140
PARTISAN REVIEW
historicity. They refuse to "repair" existence by means of logic,
but they do not shrink from healing it with the "absurd." In
rationalist philosophies "law" and "science" are often confused
with "inevitability" and "necessity"; this, say the existentialists,
leads to resignation and apologetics. But existentialists conceive
of human unhappiness as fate, and as Benjamin Fondane showed
in detail in
La Conscience Malheureuse,
their attack on reason
for preaching resignation is itself an appeal for men to be resigned.
It is true that the existentialists do not walk out of existence
proudly-like the Hegelians-they walk out of it dejectedly;
ordinary people are still left with the old burdens.
In the most recent form of existentialism all this is almost
cynically admitted. Heidegger has hypostatized Kierkegaard's
categories of Sin, Anguish, Guilt, etc., trans£orming them into
eternal entities on which man cannot act but which are themselves
preconditions of his activity. Heidegger's social philosophy defines
as generic traits of existence the conditions of the individual's
"self-realization" in a totalitarian society: he divides the people
into an elite of philosophers whose task is "to break open the
depths of existence" by rising from the level of "care" to that of
"anguish," and the anonymous masses who have to content them·
selves with "care." There is no place in this world for salvation,
redemption, recovery-and no other world exists.
Ill
One can hardly dispose of Kierkegaard by noting his con·
tradictions, his ambiguous personality, and the fate of his doctrine
in the hands of his disciples. Something in Kierkegaard's thinking
asserts its universality and logic not only against shallow refuta·
tions but even against the mythical terms in which it is stated.
This is the concept of "recovery." We doubt whether Job actually
recovered what he lost. But his claims on existence are completely
justified. To think otherwise would be to endorse existence as it
is, and to join the moralists and priests. For man is not at home
or at ease in this universe. It goes without saying that "recovery"
is a fantastic category, but the converse of this category, that
of
man's alienation (as Marx has it) is still the most precise formu·
lation of the human condition. In refusing to accept the com·
