Existentialism as a Philosophy

EXISTENTIALISM AS A PHILOSOPHY IH. M. Estall Does existentialism exist? In 1904 William James chose to ask the question does consciousness exist? and to offer a negative answer. On the face of it, James acknowledged , his proposed position seemed absurd, though he found plenty of writers who seemed to him to he on the point of abandoning the notion of consciousness altogether; however they were not quite daring enough in their negations. (One citation is worth recalling now-1959in the year of G. E. Moore's death: "The moment we try to fix our attention upon consciousness and to see what, distinctly, it is, it seems to vanish. It seems as if we had before us a mere emptiness." So G. E. Moore in 1903. One might he disposed to detect here an anticipation of Sartre. But Moore goes on at once to dispel this mere seeming: " ... it can be distingnished, if we look attentively enough, and know that there is something to look for."') James's point was that consciousness is not something to look for, but to look with. It is, if we may continue the one-sided visual metaphor for the moment, a looking through at. "Let me explain," he wrote, "that I mean only to deny that the word stands for an eutity, but to insist most emphatically that it does stand for a function."2 A comparable orientation suggests itself here by way of surmounting the initial hazards of definition. Collins' is cautious about defining existentialism, but is prepared to identify half a dozen existentialists, to listen to what they have to say, and then to reach inductively some conclusions about recurring existentialist themes. It is perhaps a minor fault in this procedure that, of those so called, few have themselves chosen the designation and several have explicitly rejected it. A more serious fault is that the inductive procedure breaks down if the observed differences outweigh the discovered resemblances. And this is what happens. At any rate, the writers themselves are much more disposed to stress their differences than their agreements. Vol. XXIX, No.3. April. 1960 298 H. M. ESTALL Kaufmann,' in the very act of editing an anthology of Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, tells us that existentialism is not a philosophy, but a label for several widely different revolts against traditional philosophy : It is not a school of thought nor reducible to any set of tenets.... The refusal to belong to any school of thought, the repudiation of the adequacy of any body of beliefs whatever, and especially of systems, and a marked dissatisfaction with traditional philosophy as superficial, academic, and re· mote from life-that is the heart of existentialism. [It] is a timeless sensibility that can be discerned here and there in the past; but it is only in recent times that it has hardened into a sustained protest and pre-occupation. This is the estimate of an editor who confesses that existentialism is completely uncongenial to him, but who nonetheless puts together a very readable volume illustrative of such "existentialist" motifs as the absurdity of man's condition, "the quest for authentic existence, the scorn of the inauthentic, ... death, and the experience of time which brings us nearer death.'" Thus existentialism, unrecognizable as a philosophy, is yet identified thematicaliy, as a timeless sensibility to certain features of the human situation. This procedure allows the editor a rather free hand in the selection of existentialist authors: existentialist authors dwell on certain themes; these themes have been brilliantly or movingly explored by Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, Rilke, Kafka, Camus. Ergo, let them be counted as existentialists. Thus Dostoyevsky strikes the opening notes from underground; the finale is taken from Camus' Myth of Sisyphus. Kaufmann's "timeless sensibility" in existentialist writers must itself be understood within the context of history. It generates a response conditioned by the times, whether in the form of timely protest, or, as Nietzsche put it, in thoughts ill-fitting to the times. Thus Kierkegaard's dearest enemy is Hegel. His animus against the Hegelian system is evident and explicit, and yet the method is Hegelian. Kierkegaard's "psychological experiments" would nowadays be better labelled as phenomenological studies-of conscience...