The Jewish American Novel

Chapter Four. The US-American Philosophical System and French Existentialism

63 Chapter Four The US-American Philosophical System and French Existentialism As the Holocaust repertoreme moved to the center of the political system and radical theology took the theological system by storm, the US-American philosophical system was undergoing a comparable reorganization by the penetration of French existentialism to the core of its institutions. In fact, the dynamics within the two former subsystems explain the penetration of the French existentialist repertoire into the latter subsystem and its popularity with Jewish American intellectuals. This mechanism illustrates both Even-Zohar’s and Swidler’s assertion that the success of any speci fic ideology—in casu existentialism, seen as a “highly organized meaning system” (Swidler 278)—depends on the historical circumstances that accompany the struggle for dominance; the historical circumstances “determine which [ideologies] take root and thrive, and which wither and die” (Swidler 280; Even-Zohar, Polysystem 88). As such, the historical circumstances of the Holocaust and radical theology, i.e., events taking place in the adjacent systems, account for the increasing popularity of French existentialism in various other systems—most conspicuously in US-American philosophy and literature. Bourdieu warns, however, against gratuitous assumptions of influence and transfer between adjacent subsystems based on a mere temporal coincidence of specific phenomena (239). Hence, an important question to consider at this point is whether one can actually perceive a connection between the French existentialist repertoire on the one hand, and the Holocaust and radical theology on the other hand. The connection between radical theology and French existentialism is fairly obvious in that the proponents of both frames of reference regard the death of God as their basic tenet. The present treatment of the philosophical system after the discussion of the theological system does not, however, imply a linear development or a temporal sequence. Clearly, French existentialism did not simply become popular in the US after and owing to the rise of radical theology. Recall that relations between systems tend to be mutual; that there tends to be “a mutual give and take” (Even-Zohar , Polysystem 23). As pointed out in the previous chapter, French existentialism became the basis of radical theological thinking, while the impact of radical theology 64 Chapter Four in the religious system—and its incorporation of the existentialist repertoire—in turn fueled the popularity and centrality of French existentialism in academic and media discourses during the 1960s (see, for instance, the acknowledged influence on Altizer and Hamilton 16, 40, 98, etc.; all of Rubenstein, After Auschwitz; and even Buber, Eclipse 66–71, as well as the rejections of radical theology, based on an explicit rejection of French existentialism: Maybaum 109; Lelyveld 88–89; Berkovits 71). At that point, it becomes virtually impossible—and irrelevant—to determine which in- fluenced which: Did radical theology originate because of the theologians’familiarity with French existentialism, or did these theologians, quite conversely, embrace existentialism because of their fundamental belief in the death of God (which they found lapidarily expressed in Sartre’s and Camus’s writings)? The second question concerns the relation between the Holocaust and French existentialism. As is commonly known, the philosophical insights of the two major representatives of French existentialism in the US—Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus—were chiefly formed under the German occupation during the Second World War (when Sartre wrote his magnum opus, L’Etre et le néant). Both authors opposed the German oppressor by joining the French resistance—Camus became the editor of the underground journal Combat and Sartre ended up a prisoner of war in 1940. As a result, French existentialism is concerned chiefly with moral choice and human responsibility in extreme (specifically wartime) situations—to the extent that it has unjustly been discarded as a mere “intellectual byproduct of the war” (Fulton 28). Precisely these concerns (which led to the existentialists’ rejection of a beneficent God) and the emphasis on human incarceration within an absurd universe became congenial to those who had survived the German death camps. Walter Kaufman notes incisively that “the most important way in which the Nazi regime promoted existentialism and the literature associated with it was not by compelling many people to emigrate but rather by killing so many more. As fear and trembling, dread and despair, and the vivid anticipation of one’s own death ceased to be primarily literary experiences and, like the absurd visions of Kafka, turned into the stuff of everyday life, the originally untimely Kafka and Kierkegaard became popular...