“the leading German existentialists and their precursor, Husserl, have made great conquests in France and in America – not only in the United States but in Latin America as well.”
“Is all this a passing fad-perhaps one which may last a few years? Or is it really an epoch-making new philosophy? The answer depends on how accurately the new philosophy reflects reality, and how adequately it deals with the crucial human question with which the age is faced.”
“An epoch-making philosophy has never yet arisen without a really original method.”
“This was so for all the great philosophers of the past, Plato and Aristotle, Descartes and Spinoza, Kant and Hegel.”
“What is the originality of existentialism’s method? The question is not settled by referring to the fact that existentialism is an offshoot of Husserl’s philosophy.”
“It is important to note that modern phenomenology is one of the numerous philosophical methods which seek to rise above both idealism and materialism by discovering a philosophical “third way,” by making intuition the true source of knowledge.”
“From Nietzsche through Mach and Avenarius to Bergson and beyond, the mass of bourgeois philosophy goes this way. Husserl’s intuition of essence (Wesensschau) is but one strand of the development.”
“Is there any room for a “third way” besides idealism and materialism? If we consider this question seriously, as the great philosophers of the past did, and not with fashionable phrases, there can be only one answer, “No.””
“For when we look at the relations which can exist between being and consciousness we see clearly that only two positions are possible: either being is primary (materialism), or consciousness is primary (idealism).”
“Or, to put it another way, the fundamental principle of materialism is the independence of being from consciousness; of idealism, the dependence of being on consciousness.”
“The fashionable philosophers of today establish a correlation between being and consciousness as a basis for their “third way”: there is no being without consciousness and no consciousness without being. But the first assertion produces only a variant of idealism: the acknowledgment of the dependence of being on consciousness.”
“only in becalmed, untroubled times can men hold themselves to be thorough-going idealists”
“Ever since Nietzsche, the body (Leib) has played a leading role in bourgeois philosophy.”
“The new philosophy needs formulas which recognize the primary reality of the body and the joys and dangers of bodily existence, without, however, making any concessions to materialism. For at the same time materialism was becoming the worldview of the revolutionary proletariat.”
“The phenomenological method, especially after Husserl, believes it has discovered a way of knowing which exhibits the essence of objective reality without going beyond the human or even the individual consciousness.”
“The intuition of essence is a sort of intuitive introspection, but is not psychologically oriented. It inquires rather what sort of objects the thought process posits, and what kind of intentional acts are involved. It was still relatively easy for Husserl to operate with these concepts, because he was concerned exclusively with questions of pure logic, i.e., pure acts and objects of thought. The question became more complex as Scheler took up problems of ethics and sociology, and Heidegger and Sartre broached the ultimate questions of philosophy. The need of the times which drove them in this direction was so compelling that it silenced all gnosiological doubts as to whether the method was adequate to objective reality.”
“For Dilthey’s intuition, the colorfulness and the uniqueness of historical situations are the reality; for Bergson’s, it is the flow itself, the duration (durée), that dissolves the petrified forms of ordinary life; while for Husserl’s, the acts in which individual objects are meant constitute “reality” – objects which he treats as isolated units, with hard contours like statuary.”
“phenomenological method, excluding all social elements from its analysis, confronts consciousness with a chaos of things (and men) which only individual subjectivity can articulate and objectify”
“Here we have the well-publicized phenomenological objectivity, the “third way,” which turns out to be only a revival of neo-Kantianism.”
“Phenomenology and the ontology deriving from it only seem to go beyond the gnosiological solipsism of subjective idealism.”
“those inner experiences which constitute the attitude revealed in the intuition of the Wesensschau, and its content, are as sincere and spontaneous as possible. But that does not make them objectively correct. Indeed this spontaneity, by betraying its immediate uncritical attitude toward the basic phenomenon, creates the false consciousness: fetishism.”
“Fetishism signifies, in brief, that the relations among human beings which function by means of objects are reflected in human consciousness immediately as things, because of the structure of capitalist economy.”
“They become objects or things, fetishes in which men crystallize their social relationships, as savages do their relationships to nature; and for savages the laws of natural relations are just as impenetrable as the laws of the capitalist system of economy are to the men of the world of today.”
“Like savages, modern men pray to the fetishes they themselves have made, bow down to them, and sacrifice to them (e.g., the fetish of money).”
“Human relations, as Marx says, acquire “a spectral objectivity.””
“The social existence of man becomes a riddle in his immediate experience, even though objectively he is a social being first and foremost, despite all immediate appearances to the contrary.”
“I shall merely point out the most important questions which have had decisive influence on the development of existentialism.”
“The first is life’s losing its meaning. Man loses the center, weight, and connectedness of his own life, a fact life itself compels him to realize.”
“How can my life become meaningful? The man who lives in the fetish-making world does not see that every life is rich, full, and meaningful to the extent that it is consciously linked in human relations with other lives.”
“The isolated egoistic man who lives only for himself lives in an impoverished world. His experiences approach threateningly close to the unessential and begin to merge into nothingness the more exclusively they are his alone, and turned solely inward.”
“The man of the fetishized world, who can cure his disgust with the world only in intoxication, seeks, like the morphine addict, to find a way out by heightening the intensity of the intoxicant rather than by a way of life that has no need of intoxication. He is not aware that the loss of communal life, the degradation and dehumanization of collective work as a result of capitalist division of labor, and the severance of human relations from social activity have stupefied him. He does not see this, and goes further and further along the fatal path, which tends to become a subjective need.”
“For in capitalist society public life, work, and the system of human relations are under the spell of fetish making, reification and dehumanization. Only revolt against the actual foundations, as we can see in many authors of the time, leads to a clearer appreciation of these foundations, and thence to a new social perspective. Escape into inwardness is a tragic-comical blind alley.”
“Many a good writer and keen thinker saw through the intoxication of carnival to the fact that the fetishized ego had lost its essence.”
“The fetishized bases of life seemed so beyond question that they escaped study, let alone criticism.”
“Mind was so formed by fetish thinking that when the first world war and the subsequent series of crises called the very possibility of human existence into question, giving a new tinge to every idea, and when the carnival of isolated individualism gave way to its Ash Wednesday, there was still virtually no change in the way that philosophical questions were asked.”
“Yet the aim and direction of the quest for essence did change. The existentialism of Heidegger and Jaspers is proof. The experience which underlies this philosophy is easily stated: man stands face to face with nothingness or nonbeing.”
“The originality of Heidegger is that he takes just such situations as typical and makes them his starting point. With the help of the complicated method of phenomenology, he lodges the entire problem in the fetishized structure of the bourgeois mind, in the dreary hopeless nihilism and pessimism of the intellectuals of the interval between the two world wars. The first fetish is the concept of nothingness.”
“In Heidegger as in Sartre, this is the central problem of reality, of ontology. In Heidegger nothingness is an ontological datum on a level with existence; in Sartre it is only one factor in existence, which nevertheless enters into all the manifestations of being.”
“it is only idolizing of subjective attitudes that gives nothingness the semblance of reality”
“The nothingness which fascinates recent philosophers is a myth of declining capitalist society.”
“Existentialism consistently proclaims that nothing can be known by man. It does not challenge science in general; it does not raise skeptical objections to its practical or technical uses. It merely denies that there is a science which has the right to say anything about the one essential question: the relation of the individual to life. This is the alleged superiority of existentialism to the old philosophy.”
“The more phenomenology is transformed into the method of existentialism, the more the underlying irrationality of the individual and of being becomes the central object, and the closer becomes its affinity to irrational currents of the time.”
“Being is meaningless, uncaused, unnecessary. Being is by definition “the originally fortuitous,” says Sartre. If nothingness comes to “exist” by the magic of existentialism, existence is made negative. Existence is what man lacks.”
“The human being, says Heidegger, “knows what he is only from ‘existence,’ i.e., from his own potentialities,” whether he becomes the one he “is,” or not. Is man’s becoming authentic or not?”
“We have seen that in the leading trends of modern philosophy this question has an antisocial character. Using the familiar method, Heidegger subjects man’s everyday life to phenomenological analysis. The life of man is a co-existence and at the same time a being-in-the-world. This being also has its fetish; namely, “one.” In German, subjectless sentences begin with man (“one”): “One writes,” “One does.” Heidegger, making myths, erects this word into an ontological existent in order to express philosophically what seems to him to be the function of society and social life; viz., to turn man away from himself, to make him unauthentic, to prevent him from being himself. The manifestation of “one” in daily life is chatter, curiosity, ambiguity, “falling.” To follow the path of one’s own existence, according to Heidegger, one must take the road to death, his own death; one must live in such a way that his death does not come upon him as a brute fact breaking in on him from without, but as his own. Actual existence can find its crowning achievement only in such a personal demise.”
“The complete capriciousness and subjectivism of the ontology, concealed behind a show of objectivity, come to light once more.”
“Heidegger’s way of thinking is not without interest. Sein und Zeit is at least as absorbing reading as Céline’s novel, Journey to the End of the Night. But the former, like the latter, is merely a document of the day showing how a class felt and thought, and not an “ontological” disclosure of ultimate truth.”
“It is only because this book is so well suited to the emotional world of today’s intellectuals that the arbitrariness of its pseudoargumentation is not exposed.”
“Jaspers and Sartre are less radical than Heidegger in this respect, although their thought is not the less conditioned by time and class.”
“Jaspers developed the thesis that nothing good or essential can come of political or social activity: the salvation of man is possible only when every one passionately concerns himself exclusively with his own existence and in relations with other individuals of like persuasion.”
“Taking eternal death as goal makes man’s existing social situation a matter of such indifference that it might as well remain capitalistic. The assertion of death as absolute fate and sole destination has the same significance for today’s counterrevolution as formerly the consolation of the hereafter had.”
“This keen observation casts light too on the reason why the popularity of existentialism is growing not only among snobs but also among reactionary writers.”
“Only sophistry could infer the “existence” of nonbeing.”
“Existentialism is the philosophy not only of death but also of abstract freedom.”
“The inner experience – above all, in the Western countries – was one of freedom in general, abstractly, without analysis or differentiation, in brief freedom as myth, which precisely because of its formlessness was able to unite under its flag all enemies of fascism, who (whatever their point of view) hated their origin or their goal.”
“Only one thing mattered to these men, to say “No” to fascism. The less specific the “No” was, the better it expressed the feeling of actuality.”
“The abstract “No” and its pendant, abstract freedom, were to many men the exact expression of the “myth” of the resistance.”
“how is it possible that existentialism, with its rigid, abstract conception of freedom, should become a worldwide trend? Or more precisely, whom, and how, does existentialism carry conviction as a philosophy of freedom? To answer this central question, we must come to closer grips with Sartre’s concept of freedom.”
“According to him, freedom is a basic fact of human existence. We represent, says Sartre, “freedom which chooses, but we could not choose to be free. We are doomed to freedom.” We are thrown into freedom (Heidegger’s Geworfenheit).”
“Not choosing, however, is just as much choice as choosing is; avoiding action is action too. Everywhere Sartre stresses this role of freedom, from the most primitive facts of everyday life to the ultimate questions of metaphysics. When I take part in a group excursion, get tired, am weighed down by my pack, and so forth, I am faced with the fact of free choice, and must decide whether I will go on with my companions or throw off my burden and sit down by the roadside.”
“From this problem the way leads to the final, most abstract problems of human existence; in the plans or projects in which man concretizes his free decision and free choice (projet, projeter is one of the most important notions of Sartre’s theory of freedom) there lies the content of the ultimate ideal, the last “project”: God.”
“In Sartre’s words: “The basic plan of human reality is best illustrated by the fact that man is the being whose plan it is to become God. . . . Being a man is equivalent to being engaged in becoming God.””
“And the philosophical content of this ideal of God is the attainment of that stage of existence which the old philosophy denoted as causa sui.”
“Kant did not succeed in establishing objective morality by generalizing subjectivity. The young Hegel, in a sharp critique, showed this failure. However, Kant’s generalization still stands in intimate connection with the first principles of his social philosophy; in Sartre, this generalization is an eclectic compromise with traditional philosophical opinion, contradicting his ontological position.”
“True to his basic thought, ontological solipsism, the content and goal of the free act are meaningful and explicable only from the point of view of the subject.”
“What is the legitimate factor in Sartre? Without question, the emphasis on the individual’s decision, whose importance was undervalued alike by bourgeois determinism and by vulgar Marxism. All social activity is made up of the actions of individuals, and no matter how decisive the economic basis may be in these decisions, its effects are felt only “in the long run,” as Engels so often stresses.”
“This means that there is always a concrete area of free choice for the individual, which does not conflict with the feet that history has its general and necessary trends of development. The mere existence of political parties proves the reality of this area. The main directions of development can be foreseen; but, as Engels stressed, it would be idle pedantry to try to foretell from the laws of evolution whether in a given case Peter or Paul will individually decide this way or that, vote for this party or the other, and so forth.”
“The necessity of evolution is always effected by means of internal and external contingencies.”
“Even in the case of individuals he divorces decision situations from the past. He denies any genuine connection of the individual with society. He construes the individual’s world as completely different from that of his fellow men. The notion of freedom thus obtained is fatalistic and strained in a mechanical way; it thus loses all meaning.”
“Here again the formal-logical overstraining of a relative truth-factor leads to the theoretical and practical annihilation of the concept in question. For so rigid a formulation of responsibility is identical with complete irresponsibility.”
“A master of the “psychology of depths,” Dostoevsky, often said that extreme rigid forcing of moral principles and moral decisions generally has no influence on men’s actions. They sweep overhead, and the men who act on them have weaker moral guidance than would be the case if they had no principles at all. In the shadow of the rigorous pitiless feeling of responsibility, extending to the point of suicide, it is easy to commit one villainy after another with frivolous cynicism.”
“Just as the sublime is but a step from the ridiculous, so a certain kind of moral sublimity is only a step from frivolity and cynicism.”
“It was necessary for us to elaborate thus sharply on the bankruptcy of the Sartrean concept of freedom because this is precisely the key to the widespread effectiveness of the doctrine in certain circles. Such an abstract, forced, totally vacuous and irrationalized conception of freedom and responsibility, the haughty scorn for social viewpoints and public life used to defend the ontological integrity of the individual – all adequately rounds out the myth of nothingness, especially for the requirements of snobs: for they must be particularly impressed with the mixture of cruelly strict principle with cynical looseness of action and moral nihilism.”
“But in addition this conception of freedom gives a certain section of intellectuals, always inclined toward extreme individualism, an ideological support and justification for refusing the unfolding and building of democracy. There have been writers who, calling themselves democrats, under took to defend the rights of the black market and of the sabotaging and swindling capitalist, all in the name of individual freedom, and who carried the principle so far that room is found for the freedom of reaction and fascism; responsibility has been the slogan in whose name the attempt was first made to block the registration of the new owners’ land and later to call for their return. Sartre’s abstract and strained conception of freedom and responsibility was just what these forces could use.”
“But large-scale fashions pay little heed to the internal intentions of their authors.”
“This is one more reason for us to point out that the acquisition of existentialism is no Promethean deed, no theft of celestial fire, but rather the commonplace action of using the lighted cigarette of a chance passer-by to light one’s own.”
“This is no accident, but follows from the very nature of the phenomenological method and from the ontology which grows out of it. The method is far from being as original as its apostles would like to believe. For, no matter how arbitrary the transition may be from “bracketed” reality to allegedly genuine objective reality, the mere possibility of the transition still has its philosophical roots, though this point never is consciously formulated by the ontologists.”
“This basis is essentially that of the dominant theory of knowledge in the nineteenth century; namely, the Kantian. Kant’s clear formulation had the cogency worthy of a serious philosopher: existence does not signify enrichment of the content of objectivity, and hence not formal enrichment either; the content of the thought-of dollar is exactly the same as that of the real dollar. The existence of the object means neither novelty nor enrichment, whether with respect to content or to structure of the concept. Clearly, therefore, when the ontologists “bracket” the thought-of object and then clear the “brackets,” they tacitly assume this Kantian conception.”
“The notion appears quite obvious; the only thing wrong with it is that it is not true. The Kantian idealism unconsciously borrowed from mechanical materialism the identity of the structure and content of the thought-of and the actual object. The real dialectic of objective reality, however, shows at every step that existence enriches the thought-of object with elements which are conceptually new with respect to content and structure.”
“This consequence follows not only from the virtual infinity of every actual object, as a result of which the most complete thought is only an approximation, i.e. the object of ontology is even in principle richer in content and therefore of richer, more complicated structure than the phenomenological object of mere consciousness.”
“And this is a consequence as well of the extensionally and intensionally infinite Verflochtenheit (interrelatedness) of real objects, in which the reciprocal action of their relations changes the objects’ functions and then reacts on their objectivity.”
“In this context mere existence, the brute fact, becomes under certain circumstances one of the characters and changes the concept of objectivity, with respect to content and structure.”
“Let us consider the theory of money, to continue with Kant’s example. So long as we speak of money as a medium of circulation, we might still assume that thought-of money is identical with real money (although we should be wrong even here). But the very concept of money as a medium of payment implies existence; there is present in this case a conceptual difference between the thought-of dollar and the real one, a difference which constitutes a new category. Only the actual dollar, in one’s possession, can be a means of payment. Money in itself is not enough; we must have it too.”
“The isolating intuition of the isolated individual – in this connection it is immaterial whether his interest is directed toward the object, fixed in its rigidity, or toward the changefulness of thought – lifts every object out of the complex and living fabric of its existence, functions, relations, interactions, etc., dissolving it out of the real, living, moving totality. The “original achievement” of phenomenology and ontology in this field consists merely in the fact that it dogmatically identifies reality with the objectivity it has thus obtained. For them, objectivity and objective reality mean one and the same thing.”