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all
the pressure of industrial mass society on the bourgeois cultured
class. In
this
situation, in which "man was disillusioned in every objec–
tive belief and everything had become doubtful to him, since
all
sig–
nificant interpretations of life had been rendered doubtful by relativi–
zation, there remained only the retreat into his own inwardness, in
order to win here that stability which was no longer to be found in
an objective world order."!
It is not easy to find a common denominator for the different
currents of existentialist thought. So the following can only pass for
a sort of ideal-type construction, which does, however, endeavor to
grasp the central problem. The basic theme of "existence" is not new.
Since Indian mysticism there has been a recurrent tendency to re–
treat to a theoretically incomprehensible and therefore unassailable
place, usually an "inwardness," whose undeniable being remains as
a last, inalienable talisman in a world that has become meaningless
and godless, "forsaken by Being." Beyond all explicit knowledge and
evaluation, volition and action, even, in the last analysis, beyond
self-consciousness, lies the primal existential ground. Over against it
positive knowledge appears as a merely instrumental value, and the
conscious ordering of life only as an alienated shell and possible mask.
But even this point of view has its specific difficulties: "existence"
here would mean non-thinking and non-acting, even the dissolution
of self-consciousness. Therefore not only is all philosophizing about
existence impossible, but the whole position would be thinkable only
for a being incapable of action, since the resolve to refrain from an
active interference in events already represents a significant decision
in favor of what is to be tolerated. Moreover, if one expresses oneself
about the inexpressible, one contradicts one's own starting point and
has besides no criterion to judge which of several mutually incom–
patible expressions of this sort is correct. The parallel to cosmos meta–
physics-seemingly so diametrically opposite- is astonishing: as the
emptiness of tautology occurs there (Logos=Nomos=Physis=Kos–
mos), so here the emptiness of "existence" or of "being"-both can
be filled with any and every content at the cost of a
petitio principii.
Whether and how these empty places can be filled with deter–
minate contents, depends in each case on presuppositions of a non–
theoretical kind. Where thinkers decisively wanted something, they
could-as we have shown-subsume it without difficulty under these
