Existentialism and Existence

THE THOMIST A SPECULATIVE QUARTERLY REVIEW OF THEOLOGY AND PHILOSOPHY EmToRs: THE DoMINICAN FATHERS oF THE PRoVINCE oF ST. JosEPH Publishers: The Thomist Press, Washington 17, D. C. VoL. XI APRIL, 1948 No.~ EXISTENTIALISM AND EXISTENCE I. AN HISTORICAL FRAMEWORK MODERN man, in the recent words of Max Picard/ is a schizoid personality. The symptoms of his splitthe war of rationalism with religion, science with philosophy , the individual with the social, one economic class with another-all are familiar themes for historians and philosophers alike, from Hegel and Spengler to Sorokin and Northrop, from Gilson and Dawson to Toynbee and de Reynauld. Contemporary philosophers-typified by Russell, the logician, and Nagel, the naturalist-end, when their strokes are followed through, in a method without matter. The existentialists, working up from experience to reason rather than, like scientific method, from reason to experience, never disengage a method for their content. Being and truth, on the one hand, are so far separated that they are no longer convertible; and on the other hand, they are so tightly united that they cannot 1 Cf. Hitler in Ourselves, New York, 1947. 141 142 VINCENT EDWARD SMITH be distinguished. One group lays its whole weight on essence, ignoring existence; the other never gets beyond existence. That reality is a union of essence and existence-being is that which is-fonns a balance between the extremes. But such a realism, as both theory and practice today bear witness, is largely ignored. In a climate like that in America where the empirical method is still dominant and where any other approach is regarded as a " failure of nerve," 2 Descartes and Kant are seen almost exclusively in the light of their formalism. But these two men did much more than point the way to what Bergson labelled "scientism." They are also forbears of existentialism. The split in man's present approach to existence, for whatever philosophical factors that aggravated it, is owed to them. Each is a kind of fork in the road, inviting the traveller to go two ways but taking him, at any rate, off the highway. Men like Hook and Northrop still holding the torch of the Enlightenment are appealing for more science to save man, more method to cure madness. But in the words of Sartre, "We are travellers, and we have lost our way." 3 Descartes and Kant, the essentialists , are as far from Descartes and Kant, the existentialists, as the poles to which their forking branches lead. Scientism and existentialism are not new directions but shnply new distances on old roads. The discursive tendencies of Descartes and Kant are too well known to bear repetition. Scientism does not hesitate to claim them as leading spirits. Descartes, describing a world of original-though in his case created--chaos out of which order was made,4 stands like the contemporary physicist, accepting nothing but what he can lead by his own hand from indeterminism , chaos, nothingness, into being. Descartes' use of deduction was made possible by his discovery of cogito, ergo •cr. his essay in Naturalism and the Human Spirit (ed. Y. Krikorian), New York, 1944, pp. 40 ff. • No Exit and the Flies, New York, 1947, p. 65. • Oeuvrea (ed. Adam and Tannery), Paris, 1897-1918, v. 6, pp. 45 ff. EXISTENTIALISM AND EXISTENCE 148 sum, " the first principle that I was seeking." 1 His love for mathematics, freshly primed by subsequent developments in the problem of infinity, resulted finally in the substitution of a mathesis universalis for a logic that begins inductively. The Porphyrian tree was no longer vertical, sweeping man's thought through a hierarchy. It was levelled like firewood, dead. Descartes wrote a discourse on method, as though method could be divorced from matter. Kant aimed to isolate for study die reine Vernunft, reason purified of content. Maritain's reference to the " delusive purism " 6 of the logical positivists applies alike to Descartes and Kant. Kant stressed the categorical , the architectonic, the regulative, the systematic, and other such methodological, discursive, formal considerations. Randall's reference to Thomism as an "undynamic formalism " 7 applies in reality to Kant and the scientism which he abetted, including naturally Randall's own approach...