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PARTISAN REVIEW
many directions, but not a step beyond him, if in fact they have not
fallen, consistently and desperately, a few steps behind him. For
they all, with the one great exception of Jaspers, have given up at
some point Kant's basic conception of freedom and dignity. When
Schelling desired to "have" the "real Master of Being," he wished
again to participate in the movement of the world, from which, since
Kant, the free man had been excluded. Schelling flees again to a
philosophic God, precisely because he accepts from Kant "the fact
of decline," without, however, making use of Kant's extraordinary
calmness in simply coming to terms with it. For Kant's tranquillity,
which seems so imposing to us, is in the end due only to the fact that
he was strongly rooted in the tradition that philosophy is essentially
identical with contemplation-a tradition which Kant himself un–
consciously destroyed. Schelling's "positive philosophy" seeks refuge
in God, in order that he "may oppose the fact of
defection/'
in order
that he may bring Man-who, as soon as he found freedom, lost his
Reality-to a Reality.
The reason why Schelling is usually overlooked in discussions of
Existenz philosophy is that no philosopher has taken his path towards
the solution of Kant's difficulties concerning subjective freedom and
objective necessity. Instead of a ·"positive philosophy" they- sought
(with the exception of Nietzsche) to reinterpret Man, in order that
he might enter again into this world that robs him of value; his
failure was to belong to his Being and not merely to be his fate, was
to be due not to a nature hostile to him, because it was completely
determined by causal law, but was already to be traced in his own
nature. Hence Kant's concepts of human freedom and dignity, as
well as of humanity, as the regulative principle of all political action,
were abandoned and there arose that distinctive melancholy which,
since Kierkegaard, has been the hallmark of all except the most
superficial philosophy. It always appeared more attractive to be sub–
jected to "decline" as an inner law of human Existenz, rather than to
meet one's fall through the alien, causally organized world. The
first of these philosophers is Kierkcgaard.
The Birth of the Self: Kierkega'ard
Modern Existenz philosophy begins with Kierkegaard. There
are no Existenz philosophers on whom his influence would not be
traceable. Kierkegaard himself sets out consciously from a critique of
