A Reply to Existentialism Author(s): George Catlin Reviewed work(s): Source: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, Vol.

47 (1946 - 1947), pp. 197-224 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The Aristotelian Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4544426 . Accessed: 02/12/2011 04:43
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Meeting of the AristotelianSociety on June 16th, 1947, at 21, Bedford Square, London,W.C., at 8 p.m.

X.-A

REPLY TO EXISTENTIALISM. By GEORGE

(i)

CATLIN.

IN the present brief study I wish to do three things: to state why I think a certain philosophy which has taken France by storm is important as a symptom of the age; briefly to state what this philosophy of " Existentialism" is; and to offer a re-statement of the position which it attacks. Since my concern is not with some philosophic exercise but with why Existentialism has the appeal which it possesses, I shall feel free to refer to the works of writers who illustrate this trend or malaise, especially the Historical Relativists, who certainly would not call themselves Existentialists. My inquiry, if guided by an interest in theoretic truth, is yet in motive a practical one. It will avoid misunderstanding if I explain at the beginning the focus of my interest in this problem. M. Jean Paul Sartre has enunciated a popular philosophy. There are many popularized philosophies of which the publicity and wit are seldom in direct ratio to their value and wisdom. M. Sartre's philosophy has a resemblance to the Behaviourism of ProfessorJ. B. Watson in perhaps more points than M. Sartre would care to admit, especially when he compares consciousness of mental life with mirrors reflecting themselves. But we do not hear today so much of Behaviourism except as a pretentious variant of the ancient saying that by their fruits are men known. Admittedly Sartre's Existentialism has a genealogy tracing back to Heidegger, the professor of philosophy in Freiburg-im-Breisgau,with affiliations to Husserl and to Jaspers of Heidelburg. These philosophers, however, demand examination in their own right and it would be improper to suppose that criticism Of

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Sartre's doctrine is justly applicable to them or vice versa. Indeed it appears that Martin Heidegger has repudiated Sartre. This, despite the fact that Professor Ruggiero, in his " Philosophy of Existence," using a phrase applicable to M. Sartre's philosophy, speaks of " the dance of ignes fatui that hover in the cemetery of Heidegger." More interesting, perhaps, is a connection between Sartre's doctrines of choice, responsibility and good faith and a school of Lutheran thought which has acquired increasing influence in recent years and of which the progenitor was the Danish theologian, Kierkegaard. What, however, interests me in the philosophy of J. P. Sartre, and is my excuse for this criticism and reply, is that so many other people are interested-and this not superficially but out of an experience in the political " Resistance " movement, which experience Marxism was unable to meet and which yet was dissatisfied with older systems of thought. Actually my attention was first called to M. Sartre's significance by somebody who had been imprisoned during the " Resistance," not in France but in Italy-a young aristocrat. We seem to be confronted with an expression of thought which, if unsatisfactory in itself, is yet symptomatic of a malaise of an age and corresponds to a phase of the spirit which merits close attention. If we ask why this is so, the answer would seem to be that Sartre'sphilosophy has been (or seemed to be) radically opposed to determinism, and hence satisfied those who cannot swallow Marxist dialectical materialism. It was the individualist reaction to a revolutionary situation, as much as Marxism expressed the collectivist reaction. It is relevant that the Italian political prisoner, of whom I spoke, was a young aristocrat imprisoned by Mussolini in the women's prison in Rome. M. Sartre'sphilosophy appealed to those who feel that the purpose of life does not lie for a man in any plan outside himself, but in expression-the expressionof himself in some tying together of his experience in a fashion tolerable to himself. They did not perhaps reflect how often it was intolerable to himself; but at least Sartre told them to confront the intolerable. This philo-

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sophy confronted men with a stark need for personal choice, taken in anxiety of spirit, for which they must bear the responsibility-a choice which corresponds to the actual experience of men, patriotic individuals of no marked political affiliations, suddenly confronted with issues of life and death in highly civilized and self-conscious, but enemyoccupied, countries. It seemed, then, to offer an answer to their personal problem. Further, a certain brutality in stating, in its more popularized form, that the major fact for men is that they merely exist in a condition of struggle, where neither universe nor God takes any responsibility for them; the superficially courageous use by non-Marxists of the titillating word " atheism," pour epaterles bourgeois and the denial ; of absolute values which corresponds with the trend of an age of deep disorder, a Twentieth Century which has proved quite the opposite of what our grandfathers of the Age of Progress expected-all this serves to confirm its popularity as, not merely " provocative," but a possible attitude of humanity to life-although it leads Professor Guido de Ruggiero to describe Existentialism, in its latest forms, as a species of metaphysical pornography. Its " innermost essence consistsin a kind of philosphic revolution of nihilism,
. . among disable to acquire such a noisy following. hevelled youth . . . not a generic expression of the spiritual

crisis through which we are passing but a nihilistic solution

of the crisis itself . . . Lwhich] deals with existence in the In some fashion the attitude is manner of a '-thriller'."

as old as Heraclitus and those who held that " Vortex is King," and in some fashion the critique is as old as the replies to Heraclitus of the Platonists. Before examining in detail M. Sartre's own philosophy, let us direct attention to two other trends of the day closely related to it, of which the theology of Kierkegaard and the school of Historical Relativism may be taken as representative. A brief discussion of these will serve to illuminate not only the problem of Sartre, but the essential problem of the humanity which looks to Sartre and which really interests us far more as philosophic students of our own age.

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One of Soren Kierkegaard's chief writings, it will be recalled, is Fearand Trembling. Here Kierkegaarddeveloped the theme of the importance of faith as distinct from works, and of the test of the heroic man in spiritual matters that he is prepared to dare the impossible, to say " I can no other " and, on the challenge of faith, to do even that which to common sense appears immoral or absurd. Yet he finds himself justified by God by reason of his faith. One recalls the old anti-intellectualist position of Tertullian, credoquia absurdum. Were faith not "absurd ", beyond-the-rational, then reason not faith would be enough. Kierkegaardreflects here the rising anti-intellectualism of North European thought, in sequence from Kant and in reaction against Kant, which continues to our own day. Kierkegaard is as much of a fundamentalist as Barth, as suspicious of Hellenic rationalism as Niebuhr. He is dominated by revolt against the smug rational tidiness, the classic mood of Hegel. All these are Judaizers of a particular type, reactionaries against 'the Hellenic philosophic trend, the fundamental logos trend, in Catholic Christianity. The profundity of the philosophy of Cardinal Cusanus is, in my view, lacking. Kierkegaard's favourite instance is that of the sacrifice of Isaac, and the willingness of Abraham, the man of faith, to commit murder, even of his own son, if such were God's revealed will. So heroic-or, if one prefers it, so hysterical-a faith, which more recalls to me the mood of Berchtesgaden than of Gethsemane, was inevitably accompanied by a spiritual struggle, storm and stress, to which Kierkegaard did full justice. The psychological condition of " anxiety," the " anxious conscience " is at the centre of Kierkegaard's whole conscious position, although his own life history may offer some explanation of it. Only those who have this conscience can be saved. He, like Niebuhr, has no use for the Hellenic tranquillity, the Christian gnostic identification of virtue and wisdom, the " quiet conscience." It lacks soul-shaking anxiety concerning sin. Needless to say the school of Kierkegaard's followers has to skate very swiftly over the ice of modern psycho-analysis, which

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Niebuhr dismisses as irrelevant in a few pages. It is, I hope, not cruel to point out that Kierkegaardwas probably a son born out of wedlock by a deeply Puritanical, sinconsciousfather, and seems also to have had some momentary lapse with a Copenhagen prostitute which assumed immense importance in his view of his own life. His published autobiography rewards attentive reading. Certainly he did not share the view of a modern Oxford philosopherto whom I shall refer later about the sins of the flesh. For Kierkegaard, in the well-knowntradition, sin was peculiarly sex-sin, and by the sense of sin, and of faith which redeemed one from sin contrary to all rational calculations of the avenging law, his whole life was overwhelmed. Salvation was only to be found by the man who went out to meet grace by breaking through all that held him back in an endeavour to show his total faith, even to death, in the God of grace. Here we have a religious philosphy with a Protestant emphasis on the importance of being literally " Godfearing," and with an Augustinian stress on salvation. But there are certain novel elements in it which are of interest to us. There is the stress on struggle and anxiety which goes even further than Luther. There is the stress on the isolation and loneliness of the soul which has by its own supernaturalfaith to try to escape from a frightening world and from ultimate damnation. These notes we shall find reappearing in Sartre, even when the belief in God has been specifically discarded. The anxiety is increased because, now, there is no redeemer. But I would wish, in passing, to suggest that atheism is really more logical than theism for any follower of the false lights of Kierkegaard, who really considers the circumambient world (i.e., in Sartre's terminology, the real world en-soi)so hostile that man can only break from its throttle-hold by a faith which gloats over its own defiance of reason, logos, and rational trust. One of the peculiar heresies of our age is its tendency to place into antithesis faith and reason. Accepting the statement of St. Thomas Aquinas that it is a duty to follow our conscience sive errante sive non errante,one recalls the definition of Leo XIII, that " verum fides suprarationem, etsi

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inter veradissentio potest." esse tamennunquam fidem et rationem I will now turn to another trend in modern thought which has its bearing upon the problem that Sartre emphasizes. Ever since the rise of the Historical School, ideas, taken at their logical significance by the eighteenth century, have been evaluated historically in terms of their historical ambience. To describe the origins, it has been felt, is to explain. Nevertheless, during most of the nineteenth century a touchstone was provided for evaluation in something called evolution, which had a moral undertone, or, more explicitly, Progress. The collapse of this faith in what might be called " biological values " is well described by the late ProfessorC. L. Becker, in his Progress Power. and
Later comes a period when the values themselves of ethics are " explained " in terms of their anthropological and sociological background. Scholars such as Dilthey endeavour to reconcile the Kantian a priori with Utilitarian

empiricism, in a fashion that it must be confessed is a little muddleheaded ; experimental science and a vague cultural are Wissenschaft Geisteswissenschaft identified in the name or of real profundity (what A. Huxley calls tief) ; and with such writers as Westermarck,Hobhouse and James Harvey Robinson we range from the evolution of marriage to the making of mind. However in the new Historical Relativism the notion that evolution means progress,which means moral advance, has to be abandoned or we should be left precisely with that enduring moral criterion, above history, which a thorough-going relativism has to deny. At this point the Crocean philosophy (which specifically attacks existentialism, but shares so many of its heresies) provides an answer and acquires popularity. History, as Hegel thought, is the real manifestation of the spirit or of logic. But this history is not, in Croce's view, a set of beads strung together on the thread of the divine dialectic, which is a " real," underlying the epiphenoma of events. On the contrary the only reality is the ideal sustaining this phenomenal-the spirit grasping and coping with the day to day problems which history as event presents, and by its solutions raising this chaos of events to the self-conscious

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height of the spirit. The spirit finds itself in the conquest of the here and now. Easily this whole philosophy could become one of an aesthetic ; but this could easily mean admitting aesthetic " permanents " capable of abstraction from the stream of history-which is precisely what Croce is unwilling to do. It is interestingto turn to Croce'sbook, PoliticsandMorals, and to note where this philosophy has led him. For one thing it has led (as all philosophies which repudiate final values in my view must lead) to extraordinarycompromises with the rule of force, as the actual determinant in history. One cannot help noticing with the more pain this lapsus in view of Croce's almost self-righteous opinion about the rectitude of his own philosophy. Thus Croce writes: " Even the man who is stirred by the most noble, fervid and daring ethical sentiment must, in any political capacity, act solely and wholeheartedly for the safety of the State, identifying himself completely with its welfare. Sometimes it will happen that he is forced to risk the existence or prosperity of the State, but only because of the necessities arising from a struggle or in order to increase that State's power through bold undertakings" (p. 131) . . . " The moralistic historians, reducing everything to an equality by their criterion of the moral perfectio, praise the mediocre but honest and frown upon the great and guilty, the Alexanders, the Caesars and the Napoleons " (p. 70) . . . " The historian investigates the past in all its relations, in its logic and in its necessity " (as against the moralist) (p. 69) . . . " Modern philosophy has given up the claim of ever being 'definitive' and has thereforegiven up all dogmatism, being satisfied, on the other hand, with remaining perpetually alive and able to state and solve (sic) all the problems that arise ad infinitum life." (p. 87). in These brief excerpts indicate the results of a philosophy which places history at its centre ; abandons definitive values in the welter of the relativity of events and historical

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CATLIN.

phenomena ; and, hence, almost inevitably comes to terms with a force which can cut the knots that a relativistic morality is incapable of doing. A book has recently been produced in England, marked by an Oxfordian competence, well grounded in the work of Prof. Collingwood, but too hasty to be satisfying-Mr. Welden's States and Morals. It is not only decorated by the remarkable statement that " there is no general agreement as to whether or not fornication raises a moral problem." It makes its major argument turn on the fallacious supposition that the key issue in politics is the relation between a state and an individual-a petitio principii,since it is assumed that state and society are in effect today interchangeable terms. " What we want to know is whether we ought to consider the state or the individual to be supremely important." The conclusion is a kind of tribal morality, with especial allowance for the tribes that dwell in their habitations between Cher and Isis. " Even under modern conditions of transport and communication, the vast majority of individuals do not extend their systems beyond the nation State to any appreciable extent. Hence towards people outside it their sense of responsibilityamounts to very little " (p. 277) . . . " Many will, no doubt, say that, although the outline I have given is not an unfair account of the moral standards which the English on the whole accept, it is none the less quite wrong that they should do so . . . I have already disposed of this point in principle by denying the validity of universal laws of moralty, except in so far as these are mere tautologies." (p. 278) . . . " The trouble, or perhaps it is the merit, of empiricism is that it prevents me from seeing any sense in embarking on ideological wars " [whatever may be the case with other wars] " in order to improve the morals of people in whose moral welfare I am not greatly interested." One recalls here Dilthey's reduction of morality to moral types-in this case chiefly tribal types. We have here a species of introverted national socialism, personalist rather than collectivist, objecting to a universal moral law or to

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humanism in the name of national temperament and habit, and not of blood and soil. It also recalls, as a less exalted reference, the view of a recent correspondent in the News who wrote with simple frankness: " I do not Chronicle care two shakes of a duck's feathers if the whole of the German population in Germany falls down and dies of starvation tomorrow." One can admire Mr. Welden's objection to fanaticism ; but his enthusiasm seems to have carried his argument rather too far. One of the major objections to the study on which we are here engaged can be that Sartre's philosophy is merely the fashion of the moment. I am not concerned to deny that this may be the case. It does not really help much to carry ProfessorJohn Dewey's objection to " the Quest for Certainty " to the point saying that the solution is that there is no solution. It does not follow that, therefore, it is a mistake to waste upon this Sartrianphilosophy philosophical powder and shot. For it is, as I have endeavoured to show, an extreme version of a view which we detect in these other writers, some of greater influence. We have pointed out the similarity between the problemswhich Sartre emphasizes and those emphasized by the school of Kierkegaard, which must always appeal to young and active people, impatient of the discipline of experience and called upon to take in isolation decisions of life and death. We have also pointed out that a great school of writers, including Croce, Dilthey and others, has placed the phenomena of history in the centre of their philosophy with consequences that might be expected for ethical values. Even where Dilthey, who was a gourmand for reality, talks about including sciences of value within the range of and Wissenschaft, of "the dear knowledge of the personal," in a sad confusion of philosophy with science, ending nevertheless the end is not in scientized ethics, as was once hoped, but to dissolve values into a mist of historical relativity, which ends by leaving force as the adjudicator. And it is not for nothing that Sartre was influenced by Karl Jaspers, Dilthey's disciple. At least I hope to have shown that, in discussing Sartre's position, we are discussing not

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some flash-in-the-pan theory, but a set of problems very real indeed and reievant to the miseries of our civilization.

(ii) The version of the Existentialist philosophy which I wish to discuss, however much it may owe to Husserl, Heidegger and Jaspers, is the recent version of J. P. Sartre. I have explained why I choose this. The distinction is. important because Sartre's use of terms is by no means conventional. One of the first charges that can be made against him is that he is a metaphysician in the bad sense of the ierm. He is not guiltless of twisting terms, such as freedom, into unprecedented meanings and then of suggesting that reality corresponds to these twisted meanings. Again we are frequently not sure whether we are concerned with an ontological or an epistemological discussion, or whether the novelist and dramatist in Sartre may not have taken charge and whether we are not having some statement about reality demonstrated by the fashion in which the characters in a Sartre novel-very abnormal charactersfeel and act. The broad outline of Sartre's philosophy can be briefly sketched. It is, in its strength and weakness, a highly logical structure. Non-Marxist in the sense that it places in the foreground the dependence of experience upon cognition, existence as known upon the I of the knower, it yet has affinities with the more mechanical or Hobbesian kind of materialism, with a " full " world of passive " being." It posits an essence or reality-" L'Etre-en-soi "-which we infer from cognition, an essence which constitutes a plenum in the world-not-me, and which from the nature of cognition remains, Kantian-wise, on the other side, Ding-an-sich, of an unbridgeable gulf. It will be noted here that this Essence is by definitiona Not-Me, a something on the other side of cognition. There is indeed an I:tre-pour-Moi-all that of cognition which the I can grasp on the this-side of the gulf, a perpetual

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non-I:tre-en-soi. Is the I itself, as with Spinoza, an essence or aspect of essence ? No: for its total is an experience of mental phenomena viewed reflectively, so that the notion arises of the spectator, the reflector. We have indeedthe analogy is Sartre's-an endless series of reflecting mirrors, from which the image is passed on. The experience is light shed on the not-me ; the reflection on experience shows the " me " ; the retro-flexion of the image of the me gives the notion of other " me's " ; and so forth. None of them escape from the closed circle of cognition. None have essence. As Marx and Engels would have urged, they are epiphenomenal. They partake of non-essence, of nothingness, ndant. Instead, however, of rejecting this epiphenomenal, with the Marxians, as no part of the real stuff which science can pragmatically control, Sartre is a Cartesian insisting on the basic nature of cognition, a post-Kantian in his pessimism about having dealings with the Thing-in-Itself. It is rather the phenomenal, the existent, which is all my world. All I know as basic datum is that I exist, and all else must be deduced from this. This existence which is in a separate world from essence has a quality of nothingness, almost of Schopenhauerian illusion. The existent is for Kierkegaard the significant, the " true existence," as distinct from the " commonplace," the " Alltaglichkeit," of " mere existence," " Dasein." We may indeed urge here that " existence" cannot be so separated from " being " or " essence" given so negative a value. But for Sartre the existent, I suggest, lacks all this quality with which Kierkegaard endowed it. For a tragedy is substituted a noise without meaning. It is significant that Sartre, the dramatist, refers to this shadow-show as having a quality of imagination, as a product not indeed of the Schopenhauerian Will, but of Imagination. With these figments we live. We might indeed call Sartre the philosopher of Imagination. Human freedom flows from this. Our choice is no part of the full world of essence, "etre-en-soi." It is an indeterminate in a world of non-essence. We cannot escape from

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it if we would. It is even described by Sartre as our curse, our misery. No wonder that Erich Fromm can write a book on TheFearof Freedom. There is a flight from responsibility for our choice, our own choice ; but it is futile. We cannot escape from the consequence of our own cognitive natures, which make us unable to enter into real contact with the (presumably)determined world of essence " en-soi." We would like to be bond, but are damned to be free. Logically animals and all re-flective beings suffer from the same curse of having nothingness in their being. On opposite sides, to use the very title of Sartre'smost ambitious book, are L'Etreet Le NVdant. It will be noted, before we go further,that Sartre is using terms in a very unusual fashion. Freedom is prior to the act of will. It is connected, as the totally indeterminate, with nothingness. The nothing is nothing and yet also existence or becoming. (Or shall we use an evasion and talk of it as tingeing or permeating existence ?-a dramatist's effect rather than a philosopher's argument.) The entire Sartrian argument turns on this sharp dichotomy of the Essence or :tre-en-soiand the Non-Essence, with its illusive mirror images of the Itre-pour-moi. The entire argument turns upon the arbitrary decision to identify Essence with the Other-to-Mind-in brief, upon a latent materialism. Essence is neither Mind nor something accessible to mind. This essence is not, then, a substratum or substance underlying both creations. It is not something embracing the relation of the two aspects. Once this dogma is grasped, the rest of the Sartrian philosophy follows, in its strength and weakness, logically enough, with all its attractive and flashing-or should I say flash ?-appearance of boldness. The philosophy has the attraction of pseudo-audacity: it has the reclame of being atheist. Patently the :tre-en-soi has no qualities especially divine. The Itre-pour-soi partakes of the anti-god element of nothingness. In a quite new and more than Freudian sense, the cult of the gods is the worship of illusions. Further, there is a moral case

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involved. Man is brought up against his own loneliness, his own responsibility. He is master of his fate and captain on an uncharted sea beyond sight of firm land. There are to be seen only the scudding clouds of the unreal, the spindrift of mind's illusion, the spume of time. These, Sartre dogmatizes, are the facts of experience. There must be no escaping from them to pretences about abiding values, the divine will, determination by environment or anything of this order. With all Kierkegaard's sadistic vigour he preaches that man must take upon his own shoulders his responsibility. I am not suggesting that the notion of man as nothing but yet free should not be taken very seriously as part of what gives that " Tragic Sense of Life " of which Unamuno writes. It is orthodox theology that man is created out of nothing, an emergent something, but yet is a vehicle of eternal values, sustained by what Holy Writ calls "the everlasting arms." But what was meant by Pascal and Kant, and by saints and mystics, is not, I am pretty sure, at all what M. Sartre means when he writes of " nothingness " as entering into the inner core of man. Kant indeed very much insists on the " somethingness" of this inner core, and the mystics upon the somethingness (or, more precisely, the real being, prima essentia)of the substance which sustains man's soul, the Urgrund. But M. Sartre's doctrine in its logic seems to find the core in an endless peeling away, a reflection of reflections, a freedom indistinguishable from chance, which freedom is damnosa haereditas. There is neither immortal soul, present values, nor eternal substance. There is a total subjectivityof values. There is here no salvation for the rare moral hero by grace. Even that has gone. To seek it, Sartre says, is bad faith, mauvaise foi-and we will not venture to decide whether Sartre's bonne is as complete as Kierkegaard's. foi Of course, merely to build a perverselydogmatic philosophy for dramatic effect would be bad faith. But we cannot prejudge for the reader that issue. Let us agree that to embrace a creed because it is a pleasant anodyne without

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daring to ask what are the causes of our malaise would be bad faith. The anodyne is only permissible when it is a deliberate medicine for the soul, prescribed by a responsible philosopher-physician. Since M. Sartre himself so wills it, it is permissible to bring his novels and plays into evidence in interpreting a philosophy which may not always be clear. He doubtless recognizes that the devil is always good romance and good publicity for a poor devil of a philosopher. M. Sartre the philosopher suffers from the stylistic fault of being diffuse in a fashion that does not affect M. Sartre the dramatist. But from this diffuseness usually emerges something consistent, even in its more fanciful interpretations. One of Sartre's lengthier books is entitled Nausea. Here again we have a temperamental response raised to the level of a verity of reality-falsely universalized as a general truth. This nausea is the nausea we have with existence-not only J. P. Sartre, but all of us. Certainly there may be enough ground for this nausea and malaise in the Twentieth Century. The motive of the character in the novel for writing his book-an essay of Sartre's, one feels, in autobiography-is to produce something " beautiful and hard as steel and which makes people ashamed of their existence.") (However, beauty is not allowed to be any norm of value.) " Hard as steel or Stalin " is something that appeals to-day -tough, " to be a tough." The core of the whole argument about nausea is the element of nothingness, illusion, emptiness, boredom, ennui, in conscious existence which can never come to grips with objective reality but is damned to live in a closed world of freedom. The only route out is to accept one's fate, to assert by act (although why by act ?) the reality of the illusory, the self-sufficiency of myself, extreme spiritual anarchism. Maybe the act expresses me -nothing but also everything. Here lies the self-respect of homunculus-in playing the lucifer, the master of the mirrors, the Mephistopheles, the " denying spirit." In his Age of ReasonM. Sartre is concerned with the failure of a life, which has yet the honesty to look at itself

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It is concerned, as is also Huit Clos, with the answerless problem (if indeed the problem be posed " in good faith ") of human life, "a little centre-point of light that would flutter round and round, dashing itself against the walls, and never able to escape." Or is M. Sartreindeed entitled to appropriate the great traditional imagery of light, by which Dante describes the Godhead, Lumende lumine,and would he not more consistently and in better faith, if with less literary effect, speak of " a little centre-point of darkHe aspires to the irrevocable act which shall ness"? express freedom by embracing a self-chosen and perfectly fettering destiny. Always he stands poised before the plunge, claiming to be convinced and protesting against the suicide of self-resignation. But how can act fit perfectly that which at core is chance ? Or how can act, for such an empty " being," be other than the fetter of otherness? " Condemned for ever to be free," how can it lose freedom save by ceasing to be itself and being devoured by the maw of circumstances? " Some men are born bespoken; a certain path has been assigned to them." (The Flies.) Is there then, after all, a fate, a destiny, a norm, a permanence? All that M. Sartre tells us is that the " act " is the emancipation, because by it M. Sartre hopes to escape from himself, and to break the mirrors, the magic mirrorsof the thinking self. This notion of the ego as mirror is used in quite a different sense from its use in Hindu thought. This emancipation is the refrain of The Age of Reason. The gyrating self of endlesschoices topples into action. Freedom ends itself and yet finds itself, coming "like a thunderbolt," in the unpremeditated act which is destiny and sudden crystallization of fate and character. The tedious sandstorm of the will ends. A destiny and a value is made to exist out of that which was all undetermined before. Ex nihilo aliquidfit. Out of the irrational the significant is
made by the arbitrary act . . . In the end is the act. At

least it is so in the vision of the irresolute soul which ever divides its tortured mind. (The Aristotelian, contem-

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plating a creative theory, and the predestined Calvinist would, of course, have quite other answers.) Or is there indeed here any genuine notion of a historic destiny in this unreal world-a destiny more valuable than the valueless self which it expresses, the self which incarnated itself in disconnected, spontaneous, pathogenic act? Hegel said that man's freedom lay in knowing his destiny. M. Sartresuggeststhat man's freedomis discovered from his irresistible reflection that he has no destiny. The thinking reed can still have courage to be rigid ; but there is no music on these pipes and no player. Abstract freedom elevated by a contradiction to be " the " value is once again found to be empty-abstract. What " eternalizes" is for M. Sartre what " extiiiguishes hope," but time and history offer no especial ground for hope either. Freedom is indeed, like sex, a primary instinct (Pavlov) ; but M. Sartre'svirtue is that, by the despairing thoroughnessof his analysis, he shows you again that freedom is not an unconditioned value. The freedom must be significant and coherent. It is intimately connected with rational respect for the freedom of others and hence with tolerance, not the
arbitrary intolerance which says sitpro rationevoluntas. The

key may lie in the rational demand to be " convinced "to find oneself a man, not by an empty affirmation of freedom, but by consciousness of oneself as a vehicle of value and hence of vital power. We may respect Mr. Sartre for plays, such as Les
Marches, which identified him with the " Resistance " in

France. We may agree that freedom is found not in stewing in the juice of notions but in action, which incidentally has its social responsibilities and which as such transcends chance. We admit that such action, if it is to have value, must emerge from choice and not routine, or at least must emerge from a habit confirmed by choice and thought. But what matters is not action, in an existence thrust upon us, but rational action ; not choice but rational choice; and not the chance explosive expansion of powers in existence shaping themselves out as one's

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nature, but the choice, surmounting chance, of a community and stable order with its obligations, in which one's vital self can grow in richness of perception and action. " You want to be free. Absolutely free. It's your vice." So says a character in M. Sartre's Age of Reason. Absolute chance is not an absolute freedom of significance or value. Significant freedom lies in the free assumptionof obligations which enhance the values of one's own world of experience. Other human beings, those who constitute the Mitsein for Heidegger, are for M. Sartre as redundant to reality as myself. They are a bore. Sartre wrote his philosophy by sitting in a cafe, and his neighbours are the cafe bores. But thcy suffer from the added disadvantage of being also objective, ungraspable by me. I alone pay the bill to the tavern owner, the master of the caravanserai. Sympathy and empathy are also illusion. I can only enter into one of two relations, my so-called love swallowing its object in "etre-pour-moi," or in the object swallowing me-in the last resort into either the sadistic or the masochistic relation. That is the reality of talk about good neighbourliness. We end (not unnaturally) by being seized with loathing. In the play, Huis Clbs, by Sartre, dramatist, the conclusion is "Hell, it is the company of others." For this proposition there is not even the reasonable argument that this horror of sinners for each other is the working out of Karma. For there is only free will. In the play The Flies, Orestes declares that, were beings called into existence by creation, they could only assert their own existence by asserting it over against their Creator. Homunculus must be atheist and mephisto to have self-respect as homunculus. His self-respect springs from truculence, just as Milton's Satan found his self-pride in pride. In all this Sartre is dramatist. And in all this there is a deliberate exaggeration, a straining after logical extremes and after effect which I would term " the Bad Faith of Sartre." However, so far as it is all to be taken to the foot of the letter, then, in its moral consequencesit ends in a vindication of that nihilistic spirit, sniffingfleurs du mal, of

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which Camus has written in his novel The Outcast, which to Mr. Cyril Connolly has provided an introduction of the English edition in my view more romantically laudatory than rationally considered. " R faut estimer Sisyphe heureux," writes Camus. The connection is clear with Sartre's Mythe de Sisyphe. Moral objective there is none. Moral canon none. But the brave outcast, gunman and franc tireur, whom Camus glamourizes, is happy in the animal vitality evoked by the murderous problem of the moment. One feels that Neville Clively Heath of Bournemouth was a misunderstood man; had his justification; and emerges as a great human exemplar. So maybe do the Loeb brothers, who cut up unsuspecting friends to enjoy their reactions or Nechayev, the disciple of Bakunin, who indulged in the same form of pleasure. Nor do I make this remark in jest. If we are acquainted with St. Exupery's Wind,Sandand Stars or Rex Warner's Aerodrome, or even with Joseph Wood Krutch's Modern Temper,we meet an emergent human type, possessingcertain aesthetic, atheistic values detached from the traditional ones, but nevertheless recurring, in but slightly different form, especially among rich or idle men, through history, and with the moral peculiarities to which anarchism has tended since the days of Bakunin. We begin, but do not, end with drinking coffee in estaminets.

(iii) I should not have concerned myself at length with M. Sartre's philosophy except to illustrate in this extreme form the malaisesand crisis of our times; and to indicate by negatives a positive position. What I want to affirm is what Sartre wants to deny. Therefore I shall venture to call it Essentialism, although it will have some relation with what is sometimes called Personalism as over against Marx' dogma of active Materialism.

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Sartre's philosophy has the great merit of being highly logical. Its greatest merit of all is that it shows up a false notion of liberty. It stems from the postulated total dichobeyond cognized object. The tomy of subject and etre-en-soi upon a particular epistemology, can be postulate, founded and here will be denied, as Hegel denied the validity of its earlier forms by asserting the validity of the reasoning instrument. It is more in accord with common sense to assume, instead of Sartre's solipsism of an illusion, being or essence as having a dual aspect-these two aspects being genuine and in complete relation with each other, the " within-ness " or mind permeating the " without " (and indeed being conspicuously present in other persons who are " without " to me), and the " without-ness" or body penetrating and actually conditioning the " within." It would follow that Sartre's central postulate-which is a dramatic paradox too much against common sense to show good faith-of total freedom and indeterminism would fail. So would also his moral derivatives of total responsibility and a false misery of agonizing, flowing from the free choice of the unfettered imagination. Here at least we would quite part from Heidegger's thesis that anxiety lies at the basis of our souls and should be accepted instead of being seen as, indeed consequence of the Fall, of conflict with reality, but also as something pathological, manifesting frustration, leading to aggression and to be removed by education in charity and trust. This Sturmund Drang of anxiety and sense of sin is allied, not with penitence brought about by the rational workingsof conscience (and conscience for St. Thomas is subject to reason so far as this expresses q. eternal law-Summ. Theol. Prima Secundae, 19, art. 5, cf. q. 94, art. 1, quoting S. Basil) but rather with the mood which leads some people more to lament over the dead than to concern themselves with the good of the living. It is a further merit, which we must admit, of Sartre's philosophy and that of his lineal predecessorsthat, like the

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Crocean philosophy (although less thoroughly because of its intrusion of the idea of non-being), it takes existence or phenomena seriously. Entirely perverse, as we have seen, in its (in both senses) pseudo-realisticview of the internecine relations of phenomena, it yet is right in stressing the significance (I cannot say the " genuine quality," for Sartre intrudes this notion of " nothingness") of the now, the present and the actual. Here, nevertheless, I prefer Croce's clearer view of existence, because I am not convinced that Sartre's notion-as distinct from Plato's-of permeation by nothing, from which we cannot escape, means anything. But I object that Croce gives no permanent essence or substance but only historic flux ; and Sartre only a dead and unknowable essence, less significant than Marx' matter and set over against existence. It will, however, profit little to make the mere hypothesis of an essence holding dual aspects in relation, if we can say no more about it than that it is-and is because we suppose something has to be in order to fulfil this function of establishing a relationship. Any " essence " or " substance " which we shall hereafterposit will not be an empty abstraction, a merely logical buckle put in like some mathematical factor on both sides of an equation to make it resolvable, and then taken out again. It will be not an abstraction, absolute or non-quality made by some dichotomy of the qualityless (Nirvana), on the one side, and the illusory (Maya), on the other; but an essence sustaining all existencesand all qualities. On the other hand, the peculiar quality of mental existence (and this existence, alone, Sartre admits), and perhaps also of the material existence of the physicists, is its fleeting nature, its " presentness." Not only does it not outlast the " me " ; it does not outlast my memory now. Sartre very rightly concludes that the view according to which this alone is valid experiencewhich he accepts and which I reject-is a view which admits of no permanent values. These, like belief in the' being of God, merely are credulities of escapists who want, by bad faith, to be rescued from the pressing sense of

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their own choice, responsibility and loneliness. Can we not advance beyond unknowable essence " without," en-soi "; and fleeting experienced existence, pour moi " ? I do not hope to be able to refute by syllogism M. Sartre's basic hypothsis of the dichotomy of things. He is entitled to it and we can but look at the results. I can only show that it is merely hypothesis ; that it admits no knowledge whatsoever of reality ; and that it has certain consequences repugnant to common judgment (e.g., a world of total freedom, unshaped by heredity, environment, determination or grace) and repugnant to common sense (e.g., a nausea with our fellows as a basic, universal and persistentexperience) although acceptable to an unrestrained egotism which ever ends in violence, hate and Cainism. I can show how M. Satre arrives at these extraordinary views and that there is no logical compulsion to believe him. Moreover I can put forward a counter-hypothesis and ask (which is the test in science) whether it does not lead in experience to more satisfactory results, objectively, in the consistent and predictable explanation of our world or even, subjectively, in the experience of tolerable living. I would lead up to this hypothesis by pointing out that the very anthropologists, sociologists and historians who talk most about historical and moral relativity, in terms of the social surroundings, are usually writers who- conclude with some judgments about progress or the good society. These sociological comparisons are introduced to establish a norm. If the sociologists (e.g., Benedict) do not regard their blue print for society as final, almost invariably they regard it as marking a progress. I need scarcely say that a strict relativism should discard any such dialectic taken over from older theodicies or any such dogma of progress or any such scheme of values as Arnold Toynbee excogitates in his Studyof Historyor, more pessimistically, Spengler in his study. If technical development is progress, which is good, then we know quite a lot about the permanent nature of the good-as much as if we knew that the good was

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pleasure, happiness or success in competition. Whether, of course,what we shall know we shall like is another matter. It may be that this implication that what is progress is known and it is known to be good is rather an aesthetic than a logical judgment in values. In my view, going beyond Ritschl, all judgments of values are, in the last resort, aesthetic judgments, the value of logical consistency included, and the value of that control of nature or power which logic and mathematics give. Even the value of duty is intimately connected with our sense of the seemly and fitting, expressed in rational terms of symmetrical and universal application. But there is an increasing tendency among students of aesthetics to affirm the existence of an enduring criterion of the beautiful and the ugly. Here it is safest for me to quote the judgment of an expert in this field, Sir Kenneth Clark, director of the British National Gallery. " Aesthetic values may be more elusive than ghosts and more full of disillusion than love, but we know in our hearts that they exist and that they do not consist in mere recognition. We know that certain minds can create an order in the chaos of appearances which other minds can contemplate with delight. We know that certain eyes can see in Nature shapes and coloursto which our eyes were blind ; and can persuade us gradually to see them for ourselves." Lest the evidence of Sir Kenneth Clark be thought suspect as too conservative let me cite (without entirely endorsing) on this issue of permanence of standards, Miss Gertrude Stein writing on Picasso: " People really do not change from one generation to another, as far back as we know history people are about the same as they were, they have had the same needs, the same desires, the same virtues and the same qualities, the same defects, indeed nothing changes from one generation to another except the things seen and the things seen make that generation, that is to say nothing

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changes in people from one generation to another but the way of seeing and being seen, the streets change, the way of being driven in the streets change, the buildings change, the comforts in the house change, but the people from one generation to another do not change." Now let me adopt a new approach. And here I must add the caution that, in the space at my disposal I can do no more than sketch in, in the roughest possible outline, the nature of my positive position which is confirmed and shaped by the negative position I feel compelled to adopt towards the propositions and hypothesis of M. Sartre. First, taking the old Aristotelian categories, we have been accustomed to speak of the dimensions of space and, recently, taking another category, we have come to speak of the dimension of time among the modes of experience. But experience always has its content or quality, without which the mind can no more imagine it (indeed much less imagine it) than it can imagine it outside the terms of time and space. Further, this quality, whether of colour, sound, touch or other perception of the senses, has degree and a dimension in degrees. Moreover, this experience impresses itself upon the nervous system and psyche, not only in items of sound or colour, but in its totality with different degrees of vividness. Secondly, the quality of experience divides according to a gamut of vividness running from what we may call " one-damn-thing-after-another" to the illuminating or " curtain-raising." I am certainly not saying that the vivid is always significant enough to be the worth-while, for violent pain, although not insignificant, in a limited stupid sense, may not be worth while ; nor am I saying that the worth-while is always the good, for suffering may be worth while but not of itself good. I am saying that the good is a species of the worth-while and the worth-while a species, in quality of experience, of the vivid (which, needless to say, is not necessarily the violent but rather is always that which is clear to consciousness,to use a Lockeian terminology). Those dull of sense live life sub-humanly,

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without adequate appreciation of this dimension of quality and of these degrees of quality. Hegel would hold that they lacked both consciousnessand freedom. I am affirming that the essence, which underlies the whole relation between ego and other, in its totality can be grasped under the category of quality; and that it is not solely some particular experience that is so grasped. Further, it is grasped in degrees of intensity; and, although the most intense is not always the most good, the good is always the intense. We have no option about apprehending our world, the spatial and temporal contents of which are, as common sense admits, in large part predeterminedfor us. We have no option about this experience having some quality, since this quality is a mode of experience. But common sense also confirms that the intensity of this experience does depend largely upon us, and upon the education of our system of perception. We have a measure of choice whether we regard this experience, in its detail and in its continuity and in the unity of its causes with us as subjects, as merely " one damn thing after another " or as vivid, significant and even worth while. What I am concerned to point out is that there are no irrefragable reasons of metaphysics why I should deny a real unity of subject an object, manifested in the very fact that there is experience at all. Nor, again, is there reason why I should deny the continuity of essence, subtending particular phenomena-and phenomena are always particular even by being perceived. Nor wvhyI should deny the possibility of permanence of values which, whether true or not, is refuted neither by the phenomenological argument Sartre chooses nor by the arguments of the historical relativists. Sartre's atheism may be correct, but there is no more satisfactory metaphysical reason advanced by him for regarding it as a truth than as a pose. The contrary argument at least connects with the thesis that reality can more advantageously for thought be regarded under the species of significance and not of disconnected event.

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There is no particle of metaphysical reason for regarding oneself as living lonely in a world containing only hostile entities, spiritual phagocytes. On the contrary, this view may be merely a temperamental divergence of the cafe philosophers. To explain and even to refute is not always to answer. There are certain items in Sartre'sphilosophy which-unlike his metaphysics, which are arbitrary-require further comment. He provides a philosophy of freedom and seems to provide one of responsibility. And he raises a question of the nature of experience, where we must not off-hand assume that only the enduring solution and not the instant solution (let us say, for a moment, the artistic solution) of the instant problem, is significant. Such philosophical writers as Croce find enough satisfaction for themselves in the importance of living and in the pleasures of the immediate overcoming of immediate problems. And their contention cannot be brushed on one side. Chinese thought, again, has too much to say on this to be disregarded. Croce, however, cannot be brought in by Sartre as witness in defence of his own solutions. The resemblance of the two philosophies is more apparent than real. History may be reality (an obscure phrase) ; but Croce is sufficiently a Hegelian to allow for the slow build up of a historical problem, and for the need for study of this continuity to find the right solutions. Croce undoubtedly has his difficulty in explaining (apart from the " bar of history and the victory parade of the big battalions) what he means by the " rights" solution. There is a certain Germanic Philistinism of might in his self-proclaimed aristocratic philosophy. But his difficulties are nothing compared with Sartre's, with his reduction of everything in human experience to the fleeting and relative " pour-moi," in a world where that to which existence is related and that within which existence exists is itself but an illusion of nothingness, a mirror of images or a world of the impermanent, where scepticism and its mode of living, romantic or sybaritic, is alone consistent. AA 2

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Let us admit that, when we pass from the vision of values and ends to the technique of means, including the human technique of politics and manners, more than philosophers generally allow for depends upon the knack and skill of genius and art. No juridical rules can be laid down beforehand. But it is difficult to see how M. Sartre can provide us with the richness of some Chinese traditional philosophy of manners, precisely because of his doctrine of impermanence and his identification of reflection and imagination with the images of an illusory self. Here is no Montaigne or Rochefoucauld. I do not see that he can develop any satisfactory theory of significance, since the significant always carries its experience out beyond itself. I do not say that the vivid always travels beyond itself. The vivid pleasure is not less vivid a pleasure for being fleeting. And yet, even here, it lies in the nature of its vividness that it stimulates the percipient to aliveness to experience beyond this event and to reflection, which wants to be permanent, on this pleasure, which we then sometimes call happiness. Sartre, however, cannot transcend the assemblage of the insignificant or transcend, in his plays and novels, the reduction of the significantto the insignificant
and ne'ant.

The same disease affects his doctrine of responsibility which, owing to a superficial similarity to that of Kierkegaard (itself, I submit, pathological) attracts many people. Responsibility involves a measure of permanence and of permanent value. It cannot merely be abstractly deduced from the notion of freedom and choice. If there are no standards I may be free to act (or imagine)-but how can any notion of right or wrong, or responsibility to do right, even by my own standards, emerge ? The new solipsist of illusion, Mephistopheles, cannot even be judged as an artist, except by some standard affirmed to distinguish good art from bad. He pleases himself for the moment, and there is no responsibilityand no merit to it. Responsibility is a mere word to give a better moral feeling to those who take their own choice.

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We come, finally, to this issue of freedom-freedom without moral responsibility. I do not propose to discuss whether M. Sartre misunderstandsthe meaning of freedom; or to assert that freedom, in any valuable sense of the word, means freedom in society, with law and in sympathy, and not freedom from society, law and sympathy-a freedom conditioning as an original curse all relation to them. It is, I think, proper to protest against the'unusual use of received terms. But M. Sartre has chosen to give his own definition. We can only criticize his argument by considering his terms in his own way. This freedom of his arises, if I may so say, as a metaphysical necessity from the unbridgeable gulf between, not object and subject, but Ding-an-sich and Etre-pour-moi. It is a freedom so complete as to exclude any determination from without or guidance from divine law or permanent moral norms, or even from those semipermanent, social ones of which Durkheim wrote. It is a freedom which may impose on us responsibility ; but the responsibility is morally empty, because there is no moral norm, beyond a mere convention, and, so far as any statement of Sartre goes, no aesthetic norm by which responsible performances can be judged. The responsibility so called is, then, an empty caprice, pro rationevoluntas. One major reason why Sartre's philosophy is welcomed now becomes clear. It is the philosophy of the individual who is impressed by the modernity of an atheism and amoralism from which Kierkegaard shrinks, but who finds it astringent to assume, like Atlas, full responsibilityfor his own acts. Yet this reason rests on a misconception or on bad faith in presentation, i.e., on a mixture of romanticism and logic which is invalid, and can now be seen to lapse. What in the end is magnified in the Sartrian philosophy is chance. And this must be magnified in every philosophy which excludes concepts of permanence, which are the bases of significance and value as distinct from the enjoyment of instant experience in a world of problem and imaginative solution.

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Adopting Sartre's own terminology here, we may say that if Existentialism of this variety is the only logical alternative to Essentialism, then there seems to be every evidence that Essentialism is the sounder hypothesis, because it makes fewer improbable demands upon our belief. The content of Essentialism I have only been able to indicate in the briefest fashion within the limits of the present paper.