38
PARTISAN REVIEW
mediately and nakedly appears the one thing that from now on is
to be the only interesting
one-That
it is. Hence, this philosophy from
its start glorifies contingency, since there Reality falls directly upon
Man as altogether incalculable, unthinkable, and unforeseen. Hence
the enumeration of the philosophical "extreme situations" (Jaspers),
which means the situations in which Man is driven to philosophize,
such as death, guilt, fate, chance, since in all these experiences Reality
shows itself as something that cannot be evaded, cannot be resolved
by thought. In these situations Man arrives at the consciousness that
he is dependent- not upon some individual thing and not even upon
some general character of Limitation,-but dependent on the fact
that he
is.
Therefore too, since essence obviously has nothing more to do
with existence, modern philosophy turns away from the sciences,
which investigate the
What
of things.
As
Kierkegaard would put it,
the objective truth of science is indifferent since it is neutral to the
question of Existenz, and the subjective truth of the "existing indivi–
dual" is a para'clox, since it can never be objective, never universally
valid. Since Being and thought are no longer identical, since through
thought I can no longer enter into the proper reality of things, since
the nature of things has nothing to do with their reality, then science
may be whatever it happens to be- in any case it no longer yields
truth for man to possess, no truth that interests man. This turning
away from science has often been misunderstood, especially because
of Kierkegaard's example, as an attitude stemming from Christianity.
To this philosophy, passionately intent upon Reality, it's no concern
that, in view of another and truer world, occupation with the things
of this world distracts one from salvation of the soul (as
curiositas
or
dispenio).
What this philosophy wishes is
this
world,
this
world
completely, which has lost precisely only its character as Reality.
The unity of Being and thought presupposed the pre-established
coincidence of essence and existence, that, namely, everything think–
able also exists and every existent, because it is knowable, must also
be rational. This unity was destroyed by Kant, the true,
if
also clan–
destine, founder of the new philosophy: who has likewise remained
till the present time its secret king. Kant's proof of the antinomy–
structure of Reason, and his analysis of synthetic propositions which
proves that in every proposition in which something is asserted about
Reality we go beyond the concept (the
essentia)
of a given thing–
had already robbed man of the ancient security in Being. Even Chris–
tianity had not attacked this security, but only reinterpreted it within
