122
PARTISAN REVIEW
feels, however, that one can go too far in asserting the existentialist
principle. Thus, all rational knowledge and all philosophy is bound
to
colIapse if one rejects essences and essential truths altogether, instead of
merely treating them as somehow relative and subordinate to existence
and existential truths. But this is precisely what contemporary exist–
entialism is doing. It tries to build philosophy upon the concept of
existence alone, without conjoining that of essence to it; but it appears
that if existence is so radically divorced from essence, it becomes vacuous
itself. W·ithout essence, there can be no true existence; hence an exist–
entialism which rejects essences and essential truths can be no true
existentialism. "The very name of existentialism is, as regards atheistic
existentialism, a name usurped."
The message of contemporary, atheistic existentialism reduces to
pure nihilism according to the author. Its gist is that "I exist but I am
nothing, that man exists but there is no human nature." It pretends to
exalt liberty above everything, but since its liberty is "uprooted from
reason," it has become invalidated.
The existentialists destroy ethics, since "they reject the ethical
universal along with alI essence . . . they wantonly repudiate it with
the pleasure of barbarians and they know not what they do." They
destroy the basis of inter-personal communications: "They do not see
that, even before the exercise of free choice, and in order to make free
choice possible, the most deeply rooted of the intelligence, and with
others
by the affective union. Their subjectivity is not a
self,
because it is wholly
phenomenal."
Not
all
modern, non-Thomist existentialism is included in this con–
demnation. M. Maritain distinguishes between the "existential existen–
tialism" of religious thinkers and poets like Kierkegaard, Kafka and
Shestov (the latter's name, by the way, is incorrectly transliterated in
the English text) on the one hand, and the "academic existentialism"
of philosophers like Sartre and Heidegger, on the other. He describes
"existential existentialism" as "an essentially religious irruption and claim,
an agony of faith, the cry of subjectivity towards its God," and he has
all sympathy with it as religious manifestation. But he refuses to accept
"existential existentialism" as valid philosophy, or, indeed, as philosophy
at alI, because it devalues the intellect completely in favor of the
ir–
rational movement of faith. For M. Maritain, philosophy can exist only
in the medium of the intelIect.
As
to "academic existentialism," it too devalues inteIlect, but not
in order to exalt faith; thus, it is also non-existent as a philosophy, but
without any saving grace. Its only result is "a philosophical destruction of
