PARTISAN REVIEW
our age solves its spiritual dilemma. As things stand now, whether right
or wrong, it is unanswerable.
This temporary capitulation-pending the arrival of relief troops
from somewhere-is pathetic in its sincerity. But it seems to me that
the capitulation is unwarranted. Mrs. Grene definitely overestimates the
logical stringency of Sartre's position.
In reality, it is not difficult to see through the fake character of
Sartre's challenge. What Sartre says is that man is not free unless he
is free to begin completely anew at every moment.
If
he recognizes any
earlier decision as binding for him now, or if he adopts principles that
put mortgages upon his future acts, he betrays his freedom. It follows
that a value can be, for a free man, only what he pronounces to be a
value at this moment by a groundless and unjustifiable fiat, and also that
values thus created on the spur of the moment fizzle out as soon as they
are born. It is easy to show, of course, that "freedom" of such a spas–
modic nature is a terribly frustrating affair. Before bemoaning our having
to shoulder the burden of this freedom, however, we had better go into
the question whether the decision to be free really commits us to making
our life such a dreary string of senseless improvisations. I don't think
it does. Quite on the contrary: I am certain that a Sartrean being
cannot
be
free, since he cannot determine himself.
It
should
be
pointed out, at this juncture, that this theory of freedom
and value is not characteristic of Existentialism, or even of atheistic
Existentialism, as a whole. Heidegger's approach to the problem of
meaning and value, for instance,
is
an entirely different one. Heidegger
is concerned with the mode of being of things that "matter," things
that "make a difference"; and he finds that there are such things because
man's time is finite, i.e., because he dies. All meaning and urgency in
life flows from the finite character of life: it is the anticipated end of
life that gives it meaning. For Sartre, it is the other way around; mean–
ing and value are created by leaving a past behind, by departing towards
an open future.
Mrs. Grene does not seem to
be
aware of the radical nature of this
difference. In paraphrasing Heidegger's doctrine, she uses expressions
like "death in its utter negation of meaning," and "distracting and de–
ceiving cares" (p. 53). But this means reading Sartre into Heidegger.
For Heidegger, death is no "negation" but the only possible source of
meaning, and the category of "care"
(Sorge)
belongs to the sphere
of genuine rather than of distracted and adulterated existence.
Mrs. Grene's approach concedes only one function to Existentialism
-that of voicing nihilism as the only adequate expression of man's
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