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paradoxical and absurd. Mr. Barrett seems to think that there is much to
be said for this kind of knowledge which man has "through body and
blood, bones and bowels . . . through the passionate adhesion of faith
to the Being whom he can never intellectually know." He finds it
in
the Biblical knight of faith and in St. Paul as well as in the regions of
the "collective psyche" and the "chthonic unconscious."
This is, of couse, a familiar trend in existential philosophy–
from Kierkegaard to C.G. Jung. But while it may be satisfying and
rewarding insofar as it provides grounds for a leap into faith, it causes
nothing but havoc in philosophy. For now we have obviously moved to
a point where we not only discover irrational man, but justify his
exis~nce
as representing a higher type of being, endowed with a more
profound knowledge than the poor rational man who struggles hard to
make his own world as intelligible as possible. When it comes to
"thinking" in these depths of our blood and guts, we create nothing
but muddled confusion in which the dreams of ghostseers are indistin–
guishable from the hard-won, priceless conquests of disciplined thought.
Thus I submit that if existentialism be more than a romantic
return to the irrational substrata of life and thought,
if
it be more than
theology or poetry, there must be another side to it which does not
come out in Mr. Barrett's study. This is the aspect of existentialism
which moves
beyond
the romantic revolt and
back
to the Enlightenment.
Mr. 'Barrett is least successful, I think, when he comes to consider
existential philosophers who have tried to reappropriate the intellectual
heritage of the Enlightenment in order to move beyond romanticism.
Thus he describes Sartre's concept of freedom as "demoniacal"; but
this is the language of religion borrowed from Kierkegaard. It prejudges
or evades the issue at stake in philosophy, whether Sartre has presented
existential thought with a genuine alternative to the irrational man of
faith . It overlooks the crucial point that Sartre is nothing if he is not an
"intellectual."
Being and Nothingness
is not only an exercise in existen–
tial nihilism, but also an expression of Cartesian rationalism. Sartre sub–
scribes to this perennial standard of the French intellectual tradition
(including the
cogito
as his point of departure) just as he invokes re–
formulation of Kant's rationalism in order to cope with the problem
of ethics in existentialism. Similarly, Camus (in
VEte
or
The Rebel)
moves beyond the dark despair of Sisyphus in Hades to the luminous
beauty of Helen and to a celebration of the clear translucent light of
summer in the Greek-Meridian world. These are his symbols for clinging
to an ideal of aesthetic and intellectual lucidity. Both French writers
reflect, as did Gide, the influence of Nietzsche.
