Existentialism and Existence [Second Installment]

EXISTENTIALISM AND EXISTENCE [Second Installment] SoME CRITICAL REMARKS The natural impulse of a Thomist, challenged by the innumerable analyses which the existentialists plead, is to oppose their conclusions point for point by force of that appeal to experience on which a realistic philosophy should rest. Such a course seems normal and natural; there was a time in the history of thought when it was effective. But existentialism, despite its protests against abstract dialectics, is a closed system, like psychoanalysis and scientism in general. Any overture of traditional principles, of examples from experience, and of the power of man's intellectual nature is greeted with the reproach that it is the fruit of a false philosophy which has not explored its own roots. Thomism, Jaspers 285 like Nicolai Hartmann 286 fmds is mere systemism. The principle of sufficient reason, Heidegger argues, is premised on a view of being that cannot define reason and sufficiency. Metaphysics is considered an experience and thus powerless to account for experience. Far from beginning with experience, what the existentialists wish to do is to deduce it: ex nihilo omne ens qua ens fit.281 Existentialism builds its own system from the primitive experience of the naught. It describes the world as though it were nothing but the nothing that is man, projecting his structures of time and space from his own self in very much the manner of the Kantian a priori categories. Thus de Waelhens writes that Heidegger's essential doctrine is: "the structure of human existence determines and contains all the questions and all the answers which man validly can pose or answer. Beyond this it is impossible to go." 288 The same extreme """ DP, pp. 44-45. ••• Der philoaophische Gedanke und seine Geachichte, Berlin, 1986. 88' WM, p. 26. ••• Op. cit., p. 272. ~97 298 VINCENT EDWARD SMITH Kantianism appears in Jaspers' notion that to think is to struggle and in Sartre's account of man as fighting to define his essence. From these converging views, each of the existentialists has constructed a system as arbitrary as the system which he belittles. Such a system a realist cannot enter. He is blocked at the threshold. First principles, first facts, and first conditions are in question in the existentialist system and only when they are successfully defended does the door swing open or, rather, rot away. The realists today are in very much the position of Aristotle in the face of the ancient sophists. Hence their arguments must remain at the threshold of philosophy by showing that the existentialists deny the very experience on which they operate. Discussion of the finer points, philosophical and theological-for the existentialists raise theological issues-must await the solution of the more general problems. Cast in such a general form, some counter-arguments of existentialism are here suggested with a minimum expression, when occasion warrants, of the positive solutions to their pro"blems and with a concluding section on the meaning of existentialism for the typical philosophical pattern in contemporary America. What there is of positive value in existentialism is difficult to say. If there is anything in it that has not been said before, it is probably in the form of material for aesthetics and empirical psychology 289 rather than for a realistic philosophy. But no one could come, unmoved, through its critique of systemism, Hegelian (and this could include Marxism) and scientistic. This searching attack is especially apparent in Kierkegaard and Jaspers. Kierkegaard did not, of course, foresee the great interest in history that, greatly abetted by Hegel, was to sweep western scholarship in the form of positivism, evolutionary biology, paleontology, ethnology, and other such inductive descriptions. oso For a comprehensive study of anguish, cf., Boutonier, J., L'Angoisse, Paris, 1945. It could be concluded that anguish is psychopathic more than normal, associated with that feeling of inadequacy which, broadly, is the definition of psychoneuroses. EXISTENTIALISM AND EXISTENCE 299 He could not naturally have forecast the French sociologism of Durkheim and Levy-Bruehl, who preached and practiced the method that research into history and pre-history, from primitive societies on downward, is the only way of studying man, the social being. Nor did he personally anticipate...