Beyond Existentialism

J. Von Rintelen, Hilda Graef

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429639647
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book, first published in 1961, is a careful analysis of this modern movement of thought, and especially of its leading German representative Martin Heidegger. This study presents a sound reading and criticism of the existentialist thinkers.

CHAPTER ONE

Transcendent Thought Discarded

1. THE PRESENT SITUATION

THE all-important question of what is the main task of philosophy may be answered in two ways. Out-and-out relativists will hold it to be the analysis of the contemporary situation; all others, however, will consider the knowledge of truth independent of time its principal aim. Now this attitude presupposes that the philosopher is convinced of the possibility of attaining to truth that is objectively valid, capable of illuminating existence and revealing being, an insight that agrees with fact. In the matter of truth the ‘spirit of the age’ alone has no right to interfere, since this ‘spirit’ may only too easily go from one extreme to the other as soon as a new generation has grown up, and, moreover, it will frequently by-pass the most important issues. If we let ourselves be completely dominated by it we shall not even notice the blinkers it places on our minds. Indeed, in the name of this ‘spirit of the age’ we may have to subscribe to the most intolerant dogmas, today for example to the radical finiteness of all being, including our own existence. If we philosophize solely within the confines of the present, many things will have to be accepted as unquestionable, and very valuable findings of the past will have to be sacrificed. Now just such a completely time-bound philosophy may easily run the risk of becoming a mere subject of discussion; and an analysis of the present will be its sole achievement.

Such a way of thought should be distinguished from another philosophy which, while also capable of sizing up the historical situation, yet treats all questions from the point of view of super-temporal truth and answers them with the help of certain knowledge accumulated during past centuries. If, on the other hand, a philosophy is scarcely related to the ever-new problems of the present, it will merely ‘accompany’ the times (today this applies, e.g. to neo-Kantianism, pure materialism or a solely traditional Scholasticism). True, such a philosophy will still occupy its own niche; nevertheless it will give no decisive direction to contemporary thought, but rather by-pass it. Hence we would call that philosophy which is related to the age while yet transcending it the primary philosophy of a period, whereas the transitory philosophy which is completely circumscribed by the age or only accompanies it, would be its secondary philosophy.

Thus, philosophy has a weightier obligation than merely to write the case-history of the modern soul. Nevertheless, one of its principal tasks is to grasp the historical situation and to cope with its problems. It is probably true to say that in our time nearly everyone feels the need for a new beginning, for a spiritual renaissance. But this need is most frequently met by denying our spiritual ancestry, and first of all by jettisoning the past. This attitude extends even to the most fundamental philosophical terms. Today just the most basic facts and experiences are expressed in a totally new terminology so that none of our principal terms has a clearly defined meaning, and this Babylonian confusion has grown worse and worse. In their desire to give a new sense to words our thinkers frequently juggle with them until they are made to convey an utterly unexpected meaning, which is quite opposed to the ordinary sense of the term. The French philosopher R. Jolivet called this once ‘on joue avec les mots’—a very hazardous procedure. It is further aggravated by what logicians call an ignoratio or mutatio elenchi, i.e. of crediting the person who thinks differently with a view which he does not hold at all. Thus a controversy based on such misleading assertions will not be very difficult to conduct, especially when it concerns the use of terms such as objectivity, substance, Logos, objects, things that are merely there and so forth. We would rather find out which established concepts can still claim validity; for earlier ages viewed the problems more clearly. Hence our intention is to revive and deepen our inheritance rather than to overthrow everything and to begin constantly ‘ab ovo’, right from the start, as philosophers tried to do in 1920 and again in 1933 and 1945. Such lack of continuity will not lead us to a true understanding of man derived from his ‘historicity’, as it is called today. In fact, nowadays just this word is used in a very unhistorical sense. For it does not indicate growth and coherence. Such a continuous process appears to our contemporaries as far too ‘substantial’ and tangible. What is wanted is, on the contrary, a radical discontinuity. Inheritance is no more than ‘transmitted possibility’. Individual parts may be quite logically thought out, what is rejected is an organically constructed whole capable of assimilating new meanings also in the process of history. The same attitude applies to philosophical systems, which appear as actually objectionable precisely because they are consistent. Hence, in contemporary terminology, historicity means no more than an accidental occasion affording a personal point of departure.

If we approch reality with an open mind we shall be confronted, first of all, by the fact that our ‘being there’, Dasein¹ is limited, imperfect, divided, and, above all, finite. And at once we are told to stop, forbidden to look any further than that, as Friedrich Nietzsche warns his readers in his Preface to Thus Spake Zarathustra: ‘I adjure you, brethren, remain faithful to this earth and do not believe those who speak to you of other-worldly hopes. They are poisoners!’ In the same vein as Nietzsche, the poet, Virchow, the scientist, told his contemporaries that for them ‘everything beyond this world, all transcendence is but insanity’. Today we realize more clearly than before how this limitation came to be imposed. According to the old faith all things depended on a Being, absolutely divine yet capable of being apprehended by way of analogy, by whom the world had been created. This fundamental conception was progressively eliminated by the secularization of the modern mind. Man imagined he could solve the riddle of the cosmos, first through mathematics and mechanics (rationalism), then through senses and experience (sensualism), through measuring nature (naturalism) or through the subjectivity of the individual ego (romanticism). True, in the last century German idealism still believed in an objective, even divine spirit, while pantheistic thinkers longed to be absorbed into the infinite, metaphysical embrace of the All.

Today all this has been superseded. The positivists affirm that nothing exists save what can be grasped through the senses or defined by mathematics; the materialists see the world only as a corporeal entity; relativists believe in universal change, the exponents of historism in nothing but historical development, and the active nihilists hold that only deed void of meaning has value. All these -isms have only added to the spiritual and intellectual confusion and revealed the total cataclysm. Now the world alone—a concept which will be defined more precisely later on—stripped of all metaphysical aspects, has a right to the philosopher’s attention. Or we profess with Nietzsche only a metaphysic of the great deed and of the semblance of an ultimately deceptive truth and with Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit a metaphysic of the Nothing as the ‘veil of being’, with which the finiteness of what-is (des Seienden) frighteningly confronts us.

¹Dasein. The normal English translation would be existence. But as existentialists, especially Martin Heidegger, distinguish Dasein from existence, we shall normally leave this term in German. It means something like ‘human reality’ ‘in the sense of the state of being human with all that this state, for Heidegger, involves’, as is pointed out in the notes to Werner Brock Existence and Being, p. 397. Translator’s note.

Hence today the philosopher is concerned only with the world ‘here below as such’, a term charged with ressentiment because it includes the negation of the so-called ‘beyond’. Now both these terms refer to a spatial concept which is very misleading. For we are here concerned with a sphere of being that belongs to a higher dimension altogether, to which the data of spatial and temporal existence do not apply, because it transcends them. Now contemporary thinkers refuse to admit this sphere; they lay all stress exclusively on the finite world and reject any metaphysical idea of an independent non-sensual sphere. Commenting on Nietzsche’s statement ‘God is dead’, Heidegger says that the ‘supra-sensual ground’ as the ‘effective reality of all that is real… has become unreal’. Thus he attacks eternal Platonism.¹ According to the views of contemporary thinkers the spirit descends finally so-to-speak into the corporeal world. Surprisingly, however, it does not follow from this that they advocate pure materialism and practical success. True, at the moment such an attitude is still widespread. But today a very peculiar and entirely new type of man is emerging. We are confronted with the purely this-worldly idealist, even though he may actually suffer from a self-deception which is only gradually becoming apparent. In Nietzsche he took the form of a violent activist, in Ludwig Klages that of a passive vitalist. This type of man represents an wholly earth-bound philosophy of life, while the philosopher Georg Simmel was still aware of something ‘more than life’; for why, he asked, do we speak of ‘human’ existence at all? Nevertheless, this view of the self-sufficiency of the world has an emphatically religious aspect. Inner-worldliness is meant to give existence an infinite depth of being. According to Romano Guardini this is a ‘Pseudomorphie of the concept of God’, from which the fullness of meaning is borrowed. Nor should we overlook those idealists of the Inferno, as we may paradoxically call them, who confuse the minds and, in the interests of their power-political ideology which is also wholly confined to a finite world, outrage man and consider all things lawful.

If we speak of a philosophy of finiteness as a special feature of our time this term is meant to characterize a general position, which in itself is independent of particular materialistic, idealistic, religious and other views. According to this position human beings exist— also ontologically—only in a reality subject to constant spatial and temporal change, hence in a completely finite reality. This alone gives Dasein its full meaning—if such meaning can still be found.

¹ Heidegger, Holzwege, pp. 193, 199, 203 (1949).

Such a turning towards pure finiteness or, to put it paradoxically, to infinite finiteness in the sense of intensified finiteness, is most evident in the poetry of Rilke and in the work of Heidegger, who in the beginning presented it in the sense of a radical finiteness without any romantic-idealistic trimmings. In fact, Nietzsche had already limited man to his finite reality. But in Sein und Zeit Heidegger is more sober. There he is still the genuine ‘realist of this world’, even though he is not a positivist or an agnostic with an anti-religious bias.¹ His position is neutral, and his confidence in possible human existence has idealistic traits. Now both, Rilke as well as Heidegger, exercise a strong attraction. Rilke, being earlier in time, furnishes only a partial expression of our own age; he is too delicate for it and attracts only the more sensitive of our young men and women. To him Leibniz would apply the words that ‘poetical expressions often grip and persuade men far more than what is said exactly’.² In Rilke’s late works, the Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus his thought goes further in the direction just indicated. They are profoundly moving, expressing a sublime ethos and placing the idea of love at the centre of religious existence. But in our view they are a half-way house. For they show clearly that despite his contrary affirmations Rilke is still largely indebted to a Christian atmosphere, but nevertheless demands complete restriction to earthly existence without, however, being as consistent as Heidegger. The latter is more realistic; he rejects all ‘false longings’, at least in the beginning, and does not demand idealistic norms of value. Thus he represents—or at least did so in the past—a more genuine expression of our age. From this point of view we are glad that his honesty has forbidden him up to now to use the concept of God, except on very rare occasions.³ He does not apply this term in a metaphorical sense to the finite and nihilating (nichtend) being of Dasein. A strange, radical austerity prevents him from letting his thoughts lead him towards God. Thus his philosophy is, indeed, an analysis of the mood of our time. In his later writings, however, he turns to a more religious outlook. Nevertheless, he does not merely elucidate finite being in a mood of complete disillusionment or show up the falsity of an optimistic view of this life. Nor does he destroy completely belief in an earthly paradise, such as the ‘rhythmic life’ of Ludwig Klages (cf. Edgar Dacqué); his object is to find a fresh starting point in human ‘existence’ itself. The world, however, is no longer a well-ordered cosmos, presupposing a deistic God; it is merely contradictory earthly existence. ‘For the existentialist thinker finiteness is not organized being’ (Theodor Steinbüchel). Yet we do not want to be drowned. On the contrary, the decadence and dehumanization of our time must be opposed; and this is thought to be possible only if we derive and make this new start, so characteristic of modern times, from our own transitory human being. Since all external things which are merely there (das Vorhandene) have become thoroughly questionable we are ready for this turning back on ourselves, even though Heidegger may not consider this to be subjectivity.

¹This applies to Heidegger’s very impressive earlier period, which had such pr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Translator’s Preface
• Introduction
• Contents
• I. Transcendent Thought Discarded
• II. The Expedient of Existence and the Affirmation of Finiteness
• III. Innerworldly Attempts at Transcendence?
• IV. Beyond Finiteness
• Index