Boorstin - Pensadores

SERIES NUMBER TWO
WHAT IS
EXISTENTIALISM?
BY WILLIAM BARRETT
50 CENTS
WILLIAM BARRETT
WHAT IS
EXISTENTIALISM?
SERIES NUMBER TWO

COP Y RIG H T · I 94 7 BY PAR TI SAN REV lEW. P R I N TED I NTH E U. S. A.
We have ambiguous relations to the nineteenth century. For at
least two decades~ maybe more~ we have felt ourselves from time to
time~ and more or less consciously~ in revolt against it. But the revolt
is a little like that of a rebellious son against his father: the more con-
centrated and sharp his <opposition the more he begins to discover in
himself possible resemblances to the parent-his voice~ his gestures~
features that stare back at him from the mirror-all of which makes
him more deeply uneasy~ and only serves to sharpen the fury of his
rebellion. For~ after all~ what is his revolt for except to be himself: to
have a mind of his own.
Indeed~ that centur'y has so many aspects that all we are~ and have~
seems to be found there-at least in germ. It contains positivism~· but
shortly before he publishes his Course in Positive Philosophy, August
Comte spends a year in an insane asylum. Curious contrast of light aT?d
shadow! The century contains Macaulay~ very much at ease in Sion~
prophet of liberal enlightenment and progress~· and in 1851 London
exults in what seems almost the architectural embodiment of his voice:
the Crystal Palace of the In ternational Exposition. But far away i'n
Russia this Crystal Palace evokes a strange comment., and a stranger
commentator: Dostoevsky's Underground Man.
He seems to haunt that century. He is the bad breath that one sniffs
behind the smile and clear even teeth-a little like that odor of death
that Celin e (our twentieth-century incarnation of the Underground Man)
smelled from the mouths of the poor. But perhaps the Underground Man
has as much to teach us as the Crystal Palace. A wise French critic (who
is not an Existentialist, beyond being a disciple of M ontaigne) has said:
"Man has that in him which sometimes rejects the sun or his neighbors,
and vomits out the State, nature, all logic and common sense." The
Underground Man .does not miss any of these rejections. lIe vomits
up the State:
New economic Telations will be established, worked out with mathematical

exactitude, so that every possible question will vanish. Then the "Palace
of Crystal" will be built. Of course there is no guaranteeing that it will
not be frightfully dull then, but on the other hand everything will be
6 WHAT IS EXISTENTIALISM?
frightfully rational. 0/ course boredom may lead you to anything. It

is boredom sets one to sticking pins into people.
He vomits up nature and reason:
But what do I care for the laws 0/ nature and arithmetic, when, for
some reason, I dislike those laws and the fact that twice two makes
four?
Indeed, he is capable of vomiting up everything the nineteenth century

was able, for a while, to believe i'n.
Here a scandal has broken out, we can no longer hide it, there are
outcries and a great clatter in the market place. When we look back
on it now, the whole century was struggling to exorcise this unpleasant
shade. ((I can enclose him in the System," says Hegel. HLet him make
the religious leap with me and he will be saved" (Kierkega'lrd). Or:
HWe must overcome and subdue this Nihilist, but we have first to live
through his experience to the end" (Nietzsche). Or a clipped and cooler
English voice: HHe is no gentleman" (Macaulay). And so on and SD
forth.
Now I have no new proposal as to what is to be done with this
Underground Man. Perhaps he is not demanding a new truth at all,
but only that truth should take some notice of his own concrete existence,
with its aching liver, its humiliations and resentments. I only wish to
plant him here because he sets a tone, because it is convenient to have
him here for later reference--as one might post an unpleasant beg-
gar, a poor relation of the family, at the doorway, ready to be called
in when one has to make a point very emphatically to the family inside.
I. WHO IS IIEXISTENTIAL II ?
A FEW YEARS AGO~ AFTER THE LIBERATING ARMIES SWEPT INTO PARIS
and the veil separating France from us was lifted, so that we could find
out at last what the French had been doing culturally during the dark
years of the war, a curious phenomenon took place in New York-so
closely bound together is the modern world. People began speaking of
philosophical matters in the most unexpected places. One might almost
have believed-for a moment-that in America people think. It was a
t-riumph for French culture to make 57th Street talk philosophy. Existen-
tial philosophy had acquired the voice of French eloquence, and it was
something to be assimilated along with French painting, millinery, and
literature, endowed with the charms of Gallic taste and finesse.
We have no objection at all to the fact that 57th Street (or any
other street, for that matter) should begin to talk philosophy. Indeed,
one of the signs of the decay of modern academic philosophy has been
its inability to create more than a whisper outside its own class rooms,
much less go out into the streets. Nevertheless the present vogue of
French Existentialism does create a certain embarrassment in some of
us, for like all fashions this too often seeks the adventitious, the easy
and sensational, obscuring the long and serious past required to produce
these words that are now thrown around like slogans. We become a
little embarrassed at the word "existential" altogether-though it had
known a very common and widespread use in modern philosophy before
the works of Sartre became fashionable prope.rty. Not to mention the
fact that there are a good many people who naturally suspect a phi-
losophy that is able to make the pages of the woman's fashion magazines.
But despite some accompanying aberrations, the present French
movement is serious, it is genuinely at work on a subject matter, and
it seeks to discover and assimilate something of its tradition. The im-
mediate line of descent of this tradition may be traced quite simply.
Existentialism, mOIre or less in its present form, was produced in Germany
after the First World War by two professors of philosophy, Karl Jaspers
and Martin Heidegger. Their direct spiritual ancestor was a strange,
captivating, and quite unclassifiable Dane, Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55),
most of whose important writings appeared in the 1840's. Kierkegaard
himself has left us a charming account of the incident that launched him
on his philosophical career, and for our present historical sketch it will
do as a point of beginning. While he sat at the cafe in the Fredericksberg
Garden in Copenhagen one afternoon, smoking a cigar, as was his habit,
and turning over a great many things in his mind, Kierkegaard reflected
that he had not really begun any career for himself, while a good many
of his friends were already making names for themselves, getting set up
in business or getting published, explaining everything in the philosophic
mode of Hegel, which was then the reigning fashion. The cigar burned
down, he lit another, the train of reflection held him. It occurred to
him then that since everyone was engaged everywhere in making things
easy, perhaps someone was needed to make things hard again, and that
this too might be a career and a destiny-to go in search of difficulties,
like a new Socrates. As for these difficulties, he did not have to go very
far to find them: there was, for example, his own concrete existence,
with all its passion and anxieties, its painful choices, which involved
always a pathos of renunciation of which the Hegelian philosophy
seemed to take no account. So Kierkegaard was launched upon his
career, and the rest of his life was consumed in the continuous deed
of existential thinking. Eventually, his writings were translated into
German around the turn of the century, but they did not find their
really fertile soil until the period following 1918, when they were taken
up systematically by Jaspers and Heidegger. In France, the impact of
Kierkegaard was not experienced until the thirties. About that time.
Heidegger too was translated into. French and met a favorable reception
from the young intellectuals nauseated by French bourgeois civilization
on the eve of Munich. But it required another postwar climate-World
War II, this time-for Existentialism to take on the dimensions almost
of a popular movement, whose high priest became the energetic Jean-
Paul Sartre. We travel a long road from Frederiksberg Garden, Copen-
hagen, to 57th Street, New York. Strange things can happen when one
lights a cigar.
Unfortunately for any such simple outline, history is never a matter

of such direct filiations. We hardly trace a branch by following the
single outline itself without reference to the trunk from which it springs
and the other branches that bend it with them as they struggle together
toward the same sunlight. Every idea comes into being at its own par~
ticular time, with all the pressures of this time upon it, and the less
superficial it is the deeper its co.rrespondences with the other ideas
germinating in the same period. So we look beyond the many schools to
WILLIAM BARRETT 9
the single tendency that unites them like so many isolated points on a
curve; the tendency breaks down into issues, and these issues return us
always to men, bound together in a particular historical epoch) facing
the same world with the urgency of the same problems. Existentialism
could be examined as just another philosophic school, one among man¥;
but its full significance is disclosed only when we see it as a particular
offshoot of a much broader and more complex existential tendency
within modern philosophy as a whole.
I t requires only a rapid glance over the philosophy of the last
hundred years to discover in its development a remarkable enlargement
of content, a progressive orientation toward the immediate and qualita-
tive, the existent and factual-"concreteness and adequacy," to use
Whitehead's pregnant words. The mention of Whitehead places us im-
mediately within a circle of different names and influences. William
James with his radical pluralism at the turn of the century, Bergson with
his intuition, Whitehead with his doctrine of feeling-all bear witness
to the same general direction. James, in turn, brings to mind John
Dewey, and we recall that Dewey stood in the philosophic pillory for
some of his earlier pragmatic writings while charges of "antirationalist"
were hurled at him. Dewey had insisted on an existential context of
thought, and some philosophers had cried out, scandalized, as if a finger
had been pointed at their nakedness. Nietzsche. had already pointed a
more shocking and scandalizing finger at this philosophic nakedness.
(And he had only the dream, the daring guess, of psychoanalysis, where
we have now the rudiments of a science, so that we may be tempted
shortly to a more systematic rudeness than his.) Thus, letting our circle
widen, we pass from name to name, where the possibility of direct
influence, as a simple linear filiation, is no longer in question. What we
are present at is no longer a matter of schools, or isolated figures extract-
ing explicit nuggets of "influence" from one another, but the whole
Western mind-Europe and America-bending before a new climate
of opinion; as the biologist portrays a whole species, scattered in space
and without contact, moving along the same paths of adaptation before
a new ,geological upheaval. We could multiply correlations in this direc-
tion, but perhaps none lends more striking confirmation to our historical
grouping than the comparison of Dewey with Wilhelm Dilthey: following
an altogether different voyage of discovery, Dilthey came into sight of
the same new-found land-the great intuition that human thinking,
philosophy included, arises within the context of a definite cultural
existence, which at once sets philosophy its problems and defines its
ultimate horizons. What had seemed a single branch has already broken
out into a cluster, and we have now to thread our way through this
greater density in search of the line of development in relation to which
each of these philosophic shoots has its own grade of relevance.
The past is never given as finished and fixed, we are remaking it
at every moment, and nowhere more than in that peculiarly fluent and
plastic subject matter: the history of ideas. The order we impose upon
the history of thought is modified by the entrance of new elements
within that order. The names of Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Jaspers,
are just beginning to be known in America. Once we admit these figures
within our perspective on modern thought, this perspective itself be-
comes altered, and we see other issues at work below the surface of that
past whose main lines had been taken as fixed and given. When William
James objected to Hegel's universe on the ground that it reJ;Dinded him
of a seaside boarding house-a world without privacy, in which he felt
faintly suffocated-he was making the kind of personal and passionate
argument that we find everywhere in the pages of Kierkegaard. Only
the convinced Hegelian might object that this is a personal remark and
not a philosophic argument at all. James's point may be that there
is no very great difference after all-that there can be no real separation
between himself as man and himself as thinker, so that he could not, as
philosopher, accept any elaborate view of the universe which he could
not live with as a concrete existent being. Having read Kierkegaard,
we can now see more clearly what was at issue in James's rejection of
idealism. What James had seen with his psychologist's eye, delicately
attentive to the variety and flux of experience, Kierkegaard had carried
further toward explicitness as a philosophic principle. Where do we find
this principle?
Walking around our subject for the mon;tent, taking its measure
from the outside like the invader surveying the city into which he would
penetrate, we may begin from what is an external, but not therefore
superficial, aspect: the language and style of this philosophy. Certainly,
there is something historically remarkable in the way this philosophy
is being written. Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, both literary geniuses, adopt
the decision to communicate their thought indirectly, by fragments and
aphorisms, and in both the philosophic expression hovers always on the
edge of lyricism. Literary eloquence is never completely absent from the
pages of James or Bergson, and often moves into the high gear of rhap-
sody. Whitehead fabricates a tremendous and orotund rhetoric, which
is necessary more for expressive than analytic purposes. Heidegger de-
velops a language of Gothic heaviness, lumbering under its weight of
jargon and coinage, but in his use of it he often attains an extraordinary
WILLIAM BARRETT II
degree of expressiveness. Even Dewey, who would seem to be without

literary pretensions altogether, nevertheless produces, in a book like
Experie~ce and Nature J a curious linguistic phenomenon: a language
amorphous, halting, groping-as if he were trying to convince us of
pragmatism by presenting us his thought in the very process of its
making. When we come to the present Existentialist school in France,
we find the frontiers between philosophy and literature at the point of
disappearing altogether: the nature of human existence would seem to
be such that it compels philosophers to write novels, plays, and literary
criticism.
One might at first be suspicious, and even not pass beyond the sus-
picion, that we have here only a fundamental confusion of genres. But
the miscegenation of literary genres in the past has often brought forth
a really new kind of expression and even new kinds of consciousness; and
philosophy itself has performed many of its historical services, whether
or not the eventual specialization of the human mind will dispense with
these, as a rather uncertain hybrid of poetry and science. At some levels
of experience the distinction between the expressive and analytic uses
of language may break down or become unusable. We do not know,
but in any case some modern philosophers have become so possessed
by the vision of the existent in its concreteness and immediacy, that this
has got into their language, which struggles to present the reality that
they seek to understand. This quality of language immediately marks
off this tendency from another that is equally characteristic of modern
philosophy. What is now called analytic philosophy has proceeded in
the opposite direction, toward greater abstractness, a purification and
precision of language, formalism, symbolic language. The result is that
philosophers in one group have largely ceased to understand those in
the other. Philosophy seems well on its way toward the schizophrenic
split that, in other forms and on other levels, has become the common
experience of our culture. The dangers of this split, which are grave for
both sides, we need not go into here; we point to it only in order to
demarcate the broader existential tendency against the contrasting back-
ground of another large-scale modern movement. And we have only to
turn our attention to the language in which the philosopher of the eight-
eenth century expressed himself to see how the style and expression of
these moderns also defines them against the background of the past.
When a literary note creeps into a philosopher like Kant, it is only by
way of an occasional and extraneous flourish or metaphor, by which,
paying his respects to the eighteenth-century humanities, he punctuates
the straightforward bald presentation of his argument.
All this adds up to the fact that we may now isolate a single ten-
dency of philosophy during the last hundred years and place it against
the background of the whole of Western philosophy, taken a s a unit,
fron1 Descartes to Kant. The first, the immediately obvious characteristic
of this tendency, is that through it philosophy has experienced an
extraordinary widening and enrichment of data. From D escartes to
Kant, man was taken fundan1entally as a perceiving-thinki~g animal, a
mechanical body plus a conscious soul. This was the traditional inheri-
tance from the Greeks, who had defined man as essentially the rational
animal, but a tradition now runninK thin, having lost all its original
overtones from Greek religion, poetry, and society. Other regions of
man's being fall within the experience of the Christian religion, but in
this period philosophy separates itself from positive religion. In the seven-
teenth century this rational soul falls within the framework of a universe
whose basic features are expressed by the physical notions of Newton.
The fundamental key to the human situation becomes the relation of
the rational soul to this inertly material universe: man becomes the
epistemological animal. But bit by bit the developments of history com-
plicate this simple picture: new sources of information, new regions
of experience and feeling, enrich and complicate the philosopher's view
of the human situation. Reason itself can no longer be looked upon as
the simple faculty of a soul or mind; viewed concretely, it shows itself
as a complicated structure evolved by culture and history, as, in the
sphere of morals, the complexity of the superego takes the place of the
older simple "moral sense." Now, up to a certain point the enrichment
of data takes place within the old framework, each detail filling in an
empty space on a canvas that is completely sketched out; but a threshold
is crossed, the accumulation of detail suddenly effects a transformation of
the whole, and a new form either appears or must be sought. The radical
extension of data demands a new point of view for generalization. We
come back to our question: Is there some new principle grasped here,
some new point of departure for thought?
I think we may baptize it as The Search for the Concrete. vVe find
this principle become most explicit precisely .in the two philosophers
who propose the most consciously revolutionary break with the whole
philosophic tradition: Whitehead and Heidegger. Whitehead condemns
two thousand years of philosophy (after Aristotle) for its mistaken
notion of the concrete-for its "fallacy of misplaced concreteness."
Heidegger remarks just as drastically: "Only by accomplishing the de-
struction of the ontological tradition do we obtain for the question of
Being its true concreteness." Audacious words! We have abundant
WILLIAM BARRETT 13
experience of the way tradition sneaks back to destroy its destroyers,

but at least these men have formulated the principle on which they
propose a revolutionary break, and it is worth our while to journey a
little further into their uncharted land.
Where, how, does this movement begin? What insights, what qu es-
tions, first launch it into the world? We have only succeeded so far in
bringing this very complex tendency into momentary relief against the
welter and fluidity of the schools of the past century; we have yet to
define it as a really definite historical unit, with a more or less clearly
marked point of inception, initial direction, and subsequent progress.
The history of philosophy, when it is written at all, is written, not. as a
succession of opinions, but as a dialogue continuing in time. We have
always taken this truth literally, and so we shall risk placing these two
philosophies, of Whitehead and Heidegger, in a momentary exchange
of dialectic. True, their philosophies develop in such radically different
directions that they seem to agree only on the single point of orientation
and the destructive role it is to play in relation to the whole philosophic
tradition. But dialectic requires the tension of contrariety, and perhaps
this dialogue, unfolding, will generate the dialectical theme that supplies
the inner form of this historical movement. As an excuse for the liberty
of making two other men speak for us, we might plead-with tongue
very much in" cheek, of course-the example of Aristotle's treatment
of the pre-Socratic philosophers. He has often been accused of mis-
representation because he made them speak for him, but probably he
would have retorted that what he was really interested in was exploring
his own thought. This is what is known as the ~xistential category of
appropriation.
AN IMAGINARY CONVERSATION
Whitehead: The occasion seems to demand something of a ritual.
We are met to consummate the death of Descartes. I t has taken him
three centuries to die, and I do not think he is altogether dispatched yet.
You, as the expert on death, ought to know what ritual is appropriate.
Heidegger: We ought to be sure, first, that we are really consum-
mating the same death.
W: You mean, what do I wish to see enterred? Very simply, the
Cartesian dualism, which splits nature apart into the two incommensur-
able domains of matter and mind. But perhaps that does not tell the
whole story. It begins with the "fallacy of misplaced "concreteness."
H: The fallacy of what?
W: Misplaced concreteness. It is the fallacy of taking the abstract
as concrete. Or, more precisely, of overlooking the degree of abstraction

that may be involved in taking certain matters of fact as concrete. It is
allied with another habit of thought, which I have baptized as "the
fallacy of simple location."
H: Another one!
W: Well, the idea of this is already ip Bergson. A body is present
wherever it exercises an effect. To locate a body at a given point in
space is a very complicated procedure, in the course of which the selected
purposes and the degree of abstraction involved usually get forgotten.
H: I have expressed something like that in my notion of hu-
man transcendence. Human existence, immediately and as such, is in
the world. A man's existence is not something that goes on inside his
skin. He is always beyond himself.
W: Capital. Perhaps we shall even understand each other, ,who
knows? But let us come back to our burial ritual. Now, Descartes did
not invent this misplaced concreteness. Traditional philosophy, under the
drug of Aristotle, had its doctrine of substance, according to which
stones, trees, and tables were the ultimately concrete things in the world.
Descartes simply carried this pernicious habit to its final impasse: he
proceeded to isolate matter at the one pole of nature, and mind at the
other. What he called matter was an abstract stuff in an abstract
Euclidean space, and this highly abstract entity he took as an ultimate
concrete, a substance. Consciousness did not fare any better at his hands:
isolating a very rarefied self-consciousness, he left out of account all the
concrete cluster of feelings, the unfailing "withness" of the body, which
are ingredients in every conscious state. Naturally, after he had split
nature into these two poles, he was 'bound to face the vexing question
of how they could even be related to each other. This is the skeleton he
leaves in the closet of modern philosophy. 1t leads to Hume's skepticism,
and eventually to Kant's Thing-in-itself, forever inaccessible to' human
thought.
H: It certainly seems to me that I would move in your direction.
I leave the physics to you, I would concentrate simply on the fa-
mous Cartesian truth, "I think, therefore I am." The trouble with
this is that it puts the cart before the horse; on the contrary, we have
to understand the "I am" before the "I think." Thinking is only a mode
of human existence, after all. If we ' try to describe concretely the existence
that thinks, we shall never be led to posit anything like Descartes's ab-
stract subject as the thinker.
W: I hope we can continue to agree, but I cannot help putting
the question here: just what is the point of all this emphasis up~n con-
WILLIAM BARRETT 15
creteness? Isn't it really the oldest question in philosophy itself, the

question which the Ionian Greeks asked as soon as they raised their
eyes toward their Mediterranean horizon, and began to wonder?
H: Yes and no. There was a sense to their question that they
themselves did not grasp. Hegel has made us very conscious of it. Those
ancient philosophers spoke of their principles as archai~ points of be-
ginning, and this aspect of their search is perhaps more significant than
the abstractions of air, water, earth, and fire, in which they sought the
underlying substance of all things. That is why Hegel makes so much of
the question where to begin in philosophy. His answer is that you really
may begin anywhere, because you are always beginning with the same
thing, and it is the whole task of philosophy just to make tliis beginning
explicit.
W: Let me try to come at it in another way. It is the old question
of the whole and its parts, is it not, and the fact that the whole is more
than the sum of its parts-
H: ... that much abused catch-phrase-
W: '" which nevertheless conceals a profound truth. Hegel's
point would be, would it not, that the concrete whole is already implicit
in the parts that we seek to analyze?
H: Yes; when he analyzed your English empiricists for example,
he sh()I\.Ved that sense-data were intelligible only if we presupposed a
concrete self-consciousness implicit in the act of sensing.
W: I learned that point from Bradley, and I have made my own
use of it. But we are also touching upon Bergson's point about intuition,
are we not? We cannot grasp a movement as a movement~ for example,
by adding up a set of positions. Unfortunately, Bergson simplified his
point unduly, he contrasted intuition and intelligence as fixedly as if he
were trying to erect another faculty psychology.
H: What happens often in the case of aesthetic experience would
probably be the simplest and commonest illustration. I have seen a very
intelligent man, a trained philosopher, trying to reason his way into
the experience of a certain style that he was not able yet to appreciate.
He asked himself, "What is experience? Sensation plus interpretation"-
as if he could get inside that experience through a summation of parts.
But no literary work was ever written by adding one sentence to another.
If we are unable to live in the writer's world, we cannot explicate his
single sentences formally.
W: Then we do not disagree about whole and part, that the parts
themselves lose their sense away from their concrete whole-
H: Perhaps I would prefer to put it now in Kierkegaard's phrase,
"the point of view," laying all the weight of emphasis upon this that he
did. The question in understanding anything is whether · we have the
point of view or do not have it; whether we are really inside the point
of view or on the outside.
W: Then, on the whole, it is really the same death we are con-
. summating. I see you nod in agreement. Perhaps we should say that
Descartes was a disaster if we did not remember the words of James
Joyce (if an Englishman may quote an Irishman) that the errors of a
genius are portals of discovery. Perhaps philosophy makes progress only
by going to the end of blind alleys.
(We may pause here to observe that philosophers do not seem to be

very different, after all, from you and me: they agree most when they
are talking about the faults of other people. But, just as obviously as
with YOll and me, this is not done out of malice: it is the only way they
can define their own tasks historically. In tRis intermission, when the
reader may draw breath and digest the argument so far, we may imagine
that these two philosophers, who have almost certainly never read each
other, are taking a rapid glance at each other's books. Now we cannot
expect the agreement to last, when they go on to talk about themselves.)
H: It is time we came directly to the point. Where do you propose

to find your concreteness?
W: I look for it in the deliverances of immediate perception, with
all their richness and vagueness of content. "Perception" is not the ade-
quate word here, but I use it in order to abbreviate what would be a
very long description. Briefly, the concrete is the event. But every event,
since it is a concrete fact of relatedness, is a kind of perceiving. The time
of our perceptions is the specious present. This specious present is a
block of duration, so to speak. Nature, in its aspect of becoming, is the
emergent succession of such blocks of duration.
H: I should think, on the contrary, that the more I surrender
myself to the immediacy of perception, the more abstract it becomes.
I am thinking precisely of the argument at the beginning of Hegel's
Phenomenology.
W: Oh, but I have provided myself with a defense against that
Hegelian gambit. I do not talk at all about bare immediacy, and least
of all the immediacy of a mere subject. I take the occasion of experience
as an occasion within, indeed an occasion ol the whole universe. The
concrete is the whole universe in my specious present.
H: But Hegel's argument, all the same, may still work against
WILLIAM BARRETT 17
you. Suppose we follow it concretely. You are fond of the English

Romantic poets, and Wordsworth particularly, are you not?
W: I find that Wordsworth expresses well that fundamental
fact which is the inflow of feelings from an enveloping nature. But why
bring it up?
H: I will come to that question in a moment. Suppose, now, I
walk in the green spring landscape with Wordsworth, and surrender
myself, like him, to a "wise passiveness." To the inflow of feelings from
an enveloping nature, as you just put it. I allow my perceptions to be-
come soaked through, so to speak, with the greenness of the landscape.
But the more I give myself to this immediacy the more I give myself
to universals: greenness, blueness of sky, whiteness of cloud. In vain,
you allege that I am here engaged with unique nuances of color, a
unique nexus of quality. Whatever is a content of awareness can be
repeated, and is therefore universal. Even that buzzing blooming tone
of feeling that surrounds and permeates my perception is a conscious
content, and as such can be repeated.
No, it is I myself, my human reality, that is at the center of the
scene and cannot be repeated. Relative to this human reality of mine,
the specious present is a fragment that I am continually transcending,
passing beyond, toward the future and the past. Immediate consciousness
is a very paradoxical thing ( and perhaps it does not even exist) : it may
contain material that I do not notice at all! The specious present repre-
sents a limiting condition to my attention, but only if I turn my atten-
tion in that direction: viz., to the perception of small increments of
change. Meanwhile, my consciousness may be elsewhere-and I hold it
is the nature of consciousness to be "elsewhere," in its future and past-
and these specious presents (if they really do exist) flow by, beneath
me, so to speak, unnoticed.
W: I remember now, I have heard this criticism before.
H: Perhaps I'm only making the same criticism that one of my
cleverest followers has made against Bergson. Sartre maintains that
Bergson is describing the flow of human consciousness as a natural
phenomenon, seen from without, a thing in itself (en soi), budding and
ripening before the observer's eye. But the point of view of human
existence is not that it is in itself, but that it exists for itself (pour soi).
This cosmic emergence of events, no matter how delicately observed in
its nuance and flux, does not in the least put us inside the human project.
I should not have to remind YOIU, an old Cambridge man, of all that
old business about the specificity of the color yellow. We have another
specificity here.
W: Well, the problem is, to put it logically, simply whether my

descriptions can encompass all the data you bring forward. I think my
notion of the person as a "superject" (rather than subject) can deal
with what you say about the human project. (See, for example, my
Process and Reality., p. 374.) But I suppose I am here principally as
a "correlatee" and guest, to bring out your point of view rather than to
take the platform for my own theories. Your point of view has become
clearer to me; but I have just been wondering, in relation to what you
have said, why it is you place such emphasis upon the pre-Socratic
philosophers. Perhaps we may round off the matter if you explain what
you see in those ancient philosophers.
H: That is a very good opportunity fOor me to make my point of
view clearer. I think I can explain it more concisely than I have any-
where in my writings.
This dream of the pre-Socratics, the vision of their meaning, goes
back to Nietzsche, who fell in love with the Greeks and the sunlight
of their Mediterranean world. They were men, those Greeks, and rec-
ognized nothing higher in the universe than man himself, for even their
gods were only men, a little larger, more powerful and passionate than
the men we know. Nietzsche loved the pre-Socratic philosophers because
they incarnated this overflowing sense of humanity. That man should
really be the measure of all things, this was the highest flight of their
wisdom, which Socrates distorted by giving it only the banal sense of
pointing to a relativity of human mores) when in fact it brings forward
its own absolute; an absolute which Nietzsche dared again to imagine
with reverence and love.
Suppose we believe) really believe, that man is the highest existence
in the universe. Do philosophers really grasp all that is implied in this-
even those philosophers who philosophize, or pretend to philosophize,
without any recourse to a Deity? Have they gone to the depths of this
belief, to see what forlornness, terror, and joy, lurk there? Do they un-
derstand what follows if there is nothing higher by which to explain
human existence? If this existence has no other terms by which to inter-
pret itself than its own: its projects, cares, death, and freedom? Bergson's
flux 01 duration and your passage of events are only so much matter over
which this human liberty takes its stand.
W: But how does Kierkegaard fit in with all this?
H: Of course he held that man exists in the end only by virtue
of the absolute relation to the Absolute which is God. But notice how
he deals with this. He does not, like the Catholic Thomist, plant this
relation in man's being as a kind of natural tropism or gravitation toward
WILLIAM BARRETT 19
God; on the contrary, it is the result of an absolute decision and a leap,

founded upon the Absurd and the Paradox. Nietzsche could have made
capital of this: the religious man w ills that life shall have a meaning on
the basis of what is possibly meaningless, an absurdity. Here is the Will
to Power at its very apex. But when Kierkegaard repudiates Hegel, his
point of view comes close to Nietzsche's. Having posited this Absolute
Relation, Kierkegaard nevertheless insists that we must rernain within
one of its terms, human existence; that we cannot pretend, like Hegel,
to penetrate into that other term, exploring the Divine secrets by a
rational dialectic. The "subjective thinker" seeks to explore human
existence in its own terms because there is nothing higher that he can
explore.
W: I am struck by the number of times that the name of Hegel
has come up in this conversation.
H: He has been with us at almost every step, even where we may
have been repudiating him. I mentioned that my argument against your
immediate perception came straight out of his Phenomenology. True,
Hegel's argument there has to do mainly with knowledge, while we have
been talking directly about existence. But that in itself is a sign of how
far we have progressed in the direction of concreteness-something for
which we have greatly to thank him. Did you know, for example, that
he discovered the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness" long before you
baptized "it?
W: He did!!
H: It was an important stage of his dialectic to show that the
traditionally concrete objects of perception-stones, trees tables-are
mere abstract fragments of existence. Hegel aimed at sOlnewhat the
same revolution as yours and mine: he upset the traditional contrast
of abstract and concrete, universal and particular; gave the whole ques-
tion a new meaning and endowed it with a new dialectic. In fact, we
might say he began that search for the concrete, which you in your
direction, and I in a quite different one, have tried to carry out.
W: And he too sought to consummate the death of Descartes?
H: Descartes and Kant too--
At which point we may conveniently ring down the curtain. Our

dialogue has done its work: the dialectical theme it developed has
brought us closer to the center of the movement we were describing
and at the same time disclosed to us its source. There is no such thing
as an absolute beginning of any movement, n1uch less of one so comp]ex
as an historical movement of thought, and we could find many predeces--
sors of Existentialism before Hegel. But we have not been looking for
historical anticipations but something quite different: namely, the point
at which a principle implicit in a whole historical movement first be-
came explicit and articulate. For present purposes, then, we may rest
with Hegel's Phenomenology as a beginning.
HEGEL AND KIERKEGAARD

We are so familiar by this time with Kierkegaard's joke that Hegel
walked out of existence into the System that we are likely to be a bit
surprised when anybody locates the beginning of Existentialism in Hegel.
But rejection requires an antecedent kinship, and Kierkegaard could
not have revolted if Hegel had not provided him with the weapons and,
in part, the point of view for doing so.
Leaving aside the System with all its prestidigitations, let us try to
catch some glimpse of Hegel at the very moment he faces existence itself.
What was he thinking of when he protested against Kant as a particular
representative of eighteenth-century rationalism?
"The trouble with Kant," the young and exuberant Hegel reflects,
"is that he treats the thinking subject altogether too abstractly. He ex-
plores the human mind as if he were constructing an abstract geometry.
This is his inheritance from Descartes, 'who thought he had got to the
bottom of thinking when he arrived at the absolutely clear and distinct
truth, 'I think'-a truth which had no reference to the quality, time,
and place o{ the thinker. This'!' who thinks-according to Descartes
and Kant-is a completely abstract being, who does not exist at any
particular time. But really! when I think, I am existing, and existence
is inescapably historical. These categories themselves through which I
attempt to grasp the world are the result of the long evolution of human
experience, the deposit of the historical experience of mankind, and
when I think, I am taking my place in this long chain of human thought,
I am all mankind thinking at one stage of its history. (But perha.ps I,
Hegel, have gotten such hold of the truth, that the chain conIes to an
end in me, and mankind after me will simply have the task of filling in
the details and interstices of the System.) *
"So, I have really ~asped something concrete that was in1plicit in
Kant's abstract geometry of the human consciousness, but that he him-
self did not see. Good God, what a genius I must have! What is this
new principle? Simply this: that human consciousne$S is inexplicable
except in terms of a concrete developing Self, which evolves by making
* Sotto voce) the Unconscious speaking around 1807. Later,. in the 1830's,
the old man, drunk with his vision, really believed it.
WILLIAM BARRETT 21
its differences explicit and then attempting to unify them in a larger

whole. Otherwise all that business of the Kantian schemata and cate-
gories is a skeleton without the flesh-an anatomy of the human mind
without either an accompanying physiology or an evolutionary biology
that would make the anatomy intelligible. Lo, the vision is upon me, the
veil of the future is rent, and I see in the next century a philosopher
named Whitehead (who will know a new kind of physics) proclaiming
that Kant's categorical scheme actually occurs within the framework
of Newtonian physics, and thus merely represents human thinking at
one historical stage."
We may leave Hegel at this moment of his vision-son1ewhere short-
ly after l'an trentiesme de son age. Was Kierkegaard justified, then,
in accusing him of walking out of existence into the System? I think he
was, for Hegel had nO' sooner walked intO' an existential point of view
than he continued on out of it-like a man who gets stuck in a revolv-
ing door, for a moment is really inside the building, then continues the
original push around, and is back in the bleak out-of-doors again. What
happened?
Simply this: from the perception of human thinking as existential,
Hegel took another step-which we may call the Hegelian leap-to the
conclusion that existence itself was rational and therefore could be put
inside logic. "My thought," Hegel reasoned, "not only represents human-
ity thinking at one particular stage in its history, but this consciousness
has also come · to be within the whole context of nature, and is in fact
the whole universe become conscious in me. Unless this consciousness is
a curious kind of sport with no real relation to the universe in which
it appears (the possibility that haunts Kant's thinking), then the uni-
verse itself must be thoroughly accessible to human thinking. If my
thought is to count for anything, then it must make sense of this uni-
verse, and nothing less than the whole universe. And that requires that
the Whole itself be rational." At which point Hegel burst into a loud
Hosanna, and began to build the System.
When I think, then, not only history but the whole of Nature and
the Absolute are incarnated in my thought and when we read Hegel,
we are really supposed to have been moving all along through God's
mind itself! Perhaps Hegel was only a madman who thought he was
Hegel. But like most madmen, he had abundant reasons for what he
was doing. The Hegelian leap, we have seen, was the outcome of two
separate principles: (1) the positing of the concrete developing Self
to explain thinking, and (2) the intellectual demand of in telligibili ty.
But in Hegel's treatment this second principle breaks down into two
aspects: he demanded not only that the universe be intelligible in its

totality, for which he needed to posit an Absolute, but also that it be
intelligible to him, Hegel-at which point he leaped into the Absolute's
mind and declared himself privy to its secrets. There is in all this one of
the great unconscious ironies of history, for Hegel, who thought he was
really bringing the rationalism of the Enlightenment to its completion,
actually created instead a new Kabbalah, in which all things were turned
into signs, cryptic and interrelated, of the Divine presence.
But while the Absolute continued its march through history, Hegel
the man, marching to his class room, lost his shoe on the road. Here
Kierkegaard, "the spy," observes and objects. God has numbered the
hairs of our head, the Gospel tells us, and apart from the Divine inten-
tions not a sparrow (not even Hegel's shoe) falls to the ground. That is
all very true, but for God not for Hegel, and it is hardly to be taken
seriously that Hegel, an existing man and professing Christian, should
pretend to be in on the Divine intentions. There is a gulf between finite
and infinite, God and his creatures, that cannot be made to disappear
by dialectical manipulation and approximation. Otherwise, what is the
point of Christianity at all? The Hegelian System really dispenses with
the whole point of Christianity. For what precisely does Christianity
teach but that I, a concrete being existing in despair and uneasiness,
need a Redeemer to appear in history in order to save me? This is a
symbol of the gulf between God and His creatures-a gulf that was
bridged only by the Scandal and the Paradox, the appearance of Chris-
tianity in history-and a sign therefore that no existing man can hope
to plant himself within the Divine mind and think Its thoughts for It.
Since Hegel had his Dialectic, he hardly needed Jesus Christ in order
to be saved.
Passing over the issue of Christianity, we can isolate from Kierke-
gaard's attack the simple point of human truthfulness~ the will to remain
faithful to human experience itself. Reading Hegel, we are always
divided between admiration for his genius and shock, even disgust,
at a certain coarseness of mind by which he can override the rough
edges of contingency, chance, human existence itself. Hegel has the
histrionic ability necessary to any genius, he dared the Grand Style and
carried it off with success; but he is a little too much the actor locked
tightly in the armor of his solemnity, unable to relax and regard himself
at any point with irony. Consider his treatment of the "unhappy con-
sciousness" in the Phenomenology of Mind. The "unhappy conscious-
ness" may be taken as Kierkegaard himself, and the place Hegel assigns
to it in his dialectic is the place he would assign to the unhappy Dane.
WILLIAM BARRETT 23
This unhappy consciousness-divided and alienated from itself-is merely

one stage, and an early one, in the Dialectic of Reason. That is, our
human suffering is really the result of an incomplete rationalism. The
unhappy consciousness disappears in a higher synthesis with the knowl-
edge that we are not cut off from the universe; disappears as soon as
consciousness knows itself to be identical with the whole of Reality, and
Reality itself to be rational. Here Kierkegaard's objection becomes a
positive revolt. How can my suffering-the despair of my own unique
existence-be made to disappear by being enclosed in a logical systern?
Suppose the universe is a logical system, how does that lighten n1y
suffering-which is an absolute for me-make it more bearable, give
it meaning? Christianity is more honest than Hegel (and whether Chris-
tians or not, we must agree with Kierkegaard here), for it professes
to lighten my suffering by offering me an eternal happiness in return
for my renunciation on this earth.
This is the historical explanation of Hegel: the exuberance of early
German Romanticism sublimating itself in the confident rationalism of
the Enlightenment. Now, it is just these two tendencies that supply the
opposed tensions which eventually split the System apart. Hegel, seeking
to put existence into logic, is like a man ""ho plants an acorn in a flov,rcr
pot; the plant grows and splits the vase, and Kierkegaard is there to
harvest what Hegel had planted. In Kierkegaard., the Underground Man
acquires his philosophic v,oice. This does not mean that the resentment,
spite, and aching liver of Dostoevsky's creature appear in the gentle,
beautiful soul of the Dane. Those were qualities that Dostoevsky needed
in order to define his character fictionally, and particularly to give him
a place in relation to the Russian society of the 1870's. The philosophic
significance of the Underground Man, going beyond this social refer-
ence, is just that he proclaims his own existence a surd that cannot be
resolved without remainder into any purely logical structure, and it is
this that Kierkegaard brings to explicit philosophic expression.
With this, Existentialism acquires both its name and its birth, and
our brief account of its genesis may come to an end. Yet it is significant
that, while Kierkegaard's works were buried in obscurity until the be-
ginning of this century, nevertheless other philosophers during the last
part of the nineteenth century went along their own existential paths,
carrying out their own revolts against Hegel, Idealism, or Classical
Rationalism. The epoch itself had spread its tentacles into the minds of
its philosophers; far from being the work of one special school, the
existential movement represents a true tendency of the whole historical
period, in which we too still exist.
II. EXISTENTIALISM SEEKS ITS SYSTEM
THERE MIGHT SEEM TO BE SOME SORT OF CONTRADICTION IN THIS TITLE,

as if Hegel were returning to enjoy a kind of revenge against Kierke-
gaard. But existential philosophers could not continue to' communicate
by Kierkegaard's indirect method forever, in philosO'phical scraps and
fragments. Every meaning, however fragmentary, seeks a system; it
was one of Hegel's great contributions to have understood this so
thoroughly, and in fact Kierkegaard could communicate successfully
by his indirect method, by scraps and fragments, chiefly against the
background of the Hegelian system, which was already in existence and
widely known.
But we need hardly raise any abstruse questions of system, for we
wish simply to turn now from our account of the genesis of Existentialism
to cCYl1sider its principal themes. And if we choose Heidegger as our
subject, the reason is one of pure convenience, for he has gathered
together the leading threads of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Dilthey, and
others, and woven them into a more unified pattern. I do not mean
to imply in the least that Heidegger is the most important of the
philosophers with whom we have had to deal here, but he does strike
me as the most self-conscious in his attempt to place himself in relation
to the whole tradition of Western thought, and this consciousness of
tradition does in itself supply us with so many h andles or keys by
which we may appropriate his meaning. Heidegger, moreover, has been
the principal point of departure for the French Existentialists, particu-
larly those of Sartre's school, and their contributions beyond him have
so far largely been certain new emphases, details of further explication,
and the eloquence of individual temperament. At this point, then, we
propose nothing more than a job of straightforward exposition which
may serve to make accessible to the English reader the main outlines
of Heidegger's thought.
But this is not at all the simple job it sounds, for the whole struc-
ture of Heidegger's thought seems to nestle ·810 closely in the bosom of
the German language that all his writing might be alleged as evidence
for an inescapable identification of thought and language. Probably these
difficulties of language banish to a remote future, if we shall ever see it
WILLIAM BARRETT 25
at all, the time when Heidegger's writing, in any considerable bulk, will
be available in English translation; which possibility would seem to
supply an additional point and usefulness to any effort of simple exposi-
tion now. We shall confine ourselves principally to his chief work,
Being and Time (1927), which, besides being by far the best of his
books, setting a standard to which he never came near again, is also the
most comprehensive, containing all the themes that he was to elaborate
or modulate (not always fortunately, alas) in his subsequent writings.
By reason of its completeness, we may take it as being something of a
Bible of non-religious Existentialism-or if this seems a bit paradoxical,
anyway a very convenient textbook.
BEING AND TIME

Heidegger proposes for himself the goal of elucidating the n1e3.ning
of Being, in general-Being, as it is everywhere and in all things. If
the proposal does not look very promising at first view, nor very novel,
nevertheless the means of his investigation do attract us, for he seeks
to discover the meaning of Being from the analysis and description of
human being. In fact, all that we have of Being and Time is this pre-
paratory analysis of human being, the second part-in which he was to
deal, after this lengthy preparation, with the question of Being, in gen-
eral-Heidegger has never published; perhaps with good reason, as I
shall later suggest.
The trouble with all previous metaphysics, Heidegger says, is that
it attempted to understand human being from the categories of Nature.
This tradition took its point of departure from Aristotle's M etaphysics)
and the medieval Schoolmen simply perfected logically most of Aris-
totle's points. (In the process they may also have lost certain of the
meanings, the overtones, that Heidegger is struggling to restore to phi-
losophy; a point very much worth exploring-but we simply mention
it here, and pass on.) This tradition from Aristotle through the School-
men even dominates the Idealist Hegel, at least in his most "metaphysical"
work, his Logic. Now, in contrast to his long tradition, Heidegger pro-
poses something analogous to what Kant called a Copernican Revolution
in philosophy: he intends to understand Being, in general, from the fact
of human being.
But the point of departure of his Copernican Revolution is very
different from that of Kant. Kant, he says, was too much under the spell
of Descartes, and Heidegger wishes to place himself in revolt also against
the three centuries of Western philosophy initiated by Descartes. Des-
cartes made the proposition Cogito) ergo sum (I think, therefore I am)
basic to his philosophizing, arriving at the fact that I am from the fact
of my thinking. Kant, following him, located a pure or Transcendental
Ego (the I in the "I think" after Descartes's reduction) as the ultimate
subject of all experience. This is wrong, says Heidegger, we must invert
this order: we must understand the Cogito from the Sum; unless we
understand man's being we cannot understand his thoughts (cogitationes)
or his thinking.
(Admirable. But then we immediately wonder how close this brings
Heidegger again to ~e other tradition from which he is in revolt-the
tradition of Aristotle and the Schoolmen, who also began with Being
rather than Thought. Heidegger's revolt against two long traditions in
philosophy places him in a new and unique relation of balance or
tension between these traditions. The question then becomes: How stable
is this balance? We shall come back to this later.)
Why should man be given this precedence over other beings in
nature as a starting point for the new metaphysics (or ontology) that
Heidegger proposes? Because, says Heidegger, man is the metaphysical
(or ontological) animal: in being he is concer_n ed with his own being.
Man seeks to understand his own being, and this search itself is a fact
that characterizes profoundly his being. And when he poses the prob-
lem of Being in general, he is putting his own being in question. Thus,
a study of Being, in general, ought to begin from this being who is con-
cerned about his own being, if that study is to achieve a new concreteness.
In his description of human existence, Heidegger resolutely avoids
the use of the terms "man," "human," "human being," which might
carry traditional connotations of a definite human nature. Instead he
uses the word ~~Dasein/J a common German philosophical tenn to des-
ignate existence, which in his use is also meant to preserve its literal
meaning of "Being-there" (Sein-Da). Man, for Heidegger, is Mr.
Being There. I.e., man always exists in a situation, he comes to con-
sciousness of himself in a world, surrounded by factual conditions which
he himself has not created.
The reason for this choice of terminology lies, in great part, in
Heidegget's historical derivation from the great German philosopher
Wilhelm Dilthey. Heidegger indicates his historical relation to Dilthey
at several places, but perhaps too briefly for its full depth and breadth
to be seen by the unprepared reader. But without Dilthey's researches,
the daring of Being and Time as an interpretation of human existence
could never have been projected by Heidegger.
Dilthey's contribution to the history of thought can be best outlined
perhaps in terms of his departure from Hegel's brand of historical
WILLIAM BARRETT 27
thinking. Hegel sought to incorporate the whole of history within the

compass of reason. He sought to put history inside mind. Dilthey started
from a more or less Hegelian historicism, but soon worked away from
it. He (like Marx) also turns Hegel on his head: Dilthey seeks to locate
mind in history. His historical researches led him to see the various phi-
losophical systems of the past as historical configurations existing in
relation to their historical period, to the cultural and social context of
their epoch. The fundamental category for Dilthey became that of life)
and all philosophical systems were to be interpreted as offshoots of
man's total life as lived through the framework of his cultural and social
conditions. Mind must be construed in relation to this category of life.
Man, according to Dilthey, does not have a nature but only a history.
Human nature is plastic; human life differs strikingly, in its character-
istics and presuppositions, in different times and places: classical man
differs from medieval man differs from Renaissance man differs from
modern man.
But Dilthey's shortcoming, Heidegger says, was that, having arrived
at this great generalizing idea of Life, he did not analyze its structure.
Heidegger attempts to. make up for this shortcoming not by analyzing
the concept of Life, which would fall under the special science of
biology, but by analyzing the structures of human existence itself. Man's
existence, says Heidegger, is prior to his essence; or, more exactly, man's
existence is his essence. It is easy to see how this comes out of Dilthey's
proposition that man does not have a nature but only a history. Heidegger
has only taken one step beyond Dilthey; the radical daring of his inter-
pretation takes off from the prior conclusions at which Dilthey arrived.
What Heidegger means is that it is human existence itself, facing its
tasks, transcending its past and projecting itself toward its future, that
transforms and recreates the structures, social and factual, surrounding
it, and which philosophers hitherto have too easily taken as being human
nature itself. .
The connection with Dilthey must be grasped if we are to under-
stand the rationale of Heidegger's difficult and daring experiment \\,ith
terminology, and the goal at which this terminological structure aims.
HUMAN EXISTENCE: PRIMARY FEATURES OF DESCRIPTION

The first thing to notice is that existence is never just existence in
. general. On the contrary, existence is always mine, yours, his, etc.-that
is, it is always personal. This does not mean that Heidegger is going to
interpret his existence by seeking out a pure I-a pure or transcendental
Ego--as the subject of all experience. On the contrary, Heidegger locates
existence, immediately and at the first stroke, in the public world and
among other people. Here he gives Phenomenology a radical shift in
point of departure from that of Husserl, who had entered into the
phenomenological domain of the given by isolating; in the manner of
Kant, a pure Ego involved in all consciousness. In comparison with this
"subjective" approach, I-Ieidegger's is radically " objective." (How far
it takes him from the tradition of German philosophy, I do not believe
he himself is fully conscious, despite his various pronunciations about the
revolutionary and tradition-destroying nature of his approach. Another
point of tension within his system, to which we shall return later.)
Heidegger proposes to understand our human existence by beginning
from our ordinary everyday existence (banality, Altaglichkeit) , rather
than from the purified philosophical existence that is reached after we
practice the Cartesian doubt about the existence of external objects and
other people-and this everyday existence is always in the world and
with others. To be means to be in the world and to be with others.
Dasein is always da-sein~ i.e. is always there (da), in a situation, and is
always Being-with (Mitsein) others.
But what is the subject of this everyday existence? Who is it we are
really speaking of now as being in the world and with others?
It is not, Heidegger tells us, the pure I that philosophers have
isolated as the subject of all experiences. It is a much more common
and humble creature. Heidegger calls this creature of everyday existence
the One (das Man). Who is this One? Everybody and Nobody. He is
the one we refer to in all tpe prescriptions of public behavior: "One
does this, one doesn't do that, one doesn't smoke here, etc." This One is,
so to speak, the mere point of intersection of all these prescriptions of
the public and external behavior of everyday existence. Thus, Everybody
and Nobody.
It is significant that we locate this subject of everyday existence
-this existent who is in the world and with others-through the clues
of language. Heidegger's brief and passing remarks upon language make
up one of the most pregnant of his analyses in Being and Time; they
contain many fruitful hints for literary critics, and he himself has car-
ried them into the domain of criticism in his discussions of the German
poet Hoelderlin; and these views of language have become fundamental
to much of the criticism now being practiced in France. Language, ac-
cording to Heidegger, is speech, and speech is always given along with
our world and other people. Our everyday existence is in speech. Our
Being-in-the-world comes to expression in speech, and through expres-
WILLIAM BARRETT 29
sion to interpretation and understanding. Thus, speech is not primarily

a means of expressing interior psychic states of a pure inner conscious-
ness. On the contrary, speech is th-'ough and through "worldly," belong-
ing to and including the world. Robinson Crusoe on his island was not
outside of language: he existed still in relation to others and to lan-
guage; it happened only that the mode of this relation was the mode
of absence and the mode of silence.
But in everyday life the speech through which the One expresses
itself is chatter. Chatter and ambiguity-these are the characteristics of
the everyday Being-in-the-World. They characterize, with respect to
One's language, the fallen state of the One that we all are, so far as
we are in the banal public everyday world. This state of Fail (V erfallen )
which Heidegger describes, has nothing to do with the fall from grace
of which theologians treat-though, as a matter of histodcal fact, some
of its principal descriptive features are derived from the descriptions
theology has given. Nor does it entail in any way a lower degree of
reality, in the manner of some traditional metaphysical systems. On the
contrary, it is just as real, Heidegger stresses, as the authentic human
existence that manages to escape from it. Heidegger even says that it is
not a value judgment that separates this state of Fall from that of
authentic human existence (which latter we shall describe in a moment)
-though we can hardly subscribe to this statement since it is he as a
value-seeker who is led to make these different descriptions of the two
possibilities of human existence.
What are the full characteristics of this fallen state of everyday
existence? They have to be seen from another point of view: everyday
existence-no matter how public and banal-is always pierced and
permeated by some feeling, some affective state (Befindlichkeit). To
exist is to be in some mood or other: fear, anxiety, tranquillity) or joy.
Feeling is _a fundamental mode of existence. The world is given to us
in feeling. Heidegger is not talking of feeling as a modification of an
inner consciousness which is then projected onto things outside, and so
"colors" the world given to us at any moment. That is a state of affairs
already cut up by analysis and therefore much more sophistica ted than
the primary unity of world and feeling- given together- that is our
concrete reality in daily life.
Anxiety (Angst) is the fundamental feeling precisely because it is
directed toward the whole world more plainly than any other feeling.
Anxiety is indefinite: it is not about this or that object, we are simply
anxious and we do not know about what; and when it is over, we have
to say that "it was about nothing."* This is what the psycho~nalysts
call free-floating anxiety; anxiety without any discoverable object. Of
course, the psychoanalysts are able '·0 discover in the case of certain
patients the very definite causes and circumstances that engender this
anxiety. But the empirical discovery of its genesis does not do away with
Heidegger's point since he is concerned not with the genesis but the
content of the state: namely, in what manner we are existing when we
exist in that state. What we are anxious about in such states, Heidegger
tells us, is our very Being-in-the-world as such. That is why anxiety is
more fundamental to human existence than fear. Fear is always definite;
about this or that object in the world; but anxiety is directed toward
our Being-in-the-world itself, with which every definite object, or thing,
within the world is involved. Thus anxiety, more than any other
feeling, discovers to us the world: i.e., brings us face to face with a
world, to which we now sense ourselves to be in precarious relation.
Anxiety, like speech, is through and through "worldly"-belonging to
and revealing the world.
Anxiety thus gives us the first clue to an authentic existence pos-
sible for the human person. But in ordinary life we usually evade the
condition: we try to transform this indefinite anxiety into a definite
fear or worry about this or that particular object. Thus authentic
anxiety disappears, in our banal existence, into curiosity and inquisitive-
ness (N eugier) . Here Heidegger is borrowing from the Christian tradition,
which represented the worldly existence of man (as opposed to a genuine
religious existence) as one of dispersion (dispersio) -a state in which
man perpetually busies himself with diversions and distractions from
himself and his own existence: "distracted from distraction by distrac-
tion."
But this fallen state is not one of complete worthlessness. Analyzing
it, we have already gone a good distance in discovering the essential
characteristics of man's existence. Moreover, if the human being is able
to becom~ really a Self-to discov~r and achieve an authentic mode of
existence-it will not involve his retreating from all the modes of
everyday existence. In fact, such a retreat would be impossible; we must
all-even the authentic self, provided we are able to achieve such-
exist in the world with others, speaking, busying ourselves with cares
about this or that particular object. Authenticity is only a question of
a modification, slight but profound, within our everyday existence, which
* Unfortunately, Heidegger plays badly with this manner of speech in his

essay, What is Metaphysics? But in Rein,!! and Time he avoids this particular
word-play.
WILLIAM BARRETT 31
places this existence in a new and altogether different perspective.

Heidegger is here drawing upon Kierkegaard's notion of Repeti-
tio~: the man who really arrives at the religious stage of existence, says
Kierkegaard, makes the absolute renunciation of worldly existence, but
he expects that it will all be restored to him. Job renounces before God
and then all his worldly goods are restored. So the Knight of Faith, says
Kierkegaard, comes back cheerfully to ordinary humdrum existence,
, which becomes much richer an'd more satisfying than for the Knight of
Despair, who, because he has not yet gone beyond it through the abso-
lute renunciation, is not able to come back to it for what it is. For Hei-
degger too, the question of an authentic human existence involves this
"small piece of spice that will season the whole dish"-that slight modi-
fication that will take us out of everyday existence, but then restore it
to us fully for what it is. To be sure, Heidegger is not going to find
this possibility of an authentic existence in any kind of religious leap.
Quite the contrary.
CARE
Having elucidated various aspects of the human condition as it
shows itself in everyday life, can we now gather together all these threads
into one pattern, under one unifying concept? Yes, says Heidegger, and
this unifying concept for the human condition is Care. Care expresses
the whole nature of our being insofar as we exist in the world and with
others.
This essential trait of Care, which permeates our human existence,
is revealed to us in the primary feeling of anxiety. Anxiety flows from
the fundamental trait of man: that he is a being whose being is charac-
terized by the fact that he is concerned about his own being. This sepa-
rates him from all other beings in the universe, and Care is simply the
concretion of this quality in our everyday existence. Even the ' mode of
our Being-in-the-world points to this primary aspect of Care. We are
not in the world as an object in a box; not in a sense of occupying a
given point or points in an abstract and geometrical space-that is a
much later notion developed by the abstractive operations of science;
no, the primary sense (i.e., the sense that is given to us directly in our
everyday life) is that we are in the world in that we take care for this
or that object among the objects surrounding us. The notion of a world
in which we exist is discovered to us through the immediate environ-
ment of objects in which we move, which we take care of, are appre-
hensive and concerned about, attend to. Care expresses the fundamental
character of experience as we move through the world about the tasks

of everyday existence.
Heidegger quotes, as a kind of literary summation of his phe-
nomenological analysis, a beautiful Latin fable that Goethe, learning of
it from Herder, drew upon for the second part of his Faust (the most
philosophical of all his poems) :
One day when Care was crossing a river, she saw some clay on the bank.
She took up a piece and began to fashion it. While she was still reflect-
ing over what she had made, Jupiter arrived on the scene. Care asked
him to give the shape a spirit or soul, which Jupiter promptly did.
Then a dispute arose between them: each wanted to give his own
name to the new creation. While they were disputing, Earth came up
and insisted that her name be given to the new creature, since she had
furnished it with its body. The three of them called in Saturn to
judge the dispute. "Jupiter," said Saturn, "since you have given the
thing a soul, you shall receive this after its death; you, Earth, shall
finally receive the body; but since Care first shaped this creature, she
shall possess it as long as it lives. As for the quarrel over the creature's
name-let him be called Man (homo) since he is fashioned of earth
(humo) .
Man, as long as he is in the world, is to be possessed by Care. The fable

illustrates Heidegger's meaning only in that one point, for his whole
analysis dispenses with any reference to a possible immortality: there
is no soul which is received in Jupiter's or Abraham's bosom after death.
Moreover, when earth finally gets the body, the possibilities that consti-
tute human existence have been canceled, and it is no longer a man but
a thing. Remove the dualism of the fable (the whole of Heidegger's
analysis is directed against any dualism between soul and body) and you
get the fundamental point: Care is the being of man.
DEATH
But since Care is always pointed at the absent and the future, it
seems to give human existence a singular incompleteness and make it
impossible to grasp this existence as a whole and integral structure.
I t is to this task that Heidegger addresses himself now in his analysis of
death~ for any attempt to grasp our existence as a whole must send us
toward the fact of death, which concludes that existence.
His analysis of death is perhaps the most important and satisfying
interpretation in his whole picture of man. It is, in a certain way, the
keystone of his analysis, since we are able to attain an authentic existence
only if we come face to face unblinkingly with the possibility of our
death, for it is death that tears us out of the external banality of every-
WILLIAM BARRETT 33
day existence. What, then, are the main points in a phenomenology of

death?
First: It is impossible to experience the death of others. No matter
how much I may suffer, sympathetically, their actual death-pangs, no
matter how much I may be afflicted personally by the loss of the person
deceased, the fact remains that it is his death and not mine, and the
very meaning of death is that it robs me of my own being. Just as no
one else can relieve me of my death by taking it upon himself, so it is
impossible for me to experience death as a fact happening to someone else.
Death is not a public fact occurring out there in the world: it is some-
thing that happens within my own human existence.
Sec()lnd: Death is not the end of human life in the sense in which
the end of a road may be the termination of a journey. When I arrive
at the end of my journey, I still exist, and, existing, I am in the state
of having completed something. But when death comes, I no longer
exist and so there is no journey which, properly speaking, I can be said
to have completed. ("What has been concluded, that I can have con-
cluded it"-to paraphrase William James's moving death-bed state-
ment.) Moreover, when I am halfway along the journey, I can be at its
termination only by crossing the remaining half of the road; but death
is an end of human life in the sense that it may cut short my existence
at any moment. "As soon as we are born we are old enough to die,"
Heidegger quotes the proverb. The life that is allotted me is not a well-
laid-out road at the end of which is death, but death as a possibility
permeates my existence from the moment I am thrown into this world
I never made.
Having made these two negative points, how then are we to con-
ceive, concretely and positively, of death in its relation to our human
existence? To answer this, Heidegger turns to the analysis of everyday
existence and asks how death appears in that context.
Our everyday existence is dominated by the One, the external public
individual. The One has some very cute tricks to play in order to escape
the prospect of death. First, we-insofar as. we are this One of banal
life-transform death into a fact, an occurrence within the world along
with other events. We read about deaths (as so many facts) in the
obituary columns of newspapers. We attend funerals as public and social
occasions, regulated by their own complex prescriptions as to how one
is to behave there. All the rites and ceremonies surrounding death aim
at transforming it into a public event. By this means the One very cun-
ningly tries to farb off death as something that happens to Everybody,
and therefore precisely to Nobody-neither to me, you, nor any real self.
The reader will recall here Ivan Ilyich's reflection on his deathbed as
he faced for the first time the prospect of his ow n death: long ago he
had read in his school logic text the example of a syllogism, "All men
are mortal, Caius is a man, therefore Caius is mortal." Precisely-Caius
was mortal, but who was this Caius? eaius was not he, I van Ilyich, who
had had. that childhood, those parents, this particular life. It was all
right for Caius to be mortal (for Caius is the One, and therefore Nobody
in particular) ; but that he, poor Ivan Ilyich, should be mortal, should
face death !-that is the shattering and inexplicable prospect he now
faces. Everything in Heidegger's analysis of death is implicit in Tolstoy's
"Ivan Ilyich"; Heidegger has simply placed Tolstoy's perceptions within
the framework of a more or less rigorous phenomenology.
The One has another clever trick too: not only does it make out ·
death as something that happens to other people, but also as something
that will occur at another and later time. In our banal chatter, we say,
"To be sure, death comes to all," but we tacitly understand: "But it
does not come now) we have plenty of time ahead of us." We keep
thinking of death as the end of a journey, and comfortably imagine that
a great part of the road stretches still in front of us. Death, however, is
not a fact but a possibility. And its real character as a possibility is that
it is possible at any moment. "As soon as a man is born he is old enough
to die."
But notice an even more significant point in the everyday attitude
toward death. Despite the fact that it flees from the consciousness of
death, our everyday existence reveals itself as essentially pointed toward
death. We exist continuously in relation to death, it happens only that
the manner of this relation, as it appears in daily life, is one of deception
and veiling. Precisely because we flee from the full and authentic con-
sciousness of death, death is revealed as a possibility already permeating
our existence. Human existence, even in everyday life, is essentially
Being-toward-death. Death, as the end of existence (in the authentic
sense of end), is present in human existence from the beginning.
But death--once truly grasped as this possibility-also affords us
the first glimpse of a possible authentic existence for man. Confronting
death as possible at any moment, we are tom out of the context of banal
life, and restored to a Self, which must face death without disguise.
This was the experience of Ivan Ilyich on his deathbed. Authenticity
means no more than to become oneself truly through the R es10 luteness
(Entschlossenheit) with which we face death. Death is liberating: it
frees us from the servitude of petty cares that threaten to engulf ordi-
nary existence completely, and delivers us to the essential projects by
WILLIAM BARRETT 35
which we make our own existence. Popular language almost recognizes

this, saying, "Life is too short to worry about those (petty) things." This
is in the right direction, though the language still betrays the deception
of the 9ne, referring to the future as a thing that is there, ahead of us,
waiting till we travel the road to it. Better to say, in more authentic
language, "I shall die, and what does anything matter beside my becom-
ing the Self that I must become." And even joyfully: "Thank God, there
is death, for how should I live otherwise? I might go on indefinitely
being someone else, someone unconsciously false."
This is the human condition that Heidegger calls Freedom-toward-
death. Suspended over death, "over seventy fathoms," moving at every
moment within this perpetual possibility of nothingness, which is the
authenticity of death, we are also released at last into an authentic
human freedom. The chain has slipped away, and whatever movement,
whatever project, we launch against the background of this void, has
nothing to rest upon but ourselves, and just in this do we know ollrselves
to be free. But this authentic freedom, which is disclosed to us as we
confront death, represents only the completion, the full realization, of
the freedom which in fact lies at the very source of existence. This
freedom is presupposed in Heidegger's system from the very beginning,
since, banishing the notion of a fixed human nature, he has defined
man's existence as his essence-as that which creates his essence. The
doctrine of human freedom is essential to any Existentialism.
Perhaps we are indebted to Sartre, even more than Heidegger, for
making this point fully clear and placing it at the center of his thought.
Heidegger does not attempt any elaborate philosophic argun1ents to
demonstrate that the freedom of the will is a fact; he presupposes,
rather, that freedom is part of the phenomenologically given-something
that is immediately grasped as soon as we grasp that man is to be
defined by his possibilities. Sartre, however, has attempted a more thor-
oughgoing phenomenological validation of this freedom, which, if not
precisely a demonstration, may be taken to fill, in his thought, the place
of the traditional arguments in favor of freedom of the will.
Freedom requires otherness and negation, and man, says Sartre,
brings negation with him into the universe. Conscious Being (l' etre-pour
soi) is defined by the characteristic that it violates the Law of Identity:
man is not what he is at any given moment, and he is what he is not,
for he is his future which is not yet, and his past which is no longer.
Thus the yawning gap of negation appears within the dense plenitude
of Being, and out of this gap arises human possibility and human free-
dom. Man is free, Sartre is saying, because he can always say no to what
exists. Orestes, confronting Jupiter, can always say no--even to the

omnipotence which can crush him; so too, the French Resistance can
always say no to the occupying Germans, however near they be to
military and political omnipotence.
But is this resolute confrontation of death possible in fact as well

as merely in principle? I-leidegger finds the indication of this real pos-
sibility in the voice of conscience. But in the experience of conscience
who cries, and to whom, and what does it cry? We cry to ourselves;
but the self that cries is not something that already exists, but something
that is to be-i.e., is projected as future. This is the basis on which
Heidegger finds man's being permeated by the negative, by nothingness.
That on which we seek to ground ourself-justify ourself-is not yet:
a self that we seek to bring into being. And we exist as men not by
relapsing back into being what we are-like a thing, a stone or table-
but to the extent to which our whole being is projected toward that
which does not yet exist, which is to be, but is never realized and pos-
sessed in its completeness like a thing. However negative this language,
it is really at the opposite pole from nihilism. ,,yhen Heidegger says
(with James Joyce) that man's being is founded on the void, he intends
this as an affirmation of human life-in the only sense in which it can
be an authentically human life. Modern man has been haunted by the
smell of death and nothingness now for over a century; here Heidegger
follows Nietzsche by affirming life but not stopping his nostrils.*
TIME
All the foregoing analysis has been only to clear the ground for
the interpretation of time as the very meaning of existence. It should
already be evident from the analysis of Care that man's being is tem-
poral through and through. This temporal character of human existence
Heidegger calls temporality (Zeitlichkeit), and it is to be distinguished
from the "vulgar" conception of time (Zeit), which is an affair of clocks,
chronometers, and calendars, encountered within the world of man's care.
Since man's nature is Care, his being is to be projected always toward
a future. Man must be defined by his possibilities: "Man is always in-
finitely more than what he is at any given moment." The future reveals
itself as that toward which existence is projected; the past as that which
* Heidegger has just published an Essay on Nihilism~ which is not yet avail-
able in America. It is proper that he should have at last addressed himself
directly to this subject, since for him, as for Nietzsche before him, it becomes the
central question of philosophy.
WILLIAM BARRETT 37
our existence perpetually transcends-i.e., goes beyond, or rises above-

and toward which also we may turn back in choosing to affirm this or
that part of the past; the present is that in which we make-present,
realize, a future in this transcending of the past. Future, past, and pres-
ent are thus given to us "together as defining an inescapably temporal
existence. Heidegger calls them the three ecstasies of temporality. The
word "ecstasy" here retains the meaning of the Greek original, ekstasis:
displacement. Future, present, past are three aspects into which our
existence is horizontally displaced, and here again man's existence ap-
pears essentially incomplete, perpetually displaced or spread out into
these three phases.
Notice that Heidegger does not conceive of this primary tempo-
rality as a time-series-a series of instants sliding from future through
present into the past. This "vulgar" notion 'Of the time-series as the
primary datum of our temporal existence results fundamentally from
the unauthentic existence 'Of everyday life, where time appears as some-
thing that passes moment by moment. If we have not resolutely taken
our existence into our own hands, and projected it, in full anticipation
'Of our death, tDward the future, then life must appear only as a series of
moments that passively succeed each other. Only on the level of an
authentic existence dD we glilnpse the more basic meaning of future,
present, past as three "ecstasies" of existence.
But Heidegger also affirms, against philosophers like Bergson, that
this "vulgar" concept of time as a series-something measured by clocks
and calendars-has its valid place within the phenomenDlogical structure.
It is a valid aspect of our Being-in-the-world, a valid part of that world
\vhich is the object of our prudent carefulness. Clocks and calendars are
tools, and like all tools they have their validity within that world where
human Care seeks to regulate its projects. However, Care, in its essential
tempo\I'al character, is not defined by clocks and calendars; 'On the con-
trary, clocks and calendars are useful tools because existence is temporal
in its very nature.
Thus Heidegger would attempt to cut the ground from under the
old philosophical quarrel as to whether time is "subjective" or "objec-
tive," by embracing neither alternative: both positions are wrong, but
both seize aspects of the truth, it is only necessary to assign them their
right place (!nd order in the whole phenomenological structure of tem-
porality. It was Aristotle who first enunciated this "vulgar" conception
of time, which has dominated the minds of philDsophers ever since,
including Hegel and Bergson (who tried unsuccessfully, according to
Heidegger, to escape its toils). But the history of philosophy also affords
suspicion that it is not the complete truth about time, since other philos-
ophers, from Plotinus and St. Augustine to Kant, have felt it necessary
to make time "subjective." Though Heidegger claims to forswear-and
incorporate-both alternatives, I think we shall find him belonging, in
the end, to the latter camp- a contention which I shall come back to
later.
Being essentially temporal, existence is also essentially historical.
Parallel to temporality and time we have historicity (Geschichtlichkeit)
and history (Geschichte). Historicity is prior to history, as temporality
is prior to time. Because man's existence is historical, he is able to write
histories that represent history as a flow of events succeeding each other
in time. Our existence is historical, whether we try to escape history or
not, because, perpetually projecting a future, we transcend and yet re-
turn to our past. Perhaps Heidegger's chief contribution is to point out
the significance of the future as defining our past. Tradition is not a
thing) complete in itself, existing outside of the decision that places
us in relation to it; on the contrary, we seize upon this or that aspect
of the past-we create a tradition, in short-in view of the kind of
future we are projecting. We choose ourselves in choosing our personal
heroes out of history. T. S. Eliot, who has provided the best-known
modern discussion of literary tradition, illustrates this point: the tradi-
tion that Eliot talked about as the tradition of English poetry was defined
by the kind of poetry and criticism he himself was projecting for the
future. * The contrast between the histories written by bourgeois and by
socialist historians is the result of their different projects for the social
future of mankind.
"Man makes history," said Marx, "but he does not make it out of
whole cloth." Now the Marxist tradition has tended to affirm the second
part of this proposition at the expense of forgetting altogether about the
first. If Heidegger takes only an abstractly theoretical account of the
second part, his distinction is nevertheless to have fully elucidated the
first part. The present, for Heidegger, is a making-present, and it is only
as a derivative of this that we say man exists in the present. Historically
his present is always the present of his generation. (This historical con-
cept of the "generation" is borrowed from the writings of Dilthey.) Each
generation feels its present as its historical fate (Schicksal). Far from
being something external to which our existence passively submits, this
fate is the very act of self-definition and self-projection by which we
choose it as our fate. But Heidegger hardly notices the fact that one and
* Eliot himself has admitted this point in his essay, "The Music of Poetry,"
in The Partisan Reader, pp. 494-509.
WILLIAM BARRETT 39
the same generation may define for itself many and conflicting fates.
Our generation, we say-and that may mean that our fate, the fate we
choose, is to struggle against the whole of our generation. Heidegger's
catego!fies, of course, would apply to these historical conflicts within a
given generation; the fact that he does not touch upon them shows
something about himself rather than his system-namely, how greatly he
lacks a sharp sense of history in its social and political dimensions.
Whatever his merits, he remains first and last one of the Brahmans of
the great German academic tradition-capable of the most childish self-
deception (alongside of great learning and profound introspective imagi-
nation) in empirical matters; facts to remember in connection with his
later allegiance to the Nazi party.
III. EXISTENTIAL PATHOS AND THE SENSE OF FACT
NO DOUBT) .EACH AGE TENDS TO THINK ITSELF MORE PROBLEMATIC THAN

its predecessors, for one's own existence must always seem more pre-
carious than the past; but in our case we have witnessed such dissolution,
accomplished or imminent, of so many structures of Western civilization
that we seem to have good grounds for believing we are more doubt-
ridden, more uncertain of ourselves, than man in the past. But despite
our questioning, our multiplied sources of information, the twentieth
century is still without any complete view of man, and in that direction
Heidegger's is a document that cannot be neglected. Moreover, French
Existentialism is still a movement very much in progress, and it is im-
possible to foresee the precise directions it will take. We shall aim,
therefore, at those criticisms that lead somewhere, permitting us to take
over what is useful and reject the rest; that mark out the truly existen-
tial directions from the dark wood where speculation has lost the direct
way.
Whatever our ensuing objections, they should not obscure the cri-
tical judgment that Heidegger's must be counted as one of the really
important books of its time. Published in 1927, Being and Time belongs
to the great productive period of postwar Germany, when the defeat of
1918 had actually quickened the spiritual life of the country-had given
Germany its decadence) a state of spiritual refinement France went
through after 1870, without, as after this last war, reducing social
existence in Germany to the level of the animal. Being and Time exhibits
Heidegger as a strange combination of remarkable genius and solemn
actor (I almost said faker), and in his subsequent writings this latter
quality seems to have become more predominant. One suspects that his
intellectual fortunes may have followed the political graph of Germany
over the last decade and a half, a period that witnessed the decline of
the traditional and disciplined bourgeois existence from which the great
German academic tradition had flowered. His seduction by the Nazis
may be taken as one small incident in the accelerating bankruptcy of
that class. Whether or not this intellectual and political parallel is too
pat, only some future review of Heidegger's career will show; but we
WILLIAM BARRETT 41
tend to doubt that any intellect, no matter how theoretical and rarefied
its researches, could have escaped breathing the bad air of a corrupt
na tional existence.
Which are the existential directions here? Where is the existential
point of view confinned, where abandoned? We address ourselves to
these questions by turning immediately to Heidegger's initial ontological
presentation itself-his claim that the analysis of human existence will
provide a new key to the understanding of Being, in general. But this
claim, I believe, is never realized, its persistence is a delusion, and the real
value of the work lies rather in its concrete descriptions of hun1an
existence.
One proof of our contention would seem to be the fact that he has
never published the second part of Being and Time~ which was to have
been the general theory of Being, for which the first, the published part
was only the preliminary clearing of ground. The metaphysics that we
do get in some of his subsequent works-in On the Nature of Cause
(1929) and What is Metaphysics? (1933)-leaves it very questionable
indeed that we have found here a new key to Being that will successfully
upset the whole philosophic tradition of the West. In fVhat is lvJeta-
physics? he speaks of metaphysics as the fundamental happ e ning~ or
experience, within human existence. If metaphysics has now become an
experience, does not that imply that we are no longer to take it as
furnishing us a doctrine-a structure of statements elucidating Being-
and that Heidegger himself must have given up the claim to produce
such a doctrine?
We are told, of course, that he wrote the second part of Being and
Time before the first. The existence of this second part should not
excite one's expectations too much; we can already guess its main direc-
tions fr.om the indications toward the end of the first part. These indica-
tions deal with the subject of time, and as soon as one questions them,
the crucial point in Heidegger's whole enterprise becomes exposed.
Now, Heidegger's whole treatment of the subject turns on the
distinction between temporality and time, which we have already ex-
plained. By means of this distinction, and the phenomenological struc-
ture into which he integrates it, Heidegger claims to cut the ground
from under the old philosophic quarrel whether time is "objective" or
"subjective." Is this really possible, without choosing one or the other,
and does he do it? Certainly, we should be very much surprised if a
Gennan academic thinker escaped altogether the egotism of German
philosophy, and even more surprised if Heidegger, who sees his philo-
sophic mission in analogy with Kant's (see his Kant and the Problem of
Metaphysics, 1934), should throw off completely the influence of that

great Idealist on this point. What is at issue here is not simply the
question of time, however fascinating in itself, but the whole orientation
of Heidegger's existentialism-and also the existentialism of Sartre, who
follows Heidegger in this respect.
The fact is that Heidegger really relapses into idealism on this point.
There is time, he says, because there is the temporality of human ex-
istence. This can only mean that if man did not exist, there would be
no time. However different the terms by which he expresses it, and
however much he seeks to bracket this question of objectivity versus
subjectivity, his view of time, when we disengage its real content, is
essentially subjective.
Thus he describes the traditional, realistic view of time, first ex-
pounded by Aristotle, as the "vulgar conception of time." There is
much to reflect on in this use of the word "vulgar." The German Brah-
mans have always had a strong will to truth, otherwise they .w ould not
have created the greatest tradition of scholarship in the world; but their
will to truth has always been weak in this one respect, that they did
not love the vulgar truths enough-and how you raved against jt.
Friedrich Nietzsche! And those will not be repelled here, who have
taken it upon themselves to love the humble, vulgar truths, recalling
that Freud made a science out of these lowly "rejects from the phe-
nomenal world," and that old Aristotle at the beginning of his biology
warned the Greek gentleman, the kalokagathos, that it was also noble
to soil one's hands with the small, dirty facts of nature. What, then, are
the necessary logical ingredients of this "vulgar conception of time"?
Principally: time exists so long as there is change, which need not all
be the inner flow of consciousness. When Kant sought to locate time in
the mind by abstracting it from the inner flow of consciousness, he was
only drawing upon one example of change, and in respect to the rela-
tions of earlier and later the flow of thought is no different from ~ny
"objective" change in nature, like the earth's going around the sun.
(Heidegger actually admits this point against Kant on p. 419 of Being
and Time.) So long as there is change in nature, whether or not human
cons'ciousness is present, there is a time series based on the relation of
earlier and later, and also containing present, past, future. *
But passing quickly beyond the abstract dialectic, let us plunge
* This is not the occasion to go into the difficulties of constituting the time
series. I hold with McTaggart against Russell that time must involve present,
past, future; I am not aware of any valid argument that these require conscious-
ness.
WILLIAM BARRETT 43
directly into the existential question itself. Is it possible really to grasp

the full pathos of human existence if one accepts Heidegger's (and
Sartre's) view of time? I think not, and I think that we get a far deepet:
view of the pathos of man's existence in time if we tum to another and
older existentialist, Pascal, who says in one of his most famous fragments:
When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the

eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see,
engulfed in the infinite immensity of space of which I am ignorant, and
which knows me not, I am frightened, and am astonished being here
rather than there, why now rather than then.
Why now rather than then? This question haunts the existing individual
as soon as he casts his vision over the immense extent and possibilities
of human history. How, in fact, can Heidegger interpret the moment of
my birth at all, since that is the time at which my temporality comes
to be, and he makes the latter prior in nature? It is human pathos
to have been born "at this time" always, and man, coming into the
world, must always confront his time with something of Hamlet's cry,
"0 cursed spite that ever I was born to set it right!" It is also my
pathos to be excluded frOlTI the centuries preceding me, from the heroes
I love, whose actual existence is a riddle at which I can only guess.
I am cleft and incomplete because I cannot know the future that will
continue after me-will America, for example, ever have a culture,
can mankind achieve a decent and rational society?-although this
future, from which I am cut off, inhabits my thinking at almost all
moments. And even if men should achieve in the future a Utopia in
comparison with what we have now, they too will not escape this pathos,
but will in turn be cut off from their future; and if human development
ceased, and there were no future toward which they could turn, they
would be even more pathetic. These aspects of human pathos cannot
be adequately expressed within the context of Heidegger's distinc-
tion between temporality and time. Pascal strikes me as a superior ex-
istentialist here because he has a superior sense of fact. Analyzing man's
cares and anxieties, Pascal never leaves any doubt as to the objective
world of space and time in which he locates man's being. Man is located
against the background of "the silence of those infinite spaces," against
the teeming world of microscopic animalcules, Cleopatra's nose, and
the grain of sand in Cromwell's kidney. *
Pascal, it seems, grasped certain of Heidegger's concepts better than
* Heidegger distinguishes between spatiality and space in a manner analogous

to his distinction between temporality and time. I think the quotation from Pascal
can be used to develop the same dialectic against this distinction too.
Heidegger himself. In his c0I?-cepts of Geworfenheit and F aktizitaet ~

Heidegger attempted to express two essential aspects of human contin-
gency: that man is thrown (geworfen) into a world he never made
and his existence undertaken amid conditions that are there, given,
factual (faktisc h ~ hence F aktizitaet ). Accordingly, we propose to turn
Heidegger on his head, and say: Man is temporal because he happens to
have been thrown into a world in which there is time. Human conscious-
ness does not add time to the universe, but only the consciousness
of time. To be sure, consciousness makes man's temporality unique
among all beings, but only because through consciousness he grasps his
own existence as immediately spread out in time. What, after all, is the
whole point of Kierkegaard's polemic against Hegel, if not that Existen-
tialism loses its pungency, its sense of fact, when it relapses into Idealism?
PHENOMENOLOGY, AND THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL SURFACE

The fact that Heidegger relapses above into the egotism of German
philosophy brings up one of the principal tensions within his system-
which we mentioned earlier but postponed discussing. One extraordinary
feature of his approach is its sweeping "objectivity": he does not begin
to philosophize from a pure Ego-an inner consciousness abstracted
from all its ~'piritual conditions-but with a world and other people
that are immediately there. But it seems that Heidegger has not really
grasped the extent to which he is r~dical1y overturning phenomenology,
and phenomenological method, as understood and practiced by Husserl.
Let us look at Husserl first. He begins from the natural standpoint
of everyday life, which is a continuous perceiving of an external world,
or environment, surrounding us:
For me real objects are there, definite, more or less familiar . . . . I can
let my attention wander from the writing-table I have just seen and
observed, through the unseen portions of the room behind my back to
the verandah, into the garden, to the children in the summer-house,
and so forth, to all the objects concerning which I precisely know that
they are there and yonder in my immediate coperceived surroundings-
a knowledge which has nothing of conceptual thinking in it, and first
changes into clear intuiting with the bestowing of attention, and even
then only partially and for the most part very imperfectly.
Into this natural perceiving state of everyday life Husserl wishes to

introduce a radically different standpoint: namely, the Cartesian doubt
about "the external world-though, to be sure, his use of this doubt will
be different from Descartes's. I say to myself: it is possible I am being
deceived, there is no table here, I only have the illusion of perceiving it;
I appear to hear shouts from the garden, but there are really no children
WILLIAM BARRETT 45
there. And so on, for all the objects in my "real" world of ordinary
experience. What remains? Only the experiences of consciousness itself.
The real external world of natural normal experience has been discon-
nected, or bracketed, from consciousness. Husserl does not raise this
"doubt" in order to cast uncertainty upon our belief in the existence of
a real world outside our consciousness; it is only his means of bracketing
off, in turn, the whole manifold realm of consciousness, which is now
to become the domain investigated by the rigorous philosophic discipline
he calls phenomenology.
Let us examine this Bracketing with historical eyes for a moment.
Ancient skepticism-I am talking about the pre-Aristotelian skeptics-
did not travel this road of doubt, though it went farther along other
paths. How is this? How is it they did not doubt the external world and
other people, although one fine Sophist went so far as to doubt the pos-
sibility of communication itself and ended up by wiggling his finger in
order to express himself? At the very moment they felt their language
incapable of coping with the eternal flux of nature, these Heraclitean
Greeks, healthy and natural children, could not bring themselves to
doubt the existence itself of nature. They philosophized in the market
place, in the open air and the good Mediterranean sunlight, and it
would have struck them as insanity, rather than doubt, not to recognize
where one was and the people around one. Modem philosophy, since
Descartes, has smelled of the private study and the library, where a man,
in his solitude, perpetually pinching himself to see whether he is dream-
ing, can entertain, or pretend to entertain, beliefs he could not hold in
the open air and light of a city square.
What will do us for a market place? Washington Square on a fine
spring afternoon, where we are lucky to find an empty seat to squeeze
into, and this neighbor, whose existence we are to bracket, probably is
sticking his elbow in our ribs. Here, now, what does this Bracketing
mean? By a process of intense self-hypnosis I may be able to work myself
into a state where I suspend my beliefs, my perceptions seem illusions,
and I can even feel, like a Hindu sage, that all this is a dream-and a
dream from which I shall never awaken. But this state would only be one
among many, and we have to ask: What 'does this bracketing mean-
logically? Simply this: that the proposition, "There are no people
here in the park," is not logically self-contradictory. But the question
remains, whether I do not in fact know that this proposition, however
self-consistent, is actually false. Husserl tells us we are to put within
brackets absolutely everything that is given; but where does the given
end, and suppose the reality of the world, as well as its appearance, is
given? I am to place within brackets not only the objects of my present

perceptions, but of my memories of this place, of other people, of my
total experience. The brackets bulge and break, the mass of the world
is too great to be contained by them. Under th ese co·m plete and con- .
crete conditions (which cannot be expressed in their totality), I do
certainly know that I am in this s.quare, and that there are other people
here. And if this certain knowledge is given, then its object, the reality
of the world and other people, is also given. *
Our argument seems to me a quite rigorous one, a reduction to the
absurd: if we attempt to bracket the world completely, the brackets
break down, and we are necessarily led from a bracketed consciousness
to a world outside consciousness. The mind is inextricably tangled with
things, mind and world are given together. A classical position in fact,
already expressed in Aristotle's great statem'e nt, "The mind is in a
manner all things." \'Ve have but to plunge into consciousness and we
find ourselves among things and within the world.
The procedure of Bracketing served Husserl as a propaedeutic: a
means of isolating the fact of consciousness as a domain for philosophic
investigation. We do not question its usefulness for that-and particu-
larly for guarding against some m aterialistic misunderstandings of con-
sciousness. What we question is the phenomenological orientation itself
as a complete and final attitude of mind, particularly its usefulness as
soon as we want real knowledge-knowledge that bites into reality and
does not remain merely on the surface. In the hands of Sartre, French
existentialism has tended to become all too phenomenological. The
dwelling on the phenomenological surface can become a kind of virginity
of mind. Where does the complete phenomenological attitude lead us?
In aesthetics, for example? To theories of the aesthetic surface, formal-
ism, beauty as disinterested contemplation, etc. , etc.-theories which
leave the complete work of art inexplicable, and were already refuted
by Stendhal and Nietzsche. In psychology? To Sartre's attempt to ex-
plain the anti-Semite by a dialectical manipulation of two very abstract
categories of Being, which hardly touches the facts of anti-Semitism, and
where psychoanalysis gives us real knowledge because it dares to go
below the surface. And what of those "eidetic," or formal, disciplines
* This argument rests upon G. E. Moore's analytic of common sense, and its
dialectic defense, in detail, may be safely left to Moore or his followers. Moore's,
by the way, is one more of the modern efforts to consummate the death of
Descartes. Moore has arrived at the position that he knows certain things con-
cerning which he cannot give any adequate explanation how it is he knows them.
The next step of the C ambridge School would be to declare that its philosophy
is inadequate to what it knows. That would require more daring.
WILLIAM BARRETT 47
Qf mathematics, which were really the gDal Qf Husserl's aspiratiQns?

What a deal Qf pushing and pulling Qn the wharves Df the Italian cities
Df the Renaissance, what hauling and carting Qf the new commerce,
raising and IQwering by cranes, winches, and pulleys, befQre GalileQ CQuid
think Qf fQrces with any degree Qf abstractness, and mQdern mathematics
CDme intO' the world-hand in hand, nDtice, with modern physics, frQm
which it passed intO' formal purity only much later. Existentialism (Qf
the Sartrian schoDI) has nDt prQfited enough from Nietzsche, whO' under-
stood that knDwledge is a fDrm of aggression against nature, a breaking
into Being, a diving beneath the surface. Can the whDle of mQdern science
be understood historically except as the child of the Renaissance, when
man, giving up the passive religious contemplation of the Middle Ages,
enters upon the historical scene as the conqueror Qf nature, as a doer Qf
deeds? And we may recall, finally, the words Df Hegel against Kant, in
a slightly different cDnnection, but which apply against Kant's twentieth-
century follower, Husserl: "Clearly, behind the so-called curtain, which
is to hide the inner world [below the surface of appearances] there is
nothing to be seen if we Durselves do not gO' behind there."
If Heidegger has not pursued our argument about Bracketing, we
might say it is really implicit in his abrupt plunge in medias res, begin-
ning with Being-in-the-world and other peDple. But we should also say
that he had not grasped the radical significance of his starting-point.
For what follDws if cDnsciousness and world (not Heidegger's Well,
which is only a part of a phenomenological structure, but real world
external to cDnsciousness) are given together? Then man-conscious
existence, Dasein-is only one being among other beings, and it is an
illusiDn to' seek for a key to' Being in general from the analyses of human
Care, temporality, ' etc. Heidegger cannot hope to philosophize in any
fashion parallel to the Copernican Revolution of Kant (whO' attempted
to constitute the world from the nature of the knD\ving subject), for
his initial point of departure has already taken him beyond any possible
Kantian approach. (This is the fundamental tension we spoke about
earlier.) But it seems impossible that a German should overcome alto-
gether his youthful discipline in Kant.
This illusion concerning the key to Being is shown, once and for
all, by the final conclusion to\vard vvhich the 400 pages of Heidegger's
analysis points: since human existence is essentially tempDral, woven
warp and woof of future, past and present, he goes Dn to' say that time
is the meaning of Being in general. But what does this mean? Simply,
that it would be impossible to conceive a nontemporal Being. But sup-
pose there were an essentially unchanging (and therefore nontemporal)
thing anywhere in or out of the universe-suppose God existed, to speak

in more traditional terms. Here the actual existence ·is not in question,
but only the possibility; Sartre flatly denies this possibility, but without
proof, and Heidegger, if he is serious, would have to make the same
denial. But I see nothing self-contradictory in the ronception of a non-
temporal Being, and so I must find here, as it would be anyway, the
inference from human being to Being, in general, invalid.
Another illustration of the same point could be taken from his
analysis of causality and the principle of sufficient reason in his essay,
On the Nature of Cause. Heidegger begins with a brief historical review
of the problem · in Leibnitz and Schopenhauer, and then goes on to say
that the problem must be posed within the context of human existence
itself. Man's nature is to transcend his past, and in this act of transcend-
ing he wills to ground his own existence-such is Heidegger's account
of the basis of the Principle of Sufficient Reason. Now it is all very well
to point out with Nietzsche (it is from him that Heidegger is borrowing
here) that causes, laws, reasons follow from man's will to seek a ground;
but this is absolutely no answer at all to the question that Leibnitz, and
other philosophers, were raising. They wished to know whether such a
thing as causality did in fact hold of nature, and (in Leibnitz's case,
particularly) whether there was a cause for nature in its totality. Hei-
degger says absolutely nothing to answer those questions; instead he
turns to an analysis of the self-transcending existence of man, and it
should be quite clear that once the problem is posed within that context,
no answer at all can be given to the older problems.
We come back to the same criticism (and perhaps it is only one
criticism we have throughout) in connection with the essay What is
Metaphysics? Metaphysics, he says, is the fundamental experience of
human existence, arrived at through anxiety, which lays bare the basic
question: Why is there anything at all rather than nothing? There the
essay ends, but if this is a question, presumably there is some answer,
whether we are de facto able to know it or not, or else the question is
meaningless. Heidegger does not deal with this question in its own terms,
but as part of the phenomenology of human existence: Man's being is
perpetually suspended over this question, which he can neither remove
nor answer. But the very nature of the question is that it points beyond
the human condition and whatever phenomenological brackets we place
about that condition. It is the situation of the religious decision with
Kierkegaard, of Pascal's wager; and Pascal is right, we must wager:
even if we choose to hover permanently within it, we have answered this
question, and moved beyond the brackets. If Heidegger holds there is
WILLIAM BARRETT 49
nothing higher than human existence, he has already answered that

tJ:1ere is no reason why anything at all exists rather than nothing,
and this answer takes us beyond phenomenology, for it is a decision on
the universe itself and in its reality. The dialectical irony is that Heideg-
ger's systematic thought ends by arriving at a question, which, so long
as he remains within that system, he can neither answer nor reject.
THE ONE
Once we have traversed our preceding arguments, and placed man
among things and within a world (in a far more real, or realist, sense
than Heidegger), then any empirical source of knowledge becomes rel-
evant, and we must question Heidegger's analysis of this One-the anon-
ymous individual of the crowd-from the viewpoint of the psychoanalyst.
Heidegger tells us that this banal character of everyday existence
is fundamentally guiltless: the One avoids, as much as he can, the really
human responsibility of guilt. He regards his guilt as a thing-something
like a toothache, which he is concerned only to get rid of. The One
does not have the "will to be guilty"-the essential note of conscience
that defines authentic existence. Now, the psychoanalyst would tell us, on
the contrary, that this banal individual is ridden with guilt; that he is
choking with the repressions, resentments, and guilt that arises from
these; and, finally, that he can reach a really human level by willing to
throw off a good deal of his guilt, particularly the parts that arise from
the invalid prescriptions of social fear, the mores of the human hive.
Hence the voice of conscience would become the will not to be guilty-
the will to conquer one's guilt and rise above it. Here Nietzsche speaks
against Heidegger.
The One, we have seen, escapes from his fallen state, and rises
to authentic existence through the experience of his complete isolation
as a Self confronting death. Mterward the public world is restored to
him, but with a difference. (Heidegger's version, we have observed, of
the Kierkegaardian Repetition.) Heidegger, however, hardly deals with
this point adequately. If a realization of our complete solitude in the
face of death is necessary for securing an authentic existence, it is also
true that we must realize our authenticity in communication and ex-
change with others. Now, this criticism has often been made, but never
in such a fashion as to get at the source of Heidegger's inadequacy.
His trouble is that, though he begins by positing our existence as an
existence-with-others, what he describes is an abstraction and not the
concrete co-existence of daily life. Everyday life is not that undiffer-
tJntiated public existence that he describes as the existence of the One;
our banality is not the anonymity of the crowd, except for ce~tain
moments; we move within smaller .communities rather than an abstract
public world at large; within groups, circles of friends and enemies, fl,lll
of the passion of personal intrigue, differ.ences, backbiting, gossip, and
now and then the possible occasions of friendship, the joys and commu-
nication in friendship. H~nce it is within that concrete and extremely
personal context (from which we start) that we must hammer out our
own truthfulness and authenticity. Otherwise the absolute solitude with
which we resolutely confront death becomes a neurotic escape from the
task of being a person, ourself, among the other persons we know.
There is another tension (but perhaps it returns, at bottom, to the
one we have been talking about) in Heidegger's system, which we may
baptize as the opposition between Dilthey and Husser!' Husserl had
claimed for phenomenology .an absolute rigor and universality: abso-
lutely self-contained, embracing its own principles, it reaches truths that
are not relative to the given historical epoch and culture. Now the ques-
tion is whether these claims can be maintained in the case of the
phenomenological analysis of such a subject as death, for example. Hei-
degger, insofar as he is practicing phenomenology, is claiming to produce
an analysis of death, and the mode in which man confronts it,_which is
valid for all times and cultures. Dilthey, on the other hand, had arrived
at what we might call an ontology of historical relativism: no system
can embrace existence totally and finally, and hence every philosophical
system is only a "philosophical fragment" (a Kierkegaardian fragment,
but arrived at by an entirely different path). Hence philosophy must
always take its origin from the prephilosophical from which it can never
cut itself com{lletely off, and this prephilosophical stage of existence
changes with human history. From this point of view, I doubt whether
Heidegger's analysis of death can pretend to any absolute phenomeno-
logical universality. In ages of faith, where belief in an after life is
assumed as a matter of fact, the way in which man confronts death
is altogether different from what Heidegger describes. The medieval
Christian, believing exultantly or fearfully in the next life, could f~ce
death as the simple gateway to another world, and he did not fear the
losing of this existence so much as the loss of happiness hereafter.
Clearly, ~eidegger is analyzing the consciousness of death of our historical
epoch-which has, precisely, foregone the hope of immortality.
Thus we have found Heidegger's to be a system full of the tensions

of opposed orientations. In a sense what he attempts to do is to bring
Pascal and Kierkegaard together with the whole Western tradition of
WILLIAM BARRETT 51
ontology from Aristotle through the Schoolmen. But in this matter we

should remember Pascal's careful avoidance of metaphysics. Pascal is
more aware of the unique character of his existential task: he never
takes his eye off the fact that he is addressing the individual person,
who exists in uneasiness and anxiety and longs for his own salvation,
and that this uneasy individual is not looking for a general metaphysical
system. Here, again, we may invoke our old friend, the Underground
Man. What concern is it of his to have a key to all Being~especially
when we find that the key really unlocks nothing? He wants something
for himself, for his own unique existence, and it is this need to which
both Pascal and Kierkegaard address themselves-whether or not what
they offer will satisfy our Underground Man of today. In short, the
existential point of view in Pascal and Kierkegaard is purer.
The presence of all these tensions within Heidegger's system is a
witness of the extraordinary breadth of his philosophic culture, of the
number of influences he has tried to absorb, but I also take it as the
sign that the great tradition of German philosophy has here reached
its stage of late August, overripe, ready for decline. And perhaps-now
with Germany's destruction as a culture-Heidegger is the last phi-
losopher of that tradition: if there is to' be any future German philosophy,
it will .have to overcome- a good deal of its tradition. A sign that we
have here reached a late stage of cultural development is Heidegger's
peculiar fascination by the pre-Socratics, for what else is this but that
longing for the primitive that always characterizes the stage of over-
ripeness? Heidegger seeks to resuscitate the thought of the pre-Socratics
because he finds in them a consciousness, not yet broken up by analysis,
O'f the unity in existence of man and his world. But we can find this
unity; and more consciously articulate, at least as late as Aristotle, and
the wish to capture the spirit of his predecessors is perhaps only a gra-
~uitous and unneoessary aspiration toward primitivism. Heidegger's
longing for the primitive strikes us as an extraordinary accompaniment
of certain primitive tendencies that run through modern art and mod-
ern literature. Perhaps Western culture as a whole has become overripe.
IV. THE HISTORICAL FRAME: EXISTENTIALISM
AS A "PHILOSOPHIC FRAGMENT"
THE ANCIENT SAGE THALES, WHILE WALKING AND CONTEMPLATING ~HE
stars, fell into a well. A serving girl, who stood nearby, greeted this with
jeers and laughter. She was no intellectual, obviously, otherwise she
might have paused to think that what she had just observed was the
history of philosophy as comedy. Thales was no dreamer, far from
" it; we are told he went on to establish the first monopoly recorded
in history, cornering the olive market in Greece; I like to think he did
this because he had been so annoyed by the girl's laughter. Now, this
well is actuality itself, and the comedy is that the philosopher is always
falling down it. Philosophers have always been haunted by the goal
of a complete system that would grasp its own"principles in a systematic
and self-justifying rigor; but they never quite get free from dependence
upon the prephilosophic stages of language and thought, from which
they would take off into the upper atmosphere. They too are children
of their epoch, and the system turns out in the end a "philosophic frag-
ment" (in Kierkegaard's sense). Probably it never occurre~ to Spinoza,
as he walked past the stock exchange in Amsterdam, that his thought
was particularly related to these counting houses; his attention was on
his own stars, the system he was developing more geometrico from nec-
essary first principles; but we who compare his treatment of the human
passions with the medieval treatment by St. Thomas Aquinas easily see
a relation to those stock exchanges and the nascent capitalism of the
Renaissance. Suppose that history had not accumulated for us since
Thales' day, what kind of philosophic questions would we be asking?
If we did not know any more science than he, we would probably still
be asking with him whether water is the substance of all things.
By turning to history as our summing up, we do not pass to some-
thing extraneous to our argument, but simply continue our previous
criticisn1, in the direction of the concrete and actual, bringing abstrac-
tions face to face with the sense of fact, exhibiting philosophy itself in
its existential incompleteness, as it opens out upon the world in which
it came into birth. This is but to bring the existential point of view to
its completeness, and that is why we place this bit of history at the end
WILLIAM BARRETT 53
rather than the beginning. No doubt, this may involve some cynicism
toward philosophy, but it is a kind of cynicism already expressed in
Kierkegaard and Nietzsche; and here, as with women, perhaps it is
only cynicism that permits us to love philosophy wisely.
Nevertheless a very long chain of causes stretches from those Am-
sterdam counting houses to Spinoza's treatment of the passions; we do
not deny it, but neither do we intend to become involved in one of the
most intricate and difficult quarrels of historical theory. Instead, we
simply assume that human consciousness exists completely in its historical
epoch, and ask what correlations that permits us to make. Perhaps a
cultural event is "explained" only in the sense and to the degree that the
correlations with other historical events are suitably dense and coherent.
The historical period we have been dealing with here is obviously
the period of Romanticism in Europe, and we should like to take as
integral a view of it as we can of the Renaissance-an impossibility
perhaps, since we are still in the midst of this period, and its final
horizon, still in the future, is darkened to us. What we can distinguish as
a Renaissance consciousness ' is already found in the painting of the
fourteenth century, but it does not appear in the philosophers until the
fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. The artists are the sensitive
reeds that first vibrate to the new currents which flow into the historical
epoch and which give it preci ely the feeling and exultation that it is
new. The Renaissance artists themselves need not have been expressly
aware of this new attitude toward existence, which they possessed only as
an ingredient in their way of seeing the world; it became conscious and
explicit in the philosophers. If Romantic art was also new and revolu-
tionary, then it too must have grasped some radically new areas of
human existence, which the philosophers have subsequently been strug-
gling to bring to explicit conceptual expression.
ART
Modern art-that art that begins with the Romantic movement-
has become characterized by its progressive morbidity, its sensational and
startling character, the presentation of hUlnan life in its extreme situa-
tions. The art produced in the first part of the eighteenth century, fun-
damentally classical in . its directions, deals with the human in its uni-
versal dimensions, with wit, n1anners, morals: man as a creature of a
definite nature, at the center of a world which is ordered and under-
stood, and does not exist on the edge of chaos. The novel, which is so
peculiarly a modern literary form, exists, but it has not yet become the
modern novel. Thus Fielding's Tom Jones and Stendhal's Red and the
Black are both versions of the picaresque novel dealing with a young
man's adventures in the world, but it would be hard to find two works
more different in fundamental outlook. Where Fielding's subj ect is the
existence of human foibles against the background of a definite concep-
tion of human nature, Stendhal has introduced a new and daring sense
of experiment with man: all the stable forms of society are seen to be
perched over the chaos of the irrational, the arbitrary, and the contingent
in man himself.
We also hear these tones of discord in the new music. Turning
from the melancholy portions of Handel's "Water Music" to one of
Beethoven's last quartets, we have entered a different world. In Handel,
the emotion is completely contained and formed; sad and melancholy,
it is torn neither by doubts nor uncertainties; we seem to be present
at some recognized social occasion and chamber of mourning, where
our grief is shared, in essential human communion, by other people
there. When we hear one of Beethoven's last quartets, we seem to be
alone. The solid human world whose contours were present in Handel
has dissolved into questions, doubts, anxieties. Through this dissolution
of accepted musical form we hear the dissolution of a whole world of
accepted status. The naked ego has come into the world, the individual
has been born into bourgeois society with all its pressures and conflicts.
This is the music of anxiety, and, as such, it strikes us as peculiarly
mode'J1n music.
A French critic has found in the paintings of Picasso a "terrible
and modern beauty." An important chapter of intellectual history could
be written on this particular use of "modern"-the peculiar reveFbera-
tions and associations it has for contemporary ears. When Baudelaire
wrote of Flaubert, and found Madame Bovary "so profoundly modern"
(his italics) , he was illustrating this meaning that seems to set the art
of the last 150 years off from the great bulk of earlier art. It is hard
to know just when this peculiar awareness of modernity begins, but tqe
first conscious uses of it I find in Stendhal, when he poses such ques-
tions for his age as, "What kind of art do we, we moderns of the year
1830, want?"
Now, this sense of the modern is quite different from what launched
the seventeenth-century debate in France and England about the rela-
tIve merits of ancients and moderns. That debate arose in the historical
period when the new national literatures had already developed to the
point where they had produced works that invited comparison with the
great classics of the ancient world. However, the comparison was be-
tween works on the same terrain of consciousness-works of the same
WILLIAM BARRETT 55
genus, which were essentially comparable one with another: Milton

with Virgil, for example. But in Baudelaire's use of "modern" there is
the feeling of something new in kind, strictly incomparable with what
has gone before. .
In this sense, it might not be wrong to describe modern art, where
it has succeeded, as more profound than the art of the past, provided
that we do not take this to mean "superior" or "more perfect," since
profundity may be purchased by the loss of other qualities. Dostoevsky
is often more profound than Shakespeare, but we should not say that
he was a greater writer. What does this modern profundity mean? In
what sense does Beethoven seem to us more profound than Handel?
Because what we hear in Beethoven seems at times just on the edge of
articulate sound, as if the music were hovering over the inexpressible and
drawing it into itself. The experience with which modern art struggles
has become more frantic, homeless, solitary, speechless. The pages in
literature of which I am reminded by some of the last quartets are certain
passages in Kafka's Journals-and precisely those passages where he
talks of the mystery of suffering and expression, of suffering become
lucid in expression, the speechless and the articulate. What we hear,
then, in Beethoven are the opening chords in the Age of N eur+osis.
SOCIETY
But what art gives expression to has come into being through other
causes. Two large-scale historical events run parallel to the movement
we are considering: (1) the industrial revolution, and the consequent
establishment of the bourgeoisie (which, of course, as a class had emerged
long before) at the helm of modern society; and (2) the uneasiness and
tensions within bourgeois society, its inability to solve its problems, its
rapid and startling decline within this century, and the consequent
despair in the midst of this class.
The bourgeois brings with him into history a scrupulous concern
for the individual. But this only opens the subject to us, since it is nec-
essary to go on to explain why this concern for the individual was con-
tent to exercise itself in the eighteenth century in the field of social and
political criticism, whereas in the nineteenth century it is turned in upon
personal existence in and of itself, and philosophers begin to go in
search of the concrete and existential.
The French Revolution brought into existence what Karl Jaspers
has aptly termed "the epochal consciousness." Kant himself remarked
a propos of the events ~f 1798:
56 WHAT IS EXISTENTIALISM7
Such a phenomenon in history can never be forgotten, inasmuch as it

has disclosed in human nature the rudiments of and capacity for better
things which, prior to this, no student of political science had deduced
from the previous course of human events.
This epochal consciousness begets the modern historical sense. History,

as a critical and scientific study, really began in the eighteenth century,
but that century, still too much under the influence of Plutarch, tended
. still to think of history as "philosophy teaching by examples," to cite
Bolingbroke's words. The modem historical sense came into being
after the French ReVOIlution had shown that human society might be
remade from top to bottom by the actions of men. Henceforth the most
deeply embedded social forms could appear as potentially transitory, and
human existence in the past could be seen as relative always to its his-
torical conditions of social and economic organization. But if society
now appeared capable of such profound transformations for human
betterment, it could also, on the other hand, be seen as hovering on the
e~ge of the precipice, capable of some really radical smash-up and con-
sequent regression to a lower phase. Hence this epochal consciousness
brings to birth in the nineteenth century a peculiarly new kind of prophet
of despair or degeneration-Stendhal, De Tocqueville, Nietzsche, Burk-
hardt-that we have seen multiply in the historical pessimists of the
twentieth century.
The existential notion of "authenticity" itself has a great deal to
tell us about the progress of life under the bourgeois order. Let us speak
for a moment like Nietzsche, who used to ask of other thinkers, "What is
his truth, their truth, and how does it measure against my truth?"-
the point being that we completely grasp another doctrine only by_
taking the measure of the man who has brought it to utterance. What,
then, is their truth-the truth of Heidegger and Jaspers-when they
enunciate their category of an authentic life? We catch the clearest
glimpse of what is historically involved from Jaspers' own book about
our age, Man in the Modern World. The category of authenticity is the
fear which the bourgeois, the academic Brahman, expresses at the en-
croachment of the masses, of the technological agglomeration of the
life-order under modern society, upon his own spiritual existence. This
is also what we find expressed in the writings of the Spanish philosopher
Ortega y Gasset. Authenticity could not become such a compelling
concept if modern society did not make it more and more difficult,
almost impossible, to live a human life.
This is their truth, but let us not fall into the error that by placing
a man's truth we rob it of its veracity. Marx prophesied rightly the
WILLIAM BARRETT 57
breakdown of capitalist society and the consequent decay of the bour-

geois class itself, but we must recognize that the aristocrats and the bour-
geois Brahmans have been on their own side quite as good prophets
about the quality of life that is now succeeding Europe's bourgeois civil-
ization. I am writing the history of the next hundred years, said Nietzsche,
and that history will be one of Nihilism; this was as good a prophecy as
Marx's, though Nietzsche, of course, failed to predict that when this
Nihilism came it would express itself in his own language of power,
both in German and Russian! No, we cannot rob their truth of its truth-
fulness: a.uthenticity has become a profoundly meaningful, -indeed
inescapable, category for all of us because the modern world, the modern
city, has made it increasingly difficult for any person to lead a life that
is really his own. The forces of advertising, mass culture, crowding,
traffic congestion, standardization, regimentation in and out of war,
beat upon us all, threatening to reduce our personalities to mere figments
and shadows. The man of the early eighteenth century (the man of
leisure and means, that is, for the masses were not thought of as falling
within the really human pale) could not have felt that the achievement
of a personality was his task in life. He took the fact of his own per-
sonality for granted.
Now, there are many historical sources for this uneasiness toward
the possibility of achieving a human life. The crudest and most powerful
cause may be the fact that n1an has not yet shown himself capable of
controlling and shaping in some rational way the technological order, or
disorder, that surrounds and strangles modern life like a rampant jungle
of metallic liana plants.
The industrial revolution, on its intellectual rather than directly
social side, is the triumphant emergence of technology at the forefront
of modern life. Technology is the visible and material incarnation of
science in the social life. Modern science had, of course, begun to exist
long before this period. But by this time the scientific Weltanschauung
comes to the fore: science has become the chief intellectual activity of
modern man. The newcomer threatens the previous incumbent: religion.
The Enlightenment had already been at work in the eighteenth century,
and accomplished its task of religious criticism in the name of Reason.
Henceforth, the nineteenth century will be engaged in the passionate
struggle to recapture, or to demolish finally, what is actually in the
process of wi thering away.
Hence, the startling fact that in this broad movement we are
considering science becomes a "problem" to philosophy in a way never
seen before. No doubt, there are certain antirationalist strains present
throughout this movement. But perhaps too much attention may have
been called to them, since the presence of antirationalism does not char-
acterize this movement essentially. When a philosopher like Bergson-
criticized perhaps as much as any figure here for antirationalism-speaks
of certain deficiencies of the "intelligence" in comparison with "intui-
tion," we must also remember that the body of his writings, both in
form and concentration, witness an intense devotion to the intellect.
Nevertheless, in this movement science does appear as something to be
"transcended" in one way or another, or to be reintegrated within the
total of human experience. Kierkegaard is the most dramatic: in his
category of the "exception" he announces that individual existence, with
its dread, freedom, and absolute decisions, forever escapes all science.
Nietzsche thinks that the results of science call for a desperate affirma-
tion on the part of man, the hero, who would look truth in the face.
Whitehead would replace science within the fundamental "feeling" pat-
tern of human experience; Heidegger would see science itself as a pas-
sion and mode of human existence; Dewey attempts, in a more matter-
of-fact way, to reintegrate science into the biological and cultural matrix.
To put it another way, Dewey seeks to give science its concrete and
proper place in the human community. Science has become a "problem"
not simply because its appearance has upset the intellectual economy by
undermining traditional religious beliefs. This disruption in the intellec-
tual economy is itself a reflection of the disruption in the actual social
economy that science, in its visible incarnation as technology, has brought.
Science remains something to be reintegrated into the intellectual econ-
omy, as its material counterpart has not been integrated into the social
economy. Technology has raised immeasurably the productive forces of
modern society, but at the same time produces the most drastic convul-
sions and contradictions within society in the form of crises, pauperization
of the masses, uprooting of the peasantry, and wars which, in their
mechanical horror, virtually make war itself a new historical phenomenon.
It is questionable whether science would have become such a passionate
"problem" for philosophy if its social embodiment in the form of tech-
nology had not become such an insoluble problem to modern society.
In his vision of this social aspect, Dewey outstrips all the other philoso-
phers we have touched upon here.
Examination of Romantic literature 'deepens this correlation. Roman-
ticism appears first as a literary phenomenon in England, precisely the
country in which the industrial revolution makes its first appearance.
Romanticism appears here as an intense longing for return to the past,
and the particular past longed for is the medieval past. This is a remark-
WILLIAM BARRETT 59
able phenomenon. The first Romantic literature appears in England after

1750, and it is precisely at this time that the development of factories
and industrialism is in process of uprooting the peasant , from his feudal
and medieval past. This past slumbered around the Englishman in his
villages, in the thousand inherited habits and customs of their daily
life-slumbered unnoticed, its medieval origin being on the whole hidden;
but at the moment when this richness of rural life is about to be sub-
merged under industrialism, the medieval past-"Merrie England"-
acquires an astounding enchantment. The irony of history could not
be more pronounced.
But not only when it seeks return to the medieval past, with all its
imagined folk-richness, is Romanticism in quest of a renewed intensity
for ordinary existence. Medievalism is only a station on the way in
pursuit of the intensity of life in general. Distant times 'and places acquire
an intoxicating glamor precisely because industrialism has impoverished
the richness of ordinary existence. A philosophy which gives itself com-
pletely to concrete existence takes its point of departure from the same
fundamental impulse: the philosopher too is seeking to resuscitate the
richness of existence, to restore its passion, decision, and meaning. Kierke-
gaard announces this goal with the greatest possible clearness and de-
CISIon.
Romanticism did not stop at literature, it entered life jn a very
direct way. The Roma,ntic revolt could not have confined itself merely
to the heroes of its fiction; its existence overflowed the realms of imag-
ination and art, .and posed the problem of life directly. Rimbaud, who
occurs in the ripe or overripe stage of the movement, becomes a kind of
parable of all the extreme situations posed by the whole of Romanticism.
His history is a passionate incarnation of the categories that existential
philosophers have been struggling with on their own field-the Absolute
Decision, Resoluteness, Choice of Oneself. Romanticism posed the prob-
lem of the individual as it had never been posed before in human his-
tory. Considered from this point of view, Heidegger's philosophy repre-
sents the scholasticism, the final anatomy, of the Romantic individual.
RELIGION
It has been obvious through all the foregoing that the dissolution
of a world of status has also been the dissolution of a received religious
framework. Perhaps the decay of religion over the last two centuries
has been the most profound event touching the life of man-at least, '
his spiritual and conscious life-though, as we have seen, there have
been more drastic changes modifying the rest of his being. With this tradi-
tional religious framework speculative philosophy went hand in hand;

and the passing away of speculative philosophy-the growing unwilling-
ness even to attempt it-entails more consequences than I believe mOISt
rationalist philosophers have been able or willing to see.
But we must see this disappearance of the accepted religious frame
on the level of existence first, for the withering away of religion does not
operate only on the intellectual level of belief. Religion surrounded the
daily life of man, sanctifying his birth and death, making the ordinary
occasions of life resonant with the tremendous echoes of supernatural
existence. One cannot forget, for example, the extent to which Chris-
tianity exists as a fundamental mode of feeling and thinking in such
"rationalist" writers of the eighteenth century as Pope and Swift. We
see now that Swift (and this is true of Pope too) was sometimes pene-
trated by the rationalism of his epoch much more than he was aware of:
from his enthusiastic picture of the completely rational Houyhnhnms we
hardly get the impression that they have any need of a Savior to redeem
them by His death, whereas a Savior could have no meaning for the
Yahoos since they are beyond redemption. But Christianity was never
consciously in question for Swift, it was his accepted view o.f life and
the world, taken over along with the rationalist prejudices of his epoch,
and he felt no. tension at all between the two inheritances. So Pope on
his deathbed received extreme unction quite as a matter of course-
although a friend remarked that it was simply Socrates' sacrifice of a
cock to Aesculapius.
Some historians and critics have written of the conflict between Ro-
"manticism and Classicism as if this latter were simply a repetition of an-
cient Greece and Rome. The fact is that a fundamental Christian content
lies at the basis of Classicism both in England and France, and the literary
models from classical antiquity are superposed upon this content. Romanti-
cism is not simply the rejection of the "unities," the heroic couplet, the
Alexandrine, or any other accepted literary convention or form; its
opposition to classicism takes place at a deeper level: the Romantic sensi-
bility, the Romantic passion for existence, posit an attitude towards life
which rejects this inherited Christian content; and although one early
wave of Romanticism came in the form of a religious revival, it pursued
mainly the intoxicating trappings of religion, liturgy, incense, stained
glass, and medieval cathedrals. It is no accident that the acutest of
modern critics, T.S. Eliot, joins his affirmation of classicism in literature
to an affirmation of Christianity in religion; Eliot sees very well that his
acceptance of a Christian view of life involves the rejection of Romanti-
cism. Eighteenth-century man did not feel this passionate necessity to ex-
WILLIAM BARRETT 61
plore concrete human existence in itself as a subject matter for philosophy;

the Romantic quest for the intensity of experience was, in part, its com-
pensation for the loss of the eternal horizons of religion-as the Christian
sinner plunges desperately into the intensity of his sin believing die
price he pays for it is an eternal loss. Kierkegaard is the only believing
Christian among the figures we have considered, and his exception con-
finns our rule. For what is involved in Kierkegaard's lifelong struggle
against institutional Christendom but the fact that the Christian attitude
toward life can no longer be presupposed as a datum, that it has been
cottnpletely forgotten by everybody, and must be struggled for to be
recovered?
The fact that these historical phenomena with which one is bound
to correlate this philosophical movement are still the main forces con-
ditioning, whether for good or evil, our own lives, is a witness of how
decisive the problems still are for our own thinking and living. If most
of these correlations have been already familiar, this does not mean
that they have already yielded their last drop of insight for our own
particular uses. On the contrary, we are still in an. uncertain relation to
Romanticism: no one has yet delivered at our feet in a neat bundle
the final results, conclusions, and generalizations, which would permit
us to declare a chapter finally closed. Every fundamental problem of our
contemporary existence sends us back to this historical context; and,
questioning this historical context for its meaning, we are brought back
in turn to the problem of our own existence.
We come back to our Underground M an. He has been with us
throughout, and it is obvious frlo m the preceding history that we have
not yet gotten rid of him. One of his most p~werful talents is to be
capable. of the most startling reincarnations, and in various guises and
disguises he has been haunting the literature of this century. He is the
protagonist of Celine's Journey to the End of Night, of Sartre's La
Nausee, and with a slightly different temperament, he is M eursault, the
hero of Albert Camus's The Stranger. And if those incoherent creatures
of thunder and lightning, William Faulkner's heroes, were to think, they
too would exhibit an underground consciousness. .
He also walks the streets of real life. 1 used often tlO meet him in
New York cafeterias during the long Depression of the thirties, afLd even
now I still hear him speaking through the voice of some of our disabused
intellectuals condemned to the penal servitude of American life. The last
time I ran into him in the flesh was, oddly enlo ugh, at Cambridge
(Mass.), as he was coming away from the Ingersoll Lecture on Immor-
tality by Alfred North Whitehead. I should like sometime to publish
a complete report of his comments on that lecture.
But this Underground Man is dangerous-let us not forget that.
His reappearances are not always philosophical and harmless. It is pain-
ful, but one has to report the truth that in the twentieth century he also
became a Nazi functionary and burned bodies at Buchenwald; and right
now he is operating as an NKVD official herding thousands of Euro-
peans to their death.
Since he originally came oin the scene, another newcomer has ap-
peared, ready with new proposals in his behalf. ((I can cure him,"
says the psychoanalyst. This newcomer has performed some redoubt-
able feats, for which he has very serious claims on our attention,'
but we are inclined to be a little skeptical that he can turn this particular
trick anywhere in the very mear future-especially since the newcomer
himself has shown us new and unsuspected underground depths in all
of us.
This Underground Man is dangerous because he carries the ex-
plosive charge of his freedom. Perhaps, though, it will also be the fault
of the Crystal Palace if he has to stick pins into people in order to
assert his freedom. And dangerous though he be, pins and all, he is cer-
WILLIAM BARRETT 63
tainly more interesting than the Crystal Palace itself) ant} we are likely
to take his side against it since we too are human) like him> and cannot
tolerate boredom very long. Since we are still livimg with him) still living
him) our only recourse is to seek the least destructive and most valuable
levels at which to release his aggressions) which can also become his
freedom) since every act of freedom is an aggression against the void.
Now) for some 2500 years philosophers have been trying to build
their own Crystal Palaces) in which this surd) this creature of shadow)
would become as ·transparent as the walls of this geometrical hive. But
the prolegomena to. every future philosophy seems to be that it in turn
will crumble and be superseded) that a philosophy is always less than
the creature who produces it. Now a new step is being taken: it is
proposed to place this creature with all his explosive liberty at the very
center of philosophy itself. It will be interesting to see what comes of
this.
WHAT IS EXISTENTIALISM?
BY WILLIAM BARRETT
liThe nineteenth century," Andre Malraux declared recently, IIfaced the

question. Is God dead; the twentieth century now faces the question. Is Man
dead?"
Dramatic as it is, the above statement can hardly be considered extreme in

this era of the atomic bomb. The philosophy of Existentialism is one distinctly
modern effort to seek some embracing interpretation of the human condition.
and place the problem of man in a new and radical light. Hence it has become
the most discussed movement of European thought for decades.
This pa,m phlet not only presents and analyzes the main themes in Exis-
tentialist thought. but also attempts to place the movement within the larger
contexts of modern philosophy and history which give it its present perspective
and significance. WHAT IS EXISTENTIALISM? is indispensable for an under-
standing of the intellectual situation today.
William Barrett. author of WHAT IS EXISTENTIALISM? is an associate

editor of PARTISAN REVIEW.
/
This is the second in a series of pamphlets published by
PARTISAN REVIEW 4S ASTOR PLACE NEW YORK CITY 3

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SERIES NUMBER TWO

SERIES NUMBER TWO

New economic Telations will be established, worked out with mathematical

frightfully rational. 0/ course boredom may lead you to anything. It

He vomits up nature and reason:

Indeed, he is capable of vomiting up everything the nineteenth century

Unfortunately for any such simple outline, history is never a matter

degree of expressiveness. Even Dewey, who would seem to be without

experience of the way tradition sneaks back to destroy its destroyers,

as concrete. Or, more precisely, of overlooking the degree of abstraction

creteness? Isn't it really the oldest question in philosophy itself, the

(We may pause here to observe that philosophers do not seem to be

H: It is time we came directly to the point. Where do you propose

you. Suppose we follow it concretely. You are fond of the English

W: Well, the problem is, to put it logically, simply whether my

God; on the contrary, it is the result of an absolute decision and a leap,

At which point we may conveniently ring down the curtain. Our

HEGEL AND KIERKEGAARD

its differences explicit and then attempting to unify them in a larger

aspects: he demanded not only that the universe be intelligible in its

This unhappy consciousness-divided and alienated from itself-is merely

THERE MIGHT SEEM TO BE SOME SORT OF CONTRADICTION IN THIS TITLE,

BEING AND TIME

thinking. Hegel sought to incorporate the whole of history within the

HUMAN EXISTENCE: PRIMARY FEATURES OF DESCRIPTION

sion to interpretation and understanding. Thus, speech is not primarily

* Unfortunately, Heidegger plays badly with this manner of speech in his

places this existence in a new and altogether different perspective.

character of experience as we move through the world about the tasks

Man, as long as he is in the world, is to be possessed by Care. The fable

day existence. What, then, are the main points in a phenomenology of

which we make our own existence. Popular language almost recognizes

exists. Orestes, confronting Jupiter, can always say no--even to the

But is this resolute confrontation of death possible in fact as well

our existence perpetually transcends-i.e., goes beyond, or rises above-

NO DOUBT) .EACH AGE TENDS TO THINK ITSELF MORE PROBLEMATIC THAN

Metaphysics, 1934), should throw off completely the influence of that

directly into the existential question itself. Is it possible really to grasp

When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the

* Heidegger distinguishes between spatiality and space in a manner analogous

Heidegger himself. In his c0I?-cepts of Geworfenheit and F aktizitaet ~

PHENOMENOLOGY, AND THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL SURFACE

Into this natural perceiving state of everyday life Husserl wishes to

given? I am to place within brackets not only the objects of my present

Qf mathematics, which were really the gDal Qf Husserl's aspiratiQns?

thing anywhere in or out of the universe-suppose God existed, to speak

nothing higher than human existence, he has already answered that

Thus we have found Heidegger's to be a system full of the tensions

ontology from Aristotle through the Schoolmen. But in this matter we

THE ANCIENT SAGE THALES, WHILE WALKING AND CONTEMPLATING ~HE

genus, which were essentially comparable one with another: Milton

Such a phenomenon in history can never be forgotten, inasmuch as it

This epochal consciousness begets the modern historical sense. History,

breakdown of capitalist society and the consequent decay of the bour-

able phenomenon. The first Romantic literature appears in England after

tional religious framework speculative philosophy went hand in hand;

plore concrete human existence in itself as a subject matter for philosophy;

liThe nineteenth century," Andre Malraux declared recently, IIfaced the

Dramatic as it is, the above statement can hardly be considered extreme in