478
PARTISAN REVIEW
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.•· "1" ..................
will be seen to have
prepa~ed th~gro~d-·f-;;the
present movement.
Nevertheless, the immediate impetus of what Benda calls "one of
the most fashionable of our philosophies" comes obviously from Heideg–
ger, Husser! and Jaspers-seen against a historical background of post–
war merging into ante-war, unemployment, revolution, spiritual defeat
and dismay. These men were discovered, translated and assimilated by
a generation which, in the twenties and thirties, had passionately ab–
sorbed Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. It would be absurd for me to try to
sum up in a few words the work of all these tortured Nordics, yet it is
revealing to note, however briefly, certain of their ideas which seem
to
have inspired the men with whom we are concerned. First there is the
distinction between philosophy and science, the point upon which modem
metaphysics, with its inferiority complex, invariably begins. To philo–
sophize, says Jean Beaufret, is not to throw light upon the objectivity of
things; and he quotes Jaspers : "it is audacious (
Wagnis)
to force one's
way (
dringen)
into the foundations
(grund)
of the yet unexplored cer–
titude which man can have about himself." The philosopher who seeks
this certitude,
in fear and trembling,
is profoundly aware of the notion
which so terrified Dostoevski: man's awful liberty, his dizzy realization
that "all is equally possible." As Beaufret puts it: "c'est bien un vertige
qui s'empare en effet de l'homme
quand il fait naufrage dans la pos–
sibilite."
Camus' hero in L'
Etranger
is thus "shipwrecked in possibility,"
though American critics will surely prefer to see in him, simply, a victim
of what we call alienation. But the philosopher is concerned to define
the conditions of this shipwreck, and the central problem of philosophy
thus becomes the problem of Being. Since my arrival here I have had
time to find and read only those works which, quite apart from their
philosophical inspiration, possessed sufficient literary quality to tempt
my rare leisures. Yet it is already evident that the notions by which
Heidegger defines that special type of being, Man, have not only in–
formed the very warp and woof of certain works of art but have seeped
into the most common critical jargon, such as one finds on the literary
page of a dozen Parisian weeklies. Man differs from other existants in
that his awareness of his existence,
which tends perpetually to become
self-understanding,
is radical to his being. Hence, his mode of existence is
open; it involves a constant disquiet-the Heideggerian
Sorge;
man is
ein
Wesen der Ferne,
the existant who, constantly concerned to know how
he stands with his fundamental possibility, engages his being totally in
every action. Man's fate is this engagement. "He comes from afar," and
every flicker of his consciousness reiterates the question of his being.
His existence is a series of projects.
It is at this point that Heidegger's existentialism, which strikes me
as nothing so much as painfully gratuitous, becomes a usable literary
ideology. The notion of man, the
Dasein
(the "being aware that he is
there") is completed by the sense of his
dereliction,
by the loss of his
