Encounter with Nothingness

An Essay on Existentialism

Helmut Kuhn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429619335
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

This book, first published in 1951, discusses the fundamental concepts which have crystallized around the fatal 'crisis'. It proceeds by critically examining the theories which, from Kierkegaard to Heidegger, Sartre and their associates, have placed Existentialism in the focus of philosophical thought.

IV

Subjective Truth

IN AN ESTRANGED world information is available but no truth. “Truth about the world”—this mode of speech implies a meaningful or understandable whole, a cosmos. But the world is no longer recognized as cosmos, and by the same token truth as the revelation of meaning to man seems unattainable. If we call the organ of the revelation of meaning reason, then the experience of estrangement involves the eclipse of faith in reason. As the intelligible world is dismissed as a juvenile dream, the faculty of intellection, the inner eye for the vision of this world, continues, if at all, as a mere vestigial organ. In this sense Existentialism is a form of irrationalism, in spite of its professions of faith in science. In fact, neo-Positivism, that modern school of thought which makes it its business to glorify natural science as the only road to truth, is an un-avowed nihilism and thereby akin to Existentialism. Talking about metaphysics (sign-reading in a world without signs), to them an impossible thing, the two schools use the same language, the neo-Positivists speaking with complacent tolerance—metaphysics, they say, is a sort of edifying poetry—the Existentialists with the accent of despair.

Plato, so Cicero tells us, was once stranded on a desolate shore. His companions took alarm, but Plato, noticing geometrical figures drawn in the sand, reassured them: he had discovered traces of humanity (De re publica i, 29). From the point of view of the experience of estrangement, Plato was too sanguine in his conclusion. Mathematics does not teach civilized behavior, and Plato and his companions might just as well have anticipated torture applied with scientific accuracy.

Truth as the disclosure of meaning is not to be wrested from the objects of the Existentialist’s estranged world. If at all, it must be found in the inner man, as a condition or act of the mind. Instead of being objective, the essence of truth must lie in man’s veracity or sincerity. To be in truth rather than to have truth will then be the goal to be striven after. Meaning, the Existentialist affirms, is not to be revealed as though it were available in a realm of essences. It must rather be brought into existence; it must be lived. And this living in truth is called emphatically existence. However, the subjective truth is not entirely severed from reference to things subsisting outside man. A negative reference persists. That no truth can be won from inspection of the world—this insight itself is a truth, and the introduction to truth in general. The revelation of meaninglessness is meaningful—and the foundation of all meaning. First we must run against the unyielding wall of an estranged world, then be sent back by rebound, as it were, into our inwardness. The redeeming answer must be discovered in the encounter with Nothingness.

No truth is available for an inspection of the world. The unavailability of objective truth in an estranged world can be expressed by the following disjunction:

I. Objective truth (that is, truth about …), by virtue of its being known, becomes my, the knower’s, truth and thereby ceases to be truth.

II. My truth, by virtue of its being verified as objective truth (that is, truth about …) ceases to be mine.

Putting the matter more briefly: truth cannot be my truth, and my truth cannot be truth. The critical destruction of the idea of objective truth by means of this disjunction is carried out in Existentialist thought with the help of two fundamental concepts: the idea of the concrete individual and the idea of passion (or of man as a passionate being, an animal passionale).

I. No objective truth can be my truth. The correct understanding of this paradox depends on an adequate idea of “mineness.” The Existentialist may also be an idealist, and both Heidegger and Sartre do come rather close to being idealists. But they are not much troubled by the old idealist puzzle, to wit: how my ideas, my thoughts, or my perceptions as being in the mind can refer to existing things outside the mind. This puzzle, according to Existentialist analysis, misses the real problem. It operates with an abstract idea of the individual as mind in the sense of the Cartesian cogito, as the subject of rational awareness. Instead of the abstract self with its “I think,” this concrete self with its “I exist” or “I live” ought to be placed at the beginning of philosophical reflection.

Man is not an absolute consciousness engrafted upon a sentient organism and impeded, to some extent, by this alliance with an unequal partner in its proper functioning. Man is one, living and acting out of a centre of spontaneity within a concrete situation. “What really exists and counts is this particular individual, the real individual which I am, with the incredibly subtle structure of his experience, with all the special features of the concrete adventure which it is incumbent on him, and on him alone, to live out. How should all this be deduced?” (Gabriel Marcel, Homo Viator, pp. 190–91.) This concrete man is aware of this situation, forms ideas in regard to it, relates his appraisal of relevant data to his purposes and acts accordingly. But this awareness does not lift him out of the situation, transporting him, as it were, by a legerdemain from the dust and peril of the arena to a safe and lofty seat in the gallery. There is only an arena and no gallery. Thought, however high it may soar, remains elucidation of the situation which confines the thinking-living being. “Thought is unable to step out of existence” (idem, Etre et avoir, pp. 34–35). The physicist may well frame a theory which reduces time to the fourth dimension of a space-time continuum. Understanding and applying this theory, he must nonetheless relate it to the real world in which instruments are handled and real nails are driven into real boards with real hammers.

All our knowledge remains human, that is, bound up with a concrete situation within which we use things in the train of our vital preoccupations. Knowledge is orientation, by far the subtlest mode of dealing with a situation but still subject to the rules which determine the intercourse between the individual and his natural and human environment. Knowledge may consist in the possession of meaning. But a thing becomes meaningful precisely by taking its place within the vital context whose organizing principle is the “for the sake of …”— the subjective counterpart to the idea of the good (the “master sign” in a world really a world). At this juncture the Existentialist’s affinity to American Pragmatism is evident.

The hammer is not first recognized as a lump of material reality, located somewhere in space, and afterwards interpreted with reference to its purpose. We rather discover the hammer as the “thing with which to hammer.” Our seeing the hammer is an anticipation of our handling it, and hammering with it is, so to speak, an activated acquaintance. What applies to this or any other tool is true of all things composing our world. The surface of the globe is discovered as the ground to stand on or the soil to cultivate, the sea as the boundary of the habitable continent or as the bridge linking one continent with another, the star as an “instrument of time,” a plant as a vegetable or weed. In short, the character of the utensil is spread over the whole expanse of reality, stamping things with the human trade-mark of “utensility” (as Zeug or das Zuhandene,in Heidegger’s untranslatable language). Accordingly, the mere “thingness” of things, their detached objectivity, far from being their natural status within human experience, is a modification of their original “usableness,” a reduction of their functional concreteness to the neutral status of that which is “simply there” (das Vorhandene, in Heidegger)— to the status of res. It was the error of Descartes and his followers to consider the thing qua res the form under which reality normally reveals itself to human inspection (Sein und Zeit, PP. 63–113).

It is this their original “usableness” or serviceableness which, according to Heidegger’s analysis, organizes things into what he calls “world.” Its unity is provided by the unifying human concern under the form of the “for the sake of…” (um willen), and this so organized whole, called “world,” is familiar to us in advance of specific exploration. It is the “horizon” within which all discoveries are made. This so-called world, however, is a totally different thing from the world as universe—from that world which, by the Existentialist’s hypothesis, denies itself to man by its fundamental estrangement. Heidegger’s analyses presuppose the experience of estrangement and the denial of the cosmos. The possibility of “signs” is ruled out tacitly and drastically. What is left as “world” is merely the subjective correlate to the sign-bearing cosmos, an Ersatz world—a world only in the sense in which we speak of the “world of big business,” the “world of the theater,” or the “world of gamblers,” but not world as cosmos. It is a world “projected” by the self onto Nothingness and Nothingness shines through the picture of the world as its ground. Its radical subjectivity is more obvious still in Sartre’s simplified version of Heidegger’s “utensil-world.”

Sarte, making extensive use of Hegel’s dialectical method and even his terminology, distinguishes between the “in itself” (l’en soi) of objective Being and the “for itself” (le pour soi) of the subject. The “for itself” is the hole of nothingness amidst the density of Being. Speaking with greater precision and using, at the same time, the extraordinary language of Existentialism, we should call the subject a “noughting nought” (néant néantisant) which carves its world out of the block of Being by means of negative determinations. This is Fichte in reverse. In Fichte the object is posited as non-ego. In Sartre, the subject is a dynamic non-thing. In the light of these principles we must understand Sartre’s definition of the world as a totality of utensils or rather as “the undifferentiated ground against which there are discovered complexes indicative of ‘utensility’ ” (L’être et le néant, p. 252). “This totality of utensils,” he writes, “is the exact counterpart of my possibilities. And since I am my possibilities, the order of utensils in the world is the image, projected onto the ‘in itself,’ of my possibilities; that is to say, of what I am. But this mundane image I am unable to decipher: I can only adapt myself to it by action” (ibid., p. 251).

While the world is, as it were, sucked into the ego and transfigured into an enlarged self, the world as universe recedes beyond man’s reach. It becomes in Sartre the undifferentiated self-identity of the “in itself” of Being of which nothing can be said except that it is, the ineffable Sein in Heidegger, or the “Encompassing” (das Umgreifende) in Karl Jaspers’ philosophy.

As Heidegger and Sartre are strongly influenced by Hegel, so Jaspers is influenced by Kant. With him the critique of our reasoning faculty plays a decisive role. Like Kant’s “thing in itself,” the Encompassing in Jaspers recedes as human reason advances towards it—by its very nature it is unapproachable and unthinkable. We perceive things, facts, complexes of facts, and in order to see them correctly, we try to see them within the widest relevant context; in other words, within their proper horizon. Then we proceed to take under observation this wider context—only to discover that it in turn is circumscribed by a still wider horizon, and so forth. So the Encompassing is present to the mind only through negation as the ever receding ground, unamenable to objectivity. Any object, however comprehensive, is less than the Encompassing. For the Encompassing articulates itself into three “regions” which it is impossible to enclose within the limits of an object. One of these regions is Being as the totality of being things (the Encompassing as object); the second region is the Being that we are (the Encompassing as subject); the third is Reason which forms a bond between the other two regions (Von der Wahrheit [1947], pp. 47–52).

This sounds very Hegelian, but the underlying view is rather remote from the spirit of Hegel’s dialectic. What we are actually witnessing in Jaspers is the breaking asunder of the world (the world smitten by estrangement) into two components. One may be called the object-element —the Encompassing which withdraws as we try to grasp it. The other component (the subject-element) is a world picture, fully within our reach but actually nothing except our gesture of reaching, devoid of a definable reference to an independent object, an interpretation, in Jaspers’ own words, without any underlying text (ibid., p. 86). A tenuous link is left between the two halves, the unapproachable Being on the one hand and the Being as approach to nothing on the other. The latter, the world picture, is understood as a “perspective” on Being much in the same way in which Kant’s phenomenal thing is supposed to be an appearance of the thing in itself. But the link, in the case of Jaspers, links something with nothing, the world picture (which is always the particular world picture of some particular person) with the negation of all particular world pictures. Thereby the world picture, without losing anything of its definiteness, becomes transparent towards Nothingness. It is no longer a picture of the world but a picture world—and there exists an indefinite number of them.

The attempt to replace the abstract subject of rationalist philosophy with the concrete individual ends in a curious paradox. This concrete individual, rather than living in the world, is his “world.” This his world is like a halo which he radiates, an inseparable expression of his personality. “World” in this subjective sense is neither mean ingless nor meaningful but it has just as much meaning as the individual succeeds in conferring upon it. “The world is human,” Sartre writes (op. cit., p. 270); in fact, so human that it ceases to be the world. It is an archaic world, or a Renaissance world, or an American world, or, in a final advance to undiluted particularity and concreteness, Alexander’s world, my world, someone’s world. In the absence of the world, worlds multiply. Heraclitus remarked scornfully that men behaved as though they lived each in his separate world (Diels, Fragmente der Vorsokratiker [5th ed., 1934], I, 151, fr. 2). And they so live because they must, the Existentialist retorts.

Through becoming my truth, truth ceases to be true. The significance which accrues to the possessive pronoun from the preceding reflections makes this paradox plausible or at least meaningful. For to become mine means for truth as well as for anything else to become absorbed into that unique and unitary whole which is the concrete individual. Normally, truth is truth about something for someone. Now this latter relationship (true for someone) swallows, so to speak, the reference to the object. Of course, some reference to objects will have to persist, lest communication break down completely. So theology will continue to be about God, astronomy about stars, sociology about social life. But this objective reference is given significance only by the dominant relation to the subject for which these objects exist: God will be “God such as I experience him”; the heavens will be the heavens as interpreted by the Greeks or the age of the relativity theory; society will be society as conceived by Jeffersonian Liberalism, and so forth. How then can truth, being mine, still be truth? In order to verify an idea or theorem I must test its adequacy to the object on which it bears. But I, being a concrete individual myself, have no access to the object as such. I have only my view of it. The idea of the concrete individual proves destructive of objective truth.

The concrete individual, far from being a static entity, is life, a process, a continual flux. It is not only temporal in the sense in which the phenomenal world and all its parts are temporal. Its very nature is temporality. The individual exists only in the living present, the concrete moment “now,” and past and future, rather than being external to this present moment, are enclosed within it, the past as time recollected, the future as time anticipated. To live for the individual means to be present and yet to live outside this present moment in his own past and his own future, with things past and with things future. Making the utmost of etymology, Heidegger throws this feature of the self into prominence by writing “ek-sistence” and by calling man an “ec-static” being, and Sartre follows suit. Being a self means to be outside oneself, on the flight from oneself, and the “world” which every individual claims for himself is the encrustation of this centrifugal move; it is human temporality, Time proper, crystallized into that rectilinear sequence of events which characterizes physical time. This, at any rate, is the view presented by Heidegger for whom man is essentially a “centrifugal being”—ein Wesen der Ferne (Vom Wesen des Grundes, p. 40). According to Sartre, the self is flight in a different sense. The Now in which the self has its being, with its headlong rush down the steep decline of receding past, he interprets as the flight of the “for itself” (le pour soi) from the “in itself” (l’en soi) which is brought to an end by death, the final triumph of the “in itself” (op. cit., p. 193).

Truth is functionalized through appropriation by the concrete individual. By the same token it is temporalized. It is made out to be something that happens. But truth cannot be described as happening unless it ceases to be truth about something. The truth that “fastens” must yield to all-powerful process. This unrestricted prevalence of process over static being is the one feature which Heidegger and Sartre share with Whitehead. At their hands even language, the vehicle of truth, must submit to forceful temporalization. Most of their neologisms consist in the transformation of nouns into Zeitwörter (verbs, literally “time-words”). Heidegger, for example, has nichten, welten, anwesen (to nought, to world, to presentify itself), and Sartre follows him with néantiser, possibiliser, présentifier (to nought, to possible, to presentify), and the like.

As truth is made subjective and thereby temporal, philosophy becomes historiography of the human mind. This idea, foreshadowed in Hegel, is given a radical expression by Heidegger: he hopes to uncover with his analyses the hidden Urgeschichte (primal history) of man (Vom Wesen des Grundes, p. 28). The point of view according to which all knowledge must be interpreted in terms of history is historicism, and Existentialism may be called historicism grown desperate. Heidegger’s claim to carry Wilhelm Dilthey’s thought to its logic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgment
• Table of Contents
• Two Encounters
• Introduction
• I. What is Existence?
• II. Nothingness Astir
• III. Estrangement
• IV. Subjective Truth
• V. Gravediggers at Work
• VI. Condemned to be Free
• VII. The Crisis of the Drama
• VIII. Illumination through Anguish
• IX. Beyond Crisis