analyses it provides, and the criteria of justice it invokes are concrete expressions of Beauvoir’s claim, in The Ethics of Ambiguity, that existentialism is the philosophy for our times because it is the only philosophy that takes the question of evil seriously. Understanding the continued influence of The Second Sex also requires that we question established ways of reading Monique Wittig, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva. This chapter argues that we get a better sense of the contemporary French feminist scene if we read it as a genealogy that mines the ambiguities and tensions of Beauvoir’s thought for its unsaid possibilities. The chapter establishes the ground for this reading by detailing the relationship between The Second Sex and The Ethics of Ambiguity. If it is the case that the publication of The Second Sex is now celebrated, it is also the case that its relevance remains contested. Among feminists, The Second Sex has been criticized for being emblematic of what was wrong with the feminism of the 1970s. Like that feminism, Beauvoir is accused of “essentializing” the complex realities of women’s lives. She is accused of assuming that certain women—privileged, middle-class, white women—could speak for all women. This accusation misses the point that Beauvoir did not claim to speak for all women and did not ignore the differences among women. She did, however, assert that, because she was privileged, she was in the best position to analyze the situation of women.7 This claim of epistemic authority runs counter to the phenomenology of lived experience and situated knowledge. Dealing with it is one of the challenges of reading The Second Sex. Elizabeth Spelman8 and Patricia Hill Collins9 are among those who have addressed this claim of privilege. They find it unsupportable and assert that

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it renders Beauvoir’s thought inadequate, if not obsolete. They argue that is was precisely because she was privileged that she missed the significance of the compelling and complex ways in which our identities as women are yoked to our race, class, and sexual identities. In this chapter the question concerns the implications of these criticisms for the continued relevance of The Second Sex. Do they indicate that the categories of The Second Sex are inadequate per se or that they were inadequately deployed by Beauvoir? In addressing the question of relevance, everything depends on what we mean by “relevance.” For me, the continued significance of The Second Sex is not determined by whether the issues that are central for us today (e.g., globalization, violence against women, the use of rape as a weapon of war) were central for Beauvoir but rather by whether the categories of The Second Sex continue to provide logical and imaginative possibilities for understanding these contemporary issues. From this perspective, in signaling the ways that the dynamics of racism, imperialism, and slavery mimic the dynamics of sexism and in using such terms as “oppression” and “subjugation” (terms that are usually associated with class, colonial, and race domination) to characterize women’s situation, Beauvoir’s relevance lies in her insistence that we associate the condition of women with the condition of other exploited people. In citing the example of the harem woman, and in noting the ways that her cultural and social condition complicates her condition as a woman, Beauvior points to ways that women’s oppression is multifaceted. She shows that we need to go beyond associating the situation of the woman and the slave and interrogate the situation of the woman who is a slave. Beauvoir does not pursue the implications of this example. In bringing the situation of the harem woman to our attention, however, she suggests that we should. Spelman and Collins say that we must. Years later, Beauvoir returned to this problem of privilege when she took up the case of Djamila Boupacha.10 Boupacha’s torture and rape and Beauvoir’s intervention spoke to the fact that the way one lives one’s sex and gender is intimately implicated in the way one exists as raced and classed. Boupacha, accused of being a member of the Algerian resistance, was arrested, raped, and tortured by the French authorities. Her torture included rape because she was a woman. But it is not only because she was a woman that she was raped and tortured. It was because she was an Algerian, young, virgin woman who could become unmarriageable because she was raped. In coming to Boupacha’s defense, Beauvoir was not just one woman coming to the aid of another. She came to Boupacha’s defense as a French intellectual woman of standing

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who knew that her privileged position could make a difference. If The Second Sex’s explicit claim that being privileged provides the vantage point for analyzing the condition of all women has been discredited, Beauvoir’s implicit claim, in defending Boupacha, that being privileged carries responsibilities has not. The question concerns the nature of these responsibilities and the way to enact them. The issue of the continued relevance of The Second Sex becomes clearest when we turn to the matter of the “we”: the matter of creating the solidarity necessary for social and political change. Contemporary feminists, in alerting us to the dangers of essentialism and in focusing on the diverse materialities of women’s lives, are sensitive to the ways that theories of difference complicate the demands of praxis. They have attempted to resolve this problem by offering strategic arguments for common action. Returning to Beauvoir, we might find more solid grounds for a political activism that speaks for women in the name of their oppression as woman. Beauvoir saw the problem of the “we” as a pressing issue in 1949. She attributed it to several factors at work in women’s lives: their inability to affirm their subjectivity; their economic, social, and cultural situations; their dispersion among men; and the unique tie that binds them to men.11 For Beauvoir, the diversity of women’s lives—the economic, social, racial and religious differences through which they identify themselves—sabotages the political solidarity necessary for challenging the status quo. This is no accident. Keeping women isolated from each other serves the oppressive agenda of patriarchy. Seen from the perspective of the problem of solidarity, The Second Sex needs to be read phenomenologically and politically. Its phenomenological descriptions contest the reifying powers of the myth of woman by capturing the particularities of women’s lives. These descriptions also show us how to invoke the category “woman” for a politics of resistance. The analytic power of this phenomenology of singularity and solidarity is captured in Beauvoir’s unique use of the category of the other: in the question that opens The Second Sex—“What is a woman?”—and in the famous sentence that opens Book Two of The Second Sex—“One is not born, but becomes a woman.” To fully appreciate the critical power of this phenomenology, we need to remember that The Second Sex’s feminism as grounded in The Ethics of Ambiguity is committed to the propositions that separate existents can be bound to each other, that individual freedoms can forge laws valid for all, and that the condition of particularity can also become the source of a common cause.12

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The Categories of Freedom and Oppression The Second Sex identifies patriarchy as a politics of oppression that systematically deprives women of their freedom. The obvious sign of this depravation is material and psychological: women are economically dependent on men and psychologically groomed for the romanticized roles of wife and mother. They are destined to a life of service to others. Their status and value is derived from the value and status of the men in their lives. Yet the more serious but camouflaged mark of this deprivation is phenomenological: women are said to have an essence (biology, they are told, is destiny) that precludes them from becoming authors of the meaning of the world. In accordance with their essence, women live in the world as an-other, a world where values are established without reference to their perspectives or desires. As women they are hypervisible but silenced. As hypervisible they are objectified. As silenced they are alienated from their humanity. From this ethical and phenomenological perspective, granting women economic independence and political rights within the terms of the sexual contract would not alleviate the grounds of their oppression, for their phenomenological and ethical status as worldembedded beings who bring values to the world would remain in question. These are strong claims. They are hyperbolic to those who find The Second Sex offensive. They are unintelligible to those who believe in the natural order of things. But to those who heard the injustice of their situation finally given a voice, these claims were liberating. The Second Sex is a phenomenological, ethical, and political text. Its ethics and politics are tied to Beauvoir’s phenomenology, specifically to the analyses of The Ethics of Ambiguity, in which Beauvoir developed the ethical and political implications of the phenomenological understanding of consciousness as a meaning-giving activity. Phenomenology, as understood by Beauvoir, establishes two truths of the human condition. The first is that to be human is to exist as the spontaneous activity of disclosing the meaning of the world. The second is that to be human is to exist at an unbridgeable distance from the world. This distance, by precluding my identity with the world, is the ground of the relationship I sustain to it. However embedded I may be in the world, I cannot make it serve my ends. It will always exceed my grasp. The project of mastery founders in this gap that separates me from the world. The project of finding meaning in the world thrives in it. The world cannot belong to me. It does, however, speak to me. For Beauvoir, my

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passion and joy finds its home in this intersection of disclosure (the ways that I give the world meaning) and failure (these meanings are never final; the world will exceed my words). The joys of disclosing the wonders of the world would be destroyed if it were possible to appropriate the fullness of the world once and for all.13 This phenomenology of disclosure takes on ethical and political significance once we realize that, in disclosing the already present meanings of the world, we are also questioning them. The revelation of the way things are entails the question: Why are things this way rather than that? The realities of the world are always accompanied by its other possibilities. From an ethical and political perspective, the joy of disclosing these possibilities is also and necessarily the freedom that opens the world to transformation.14 From this perspective, disclosure is the agency of change. The phenomenology of The Ethics of Ambiguity establishes the joys of disclosure and the desires of freedom as our birthright.15 To be oppressed is to be robbed of these rights. Thus, for Beauvoir, oppression—before being identified in terms of economic, social, or political factors—must be understood phenomenologically: to be oppressed is to be deprived of the joy and responsibility of being a human being. Oppression at its most fundamental level exists wherever people do not or cannot experience themselves as worlddisclosing beings who bring meaning and value to life. To be oppressed is to live as the other in the world of an-other. It is easy to see how this fundamental form of oppression is materialized in such institutional practices as slavery, colonialism, and human trafficking. It is not always easy to see how it is materialized in sex/gender institutions. When, in the introduction to The Second Sex, Beauvoir tells us that the world belongs to men—that they determine the truths of the world and that women are the other16—she is identifying patriarchy with this fundamental form of oppression. In alerting us to the economic, political, and social realities of women’s subordination to men, Beauvoir asks us to see these inequities as symptomatic of this more basic oppression—that “women” as the other become “woman”—the one who is robbed of her phenomenological-ethical status as a world-disclosing being. Women may acquiesce in their oppression for practical, historical, or bad faith reasons.17 In their acquiescence, they are often said to be happy. However, in happily accepting the honors accorded them as embodiments of femininity, women forfeit the joys of being human.

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On Becoming a Woman If The Ethics of Ambiguity is read as providing the philosophical concepts necessary for deciphering what Beauvoir means when she identifies women as the oppressed, then The Second Sex can be read as using these concepts to critique the ethics and politics of sex/gender domination. The descriptions of The Second Sex make it clear that becoming a woman—the one who passively receives men’s meanings of the world, the one who depends on men for validation and status, the one who experiences herself as powerlessness—cannot be simply mandated. It must be embodied and felt as real. It is a matter of becoming habituated to living one’s body as fragile, vulnerable, and weak, of sabotaging the body’s “I can” powers by learning to “throw like a girl” so that women will distrust their ability to engage the world or lose it entirely. Becoming a woman is a matter of embodying a specific set of habits and behaviors. Habits, however, can be broken. That is the point of The Second Sex. From the standpoint of later feminists, Beauvoir missed the radical implications of her explosive declarations. Though she spoke of postmenopausal women as embodying a third sex (insofar as they were no longer embodied as feminine and were never embodied as masculine) and though she suggested that lesbians might escape the traps of the myth of woman, she never critiqued the two-sex system and never saw heterosexuality as a problem. Feminists who came after her did. Asking the question that drove the analyses of The Second Sex, “What is a woman?,” they read the line “One is not born but becomes a woman” more radically and more diversely than Beauvoir could have anticipated. That this line continues to provoke discussion is one indication of the continued relevance of Beauvoir’s thought. Another indication is the ways that her concepts and analyses created philosophical openings that continue to be fruitful for critiquing the politics of exploitation. By turning to the work of three prominent and theoretically distinct French feminists— Monique Wittig, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva—this chapter shows that the best way to gauge the influence of Beauvoir today is not by counting her defenders and critics but by seeing how those who align themselves with Beauvoir, as well as those who do not, move through the spaces, ambiguities, and tensions of The Second Sex to create new routes for feminist thinking.

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Monique Wittig In her foreword to Monique Wittig’s 1992 collection of theoretical writings, Louise Turcotte remarks: “If a single name has been associated with the French Women’s Liberation Movement [then] it is surely that of Monique Wittig.”18 In her own preface to these writings, Wittig identified herself as a materialist lesbian and associated herself with Christine Delphy, who had coined the term “materialist feminism.” Wittig also heralded the influence of Sande Zeig, an actor with whom she collaborated and who helped her understand that the effects of oppression on the body—which give it its form, its gestures, its movements, its “motricity,” and even its muscles—“have their origin in the abstract domain of concepts through the words that formalize them.”19 Beauvoir’s name is absent from this list of those who informed her thinking. Her signature, however, is unmistakable. When Wittig referred to Beauvoir in several of her essays, and cited Beauvoir by proxy in her essay titled “One Is Not Born but Becomes a Woman,” she was alerting us to the ways that The Second Sex rendered the Marxist categories of labor, class, and alienation inadequate. Traditional Marxists, attentive to the exploitations of the labor contract between men, missed the uniquely alienated position of woman as the other of man. Insofar as the inequality of women was noted, Marxists claimed that women and men would become each other’s equals once the classless society came into being. For Wittig and the feminist materialists, however, resolving the inequities of the labor contract would not resolve the injustices of the sexual contract. Bringing Beauvoir’s “one is not born but becomes a woman” to the Marxist concept of class, Wittig argued that women are a class and not a natural group, and that as a class they exist in an antagonist relationship to the class “man.”20 Comparing sex to race, Wittig contended that the class woman is the product of the ways that the myth of woman appropriates the consciousness and bodies of women.21 She credited Beauvoir with alerting us to this appropriation and with warning us against “the false consciousness which consists of selecting among the features of the myth (that women are different from men) those which look good and using them as a definition for women.”22 Thus, Wittig heard Beauvoir rejecting a feminist politics of difference and took up this rejection by insisting that arguments that extol women’s differences from men fail to solve the problem of women’s subjugation because they do not challenge the categories of man and woman through which the subjugation of women is enforced.

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Materialism, as it was shaped by Wittig, speaks more of alienated consciousness than of alienated labor (though this is not ignored). For what makes women a class is not so much their economic condition (women are too economically diverse ) but the material effects of the category woman. It is because the class woman cannot be mapped economically that feminist materialism is particularly attuned to the effects of language and the symbolic on our bodies and minds. In returning to Beauvoir’s “one is not born but becomes a woman,” Wittig did not follow Beauvoir’s phenomenological analysis of how those identified as female at birth are acculturated to live their bodies in ways that identify them as women, for she believed that attending to these issues addressed the symptom but not the cause of women’s position. Where contemporary feminists such as Sara Heimämaa23 and Eva Lundgren-Gothlin24 argue that recovering Beauvoir’s relationship to Hegel, Heidegger, Sartre, and MerleauPonty would enrich the ethical and political implications of her analyses of embodiment, Wittig took another route. She argued that the disabling effects of embodying femininity cannot be undone without undoing the system of compulsory heterosexuality. The disabled female body is a direct effect of the ways that the sex/gender symbolic system constitutes woman as the other. Reenacting the shock of Beauvoir’s “one is not born but becomes a woman,” Wittig startles us with her announcement that “lesbians are not women.”25 For Wittig, that lesbians are not women is the logical consequence of the materialist frame birthed by Beauvoir. If women are habituated to live their bodies in ways that materialize the myth of woman, and if the myth of woman situates women as the object of men’s desire, then refusing to live their bodies in relationship to men is the only path to liberation. As slaves exist only so long as they are owned by masters, women exist only so long as they are tethered to men. In escaping from their masters, slaves destroy the slave class.26 In severing relationships with men, lesbians demolish the class woman. Echoing Marx’s anticipation of a classless society, Wittig looks forward to a sexless one.27 Beauvoir had agreed to provisionally admit that women existed so that she might pose the question of woman.28 Wittig contended that, once the question of woman is adequately posed, it is no longer necessary to admit (provisionally or otherwise) that women exist. Beauvoir’s sympathy with this appropriation of The Second Sex became evident in 1972 when she joined with other Marxist feminists to launch Questions féministes, a radical feminist journal dedicated to exposing and challenging the power relationships between women and men. The hostile relationship

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between those feminists affiliated with Questions féministes and those who founded Psych et po—a journal devoted to the analysis of women’s oppression through the categories of language and the advocacy of difference—seemed to indicate that those who approached the question of woman/women psychoanalytically, rather than materially, were breaking with Beauvoir’s line of thought. I think things are more complicated. It is difficult, for example, to miss the irony in Wittig’s scathing critique of those who have taken the linguistic analytic turn for reducing the misery of the oppressed “to a few figures of speech”29 when she argued that it is the materiality of language, not just the meager paycheck, that oppresses women. It is difficult to miss the ways that both feminist camps draw out the implications of Beauvoir’s attention to the power of the myth of woman. This is not to suggest that the differences between the materialist and psychoanalytic French feminists were minimal; they were not. The point is to suggest that one way of responding to Beauvoir’s admonition to end the fruitless quarrels between those who insist that the path to liberation lies in the affirmation of women’s equality with men and those who claim that the end of the women’s oppression requires an affirmation of women’s difference from men is to see their diverse assessments of gender politics as pursuing different strains of Beauvoir’s thought. If we read materialist and psychoanalytic feminists as thinking through the tensions in Beauvoir’s thought and if we see these tensions as productive rather than antithetical, then we may be able to analyze contemporary French feminist debates in ways that avoid the ruts Beauvoir identified as the pitfalls of feminist thinking.

Luce Irigaray Where Wittig pursued the radical implications of Beauvoir’s critique of marriage by tracing the oppression of women to the heterosexism of the heterosexual couple, Irigaray discerns the liberatory possibilities of Beauvoir’s reference to the unique bond between the woman and man who form a heterosexual couple. Using a term borrowed from Martin Heidegger, Beauvoir referred to this bond as an original Mitsein. According to Beauvoir, the relation between men and women, though analogous to that of the master and slave, is fundamentally different. Unlike the master–slave relationship, which can be justifiably broken, “male and female stand opposed within a primordial Mitsein. . . . The couple is a fundamental unity with its two halves riveted

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together and the cleavage of society along the line of sex is impossible. Here is to be found the basic trait of woman; she is the Other in a totality of which the two components are necessary to each other.”30 If we accept the idea that there is an essential bond between the man and woman of the heterosexual couple, then the current structure of this bond presents a unique problem. Is marriage as we know it a perversion of this original Mitsein? When did this perversion occur? How is such a perversion possible? Though we may not be able to answer the question of the Mitsein’s origin, to claim that the heterosexual couple is an original Mitsein requires that we ask how the perversion is possible. For unless we probe this second question, it will be impossible to understand the distinction Beauvoir made between sexism and other forms of oppression. In class and race oppression, for example, otherness operates as the source of violence. The resolution of these oppressions requires that we subordinate the idea of difference to the idea of equality. According to Beauvoir, however, resolving sex/gender oppression requires that we recognize sexual difference as the source of a unique form of joyful otherness. She told us that “in sexuality [we find] . . . the tension, the anguish, the joy, the frustration and the triumph of existence,” and wrote , “when we abolish the slavery of half of humanity, together with the whole system of hypocrisy it implies, then the ‘division’ of humanity will reveal its genuine significance and the human couple will find its true form.”31 Beauvoir teased us with these references to the perversions and possibilities of the heterosexual Mitsein; Irigaray teases out the possibilities of this Mitsein in her ethics of sexual difference and politics of equity. Irigaray takes The Second Sex in unexpected but not necessarily foreign directions by bringing Beauvoir’s question of woman as the other to the matter of the Mitsein of the couple. Beauvoir rejected the possibility of a social Mitsein. According to her, it runs counter to our experience of singularity and to the realities of conflict. The experience of individuality belies the idea of an original bond. The prevalence of conflict, whether it takes the more or less benign forms of competition, trade, and festivals or erupts in the violence of war, also discredits the idea of the Mitsein, for the category of the Mitsein suggests that conflict can be avoided. In arguing that violence is a tragic fact of the human condition, Beauvoir saw the heterosexual couple as an exception to this rule of the other. She alludes to the preservation of the species as an argument for this exception. Given her insistence, however, that biological facts acquire their meaning from social practices, this argument is unsupportable.32

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Within the context of The Second Sex, the anomaly of the heterosexual couple’s Mitsein remains a puzzle. We might try to solve the puzzle by arguing that the heterosexual couple is a Mitsein because the sexual difference is an illusion. Beauvoir, however, rejects this solution. She writes: There will always be certain differences between man and woman; her eroticism, and therefore her sexual world, have a special form of their own and therefore cannot fail to engender a sensuality, a sensitivity of a special nature. This means that her relations to her own body, to that of the male, to the child, will never be identical with those the male bears to his own body, to that of the female, and to the child; those who make much of equality in difference could not with good grace refuse to grant me the possible existence of differences in equality.33 Beauvoir further complicates her account of an original heterosexual Mitsein on two counts. First, she tells us that this Mitsein exists because women value the bonds of intimacy more than the recognition of reciprocity.34 Second, she fails to find a time when women were not the second sex. Putting these observations together suggests that the heterosexual Mitsein is original not in the sense of existing at some earlier, utopian moment of time but rather in the sense of originating in women’s desire for the bonds of intimacy. Beauvoir endorses the desire for intimacy but not the price women were being asked to pay for it. The values of recognition and reciprocity cannot be sacrificed for the utopian promise of the heterosexual Mitsein. Between Beauvoir’s axiom that the couple is an original Mitsein and her principle that the category of the other and the conflict it engenders are fundamental to the human condition, we are left with a dilemma. Insofar as she affirms the otherness of the sexual difference, Beauvoir cannot affirm the Mitsein of the heterosexual couple. Insofar as she affirms the Mitsein of the heterosexual couple, she cannot argue for the otherness of the sexual difference. Offering us the utopian promise of the heterosexual Mitsein as a way of giving us hope for the end of sexual exploitation, but refusing to abandon either of these two principles, Beauvoir leaves us at loose ends. How can we justify calling the heterosexual couple an original Mitsein? Why should we embrace it as a utopian promise? Irigaray, accepting the category of the other and otherness as fundamental to the human condition but rejecting Beauvoir’s reading of this otherness as a prescription for conflict and violence, provides a way to resolve the conundrums of Beauvoir’s analysis.

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From Irigaray’s perspective, Beauvoir was correct in recognizing the original Mitsein of the heterosexual couple. Her inability to account for it lies in her failure to challenge the metaphysics of the One, a metaphysics grounded in the idea that there is a hierarchy of truths whereby each truth is legitimated through its reference to a single absolute Truth. Anything not consistent with this one Truth is dismissed as false. If we abandon this metaphysics of the One and recognize a metaphysics of the Two—a metaphysics grounded in the idea that we cannot reduce the Two truths of sexual difference to a One absolute truth that is authorized to silence the other—then the different other would not be experienced as a threat. Instead of a world structured by the violence of the One there would be room in the world for the otherness of the Two. For Irigaray, Beauvoir’s observation that the other is a fundamental category of consciousness revealed the truth of a metaphysics of the Two that grounds the ethics of sexual difference, an ethics embodied and lived in the heterosexual couple. Whereas Wittig abandoned the heterosexual couple, finding that its exploitive class “two” destroyed women’s humanity, Irigaray endorses the heterosexual couple as the ground of an ethics of sexual difference that affirms women’s and men’s distinct dignity. There is just one problem. As currently constituted, the heterosexual couple is not a Two. It is structured according to the oppressive law of the One. This law precludes the existence of women because, according to Irigaray, to exist as a woman I must have access to a language and a symbolic system that allow me to express the unique sensuality of my desire. Current symbolic systems follow the logic of the One. They allow for the expression of men’s desire but not women’s. Both Beauvoir and Wittig were aware of this problem. They saw it in terms of the power of the myth of woman, which allowed women to exist only as figments of men’s desire. Noting a problem is not the same as getting as its root. From Irigaray’s perspective, Wittig—in thinking that lesbians could escape their destiny as women by disengaging from men—missed the fact that as long as women are captured by a symbolic system that alienates them from their desire, whether they live with men or apart from them will be irrelevant. Beauvoir was also naive. Her focus on the habits of our bodies and the economics of our lives ignores the fact that if the only symbolic system available to women is one that speaks exclusively of men’s desire, then women’s status as the inessential other will remain unchanged. Trained in the psychoanalytic traditions of Freud and Lacan, Irigaray exposes the masculine footprints of psychoanalysis. To rewrite the answer to

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Beauvoir’s question of how one who is not born a woman becomes one, Irigaray takes up Freud’s question: What do women want? In answering Freud, she also answers Beauvoir. Irigaray’s response to Freud is twofold: first, under the rule of a symbolic system that expresses only masculine desire, women can want only what masculine desire allows them to want. Second, women want to speak their own desire, but when they try to do so according to the symbolic laws of patriarchal language, they are dismissed as unintelligible. When Freud raised the question of woman’s desire and acknowledged that he could not answer it, he exposed what Irigaray discerns as both the problem and possibility of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, as long as it follows Freud in not seeing the problem of women’s desire in terms of a symbolic system that is only capable of expressing masculine desire, will not resolve the problem of women’s desire. It may, however, follow Freud in noting that its descriptions of the Oedipus complex do not adequately account for women’s sexuality. It may, like Freud in his essay “On Femininity,” return to the question of woman to leave it unanswered and open. Freud expected that women analysts would be more successful than he (and other male analysts) in deciphering the enigma of women’s desire. In this he may have anticipated Irigaray. He certainly did not anticipate that in returning to the place where psychoanalysis begins—the maternal body and the Oedipus complex—this woman analyst would upend the psychoanalytic story of the family romance. As Irigaray sees it, the law of return drives desire. Our desire, she tells us, is born as a longing to return to the place where we began.35 It is structured by the hope that there are routes of return and is assuaged by the assurance that such routes can be found. Given that we are all of woman born, the maternal body stands as the origin of the human. But given that we are not all born women, we cannot all return to this body in the same way. This is the source of sexual difference. We learn who we are and secure our place in the sym­bolic order that structures the social world by discovering how our lived bodies are related to and differentiated from the source of our desire. This is what analysts call resolving the Oedipus complex. For the male analysts, Freud and Lacan, resolving the Oedipus complex required rejecting the bond with the mother for the authority of the father. For Irigaray, however, this account of the Oedipus complex has the effect of erasing our debt to the mother. It is tantamount to murdering her. It is a recipe for violence and destruction. Resolving the Oedipus complex is not, according to Irigaray, a matter of abandoning the mother’s body. It is a matter of creating symbolic systems where each sexed embodiment of the human can discover its unique route

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of return. The only road that exists today follows a patriarchal geography of masculine fantasies. These fantasies reduce women to the mother (the origin of his being and ground of his desire) and then transform them into the wife (the one through whom he will/can return to the origin/ground). Serving as the image of the desired origin and the possibility of his return, woman guarantees man’s desire. As long as she is denied her own desire, she can be counted on to anchor and secure his. The myth of woman attempts to ensure that women will anchor and secure man’s desire by portraying women as wanting to be the object of men’s desire. In directing us to think our way back to the maternal body, Irigaray is neither essentializing women as mothers nor romanticizing motherhood. Rather, she is laying the ground for her account of the transition from a natural to a civic identity. Like the democratic social contract theorists, Irigaray finds that we are not born but become citizens. Unlike the contract theorists—who sever the civic realm from the “natural” domain of the family, allowing only men to enter the public realm and become citizens—Irigaray ties the private and public domains to each other. She argues that both men and women must make the transition from their natural to their civic identities by transforming their biological differences into civic ones. Civic identity is two. Equity, not equality, must ground civil law. Irigaray is insistent and clear: the transition from natural to civic identity occurs in the intimacies of the heterosexual couple or it does not occur at all. The affections of friendship, the love of parents and children, same-sex love, cross-cultural respect, interracial affiliations—all of these socialities of difference are possible only if and after the unique desires of men and women are intelligibly and legitimately expressed. The clearest discussion of how Irigaray envisions the give-and-take between the natural and civic domains is her essay “Toward a Citizenship of the European Union.” There she describes the civil code as “a code for us and for the between us.”36 This code sets the conditions for “a civil relationship between a man and a woman” that “safeguards and protects human identity . . . and coexistence in the community.”37 This code defines civil identity “at the intersection of individual, natural identity and of community, relational identity, a transition which each person, male and female would have to make on their own behalf and consent to the other, male or female.”38 For all of its differences from Beauvoir’s politics of economic, political, and social equality, Irigaray’s politics of equity may be read as attentive to the ghost of the myth of woman that continues to haunt Beauvoir’s independent

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woman. In challenging this ghost with the Two of civic identity, Irigaray may be seen as pursuing Beauvoir’s invitation to imagine how women who were not woman (i.e., not bound by the laws of men’s desire) might navigate the world.

Julia Kristeva Kristeva also takes up Beauvoir’s invitation. Unlike Wittig, who addressed it through the question of class, and Irigaray, who attends to it through the question of the heterosexual Mitsein, Kristeva probes Beauvoir’s phenomenology of intentionality. In her account of intentionality, Beauvoir described us as bringing meaning and value to the world and as putting the meanings and values of the world into question. According to Beauvoir, it is because I am free to question the present meanings and values of the world that I am free to create new meanings and values for the world. Kristeva pursues the implications of aligning the intentionality of freedom, meaning-making, and value formation with the process of questioning. She asks what this entails for our understanding of the subject. For Kristeva, to understand ourselves as beings who question the world we must also understand ourselves as the process of questioning. In order to put the world in question we must also put ourselves in question. Questioning is seen by both Kristeva and Beauvoir as a negating activity. To question something is to negate its certainty. Using the categories of psychoanalysis, Kristeva speaks of the questioning subject in terms of the creative negativity of the drives that reveal alternatives to the status quo. In translating Beauvoir’s concepts of intentionality into the discourse of psychoanalysis Kristeva gives us new ways of understanding how women living under the spell of the myth of woman might live otherwise. For Kristeva, the liberation of women from the myth of woman requires that we tap into the transformative powers of the questioning subject. In creatively negating or questioning the subject designated as woman, we will find ourselves in a world where one who is not born a woman does not become one. That Beauvoir and Kristeva address the same questions through different paradigms should not deflect us from hearing the ways that they speak to each other. We can detect these affinities by listening for the echoes of Beauvoir’s ethics and politics of joy in Kristeva’s ethics and politics of jouissance, by hearing Kristeva’s allusions to the weakness of language in terms of Beau-

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voir’s attention to the meaning of failure, and by discerning the resonance between Kristeva’s discussions of the maternal body as the original site of the semiotic challenge to the law’s authority and Beauvoir’s descriptions of the destabilizing effects of the generosities of the erotic body. The point of identifying these affinities is not to erase the differences between Beauvoir and Kristeva. The point is to alert us to the fruitfulness of putting existential and psychoanalytic analyses in conversation with each other. Within the feminist frame, the question of woman as the other is the question of sexual difference. As we saw with Irigaray, within the psychoanalytic frame this question must be configured in terms of the drives—specifically, the drive to return to the mother and the relationship between this drive and the symbolic order. Bringing a feminist perspective to the traditional psychoanalytic account of how our desires are lived, Kristeva finds what Irigaray finds—that although each of the sexes has its own sensuality, only masculine desire has secured the right to express itself in language. Women’s desire is either silenced or rendered unintelligible. It has no symbolic voice. Everyone who wishes to speak must become homologous to the male speaking body.39 Where Irigaray attributes this state of affairs to the power of the logic of the One, Kristeva finds it symptomatic of a more fundamental issue: our current ways of anchoring the structure of the subject in a secure identity whose health is measured by its stability. By immunizing itself from the destabilizing effects of the question, however, the securely identified subject severs itself from its life blood. Challenging this mode of subjectivity, Kristeva calls for a “herethical” ethics.40 This ethics is grounded in the concept of the subject as a process of self-formation and self-transformation, a questioning that is open to the creative and disruptive energies of the bodied rhythms that Kristeva terms the semiotic. Kristeva calls her ethic a “herethic” not because it expresses a unique female desire but because it is anchored in the maternal body. The maternal body, according to Kristeva, is the paradigmatic subject in process. It challenges current depictions of the subject as the stable core of our identity on two counts. First, the pregnant body is a subject divided within itself: instead of immunizing itself against the disruptions that challenge our secure identities, it embodies the disruptive forces that ground our existence as questioners. As the embodiment of the subject as a process of formation and transformation, the pregnant body is the home of the semiotic’s creative energies. In letting these energies circulate, it contests current masculine modes of subjectivity that approach these energies as forces to be controlled and mastered. Second, the maternal body is the site of our first

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encounter with the touch, rhythm, and flow of the semiotic. This unnamed and unnamable experience, the source of desire and language, is alluded to in the term jouissance. Literally translated as “joy,” the word jouissance has been appropriated by Kristeva and others influenced by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to denote an explosive experience of vitality that breaks all boundaries and laws. Drawing on this psychoanalytic meaning, Kristeva adopts the term jouissance to characterize her politics of revolt. This politics is distinguished by the fact that, like the semiotic, which cannot be contained by the laws of language but is the site of new language forms, it refuses to be bound by absolute goals in order to foster the disruptions that preserve the creative energies of the questioning subject. This politics translates the jouissance of our creative energies into the right to happiness and insists that the right to happiness is essential to human dignity. Kristeva’s herethics may be seen as both critiquing and probing Beauvoir’s erotic ethic. When she argues for an ethics and politics of “alterity”—where, instead of confronting each other as threats to our stable gendered identities, we are drawn to each other as the source of a joyful, destabilizing renewal— Kristeva may be seen as developing Beauvoir’s analyses of the erotic encounter as a site where men’s and women’s gendered identities are questioned.41 Unlike Beauvoir, who reserved this experience of renewal to the destabilizing effects of hetersosexual passion, Kristeva identifies it with motherhood and the birthing body. She refuses to be be duped by the ideology of motherhood and rejects the idea that, in becoming a mother, a woman is the author of her own oppression. For Kristeva, in becoming a mother, a woman materializes the transformations, alterity, and otherness that speak the truth of the subject who questions, creates, and re-creates. As we are all of woman born, the semiotic truths of the maternal body’s jouissance are bequeathed to us. The truths of a herethics and a politics of revolt are part of this bequest.42 Although Kristeva finds that Beauvoir was right to reject a social order that imposes motherhood on women, she also finds that Beauvoir’s opposition to motherhood goes too far. In ignoring the pleasures of motherhood and the power of the mother–infant bond, Beauvoir lost the chance to analyze the forces that co-opt the revolutionary resources of the maternal body. For Irigaray, Beauvoir’s description of the other as a fundamental category of human thought points to the truth of the metaphysics of the Two; for Kristeva, Beauvoir’s descriptions of otherness as a fundamental category of consciousness and a constant factor in social life are materialized in the splitting and otherness of the maternal body.43 More specifically, for Kristeva the

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split that the category of the other names (i.e., the split between myself and an-other) reflects a more basic split: the split at the threshold of language, where the laws that structure the symbolic and the semiotic’s disruption to those laws intersect and resist each other.44 Whereas the split between the I and the other may be reconciled through a praxis of mutual recognition, no such reconciliation is possible for the split between the symbolic and the semiotic. Attending to the maternal body makes this clear. For this body “brings to light and imposes without remedy the separation that precedes pregnancy . . . [the] abyss between the mother and the child.”45 Radicalizing Beauvoir’s refusal to deny a priori that separate existents can be bound to each other by a common law, Kristeva asks: “What connection is there between myself . . . between my body and this internal graft and fold, which once the umbilical cord has been severed is an inaccessible other?”46 To answer this question, Kristeva invites us to see the artist, and in particular the poet, as playing with the laws of language in order to return language to the creative energies of its semiotic source—that is, to the place where the symbolic risks the security of its laws for the creative possibilities of their semiotic disruption. The poet and the artist may be seen as answering the question posed by the maternal body concerning the connection between itself and its issue once the umbilical cord is severed. The poet reconnects language to the nourishing and maternal motility of the semiotic.47 She plays with the rules of grammar to open language to the expressions and meanings of sound and meter, thereby giving language new ways to speak. Moving between the maternal body and the artist, Kristeva rejects romantic images of either. Both are playing with fire. The disruptive splitting of the maternal body carries the threat of psychosis. The poetic disruptions of the laws of language expose the weakness of those laws.48 This weakness is characteristic of all principles of law: freed from all constraints, the semiotic cuts a path of destruction, aggressivity, and death.49 The maternal body invokes the laws of creative negativity to counter the threat of psychosis. It does not give the psychotic split the last word. That is given to the changes and stases of the subject in process whose paradigm of unity provides an alternative to the model of identity authorized by the stable subject.50 Artistic practices mimic the maternal body’s laws of creative negativity. They do not give the weakness of language the last word. When artistic practices call on the energies of the semiotic to counter the ossifications of the laws of order, they call on language to respond to the challenges of the semiotic by refashioning the structures of the law. Language, like the subject, is an

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organizing process that allows us to question and re-create structures without destroying the order that protects us from the chaos of psychosis or anarchy. Like Irigaray, Kristeva links the problem of ethics to the problem of the question of the subject. For Kristeva, however, Irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference still invokes the notion of the subject as a structure; it simply increases the number of acceptable structures from one to two. Insisting that the subject be understood as a structuring and not a structure, Kristeva argues that since we cannot anticipate how the encounter between the semiotic and the symbolic will be lived, we can neither predict the forms that future subjects may assume nor limit their possible number. To understand how Kristeva moves from psychoanalytic analyses of the subject and the maternal body and discussions of the relationship between the semiotic and the symbolic to a politics of revolt, we need to understand that in invoking the right to transgress the law, Kristeva does not advocate abolition of the law. This became clear in her support of the May ’68 student– worker protests in France. Kristeva takes May ’68 as her point of reference for describing a politics of revolt that avoids the destructive dead ends of anarchism and authoritarianism. May ’68, Kristeva writes, expresses a fundamental version of freedom: not freedom to change or to succeed, but freedom to revolt, to call things into question . . . liberty as revolt isn’t just an available option, its fundamental . . . by putting things into question . . . “values” stop being frozen dividends and acquire a sense of mobility, polyvalence, life . . . May ’68 was a . . . desire to come up with new, perpetually contestable configurations . . . for an exhilarating and joyful permanent revolution . . . it was a sexual and cultural contestation.51 For Kristeva, May ’68 was quintessentially French. First, because it expressed the impulse of the 1789 French Revolution that Kristeva identifies as driven by the idea of happiness for the most disadvantaged. Second, because the politics of 1968, like the politics of 1789, linked the idea of happiness to the aspiration for dignity.52 Returning to Beauvoir’s distinction between happiness (satisfaction with the securities and comforts offered by the status quo) and joy (experiencing oneself as bringing meaning and value to the world), Kristeva describes the happiness of jouissance as the antithesis of the satisfaction of consumer needs.53

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Again, it would be a mistake to take the resonances of Beauvoir in Kristeva too far. Their differences are marked, and it is the importance of these differences that makes their ability to “speak” to each other so significant. One way to see how their differences matter—to see how attending to these differences opens alternative and intersecting paths for considering the situation of women—is to compare Beauvoir’s and Kristeva’s understanding of the condition of women living in a harem. According to Beauvoir, women living in a harem are so alienated from their meaning-giving powers that they are unable to even imagine transcending their allotted situation. Their oppression is complete in that they do not recognize that they are oppressed. It thus becomes the responsibility of privileged women, women who know they are human and who know the power of the right to imagine oneself free, to intercede. In arguing that privileged women ought to alert the women of the harem to the possibilities of freedom, Beauvoir did not argue that these women have the right to tell the women in the harem what to do with their freedom. The meanings and values that the harem women bring into the world will speak to their experiences and desires. Beauvoir’s point here was that the condition of the possibility of freedom is the ability to imaginatively transcend the conditions that tie one to the present. Fighting oppression in the name of freedom is not a matter of providing prescriptions for the future but a matter of fostering the creative powers of the imagination. To be free is to live in a world where one’s desires count. Beauvoir is clearest on this in All Men Are Mortal, where Fosca (the immortal man) asks Armand (his mortal revolutionary great grandson): “What will man do with this freedom?” To which Armand replies: “What’s the difference, he’ll do whatever he likes.”54 Kristeva, examining the mores of harem women, finds that they trigger her imagination by opening up the question of the homosexuality endemic among women. Instead of seeing these women as having no way of bringing their values to the world or as unable to imagine themselves giving their meanings to the world, Kristeva—attentive to the universal attachment of daughter to mother and mindful of Freud’s descriptions of the male homoerotic bonds that ground contemporary forms of civilization— suggests that the female bonds of the women in the harem might provide the basis for a more democratic community where women would live among men without being subordinated to or dependent on them.55 These different understandings of the harem point to the critical differences between Beauvoir and Kristeva. Beauvoir, who focused on the position of woman as the inessential other, could not imagine that the women in the

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harem might create an erotic bond and a way of life that escaped the scrutiny of masculine power. Kristeva, attentive to the ways that the maternal body can destabilize the patriarchal configurations of civilization, sees that the mores of the women in the harem might effect this destabilization by invoking the dignity of women’s jouissance. Beauvoir and Kristeva took up the question of women’s subjectivity in the name of an ethics and politics of solidarity. In asking similar questions and appealing to similar values (for example, the values of joy and jouissance), they relied on different principles and offered distinct paradigms for rewriting the meaning of woman. Equality in difference was a key principle of Beauvoir’s feminism. In organizing the Parisian centennial celebration of Beauvoir’s birth, I hear Kristeva suggesting a complementary feminist principle: solidarity in difference. I hear her directing us to take up Beauvoir’s challenge to abandon the ruts of our quarrels for new beginnings, in which we endorse practices that welcome the disruptions we bring to each other’s positions.

An Opening by Way of an Ending The Second Sex began its life as a contested text. It remains a site of contestation. It was rejected in 1949 for creating a problem where none existed and dismissed as the hysterical rant of a sexually frustrated woman. It has outlived these charges. Today, however, it faces other difficulties. Though we agree that the problems detailed in The Second Sex are real and recognize it as one of the most influential works of the twentieth century, we do not give The Second Sex its due. Instead, we either treat it as an interesting but dated work (after all, it was written more than fifty years ago) or render it passé by identifying it with existentialism (a theory that is said to be obsolete). By looking at The Second Sex as belonging more to the past than to the present we miss its complexities and lose it as a resource for contemporary feminist and philosophical thought.56 This chapter protests that loss. It situates The Second Sex within the context of Beauvoir’s existential phenomenology to show how her philosophy of intentionality, in tying the concept of oppression to practices that rob people of their freedom to bring value and meaning to the world, gave birth to the category of the other and to a phenomenology of embodiment captured in the

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phrase “one is not born a woman; one becomes one.” These words and the analyses supporting them debunked the idea that biology was destiny. They gave women the space to speak and act in the name of their freedom and desire. In rooting The Second Sex in Beauvoir’s phenomenological commitments and existential ethics I do not intend to confine it to these roots. Reading the work of Wittig, Irigaray, and Kristeva as taking up different strains of the ambiguities and tensions of The Second Sex is one way of showing how Beauvoir’s logic of intentionality (and the concept of the subject that is allied with it) bursts its existential-phenomenological frame. It is one way of showing that we pay our debt to Beauvoir by recognizing how the language of The Second Sex is at work in the different iterations of contemporary feminism. This language is attentive to the material effects of the myth of woman. It argues for a politics of particularity and solidarity. It links the concept of the subject to the notions of disclosure, desire, critique, and transformation. It speaks of the contest between freedom and oppression as a struggle between the energetic joy that refuses to accept the status quo in the name of the possibilities of the world and the forces of authority that claim that the established meanings of the world are absolute and that we have no choice but to submit. This language is a discourse of liberation and transformation that ties theory to practice. It identifies feminist politics as a politics grounded in concepts of the human and of oppression, where the differences of the human cannot become an excuse for exploiting those who are different. Grounding feminist politics in this way saves it from fragmenting into a series of unfocused reactions to this or that particular offense. Keeping The Second Sex on our bookshelves as a resource, rather than a historical artifact, may remind us that the new beginning it hoped to inaugurate has yet to occur. We are still entrenched in old and familiar ruts. We have yet to create a politics of solidarity guided by our respect for difference and commitment to dialogue—a politics that creates the space for us to meet through what we share and what we do not and a politics in which we surprise and encroach on each other and are in this way mutually transformed.57 Solidarity conceived of in this way keeps the disorientation of the other in play without allowing the challenge of the other to degenerate into a declaration of war. It repositions the other from the one who has no voice to the one whose disruptive voice, in disclosing other world possibilities, is essential to the feminist work of critique and transformation—a work perhaps best described by Kristeva: “I revolt therefore we are still to come.”58

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Notes 1. Simone de Beauvoir, After the War: Force of Circumstance, vol. 1, 1944–1952 (New York: Paragon, 1992), 5. 2. Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), 34. 3. Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), xix. 4. Ibid., xxii. 5. Ibid., xxxiii. 6. Ibid., xxxv. 7. Ibid., xxxiii. 8. Elizabeth V. Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon, 1998). 9. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (London: HarperCollins, 1990). 10. Mary Caputi, “Beauvoir and the Case of Djamila Boupacha,” in Simone de Beauvoir’s Political Thinking, ed. Lori Jo Marso and Patricia Moynagh (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 109–26; Julien Murphy, “Beauvoir and the Algerian War: Toward a Postcolonial Ethics,” Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Margaret Simons (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995); Karen Shelby, “Beauvoir and Ethical Responsibility,” in Marso and Moynagh, Beauvoir’s Political Thinking, 93–108. 11. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, xxv. 12. Beauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity, 18; Beauvoir, The Second Sex, xxxiv. 13. Beauvoir, Ethics of Ambiguity, 12, 16. 14. Ibid., 20, 27. 15. Ibid., 32, 34. 16. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, xxi–xxii. 17. Ibid., xxvii. 18. Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays (Boston: Beacon, 1992), vii. 19. Ibid., xv. 20. Ibid., 9. 21. Ibid., 11. 22. Ibid., 13. 23. Sara Heinamaa, Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference: Husserl, MerleauPonty, Beauvoir (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). 24. Eva Lundgren-Gothlin, Sex and Existence: Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1996). 25. Wittig, The Straight Mind, 32. 26. Ibid., 9. 27. Ibid., 24.

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28. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, xii. 29. Wittig, The Straight Mind, 21–24. 30. Beauvoir, The Second Sex, xxv–xxvi. 31. Ibid., 731. 32. Ibid., xxii–xxiii. 33. Ibid., 731. 34. Ibid., xxv. 35. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 18. 36. Irigaray, Democracy Begins Between Two (New York: Routledge, 2000), 64. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid., 65. 39. Julia Kristeva, “Revolution in Poetic Language,” in The Portable Kristeva, ed. Kelly Oliver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 305. 40. Ibid., 330. 41. Ibid., 301–4. 42. Ibid., 308. 43. Ibid., 302. 44. Ibid., 304. 45. Ibid., 322–23. 46. Ibid., 322. 47. Ibid., 35–36. 48. Ibid., 322. 49. Ibid., 37. 50. Ibid., 322. 51. Kristeva, Revolt, She Said (New York: Semiotext, 2002), 12. 52. Ibid., 14. 53. Ibid., 37. 54. Beauvoir, All Men Are Mortal (New York: Norton, 1955), 319. 55. Kristeva, Revolt, She Said, 205. 56. Margaret Simons, “The Second Sex: From Marxism to Radical Feminism,” in Feminist Interpretations of Simone de Beauvoir, ed. Margaret Simons (University Park: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995) 243–362. 57. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Dialogue and the Perception of the Other,” in Merleau-Ponty, The Prose of the World, trans. John O’Neill (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 142. 58. Kristeva, Revolt, She Said, 42.

14

The “Letter on Humanism” Reading Heidegger in France Ethan Kleinberg

In what follows I situate the first “Heidegger Affair” and Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” in relation to the initial reception of Heidegger’s philosophy in France.1 To do so I present what I have defined as the first three “readings”—or understandings of Heidegger’s work in France—in order to clarify the relationship between Heidegger’s own work and existential philosophy. Yet I do this also to articulate the ways that Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” led to the demise of “existentialism” as the leading philosophy in France. All three of these readings can be traced to differing French interpretations of Heidegger’s work that reflect the internal tensions within Heidegger’s philosophy. In broad strokes, the first reading of Heidegger in France, perhaps best articulated by Jean-Paul Sartre, is characterized by a focus on the individual subject. These early interpreters of Heidegger understood his philosophy to be subjective, anthropocentric, teleological, and fundamentally humanistic. This is to say that the proponents of the first reading understood Heidegger to be an “existentialist” thinker cut from the same cloth as they and focused

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on the same concerns. In contrast, proponents of the second reading—which followed on the heels of Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism” and the Heidegger Affair of 1945–1946, emphasized Heidegger’s ontological antisubjectivism and dismissed the more individualistic aspects of Being and Time. Here, Heidegger emerged as an “ahumanist” postsubjective philosopher whose work stood in opposition to the existentialism of Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Raymond Aron, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The third reading resulted from the response to the first and second readings and also to Heidegger’s political affiliation with National Socialism. The work of both Maurice Blanchot and Emmanuel Levinas attempts to use Heidegger’s critique of the Western philosophical tradition, existentialism included, to move beyond Heidegger and to construct a new type of ethics in the aftermath of World War II and the Shoah. The internal tensions inherent in Heidegger’s own work would ultimately become the fault line that broke open when the first reading of Heidegger’s philosophy in France, based on its subjectivist elements, was confronted by the second and third readings, which focused on the ontological, postsubjectivist aspects of his project. But the historical events that provoked this clash were the first Heidegger Affair and the publication of Heidegger’s “Letter on Humanism.” Therefore, in order to understand the relation of the three readings to the reception of Heidegger in France, we must begin with these two distinct but related events.

The First Heidegger Affair Martin Heidegger wrote the “Letter on Humanism” to Jean Beaufret in the fall of 1946, but it was not published in France until 1947.2 At the time of its publication, the battle lines for the first Heidegger Affair had been drawn following the appearance of a series of articles debating the extent and philosophical ramifications of Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism in the pages of Les temps modernes.3 There is substantial and conclusive evidence regarding the extent of Martin Heidegger’s involvement with (and commitment to) National Socialism, but it is worth rehearsing what we now know.4 In April of 1933, with the support of the National Socialist party, Heidegger sought to obtain the post of rector of Freiburg University as part of a calculated plan coordinated by Nazi student groups and “sympathetic” faculty. On April 21, Heidegger was elected rector and on April 27 he delivered his

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rectoral address on “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” in which he put forth his plan to restructure the university based on his political and philosophical initiatives. Then on May 1 (the National Day of Labor), in a well-publicized ceremony with much pomp and circumstance, Heidegger officially joined the Nazi Party.5 It is true that Heidegger resigned as rector only a year later in April of 1934, but it is also true that during his time as rector he was absolutely serious about the implementation of National Socialist policy in the university and everything that this implied.6 In the years between his resignation as rector and the end of the Second World War, Heidegger never distanced himself from his pro-Nazi statements of 1933. Although his work on Nietzsche and the limits of metaphysics later led him to view the historical incarnation of National Socialism as the fruition—and not the solution—to the crisis of modernity, he never renounced the “inner truth and greatness” of the National Socialist movement. Nor did he stop paying his Nazi party dues until after the war.7 This historical account stands in stark contrast to the versions offered by Heidegger himself and his defenders in the first Heidegger Affair. But here it is important to remember that, in 1945 and 1946, the extent of Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism was still very much in question. To address this question, Jean Paul-Sartre and the editorial board of Les temps modernes assigned two young French philosophers, Alfred de Towarnicki and Maurice de Gandillac, to write articles on Heidegger and National Socialism. These articles would “present the facts” as each author saw them and let the “reader decide for himself.” The first articles by Towarnicki and Gandillac appeared on January 1, 1946, and each author asked Heidegger to respond to those accusations against him that were based on Heidegger’s position as rector at Freiburg, on reports from the dossier collected by military intelligence, on the rumors and innuendo presented in the French press in attacks on Sartre and existential philosophy, and on the testimony of émigrés and survivors.8 At the time these articles were written, very little had been concretely established; there was no paper trail, and the French army was still soliciting testimony from Heidegger’s colleagues. The official position of the French army in its evaluation of Heidegger’s wartime activities was not declared until December 1947. Thus the first Heidegger Affair was a case of sweeping accusations and strategic denials that, in the end, required a certain amount of “good faith” in the testimony of one side or the other. For both Towarnicki and Gandillac, that “good faith” seems to have been placed in Heidegger.

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Towarnicki’s article is a strident defense of Heidegger based on the faithful reproduction of Heidegger’s own testimony concerning the series of events that befell him in the 1930s and how he reacted to them. In Heidegger’s account, as reported by Towarnicki, Heidegger was a reluctant and critical participant in the Nazi regime and took the rectorship in Freiburg only at the specific request of the former rector, who hoped that his “personality as a professor would help to preserve the faculty from political slavery.”9 The article by Gandillac is less supportive of Heidegger and significantly less enthusiastic than Towarnicki’s, but it still paints a flattering picture of Heidegger. Heidegger’s story was called into question by Karl Löwith, a German Jew and former student of Heidegger, in an article written while in exile in 1939 but updated to appear in the November 1946 issue of Les temps modernes in response to the articles by Towarnicki and Gandillac. However, Löwith’s article focused not on Heidegger’s association with the Nazi Party (this it assumed) but on Heidegger’s philosophy itself. Toward this end, Löwith’s strategy was to use an analysis of Heidegger’s political texts to show that his philosophy led directly to his affiliation with National Socialism. In July 1947, two articles appeared in Les temps modernes in response to Löwith’s piece: one by Eric Weil and the other by Alphonse de Waehlens; each attempted to defend Heidegger’s philosophy against Löwith’s claim that it was inherently National Socialist. The debate concluded with an exchange of letters between Löwith and Waehlens in which each reiterated their points but no ground was given. Thus the first Heidegger Affair can be divided into two components. The first is a “presentation of the facts” based entirely on the allegations against Heidegger in the Allied dossier and Heidegger’s own version of the facts as told to Towarnicki and Gandillac. The second component focuses on the extent to which Heidegger’s philosophy was (or was not) National Socialist. In the first Heidegger Affair the two components are related, but this relation is not necessary because it is possible (though perhaps not satisfactory) to reach a conclusion about one component without recourse to the other. However, of particular relevance to the topic of this volume is how the defense of Heidegger’s philosophy by Waehlens and Weil seemed to be more a defense of existentialism. This is because, for both Waehlens and Weil (as for Towarnicki and Gandillac), the defense of Heidegger was based on their particular understanding of his philosophy, which informed their response to Löwith’s claim that Heidegger’s philosophy was the basis for his political decision to join the Nazi Party. What is at stake is Heidegger’s credibility as

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an existentialist thinker whose primary focus is ontology as the investigation into human being—with all the humanistic trappings that accompany this interpretation. As a result, the defense of Heidegger’s philosophy in the first Heidegger Affair is based on a subjectivist understanding of his work that characterizes what I have termed the “first reading” of Heidegger in France.10

The First Reading Heidegger’s philosophy first came to France through the work of Emmanuel Levinas, who had studied with Heidegger at Freiburg in 1928/29 and in 1932 published the first article on Heidegger to appear in France, “Martin Heidegger et l’ontologie.”11 So Levinas can be credited with bringing Heidegger’s philosophy to France, but the development of the “first reading” and subsequent popularization of Heidegger’s philosophy in France resulted from the confluence of the young French philosophers and foreign émigrés in Alexandre Kojève’s 1933–1939 Hegel seminar at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris.12 Those attending the seminar represented a mélange of intellectuals who came looking for answers to the concerns of a changing France and the questions presented by the events of World War I. Kojève lectured to a core group of Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, and Raymond Queneau, but figures such as Raymond Aron, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Eric Weil, and André Breton were also key participants.13 Kojève brought to the table a new way of looking at philosophy. He used no notes: he translated from German to French as he went, and he avoided putting anything in writing.14 Furthermore, the oral nature of the seminar allowed him to move among philosophies and philosophers in juxtapositions that were surprising to the young French philosophers, many of who lacked previous exposure to Hegel or knowledge of German.15 The key to Kojève’s popularity and the long-lasting influence of his seminar lay in the new answers he provided within a familiar French philosophical framework. Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel revolved around a fundamentally humanistic, anthropocentric existentialism that places the individual at the core of all understanding. As Vincent Descombes points out in his analysis of Kojève’s lectures, the turn toward an existential subject in the throes of a conflict of consciousness already existed in embryonic form in the Cartesian cogito.16 Kojève’s anthropocentric interpretation used Heidegger’s philosophy to read Hegel in the light of the subjectivist tendencies in Being and Time,

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an approach that led to the fundamentally anthropocentric understanding of Heidegger’s thought that underpinned French existentialism. Heidegger’s philosophy was seen as an attempt to liberate human being, free will, and action from the shackles of theism, scientism, and all other systems that did not take the individual (read: existential) nature of being into question. Thinkers such as Aron and Merleau-Ponty employed this existential language in their own work. In his Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire, Aron relied heavily on Heidegger’s concept of historicality (Geschichtlichkeit) as presented in Being and Time. However, Aron’s understanding of Heidegger was based on his participation in Kojève’s seminar, in which Heidegger’s concept of resolute action was presented as the locus for the Hegelian dialectic and the progress of history. Aron derived an anthropocentric existential reading of historicality that focused on the decisions of the individual subject who acts in history, thus opening the way for an ontological “human history” that emphasizes choice and action.17 This presentation of Heidegger’s historicality played a major role in Sartre’s understanding of the term and served as a basis for his existentialism. For Merleau-Ponty, the most obvious legacy of the Kojève seminar was his understanding of the dialectic as ontological and thus compatible with phenomenology. Thus, Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of Hegel was entirely compatible with his understanding of Edmund Husserl and Heidegger. This understanding allowed Merleau-Ponty to use both Husserl and Heidegger in the service of his existential Marxist philosophy after World War II. Furthermore, it was in Kojève’s seminar that Merleau-Ponty came to a sophisticated and articulate understanding of historical materialism and the works of Marx—something his friend Sartre had not acquired in the 1930s.18 It was also in Kojève’s seminar that Merleau-Ponty came to address the relation of individual consciousness to the world in which we live—a fundamental question that would guide his work from the early Gestalt phase through his existential Marxism and into his later writings on language, structure, and ontology. This, too, was an important influence on Sartre, since MerleauPonty brought the Kojèvian conflation of Hegel and Heidegger to Sartre’s attention.19 The work of Sartre represented a shift in emphasis from Kojève’s historical understanding of Heidegger (veiled by Hegel’s teleological dialectic) toward an understanding of Heidegger’s work taken on its own terms. And though the work of Merleau-Ponty, Aron, and the other figures involved in Kojève’s seminar prepared the ground for the understanding of Heidegger in France,

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his popularization can be attributed entirely to the work of Sartre. Sartre’s work on Heidegger hit the French intellectual scene on the eve of World War II, when the Hegelian historical project had lost some of its appeal. Kojève’s seminar had come to an end and, amid the disorienting events of defeat and collaboration, the teleological project of history could not satisfy the immediate concerns of these French thinkers or of the larger French public. It was in this atmosphere of angst and uncertainty that Sartre’s most Heideggerian works appeared—between 1940 and 1945.20 Here it is instructive to note how Sartre differs from Heidegger. In Being and Nothingness Sartre writes: “Certainly we could apply to consciousness the definition which Heidegger reserves for Dasein and say that it is a being for whom, in its being, its being is in question. But it would be necessary to complete this definition and formulate it more like this: consciousness is a being for whom, in its being, its being is in question in so far as this being implies a being other than itself .”21 Because Sartre does not distinguish between Dasein and human consciousness, the sole departure for his investigation is via the ego cogito. After its publication in 1943, Being and Nothingness did not sell especially well, and despite its popularity among a small number of intellectuals, it cannot be said to be the main factor in the popularization of Heidegger in France. Instead it was through the fundamentally Cartesian presentation of Heidegger’s philosophy in Sartre’s literature, theatrical pieces, and articles that a wider public became acquainted with the name Martin Heidegger. By the end of World War II, Sartre was a celebrity. The success of Nausea had made him a literary name, and the appearance of The Age of Reason and The Reprieve in 1944 secured this success. The impact of his “Resistance” play The Flies, first performed on June 6, 1942, made Sartre a force in the theater world as well. The Flies was not a box-office hit but his next play, No Exit, was; with its success, existentialism came into vogue and Sartre gained international renown. In the first reading, then, Heidegger’s philosophy was seen as entirely compatible with existential humanism.

The Second Reading The publication of the “Letter on Humanism” in 1947 created a schism between this first reading of Heidegger in France—popularized by Sartre and such other thinkers as Aron, de Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty—and the an-

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tihumanist variant that came to prominence following the war based on the direct influence of Heidegger through Jean Beaufret. This second reading manifested itself in a movement of French intellectuals—many of whom had discovered Heidegger through the works of Sartre—away from this Sartrean interpretation and toward the Heidegger they were now encountering through the correspondence with Beaufret. The existential presentation of Heidegger’s work caught the interest of these younger intellectuals; it led them to Heidegger himself and to a reading of his work that was antithetical to the humanist interpretation offered by Sartre. In his letter to Beaufret, Heidegger destroyed the entire interpretation of his work as it had come to be read in France in the years prior to World War II. The cherished values of humanism, progress, and freedom (even the concept of “values” itself)—which had been assumed to be the basis of Heidegger’s project in a fundamentally Cartesian sense—were now placed under scrutiny by Heidegger, who in calling for a more “essential” understanding of philosophy now stated that this had been the basis of his project all along. From the “Letter on Humanism” it became clear that Heidegger was not what the French had assumed him to be. The Gallic version of Heidegger now came face-to-face with Heidegger’s philosophy itself. For younger French students, the Heidegger who arrived on the scene via the “Letter” seemed even more radical than Sartre because he completely detached the ego cogito from the philosophical investigation and thus severed philosophy from the Cartesian tradition. Sartre’s generation was thus forced to rethink their understanding of Heidegger in relation to this revelation. This second reading of Heidegger, in opposition to the early existential reading and following the Heidegger Affair, also raised the stakes of the subsequent “Heidegger Affairs.” For in the 1960s, the issue was not only Heidegger’s affiliation with National Socialism but also his “betrayal” of existentialism and the prominent place of his work in the newest incarnations of French philosophy. Heidegger’s visits with Frédéric de Towarnicki in 1945 had given him a fairly good understanding of the state of philosophy in France.22 He became acquainted with the works of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Beaufret and intuited that they had not yet moved beyond the shadow of Descartes in spite of Heidegger’s influence and the influence of phenomenology more generally. It was apparent in their work that they sought to address the primacy of the subject and the relationship to Being, but in his view they were insufficiently divorced from the metaphysical tradition to address what he considered to be the most fundamental questions. Heidegger’s interest in phenomenology

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in France occurred at a time of his increasing isolation: he was on the brink of banishment from the university and had lost credibility in Germany. He found himself in a desperate personal situation, and one can feel the sense of urgency in his attempts to contact Sartre immediately following the war and in his interviews with Towarnicki. Seen in this light there is something of a calculated nature in the “Letter on Humanism.” The letter is suspect also because it was not written to Beaufret until Heidegger’s attempts to contact Sartre had fallen through.23 Seen in this light, it is difficult to avoid the calculative aspects of Heidegger’s “Letter.” Yet in Beaufret, Heidegger found an acolyte enthralled by everything Heidegger had to say and whose questions allowed Heidegger to address what he believed were the most important philosophical issues and to take center stage again in the world of philosophy. Heidegger wrote the “Letter on Humanism” as a clarification of his work. Jean Beaufret was still in debt to both Merleau-Ponty and Sartre for his understanding of Heidegger, and the nature of the questions he posed to Heidegger reveal the extent of that debt. Beaufret wanted to know how Heidegger’s philosophy related to humanism and whether it was compatible with an ethics. He also asked: How could one come to “restore meaning to the word humanism?” These questions all presuppose an existentialist reading of Heidegger, especially as in the work of Sartre. Heidegger’s response severed the ties to that reading and removed the debt. In fact, in the case of such thinkers as Wahl, Merleau-Ponty, and Lacan, it inverted the relationship because they turned to Beaufret as the porte-parole through which each of these philosophers came to their later understanding of Heidegger. Heidegger’s chief goal in the “Letter on Humanism” was to distance himself from the variant of existentialism that Sartre produced in his published lecture Existentialism Is a Humanism. In this lecture, Sartre presented Heidegger as coterminous with his brand of existentialism. Sartre claimed that Heidegger’s philosophy was a prime example of “atheistic existentialism,” and he defined the essential component of Heidegger’s thought in the formula “existence precedes essence.” Sartre cited Heidegger frequently throughout the lecture and took little time to distinguish between his ideas and Heidegger’s. Sartre presented Heidegger’s Dasein as réalité-humaine (human reality) and thus reiterated his assumption of Dasein into the cogito. Sartre’s reduction of Heidegger’s philosophy into the phrase “existence proceeds essence” reversed Descartes’s formula. In place of “I think therefore I am,” Sartre offered “I am therefore I think.”24 This reversal conserves the Cartesian

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cogito and places it at the center of Heidegger’s philosophy as reformulated by Sartre in the image of the French philosophical tradition. The “Letter on Humanism” also reflected the extent to which Heidegger’s own work had shifted its emphasis since the publication of Being and Time. This shift is generally discussed as Heidegger’s “turn” (Kehre) and more specifically as his “turn toward language.”25 Heidegger’s turn is a shift in emphasis from the fundamental ontology of Being and Time to a meditation on the history of Being, and it coincides with Heidegger’s attempt to break with the metaphysical tradition. Heidegger’s work in Being and Time is cross-cultural and ahistorical (it is not apolitical, but it does not have a specific political allegiance). The basis of the suppositions he presents—in particular, about human beings in relation to Being—is that understanding is not in people’s minds but in their everyday lives. The categories Heidegger sets up in Being and Time are applicable to this relation regardless of time or place. After the Kehre, Heidegger became concerned with “historical Being.” Heidegger’s suppositions became more temporal and more concerned with the phenomenon of the history of Being. Incorporated into this more specific type of investigation is the inquiry into the relation of language to Being.

The Letter on Humanism, I: Being and Language The two most important themes in the “Letter on Humanism”—as concerns French existentialism and the reception of Heidegger in France—were Heidegger’s emphasis on language and his dismissal of the traditional understanding of humanism as derived from the ego cogito. Both of these themes stemmed from his attempt to break with traditional metaphysics. The two themes were also intended as instructions regarding where to follow the work of Heidegger (i.e., in the investigation of language) and where not to follow him (i.e., toward Sartrean existentialism). Heidegger begins his letter by emphasizing the relation of Being to language, not in the sense that language serves a particular being but in that “thinking accomplishes the relation of Being to the essence of man. It does not make or cause the relation. Thinking brings this relation to Being solely as something handed over to it from Being. Such offering consists in the fact that in thinking Being comes to language. Language is the house of Being.”26 Thus the relation between man and Being is based on thinking as it occurs through language. This is not to say that the relationship between thinking,

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language, and Being is important simply because it is quantifiable or produces a specific response or desired effect. “Thinking is not merely l’engagement dans l’action for and by beings in the sense of the actuality of the present situation.”27 To seek a specific response from language, from thinking, or from Being is the domain of science, and Heidegger contended that philosophy’s greatest error was in following the model of science and that “such an effort is the abandonment of the essence of thinking.”28 In Was ist Metaphysik? (What Is Metaphysics?), Heidegger asserted that the desire to find a specific answer concentrates only on what one already knows. To ask a question that expects a specific answer is to ask the wrong question, because such a question does not allow Being to present itself as what it is. Philosophy is perverted by this scientific model. In opposition to science, “thinking lets itself be claimed by Being so that it can say the truth of Being.”29 Thus, thinking is in its very essence opposed to science. Science interrogates with the expectation at deriving an answer; thinking lets Being be. Having established this preliminary distinction between the realm of science (which is the realm of metaphysics) and the realm of thinking (which should be the realm of philosophy), Heidegger approached the questions put forth to him by Beaufret. The first and primary question Beaufret asked was: “How can we restore meaning to the word ‘humanism’?” The nature of this question allowed Heidegger to begin his critique of humanism, which is not an antihumanism (as is often supposed) but rather a rethinking of humanism and the centrality of the human in our philosophical tradition. In this Heidegger’s postsubjectivist tendencies come to the fore. One can clearly see the difference between his earlier emphasis on the individual Dasein in Being and Time, which led to the first reading of his work in France, and his current emphasis on Being as detached from the individual human, which informs the second reading. In his reply, Heidegger returned to his understanding of thinking in opposition to the metaphysical tradition of philosophy, which was the basis for the term humanism. He did not believe that the metaphysical methodology was capable of investigating Being, given that it necessarily disturbs whatever it observes or interrogates. Instead we must respect Being, because “Being is the enabling-favoring, the ‘may-be’ [das Mög-liche]. As the element, Being is the ‘quiet power’ of the favoring-enabling, that is, of the possible.”30 For Heidegger, the “quiet power” of Being is that it reveals the myriad possibilities open to human beings but not in a forceful or prescriptive fashion. Being does not tell one what to do; it allows one to encounter what one can be. The

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problem with metaphysics, and thus with humanism (at least as understood by Sartre), is that it wants to be practical and applicable. Hence metaphysics does not allow things to reveal themselves but instead forces answers from them. As a result of this misplaced emphasis, “philosophy becomes a technique for explaining from highest causes. One no longer thinks; one occupies himself with ‘philosophy.’”31 Thus thinking is replaced by a proliferation of “‑isms,” which are based on subjectivity and which Heidegger attributes to the “peculiar dictatorship of the public realm.”32 This is the realm of universal laws and rational principles that seek to define Being in the same rational manner that one defines a scientific equation. But Heidegger also attacks the obverse side of this public realm, which is the emphasis on “private existence.” The philosophy of private existence is especially deceptive because it pretends to offer an escape from the public realm but is actually dependent on that realm. Thus the philosophy of “private existence” is not really essential, that is to say free, human being. It remains an off-shoot that depends upon the public and nourishes itself by a mere withdrawal from it. Hence it testifies, against its own will, to its subservience to the public realm. But because it stems from the predominance of subjectivity the public realm is the metaphysically conditioned establishment and authorization of the openness of individual beings in their unconditional objectification.33 This critique brings the work of Sartre (especially in Existentialism Is a Humanism) immediately to mind, not only because Sartre presents philosophy as prescriptive and immediately applicable but also because of his reversal of Descartes’s formula. According to Heidegger, language loses its meaning when serving either the philosophy of the public realm or that of private existence. When confined by the metaphysical tradition, language “falls into the service of expediting communication along routes where objectification—the uniform accessibility of everything to everyone—branches out and disregards all limits.”34 In the service of metaphysics, the truth of Being is lost to language. Hence Being is no longer accessible to man through language and instead is “concealed beneath the dominance of subjective thought that presents itself as the public realm.”35 Once language has been co-opted by metaphysics, it takes on the properties of science and becomes a technology for classification and representation. This renders language flat by virtue of representational

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categories that serve only to objectify in relation to a subject and not to let things express themselves. In order that philosophy may return to the realm of thinking from the world of science, we must rethink language beyond the limits of comprehensibility in the subject–object meaning of the word.36 For Heidegger, it was thus imperative that we rethink our relationship to language. It is in the silence, or in the possibility of silence, that things can reveal themselves and that language can regain its power in relationship to Being. But here we again encounter the relation of Being to man through language, so Heidegger returned to the question of the relation of the human being to Being and the place of humanism in this relation. Heidegger asserted that this “letting be” should be the real concern of humanism: “For this is humanism: meditating and caring, that man must be human and not inhumane, ‘inhuman,’ that is, outside his essence.”37 Heidegger called for a rethinking of humanism outside the realm of metaphysics. To make his point, Heidegger presented a number of “humanisms”: the humanism of Marx, the humanism of Christianity, and Sartre’s variant in Existentialism Is a Humanism. Heidegger then concluded as follows: However different these forms of humanism may be in purpose and in principle, in the mode and means of their respective realizations, and in the form of their teaching, they nonetheless all agree in this, that the humanitas of homo humanus is determined with regard to an already established interpretation of nature, history, world, and the ground of the world, that is, of beings as a whole. Every humanism is either grounded in a metaphysics or is itself made to ground one. Every determination of the essence of man that already supposes an interpretation of being without asking the truth of Being, whether knowingly or not, is metaphysical.38 For Heidegger, all humanisms as commonly defined were inherently metaphysical and as such concentrated only on the humanity of man the subject, neglecting the relation of humanity to Being. In “defining the humanity of man[,] humanism not only does not ask about the relation of Being to the essence of man” but, “because of its metaphysical origin humanism[,] even impedes the question by neither recognizing nor understanding it.”39 Heidegger argued that the metaphysical tradition in general, and humanism in particular, divert all thinking from the vital question of Being by focusing

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only on the subject as dictated by the scientific method, which had become the model for philosophy. Heidegger conceded that this attempt to rethink humanism must commence on the grounds of metaphysics and claimed that this was his intention in Being and Time. That is, in Being and Time Heidegger sought to cast doubt on traditional metaphysics by approaching the question of Being, the question that metaphysics avoids, from within the traditional grounds and methodologies of metaphysics. Part of this investigation thus involved an internal critique whereby “the essential provenance of metaphysics, and not just its limits, became questionable.”40 Seen in this light, Being and Time is an ambiguous work because its goal was an investigation of Being yet it proceeded from the metaphysical grounds on which Being is most obscured.

The Letter on Humanism, II: Overcoming Existentialism Heidegger thus declared that the French existentialist interpretation of his philosophy was based on a metaphysical understanding of Being and Time that had seized on the desire to “represent beings in their Being” and so posited Being within the representable site of a human being. But Heidegger insisted that his philosophy was not existentialist.41 To make this point clear, he took time to redefine Dasein so as to distinguish what he wanted to say from the common French rendering as réalité-humaine. Heidegger concluded that the translation was based on a metaphysical reading of Being and Time, which missed the point of the internal critique of metaphysics—through the investigation into Being—that he now claimed was the true goal of the work. The rift between the first and second reading of Heidegger in France thereby turns entirely on whether Being and Time is seen as a metaphysical text or as a critique of metaphysics: “If we understand what Being and Time calls ‘projection’ as a representational positing, [then] we take it to be an achievement of subjectivity and do not think it in the only way the ‘understanding of Being’ in the context of the ‘existential analysis’ of ‘Being-in-the-world’ can be thought—namely as the ecstatic lighting of Being.”42 The consequence of such a subjective approach is that Being is passed over altogether. The truth of Being as that which “lights up” our world and makes it meaningful is concealed from metaphysics, which looks over or past it. Thus, the problem with metaphysics, Sartrean existentialism, and humanism in particular is that they look first to man as the measure by which to determine humanity and thus

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neglect what is most important to humanity: the relationship between Being and man that occurs in language. The question for Heidegger was: Does the understanding of man in this rethought investigation into humanity still fall under the rubric of “humanism”? The answer is both yes and no. The answer is no insofar as “humanism thinks metaphysically,” and “certainly not if humanism is existentialism and is represented by what Sartre expresses: We are precisely in a situation where there are only human beings.” But the answer is yes if we rethink humanism as principally concerned with understanding humanity in its relation to Being. The issue for Heidegger was that we need to escape from an outlook that concludes there are “only human beings” and shift to one where we understand humanity as “in a situation where principally there is Being.”43 This recalled his statement about the “quiet power” of Being that reveals what is possible. It also allowed Heidegger to elaborate on his claim that Being should not be thought of as a possession or as something that specifically “is” because “Being ‘is’ precisely not ‘a being.’” Here Heidegger was referring not to a specific being (and certainly not to a human being) but rather to the category of Being in general. Once again, Heidegger has exposed the trap of representational thinking that seeks to give Being spatial and quantifiable attributes so that it can be placed under subjective observation. For Heidegger, humanism could be a productive category only if considered in terms of man’s relationship to Being that is neither spatial nor representable. This, Heidegger claimed, was the point of Being and Time: But does not Being and Time say on p. 212, where the “there is/it gives” comes to language, “Only so long as Dasein is, is there [gibt es] Being”? To be sure. It means that only so long as the lighting of Being comes to pass does Being convey itself to man. . . . But the sentence does not mean that the Dasein of man in the traditional sense of existentia, and thought in modern philosophy as the actuality of the ego cogito, is that being through which Being is first fashioned. The sentence does not say that Being is the product of man.44 Thus Being and Time set out to present Being in relation to man, but in the French interpretation this became an investigation into Being as the product of man. The first reading of Heidegger in France is therefore a metaphysical reading of his work, which effaces the problem of Being by viewing it as a product of man. According to Heidegger, this reading revealed the

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domineering nature of metaphysics and humanism, which attempt to define everything—even Being—in relation to man as the primary subject, the measure of all things.

The Letter on Humanism, III: Homelessness On Heidegger’s reading, the result of this domineering metaphysical tradition is that humanity has lost what is most essential to it, its relationship with Being. Heidegger described this condition in terms of a “homelessness” (Heimatlösigkeit) that he claimed was the destiny of the modern world.45 This homelessness can be understood in the light of Heidegger’s understanding of language as the house where Being dwells. Cut off from our relationship with language by the metaphysical tradition, man finds himself homeless. Heidegger claims that these categories should not be thought of “patriotically or nationalistically but in terms of the history of Being.”46 This is a particularly troubling claim in light of Heidegger’s past, and it can be unpacked in relation to the statement Heidegger made to Maurice Gandillac about National Socialism being the explosion of a structural malady in all men.47 According to Heidegger, the end result of the metaphysical tradition was precisely the kind of blind nationalism and patriotism that avoids the real issue of Being’s homelessness by assigning it to a spatial and categorical realm. Thus Heidegger’s letter also serves the strategic purposes of establishing the foundation for his critique of National Socialism and presenting Heidegger to his French audience as a critic of crude nationalisms.48 Homelessness, as understood by Heidegger, consists in the abandonment of Being by beings. This is the product of metaphysics; however, as Heidegger establishes in Being and Time, Being does not disappear but lies hidden. Even “the oblivion of Being makes itself known indirectly through the fact that man always observes and handles only beings.”49 For Heidegger, homelessness is the destiny of the world precisely because man is so concerned with beings to be observed and handled (represented categorically). Hence the question of Being is concealed and remains unthought. However, even though unthought, it remains a concern. Homelessness is itself a concern with Being but is thought in such a way that it “is evoked from the destiny of Being in the form of metaphysics and through metaphysics is simultaneously covered up as such.”50

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Heidegger saw this homelessness as the basis for Marx’s understanding of the estrangement (Entfremdung) of modern man that Marx derived from Hegel. Heidegger believed that Marx’s understanding of history in terms of estrangement intuited the problem of homelessness and the concealment of Being and that, in this sense, was far more productive than the work of phenomenology or existentialism. But Heidegger contended that Marx was still limited by his metaphysical reading of estrangement and history, and he suggested this as the issue Sartre should consider for a “productive dialogue” between existentialism and Marxism to become possible. This comment later had important ramifications in France because it led to a variant of Heideggerian Marxism as embodied in the work of Kostas Axelos. Heidegger was himself apparently interested in a “productive dialogue” with Marxism, but only insofar as it would lead to a departure from traditional metaphysics.51 This returns Heidegger to the issue of how one can depart from the metaphysical tradition and return to the question of Being in the face of man’s essential homelessness. According to Heidegger, this can occur only when man realizes that, contrary to the dominant claims of humanism as presented in the metaphysical tradition, “the essence of man consists in his being more than merely human, if this is represented as ‘being a rational creature.’”52 Man can discover his true human nature only by abandoning his obsession with a rationality that desires to subjugate everything to a logical and productive order. Man must relinquish his position as “the measure of all things” and accept that, far from it, “man is not the lord of beings. Man is the shepherd of Being.”53 For Heidegger, man loses nothing in this equation—despite the appearance of giving up his mastery—because it means that he regains the truth of Being.

The Letter on Humanism, IV: Whither Humanism? We have seen how Heidegger responded to Beaufret’s question about humanism by refuting humanism in the metaphysical sense while affirming it in a more radical sense: “It is a humanism that thinks the humanity of man from nearness to Being.”54 Heidegger’s brand of humanism calls for an investigation into Being that affects the ego cogito in a way far more fundamental than Sartre’s reversal: by removing it entirely from the philosophical equation. Heidegger called for eliminating the subject as the primary means of philosophical inquiry. This is exactly what was so attractive to a later generation

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of French scholars looking at Heidegger through the lens of a structuralist program that also tried to decenter the self. The question for Heidegger, as presented by Beaufret, then became: “How do we give meaning back to humanism?” Heidegger pointed out that this question presupposed that humanism had already “lost” its meaning. In that case, do we want to give back humanism its meaning? In other words, would it be valuable to retain the term “humanism”? Heidegger’s answer was to present a defense of his current philosophical program in response to several self-proclaimed questions that evoke the specter of his political activities, which remain at the core of his questions if not at the fore of his thought: Because we are speaking against “humanism,” people fear a defense of the inhuman and a glorification of barbaric brutality. For what is more “logical” than that for somebody who negates humanism nothing remains but the affirmation of inhumanity? Because we are speaking against “logic,” people believe we are demanding that the rigor of thinking be renounced and in its place the arbitrariness of drives and feelings be installed and thus that “irrationalism” be proclaimed true. For what is more “logical” than that whoever speaks against the logical is defending the alogical? Because we are speaking against “values,” people are horrified at a philosophy that ostensibly dares to despise humanity’s best qualities. For what is more “logical” than that a thinking that denies values must necessarily pronounce everything valueless?55 In the context of its pronouncement in 1947, Heidegger was strategically distancing himself from these sorts of criticisms. His point was that the inability to critique such notions as “values,” “logic,” or even “humanism” is indicative of the manipulative and domineering nature of the metaphysical tradition. When “people hear talk about ‘humanism,’ ‘logic,’ ‘values,’ ‘world,’ and ‘God,’” they “accept these things as positive” and anything that “disturbs the habitual somnolence of prevailing opinion is automatically registered as a despicable contradiction.”56 Concealed in this procedure is “the refusal to subject to reflection this presupposed ‘positive’ in which one believes himself saved. . . . By continually appealing to the logical, one conjures the illusion that he is entering straightforwardly into thinking when in fact he has disavowed it.”57 “Humanism,” “values,” “God,” “logic”—all of these terms are indebted to the metaphysical tradition for their meaning and so cannot address

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the fundamental question of Being. Furthermore, because these terms have been rendered unquestionable, none can be used as a basis for reclaiming the truth of Being. Heidegger called not for the refutation of any of these terms but instead for a critical rethinking of all of them. The final issue Heidegger sought to address in “Letter on Humanism” is the relation of ethics to ontology. In doing so, again Heidegger answered a question posed by Beaufret, but the answer was closely related to Sartre’s statement about Heidegger (at the end of Being and Nothingness) that an authentic understanding of human being would be inextricably linked to an ethics. Heidegger saw this “need” for an ethics as indicative of the problem of metaphysics, not as a solution to that problem.58 On his reading, the creation of an ethics based on the tenets of metaphysics does not resolve but only adds to man’s perplexity. Heidegger concluded that this was the problem with French philosophers such as Sartre, and asserted that his kind of prescriptive philosophy had no place in the investigation of Being. Instead, Heidegger stated, to understand our relation to Being is to understand thought as it is, in its capacity to let things be and thus let them reveal themselves as what they are. This is not the strategy of humanism as constructed in the metaphysical tradition, which seeks to produce, collect, and control. To the extent that Heidegger was against this sort of domineering subjectivity, he was against humanism. What Heidegger proposed is an alternative humanism whose primary concern is not the subject man but rather man as he relates to Being. For Heidegger, access to this new concern was through language: “Thus language is at once the house of Being and the home of human beings.”59 Heidegger brought the letter to a close by stating: “what is strange about the thinking of Being is its simplicity. Precisely this keeps us from it.”60 According to Heidegger, our problem is that we are beings that like to represent things, so we form complex models that allow us to present and represent the world around us. But in this process of ordering and naming, we have lost track of that which is the most simple in nature: Being. For us, what is simplest also seems the most complex because it is not representable or quantifiable. The “Letter on Humanism” is a complex text that combines Heidegger’s philosophical project as of 1946, including a retrospective explanation of the shortcomings of Being and Time, with a refutation of Sartrean existentialism and strategic sections of self-rehabilitation for the foibles of his Nazi past.61 However, one immediate ramification of the “Letter on Humanism” was a movement away from Sartre and his brand of existentialism and toward the

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questions of language and the relation of Being to beings. In the wake of World War II and faced with a rapidly industrializing world, Heidegger’s critique of technology and traditional metaphysics spoke to the young intellectuals who sought an alternative to existentialism with its allegiance to Cartesianism and traditional metaphysics. The same concerns that led this younger generation to Heidegger also led them to structuralism, and the interaction between these two trends played a key role in the rise of poststructuralism. A subsequent result was that the letter—because it had been written to Jean Beaufret, a member of the Resistance with impeccable credentials— was viewed as a vote of confidence for Heidegger in response to accusations regarding his support of National Socialism. Beaufret repeatedly took advantage of his Resistance past in defending Heidegger.

The Third Reading There were some, of course, who did not share Beaufret’s epigonic views. In the post–World War II work of Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, confronting the philosophy of Heidegger was not restricted to relating Heidegger’s philosophy to his “politics” in the narrow sense of party affiliation; in addition, it involved addressing the ramifications of the Final Solution on the world of thought. The issue of the Holocaust is peripheral in the work of Aron, Beaufret, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre,62 and it is virtually absent in the work of Heidegger.63 Only for Levinas and Blanchot did confrontation with the Shoah become the central focus of a project to rethink philosophy that was fostered by Heidegger’s influence in France. After World War II, Blanchot and Levinas both broke with Heidegger because of the Shoah. These philosophers turned away from ontology, which they felt was still limited by the dominance of the self, and toward a new investigation based on ethics as the site of the rapport with the other. This third reading of Heidegger’s philosophy in France moved away from Heidegger and into the realm of the Mitsein (Being-with-others) that is underdeveloped in Being and Time and never completed in his later work.64 After the Shoah, the need to elaborate on the concept of the Mitsein—and thereby to establish a place for the other based on a rethinking of Heidegger’s work in relation to language—became an imperative for Blanchot and Levinas. It is ironic that the interests of Blanchot and, to a lesser extent, Levinas were parallel to those of Heidegger in 1947: language and the poverty of

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traditional philosophy predominate. In this sense, the “Letter on Humanism” and the second reading of Heidegger in France opened the possibility for a serious interest in the work of Blanchot and Levinas. Yet the force of the third reading was such that it put both the first (existential) and second (antisubjectivist) readings of Heidegger into question. In contrast to the philosophy of Sartre and in opposition to Heidegger, Blanchot and Levinas used language as a turn to the other and not to regain an originary understanding of Being. Thus Blanchot and Levinas used and confronted Heidegger in attempting to reestablish the possibility of an ethical system of thought in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Blanchot’s project confronted the Shoah by using the work of Heidegger and Levinas, as well as that of Kojève and Sartre, to rethink philosophy in the wake of what he called “Disaster.”65 Blanchot challenged not only the Hegelian notion of history and narrative but also Sartre’s notion of the dominant subject. In contrast to Beaufret, however, Blanchot used the philosophy of Heidegger to think past Heidegger and establish the parameters (always ambiguous) of a thought that is always to come, thus confronting Heidegger’s understanding of death in Blanchot’s search for the moment before/after. Most important is that this critical engagement occurs within the framework of Blanchot’s confrontation with Disaster and his attempt to think the Shoah, a topic Heidegger never deigned to addressed. In a letter to Catherine David dated November 10, 1988, in the wake of the controversy created by Victor Farias’s Heidegger and Nazism, Blanchot wrote: It is in Heidegger’s silence on the issue of the Extermination that his irreparable error lies, his silence or refusal to ask Paul Célan forgiveness for that which is unforgivable. This refusal threw Célan into a despair that made him sick, because Célan knew that the Shoah was the revelation of the essence of the West and that he had to preserve the memory in common, even at the expense of losing any hope for peace, to safeguard the possibility of a rapport with the Other.66 For Blanchot, the Shoah revealed the West’s essence but was also a moment of rupture that opens the possibility of a rapport with the Other.67 This is a painful and disturbing moment that forces one to confront the most horrible, the impossible. But this confrontation cannot exist until one puts voice to it: when one says what one cannot say. Heidegger’s fault is that, even though he could never be forgiven, he never asked for forgiveness. By refusing to seek

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forgiveness Heidegger foreclosed the Shoah in all of its significance. He engaged in the kind of forgetting and covering up that his philosophy claimed to remedy. Heidegger refused to speak the unspeakable, instead turning to equivocations and generalizations. In the “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger sought refuge in the tranquility of language that allowed him to ignore the Disaster’s horror. After the Holocaust—the moment in history that, for Blanchot, defines all history and thus is outside of history—Heidegger’s refusal to speak confirms his culpability. For Levinas, the event of the Shoah revealed that the question of Being could no longer suffice. In the “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger’s investigation of Being had removed the emphasis on the subject but had also removed the possibility of placing emphasis on the other. For Heidegger the question was, first and foremost, Being. Levinas believed that philosophy could not make sense in the wake of the Shoah unless it moved beyond Heidegger’s emphasis on Being, but he also believed that philosophy could not return to the investigation of the individual being and that being’s own personal horizon. Instead, philosophy had to work through the question of Being to the relation of an individual being to an-other. Thus did Levinas acknowledge his great debt to Heidegger’s philosophy, for only by rereading intellectualism in light of Heidegger’s critique was he able to construct a philosophy that opens to the other. But Levinas also judged Heidegger harshly, viewing his philosophy as ethically bankrupt. The moral imperative to move beyond the philosophy of Heidegger became painfully clear to Levinas in the aftermath of Heidegger’s political choices and the horror of the Shoah. Levinas’s turn away from ontology was made clear immediately after World War II with the publication of De l’existence à l’existant and his lecture on “Time and the Other,” both in 1947. But his response to what he considered the crisis of Western philosophy—manifested in the events of World War II, Stalinism, and principally the Shoah—came in the form of his thèse de doctorat, published in 1961 as Totalité et infini (Totality and Infinity).68 Levinas’s attempt to move beyond the Western metaphysical tradition by rehabilitating the very meaning of metaphysics is especially interesting because he uses Descartes, filtered through Heidegger, to displace the primacy of the ego cogito in favor of the other. What is essential for the project of this chapter is that Levinas’s work opened the possibility of rereading all prior readings of Heidegger in France in the light of an ethics of alterity, plurality, and difference. In this sense, Levinas’s Totality and Infinity engaged the existential and antisubjectivist readings of Heidegger in a way that moved beyond them. In

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the work of Blanchot and Levinas, any “reading” of Heidegger or his French interpreters was necessarily a “rereading” that engaged both Heidegger the philosopher and Heidegger the man and, as such, entailed addressing the issues of politics, ethics, and responsibility. After the first Heidegger Affair in 1946, one could no longer use Heidegger’s philosophy without confronting the issue of National Socialism. After the work of Blanchot and Levinas, one could not use Heidegger without confronting the issue of the Shoah. But this third reading was still primarily concerned with the Heidegger of Being and Time and the “Letter on Humanism.” Later French thinkers would take this critique and extend it to all of Heidegger’s work as well as to areas of investigation beyond Heidegger, Sartre, Kojève, or any of the figures encountered in the initial reception of Heidegger in France. Thus the third reading, and specifically Totality and Infinity, marks the end of a certain use and understanding of Heidegger’s philosophy and the start of another. It also coincides with the decline of existentialism. This new engagement with Heidegger began in the 1960s and continues to this day through the projects of such thinkers as Jean Baudrillard, Hélène Cixous, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Luce Irigaray, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Francois Lyotard, and Jean-Luc Nancy. It is the work of Jacques Derrida that perhaps best exemplifies this trend, since his take on Heidegger was indebted not to the work of Beaufret but instead to the works of Blanchot and Levinas; this points to the importance of what Derrida called the “Heideggerian breakthrough” and also to the troubling and horrible decisions Heidegger made during the “epoch of Being and Time.”69 Here the question is not only the relation of Heidegger’s philosophy to National Socialism but also Heidegger’s stunning and “blind silence” in the wake of the Shoah. Derrida’s engagement with Heidegger spans the entirety of his career—in works such as “La différance,” “The Ends of Man,” and Of Grammatology (from the late 1960s) as well as Of Spirit, Heidegger and the Question (1987) and Aporias (1994)—and characterizes what I have termed the second phase of the reception of Heidegger in France after 1961. Although the “Letter on Humanism” led a new generation of French intellectuals to a confrontation with existentialism predicated on a sustained critique of humanism and subjectivity, the third reading pushed them beyond the issues of “antihumanism” and Being toward a reconsideration of ethics. This philosophical engagement was especially attractive to a younger generation of intellectuals who had come to realize that neither ontological

The “Letter on Humanism”—409

project—that of Heidegger’s or that of the existentialists—adequately addressed the issue of morality; who were confronted with the failure of socialism via revelations about Stalin’s regime and were thus uncertain about the future of Marxism (existential or otherwise); who had witnessed the terrible capacity of technology in the atom bomb; and who were confronting the legacy of colonization, which presented a concrete example of the subjugation of the other under the rule of the same. Behind all these historical realities loomed the specter of the Shoah, which—despite or because of Heidegger’s silence—spoke of the urgent need to construct an ethics, to approach the other, and to rethink the philosophical project of the West.

Notes 1. This chapter is based on portions of Ethan Kleinberg, Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927–1961 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), especially chapter 5, “Jean Beaufret, the First Heidegger Affair, and the ‘Letter on Humanism.’” 2. This partial translation was published in Fontaine 63 (1947); a translation of a revised version was published in Cahiers du sud 319/320 (1957). 3. See Kleinberg, Generation Existential, 168–83. 4. See Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1993). On the relationship between Heidegger’s philosophy and politics, see Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990); Tom Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Tom Rockmore and Joseph Margolis, eds. The Heidegger Case: On Philosophy and Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992); Hans Sluga, Heidegger’s Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Dominique Janicaud, The Shadow of that Thought, trans. Michael Gendre (Evanston, Ill.: Nothwestern University Press, 1996); and Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, trans. Gabriel R. Ricci (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989). 5. Ott, Martin Heidegger, 140–48. 6. Ibid., 194–95. 7. This is a remark that Heidegger made in his 1935 lecture course. See Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000), 213. 8. The issue is clouded by Heidegger’s ability to deny certain rumors that were untrue, which gave him the appearance of denying his association with National Socialism.

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9. This is a direct quote from Heidegger to Towarnicki, “Deux documents sur Heidegger,” Les temps modernes 4 (January 1, 1946): 717. 10. See Kleinberg, Generation Existential. 11. Emmanuel Levinas, “Martin Heidegger et l’ontologie,” Revue philosophique (May/June 1932). See also Kleinberg, Generation Existential, 33–45. 12. See Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, trans. L. Scott Fox and J. M. Harding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Michael Roth, Knowing and History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988); and Judith Butler, Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth Century France (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). 13. Kleinberg, Generation Existential, 66. 14. Kojève disliked putting anything in writing unless absolute necessary—as when writing book reviews or articles for income or writing to obtain a degree. 15. The first complete translation into French of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit was by Jean Hyppolite and was published from 1939 to 1941. The first full-length study of Hegel in French was Henri Niel’s De la méditation dans la philosophie de Hegel (Paris: Editions Montaigne, 1945). For interpretations of Hegel in France, see Iring Fetscher, “Hegel in Frankreich,” Antares 3 (1953): 3–15; Jacques d’Hondt, Hegel et hégélianisme (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1982); and Lawrence Pitkethly, “Hegel in Modern France,” Ph.D. dissertation, London School of Economics, 1975. 16. Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, 22. 17. Georges Fessard, Récit de la soutenance par le père G. Fessard, Annexes 2, in Raymond Aron, Introduction à la philosophie de l’histoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 452. 18. For an overview of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty’s differing understanding of Marxism, see Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), chapters 11 and 12; and Mark Poster, Existential Marxism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975). 19. To read Merleau-Ponty solely in relation to Sartre would be to minimize his proper role in the reception of Heidegger in France. In fact, despite the distance he kept from Heidegger throughout his career, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical project was probably closer to that of Heidegger than to that of either Husserl or Hegel. Moreover, Merleau-Ponty provided one of the most informed and lucid readings of Heidegger of any of the initial French interpreters. Yet even though Merleau-Ponty is often associated with French existentialism, his work is perhaps better described as phenomenological. 20. Jean-Paul Sartre, Carnets de la drôle de guerre (Paris: Gallimard, 1995), 406. 21. Sartre, L’être et le néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 29. 22. See Kleinberg, Generation Existential, 162–68. 23. Anson Rabinbach states that “the ‘Letter’ exemplifies Heidegger’s characteristic ability to assume a position of the highest philosophical rigor while positioning

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­ imself in the most opportune political light.” Anson Rabinbach, “Heidegger’s ‘Letter h on Humanism’ as Text and Event,” in Rabinbach, In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 97. 24. Sartre, L’existentialisme est un humanisme (Paris: Nagel, 1970), 64. 25. On Heidegger’s “turn” see Beda Allemann, Hölderlin und Heidegger (Zürich: Atlantis, 1954); Jean Grondin, Le tournant dans la pensée de Martin Heidegger (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1987); Jean-François Mattéi, “Le chiasme heideggérian ou la mise à l’écart de la philosophie,” in La métaphysique à la limite, ed. Dominique Janicaud and Jean-François Mattei (Paris: Presse Universitaires de France, 1983); and Alberto Rosales, “Zum Problem der Kehre in Denken Heideggers,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 38 (1984). See also Fred R. Dallmayr, “Ontology of Freedom: Heidegger and Political Philosophy,” Political Theory 12, no. 2 (May 1984): 204–34. Jacques Derrida and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe each placed Heidegger’s Kehre at the center of their respective investigations into Heidegger’s politics and philosophy. Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics: The Fiction of the Political (New York: Blackwell, 1990). For a critique of these works, see Richard Wolin, “French Heidegger Wars,” in The Heidegger Controversy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992), and Tom Rockmore, “Heidegger’s Politics and French Philosophy,” in Heidegger and French Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1995). 26. Martin Heidegger, “The Letter on Humanism,” in Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Krell (San Francisco: Harper, 1993), 217. 27. Ibid., 218. 28. Ibid., 218–19. 29. Ibid., 218. 30. Ibid., 220. 31. Ibid., 261. 32. Ibid., 221. 33. Ibid., 222. 34. There is definitely an antidemocratic sentiment to Heidegger’s thought here, which can be traced to Kierkegaard’s essay “The Present Age.” 35. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 222. 36. Ibid., 223. 37. Ibid., 224. 38. Ibid., 225. 39. Ibid., 226. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 229. 42. Ibid., 231.

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43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., 240. 45. This is also the move by which Heidegger shifts responsibility for National Socialism from Germany (and himself) in particular to the West in general. See Rabinbach, “Heidegger’s ‘Letter on Humanism’”; Rockmore, “Heidegger’s Politics”; Wolin, “French Heidegger Wars.” 46. For an in-depth investigation into the idea of Heimat see Celia Applewhite, A Nation of Provincials (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 47. Heidegger claimed that “Hitlerism was, in a sense, the historical explosion of a structural malady that afflicts all mankind.” Heidegger, “Deux documents sur Heidegger,” Les temps modernes 4 (January 1, 1946), 715. 48. Although the self-serving nature of this philosophical statement is obvious, it has been fruitfully employed in several legitimate critiques of modernity and thus should not be completely discounted. 49. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 242. 50. Ibid., 243 51. Heidegger’s use of Marx smacks of opportunism, first because of the Soviet victory under Stalin and second because Heidegger’s sons were in Soviet prisoner-of-war camps and he feared that Georg Lukács’s criticisms of his work might affect them. See Rabinbach, “Heidegger’s ‘Letter on Humanism,’” 112–13. Heidegger’s use of Marx also had the consequence of allying him with certain members of the French communist Resistance, including Jean Beaufret. 52. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 245. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. These questions must be taken seriously given Heidegger’s past and especially since it is Heidegger who presents them. 56. Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” 249–50. 57. Ibid., 250. 58. Ibid., 255. 59. Ibid., 262. 60. Ibid., 263. 61. Some claim that the text is intentionally ambiguous; see Jean Henri Cousineau, Humanism and Ethics: An Introduction to Heidegger’s Letter on Humanism with a Critical Bibliography (Louvain: Editions Nauwelaerts, 1972), 65–66. 62. Even in Sartre’s Réflections sur la question juive (Paris: Morihien, 1946), the issue is dealt with in terms of his existential political program and not as an attempt to address the issue of the Shoah. 63. See Berel Lang, Heidegger’s Silence (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1996); Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and “the Jews,” trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990).

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64. See Frederick Olafson and Robert Pippin, eds., Heidegger and the Ground of Ethics: A Study of Mitsein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Michael Theunissen, Der Andere: Studien zur Sozialontologie der Gegenwart (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1965); Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas and Interwar Philosophy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005); and Jean-Luc Nancy, La communauté désoeuvrée (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1990). 65. Maurice Blanchot, “Littérature et le droit à la mort” and “La parole ‘sacrée’ de Hölderlin,” in La part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949); Blanchot, L’arret de mort (Paris: Gallimard, 1948); Blanchot, L’écriture du désastre (Paris: Gallimard, 1980). 66. This letter was published as “Penser l’Apocalypse” in Le nouvel observateur (January 22–28, 1988): 79. 67. As mentioned in note 45, the thesis that “modernity” and the West were responsible for World War II and the Final Solution was employed by Heidegger to shift the blame from Germany in particular to the West in general. Others—such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkeimer in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972), and Zygmunt Bauman in Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989)—have attempted to investigate the West’s complicity and the project of modernity in a manner that neither excuses nor diminishes the role that Germany, and particular Germans, played in the rise of National Socialism and in the enactment of the Final Solution. It is fairly clear that Heidegger’s goal in employing this strategy was to avoid the issue of German responsibility, but this was probably not Blanchot’s intention in presenting his critique of the West. 68. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1980). 69. Derrida, “Ousia and Gramme: Note on a Note from Being and Time,” in Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 62.

Contributors

Ronald Aronson is Distinguished Professor of the History of Ideas at Wayne State University. He is the author or editor of nine books, including Jean-Paul Sartre: Philosophy in the World (Verso, 1980), After Marxism (Guilford, 1995), Camus and Sartre: The Story of a Friendship and the Quarrel That Ended It (Chicago, 2004), and Living Without God: New Directions for Atheists, Agnostics, Secularists, and the Undecided (Counterpoint, 2008). Charles Bambach is a professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Dallas. He has published widely on hermeneutics, phenomenology, ethics, and the history of German philosophy. His books include Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks (Cornell, 2003) and Heidegger, Dilthey, and the Crisis of Historicism (Cornell, 1995). Debra Bergoffen is professor emerita of philosophy at George Mason University and Bishop Hamilton Lecturer in Philosophy at American University. She is the author of The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities (SUNY, 1997) and Contesting the Politics of Genocidal Rape: Affirming the Dignity of the Vulnerable Body (Routledge, 2012) and coeditor of Confronting Global Gender Justice: Women’s Lives, Human Rights (Routledge, 2011).

416—contribu t o rs

Robert Bernasconi is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. He has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century European philosophy as well as on the critical philosophy of race. He is the author of two books on Heidegger and How to Read Sartre (Norton, 2007). He has edited books on Levinas, Derrida, and various aspects of the history of the concept of race. George Cotkin is a professor of history at California Polytechnic State University. He is the author of Existential America (Johns Hopkins, 2003) and Morality’s Muddy Waters: Ethical Quandaries in Modern America (Pennsylvania, 2010), among other books. His latest book, Our Moby-Dick: Adventures with a Novel and Its Readers, will be published in 2012. Peter E. Gordon is Amabel B. James Professor of History and Harvard College Professor at Harvard University. He is the author of Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (California, 2003) and Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Harvard, 2010). He also coedited The Cambridge Companion to Modern Jewish Philosophy (Cambridge, 2007) and The Modernist Imagination: Intellectual History and Critical Theory in honor of Martin Jay (Berghahn, 2011). Jonathan Judaken is the Spence L. Wilson Chair in Humanities at Rhodes College. He is the author of Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question: Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual (Nebraska, 2006) and the editor of Race After Sartre (SUNY, 2008) and Naming Race, Naming Racisms (Routledge, 2009). Ethan Kleinberg is a professor of history and letters at Wesleyan University and executive editor of the journal History and Theory. He is the author of Generation Existential: Heidegger’s Philosophy in France, 1927–1961 (Cornell, 2005) and is currently finishing a book on Emmanuel Levinas’s Talmudic lectures. Paul Mendes-Flohr is professor emeritus of modern Jewish thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and currently a professor at the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. He has written widely on Jewish existentialism, and together with Bernd Witte, he serves as editor-in-chief of a twenty-two-volume German critical edition of Martin Buber’s writings. Eduardo Mendieta is a professor of philosophy at Stony Brook University. He is the author of The Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy (Rowman and Littlefield, 2002) and Global Fragments: Globalizations, Latinamericanisms, and Critical Theory (SUNY, 2007). He is also coeditor of The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (Columbia, 2011). Samuel Moyn is a professor of history at Columbia University. He is the author of Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas Between Revelation and Ethics (Cornell, 2005), A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France (Brandeis, 2005), and most recently, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (Harvard, 2010). George Pattison is Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford and a canon of Christ Church Cathedral (Oxford). He has written extensively on post-Hegelian philosophy of religion, especially on Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and

Contributors—417

Heidegger. His most recent book is God and Being: An Enquiry (Oxford, 2011), and he is currently editing The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought and The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard. Val Vinokur teaches literature and directs the Jewish Studies Program at Eugene Lang College (the New School). He is the author of The Trace of Judaism: Dostoevsky, Babel, Mandelstam, Levinas (Northwestern, 2008). He is also the cotranslator (with Rose Réjouis) of numerous works, including Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco (Pantheon, 1997). Martin Woessner is an assistant professor of history and society at the City College of New York’s Center for Worker Education, where he teaches courses in intellectual and cultural history. He is the author of Heidegger in America (Cambridge, 2011).

Index

abandonment, state of, 92–93 Abraham and Isaac, 4, 23, 213–18, 224, 228– 30 absurdity, 102–3, 148, 215, 248, 258, 266–71 Adam and sin, 281–82 Agamemnon, 214, 219 Age of Anxiety, 11, 294 age of ideologies, 269 age of negation, 268–69 agora, 311, 314 Akehurst, Thomas L., 159 Alain (Émile-Auguste Chartier), 112 aletheia, truth as, 327 Algeria, 345–46, 349, 363 alienation, cultural politics of, 162–69 Allen, John J., 183 Allen, Woody, 139–40 Allsop, Kenneth, 163 alterity, 3, 378 Altmann, Alexander, 248

Alyosha (in The Brothers Karamazov), 37, 46–48, 51–57, 60–61, 259 ambiguity, 93, 344 American existentialism, 126–27; and African Americans, 124, 131–34; Hazel Barnes, 127–29, 137, 140, 258; interpretation of anxiety in, 293–96; Kierkegaard and, 133, 135–38, 293–96; Latin American perspective, 195–203; Norman Mailer, 123–26; post-WWII, 129–30, 297; precursors of, 134–35; psychological and religious, 130–31; Ralph Ellison, 11, 124, 131–34; recent, 139–41; Richard Wright, 123–24, 131–34, 340; and totalitarianism, 124–26, 130, 294–95; waning of, 138–39 Amis, Kingsley, 163, 165 Anaximander, 319–20 Andler, Charles, 103, 112 Angest, 4, 294

420—index

anguish, 292 anthropocentric existentialism, 390–91 anthropological existentialism, 317–21 anti-existentialism, 249–50 anti-psychiatry movement, 169 antirational, 190 anxiety: and “comforted despair,” 286–87; a condition of action, 295; “contem­ porary cult” of, 296; etymology of, 281; experience of nothingness, 292– 93; Freud and, 286–87; Heidegger on, 78–79, 82, 282, 284–86, 291–93; Kier­ kegaard on, 97, 129, 280–88; “slipping away of beings,” 66–67; as a Western illness, 296. See also Angest; dread/anx­ iety; secularization of anxiety anxious angels, 212 apodeixis, 237 Aquinas, Thomas, 95–96 Arabs of North Africa, 346–48 architectural metaphor, 40–45 Arendt, Hannah, 89, 138, 288–89, 294 Argentina, 197 Aron, Raymond, 390–91 art, metaphysical role of, 271 Astrada, Carlos, 197 Ateneo de la Juventad group, 198, 200 atheism: Camus on, 257; and existentialism, 91–92, 95–96, 260, 263, 305; and irrelevance of belief, 58; and Ivan Karamasov, 51; Nietzsche on, 313; Sartre and, 259–63 atomic/nuclear age, 11, 91, 124–25, 131, 136, 139, 295–96 Auden, W. H., 11, 136, 294 Augustine, 226 Austin, J. L., 152 authentic/inauthentic self-understanding, 5, 73–74, 92–93, 225 autonomy, pursuit of, 227–28 Axelos, Kostas, 402 Ayer, A. J., 152, 159–60 Bacon, Francis, 8 bad faith (mauvaise foi), 5, 92, 109, 132, 224, 366 Baeumler, Alfred, 306–7, 318–19 Baldwin, James, 134

Bambach, Charles, 172–73n32 Barnes, Hazel, 127–29, 137, 140, 258 Barrett, William, 6, 130, 146 Barth, Karl, 285 Basch, Victor, 289 Baugh, Bruce, 112 Baxter, Richard, 68 Beat movement, 125 Beaufret, Jean, 387, 393–94, 396, 402–5, 412n51 Beauvoir, Simone de: “ambiguous world,” 93; on becoming a woman, 367, 383; on existentialism “epithet,” 121n113; “existentialist offensive,” 100, 261–62; living under occupation, 360–61; marriage to Sartre, 90; oppression, 360–66, 370–71, 381–83; on phenomenology, 365–66, 382– 83; as privileged woman, 362–64, 381; traveling American South, 361–62; Wittig on, 368–69 —works: All Men Are Mortal, 381; America Day by Day, 361; The Blood of Others (Le sang des autres), 100; The Ethics of Ambiguity, 128, 262, 344, 360–67; Force of Circumstances, 121n113; The Second Sex (Le dieuxième sexe), 114, 130, 361–67, 371, 382–83; The Useless Mouths (Les bouches inutiles), 101 Beckett, Samuel: Waiting for Godot, 106, 145–49, 171n1 Begegnung (encounter), 241 Beigbeder, Marc, 89 being and language, 395–98 being and man, relationship between, 395–96 being-for-another-person/being for others, 98, 341 being-in-the-world (Dasein), 26, 73–75, 78–80, 111, 285–86, 323, 392–96 being over freedom, 230 being-toward-death, 72, 226, 249 Benjamin, Walter, 306 Berdyaev, Nicholas/Nikolai: humans in God’s image, 7; as logomachical mystic, 95; main concepts of, 18, 230–32; on obsession, 39; Orthodox Catholicism of, 212; on Russians, 45–46, 48, 61; on theodicy, 51 Bergson, Henri, 109

Index—421

Berlin, Isaiah, 184 Bernstein, Leonard, 294 Berra, Yogi, 39 Bertram, Ernst, 306, 318 Biess, Frank, 296 Binswanger, Ludwig, 287 Biran, Maine de, 109 Bishop, Thomas, 106 Blake, William, 44 Blanchot, Maurice, 387, 405–8 Bloch, Ernst, 306 blues, 132 body and soul, 243–44 Bohlin, Torsten, 290 Bolivar, Simon, 192 Bolshevism, 153 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich, 212, 233n6 Book of Job, 57 Borges, Jorge Luis, 186, 202 Boss, Medard, 298 Boupacha, Djamila, 363–64 Brandes, George, 224–25, 283 Brazil, 197 British existentialism: Angry Young Men movement, 162–65; Colin Wilson and The Outsider, 164–69; Samuel Beckett and Waiting for Godot, 106, 145–49, 171n1; Werner Brock, 149–53, 172n32 Broakes, Justin, 161, 166 Brock, Werner, 149–53, 172n32 broken world, 93 Brown, Robert McAfee, 131 Brutus, 214, 219 Buber, Martin, 3, 237–41, 253n24 Bultmann, Rudolf, 166, 212 Caillois, Roger, 94 Cain, James M., 134–35 calling, a, 67–68 Calmy, Jacques, 89 Calvinism, 68 Camus, Albert: and atheism, 257; on Dostoevsky, 55–56; on genuine rebellion, 8, 138; on Kierkegaard, 267; on Marxism, 269; on nihilism, 271; and Robert Moses, 137; and Sartre, 101–4, 257; on “sin without God,” 297; on suicide, 102–3, 265, 267, 268–69

—works: Caligula, 101–2; Combat newspaper, 101, 105; The Myth of Sisyphus (Le mythe de Sisyphe), 102–4, 256, 265–68, 270; Noces (Nuptials), 264–65, 267–68; The Plague (La peste), 257, 270; The Rebel (L’homme revolté), 8, 257, 259, 268– 73; “The Renegade” (“Le renégat”), 257; The Stranger (L’étranger), 102–3, 257, 270 capitalism, 68 care, 72, 74 Carmichael, Stokely, 169 Cartesian tradition, 29, 50, 74–75, 390, 393, 397, 405, 407 Casanova, Pascale, 150 Cascardi, Anthony J., 184–85 Caso, Antonio, 198 Catholicism and existentialism, 91, 211 Cavell, Stanley, 170 Celan, Paul, 406 celebration, 247 Cervantes, Miguel de (Don Quixote), 22, 181, 182–87, 201 Césaire, Aimé, 336–37, 341, 343, 345, 348 Chambers, Whittaker, 129 Chandler, Raymond, 135 Chartier, Émile-Auguste, 112 children, death of, 47–53 Christ, Jesus as, 229–30 Christian existentialisms, 211–13, 263; and anxiety, 282–85; the exception, 212–25, 231; Fear and Trembling (Kierkegaard), 4, 213–18, 225–26, 259; Gabriel Marcel, 93, 95, 110–12, 121n113, 212, 233n2; Jacques Maritain, 91, 95–98; Nicolas Berdyaev, 230–32; Nietzsche on, 313; Paul Tillich, 167, 212, 226–32, 294; personalism, 340. See also Berdyaev, Nicholas/Nikolai circumstantialism, 193–94 civic identity, 375 civil defense culture, 296 “The Claims of Philosophy” (Ayer), 159–60 Cochrane, Arthur, 96 cognition, 237 Cohen, Hermann, 87n62 Cohen-Solal, Annie, 90 Cold War, 11, 298

422—index

Colin, Michel, 340 Collini, Stefan, 149–50, 161, 164 Collins, Patricia Hill, 362–63 Collins, Randall, 157 colonialism, 337, 342, 346, 349, 351 communism, 3, 132, 159, 270–72 confirmation, need for, 239 conformism, 295 Connolly, Cyril, 165 consciousness, 267; call of, 74; Camus on, 266–68; false/alienated, 19, 368–69; Kierkegaard on, 281–82; as meaninggiving activity, 365; and the other, 373, 378; Sartre on, 261, 292; a sickness, 41, 45, 61, 189; split, 38–45, 50, 64n62; states of, 111–12 Conviction, 161–62 Cooper, David, 169 Cotkin, George, 293 counterfeiting, 311–13 Crane, Stephen, 134 creativity, 189, 231–32 Critical Philosophy of Race, 336 Croft, Sergeant, 126 Crossley, Nick, 169 Crystal Palace, 43–44 Cusa, Nicholas de, 77 Cynicism, 311–12, 316–17 Damon (in The Outsider), 133–34 d’Arbousier, Gabriel, 344 dark night of the soul, 92 Darwinism, 136 Dasein, 73–75, 78–80, 111, 285–86, 323, 392–96 David, Catherine, 406 Dawkins, Richard, 257 death: as crown of creation, 244; of God, 5, 92, 221–23, 266–67, 308–17, 322, 326, 330; as revealing God, 190; singularity of one’s, 242–43; without hope, 264–65 death instinct, 37 “death of God” theologians, 212 decisionism, 152, 161 dédoublement, 39 deixis, 237 Delacroix, Henri, 289 Deleuze, Gilles, 169

Delphy, Christine, 368 Dennett, Daniel, 257 depth-dimension, 228 Der Brenner journal, 284–85 Derrida, Jacques, 408 Descartes, René, 30, 50, 74–75, 390, 393, 397, 405, 407 Descombes, Vincent, 390 determinism, 91 dialogue, 241 Diamond, Cora, 170 Dickinson, Emily, 134 Diederichs, Eugen, 284 Diogenes, 310–17 Diop, David, 344 disclosure and failure, 366 disenchantment, 81–82 divertissements (distractions), 92, 109 docta ignorantia, 77 Domenach, Jean-Marie, 340 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 181, 182–87, 201 Doonan, Simon, 118n54 Dostoevsky, Fyodor: biographical facts, 40, 47; Camus on, 55–56; everything is permitted, 92, 262; the exception, 218–20; Richard Wright and, 133 —works: The Brothers Karamazov, 38–39, 45–49, 51–61; Crime and Punishment, 218–20, 259; Demons, 54, 220–23, 259; The Double, 39–40; Notes from Underground, 38–45, 259 dread/anxiety, 4, 126, 133, 248, 294 dream of reason, 186 Dreyfus, Hubert, 297 Drieu La Rochelle, Pierre, 119n61 Dru, Alexandre, 294 Du Bois, W. E. B., 344 Dudognon, Georges, 100 Dullin, Charles, 105 Dupré, Louis, 280 Du vs. Sie in translation, 238 Edwards, Jonathan, 134 ego cogito, 390, 392–95, 402 Einstein, Albert, 274n4 ek-stasis, 227 Eliot, T. S., 9 Ellison, Ralph, 11, 124, 131–34

Index—423

emancipation, existential, 70–71 em-bodied self, 243–44 encounter (Begegnung), 241 engagement (political commitment), 111 ensimismarse, 193 epistemic authority, 362 equity vs. equality, 375 Erasmus, Desiderius, 187 Ereignis (event), 305 Erfahrung (experience), 240 Esprit journal, 339–40 essentialism, 91, 200, 362, 364 estrangement (Entfremdung), 402 ethics: Beauvoir and, 262; Heidegger and, 404–5; Kierkegaard on, 291; ontology and, 250, 404; Tillich and, 228; and transcendence, 60; and universality, 213–17 Euclidian minds, 47 European Enlightenment, 245 everything is permitted, 221 evidence, 345 evil, the question of, 38, 45–49, 54–61, 360–61 existence precedes essence, 6, 91, 93, 96, 211, 260, 394 existential atheism, 91–92, 95–96, 263, 305, 394 existentialisme (use of term), 110, 113n121 existentialist “family tree,” 11–12, 97 Existentialist Offensive, 98–101 existential novels, 185 existential-phenomenological method, 167 existential Russianism, 37–38; Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, 38–45; theodicy, 45–49, 54–61; Tolstoy’s Anna Kare­ nina, 49–54 Existenz-philosophie, 4, 12–13, 69, 151, 153, 306–7 experience of a present, 244 Fachphilosophie, 151–52 faith: Abraham and Isaac, 4, 23, 213–18, 224, 228–30; anxiety leading to, 282–83; bad faith (mauvaise foi), 5, 92, 109, 132, 224, 366; biblical ‘emunah, 239; as creating its object, 190–91; and ethics, 4; given from beyond, 227–28; lonely man of, 246–47; paradox of, 213

fallen state of man, 129 Fanon, Frantz, 114; the ambiguity of black experience, 343–46; on North African Arabs, 346–48; race in the colonical context, 348–51; racism as system, 351– 53; on Sartre, 343–45 —works: “Algeria Unveiled,” 345–46; “Antilleans and Africans,” 349–50; Black Skin, White Masks, 336–41, 349–51; “The Lived Experience of the Black,” 339–43, 348–50; “The North African Syndrome,” 346–48; “On Violence,” 351; The Wretched of the Earth, 337, 351–52 Farias, Victor, 406 Farmer, Sarah, 120n90 Fascism, 153, 228 Faust (Goethe), 51 feminism, 20, 130, 361, 368–70 Ferlov, Knud, 289 Ferreira da Silva, Vicente, 197 Feuerbachianism, 215–16, 259 fictional realism, 64n62 film noir, 134–35 Final Solution, 405, 413n67. See also Holocaust/Shoah, making sense of the Finch, Patricia, 183 flesh-and-blood humans, 188–89 flight from the world (Weltflucht), 249 Fondane, Benjamin, 290 forgotten beings, 181 forlornness, 92 Foucault, Michel, 138–39, 169, 186 France and French existentialism, 89–90; the absurd, 101–4; effect of Heidegger on, 386; as epicenter of existentialism, 99–101; “existentialist offensive,” 98– 101; Gabriel Marcel, 93, 95, 110–12, 121n113, 212, 233n2; as a humanism, 90–93; Marxism and Catholicism, 93–98; May ’68 student–worker pro­ tests, 380; Paris, 90, 105, 108–14; Resistance, 93–95, 101, 105, 260, 270, 405, 412n51; secularization of anxiety in, 290–93; study of German philosophers, 390; theater, 101, 105–8. See also Beauvoir, Simone de; Camus, Albert; Sartre, Jean-Paul Frank, Robert, 124

424—index

Frankel, Charles, 296 Fraser, G. S., 145 freedom: of Christ, 223; in Don Quixote, 183–84; ethics of, 361; existential, 38–45, 91; foundation of all values, 93; and God-relationship, 231; humanism of, 197; to interrogate God, 217; as leading to totalitarianism, 269; over being, 230; possibility as sign of, 292; and sin, 281–82; torment of, 222–23; and will of God, 228 Freiburg University, 387–89, 394 Freistudentische Bund, 81 French Hegel, 112, 301–2n34 French Indo-China War, 349 French Kierkegaard, 112, 288–93 French Revolution, 271 Freud, Sigmund, 273–74n4, 286–87, 373–74, 381 Friedan, Betty, 130 Fuentes, Carlos, 187, 202 functionalism, 111–12 Funny Face, 137 Galtier-Boissière, 99 gambling, 38–40 Gandillac, Maurice, 388–90, 401 Gaos, José, 199–200 Garaudy, Roger, 94 Gasset, José Ortega y, 22, 192–94, 201, 329 —works: Man and People, 194; Meditations on Quixote, 192–93 Gâteau, Jean, 289 gaze: of others, 3, 5, 91, 98; racist, 91, 98, 341–42, 345–46, 348–50 Gegenwart (presence), 239–40 Gellmann, Jerome, 234n13 Gellner, Ernest, 152 Genet, Jean, 106 George, Stefan, 318 German existentialism, 65–67; Brock on, 151; Heinemann on, 153–54, 166. See also Heidegger, Martin; Jaspers, Karl; Nietzsche, Friedrich German Idealism, 279 Geschichtlichkeit (historicality), 391 Geschick (destiny) of being, 330 Ge-stell, 328–29

ghettos, Jewish, 245–46 Giacometti, Alberto, 107–8 Gilson, Étienne, 96, 211 Ginsberg, Allen, 125, 169 Glatzer, Nahum N., 254n37 Gleichschaltung legislation, 150 Gnosis und spätantiker Geist, 248 Gnosticism, 248–49 God: communism replacing, 272; as created in our image, 190; death of, 5, 92, 221–23, 266–67, 308–17, 322, 326, 330; existence of, 102, 140, 260–61; as existing in weakened state, 124; “He Who Is,” 211; as hidden, 97–98; “I am that I am,” 226; as mnemonic device, 57; prevalence of belief in, 274n8; quarrel with, 134; Unamuno and, 188 God-Man-World, 324 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 51 Goffman, Erving, 169 Gontarski, S. E., 150 González Echevarría, Roberto, 184 “Good European,” 329–30 Gordon, Peter, 249 Gospel of John, 296 Goya, Francisco, 186, 204n13 Grand Inquisitor, 48, 222–23, 231 Gréco, Juliette, 100 Greek language, 189 Greek philosophy, 319–20, 327–28 Gregh, Fernand, 105 Grene, Marjorie, 128, 135 Guattari, Félix, 169 Gundolf, Friedrich, 318 Guy, Alain, 190 hacer, un, 194 Haecker, Theodor, 284 Hall, Peter, 145, 171n1 Hallie, Philip, 57, 58–59 Hammett, Dashiell, 134–35 Hare, R. M., 160 harem women, 363, 381–82 Harris, Sam, 257 Haufniensis, Vigilius (pseud. Kierkegaard), 280 Hayden, Tom, 138 Hayman, Ronald, 236n43

Index—425

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 3, 112–13, 151, 343 Heidegger, Martin: on anxiety, 72–75, 82, 282, 284–86, 291–93; on bad faith, 92; Camus on, 267; and Christian anthropology, 297; and Germany’s place in history, 326–31; “Heidegger Affairs,” 387–90, 393–94; on Jaspers, 325; Jonas and, 248–50; Kanapa on, 95; Kojève on, 390–91; on Marxism, 402, 412n51; metaphysics and science, 75–81, 399– 400; Nazis/Nazism, 3, 152–53, 249, 387– 90, 393, 404–7; on Nietzsche, 325–31; nihilism, 326; phenomenology, 393–94; Sartre on, 386, 388, 391–92, 394–95, 404; translations, 138, 166, 197. See also “Letter on Humanism” (Heidegger) —works: Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), 72, 76–79, 92, 159, 166, 199, 284–86, 390–401 passim; The History of the Concept of Time, 285; “Nietzsche’s Word,” 326; Rektoratsrede, 172n32; “The SelfAssertion of the German University,” 388; What Is Called Thinking?, 197; “What Is Metaphysics?” lecture, 65–67, 75–81, 197, 396–405 “Heidegger’s Fundamental Ontology” (de Reyna), 198 Heimämaa, Sara, 369 Heinemann, F. H., 12–14, 149, 153–56, 307 Hell, 106, 128, 141 Henricksen, Margot, 296 Heraclitus, 320 Herberg, Will, 131 herethics, 377–78 Heschel, Abraham Joshua, 247–48 heterosexual couple, 370–73 Hicks, David, 145 hidden God or hidden man, 97–98 Hildebrandt, Kurt, 318 Hillel, Rabbi, 225 Himes, Chester, 340 Hiperión group, 200 hipsters, 123–25, 262 Hirsch, Emanuel, 290 Hispanic and Latin American existentialism, 180–82; Don Quixote, 182–87, 201–3; José Ortega y Gasset, 22, 192–

94, 201, 329; Latin America, 195–203; Miguel de Unamuno, 187–95 historical being, 395 historical materialism, 197, 391 history: as breaking in two, 305; of European pride, 271; humans are their, 193 Hitchens, Christopher, 257 Hitler, Adolf, 105, 249 Hobson, Harold, 147, 171n1 Høffding, Harald, 279, 283 holiness conquers absurdity, 248 Holocaust/Shoah, making sense of the, 93, 114, 131, 139, 248–50, 336, 387, 405–9 homelessness (Heimatlösigkeit), 401–2 homo ipse se fecit, 191 hope, delusion of, 264–65 housings (Gehäusen), 70, 82 Howl (Ginsberg), 125 Hulme, T. E., 297 humanism, 127–29, 140, 396–404 Husserl, Edmund, 73, 75, 267 Huyssen, Andreas, 81 “hygiene” of Christianity, 287 hypervisible but silenced, 365 Hyppolite, Jean, 410n15 Ilyushechka, 52–53, 55, 57 imago dei, 189 indigenismo, 196, 200 individualism, 6; Murdoch and, 159, 170; silent voice of, 229; vs. traditional philosophy, 242; and the universal, 213– 26 individuation, metaphysical, 71 Ingersoll, Robert, 258–59 inquiétude (disquiet), 110 intentionality, 376, 382–83 interpersonal connectedness, 161 intus, 194 inverted apocalypsism, 46 Ionesco, Eugène, 106 Iphigenia, 214 Irigarary, Luce, 362, 370–76 iron cage of modernity, 66–67 Isaac, sacrifice of, 213–18 Israel, 273 Ivan (in The Brothers Karamazov), 37, 46–53, 55–61, 221

426—index

Jake (in Under the Net), 163–64 James, C. L. R., 133 James, William, 129 Jaspers, Karl, 3; Heidegger on, 307, 325; iron cage theory, 66–67; and limitsituations, 5, 67, 69–72, 78, 82; on metaphysical guilt, 92; on Nietzsche, 308, 321–25; and Weber, 81–82; withdrawal into shell, 238–39 —works: Existenzphilosophie, 14; Nietzsche and Christianity, 325; Nietzsche: An Introduction to the Understanding of His Philosophizing, 321, 323; Psychology of Worldviews (Psychologie der Weltanschuauungen), 69–72, 285, 306–7; Reason and Existence, 321, 323; The Spiritual Situation of the Age, 323; Von der Wahrheit, 71 Jephthah, 214, 219 Jesus, 222–23, 227, 229, 287–88 Jewish existentialism: and anxiety, 282; co-existentialism, 245–51; Franz Rosenzweig, 241–45; I and Thou (Martin Buber), 237–41, 253n24; and Kierke­ gaard, 290 Johannes “de silentio,” 213–18, 234n11 Jonas, Hans, 248–50 jouissance, 376, 378, 380, 382 Journal métaphysique (Metaphysical Journal), 110–11 Joyce, James, 150 Kafka, Franz, 186, 246–47 Kanapa, Jean, 94–95 Kant, Immanuel, 240, 282 Kantianism, 214, 243 Kaufmann, Walter, 37, 62n1, 137, 307 Keen, Sam, 111 Kelly, Michael, 98 Kerouac, Jack, 125 Kierkegaard, Søren, 7–8; on anguish of Abraham, 92; on anxiety, 97, 129, 280–88; Binswanger on, 287; Camus on, 267; and Christian existentialism, 212–18, 259; on encounter with God, 71; on ethics, 291; French revival of, 112–13, 288–93; influence in America, 133, 135–38, 293–96; and Jewish existen-

tialism, 290; Mailer on, 126; Sartre on, 263; Wilson on, 166 —works: “At a Graveside,” 226; The Concept of Dread/Anxiety, 133, 280–83, 287, 290–95; Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 4, 213; “Diary of a Seducer,” 283; Either/Or, 4, 283; Fear and Trembling, 4, 213–18, 225–26, 259; The Present Age, 3; On the Psychology of Sin, Conversion, and Belief, 284; Repetition, 217; Sickness Unto Death, 289, 296 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 134 Kirillov (in Demons), 48, 57, 221 knights of faith/resignation, 215 Kojève, Alexandre, 113, 156, 390–91, 410n14 Koyré, Alexandre, 113 Kristeva, Julia, 362, 376–82, 383 Kuklick, Bruce, 173–74n43 Kundera, Milan, 181, 185 Künzli, Arnold, 296 Lacan, Jacques, 288–89, 373 Lactantius, 190 Laing, R. D., 167–69 “Lament of the Black” (Esprit journal), 339–40 Latin America, 196–97, 201. See also Hispanic and Latin American existentialism “leap of faith,” 4, 23, 136, 282 Leary, Timothy, 169 Leavis, F. R., 174n47 Lebensphilosophie, 306 Lefebvre, Henri, 94 Le mur (The Wall), 104 lesbianism, 367–69 l’esprit de finesse (intuitive mind), 108–9 l’esprit de géometrie (mathematical mind), 108–9 Lessing, Doris, 162 Les temps modernes journal, 19, 101, 340, 387–90 “Letter on Humanism” (Heidegger): being and language, 395–99; first reading, 390–92; homelessness, 401–2; overcoming existentialism, 399–401; second reading, 387, 392–95; third reading, 387, 405–9; whither humanism?, 402–5

Index—427

Levinas, Emmanuel: on escape, 43; on guilt, 60; on Heidegger, 250, 387, 390, 405–8; and meaning of life, 37, 56 —works: De l’existence à l’existant, 407; “Time and the Other,” 407–8; Totality and Infinity (Totalité et infini), 407–8 Lévy, Benny, 263 liberation philosophy, 201–2 liberty, difficult, 250 limit-situations, 67, 69–72, 78, 82 Löwith, Karl, 279–80, 306–8, 317–21 —works: Das Individuum in der Rolle des Mitmenschen, 307; Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, 317–18; Von Hegel bis Nietzsche (From Hegel to Nietzsche), 279–80 Lowrie, Walter, 136, 293–94 Lukács, Georg, 216 Lundgren-Gothlin, Eva, 369 Luther, Martin, 281 Lutheran sin, 297 MacKinnon, Donald, 160 Macquarrie, John, 166 madness: and Don Quixote, 191–92; history of, 186–87 Magee, Bryan, 176 Mailer, Norman, 123–26, 140, 262–63 —works: The Deer Park, 126; Existential Errands, 123–24; The Naked and the Dead, 126; “Sartre’s God Problem,” 263; “Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” 125; “The White Negro,” 123–25, 262 Maillol, Aristide, 107 Malik, Habib, 283 Mann, Thomas, 306 Mannoni, Octave, 339, 342 Marcel, Gabriel, 93, 95, 110–12, 121n113, 212, 233n2 Marcuse, Herbert, 169, 197 Marías, Julián, 185, 192, 195 Maritain, Jacques, 95–96, 211 marriage, 371 Martin, Bernard, 58 Martinique, 338–39, 348–50 Marxism: Camus on, 269; Carlos Astrada and, 197; and colonialism, 352; and existentialism, 91, 93–95, 295; Heidegger

on, 402, 412n51; and material feminism, 368; Merleau-Ponty and, 391; and Philosophies circle, 110 “master race,” 308 materialist feminism, 368–70 maternal body, 377–80 mathematics, 102, 108, 152, 194, 235n29 Maurras, Charles, 105 May, Rollo, 130–31, 288 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 236n43 McDowell, John, 170 McLaughlin, Richard, 100 meaninglessness, 68, 81–83, 153–54, 180–81, 216 Mehta, Ved, 160 Melville, Herman, 124, 134 Memmi, Albert, 351 Meng, Heinrich, 347 Mephisto, 50–51 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 93, 117n27, 340, 344, 390–94, 410n19 Messkirch, magician of, 249 mestizaje and the cosmic race, 196 mésure, 25 meta-ethical self, 243 meta-narrative, novel as, 182–87 metaphysics: and guilt, 92; Heidegger and, 65–67, 75–81, 197, 396–405; history of, 309, 315–16, 325–30; role of art, 271; Thomist, 96; of the Two, 373, 378 Meursault (in The Stranger), 103, 257, 268 Mexican Revolution, 196 Mexico, 198–201 Middle Ages, struggle against Renaissance, 191 Milton, John, 44 Mitsein, 370–73, 405 Moby-Dick (Melville), 124, 134 modernity/modernism, 9–11, 139, 172n23, 246, 388, 413n67 Moloch, 125 monde vécu (lived world), 158 Montagu, Ashley, 336 Montaigne, Michel de, 108 Moore, G. E., 152 morality a work of art, 92–93 Moses, Robert, 137 Mougin, Henri, 94

428—index

Mounier, Emmanuel, 12, 96–98, 340 mouse-man, 42 movement of infinity, 215 Moyn, Samuel, 82 Mulhall, Stephen, 170 murder, justification for, 218–25, 269, 271 Murdoch, Iris, 145, 156–63, 166, 170, 176nn83–84 —works: The Bell, 162; “The Existentialist Political Myth,” 158, 160; The Flight from the Enchanter, 162; “A House of Theory,” 161; “The Idea of Perfection,” 161; The Sandcastle, 162; Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, 157; The Sovereignty of Good, 161; Under the Net, 162–63 myth of woman, 373, 375, 376 Natasia, 52–54 nausea, 5, 102, 104, 163, 266 Nazis/Nazism: ban on Jewish publications, 248, 317; control of universities, 307, 387–88; existentialism equated with, 149–51, 159–60; Final Solution, 403, 413n67; Heidegger and, 3, 152–53, 249, 387–90, 393, 404–7; Holocaust/Shoah, 93, 114, 131, 139, 248–50, 336, 387, 405–9; Jaspers and, 324; living under, 89, 105, 324, 360–61; and Nietzsche, 307–8, 318–19; as predestined, 153–55; rise of, 289, 317 negation, 78, 80 negritude movement, 342–43 neo-Kantianism, 66, 69, 71, 75–76, 80, 82 Neumann, Franz, 294–95 New Atheists, 257 new being, 227 New Left generation, 137, 169 New Orleans, 146 New Thinking, 241–45 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 129, 131 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 236n43; as anthropological existentialist, 317–21; on atheism, 313; Camus on, 56, 259; on Christian existentialisms, 313; as cultural prophet, 317–18; on death of God, 223–24, 259, 266, 308–18; and demon of eternal recurrence, 59–60; and divine absence,

71; early training of, 310; as an “event,” 305–8, 330; Heidegger on, 325–31; influence on Germany, 306; Jaspers on, 308, 321–25; Löwith on, 317–21; and Nazis/ Nazism, 307–8, 318–19; and nihilism, 308, 316, 319–22; precursors of, 103; on will to power, 311, 318–19, 322–24 —works: The Birth of Tragedy, 311; Ecce Homo, 305–6, 316; The Gay Science (Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft), 259, 308–17; Human, All Too Human, 264; “The Madman,” 65, 308–18; On the Genealogy of Morality, 2, 312–13; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 223–24, 259, 309, 317; “The Wanderer and His Shadow,” 311; The Will to Power, 322 Nietzsche’s Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same (Löwith), 317 nihilism: Camus on, 271; Europe and, 153–54, 249; Heidegger and, 326; Nietzsche and, 308, 316, 319–22; Russia and, 45–46 nomoi and nomisma, 315 nothing, the (das Nichts), 66, 77–78, 83 nothing and anxiety, 282 nothingness, 146, 149, 292–93 Nouvelle revue française journal, 119n61 novel form, use of, 157–58, 161–62, 181–87, 202 nuclear annihilation, specter of, 11, 91, 124– 25, 131, 136, 139, 295–96 Oakeshott, Michael, 160 objective negritude, 343 obsession, 39, 402 Oedipus complex, 374–75 ontic and ontological knowledge, 72–73 ontological insecurity, 168 oppression, 360–66, 370–71, 381–83 “ordinary language” philosophy, 152 Orestes, 105 original sin, 281, 284 Ortegism, 193 Osborne, John, 162, 165 “other-directed” personality, 295 otherness, 371 Oxford philosophy, 152, 155–61

Index—429

pagan ethics, 264, 282 Palestine, 273 pancakes, 54–55, 57 Pandora (in Human, All Too Human), 264 Paris, 90, 105, 108–14 Partisan Review, 137 Pascal, Blaise, 56, 92, 103, 108–10, 186–87, 316 Passmore, John, 160 pasteboard masks, 134, 140 past limits future, 193 patriarchy, 365–66 Pattison, George, 8 Paz, Octavio, 199 Pericles, 315 perspectivism, 193 Peru, 198 Petrashevsky’s Circle, 40 Pfister, Oskar, 287–88 phenomenal world (die Erscheinungswelt), 240 phenomenology: Beauvoir on, 365–66, 382–83; Heidegger on, 393–94; MerleauPonty and, 393–94 philology, all philosophy essentially, 189 Philosophical School of Paris, 113 Philosophies circle, 110 physis, 311, 313, 315–17, 319–20, 331 Plato, 189, 311, 313–15, 327 post-Existenz philosophy, 249–50 potentiality-for-Being, 74 pregnant body, 377–79 presence (Gegenwart), 239–40 Presence africaine journal, 340 preservation of the species, 371 principium individuationis, 240 private existence, 397 Protestantism, 67–68 proto-existentialism, 68 Psych et po journal, 370 psychoanalytic theory, 286–87, 373–74, 376– 77 psychopaths as heroes, 125 Puritanism, 68 quehacer, 193 Queneau, Raymond, 156, 163

Quesada, Francisco Miró, 198 Questions féministes journal, 369–70 Quixotism, 191, 203 Rabinbach, Anson, 410–11n23 racism, 132, 337–45, 350, 361–62 Ramos, Samuel, 199, 200 Raskolnikov (in Crime and Punishment), 218–20, 259 rationalism, 241–42 rationalization, 70 ratiovitalism, 192–93 Ravisson-Mollien, Félix, 109 reason(s): as anti-vital, 190; individual defined by, 213; and madness, 186–87; not truths, 189–90; Unamuno and, 188–91 rebellion vs. revolution, 270 recognition and reciprocity, 372 Rée, Jonathan, 164–65 religion: and anxiety, 136, 282–86; living without, 257–58, 266, 272–73; as retreat, 83, 84n11; and secularity, 297–98; Unamuno and, 190–91 repentance, 282 Republic (Plato), 313–14 Resistance, French, 93–95, 101, 105, 260, 270, 405, 412n51 resolute action, 391 resurrection, 230 Revista de Occidente journal, 192, 195 revolt, 264, 269–71 Richardson, Maurice, 163 Rickert, Heinrich, 71–72, 80 Ries, Wiebrecht, 309 Riesman, David, 295 rigorous science (strenge Wissenschaft), 75, 81 Robinson, Edward, 166 Roquentin (in Nausea), 163, 266 Rorty, Richard, 170 Rosenberg, Alfred, 306–7 Rosenzweig, Franz, 23–24, 238, 241–43, 246, 250 Rougemont, Denis de, 291 Roumain, Jacques, 344 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 109

430—index

Roy, Claude, 100 Russell, Bertrand, 152, 173n34 Russian existentialism, 37–38; Berdyaev on, 45–46, 48, 61; Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, 38–45; theodicy, 45–49, 54–61; Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, 49–54 Ryle, Gilbert, 152, 158–59 saeculum-oriented society, 247 Saint John of the Cross, 92 Salazar Bondy, Augusto, 198 Salwak, Dale, 165 Sancho Panza (in Don Quixote), 191–92 “Sanctus Januarius,” 313 Sartre, Jean-Paul: and Americans, 126, 137; on anxiety, 282, 291–93; and atheism, 259–63; Barnes translations of, 128–29, 137; and Camus, 101–4, 257; on “everything is permitted” slogan, 221–22; Fanon on, 343–45; and the gambler, 38–39; on Heidegger, 386, 388, 391–92, 394–95, 404; “I am, therefore I think,” 29; influence on Richard Wright, 133; Is Existentialism a Humanism? lecture, 12, 87–88, 258; on Kierkegaard, 263; marriage to Beauvoir, 90; Murdoch on, 159; on novelists, 123; reactions to, 93–101, 392; on suicide, 103 —works: Anti-Semite and Jew, 341–43, 351; Being and Nothingness (L’être et le néant), 38–39, 106, 111, 137, 158, 261, 269, 291; “Black Orpheus,” 342–45; Critique of Dialectical Reason, 337, 351–52; Existentialism Is a Humanism, 12, 89–93, 99, 106–8, 111–14, 260, 295; The Flies (Les mouches), 104–5, 263; Nausea (La nausée), 104, 163, 266, 392; No Exit (Huis clos), 3, 105–6, 112, 392; The Others (Les autres), 106; The Roads to Freedom (Les chemins de la liberté), 100; The Words (Les mots), 263 Satan, Milton’s, 44 Scheler, Max, 151 schizophrenia, 167–69 Schlesinger, Arthur M., 129 Schmitt, Carl, 234n17 School of Madrid, 192, 194 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 240–41

Schrempf, Christoph, 283–84 Schwartz, Delmore, 137 Schweitzer, Albert, 326 science, place of, 76–81 secular ethics, 228 secularization of anxiety, 280 Seinfeld, 106 selfhood, 73–74 self-will, 221 semiotic, 377–80 Senghor, Léopold, 341–42, 344 sensate experience (Erfahrung), 240 sense of Being (Seinssinn), 72 sexless society, 369 sexual contract, 365 Shakespeare, William, 186 Shestov, Lev, 40–41, 44–45, 58, 95, 113, 217, 267, 290 shipwreck (Scheitern), 69, 71 Shklar, Judith N., 295 Shoah/Holocaust, making sense of the, 93, 114, 131, 139, 248–50, 336, 387, 405–9 shock of non-being, 226–27 Simmel, Georg, 151 sin, 282, 297, 299n5 singularity, 242–43 situation, 347, 351 slave morality, 24, 308 slavery, goodness as, 51 snail shell, 239 Snow, C. P., 174n47 social identity, 341 Socialisme et liberté group, 260 Socrates, 97 Socrates gone mad, 311, 313 Solomon, Robert, 109–10 Soloveitchik, Joseph, 246–47 Sombart, Werner, 306 Song of Songs, 244–45 “Speech at the Stone,” 55 Spelman, Elizabeth, 362–63 Spengler, Oswald, 306, 317 Speshnev, Nikolai, 40 spirituals, 132 split consciousness, 38–45, 64n62 standing-out-of, 227 Stavrogin (in Demons), 220–21 Strauss, Leo, 173n42

Index—431

Student Christian Movement Press, 166 Students for a Democratic Society, 138 stupidity and reason, 46 subjective negritude, 343 subjugation, 28, 363, 368, 409 sublime madness, 191 suicide: Anna Karenina’s, 49; Caligula’s, 101–2; Camus and, 102–3, 265, 267, 268–69; in Demons, 221–22; logical, 48, 57; Marcel and, 111; meaning of, 56; Sartre on, 103; Stavrogin’s, 221 Swenson, David, 136, 293 symbolic systems, 373–74 system, 352 systematized Negroes, 348 Szasz, Thomas, 169 taste of untruth, 136 teleological suspension of the ethical, 214 terrorism, 140 theodicy, 38, 45–49, 51, 54–61, 360–61 theonomy, 227–28 thinking, method of, 242 third sex, 367 Thomist existentialism, 95 “throw-forwards,” evolutionary, 164–65 thrownness, 74–75 Thucydides, 315 Tillich, Paul, 167, 212, 226–32, 294 Tisseau, P.-H., 290 Tolstoy, Leo, 41, 49–54, 67, 158 —works: Anna Karenina, 49–54 totalitarianism: Americans and, 124–26, 130, 294–95; impulse to freedom leads to, 269; replacing God, 272; as secular fanaticism, 48; utopia leading to, 129 Towarnicki, Frédéric (Alfred) de, 388–90, 393–94 transcendence, 73, 267, 293, 321–25 transparency (Durchsichtigkeit), 75 transterrados, 194–96, 199 tree of existentialism, 11–12, 97 Trevor-Roper, H. R., 149–50 Turcotte, Louise, 368 Tynan, Kenneth, 145, 171n1 Übermensch (overman), 221, 223–25, 316 Unamuno, Miguel de, 186–95, 201

unbearable lightness of being, 92 uncanniness, 74–75, 248 UNESCO declaration on race, 336 Unheimlichkeit, 78–79, 248 universal, the, 213–15 universal human condition, 91 universalism, 343 Uranga, Emilio, 200 Valéry, Paul, 110 Vargas Llosa, Mario, 183–84, 202–3 Vasconcelos, José, 196 veiled women, 345–46 vertigo, 39 Viallaneix, Nelly, 113, 289 Vian, Boris, 100 Vichy regime, 105 Vienna Circle, 152 Vietnam, 349 Villoro, Luis, 200 vocation, science as, 81 Voss, Lola, 287 Waehlens, Alphonse de, 389 Wagner de Reyna, Alberto, 198 Wahl, Jean, 95, 112–13, 290–93 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 106, 145–49, 171n1 waiting without purpose, 147 wall, the, 41–45 Warnock, Mary, 145, 159 Weber, Max, 66–69, 81–83 Weil, Eric, 389 Weil, Simone, 166, 212 “we,” the, 364 White, Hayden, 172n23 white privilege, 342 Wild, John, 130 Wilder, Thornton, 136 Will of God, 228 will to power, 311, 318–19, 324 Wilson, Colin, 164–69 Wissenschaften, 65–67 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 152 Wittig, Monique, 362, 368–70 women: as a class, 368–69; existing only in relation to men, 369; feminist movement, 20, 130, 361, 368–70; harem, 363,

432—index

women (continued) 381–82; lesbianism, 367–69; maternal body, 377–80; Mitsein, 370–73; myth of, 373, 375, 376; pregnant body, 377–79; veiled, 345–46 Woolf, Virginia, 164 words, creating through, 189 world-disenchantment (die Entzauberung der Welt), 67 worldview (Weltanschauung), 69–72 World War I, 136, 288, 306, 348, 390 World War II, 136, 407, 413n67. See also Nazis/Nazism; Resistance, French Wright, Richard, 123–24, 131–34, 340

—works: Black Boy, 133; Native Son, 133, 340; The Outsider, 123, 133–34 writing from experience, 338 Yallom, Irvin, 131 Youth Movement, 306 Zarathustra, 308, 316 Zea, Leopoldo, 193, 200–201 Zeig, Sande, 368 Zelechow, Bernard, 224 zetesis, 313–15 Zosima, Father, 46, 51–54, 57 Zusya, Rabbi, 241