THE SOCIOLOGY OF EXISTENTIALISM
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formulae. One can
also
leave them empty if one wants to say nothing
or has nothing to say but wants to give the impression of saying
something. The existential philosophers present difficulties
in
both
respects.
Yet clarification comes if we consider the starting point of
existential philosophy. It lies, as already indicated,
in
that peculiar
intermixture of problems of nature and of value which arose from
the decline of the anthropomorphic-normative conceptual world and
which has been extolled and excoriated under the name of the "dis–
enchantment" of the world. Karl Jaspers is directly dependent on Max
Weber's conception of value-free science, and beyond this historical
relationship existential philosophy has been justly considered, from
the systematic point of view as well, a parallel or complementary
position to positivism. Upon critical reflection, however, that "dis–
enchantment" shows itself to be a misunderstanding. Positivism had
only shown, that in attempting to demonstrate ultimate values we
derive only the values that we have presupposed. Now, the need for
"demonstrations" of one's own value principles arises as a rule only
when the latter have somehow already become doubtful. The result
of such efforts is either a dogmatic self-appeasement-absoluteness is
ascribed with the greatest passionateness precisely to the values that
had grown problematic--or a strengthened doubt. The latter, how–
ever, is very easily confused with the systematic freedom from values
characteristic of science, to produce a chimerical monster.
As
our par–
ticular evaluations were earlier attributed to things, so now are our
doubt and uncertainty made a property of things-which are natur–
ally as little "objectively valueless" as "objectively valuable"-and the
whole is blamed on "science." Thus the "disenchantment" is exag–
gerated to that almost grotesque form, which
L.
Binswanger has
given it: what appears in science as the really positive, as the object
of statement and investigation, turns out, as interpreted from the
point of view of human existence, to be precisely the Meon, Non–
Being: that is, naked terror.·
Thus for many thinkers science has become since, roughly, the
beginning of this century a sort of metaphysical incubus. They speak
of logical knowledge as a "special form of death," of the "skeleton
fingers of science"; they discover the "mind as antagonist of the soul"
and call for rescue from this distress. Sometimes the "living of life,"
