EXISTENTIALISM AND RELIGION
323
the intellect ... a philosophical art of ideological proliferations of the
absurd, cleverly barricaded behind Freudian analyses and phenomeno–
logical parentheses, and a complete philosophical liquidation of the basic
realities and radical claims of the person and subjectivity."
M. Maritain's book contains a good deal more than this indict–
ment of atheistic existentialism. He gives a reasoned account of the
Thomist position with regard to such categories as existence, being, ac–
tion and freedom. His passionate and severe meditations center around
the specific problem of all Thomist philosophy, that of reconciling the
autonomy of rational human intellect with the exigencies of super-in–
tellectual faith. He is thoroughly convinced, not indeed of having solved
this problem once and for all (he is too sincere a thinker not to be aware
of pitfalls inherent in all systematizations), but of the necessity of
solving it ; for, according to him, neither freedom nor civilized human
life is possible on any other basis. The attack upon existentialism is
incidental to this positive belief held by M. Maritain.
Existentialism serves here as a foil to true (Thomist) philosophy;
it is not analyzed as a phenomenon in its own right. M. Maritain's
own thinking is too finnly anchored to such scholastic categories as
esse
J
existentia J essentia J act J potencYJ
etc., to make it possible for
him
to
recognize that a different approach would be necessary to understand
what a thinker like Heidegger, for instance, is aiming at. The point of
Heidegger's philosophy is by no means the denial of essences and es–
sential truths, as M. Maritain suggests; he rejects metaphysics not as
something untrue but as something beyond which philosophy must pene–
trate in order to capture the ultimate, Being itself, at the
mo~ent
of its
first manifestation. This may be an impossible undertaking, but it is
not a nihilistic one. And similarly with inter-personal communication:
the statement quoted above could have been made in literally identical
tenns by Karl Jaspers.
Much of what M. Maritain says about existentialism is true of
Sartre because Sartre combines existentialism with a curious Hegelian
brand of metaphysics. (Incidentally, M. Maritain detects this relationship
with Hegel with great perspicacity.) Modem existentialism started as
. a revolt against Hegel, and Hegelian admixtures are alien to its original
message.
Since I have not seen the original, I cannot appraise the transla–
tion as such; considered merely as a piece of English philosophical
prose,
it
is remarkably clear and crisp indeed.
Paul Kecskemeti
