Existing : an introduction to existential thought 9780767405874, 0767405870

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EXISTING Steven Luper

An Introduction to Existential Thought

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r The Search for Being from Philosophy GENERAL, FORMAL CONCEPTS OF BEING: OBJECTIVE BEING, SUBJECTIVE BEING, BEING-IN-ITSELF

To think of being is to make it a distinct being. If we ask what being is, we have many answers to choose from: empirical reality in space and time; dead and living matter; persons and things; tools and material; ideas that apply to reality; cogent constructions of ideal objects, as in mathematics; contents of the imagination— in a word, objectiveness. Whatever being I find in my situation is to me an object. I am different. I do not confront myself as I confront things. I am the questioner; I know that I do the

asking and that those modes of objective being are offered to me as replies. Whichever wayI turn, trying to make an object of myself, there is always the “I” for which my self becomes an object. There remains a being that is I. Objective being and subjective being are the two modes that strike us first of all, as most different in essence. Objects include persons, of course, who are their own subjects just as I can be their object—and I, as | exist, can even become my own object. But there

bidi,/55: 'eTbid., 63.

remains a point where the objective and subjective I are one, despite the dichotomy. The being of things is unaware of itself; but I, the thinking subject, know about it. When I conceive of this being in the abstract, the way it is independently of its being an object for a subject —that is to say, not as a phenomenon for something else—I call it being in itself. This being-in-itself is not accessible to me, however, for the mere thought of it will turn it into an object and thus into something that appears to me as being. It is in myself alone that I know a being that not merely appears to, but is for, itsel{—one in which being and being known go together. My own being differs radically from any being of things because I can say, “I am.” But if I objectify my empirical existence, this is not the same as the I-in-itself. I do not know what I am in myself if I am my own object; to find out, I would have to become aware of myself in some way other than cognitive knowledge. And even then the being-in-itself of other things would remain alien to me. The division of being into objective being, beingin-itself, and subjective being does not give me three kinds of being that exist side by side. It does give me three inseparable poles of the being I find myself in. I may tend to take one of the three for being as such. Then I either construe the one and only being as being-initself, without noticing that I am making it an object for myself in the process— or I construe it as this object of mine, forgetting in this phenomenal transformation of all being that in objectiveness there must be something which appears, and something it appears to—or I construe it as subjective being, with myself as ultimate reality, without realizing that I can never be otherwise than in a situation, conscious of objects and searching for being-in-itself. Objective being pours out to me in endless variety and infinite abundance; it means the world I can get to know. Subjective being is to me as certain as it is incomprehensible; it can come to be known only to the extent to which it has been objectified as empirical existence and is no longer truly subjective. Being-in-itself defies cognition. It is a boundary concept we cannot help thinking, one that serves to question everything I know objectively—for whenever some objective being should be taken for being proper, in the absolute sense, it will be relativized into a phenomenon by the mere idea of being-in-itself.

The Search for Being

Thus we fail to hold fast any being as intrinsic. None of them is being pure and simple, and none can do without the other; each one is a being within being. The whole eludes us. There is nothing like a common genus of which the three modes— objective, subjective, and in-itself—might be species; nor is there one source to which they can be traced. They are heterogeneous and repel each other as much as they need each other to be at all—to be, that is, for our consciousness. They almost seem to have dropped out of the unfathomable, three mutual strangers who belong together even though there is no link between them and none of them will help us comprehend another. None may claim precedence, except in some particular perspective. For naive metaphysics, seeking direct possession of intrinsic being, being-in-itself comes first; but it can only be populated with conceptions from the objective world, which in such metaphysics is supposed to be underlying all existence. Objective being has precedence for all cognition, because objects alone are knowable, and also because in cognition we take being for the sum of knowledge—not including the knower, who is merely added to this being. In illustrative philosophizing, on the other hand, subjective being will come briefly to the fore; from this standpoint of self-comprehension, the questioning and knowing subject tends to accord precedence to itself.

EXISTENCE ANALYSIS AS AN ANALYSIS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

We have found being distinctly conceived in objects, directly grasped in self-reflection and evanescently touched—and recognized as inconceivable—in the boundary idea of being-in-itself. All of these thoughts spring from the thinker’s existence. From this common ground, to which the search for being takes me, the modes of being appear as perspectives for my thought. The thought itself comprises all perspectives; what it means by being is sim-

ply all there is at a time, comprising whatever may occur to me as being. It is my consciousness of tem-

poral existence in the situation I find myself in. Since existence is consciousness and I exist as consciousness, things are for me only as objects of con-

sciousness. For me, nothing can be without entering

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into my consciousness. Consciousness as existence is the medium of all things— although we shall see that it is the mere fluid of being. To analyze existence is to analyze consciousness.

1. Consciousness of Objects and of Self; Existing Consciousness To be conscious is not to be the way a thing is. It is a peculiar kind of being, the essence of which is to be directed at objects we mean. This basic phenomenon— as self-evident as it is marvelous—has been called intentionality. Consciousness is intentional consciousness, which means that its relation to its object is not the relation of a thing that strikes another, or is struck by another. There is no causal relation, and indeed no interrelation at all, as between two of a kind or two on one level. In consciousness, rather, I have an object before me. The wayIhave it does not matter. It may be perception, which is biologically based on causal relations between physical phenomena, though the phenomena as such can never cause intentionality but require intentional acts to animate perception. It may be imagination, or recollection. Or it may be thinking, which can be visual or abstract, aimed at real objects or at imaginary ones. One thing always remains: my consciousness is aimed at what I mean. Consciousness is self-reflexive. It not only aims at objects, but turns back upon itself—that is to say, it is not only conscious but self-conscious at the same time. The reflexion of consciousness upon itself is as self-evident and marvelous as is its intentionality. I aim at myself; Iam both one and twofold. I do not exist as a thing exists, but in an inner split, as my own object, and thus in motion and inner unrest. No con-

sciousness can be understood as stable, as merely extant. Because it is not like the being of spatial and ideal things—things I can walk around, things I can hold fast, things I can visualize so that they stand before me— consciousness evaporates when I would take it for being. While I am conscious of objects as of something else, I am also conscious of myself as an object, but so as to coincide with this object that is myself. It is true that what happens in this confrontation when I observe myself psychologically is that the experience I know and my knowledge of this experience will be so aimed at each other as to make me conscious of two different things at once: what I know, and my know-

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ing it. Yet at the core of the process stands my subjective consciousness, with the one identical “I” actually doubled by the thought that “I am conscious of myself.” The coincidence of “I think” and “I think that I think” permits neither one to be without the other. A seeming logical absurdity becomes a reality: one is not one but two—and yet it does not become two, but remains precisely this unique one. It is the general, formal concept of the I.

The omnipresent and not otherwise deducible basic phenomenon of consciousness as the split into subject and object means that self-consciousness and consciousness of objects go together. True, I become so absorbed in things that I forget myself. But there always remains a last subjective point, an impersonal and purely formal I-point which a thing will confront by existing—that is to say, for which the thing will be an object. Conversely, I cannot so isolate my selfconsciousness that I know myself alone: I exist only by confronting other things. There is no subjective consciousness without an objective one, however slight.

Finally there is a consciousness that is neither like the external being of things nor an objectless intentionality. This is the experience of mere inward motion that can light up in sudden intentionality and be known in retrospect, although the lack of any split keeps it dormant and its existence can only be remembered—of experiences had while awakening, for example, and of undefinable sensations. Viewed from the split consciousness, this merely existing one is a limit that can be empirically illuminated as a start and a transition, and as the encompassing ground; from the viewpoint of things outwardly extant, it is inwardness. Without any splits into subjective and objective consciousness, the merely existing one would be a fulfillment distinguished from an objective, concrete process by the fact that I can recall this experience as existing at a time when I was not myself, and that I can but retrospectively visualize it, that is, make it conscious, objective, and plain. If existence is consciousness, it is still not just one or all of the definite concepts of consciousness. Opposed to them is the unconscious. But if this is to have any being for us, we must either make it conscious or we must be conscious of it as “the unconscious”—in other words, as a phenomenon, an object of consciousness—and thus, for our consciousness, enable it to be.

The several meanings in which we conceive the unconscious correspond to the concepts of consciousness. The unconscious equivalent of intentional, objective consciousness is nonobjectiveness. The unconscious equivalent of self-consciousness is what we have experienced and objectively sensed but not expressly reflected upon and rated as known. The unconscious equivalent of merely existing consciousness is what we have not inwardly experienced in any sense, what lies entirely outside the realms of our consciousness. The statement that all existence is consciousness does not mean that consciousness is all. It does mean that for us there is only what enters into the consciousness to which it appears. For us the unconscious is as we become conscious of it. 2. Possibilities of Analyzing Consciousness Real consciousness is always the existence of an individual with other things that exist in time; it has a beginning and an end. As such, consciousness is an object of empirical observation and study. It contains the fullness of the world if the world is only the temporal world of real consciousness. Our conscious existence as a temporal reality is a ceaseless urge to satisfy many desires. Raised from a state of nature by knowledge and the faculty of choice, we consciously envision death and seek to avoid it at all costs. The instinct of self-preservation makes us fear perils and distinguish them so as to meet them. We seek pleasure in the enjoyment of existence and in the sense of its expansion, for which we toil each day. In anticipation of things to come we think of distant possibilities and goals and dangers. Worry, born of this reflection on what lies ahead, forces us to provide for the future. To satisfy the boundless will to live and the power drives of existence, we conquer others and delight in seeing our status reflected in our environment; indeed, it is this mirror that seems to give us our real sense of existence. Yet all this will satisfy our consciousness only for moments. It keeps driving us on. Never really bringing content, it achieves no goal and ceases only when we die. Such are the descriptions of consciousness as the empirically real existence of an instinctual life. It can also be described as formal consciousness at large. In

self-consciousness, distinct from other selves and

The Search for Being

from the objects I mean, I know myself as acting, then, and as identical with myself as time passes; I know I remain the one I. In objective consciousness I have the modes of objective being in the categories; I understand what definite being I encounter, and I know that cognition of all mundane existence is possible in generally valid form. My consciousness at large is interchangeable with that of anyone else who is my kind, even though not numerically identical. Insofar as consciousness with its world —whether existing reality or consciousness at large —is an object and may thus come to be known, it becomes a topic either of psychology, if it is empirical existence, or of logic, if possessed of generally valid knowledge. But there is a third way to analyze consciousness: not as naturally given the way it is, but as a fulfilled real consciousness which never remains the same, which undergoes transformations and is thus historic. Historically changing consciousness not only happens, as does a natural process; it remembers, it affects itself, it engenders itself in its history. Man actively lives the life of his successive generations, instead of merely suffering it in a repetition of the same. An objective study of these metamorphoses constitutes world orientation—as anthropology and analytical psychology and intellectual history. Beginning with the dull mind of primitive man, such study allows us to glimpse the leaps in human history from one form to the other, to see now how germs unfold slowly, and then again the sudden flash of new origins of consciousness. In the individual we trace the inner changes and analyze them up to the limit where the processes defy analysis. We seek to penetrate the worlds and self-illuminations of the personally and historically strangest and most remote forms of consciousness. The study of changeable consciousness teaches us that we cannot set up any substantial real consciousness as the “natural consciousness,” or its substance as the “natural view of the world.” This would be a reduction to the slicked-down form of a distinct phenomenal consciousness—as a society of historically linked individuals will take it for granted— or to the psychological pattern of the drives of living existence in its environment. There is no immediate existence that might be scientifically analyzed, in one exclusively correct way, as the natural one. Objectively, any attempt to construe and characterize such an existence

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has only relative significance. The man who takes it for a radical cognition of being determines only what his narrow mind will make him think of himself. We can, of course, try to go back beyond all historicity and all concreteness in pursuit of what we might call “bare existence’—but this will only impoverish us. We may claim that what we know at the end will fit the universal immediacy of existence, but in fact we shall have stated only a very meager and formally empty consciousness of being that will be historically particular and fixed in time. And if we approach the supposedly immediate by construing the seeming genetic priority of primitive tribes as “natural,” we find that once we know more about their existence it proves to be not at all natural but specifically artificial and strange. There is no radical departure for the awaking of consciousness. Nobody begins afresh. I do not step into a primal situation. So, as there is no generally determinable, natural, unveiled existence to be discovered by removing fallacies, what really lies at the root of it cannot be sought by abstracting from acquired traits. It can be sought only by questioning what these traits have led to. An understanding ofall that has been acquired and evolved remains the ground on which we understand existence. The utmost clarity about existence that we can achieve comes to depend upon ’ what scientific intellectual history has achieved already. I cannot see through existence if Imerely know general structures, but only ifI take a concrete part in the historic process of factual, active, and cognitive world orientation. Thus the existence analysis conceived as preceding any research operation in the world—though actually performed only after the completed operation— will be either a schema for consciousness at large, showing the network of the modes of being and the sense of validity, or it will be a diagram of conscious existence in reality, isolating the psychological forces at work as libido, fear, worry, will to power, fear of death, or death wish; or it will be the historic selfunderstanding of consciousness as it has evolved. No way of making existence conscious gets me to the bottom ofit. Instead, unless I confine myself artificially and try to use a supposed knowledge as an anchor in existence where it cannot take hold, any existence analysis will leave me suspended in my situation. The fact that efforts to get underneath it all—as if there

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were an existing ground to penetrate—seem to plunge

me into a void indicates that existence is not what counts if I want to get at being. What counts is myself. Constructions of existence will not take me to being. They can only help me get there by a leap; and the approach that may enable me to take this leap is not existence analysis any more; it is elucidation of Existenz. 3. Consciousness as a Boundary

In analyzing consciousness we work out constructive schemata for logic (the formal visualization of what is valid for consciousness at large), for psychology (the study of empirically existing consciousness), and for the history of consciousness (the reproduction of the mental process). In part, these objectifying analyses are available in magnificent drafts, but they can never be conclusive. They keep encountering limits that make us feel what is beyond the analyses. Logic, then, will turn about into a formal metaphysical transcending (as in the case of Plotinus); psychology, into elucidation of Existenz (as in Kierkegaard’s); and the history of con-

sciousness, into consummate metaphysics (as in Hegel’s). Philosophizing cannot be consummated in the self-observation of an empirically existing consciousness, nor in the construction of the ever-present consciousness at large, nor in historical knowledge. Consciousness is a boundary. It is an object of observation, and yet it already defies objective observation. The statement that in philosophizing we start out from consciousness is untrue insofar as it would seem to confirm that the general—logical, psychological, or historical—analyses of the kind of conscious-

ness that anyone can have at any time amount to philosophical thinking. The statement truly refers to the elucidations that begin and end with existential consciousness.

1. Empirical Existence; Consciousness at Large; Possible Existenz

What do I mean when I say “I”? The first answer is that in thinking about myself I have made myself an object. I am this body, this individual, with an indefinite self-consciousness reflected

in my impact upon my environment—I am empirical existence. Second, I am a subject essentially identical with every other subject. I am interchangeable. This interchangeability is not the identity of average qualities among empirical individuals; it is subjective being as such, the subjectiveness that is the premise of all objectiveness—I am consciousness at large. Third, I experience myself in potential unconditionality. I not only want to know what exists, reasoning pro and con; I want to know from a source beyond reasoning, and there are moments of action when I

feel certain that what I want now, what I am now doing, is what I really want myself. I want to be so that this will and this action are mine. My very essence— which I do not know even though I am sure of it— comes over me in the way I want to know and to act. In this potential freedom of knowledge and action I am “possible Existenz.” Thus, instead of an unequivocally determined I, we have several meanings. As consciousness at large I am the subject whose objects are the things of reality and general validity. Every individual shares in this conceptual general consciousness if objectified being appears to him as it does to all men. Next, I am empirical individuality as objectified subjectiveness; as such I am a special and, in this form, singular occurrence in the endless diversity of individuals. Then, again as empirical existence, I am this individual for

consciousness at large, which makes me an object for psychology, and an inexhaustible one at that—an object of observation and research, but not of total cognition. Finally, as possible Existenz, I am a being re-

DISTINGUISHING EXISTENZ

lated to its potential and, as such, nonexistent for any

We saw being as kept in suspension by the inconceivable being-in-itself. We sensed it as a boundary in existence analysis. But while being-in-itself was the utterly other, completely inaccessible to me as nonexistent for thought, I myself, as I exist, am the limit to analyzing existence. Herein lies the next step we must take in our search for being.

consciousness at large. To conceive the meaning of possible Existenz is to break through the circle of all modes of objective and subjective being. In philosophizing we admit each of the modes of subjective being. We do not lump them together as identical; and in a limited sense we accord a primacy to each one, though reserving the absolute primacy for possible Existenz.

The Search for Being

We recognize the primacy of the empirical I as compelled by the needs of existence, but we recognize it relatively, and not for philosophizing itself. Consciousness at large will be paramount as a requisite of any being for me as the subject. The following two trains of thought may illustrate the meaning of this formal paramountcy that covers all subjectiveness and objectiveness. First, I not only exist like any living thing; I also know that I exist. I can conceive the possibility of my nonexistence. If I try to think of myself as not being at all, however, I notice that in allowing the rest of the world to stand I am involuntarily letting myself stand as well, as a point in consciousness at large for which the world would be. Then I go on to think of the possibility that there were no being at all. But while I can say this, I cannot really think it either, because I still keep thinking as this “I”?—as if I had being even though the world had not. Each time, the questioner remains

extant as consciousness

at

large, while it seems that all other being can really be thought out of existence. The thinker’s consciousness at large is entitled to its specific primacy in the limited sense that we can temporarily conceive it as the ultimate being without which there is no other. In philosophizing, the I of possible Existenz has the decidedly dominant function of breaking through the circle of objective and subjective being, toward the being-in-itself which in that circle can be only negatively defined. Possible Existenz may perhaps open the positive way that is closed to consciousness at large in the world of objects. This kind of philosophizing is as nothing for empirical existence, and a groundless figment of the imagination for consciousness at large. But for possible Existenz it is the way to itself, and to being.

2. Existenz

Existenz is the never objectified source of my thoughts and actions. It is that whereof I speak in trains of thought that involve no cognition. It is what relates to itself, and thus to its transcendence.*

*No definable concept—which would presuppose some kind of objective being—can express the being of Existenz. The very word is just one of the German synonyms for “being.” The philosophical idea began obscurely, as a

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Can something be, and yet not be a real object among objects? Obviously it cannot be the “I am” we conceive as empirical existence or consciousness at large, as comprehensible and deducible. The question is whether all the objective and subjective conceptions of being have brought me to the end, or whether my self can be manifested to me in yet another fashion. We are touching what seems to me the pivotal point of the sense of philosophizing. To be means to decide about being. It is true that, as I observe myself, I am the wayIam; although an individual, I am a case of something general, subject to causality or responding to the valid challenge of objectively fixed commandments. But where I am my own origin, everything has not yet been settled in principle, in accordance with general laws. It is not only due to the infinity of conditions that I do not know how it might be, had it been settled. On quite a different plane it is still my own self that decides what it is. This thought— impossible to conceive objectively —is the sense of freedom of possible Existenz. In this sense I cannot think that, after all, everything takes its course, and that I might therefore do just as I please and vindicate my action by whatever general arguments come to hand. Instead, for all the dependence and determinacy of my existence, I feel sure that ultimately something rests with me alone. What I do or * forgo, what I want first and foremost, where I cling to options and where I proceed to realizations—all this results neither from general rules I act upon, as right, nor from psychological laws to which I am subject. It does spring, in the restlessness of my existence and by the certainty of self-being, from freedom. Where I stop observing myself psychologically and still do not act with unconscious naiveté; where I act positively, rather, soaring with a bright assurance that gives me nothing to know but sustains my own being—there I decide what I am. I know a kind of appeal to which my true self inwardly responds by the realization of my being. But it is not as an isolated being that I come to sense what I am. Against my self-will, against the accident of my empirical existence, I experience myself in communication. I am never more sure of being myself than at

mere inkling of what Kierkegaard’s use of the word has since made historically binding upon us.

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times of total readiness for another, when I come to

myself because the other too comes to himself in our revealing struggle. As possible Existenz I seize upon the historicity of my existence. From the mere diversity of knowable realities it will expand to an existential depth. What is outwardly definite and delimiting is inwardly the appearance of true being. The man who loves mankind only does not love at all, but one who loves a particular human being does. We are not yet faithful if we are rationally consistent and will keep agreements; we are faithful if we accept as our own, and

know ourselves bound to, what we have done and loved. A will to reorganize the world properly and permanently is no will at all; a proper will is to seize as my own whatever chances my historic situation offers. Iflam rooted in historicity, my temporal existence carries no weight in and by itself: but it does carry weight in the sense that in time I decide for eternity. What is time, then? As the future, it is possibility; as the past, it is the bond of fidelity; as the present, it is decision. Time, then, is not something that merely passes; it is the phenomenality of Existenz. Existenz is gained in time, by our own decisions. Once temporality has this weight and I know it, I have overcome temporality—not by replacing it with an abstract timelessness, not by putting myself outside of time, but by the fact that in time I stand above time. In my conscious life, governed by vital urges and the finite will to be happy, I want time to last as though deliverance from the anxieties of existence were found in blind permanence. I can no more eliminate this will from my living consciousness than I can void the sorrows of mortality. They are part of my existence as such. But if, in time, I act and love absolutely, time is eternal. This is something my intellect cannot grasp, something that will light up only at the moment, and afterwards only in doubtful remembrance. It is no outward possession, to have and to hold.

There is a distinguishing formula, meaningless to intellectual consciousness at large, but an appeal to possible Existenz. It goes as follows: real being loses its reality in all objective cognition, turning into endless duration, into laws of nature, or into the nonbeing of mere transience; but Existenz is realized in

choices made in temporal historicity. Thus, despite its objective disappearance, Existenz achieves reality as fulfilled time. Eternity is neither timelessness nor

duration for all time; it is the depth of time as the historic appearance of Existenz. 3. World and Existenz

Existenz will find itself with other Existenz in the mundane situation, without coming to be recognizable as mundane being. What is in the world appears as being to my consciousness at large, but only a transcending possible Existenz can be sure of Existenz. Being that compels recognition exists directly. Ican take hold of it, can make something of it, and with it—technically with things, or in arguing with myself and with other consciousness. In it lies the resistance of anything given, whether the real resistance of empirical reality or the resistance of logical necessities or impossibilities. It is always objective being, an original object or an adequate objectification like the models or types that serve as research tools, for instance. Existenz, which in itself does not exist, appears to possible Existenz as existence. In our minds, of course, we cannot close the gap between world and Existenz, between things we can know and things we can elucidate, between objective being and the free being of Existenz. In fact, however, the two modes of being are

so close together that a consciousness which is also possible Existenz will find the distinction an infinite task whose performance combines the cognition of mundane being with the elucidation of Existenz. It is only abstractly that we can formulate the distinction of objective being and the free being of Existenz. We can say, for instance, that objective being is given as mechanism, life, and consciousness, while I as Existenz am original—not original being, but my own origin in existence. Measured by the being of things, there is no freedom; measured by freedom, the being of things is not true being. Or we can say ' that extant being and free being are not two antithetical kinds of being which might be coordinated. They are interrelated but flatly incomparable; being in the sense of objectivity and being in the sense of freedom exclude one another. The one steps from time into timelessness or endless duration; the other steps from time into eternity. What is for all time, or valid, is

objectiveness; what is evanescent and yet eternal is Existenz. We can say that one is for a thinking subject only, while the other, though never without an object, is real only for communicating Existenz.

The Search for Being

From the view of the world, any appearance of Existenz is merely objective being. From that viewpoint we see consciousness and the subjective I, but not Existenz; from there we cannot even understand what is meant by Existenz. From the point of view of Existenz, its own being is merely something that appears in existence, an existence that is not an appearance of Existenz, and is not its true self, but is recreant. It is as though originally all existence should be Existenz, and as though whatever part of it is nothing but existence could be understood as depleted, entangled, bereft of Existenz. There is no pointer to lead us from objective being to another kind of being, unless it be done indirectly, by the disjointness and inconclusiveness of objective being. But Existenz does permeate the forms of that being as media of its realization, and as possibilities of its appearance. Standing on the borderline ofworld and Existenz, possible Existenz views all existence as more than existence. Proceeding from the most remote, from the mechanism, being will approach itself, so to speak, via life and consciousness, seeking to find itself in Existenz as what it is. Or—while consciousness at large conceives existence from this borderline as pure existence—it may be the character of all existence to be potentially relevant for Existenz by providing the impulse for it or serving as its medium. There can be no Existenz without other Existenz, and yet objectively it makes no sense to speak of it as manifold. For whenever Existenz and Existenz communicate historically in the dark of mundane being, they are one for the other only, invalid for any watching consciousness at large. What is invisible from outside is not surveyable as a being of many. On the one side, possible Existenz can see the being of the world, split into modes of being, in the medium

of consciousness at large; on the other side is every Existenz. On no side is there a conclusive being, neither objectively as the one mundane existence nor existentially as a conceivable and surveyable world of all Existenz. If I think of being, it will always be a distinct being, not the being. In the ascertainment of possible

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neither conceivable nor valid—a being that no man knows or can meaningfully claim, either in himself or in others.

BEING

We have found no one answer to the question we raised at the start: what is being? An answer to this question satisfies the questioner if it allows him to recognize his own being. But the question of being itself is not unequivocal; it depends upon who asks it. It has no original meaning for our existing consciousness at large, which we can break up into the multiplicity of distinct being. It is only with possible Existenz, in transcending all existence and all objective being, that the impassioned search for being-in-itself begins— only to fall short of the goal of definite knowledge. Whatever exists is phenomenal; it is appearance, not being. And yet it is not nothing. 1. Appearance and Being

The sense of “appearance” in such statements has its categorial derivation in a particular, objective relationship: between the way something appears from a standpoint, as a phenomenon, and the way it is in* itself, regardless of the standpoint. In an objectifying sense, then, phenomenality is the aspect of a mental

addendum, of something we have to think as objectively underlying but not yet objective itself —something I conceive as an object only because, in principle, I might come to know it as such (as the atom, for instance).

It is in the category of appearance—using it to transcend this definite objectifying relation of phenomenal and underlying elements—that we conceive all being when we seek being as such. Even so, the being that appears will remain twofold. In temporal existence we cannot overcome the

Existenz I do not have an Existenz for an object, nor

duality of the inaccessible being-in-itself of transcendence—which we cannot conceive as the objectively underlying addendum—and the self-being manifest

do I make sure of an Existenz at all. I only make sure

to Existenz, which is not existing consciousness. Exis-

of myself and of the Existenz I communicate with; we

tenz and transcendence are heterogeneous, but interrelated. Their relationship appears in existence. As an object of science, existence is the appearance of something theoretically underlying. Science has no

are what simply admits of no substitution; we are not cases of a species. Existenz is a sign pointing toward this self-ascertainment of a being that is objectively

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access to Existenz, nor to transcendence. But ina philosophical sense the appearance of being-in-itself results from the scientific cognition of a phenomenon plus the conception of the underlying addendum. In the scientific study of phenomena we think up the underlying addendum; in philosophizing we use the phenomena to touch being in our interpretation of ciphers of transcendence, and in the thinking that appeals to Existenz. Nor is the consciousness we study the same consciousness in which I am sure of self-being and aware of transcendence. There is no unconscious Existenz, but consciousness as an object of scientific cognition is never that existential consciousness. This is why I,

the single living individual existing for objective research, can turn, for myself, into the encompassing medium of all being when my consciousness is the psychologically inaccessible absolute assurance of Existenz. For the same reason, the statement that nothing lies outside consciousness is untrue if I understand consciousness as a mere research object. The statement is true in the sense that for me there is only what becomes phenomenal and thus enters into my consciousness. It is in going beyond its own explorable existence that consciousness begins and ends its contact with the unexplorable. For science this is the unconscious with its many meanings; for Existenz, it is transcendence. Yet this supplement to consciousness will of necessity be conscious again—for science as a theory of the unconscious, and for Existenz as the cipher of being in a self-contradictory and thus evanescent form. The phrase “appearance of being” must be understood as ambiguous if we are to grasp the thesis that Existenz appears in its own consciousness. It means neither the appearance of an underlying objectivity nor of a transcendent being-in-itself. On the one hand, Existenz cannot be psychologically understood as a conscious phenomenon. Only the forms of the existence of consciousness can be objects of psychology—its causally conditioned and intelligibly motivated experiences, but not its existential ground. Instead, in psychological research we think up an underlying unconscious, which we consider the reality of consciousness. In an objectifying sense, consciousness is the phenomenon of this underlying addendum, the way in which it appears. In an existential sense, however, appearance means a way of becoming conscious, a way of having been objectified,

in which a simultaneously and wholly present being understands itself. I know eternally what in this way is never known objectively. I am what appears in this way—not as something underlying, but as myself. We group the appearance of consciousness as a research object with the underlying, which to us is outright alien. And we group the appearance of Existenz with what we are originally, what we will answer for. The appearance of the underlying objectivity is generally valid for cognition; the appearance of Existenz is manifest in existential communication. On the other hand, as the appearance in consciousness of its subjective being, Existenz can be sure of itself only in relation to transcendent being-initself. This it can feel but cannot be. What manifests itself to Existenz is not plain, straightforward being; it is being that addresses Existenz— itself no more than a subjective appearance—as a possibility. Appearance is heterogeneous. The underlying objectivity appears in phenomena, transcendent being-initself in ciphers, Existenz in the assurance of absolute consciousness. In each direction, this heterogeneous-

ness voids the stability of being. In its entirety it will keep being definitively disjoint for the questioner as possible Existenz in temporal existence, even at the root of his search.

2. Being and the Many Modes of Being In thinking about our question, what is being, we may try to take one thing for being as such and all other being for derivative. There are many possible ways to try this, but none to carry it through. Suppose, for instance, I were to equate intrinsic being with objective knowability and to regard myself as derived from the objects, thus making a thing of myself and denying all freedom. Or suppose I were to turn the free‘ dom of the subject into original being, and to derive things from that. Each time, the derivation of one from the other would be a fantastic leap. I can neither comprehend myself by the being of things, nor can I take all things to be myself. Instead, I am in the world; there are things that exist for me; I do make original decisions as a possible Existenz that appears to itself in the world. No rudiment of being enables me to comprehend all the being I find myself in. This is my situation, which I must not forget as I philosophize. Our search for being started out from manifold being and led back to it, as to the modes of being. If

The Search for Being we did not find being, there is still the question why everything is called being even though it cannot be brought under one principle or derived from one origin. The fact we face here is that any statement is made in the form of language. Whatever we may be discussing will take the form of a definite sentence with the predicate “is”—even if the sentence refers to no being at all, even if it is an indirect suggestion or if it connects a train of thought that may be illustrative as a whole but that does not define an object as the one

referred to. Language is the phenomenal form of all thought. Whether in objective cognition or in nonobjective elucidation—in either case I am thinking. And what I think I have to think in categories. These are basic definitions of all thought; there is no superior category of which the rest might be species or derivations; but what they have in common, what defines them, is

that they will always state a being. It is thought itself which in some sense is one and will accordingly call heterogeneous being —though no common concept of it is discoverable—by the one name of being. As we think in categories, the question is whether our thoughts are adequately or inadequately categorized. We have to distinguish between, on the one

hand, what is directly what it is, what is to be discovered and then to be straightforwardly discussed in categories—and on the other hand, what is not such an object but will be discussed just the same, in an indirect way, open to misunderstanding, and necessarily also in categories. Schematically we can formulate the distinction as follows: The discovery of being is scientific cognition; it gives us our bearings in the world and will always more or less adequately grasp a definite being. The ascertainment of being is philosophizing as the transcending of objectivity; in the medium of categories it grasps inadequately, in substituted objectivities, what can never become objective. Methodologically, therefore, the genuine philosophical steps are to be grasped as modes of transcending. What they express regarding content, from the existential source of an absolute consciousness,

is a being that employs such thought for its selfascertainment as intrinsic being.

As possible Existenz comes to itself by way of philosophizing, it cannot exchange its freedom for the stifling narrowness of a being known as intrinsic. It will always be freedom, not cognition, that lets us

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experience what proper being is. The impulse behind our dissection of the concepts of being is to loosen our consciousness, to experiment with possibilities so as to get at the root of true philosophizing and there to search for the one being, as being proper. We can approach being either by its dilution into everything of which we can indefinitely say it “is,” or by its fixation into a categorially defined being that is known, or by the accentuation of true being, which is ascertained in thought. We differentiate, accordingly, between definite and indefinite being, between the various definitions, and between the true and the trivial. True being cannot be found in a sense that we might know. It is to be sought in its transcendence, to which only Existenz, not consciousness at large, can ever relate. One might suppose that any meaningful thinking must indirectly aim at this transcendence if it is not to deteriorate into vacuous intellectual gamesmanship and indifferent factuality. It could be that the designation of all being as being, with no noticeable common denominator save the form of language—that this most tenuous appearance of being in our speech indicates how deeply rooted all of it is in the one being. But these are indefinite thoughts, unless they already signify a transcending. For all categories can be ~ used as means to transcend themselves, to dissolve

their particularity in a unity that has neither an existence in the world nor a meaning in logic—namely,

in the one being of transcendence which enters only the soul of a historic Existenz, if anything. From there it pervades meaning and existence, seeming to confirm them both, and then again to fracture and dissolve them both. Ontology as a doctrine of being can achieve only one result nowadays: to make us conscious of being by the modes of being that occur to our thought. In the performance of this task it never touches the one being; it only clears the way for its ascertainment. Today’s ontology will not be metaphysics any more; it will be a doctrine of categories. Whatever I may be thinking can only make room for the “I” as possible Existenz—which is outside my every thought at the same time. To possible Existenz, thoughts mean relative knowabilities, possibilities, appeals, but no more. In the same way, my partner in communicative thinking will stay outside his thoughts, for himself and for me, in order to move with me in possible thoughts

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and not to be subjected to absolute ones. To meet in communication is to break through the thought that made the breakthrough possible.

&y Existenz from Philosophy MUNDANE EXISTENCE AND EXISTENZ

If by “world” I mean the sum of all that cognitive orientation can reveal to me as cogently knowable for everyone, the question arises whether the being of the world is all there is. Does cognitive thinking stop with world orientation? What we refer to in mythical terms as the soul and God, and in philosophical language as Existenz and transcendence, is not of this world. Neither one is knowable, in the sense of things in the world. Yet both might have another kind of being. They need not be nothing, even though they are not known. They could be objects of thought, if not of cognition. What is there, as against all mundane being? In the answer to this question lies the basic decision of philosophy. We answer: there is the being which in the phenomenality of existence is not but can be, ought to be, and therefore decides in time whether it is in eternity. This being is myself as Existenz. I am Existenz if I do not become an object for myself. In Existenz I know, without being able to see it, that what I call my “self” is independent. The possibility of Existenz is what I live by; it is only in its realization that Iam myself. Attempts to comprehend it make it vanish, for it is not a psychological subject. I feel more deeply rooted in its possibility than in my self-objectifying grasp of my nature and my character. Existenz appears to itself as existence, in the polarity of subjectivity and objectivity; but it is not the appearance of an object given anywhere, or uncoverable as underlying any reflection. It is phenomenal only for itself and for other Existenz.

:

It is thus not my existence that is Existenz; but,

being human, 1 am possible Existenz in existence. I exist or I do not exist, but my Existenz, as a possibility, takes a step toward being or away from being, toward nothingness, in every choice or decision I

make. My existence differs from other existence in scope; my world can be broad or narrow. But Existenz differs from other Existenz in essence, because of its freedom. As existence I live and die; my Existenz is unaware of death but soars or declines in relation to its being. Existence exists empirically, Existenz as freedom only. Existence is wholly temporal, while Existenz, in time, is more than time. My existence is finite, since it is not all existence, and yet, for me, it is

concluded within itself. Existenz is not everything and not for itself alone either, for its being depends on its relation to other Existenz and to transcendence—the wholly Other that makes it aware of being not by itself alone—but while existence may be termed infinite as a relatively rounded endlessness, the infinity of Existenz is unrounded, an open possibility. Action on the ground of possible Existenz disconcerts me in existence; as existence, concerned with enduring in time, I cannot but turn against the doubtful path of unconditionality that may be costly, even ruinous,

in existence.

My concern

with existence

tends to make existential actions conditional upon the preservation of my existence; but to possible Existenz, the unqualified enjoyment of existence is already apostasy; to Existenz, the condition of its reality in existence is that it comprehends itself as unconditional. If I merely want to exist, without qualifications, I am bound to despair when I see that the reality of my existence lies in total foundering. Existence is fulfilled in mundane being; to possible Existenz, the world is the field of its phenomenality. The known world is the alien world. I am detached from it. What my intellect can know and what I can experience empirically repulses me as such, and J am irrelevant to it. Subject to overpowering causality in the realm of reality and to logical compulsion in the realm of validity, I am not sheltered in either. I hear

no kindred language, and the more determined I am to comprehend the world, the more homeless will it make me feel; as the Other, as nothing but the world,

it holds no comfort. Unfeeling, neither merciful nor unmerciful, subject to laws or floundering in coincidence, it is unaware of itself. I cannot grasp it, for it

faces me impersonally, explicable in particulars but never intelligible as a whole. And yet there is another way in which I know the world. It is akin to me then; I am at home in it and even sheltered in it. Its laws are the laws of my own reason. I find peace as I adjust to it, as I make my tools and

Existenz

expand my cognition of the world. It will speak to me now; it breathes a life that I share. I give myself up to it, and when I am in it Iam with myself. It is familiar in small, present things, and thrilling in its grandeur; it will make me unwary in proximity or tend to sweep me along to its far reaches. Its ways are not the ways I

expect, but though it may startle me with undreamed of fulfillments and incomprehensible failures, I shall trust it even as I perish. This is no longer the world I know about in purely cognitive orientation. But my contentment in dealing with it is ambiguous. I may crave the world as the font of my joy of living, may be drawn to it and deceived about it by my blind will to live. I can indeed not exist without this craving, but as an absolute impulse it becomes self-destructive; it is against this impulse that my possible Existenz warns me to detach myself from the world lest I become its prey. Or, in the world that is so close to me, so much my kin, I may set out to transcend the world. Whether seeing it, thinking about it, acting and loving, producing and developing in it—in all that, then, I deal with something else at the same time, with a phenomenon of the transcendence

that speaks to me. This is not a world I know but one that seems to have lost its continuity. It will change according to times and persons, and depending on my inner attitudes; it does not say the same things to all men, and not the same things at all times. I must

be ready for it if Iwant to hear it. If |withhold myself, the very thing I might transcend to will withdraw. For it is only for freedom and by freedom, and there is nothing cogent about it at all. Possible Existenz thus sets itself off from the world in order to find the right way into the world. It cuts loose from the world so that its grasp of the world will give it more than the world can be. The world attracts Existenz as the medium of its realization, and repels it as its possible decay to mere existence. There is a tension between the world and Existenz. They cannot become one, and they cannot separate either. In philosophizing on the ground of possible Existenz we presuppose this tension. The world, as what

can be known, and Existenz, as what must be eluctdated, are dialectically distinguished and then reconsidered as one. Mundane being, the being we know, is general because it is generally valid for everyone. It is the common property of all rational creatures who can agree on its being the same thing they mean. Its validity

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applies, in the endlessness of real things, to the definable particular. Existenz is never general, and thus not a case that might be subsumed as particular under a universal. Objectified as a phenomenon, however, Existenz is also the individuality of the historic particular. We still comprehend this under general categories, limited only by the endlessness of individual factuality, which makes the individual inexhaustible and thus ineffable. But individuality as such is not Existenz. All that it is, to begin with, is the visible profusion of mundane existence—a profusion whose existential originality can be examined by the questioner’s self-being, but not by any knowledge. The union of Existenz and the world is the incalculable process of which no one who is a part of it can be sure.

POSSIBLE EXISTENZ UNSATISFIED IN EXISTENCE

1. Doubts of the Being of Existenz Once we divorce Existenz from existence, from the world, and from a general character, there seems to be nothing left. Unless Existenz becomes an object, it seems a vain hope to think of it; such thinking cannot last or produce results, so the attempted conception of Existenz seems bound to destroy itself. We can doubt the being of Existenz in every respect and let common sense tell us to stick to objectivity as both real and true. Was the attempt the outgrowth of a chimera? There is no way to remove our doubts about Existenz. It is neither knowable as existence nor extant as validity. We can deny Existenz as we can deny the content of any philosophical thought—as opposed to particular objective cognition, whose object is demonstrable. I can never say of myself what I am, as if I were demonstrably extant. Whatever can be said of me by way of objectification applies to my empirical individuality, and as this can be the phenomenon of my Existenz, it is not a subject to any definitive psychological analysis either—a limit of my self-knowledge which indirectly points to something else, without ever being able to compel that something to become apparent. Hence the elucidation of Existenz is a deliverance but not a fulfillment, as knowledge would be;

it widens my scope, but it does not create substance

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by demonstrating any being that I might objectively comprehend. Since Existenz is thus inaccessible to one who asks about it in terms of the purely objective intellect, it remains subject to lasting doubt. Yet though no proof can force me to admit its being, my thinking is still not an end: it gets beyond the bounds of objective knowability in a leap that exceeds the capacity of rational insight. Philosophizing begins and ends at a point to which that leap takes me. Existenz is the origin of existential philosophizing, not its goal. Nor is its origin the same as its beginning, beyond which I would go on asking for an earlier beginning; it is not my license either, which would drive me to despair, and it is not a will resulting from the endlessness of questionable motivations. The origin is free being. This is what Itranscend to as philosophizing, not knowing, brings me to myself. The helplessness to which philosophizing reduces me when I doubt its origin is an expression of the helplessness of my self-being, and the reality of philosophizing is the incipient upsurge of that self-being. The premise of philosophizing, therefore, is to take hold of Existenz—which begins as no more than a dark striving for sense and support, turns into doubt and despair as reminders of its derivation from the realm of possibility, and then appears as the incomprehensible certainty that is elucidated in philosophizing. 2. Being Unsatisfied as an Expression of Possible Existenz If I reduce all things to mundane existence, either in theory or in practice, I feel unsatisfied. This feeling is a negative origin; in separating Existenz from mundane existence it makes me sense the truth of that separation. As there is no knowledge for which the world is conclusive, no “right” order of existence that could possibly be definitive, and no absolute final goal that all might see as one, I cannot help getting more unsatisfied the clearer I am in my mind about what I know, and the more honest I am about the sense of what I am doing. No reasons will sufficiently explain this feeling. It expresses the being of possible Existenz, which understands itself, not something else, when it declares itself unsatisfied. What I feel then is not the impotence of knowledge. It is not the emptiness at the end of

all my achievements in a world in which I face the brink of nothingness. Instead, I feel a discontent that eggs me on. An inexplicable discontent is a step out of mere existence, the step into the solitude ofpossibility where all mundane existence disappears. This solitude is not the resignation of the scientist who buries his hopes for a cognition of intrinsic being. It is not the irritation of the man of action who has come to doubt the point of all action. Nor is it the grief of a man in flight from himself and loath to be alone. Instead, after all these disillusionments, it is my dissatisfaction with existence at large, my need to have my own origin. To be unsatisfied is a condition inadequate to existence, and when this condition has opposed me to the world, it is my freedom that conquers all disenchantment and returns me to the world, to my fellow man with

whom | ascertain the origin. I do not, however, comprehend all this in thoughtful reflection —which is indeed what fails me—but in the reality of my actions and in total foundering. This possible conquest alone lends substance and significance to the otherwise irremovable relativity of theoretical knowledge and practical action. I may well derive a peculiar and profound satisfaction from a theoretical knowledge of things in general, from surveying world images, from contemplating forms and existence, and from expanding all of this farther and farther, under ideas. But it is my dissatisfaction that makes me feel that this whole world, for all its universality and validity, is not all of being. My attitude in it is not one of curiosity about every particular, shared with a fellow scientist who might be interchangeable according to his function; it is an attitude of original curiosity about being itself, shared with a friend. What grips me is a communion in asking and answering questions, and a communication which within objective validity goes indirectly beyond it. When I face objective tasks in practical life, when I

deal with them and ask about their meaning, no meaning that I can grasp in the world will satisfy me. My sense of possible Existenz will not rest even if my conscious comprehension feeds on the idea of a whole in which I have my place and do my job. The thought of fulfillment in an entirety will come to be merely relative, like a temptation to conceal the boundary situations which break up any entirety. Though each idea

Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)

of the whole is also a step beyond the fission into sheer coincidence, I am never able to survey the whole; eventually it will be back at the mercy of the accidents of mundane existence. A place within the whole, a place that would lend importance to the individual as a member of the body of this kind of being, is always questionable. But what remains to me as an individual is what never fits into a whole: the choice of my tasks and my striving for accomplishment are simultaneous manifestations of another origin, unless the annihilating thought that all I do might be senseless makes me shut my eyes. While I devote my empirical individuality to my finite tasks, my possible Existenz is more than that empirical individuality, and more than the objective, realistic impersonality of my political, scientific, or economic achievements. Although its essence is realized solely by this participation in the historic process of mundane existence, Existenz is at war with the lower depths of the encompassing world in which it finds itself. It is against those depths that, failing in the world, it seeks to hold its own in the eternity of intrinsic being. Not unless it is indeed unsatisfied —both theoretically, with the mere knowledge and contemplation of all things in the world, and practically, with the mere performance of a task in an ideal entirety—can possible Existenz utter and understand this dissatisfaction. It is never motivated by generally valid reasons; those rather tend to induce contentment and tranquillity in the totality of a mundane existence permeated by the idea and thus spiritualized. The discontent of possible self-being has broken through mundane existence and cast the individual back upon himself,

back to the origin that lets him deal with his world and, with his fellow, realize his Existenz. 3. The Breakthrough Ascertained in Existential Elucidation

If Iam unsatisfied and want to clarify this not just by setting myself apart but by positive thoughts on what this is all about, I come to existential elucidation.

As Existenz results from the real act of breaking through mundane existence, existential elucidation is the thinking ascertainment of that act. The breakthrough goes from possible Existenz to its realization, without being able to leave the borderline of possibility. To have its reality—although it is not objectively

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demonstrable— in action itself is the peculiar quality of Existenz. In its philosophical elucidation we pursue each thought that leads to the breakthrough, no matter from what side. a. The breakthrough occurs at the limits of mundane existence. Philosophical thinking leads up to such limits and puts us in mind of the experiences they involve and of the appeal they issue. From the situations in the world, it leads to “boundary situations”;

from empirical consciousness, to “absolute consciousness”; from actions qualified by their purposes, to “unconditional actions.” b. But the breakthrough still does not lead us out of the world. It occurs in the world, and so philo-

sophical thought follows the appearance of Existenz in the world, in “historic consciousness” and in the

“tension of subjectivity and objectivity” in its existence.

c. The breakthrough is original. Events happen in the world, but in the breakthrough something is settled by me. Existenz is certain that no part of intrinsic being can stay unsettled for it as a phenomenon in temporal existence. For either I allow the course of things to decide about me—vanishing as myself, since there is no real decision when everything just happens—or I deal with being originally, as myself, with _ the feeling that there must be a decision. My thought, aimed at the origin, seeks to elucidate “freedom.” d. Nothing I know in the world can give me any reasons for my decision; but what I am to decide can be grasped in the medium of that knowledge. Existential elucidation pervades my existence in the world, not in the sense that what matters were now known,

but so I can sense possibilities that may give me a grasp on truth—on what is true as I become true. “I myself” and “communication” as the premise of selfbeing are the things we try to cover in the fundamental thoughts of all existential elucidation.

MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY (1908-1961) Maurice Merleau-Ponty was born in Rochefort-surmer. Like Sartre, he was educated at the Ecole Normale Superieure, and with Sartre and de Beauvoir he co-founded Les Temps Modernes. Although he was a

me

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There is “ultimately nothing that set limits to free-

Catholic during the first part of his life, he withdrew from the church in the 1930s and became critical of Christianity. After the war, during which he served in the army, he taught at the University of Lyon, the Sorbonne, and the College de France. In Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau- | Ponty draws on Gestalt psychology to develop his own account of perception. One of his targets is the sense-datum theory of perception. When I examine (say) a refrigerator at a particular time, the sensedatum theorist would be inclined to say that I have before consciousness a set of images with certain features such as color and shape. I put these images ogether and infer that there is an object before me wit

ious

dom, except those limits that freedom itself has set in the form of its various initiatives, so that the sub-

ject has simply the external world that he gives himself.” '” He elaborates on the point that some of our free choices limit, and form the backdrop of, others.

We freely choose projects and situations that then provide us with motives for further action. “Without the roots which [freedom] thrusts into the

world, it would not be freedom at all.” 8 In “The Metaphysical in Man,” from Sense and Non-Sense, Merleau-Ponty casts doubt on the idea that we may study humanity by taking up the perspective of “an absolute observer in whom all points of view are summed up and, correlatively, a true projection of all perspectives.” In sensing another person, we do not posit an object whose features we may come to know through an investigation that will leave those features unaffected. Instead, the two of us enter into a relationship of “exchange and communication.” The truth is itself something we decide upon in concert with others. Merleau-Ponty uses his view of knowledge to raise doubts about the common religious idea of a God who stands outside the world and whose observations of it constitute the absolute truth.

properties, but what I perceive is lim-

_ited sense-data. to In particular, it would be on the basis of an inference that I would conclude that the refrigerator has an inside compartment, if I were in no position at the moment to open the door and provide myself with relevant sense-data. MerleauPonty different suggests a story.When I examine the refrigerator, i tidimensional object that has a front, back, interior, and sides. I perceive

the refrigerator as having an interior even though its door is closed at the moment._He draws on Marcel’s emphasis that people are bodies in order to explain the fact that we perceive things as having properties

re not apparent. = ’s view 1 erceptio embodied, Our embodiment allows us to move about and perceive things from different perspectives and predisposes perception to anticipate confronting objects that have properties that are not immediately apparent. Our perception is also shaped by the projects we freely choose. These projects shape the form in which the world of things appears to us and they also are responsible for the significance of the things in the world. In the preface to his Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty describes the development of phenomenology from the work of Husserl and provides many helpful insights concerning Husserl’s thought and the relationship between Husserl and Heidegger. In “Freedom,” the final chapter in Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty points out a consequence of the facts (a) that we freely choose our rojects and (b) that these

j

>

cyPreface from Phenomenology of Perception What is phenomenology? It may seem strange that this question has still to be asked half a century after the first works of Husserl. The fact remains that it has by no means been answered. Phenomenology is the study of essences; and according to it, all problems amount to finding definitions of essences: the essence of perception, or the essence of consciousness, for

example. But phenomenology_is_also_a_philosophy expect to arrive

i

d does not f man and the

’Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, :

1962), 436. '8Tbid., 456.

Preface world from an

rting

point other than that of their

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yield no proof; we find in texts only what we put into

icity. It is a transcendental philosophy-which— them, and if ever any kind of history has suggested places in abeyance the assertions arising out of the natural attitude, the better to understand them; but it

is also a philosophy for which the world is always “already there’ before reflection begins—as an inalienable presence; and all its efforts are concentrated upon re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the world, and endowing that contact with a philosophical status. It is the search for a philosophy which shall be a ‘rigorous science’, but it also offers an account of space, time and the world as we ‘live’ them. It tries to give a direct description of our experience as it is, without taking account of its psychological origin and the causal explanations which the scientist, the historian or the sociologist may be able to provide. Yet Husserl in his last works mentions a “genetic phenomenology’,* and even a ‘constructive phenomenology.‘ One may try to do away with these contradictions by making a distinction between Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenologies; yet the whole of Sein und Zeit springs from an indication given by Husserl and amounts to no more than an explicit account of the ‘natiirlicher Weltbegriff’ or the “Lebenswelt’ which Husserl, towards the end of his life, identi-

fied as the central theme of phenomenology, with the result that the contradiction re-appears in Husserl’s own philosophy. The reader pressed for time will be inclined to give up the idea of covering a doctrine which says everything, and will wonder whether a philosophy which cannot define its scope deserves all the discussion which has gone on around it, and whether he is not faced rather by a myth or a fashion. Even if this were the case, there would still be a need to understand the prestige of the myth and the origin of the fashion, and the opinion of the responsible philosopher must be that phenomenology can be practised and identified as a manner or style of thinking, that it existed as a movement before arriving at complete awareness of itself as a philosophy. It has been long on

the interpretations which should be put on it, it is the history of philosophy. We shall find in ourselves, and nowhere else, the unity and true meaning of phenomenology. It is less a question of counting up quotations than of determining and expressing in concrete form this phenomenology for ourselves which has given a number of present-day readers the impression, on reading Husserl or Heidegger, not so much of encountering a new philosophy as of recognizing what they had been waiting for. Phenomenology is accessible only through a phenomenological method. Let us, therefore, try systematically to bring together the celebrated phenomenological themes as they have grown spontaneously together in life. Perhaps we shall then understand why phenomenology has for so long remained at an initial stage, as a problem to be solved and a hope to be realized. It is a matter of describing, not of explaining or analysing. Husserl’s first directive to phenomenology, in its early stages, to be a ‘descriptive psychology’, or to return to the ‘things themselves’, is from the start a rejection of science. I am not the outcome or the meeting-point of numerous causal agencies which determine my bodily or psychological make-up. I cannot conceive myself as nothing but a bit of the world, a mere object of biological, psychological or sociological investigation. I cannot shut myself up within

the realm of science. knowledge All my of the world, even my scientific knowledge, is gained from my own

articul

S xperience 0 without which thes ience would be meaningless. The whole universe of science is built upon the world as directly experienced, and if we want to subject science itself to rigorous scrutiny and arrive at a precise assessment of its meaning and scope, we must begin by reawakening the basic experience of the world of which science is the second-

the way, and its adherents have discovered it in every

order expression. Science has not and never will have,

quarter, certainly in Hegel and Kierkegaard, but equally in Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. A purely linguistic examination of the texts in question would

by its nature, the same significance qua form of being as the world which we perceive, for the simple reason that it is a rationale or explanation of that world. Iam, nota ‘living creature’ nor even a ‘man’, nor again even ‘a consciousness’ endowed with all the characteristics which zoology, social anatomy or inductive psychology recognize in these various products of the natural or historical process—I am the absolute source, my

* Méditations cartésiennes, pp. 120 ff. *See the unpublished 6th Méditation cartésienne, edited by

Eugen Fink, to which G. Berger has kindly referred us.

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existence does not stem from my antecedents, from

my physical and social environment; instead it moves out towards them and sustains them, for I alone

bring into being for myself (and therefore into being in the only sense that the word can have for me) the tradition which I elect to carry on, or the horizon

whose distance from me would be abolished—since that distance is not one of its properties—if I were not there to scan it with my gaze. Scientific points of view, according to which my existence is a moment of the world’s, are always both naive and at the same

time dishonest, because they take for granted, without explicitly mentioning it, the other point of view, namely that of consciousness, through which from the outset a world forms itself round me and begins to exist for me. To return to things themselves is to return to that world which precedes knowledge, of which knowledge always speaks, and in relation to which every scientific schematization is an abstract and derivative sign-language, as is geography in relation to the countryside in which we have learnt beforehand what a forest, a prairie or a river is.

This move is absolutely distinct from the idealist return to consciousness, and the demand for a pure description excludes equally the procedure of analytical reflection on the one hand, and that of scientific explanation on the other. Descartes and particularly Kant detached the subject, or consciousness, by showing that I could not possibly apprehend anything as existing unless I first of all experienced myself as existing in the act of apprehending it. They presented consciousness, the absolute certainty of my existence for myself, as the condition of there being anything at all; and the act of relating as the basis of relatedness.

It is true that the act of relating is nothing if divorced from the spectacle of the world in which relations are found; the unity of consciousness in Kant is achieved simultaneously with that of the world. And in Descartes methodical doubt does not deprive us of anything, since the whole world, at least in so far as we

experience it, is reinstated in the Cogito, enjoying equal certainty, and simply labelled ‘thought of ...’. But the relations between subject and world are not strictly bilateral: ifthey were, the certainty of the world would, in Descartes, be immediately given with that of the Cogito, and Kant would not have talked about his ‘Copernican revolution’. Analytical reflection starts from our experience of the world and goes back to the subject as to a condition of possibility distinct

from that experience, revealing the all-embracing synthesis as that without which there would be no world. To this extent it ceases to remain part of our experience and offers, in place of an account, a reconstruction. It is understandable, in view of this, that

Husserl, having accused Kant of adopting a ‘faculty psychologism’,* should have urged, in place of a noetic analysis which bases the world on the synthesizing activity of the subject, his own ‘noematic reflection’ which remains within the object and, instead of begetting it, brings to light its fundamental unity. The world is there before any possible analysis of mine, and it would be artificial to make it the out-

come of a series of syntheses which link, in the first place sensations, then aspects of the object corresponding to different perspectives, when both are nothing but products of analysis, with no sort of prior reality. Analytical reflection believes that it can trace back the course followed by a prior constituting act and arrive, in the ‘inner man—to use Saint Augus-

tine’s expression—at a constituting power which has always been identical with that inner self. Thus reflection is carried away by itself and installs itself in an impregnable subjectivity, as yet untouched by being and time. But this is very ingenuous, or at least it is an incomplete form of reflection which loses sight of its own beginning. When I begin to reflect my reflection bears upon an unreflective experience; moreover my reflection cannot be unaware of itself as an event, and so it appears to itself in the light of a truly creative act, of a changed structure of consciousness, and yet it has to recognize, as having priority over its own operations, the world which is given to the subject because the subject is given to himself. The real has to be described, not constructed or formed. Which means that I cannot put perception into the same category as the syntheses represented by judgements, acts or predications. My field of perception is constantly filled with a play of colours, noises and fleeting tactile sensations which I cannot relate precisely to the context of my clearly perceived world, yet which I nevertheless immediately ‘place’ in the world, without ever confusing them with my daydreams. Equally constantly I weave dreams round things. I imagine people and things whose presence is not incompatible with

* Logische Untersuchungen, Prolegomena zur reinen Logik, Doo:

Preface

the context, yet who are not in fact involved in it: they are ahead of reality, in the realm of the imaginary. If the reality of my perception were based solely on the intrinsic coherence of ‘representations’, it ought to be for ever hesitant and, being wrapped up in my conjectures on probabilities, I ought to be ceaselessly taking apart misleading syntheses, and reinstating in reality stray phenomena which I had excluded in the first place. But this does not happen. The real is a closely woven fabric. It does not await our judgement before incorporating the most surprising phenomena, or before rejecting the most plausible figments of our imagination. Perception is not a science of the world, it is not even an act, a deliberate taking up of a position; it is the background from which all acts stand out, and is presupposed by them. The world is not an object such that I have in my possession the law of its making; it is the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and all my explicit perceptions. Truth does not ‘inhabit’ only ‘the inner man’,* or more accurately, there is no inner man, man is in the world,

and only in the world does he know himself. When I return to myself from an excursion into the realm of dogmatic common sense or of science, I find, not a source of intrinsic truth, but a subject destined to the world. Cle \Ga All of which reveals the true meaning of the famous phenomenological reduction. There is probably no question over which Husserl spent more time— or to which he more often returned, since the ‘problematic of reductior occupies an important place in his unpublished work. For a long time, and even in recent texts, the reduction is presented as the return to a transcendental consciousness before which the world is spread out and completely transparent, quickened through and through by a series of apperceptions which it is the philosopher’s task to reconstitute on the basis of their outcome. Thus my sensation of redness is perceived as the manifestation of a certain redness experienced, this in turn as the manifestation of a red surface, which is the manifestation of a piece of red cardboard, and this finally is the manifestation or

outline of a red thing, namely this book. We are to understand, then, that it is the apprehension of a cer-

*In te redi; in interiore homine habitat veritas (Saint Augustine).

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tain hylé, as indicating a phenomenon of a higher degree, the Sinngebung, or active meaning-giving operation which may be said to define consciousness, so that the world is nothing but ‘world-as-meaning’, and the phenomenological reduction is idealistic, in the sense that there is here a transcendental idealism which treats the world as an indivisible unity of value shared by Peter and Paul, in which their perspectives blend. ‘Peter’s consciousness’ and ‘Paul’s consciousness’ are in communication, the perception of the world ‘by Peter’ is not Peter’s doing any more than its perception ‘by Paul’ is Paul’s doing; in each case it is the doing of pre-personal forms of consciousness, whose communication raises no problem, since it is demanded by the very definition of consciousness, meaning or truth. In so far as I am a consciousness, that is, in so far as something has meaning for me, I am neither here nor there, neither Peter nor Paul; I am in no way distinguishable from an ‘other’ consciousness, since we are immediately in touch with the world and since the world is, by definition, unique, being the system in which all truths cohere. A logically consistent transcendental idealism rids the world of its opacity and its transcendence. The world is precisely that thing of which we form a representation, not as men or as empirical subjects, but in so far as we are all one light and participate in the One without . destroying its unity. Analytical reflection knows nothing of the problem of other minds, or of that of the world, because it insists that with the first glimmer of consciousness there appears in me theoretically the power of reaching some universal truth, and that the other person, being equally without thisness, location or body, the Alter and the Ego are one and the same in the true world which is the unifier of minds. There is no difficulty in understanding how IJ can conceive the Other, because the I and consequently the Other are not conceived as part of the woven stuff of phenomena; they have validity rather than existence. There is nothing hidden behind these faces and gestures, no domain to which I have no access, merely a

little shadow which owes its very existence to the light. For Husserl, on the contrary, it is well known that there is a problem of other people, and the alter ego is a paradox. If the other is truly for himself alone, be-

yond his being for me, and if we are for each other and not both for God, we must necessarily have some appearance for each other. He must and I must have an outer appearance, and there must be, besides the

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perspective of the For Oneself—my view of myself and the other’s of himself—a perspective of For Others—my view of others and theirs of me. Of course, these two perspectives, in each one of us, cannot be simply juxtaposed, for in that case it is not I that the other would see, nor he that I should see. I must be the exterior that I present to others, and the body of the other must be the other himself. This paradox and the dialectic of the Ego and the Alter are possible only provided that the Ego and the Alter Ego are defined by their situation and are not freed from all inherence; that is, provided that philosophy does not culminate in a return to the self, and that I discover by reflection not only my presence to myself, but also the possibility of an ‘outside spectator’; that is, again, provided that at the very moment when I experience my existence—at the ultimate extremity of reflection—I fall short of the ultimate density which would place me outside time, and that I discover within myself a kind of internal weakness standing in the way of my being totally individualized: a weakness which exposes me to the gaze of others as a man among men or at least as a consciousness among consciousnesses. Hitherto the Cogito depreciated the perception of others, teaching me as it did that the I is accessible only to itself, since it defined me as the thought which I have of myself, and which clearly I am alone in having, at least in this ultimate sense. For the ‘other’ to be more than an empty word, it is necessary that my existence should never be reduced to my bare awareness of existing, but that it should take in also the

from myself as the totality of things or of processes linked by causal relationships, I rediscover ‘in me’ as the permanent horizon of all my cogitationes and as a dimension in relation to which I am constantly situating myself. The true Cogito does not define the subject’s existence in terms of the thought he has of existing, and furthermore does not convert the

indubitability of the world into the indubitability of thought about the world, nor finally does it replace the world itself by the world as meaning. On the contrary it recognizes my thought itself as an inalienable fact, and does away with any kind of idealism in revealing me as ‘being-in-the-world’. It is because we are through and through compounded of relationships with the world that for us the only way to become aware of the fact is to suspend the resultant activity, to refuse it our complicity (to look at it ohne mitzumachen, as Husserl often says), or

yet again, to put it ‘out of play’. Not because we reject the certainties of common sense and a natural attitude to things—they are, on the contrary, the constant theme of philosophy—but because, being the presupposed basis of any thought, they are taken for granted, and go unnoticed, and because in order to arouse them and bring them to view, we have to sus-

my incarnation in some nature and the possibility, at least, of a historical situation. The Cogito must reveal

pend for a moment our recognition of them. The best formulation of the reduction is probably that given by Eugen Fink, Husserl’s assistant, when he spoke of ‘wonder’ in the face of the world.* Reflection does not withdraw from the world towards the unity of consciousness as the world’s basis; it steps back to watch the forms of transcendence fly up like sparks from a fire; it slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our

awareness that one may have of it, and thus include

me in a situation, and it is on this condition alone that

notice; it alone is consciousness of the world because

transcendental subjectivity can, as Husserl puts it,* be an intersubjectivity. As a meditating Ego, I can clearly distinguish from myself the world and things, since I certainly do not exist in the way in which things exist. I must even set aside from myself my body understood as a thing among things, as a collection of physico-chemical processes. But even if the cogitatio, which I thus discover, is without location in objective time and space, it is not without place in the phenom-

it reveals that world as strange and paradoxical. Husserl’s transcendental is not Kant’s and Husserl accuses Kant’s philosophy of being ‘worldly’, because it makes use of our relation to the world, which is the motive force of the transcendental deduction, and makes the world immanent in the subject, instead of being filled with wonder at it and conceiving the subject as a process of transcendence towards the world. All the misunderstandings with his interpreters, with the exis-

enological world. The world, which I distinguished

tentialist ‘dissidents’ and finally with himself, have

* Die Krisis der europdischen Wissenschaften und die transzendentale Phanomenologie, III (unpublished).

‘Die phadnomenologische Philosophie Edmund Husserls in der gegenwartigen Kritik, pp. 331 and ff.

Preface

arisen from the fact that in order to see the world and grasp it as paradoxical, we must break with our familiar acceptance of it and, also, from the fact that from

this break we can learn nothing but the unmotivated upsurge of the world. The most important lesson which the reduction teaches us is the impossibility of a complete reduction. This is why Husserl is constantly re-examining the possibility of the reduction. If we were absolute mind, the reduction would present no problem. But since, on the contrary, we are in the world, since indeed our reflections are carried out in the temporal flux on to which we are trying to seize (since they sich einstromen, as Husserl says), there is

no thought which embraces all our thought. The philosopher, as the unpublished works declare, is a perpetual beginner, which means that he takes for granted nothing that men, learned or otherwise, believe they know. It means also that philosophy itself must not take itself for granted, in so far as it may have managed to say something true; that it is an everrenewed experiment in making its own beginning; that it consists wholly in the description of this beginning, and finally, that radical reflection amounts to a consciousness of its own dependence on an unreflective life which is its initial situation, unchanging, given once and for all. Far from being, as has been thought, a procedure of idealistic philosophy, phenomenological reduction belongs to existential philosophy: Heidegger’s ‘being-in-the-world’ appears only against the background of the phenomenological reduction. A misunderstanding of a similar kind confuses the notion of the ‘essences’ in Husserl. Every reduction, says Husserl, as well as being transcendental is neces-

sarily eidetic. That means that we cannot subject our perception of the world to philosophical scrutiny without ceasing to be identified with that act of positing the world, with that interest in it which delimits us, without drawing back from our commitment which is itself thus made to appear as a spectacle, without passing from the fact of our existence to its nature, from the Dasein to the Wesen. But it is clear

that the essence is here not the end, but a means, that our effective involvement in the world is precisely what has to be understood and made amenable to conceptualization, for it is what polarizes all our conceptual particularizations. The need to proceed by way of essences does not mean that philosophy takes them as its object, but, on the contrary, that our existence is

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too tightly held in the world to be able to know itself as such at the moment of its involvement, and that it requires the field of ideality in order to become acquainted with and to prevail over its facticity. The Vienna Circle, as is well known, lays it down categorically that we can enter into relations only with meanings. For example, ‘consciousness’ is not for the Vienna Circle identifiable with what we are. It is a complex meaning which has developed late in time, which should be handled with care, and only after the

many meanings which have contributed, throughout the word’s semantic development, to the formation of its present one have been made explicit. Logical positivism of this kind is the antithesis of Husserl’s thought. Whatever the subtle changes of meaning which have ultimately brought us, as a linguistic acquisition, the word and concept of consciousness, we enjoy direct access to what it designates. For we have the experience of ourselves, of that consciousness which we are, and it is on the basis of this experience that all linguistic connotations are assessed, and precisely through it that language comes to have any meaning at all for us. ‘It is that as yet dumb experience... which we are concerned to lead to the pure expression of its own meaning.’* Husserl’s essences are destined to bring back all the living relationships of experience, as the fisherman’s net draws up from .the depths of the ocean quivering fish and seaweed. Jean Wahl is is therefore wrong in saying that “Husserl separates essences from existence’.t The separated essences are those of language. It is the office of language to cause essences to exist in a state of separation

which is in fact merely apparent, since through language they still rest upon the ante-predicative life of consciousness. In the silence of primary consciousness can be seen appearing not only what words mean, but also what things mean: the core of primary meaning round which the acts of naming and expression take shape. Seeking the essence of consciousness will therefore not consist in developing the Wortbedeutung of consciousness and escaping from existence into the universe of things said; it will consist in rediscovering my actual presence to myself, the fact of my con-

* Méditations cartésiennes, p. 33. t Réalisme, dialectique et mystére, ?Arbaléte, Autumn,

1942, unpaginated.

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sciousness which is in the last resort what the word and the concept of consciousness mean. Looking for the world’s essence is not looking for what it is as an idea once it has been reduced to a theme of discourse; it is looking for what it is as a fact for us, before any

thematization. Sensationalism ‘reduces’ the world by noticing that after all we never experience anything but states of ourselves. Transcendental idealism too ‘reduces’ the world since, in so far as it guarantees the world, it does so by regarding it as thought or consciousness of the world, and as the mere correlative of our knowledge, with the result that it becomes immanent in consciousness and the aseity of things is thereby done away with. The eidetic reduction is, on

the other hand, the determination to bring the world to light as it is before any falling back on ourselves has occurred, it is the ambition to make reflection emu-

late the unreflective life of consciousness. I aim at and perceive a world. If I said, as do the sensationalists, that we have here only ‘states of consciousness’, and if

I tried to distinguish my perceptions from my dreams

rience of truth’ which is self-evident.* To seek the essence of perception is to declare that perception is, not presumed true, but defined as access to truth. So, if I now wanted, according to idealistic principles, to base this de facto self-evident truth, this irresistible belief, on some absolute self-evident truth, that is, on the absolute clarity which my thoughts have for me; if I tried to find in myself a creative thought which bodied forth the framework of the world or illumined it through and through, I should once more prove unfaithful to my experience of the world, and should be looking for what makes that experience possible instead of looking for what it is. The self-evidence of perception is not adequate thought or apodeictic selfevidence.’ The world is not what I think, but what I

live through. I am open to the world, I have no doubt that Iam in communication with it, but I do not possess it; it is inexhaustible. “There is a world’, or rather: ‘There is the world’; I can never completely account for this ever-reiterated assertion in my life. This facticity of the world is what constitutes the Weltlichkeit

with the aid of ‘criteria’, I should overlook the phe-

der Welt, what causes the world to be the world; just

nomenon of the world. For if I am able to talk about ‘dreams’ and ‘reality’, to bother my head about the distinction between imaginary and real, and cast doubt upon the ‘real’, it is because this distinction is already made by me before any analysis; it is because I have an experience of the real as of the imaginary, and the problem then becomes one not of asking how critical thought can provide for itself secondary equivalents of this distinction, but of making explicit our primordial knowledge of the ‘real’, of describing our perception of the world as that upon which our idea of truth is forever based. We must not, therefore, wonder whether we really perceive a world, we must instead say: the world is what we perceive. In more general terms we must not wonder whether our selfevident truths are real truths, or whether, through . some perversity inherent in our minds, that which is self-evident for us might not be illusory in relation to some truth in itself. For in so far as we talk about illu-

as the facticity of the cogito is not an imperfection in itself, but rather what assures me of my existence. The eidetic method is the method of a phenomenological positivism which bases the possible on the real.

sion, it is because we have identified illusions, and

done so solely in the light of some perception which at the same time gave assurance of its own truth. It follows that doubt, or the fear of being mistaken, testifies as soon as it arises to our power of unmasking error, and that it could never finally tear us away from truth. We are in the realm of truth and it is ‘the expe-

We can now consider the notion of intentionality, too often cited as the main discovery of phenomenology, whereas it is understandable only through the reduction. “All consciousness is consciousness of something’; there is nothing new in that. Kant showed, in the Refutation of Idealism, that inner perception is impossible without outer perception, that the world, as a collection of connected phenomena, is anticipated in the consciousness of my unity, and is the means whereby I come into being as a consciousness. What distinguishes intentionality from the Kantian relation to a possible object is that the unity of the world, before being posited by knowledge in a specific act of identification, is ‘lived’ as ready-made or already there. Kant himself shows in the Critique of Judge-

*Das Erlebnis der Wahrheit (Logische Untersuchungen, Prolegomena zur reinen Logik) p. 190. ‘There is no apodeictic self-evidence, the Formale und

transzendentale Logik (p. 142) says in effect.

Preface

ment that there exists a unity of the imagination and the understanding and a unity of subjects before the object, and that, in experiencing the beautiful, for example, I am aware of a harmony between sensation and concept, between myself and others, which is itself without any concept. Here the subject is no longer the universal thinker of a system of objects rigorously interrelated, the positing power who subjects the manifold to the law of the understanding, in so far as he is to be able to put together a world—he discovers and enjoys his own nature as spontaneously in harmony with the law of the understanding. But if the subject has a nature, then the hidden art of the imagination must condition the categorial activity. It is no longer merely the aesthetic judgement, but knowledge too which rests upon this art, an art which forms the basis of the unity of consciousness and of consciousnesses. Husserl takes up again the Critique of Judgement when he talks about a teleology of consciousness. It is not a matter of duplicating human consciousness with some absolute thought which, from outside, is imagined as assigning to it its aims. It is a question of recognizing consciousness itself as a project of the world, meant for a world which it neither embraces nor possesses, but towards which it is perpetually directed— and the world as this pre-objective individual whose imperious unity decrees what knowledge shall take as its goal. This is why Husserl distinguishes between intentionality of act, which is that of our judgements and of those occasions when we voluntarily take up a position—the only intentionality discussed in the Critique of Pure Reason—and operative intentionality (fungierende Intentionalitét), or that which produces the natural and antepredicative unity of the world and of our life, being apparent in our desires, our evaluations and in the landscape we see, more

clearly than in objective knowledge, and furnishing the text which our knowledge tries to translate into precise language. Our relationship to the world, as it is untiringly enunciated within us, is not a thing which can be any further clarified by analysis; philosophy can only place it once more before our eyes and present it for our ratification. Through this broadened notion of intentionality, phenomenological ‘comprehension’ is distinguished from traditional ‘intellection’, which is confined to ‘true and immutable natures’, and so phenomenology

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can become a phenomenology of origins. Whether we are concerned with a thing perceived, a historical event or a doctrine, to ‘understand’ is to take in the total intention—not only what these things are for representation (the ‘properties’ of the thing perceived, the mass of ‘historical facts’, the ‘ideas’ introduced by the doctrine)—but the unique mode of existing expressed in the properties of the pebble, the glass or the piece of wax, in all the events of a revolution, in all the thoughts ofa philosopher. It is a matter, in the case of each civilization, of finding the Idea in the Hegelian sense, that is, not a law of the physico-mathematical type, discoverable by objective thought, but that formula which sums up some unique manner of behayiour towards others, towards Nature, time and death: a certain way of patterning the world which the historian should be capable of seizing upon and making his own. These are the dimensions of history. In this context there is not a human word, not a gesture, even one which is the outcome of habit or absentmindedness, which has not some meaning. For example, I may have been under the impression that I lapsed into silence through weariness, or some minister may have thought he had uttered merely an appropriate platitude, yet my silence or his words immediately take on a significance, because my fatigue or his falling back upon a ready-made formula are not . accidental, for they express a certain lack of interest, and hence some degree of adoption of a definite position in relation to the situation. When an event is considered at close quarters, at the moment when it is lived through, everything seems subject to chance: one man’s ambition, some lucky encounter, some local circumstance or other appears to have been decisive. But chance happenings offset each other, and facts in their multiplicity coalesce and show up a certain way of taking a stand in relation to the human situation, reveal in fact an event which has its definite outline and about which we can talk. Should the starting-point for the understanding of history be ideology, or politics, or religion, or economics? Should we try to understand a doctrine from its overt content, or from the psychological make-up and the biography of its author? We must seek an understanding from all these angles simultaneously, everything has meaning, and we shall find this same structure of being underlying all relationships. All these views are true provided that they are not iso-

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lated, that we delve deeply into history and reach the unique core of existential meaning which emerges in each perspective. It is true, as Marx says, that history does not walk on its head, but it is also true that it

does not think with its feet. Or one should say rather that it is neither its ‘head’ not its ‘feet’ that we have to worry about, but its body. All economic and psychological explanations of a doctrine are true, since the thinker never thinks from any starting-point but the one constituted by what he is. Reflection even on a doctrine will be complete only if it succeeds in linking up with the doctrine’s history and the extraneous explanations of it, and in putting back the causes and meaning of the doctrine in an existential structure. There is, as Husserl says, a ‘genesis of meaning’ (Sinngenesis),* which alone, in the last resort, teaches us what the doctrine ‘means.’ Like understanding, criticism must be pursued at all levels, and naturally, it

will be insufficient, for the refutation of a doctrine, to relate it to some accidental event in the author’s life: its significance goes beyond, and there is no pure accident in existence or in co-existence, since both

absorb random events and transmute them into the rational. Finally, as it is indivisible in the present, history is equally so in its sequences. Considered in the light of its fundamental dimensions, all periods of history appear as manifestations of a single existence, or as episodes in a single drama—without our knowing whether it has an ending. Because we are in the world,

we are condemned to meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without its acquiring a name in history.

Probably the chief gain from phenomenology is to have united extreme subjectivism and extreme objectivism in its notion of the world or of rationality. Rationality is precisely measured by the experiences in which it is disclosed. To say that there exists rational- . ity is to say that perspectives blend, perceptions confirm each other, a meaning emerges. But it should not be set in a realm apart, transposed into absolute Spirit, or into a world in the realist sense. The phenomenological world is not pure being, but the sense which is revealed where the paths of my various expe-

*The usual term in the unpublished writings. The idea is already to be found in the Formale und transzendentale Logik, pp. 184 and ff.

riences intersect, and also where my own and other people’s intersect and engage each other like gears. It is thus inseparable from subjectivity and intersubjectivity, which find their unity when I either take up my past experiences in those of the present, or other people’s in my own. For the first time the philosopher’s thinking is sufficiently conscious not to anticipate itself and endow its own results with reified form in the world. The philosopher tries to conceive the world, others and himself and their interrelations. But the meditating Ego, the ‘impartial spectator’ (uninteressierter Zuschauer)* do not rediscover an al-

ready given rationality, they ‘establish themselves’,* and establish it, by an act of initiative which has no guarantee in being, its justification resting entirely on the effective power which it confers on us of taking our own history upon ourselves. The phenomenological world is not the bringing to explicit expression of a pre-existing being, but the laying down of being. Philosophy is not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing, truth into being. One may well ask how this creation is possible, and if it does not recapture in things a pre-existing Reason. The answer is that the only pre-existent Logos is the world itself, and that the philosophy which brings it into visible existence does not begin by being possible; it is actual or real like the world of which it is a part, and no explanatory hypothesis is clearer than the act whereby we take up this unfinished world in an effort to complete and conceive it. Rationality is not a problem. There is behind it no unknown quantity which has to be determined by deduction, or, beginning with it, demonstrated inductively. We witness every minute the miracle of related experiences, and yet nobody knows better than we do how this miracle is worked, for we

are ourselves this network of relationships. The world and reason are not problematical. We may say, if we wish, that they are mysterious, but their mystery defines them: there can be no question of dispelling it by some ‘solution’, it is on the hither side of all solutions. True philosophy consists in re-learning to look at the world, and in this sense a historical account can give meaning to the world quite as ‘deeply’ as a philosophical treatise. We take our fate in our hands, we be' 6th Méditation cartésienne (unpublished). *Tbid.

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come responsible for our history through reflection, but equally by a decision on which we stake our life, and in both cases what is involved is a violent act which is validated by being performed. Phenomenology, as a disclosure of the world, rests on itself, or rather provides its own foundation.* All knowledge is sustained by a ‘ground’ of postulates and finally by our communication with the world as primary embodiment of rationality. Philosophy, as radical reflection, dispenses in principle with this resource. As, however, it too is in history, it too exploits the world and constituted reason. It must therefore put to itself the question which it puts to all branches of knowledge, and so duplicate itself infinitely, being, as Husserl says, a dialogue or infinite meditation, and, in so far as it remains faithful to its intention, never knowing where it is going. The unfinished nature of phenomenology and the inchoative atmosphere which has surrounded it are not to be taken as a sign of failure, they were inevitable because phenomenology’s task was to reveal the mystery of the world and of reason.t If phenomenology was a movement before becoming a doctrine or a philosophical system, this was attributable neither to accident, nor to fraudulent intent. It is as painstaking as the works of Balzac, Proust, Valéry or Cézanne—by reason of the same kind of attentiveness and wonder, the same demand for awareness, the same will to seize the meaning of the world or of history as that meaning comes into being. In this way it merges into the general effort of modern thought.

) Freedom EP erste”

from Phenomenology of Perception Again, it is clear that no causal relationship is conceivable between the subject and his body, his world or his society. Only at the cost of losing the basis of all my certainties can I question what is conveyed to me by my presence to myself. Now the moment I turn to myself in order to describe myself, I have a glimpse

* Riickbeziehung der Phanomenologie auf sich selbst,’ say the unpublished writings. *We are indebted for this last expression to G. Gusdorf, who may well have used it in another sense.

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of an anonymous flux, a comprehensive project in which there are so far no ‘states of consciousness’, nor, a fortiori, qualifications of any sort. For myself I am neither ‘jealous’, nor ‘inquisitive’, nor “hunchbacked’, nor ‘a civil servant’. It is often a matter of surprise that the cripple or the invalid can put up with himself. The reason is that such people are not for themselves deformed or at death’s door. Until the final coma, the dying man is inhabited by a consciousness, he is all that he sees, and enjoys this much of an outlet. Consciousness can never objectify itself into invalidconsciousness or cripple-consciousness, and even if the old man complains of his age or the cripple of his deformity, they can do so only by comparing themselves with others, or seeing themselves through the eyes of others, that is, by taking a statistical and objective view of themselves, so that such complaints are never absolutely genuine: when he is back in the heart of his own consciousness, each one of us feels beyond his limitations and thereupon resigns himself to them. They are the price which we automatically pay for being in the world, a formality which we take for granted. Hence we may speak disparagingly of our looks and still not want to change our face for another. No idiosyncrasy can, seemingly, be attached to the insuperable generality of consciousness, nor can any limit be set to this immeasurable power of escape. _In order to be determined (in the two senses of that

word) by an external factor, it is necessary that I should be a thing. Neither my freedom nor my universality can admit of any eclipse. It is inconceivable that I should be free in certain of my actions and determined in others: how should we understand a dormant freedom that gave full scope to determinism? And if it is assumed that it is snuffed out when it is not in action, how could it be rekindled? If per impossibile 1 had once succeeded in making myself into a thing, how should I subsequently reconvert myself to consciousness? Once I am free, I am not to be counted among things, and I must then be uninterruptedly free. Once my actions cease to be mine, I shall never recover them, and if I lose my hold on the world, it will never be restored to me. It is equally inconceivable that my liberty should be attenuated; one cannot be to some extent free, and if, as is often said, motives incline

+In the sense in which, with Husserl, we have taken this word.

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me in a certain direction, one of two things happens: either they are strong enough to force me to act, in which case there is no freedom, or else they are not strong enough, and then freedom is complete, and as great in the worst torments as in the peace of one’s home. We ought, therefore, to reject not only the idea of causality, but also that of motivation.* The alleged

motive does not burden my decision; on the contrary my decision lends the motive its force. Everything that I ‘am’ in virtue of nature or history—hunchbacked, handsome or Jewish—I never am completely for myself, as we have just explained: and I may well be these things for other people, nevertheless I remain free to posit another person as a consciousness whose

views strike through to my very being, or on the other hand merely as an object. It is also true that this option is itself a form of constraint: if I am ugly, I have the choice between being an object of disapproval or disapproving of others. I am left free to be a masochist or a sadist, but not free to ignore others. But this dilemma, which is given as part of the human lot, is not one for me as pure consciousness: it is still I who makes another to be for me and makes each of us be as human beings. Moreover, even if existence as a human being were imposed upon me, the manner alone being left to my choice, and considering this choice itself and ignoring the small number of forms it might take, it would still be a free choice. If it is said that my temperament inclines me particularly to either sadism or masochism, it is still merely a manner of speaking, for my temperament exists only for the second order knowledge that I gain about myself when I see myself as others see me, and in so far as I recognize it, confer value upon it, and in that sense,

choose it. What misleads us on this, is that we often look for freedom in the voluntary deliberation which examines one motive after another and seems to opt for the weightiest or most convincing. In reality the . deliberation follows the decision, and it is my secret decision which brings the motives to light, for it would be difficult to conceive what the force of a motive might be in the absence of a decision which it confirms or to which it runs counter. When | have abandoned a project, the motives which I thought held me to it suddenly lose their force and collapse. In order to resuscitate them, an effort is required on my

* See J. P. Sartre, L’Etre et le Néant, pp. 508 and ff.

part to reopen time and set me back to the moment preceding the making of the decision. Even while I am deliberating, already I find it an effort to suspend time’s flow, and to keep open a situation which I feel is closed by a decision which is already there and which I am holding off. That is why it so often happens that after giving up a plan I experience a feeling of relief: ‘After all, I wasn’t all that involved’; the debate was purely a matter of form, and the deliberation a mere parody, for I had decided against from the start. We often see the weakness of the will brought forward as an argument against freedom. And indeed, although I can will myself to adopt a course of conduct and act the part of a warrior or a seducer, it is not within my power to be a warrior or seducer with ease and in a way that ‘comes naturally’; really to be one, that is. But neither should we seek freedom in the act of will, which is, in its very meaning, something short of an act. We have recourse to an act of will only in order to go against our true decision, and, as it were, for the purpose of proving our powerlessness. If we had really and truly made the conduct of the warrior or the seducer our own, then we should be one or the other. Even what are called obstacles to freedom are in reality deployed by it. An unclimbable rock face, a large or small, vertical or slanting rock, are things which have no meaning for anyone who is not intending to surmount them, for a subject whose projects do not carve out such determinate forms from the uniform mass of the in itself and cause an orientated world to arise—a significance in things. There is, then, ultimately nothing that can set limits to freedom, except those limits that freedom itself has set in the form of its various initiatives, so that the subject

has simply the external world that he gives himself. Since it is the latter who, on coming into being, brings to light significance and value in things, and since no thing can impinge upon it except through acquiring, thanks to it, significance and value, there is no action of things on the subject, but merely a signification (in the active sense), a centrifugal Sinngebung. The choice would seem to lie between scientism’s conception of causality, which is incompatible with the consciousness which we have of ourselves, and the assertion of an absolute freedom divorced from the outside. It is impossible to decide beyond which point things cease

to be €’ftv. Either they all lie within our power, or none does.

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The result, however, of this first reflection on freedom would appear to be to rule it out altogether. If indeed it is the case that our freedom is the same in all our actions, and even in our passions, if it is not to be measured in terms of our conduct, and if the slave displays freedom as much by living in fear as by breaking his chains, then it cannot be held that there is such a thing as free action, freedom being anterior to all actions. In any case it will not be possible to declare: ‘Here freedom makes its appearance’, since free action, in order to be discernible, has to stand out against a background of life from which it is entirely, or almost entirely, absent. We may say in this case that it is everywhere, but equally nowhere. In the name of freedom we reject the idea of acquisition, since freedom has become a primordial acquisition and, as it were, our state of nature. Since we do not have to provide it, it is the gift granted to us of having no gift, it is the nature of consciousness which consists in having no nature, and in no case can it find external expression or a place in our life. The idea of action, therefore, dis-

appears: nothing can pass from us to the world, since we are nothing that can be specified, and since the non-being which constitutes us could not possibly find its way into the world’s plenum. There are merely intentions immediately followed by their effects, and we are very near to the Kantian idea of an intention which is tantamount to the act, which Scheler countered with the argument that the cripple who would like to be able to save a drowning man and the good swimmer who actually saves him do not have the same experience of autonomy. The very idea of choice vanishes, for to choose is to choose something in which freedom sees, at least for a moment, a symbol of itself. There is free choice only if freedom comes into play in its decision, and posits the situation chosen as a situation of freedom. A freedom which has no need to be exercised because it is already acquired could not commit itself in this way: it knows that the following instant will find it, come what may, just as free and just as indeterminate. The very notion of freedom demands that our decision should plunge into the future, that something should have been done by it, that the subsequent instant should benefit from its prede-

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successors and, a decision once taken and action once begun, I must have something acquired at my disposal, I must benefit from my impetus, I must be inclined to carry on, and there must be a bent or propensity of the mind. It was Descartes who held that conservation demands a power as great as does creation; a view which implies a realistic notion of the instant. It is true that the instant is not a philosopher’s fiction. It is the point at which one project is brought to fruition and another begun*—the point at which my gaze is transferred from one end to another, it is the Augen-Blick. But this break in time cannot occur unless each of the two spans is of a piece. Consciousness, it is said, is, though not atomized into instants, at least haunted by the spectre of the instant which it is obliged continually to exorcise by a free act. We shall soon see that we have indeed always the power to interrupt, but it implies in any case a power to begin, for there would be no severance unless freedom had taken up its abode somewhere and were preparing to move it. Unless there are cycles of behaviour, open situations requiring a certain completion and capable of constituting a background to either a confirmatory or transformatory decision, we never experience freedom. The choice of intelligible character is excluded, not only because there is no time anterior to time, but because choice presupposes a prior commitment and because the idea of an initial choice involves a contradiction. If freedom is to have room' in which to move, if it is to be describable as freedom, there must be something to hold it away from its objectives, it must have a field, which means that there must be for it special possibilities, or realities which tend to cling to being. As J. P. Sartre himself observes, dreaming is incompatible with freedom because, in the realm of imagination, we have no sooner taken a certain significance as our goal than we already believe that we have intuitively brought it into being, in short, because there is no obstacle and nothing to do.* It is established that freedom is not to be confused with those abstract decisions of will at grips with motives or passions, for the classical conception of deliberation is relevant only to a freedom ‘in bad

cessor and, though not necessitated, should be at least

required by it. If freedom is doing, it is necessary that what it does should not be immediately undone by a new freedom. Each instant, therefore, must not be a closed world; one instant must be able to commit its

*J. P. Sartre, L’Etre et le Néant, p. 544. t‘avoir du champ’; in this sentence there is a play on the word ‘champ’ = field (Translator’s note). *J. P. Sartre, L’Etre et le Néant, p. 562.

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faith’ which secretly harbours antagonistic motives without being prepared to act on them, and so itself manufactures the alleged proofs of its impotence. We can see, beneath these noisy debates and these fruitless efforts to ‘construct’ ourselves, the tacit decisions whereby we have marked out round ourselves the field of possibility, and it is true that nothing is done as long as we cling to these fixed points, and everything is easy as soon as we have weighed anchor. This is why our freedom is not to be sought in spurious discussion on the conflict between a style of life which we have no wish to reappraise and circumstances suggestive of another: the real choice is that of whole character and our manner of being in the world. But either this total choice is never uttered, since it is the silent upsurge of our being in the world, in which case it is not clear in what sense it could be said to be ours, since this freedom glides over itself and is the equivalent of a fate— or else our choice of ourselves is truly a choice, a conversion involving our whole existence. In this case, however, there is presupposed a previous acquisition which the choice sets out to modify and it founds a new tradition: this leads us to ask whether the perpetual severance in terms of which we initially defined freedom is not simply the negative aspect of our universal commitment to a world, and whether our indifference to each determinate thing does not express merely our involvement in all; whether the ready-made freedom from which we started is not reducible to a power of initiative, which cannot be transformed into doing without taking up some proposition of the world, and whether, in short, concrete and actual freedom is not indeed to be found in this exchange. It is true that nothing has significance and value for anyone but me and through anyone but me, but this proposition remains indeterminate and is still indistinguishable from the Kantian idea of a consciousness which ‘finds in things only what it has put into them’, and from the idealist refutation of realism,

as long as we fail to make clear how we understand significance and the self. By defining ourselves as a universal power of Sinn-Gebung, we have reverted to the method of the ‘thing without which’ and to the analytical reflection of the traditional type, which seeks the conditions of possibility without concerning itself with the conditions of reality. We must therefore resume the analysis of the Sinngebung, and show how it can be both centrifugal and centripetal, since it has

been established that there is no freedom without a field. When I say that this rock is unclimbable, it is certain that this attribute, like that of being big or little, straight and oblique, and indeed like all attributes in general, can be conferred upon it only by the project of climbing it, and by a human presence. It is, therefore, freedom which brings into being the obstacles to freedom, so that the latter can be set over against it as its bounds. However, it is clear that, one and the same project being given, one rock will appear as an obstacle, and another, being more negotiable, as a means. My freedom, then, does not so contrive it that this way there is an obstacle, and that way a way through, it arranges for there to be obstacles and ways through in general; it does not draw the particular outline of this world, but merely lays down its general structures. It may be objected that there is no difference; if my freedom conditions the structure of the

‘there is’, that of the ‘here’ and the ‘there’, it is present wherever these structures arise. We cannot distinguish the quality of ‘obstacle’ from the obstacle itself, and relate one to freedom and the other to the world in itself which, without freedom, would be merely an

amorphous and unnameable mass. It is not, therefore, outside myself that I am able to find a limit to my freedom. But do I not find it in myself? We must indeed distinguish between my express intentions, for example the plan I now make to climb those mountains, and general intentions which evaluate the potentialities of my environment. Whether or not Ihave decided to climb them, these mountains appear high to me, because they exceed my body’s power to take them in its stride, and, even if I have just read Micromégas, I cannot so contrive it that they are small for me. Underlying myself as a thinking subject, who am able to take my place at will on Sirius or on the ‘earth’s surface, there is, therefore, as it were a natural

self which does not budge from its terrestrial situation and which constantly adumbrates absolute valuations. What is more, my projects as a thinking being are clearly modelled on the latter; if I elect to see things from the point of view of Sirius, it is still to my terrestrial experience that I must have recourse in order to do so; I may say, for example, that the Alps are molehills. In so far as I have hands, feet, a body, I sustain

around me intentions which are not dependent upon my decisions and which affect my surroundings in a

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way which I do not choose. These intentions are general in a double sense: firstly in the sense that they constitute a system in which all possible objects are simultaneously included; if the mountain appears high and upright, the tree appears small and sloping; and furthermore in the sense that they are not simply mine, they originate from other than myself, and I am not surprised to find them in all psycho-physical subjects organized as I am. Hence, as Gestalt psychology has shown, there are for me certain shapes which are particularly favoured, as they are for other men, and which are capable of giving rise to a psychological science and rigorous laws. The grouping of dots is always perceived as six pairs of dots with two millimetres between each pair, while one figure is always perceived as a cube, and another as a plane mosaic.* It is as if, on the hither side of our judgement and our freedom, someone were assigning such and such a significance to such and such a given grouping. It is indeed true that perceptual structures do not always force themselves upon the observer; there are some which are ambiguous. But these reveal even more effectively the presence within us of spontaneous evaluation: for they are elusive shapes which suggest constantly changing meanings to us. Nowa pure consciousness is capable of anything except being ignorant of its intentions, and an absolute freedom cannot choose itself as hesitant, since that amounts to allowing itself to be drawn in several directions, and since, the possibilities being ex hypothesi indebted to freedom for all the strength they have, the weight that freedom gives to one is thereby withdrawn from the rest. We can break up a shape by looking at it awry, but this too is because freedom uses the gaze along with its spontaneous evaluations. Without the latter, we would not have a world, that is, a collection of things which emerge from a background of formlessness by presenting themselves to our body as ‘to be touched’, ‘to be taken’, ‘to be climbed over’. We should never be aware of adjusting ourselves to things and reaching them where they are, beyond us, but would be conscious only of restricting our thoughts to the immanent objects of our intentions, and we should not be in the world, ourselves implicated in the spec-

* Footnote omitted— ed.

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tacle and, so to speak, intermingled with things, we

should simply enjoy the spectacle of a universe. It is, therefore, true that there are no obstacles in themselves, but the self which qualifies them as such is not some acosmic subject; it runs ahead of itself in relation to things in order to confer upon them the form of things. There is an autochthonous significance of the world which is constituted in the dealings which our incarnate existence has with it, and which pro-

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vides the ground of every deliberate Sinngebung. This is true not only of an impersonal and, all in all, abstract function such as ‘external perception’. There is something comparable present in all evaluations. It has been perceptively remarked that pain and fatigue can never be regarded as causes which ‘act’ upon my liberty, and that, in so far as I may experience either at any given moment, they do not have their origin outside me, but always have a significance and express my attitude towards the world. Pain makes me give way and say what I ought to have kept to myself, fatigue makes me break my journey. We all know the moment at which we decide no longer to endure pain or fatigue, and when, simultaneously, they become intolerable in fact. Tiredness does not halt my companion, because he likes the clamminess of his body, the heat of the road and the sun, in short, because he likes to feel himself in the midst of things, to feel their rays converging upon him, to be the cynosure of all this light, and an object of touch for the earth’s crust. My own fatigue brings me to a halt because I dislike it, because I have chosen differently my manner of being in the world, because, for instance, I endeavour, not to be in nature, but rather to win the

recognition of others. I am free in relation to fatigue to precisely the extent that I am free in relation to my being in the world, free to make my way by transforming it.t But here once more we must recognize a sort of sedimentation of our life: an attitude towards the world, when it has received frequent confirmation, acquires a favoured status for us. Yet since freedom does not tolerate any motive in its path, my habitual being in the world is at each moment equally precarious, and the complexes which I have allowed to develop over the years always remain equally soothing, and the free act can with no difficulty blow them

tJ. P. Sartre, L’Etre et le Néant, pp. 531 and ff.

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sky-high. However, having built our life upon an inferiority complex which has been operative for twenty years, it is not probable that we shall change. It is clear what a summary rationalism might say in reply to such a hybrid notion: there are no degrees of possibility; either the free act is no longer possible, or it is still possible, in which case freedom is complete. In short, ‘probable’ is meaningless. It is a notion belonging to statistical thought, which is not thought at all, since it does not concern any particular thing actually existing, any moment

of time, any concrete event. ‘It is

improbable that Paul will give up writing bad books’ means nothing, since Paul may well decide to write no more such books. The probable is everywhere and nowhere, a reified fiction, with only a psychological existence; it is not an ingredient of the world. And yet we have already met it a little while ago in the perceived world. The mountain is great or small to the extent that, as a perceived thing, it is to be found in the field of my possible actions, and in relation to a level which is not only that of my individual life, but that of ‘any man’. Generality and probability are not fictions, but phenomena; we must therefore find a phenomenological basis for statistical thought. It belongs necessarily to a being which is fixed, situated and surrounded by things in the world. ‘It is improbable’ that I should at this moment destroy an inferiority complex in which I have been content to live for twenty years. That means that I have committed myself to inferiority, that I have made it my abode, that this past, though nota fate, has at least a specific weight and is nota set of events over there, at a distance from me, but the atmosphere of my present. The rationalist’s dilemma: either the free act is possible, or it is not—either the event originates in me or is imposed on me from outside, does not apply to our relations with the world and with our past. Our freedom does not destroy our situation, but gears itself to it: as long as we are alive, our situation is open, which implies both that it calls up specially favoured modes of resolution, and also that it is powerless to bring one into

being by itself.

We therefore recognize, around our initiatives and around that strictly individual project which is oneself, a zone of generalized existence and of projects already formed ... . Already generality intervenes, already our presence to ourselves is mediated by it

and we cease to be pure consciousness, as soon as the natural or social constellation ceases to be an unformulated this and crystallizes into a situation, as soon as it has a meaning—in short, as soon as we exist. Every thing appears to us through a medium to which it lends its own fundamental quality; this piece of wood is neither a collection of colours and tactile data, not even their total Gestalt, but something from

which there emanates a woody essence; these “sensory givens’ modulate a certain theme or illustrate a certain style which is the wood itself, and which creates, round this piece of wood and the perception I have of it, a horizon of significance. The natural world, as we have seen, is nothing other than the place of all possible themes and styles. It is indissolubly an unmatched individual and a significance. Correspondingly, the generality and the individuality of the subject, subjectivity qualified and pure, the anonymity of the One and the anonymity of consciousness are not two conceptions of the subject between which philosophy has to choose, but two stages of a unique structure

which is the concrete subject. Let us consider, for example, sense experience. I lose myself in this red which is before me, without in any way qualifying it, and it seems that this experience brings me into contact with a pre-human subject. Who perceives this red? It is nobody who can be named and placed among other perceiving subjects. For, between this experience of red which I have, and that about which other people speak to me, no direct comparison will ever be possible. am here in my own point of view, and since all experience, in so far as it derives from impression, is in the same way strictly my own, it seems that a unique and unduplicated subject enfolds them all. Suppose I formulate a thought, the God of Spinoza, for example; this thought as it is in my living experience is a certain landscape to which no one will ever ‘have access, even if, moreover, I manage to enter into a discussion with a friend on the subject of Spinoza’s God. However, the very individuality of these experiences is not quite unadulterated. For the thickness of this red, its thisness, the power it has of reaching me and saturating me, are attributable to the fact that it requires and obtains from my gaze a certain vibration, and imply that I am familiar with a world of colours of which this one is a particular variation. The concrete colour red, therefore, stands out against a background of generality, and this is why, even without transferring myself to another’s point of view, I

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grasp myself in perception as a perceiving subject, and not as unclassifiable consciousness. I feel, all round my perception of red, all the regions of my being unaffected by it, and that region set aside for colours, ‘vision’, through which the perception finds its way into me. Similarly my thought about the God of Spinoza is only apparently a strictly unique experience, for it is the concretion of a certain cultural world, the Spinozist philosophy, or of a certain philosophic style in which I immediately recognize a “Spinozist’ idea. There is therefore no occasion to ask ourselves why the thinking subject or consciousness perceives itself as a man, or an incarnate or historical subject, nor must we treat this apperception as a second order operation which it somehow performs starting from its absolute existence: the absolute flow takes shape beneath its own gaze as “a consciousness’, or aman, or an incarnate subject, because it is a field of presence—to itself, to others and to the world—and because this presence throws it into the natural and cultural world from which it arrives at an understanding of itself. We must not envisage this flux as absolute contact with oneself, as an absolute density with no internal fault, but on the contrary as a being which is in pursuit of itself outside. If the subject made a constant and at all times peculiar choice of himself, one might wonder why his experience always ties up with itself and presents him with objects and definite historical phases, why we have a general notion of time valid through all times, and why finally the experience of each one of us links up with that of others. But it is the question itself which must be questioned: for what is given, is not one fragment of time followed by another, one individual flux, then another; it is the taking up of each subjectivity by itself, and of subjectivities by each other in the generality of a single nature, the cohesion of an intersubjective life and a world. The present mediates between the For Oneself and the For Others, between individuality and generality. True reflection presents me to myself not as idle and inaccessible subjectivity, but as identical with my presence in the world and to others, as I am now realizing it: I am all that I see, I am an intersubjective field, not despite my body and historical situation, but, on the contrary, by being this body and this situation, and through them, all the rest.

What, then, becomes of the freedom we spoke about at the outset, if this point of view is taken? I can no longer pretend to be a cipher, and to choose my-

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self continually from the starting point of nothing at all. If it is through subjectivity that nothingness appears in the world, it can equally be said that it is through the world that nothingness comes into being. I am a general refusal to be anything, accompanied surreptitiously by a continual acceptance of such and such a qualified form of being. For even this general refusal is still one manner of being, and has its place in the world. It is true that Ican at any moment interrupt my projects. But what is this power? It is the power to begin something else, for we never remain suspended in nothingness. We are always in a plenum, in being, just as a face, even in repose, even in death, is always doomed to express something (there are people whose faces, in death, bear expressions of surprise, or peace, or discretion), and just as silence is still a modality of the world of sound. I may defy all accepted form, and spurn everything, for there is no case in which I am utterly committed: but in this case I do not withdraw into my freedom, I commit myself elsewhere. Instead of thinking about my bereavement, I look at my nails, or have lunch, or engage in politics. Far from its being the case that my freedom is always unattended, it is never without an accomplice, and its power of perpetually tearing itself away finds its fulcrum in my universal commitment in the world. My actual freedom is not on the hither side of my being, but before me, in things. We must not say that I continually choose myself, on the excuse that I might continually refuse what I am. Not to refuse is not the same thing as to choose. We could identify drift and action only by depriving the implicit of all phenomenal value, and at every instant arraying the world before us in perfect transparency, that is, by destroying the world’s ‘worldliness’. Consciousness holds itself responsible for everything, and takes everything upon itself, but it has nothing of its own and makes its life in the world. We are led to conceive freedom as a choice continually remade as long as we do not bring in the notion of a generalized or natural time. We have seen that there is no natural time, if we understand thereby a time of things without subjectivity. There is, however, at least a generalized time, and this is what the common notion of time envisages. It is the perpetual reiteration of the sequence of past, present and future. It is, as it were, a constant disappointment and failure. This is what is expressed by saying that it is continuous: the present which it brings to us is never a present for good, since it is already over when it

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appears, and the future has, in it, only the appearance of a goal towards which we make our way, since it quickly comes into the present, whereupon we turn towards a fresh future. This time is the time of our bodily functions, which like it, are cyclic, and it is also that of nature with which we co-exist. It offers us only the adumbration and the abstract form of a commitment, since it continually erodes itself and undoes

that which it has just done. As long as we place in opposition, with no mediator, the For Itself and the In Itself, and fail to perceive, between ourselves and the world, this natural foreshadowing of a subjectivity, this prepersonal time which rests upon itself, acts are needed to sustain the upsurge of time, and everything becomes equally a matter of choice, the respiratory reflex no less than the moral decision, conservation no less than creation. As far as we are concerned,

consciousness attributes this power of universal constitution to itself only if it ignores the event which upholds it and is the occasion of its birth. A consciousness for which the world ‘can be taken for granted’, which finds it ‘already constituted’ and present even in consciousness itself, does not absolutely choose either its being or its manner of being. What then is freedom? To be born is both to be born of the world and to be born into the world. The world is already constituted, but also never completely constituted; in the first case we are acted upon, in the

second we are open to an infinite number of possibilities. But this analysis is still abstract, for we exist in both ways at once. There is, therefore, never determinism and never absolute choice, I am never a thing and never bare consciousness. In fact, even our own

pieces of initiative, even the situations which we have chosen, bear us on, once they have been entered upon by virtue of a state rather than an act. The generality of the ‘réle’ and of the situation comes to the aid of decision, and in this exchange between the situation and the person who takes it up, it is impossible to determine precisely the ‘share contributed by the situation’ and the ‘share contributed by freedom’. Let us suppose that a man is tortured to make him talk. If he refuses to give the names and addresses which it is desired to extract from him, this does not arise from a solitary and unsupported decision: the man still feels himself to be with his comrades, and, being still involved in the common struggle, he is as it were incapable of talking. Or else, for months or years, he has, in his mind, faced this test and staked his whole life

upon it. Or finally, he wants to prove, by coming through it, what he has always thought and said about freedom. These motives do not cancel out freedom,

but at least ensure that it does not go unbuttressed in being. What withstands pain is not, in short, a bare consciousness, but the prisoner with his comrades or with those he loves and under whose gaze he lives;

or else the awareness of his proudly willed solitude, which again is a certain mode of the Mit-Sein. And probably the individual in his prison daily reawakens these phantoms, which give back to him the strength he gave to them. But conversely, in so far as he has committed himself to this action, formed a bond with his comrades or adopted this morality, it is because the historical situation, the comrades, the world around him seemed to him to expect that conduct from him. The analysis could be pursued endlessly in this way. We choose our world and the world chooses us. What is certain, in any case, is that we can at no time set aside within ourselves a redoubt to which being does not find its way through, without seeing this freedom, immediately and by the very fact of being a living experience, take on the appearance of being and become a motive and a buttress. Taken concretely, freedom is always a meeting of the inner and the outer—even the prehuman and prehistoric freedom with which we began—and it shrinks without ever disappearing altogether in direct proportion to the lessening of the tolerance allowed by the bodily and institutional data of our lives. There is, as Husserl says, on the one hand a ‘field of freedom’ and on the other a ‘conditioned freedom’;* not that freedom is absolute within the limits of this field and non-existent outside it (like the perceptual field, this one has

no traceable boundaries), but because I enjoy immediate and remote possibilities. Our commitments sustain our power and there is no freedom without some ‘power. Our freedom, it is said, is either total or nonexistent. This dilemma belongs to objective thought and its stable-companion, analytical reflection. If indeed we place ourselves within being, it must necessarily be the case that our actions must have their origin outside us, and if we revert to constituting consciousness, they must originate within. But we have learnt precisely to recognize the order of phenomena. We are involved in the world and with others in an

*Fink, Vergegenwartigung und Bild, p. 285.

Freedom

inextricable tangle. The idea of situation rules out absolute freedom at the source of our commitments, and equally, indeed, at their terminus. No commitment, not even commitment in the Hegelian State, can make me leave behind all differences and free me for anything. This universality itself, from the mere fact of its being experienced, would stand out as a particularity against the world’s background, for existence both generalizes and particularizes everything at which it aims, and cannot ever be finally complete. The synthesis of in itself and for itself which brings Hegelian freedom into being has, however, its truth. In a sense, it is the very definition of existence, since it is effected at every moment before our eyes in the phenomenon of presence, only to be quickly re-enacted, since it does not conjure away our finitude. By taking up a present, I draw together and transform my past, altering its significance, freeing and detaching myself from it. But I do so only by committing myself somewhere else. Psychoanalytical treatment does not bring about its cure by producing direct awareness of the past, but in the first place by binding the subject to his doctor through new existential relationships. It is not a matter of giving scientific assent to the psychoanalytical interpretation, and discovering a notional significance for the past; it is a matter of reliving this or that as significant, and this the patient succeeds in doing only by seeing his past in the perspective of his co-existence with the doctor. The complex is not dissolved bya non-instrumental freedom, but rather displaced by a new pulsation of time with its own supports and motives. The same applies in all cases of coming to awareness: they are real only if they are sustained by a new commitment. Now this commitment too is entered into in the sphere of the implicit, and is therefore valid only for a certain temporal cycle. The choice which we make of our life is always based on a certain givenness. My freedom can draw life away from its spontaneous course, but only by a series of unobtrusive deflections which necessitate first of all following its course—not by any absolute creation. All explanations of my conduct in terms of my past, my temperament and my environment are therefore true, provided that they be regarded not as separable contributions, but as moments of my total being, the significance of which I am entitled to make explicit in various ways, without its ever being possible to say whether I confer their meaning upon them or receive it from them. I am a psychological and his-

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torical structure, and have received, with existence, a manner of existing, a style. All my actions and thoughts stand in a relationship to this structure, and

even a philosopher’s thought is merely a way of making explicit his hold on the world, and what he is. The fact remains that I am free, not in spite of, or on the

:

hither side of, these motivations, but by means of them. For this significant life, this certain significance of nature and history which I am, does not limit my access to the world, but on the contrary is my means of entering into communication with it. It is by being unrestrictedly and unreservedly what I am at present that I have a chance of moving forward; it is by living my time that I am able to understand other times, by plunging into the present and the world, by taking on deliberately what I am fortuitously, by willing what I will and doing what I do, that I can go further. I can miss being free only if I try to bypass my natural and social situation by refusing to take it up, in the first place, instead of assuming it in order to join up with the natural and human world. Nothing determines me from outside, not because nothing acts upon me, but, on the contrary, because I am from the start outside myself and open to the world. We are true through and through, and have with us, by the mere fact of belonging to the world, and not merely being in the world in the way that things are, all that we need to transcend ourselves. We need have no fear that our choices or actions restrict our liberty, since choice and action alone cut us loose from our anchorage. Just as

reflection borrows its wish for absolute sufficiency from the perception which causes a thing to appear, and as in this way idealism tacitly uses that ‘primary opinion which it would like to destroy as opinion, so freedom flounders in the contradictions of commitment, and fails to realize that, without the roots which it thrusts into the world, it would not be freedom at all. Shall I make this promise? Shall I risk my life for so little? Shall I give up my liberty in order to save liberty? There is no theoretical reply to these questions. But there are these things which stand, irrefutable, there is before you this person whom you love, there are these men whose existence around you is that of slaves, and your freedom cannot be willed without

leaving behind its singular relevance, and without willing freedom for all. Whether it is a question of things or of historical situations, philosophy has no other function than to teach us to see them clearly once more, and it is true to say that it comes into being by

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destroying itself as separate philosophy. But what is here required is silence, for only the hero lives out his relation to men and the world. “Your son is caught in the fire; you are the one who will save him. .. . If there is an obstacle, you would be ready to give your shoulder provided only that you can charge down that obstacle. Your abode is your act itself. Your act is you. .. . You give yourself in exchange. . . . Your significance shows itself, effulgent. It is your duty, your hatred, your love, your steadfastness, your ingenuity. ... Man is but a network of relationships, and these alone matter to him.’*

, The Metaphysical in Man from Sense and Non-Sense

As presently oriented, the sciences of man are metaphysical or transnatural in that they cause us to rediscover, along with structure and the understanding of structure, a dimension of being and a type of knowl-

edge which man forgets in his natural attitude.* It is natural to believe ourselves in the presence of a world and a time over which our thought soars, capable of

considering each part at will without modifying the part’s objective nature. This belief is taken up and systematized in the beginnings of science, which always takes for granted an absolute observer in whom all points of view are summed up and, correlatively, a true projection of all perspectives. But the sciences of man—not to mention the others—have made it evident that all knowledge of man by man, far from being pure contemplation, is the taking up by each, as best he can, of the acts of others, reactivating from

ambiguous signs an experience which is not his own, appropriating a structure (e.g., the a priori of the species, the sublinguistic schema or spirit of a civiliza-

tion) of which he forms no distinct concept but which he puts together as an experienced pianist deciphers an unknown piece of music: without himself grasping the motives of each gesture or each operation, without being able to bring to the surface of con-

*A. de Saint-Exupéry, Pilote de Guerre, pp. 171, 174, 176. *Some footnotes have been omitted— ed.

sciousness all the sediment of knowledge which he is using at that moment. Here we no longer have the positing of an object, but rather we have communication with a way of being. The universality of knowledge is no longer guaranteed in each of us by that stronghold of absolute consciousness in which the Kantian “I think”—although linked to a certain spatio-temporal perspective—was assured a priori of being identical to every other possible “I think.” The germ of universality or the “natural light” without which there could be no knowledge is to be found ahead of us, in the thing where our perception places us, in the dialogue into which our experience of other people throws us by means of a movement not all of whose sources are known to us. Metaphysics begins from the moment when, ceasing to live in the evidence of the object—whether it is the sensory object or the object of science—we apperceive the radical subjectivity of all our experience as inseparable from its truth value. It means two things to say that our experience is our own: both that it is not the measure of all imaginable being in itself and that it is nonetheless co-extensive with all being of which we can form a notion. This double sense of the cogito is the basic fact of metaphysics: I am sure that there is being— on the condition that I do not seek another sort of being than being-for-me. When I am aware of sensing, I am not, on the one hand, conscious of my state and, on the other, of a certain sensuous quality such as red or blue—but red or blue are nothing other than my different ways of running my eyes over what is offered to me and of responding to its solicitation. Likewise, when I say that I see someone, it means that I am

moved by sympathy for this behavior of which Iam a witness and which holds my own intentions by furnishing them with a visible realization. It is our very difference, the uniqueness of our experience, which ‘attests to our strange ability to enter into others and re-enact their deeds. Thus is founded a truth which, as Pascal said, we can neither reject nor completely accept. Metaphysics is the deliberate intention to describe this paradox of consciousness and truth, ex-

change and communication, in which science lives and which it encounters in the guise of vanquished difficulties or failures to be made good but which it does not thematize. From the moment recognize that my experience, precisely insofar as it is my own, makes me accessible to what is not myself, that I am sensitive to the world and to others, all the beings which ob-

The Metaphysicalin Man

jective thought placed at a distance draw singularly nearer to me. Or, conversely, I recognize my affinity with them; I am nothing but an ability to echo them, to understand them, to respond to them. My life seems absolutely individual and absolutely universal to me. This recognition of an individual life which animates all past and contemporary lives and receives its entire life from them, of a light which flashes from them to us contrary to all hope—this is metaphysical consciousness, whose first stage is surprise at discovering the confrontation of opposites and whose second stage is recognition of their identity in the simplicity of doing. Metaphysical consciousness has no other objects than those of experience: this world, other people, human history, truth, culture. But instead of taking them as all settled, as consequences with no premises, as if they were self-evident, it rediscovers their fundamental strangeness to me and the miracle of their appearing. The history of mankind is then no longer the inevitable advent of modern man in fixed stages starting with the cave men, that imperious growth of morality and science of which “all too human” textbooks chatter; it is not empirical, successive history but the awareness of the secret bond which causes Plato to be still alive in our midst. Understood in this way, metaphysics is the opposite of system. If system is an arrangement of concepts which makes all the aspects of experience immedi- . ately compatible and compossible, then it suppresses metaphysical consciousness and, moreover, does away with morality at the same time. For example, if we wish to base the fact of rationality or communication on an absolute value or thought, either this absolute does not raise any difficulties and, when everything has been carefully considered, rationality and communication remain based on themselves, or else the absolute descends into them, so to speak—in which case it overturns all human methods of verification and justification. Whether there is or is not an absolute thought and an absolute evaluation in each practical problem, my own opinions, which remain capable of error no matter how rigorously Iexamine them, are still my only equipment for judging. It remains just as hard to reach agreement with myself

and with others, and for all my belief that it is in principle always attainable, I have no other reason to affirm this principle than my experience of certain concordances, so that in the end whatever solidity there is in my belief in the absolute is nothing but my

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experience of agreement with myself and others. Recourse to an absolute foundation—when it is not useless—destroys the very thing it is supposed to support. As a matter of fact, if I believe that I can rejoin the absolute principle of all thought and all evaluation on the basis of evidence, then I have the right to withdraw my judgments from the control of others on the condition that I have my consciousness for myself; my judgments take on a sacred character; in particular— in the realm of the practical—I have at my disposal a plan of escape in which my actions become transfigured: the suffering I create turns into happiness, ruse becomes reason, and I piously cause my adversaries to perish. Thus, when I place the ground of truth or morality outside ongoing experience, either I continue to hold to the probabilities it offers me (merely devalued by the ideal of absolute knowledge), or I disguise these probabilities as absolute certainties—and then I am letting go of the verifiable for the sake of truth, which is to say Idrop the prey to catch its shadow. I waver between uncertainty and presumptuousness without ever finding the precise point of human resolution. If, on the other hand, I have understood that truth and value can be for us nothing but the result of the verifications or evaluations which we make in contact with the world, before other people and in given situations of knowledge and action, that even these notions lose all meaning outside of human perspectives, then the world recovers its texture, the particular acts of verification and

evaluation through which I grasp a dispersed experience resume their decisive importance, and knowl-

edge and action, true and false, good and evil have something unquestionable about them precisely because I do not claim to find in them absolute evidence. Metaphysical and moral consciousness dies upon contact with the absolute because, beyond the dull world of habitual or dormant consciousness, this consciousness is itself the living connection between myselfand me and myself and others. Metaphysics is not a construction of concepts by which we try to make our paradoxes less noticeable but is the experience we have of these paradoxes in all situations of personal and collective history and the actions which, by assuming them, transform them into reason. One cannot conceive of a response which would eliminate such an inquiry; one thinks only of resolute actions which carry it further. Metaphysics is not a knowledge come to complete the edifice of knowledges but

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is lucid familiarity with whatever threatens these fields of knowledge and the acute awareness of their worth. The contingency of all that exists and all that has value is not a little truth for which we have somehow or other to make room in some nook or cranny of the system: it is the condition of a metaphysical view of the world. Such a metaphysics cannot be reconciled with the manifest content of religion and with the positing of an absolute thinker of the world. These affirmations immediately pose the problem of a theodicy which has not taken one step forward since Leibniz and which in the last analysis perhaps consisted —even for Leibniz himself— of evoking the existence of this world as an insurpassable fact which from the first solicits creative actualization and therefore of rejecting the point of view of a worldless God. God then appears, not as the creator of this world—which would immediately entail the difficulty of a sovereign and benevolent power forced to incorporate evil in His works—but rather as an idea in the Kantian and restrictive sense of the word. God becomes a term of reference for a human reflection which, when it considers the world such as it is, condenses in this idea what it would like the world to be. A God who would not be simply for us but for Himself, could, on the contrary, be sought by metaphysics only behind consciousness, beyond our ideas, as the anonymous force

which sustains each of our thoughts and experiences.* At this point religion ceases to be a conceptual construct or an ideology and once more becomes part of the experience of interhuman life. The originality of Christianity as the religion of the death of God is its rejection of the God of the philosophers and its herald-

* Any determination one would like to give of this foundation at once becomes contradictory—not with that fertile contradiction of human consciousness but with the inert contradiction of inconsistent concepts. I have the right to consider the contradictions of my life as a thinking and incarnate subject, finite and capable of truth, as ultimate

and true because I have experienced them and because they are interconnected in the unquestionable perception of a thing or in the experience of a truth. I can no longer introduce a “transcendence in immanence” behind me as Husserl did (even transcendence qualified as hypothetical), for I am not God, and I cannot verify the co-existence of these two attributes in any indubitable experience.

ing of a God who takes on the human condition, The role of religion in culture is not that of a dogma or even of a belief, a cry. But what else could it be and

still be effective? The Christian teaching that the Fall is fortunate, that a world without fault would be less good, and, finally, that the creation, which made being fall from its original perfection and sufficiency, is nevertheless more valuable or was all to the good makes Christianity the most resolute negation of the conceived infinite. Lastly, no matter if metaphysics conceived as system has clashed with scientism, as Bergson saw, there is much more than a concordat between a metaphysics which rejects system as a matter of principle and a science which is forever becoming more exact in measuring how much its formulas diverge from the facts they are supposed to express: there is a spontaneous convergence.’ Philosophical self-consciousness does

*Bergson’s Introduction a la métaphysique shows in a profound way that science should be considered not only with respect to its completed formulas but also with an eye to the margin of indetermination which separates these formulas from the data to be explained and that, taken in this way, it presupposes an intimacy with the still-to-be-determined data. Metaphysics would then be the deliberate exploration of this world prior to the object of science to which science refers. In all these respects it seems to us that Bergson has perfectly defined the metaphysical approach to the world. It remains to be seen whether he was true to this method and did not revert to the system in passing from the “curve of facts” to a vital or spiritual impulse of which they would be the manifestation or the trace and which could be perceived only from the absolute observer's viewpoint, thus transforming the effort and tension he first described into an eternal repose. If, for Bergson, intuition really makes us transcend the

‘world, it is because Bergson is not fully aware of his own presuppositions and of that simple fact that all we live is lived against the background of the world. And if, on the other hand, his philosophy is finally to be understood as a philosophy of immanence, he may be reproached with having described the human world only in its most general structures (e.g., duration, openness to the future); his

work lacks a picture of human history which would give a content to these intuitions, which paradoxically remain very general. [English translation of Bergson’s book by T. E. Hulme, An Introduction to Metaphysics (New York and London, 1912).]}

Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986)

not make science’s effort at objectification futile; rather, philosophy pursues this effort at the human level, since all thought is inevitably objectification: only philosophy knows that on this level objectification cannot become carried away and makes us conquer the more fundamental relationship of coexistence. There can be no rivalry between scientific knowledge and the metaphysical knowing which continually confronts the former with its task. A science without philosophy would literally not know what it was talking about. A philosophy without methodical exploration of phenomena would end up with nothing but formal truths, which is to say, errors. To do metaphysics is not to enter a world of isolated knowledge nor to repeat sterile formulas such as we are using here: it is thoroughly to test the paradoxes it indicates; continually to re-verify the discordant functioning of human intersubjectivity; to try to think through to the very end the same phenomena which science lays siege to, only restoring to them their original transcendence and strangeness. Whenit seems that methodology has incontestably established that all induction is baseless in the absolute sense of the word and that all reflection always carries with it whole vistas of experience which tacitly cooperate to produce the purest of our evidence, it will undoubtedly be in order to revise the classical distinction between induction and reflection and to ask ourselves if -

two kinds of knowing are really involved or if there is not rather one single way of knowing, with different degrees of naiveté or explicitness. A certain number of negations were necessary clearly to define the limits of this conception of metaphysics, but, taken in itself, such a conception is the essence of positiveness, and it is impossible to see what it could deprive us of. The glory of the evidence such as that of successful dialogue and communication, the common fate which men share and their one-

ness, which is not merely a biological resemblance but is a similarity in their most intimate nature—all that science and religion can effectively live is here brought together and rescued from the ambiguities of a double life.

friends for life but never married, considering the institution bourgeois. She became an important figure in French intellectual life after the Second World War and co-founded Les Temps Modernes with Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. She wrote novels and plays, including She Came to Stay (1943), The Blood of Others (1944), All Men Are Mortal (1946), and The Mandarins (1954). Her most influential

publication was The Second Sex (1949), a feminist classic, and her book The Ethics ofAmbiguity (1948) is an important attempt to draw out the ethical implications of existentialism. In The Ethics of Ambiguity de Beauvoir argues

that philos have obscured oph and ers oversimplified

many aspects of our lives and our world by insisting that there is one view capable of rendering our situation completely intelligible. In fact, the human sit-

uation istoocomplex tobecaptured byany one

consistent view, and invariably philosophers advocate views that “lie to us” and “leave in the shadow certain troublingaspects of a too complex

situation.” Our situation is, she says, ambiguous through and through. Simultaneously we are: (1) part of the world and (2) the mere consciousness of the world.

We are both individuals and dependent on the collectivity. We have sovereign importance yet we are entirely insignificant. We are subjects for ourselves yet objects to others. We conceive of our lives as continuing indefinitely but know we face death.

—De Beauvoir suggests that existentialism has always been a philosophy of ambiguity, and she credits Kierkegaard with initiating existentialism by “affirming the irreducible character of ambiguity,” 2°) and Sartre with continuing the theme by treating the human being as “that being whose being is not to be.....”?! However, she also suggests that existentialism appears to have left us with a philosophy of despair in that it seems to deprive us of any “principle for making choices,” any ideal by which to live our lives. Sartre in particular has portrayed the

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR (1908-1986) Simone de Beauvoir was born in Paris, the daughter of a lawyer. She studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, where she met Sartre. The two remained close

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'9Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity, trans. Bernard Frechtman (Secaucus: Citadel Press, 1948), 8.

AD toytal,, S). 1 Tbid., 10.

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Even if we agree with de Beauvoir to posit the importance of freedom, we might still be unsure about which ethical questions will be resolved thereby. Particularly difficult will be the problem of how to decide on the relative importance of conflicting freedoms. For example, being entirely free to save lives conflicts with being entirely free to conform to one’s religion, for sometimes religious groups require people to put their lives in danger, as when Jehovah’s Witnesses require their members to refuse blood transfusions. So we must ask “when it is a question of choosing among freedoms, how shall we decide?” > And de Beauvoir’s answer is that in the final analysis “one finds himself back at the anguish of free decision.” ** One must just decide which freedoms are more important, after carefully considering the complex ways in which different freedoms will affect people, for there is no concrete basis on which to base the decision.

human being as engaged in the impossible project of becoming God, who is a synthesis of the in-itself and the for-itself. Nevertheless, even if Sartre is correct in saying that the human project is impossible to achieve, we can still see a way to affirm human existence and overcome despair. choosing We can do so by human existencein all itsambiguity. We can decide toae to engage in the tension-filledI human project “even with the failure which it involves.” Such a choice does not show that human existence is valuable from an objective point of view, a point of view independent of human existence; but then such a point of view does not exist. Instead, the decision to choose human existence shows that it is valuable from the only point of view that exists; namely, the point of view of a person who desires to exist. But if each of us is a free creator of values, can’t

we view ourselves as separate from others in a way that entitles us to ignore them when we devise our scheme of values? It might seem so. However, de Beauvoir suggests that even though individuals are genuinely separate from each other, it is possible to set out “an ethics of ambiguity” that “will refuse to deny a priori that separate existants can, at the same

In The Second Sex (1949), de Beauvoir develops

an account of the relationship between the sexes that extends ideas Hegel set out in “Master and Slave.” Like Hegel,de Beauvoir sees each ie all loth hers fus i

to make an object of everyone else. Moreover, some of us have largely succeeded in dominating others in this way. Men as a group have managed to domi-

time, be bound to each other, that their individual

freedoms can forge laws valid for all.” In defending her ethics of ambiguity, de Beauvoir claims that whatever else people might want in affirming their existence, they will also want freedom; whatever else people who affirm life might value, they will also value freedom. For we not only have goals, we also have the desire to pursue those goals ourselves. We want to be self-determining. But self-determination is possible only if we possess the freedom to pursue our lives ourselves. It is true that self-determining people will sometimes make mistakes. However, “to prohibit a man from error is to forbid him to fulfill his own existence, it is to deprive him of life.” ** Hence, freedom is considered valuable by everyone, and the prescription of freedom for everyone can be taken as a “law valid for all.” 2Tbid., 13. *3Tbid., 18. 4Ibid., 138.

person as hostile that would like

nate women; men as a group have gotten women

es

to accept the view that men are subjects and women are the objects for the male subjects. Men are the “one” and women are the “other.” This subordination penetrates every aspect of the relationship between the sexes.