This contribution to a symposium on existentialism (which also included one from Albert Camus) was the last major essay Fondane wrote.[1] Written in February 1944 during the occupation, at a time when he scarcely left his apartment, had no money, and barely had enough food to live on, this essay reflects his situation. Fondane cites Hegel’s statement that philosophical chattering ceases before the “hussars with sabers drawn,” and he deploys the word “appeasement,” an implicit reference to the Munich agreement. He criticizes Leibniz’s metaphysical concept of “monads”—individual spiritual beings “without windows or doors”—from the point of view of someone who knows what that isolation really means and how unthinkable it is. And at the heart of this essay is a question that could hardly be avoided at the time Fondane wrote it: Why does evil exist?
Fondane wrote this essay under pressure and in haste, knowing that he could be betrayed and arrested at any moment, as he was on March 7, 1944. He never had the chance to review and correct the proofs of his article. Nevertheless, “Existential Monday” provides a remarkable summary of Fondane’s philosophy as a whole. Fondane contrasts the first wave of existential thinkers—Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Shestov, and himself—with the new arrivals on the intellectual scene, Heidegger, Jaspers, Camus, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Against Hegel’s idea that history is the development of reason, in which individuals and nations are sacrificed for the sake of a future utopia, Fondane affirms— at the very moment when the forces of history overcame him—that “History was made for man, and not man for history.”
You are destined for a great Monday! Well spoken! But Sunday will never end.
—FRANZ KAFKA[2]
The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.
—MARK 2:27
•
IN HIS Life of Jesus, written around 1795, the young Hegel, still under the influence of Kant’s short works on religion and the Tractatus theologico-politici,[3] imagines Jesus debating with the “doctors of the law”[4] about the meaning of the Sabbath, which his disciples had recently transgressed. We know that, upon this occasion, Jesus gave voice to the boldest and most revolutionary Judeo-Christian thought: Sabbatum propter hominem factum est et non homo propter Sabbatum. The Law was made for man, not man for the Law.
It is impossible to understand this thought out of context. From beginning to end, it is the driving passion behind both the Old and New Testaments, both of which deal exclusively with the dramatic question of the relationship between God and man: a relationship that is mediated, external, and formal in the Law; and immediate, direct, and intimate in faith. At no time, even at the height of this conflict [between the Law and faith], which reaches great speculative intensity with Saint Paul, Saint Augustine, and Luther, was the sanctity of the Law called into question. Its “detractors” refused to see it as anything more than a parsimonious grace, incomplete, provisional, limited to fallen man alone. But even the harshest face of the Law was always turned toward man: Dii estis et filii excelsi omnes (Psalm 82:6)—you are gods and children of the Most High.[5] Thus, the immediate context from which Jesus’s thought springs gives us to understand, by concrete examples, the spirit in which the Law may be transgressed: The disciples gathered ears of grain on the Sabbath because they were hungry, and Jesus transgressed in order to heal a lame man. The Law is sacred, but it was made for man; it can, consequently, be suspended if the greater interests of man are endangered rather than safeguarded by it. The good of man directs not only the plan of History, but God’s plans as well.
We know that Hegel’s Philosophy of History follows a very different plan, but the young Hegel did not yet dare to admit this. He preferred to have Jesus on his side. Thus, in the conflict between Jesus and the doctors of the law, he pretends to see no more than a difference of opinion between the “statutes of the church” and “the self that reveals itself as the reason whose legislation no longer depends on anything, to which no authority on earth or in heaven could indicate a different standard of judgment . . . a self that by itself is able to discern the deserved reward . . . and is resolved to venerate only the eternal law of morality,” etc. Hegel dared to attribute these words to Jesus himself (“Jesus answered them . . .”), attributing to him also the concluding words: “I submit my teaching to the critique of universal reason, which shall determine whether anyone believes it or not.”[6]
The young Hegel does not seem to want to understand that, in the spirit of the Gospels, the Law—God’s commandment!—is situated well above “morality” and universal reason, and that if one nonetheless wishes to maintain that the Law was conceived to serve mankind and not to subjugate him, then all the more reason that this would be the case with reason, universal or otherwise. But if the young Hegel still regards it as prudent to “interpret” Christian doctrine according to the meaning of his own doctrine, the old Hegel, by contrast, when wrestling with the same theme, understands perfectly well that it is impossible to tear Jesus’s thought from its context without undermining the very foundations that gave birth to it. It is thus with calm audacity that thirty years later he attacks these foundations, that is, the origin of Knowledge as recounted in the book of Genesis, and takes it upon himself to defend not God’s law—too lenient toward man—but the Serpent’s law, which “no authority on earth or in heaven” can bend or move. Hegel says, “Knowledge is the fruit of the tree of Knowledge of good and evil— knowledge, that is, Reason—the general principal of philosophy for all times to come.”[7] This time, at least, he is not interpreting; he has very correctly extracted the fundamental lesson of the Book.[8] We will see later that this connection is not fortuitous: knowledge for Hegel is universal reason, Spirit and History, and his fundamental idea is that History is not made for man, but just the opposite: Man was made for History.[9]
Hegel calls himself and believes himself to be a Christian. Aristotle too called or believed himself to be a Platonist at the very moment when he criticized his Master for “empty rhetoric and poetic metaphors.”[10] But Aristotle was also persuaded—or imagined that he was—that Plato, who claimed that the only truth is that of recollection,[11] could not avoid submitting his judgment to universal reason. The problem of the sources of truth never bothered Aristotle. Or rather, on this question he agreed with Hegel: There is only one source. Jesus and Plato could only, like each and every one of us, draw from universal reason. There is something above God, indeed, above the philosopher. From early on, this conviction was established in men’s minds. Hegel does not shrink from naming the source from which derives the general principle of philosophy for all times to come. And Christian philosophy, one might add, is no different; it makes the same assertion, if less frankly and with less brutality. It too wants to defend its texts solely by establishing their conformity with universal reason. The Platonists of today have, in turn, renounced the empty discourse and metaphors of their master; no one today believes in the famous anamnesis. Man has freely renounced his demands on History, Spirit, and the Law; he no longer thinks that they were created for him. And Hegel is consequently right not to linger further on the meaning of an idea which has lost confidence in its own rights.
Of course, Hegel expected that naïve religious consciousness, which had somehow or other managed to remain outside of the dialectic stream that feeds the mill of History, would protest in the name of some letter that Spirit had long ago surpassed. Such a protest would be indignant, vehement, embryonic, incapable of crossing the threshold of philosophy; or, alternatively, it would struggle awkwardly to attract philosophy’s favors by means of a reconciliation that had served its time. But he was firmly convinced that no one, henceforth, would dare to claim as his own an idea condemned by the Spirit of the Age, one which would risk, at the very least, being labeled as empty rhetoric and poetic metaphor. How surprised he would have been to see, in place of a naïve protest or an ambiguous maneuver, a coherent and courageous discourse which, going over his head, would dare to take issue directly with universal reason! And this not only in the name of Jesus but in the name of the mere finite and miserable existent; not even in the name of Plato but of Job, of Abraham—and of Kierkegaard, the theological candidate who presumed to revive the old, outmoded debate as to whether the healing of the lame man or the hunger of man came before the interests of History and universal reason. And all of this from within philosophy, not from without! By someone who had read Hegel’s Logic, who had attended Schelling’s lectures![12]
Hegel, in his History, had thought of everything except surprises. He had made the mistake of believing that outmoded ideas ceased to haunt the minds of the living. But could he have so gravely misunderstood his age? Was it possible that this age preferred empty rhetoric and poetic metaphor to “universal reason”? He had granted History the absolute privilege of passing the final judgment. “Success” was, for him, the touchstone of truth. He had bet everything on that card, and the slightest success of the adversary would undermine his entire philosophy from top to bottom.
In fact, “success” does not seem to have crowned the efforts of the first generation of existential philosophers. For one thing, it took Kierkegaard a hundred years to gain recognition; Dostoyevsky is still not recognized as a philosopher; Nietzsche is considered a poet, a prophet; and the work of Shestov has never been anything other than a vox clamantis in deserto [voice crying in the wilderness].[13] On the other hand, the twentieth century seems ready to welcome with open arms the new generation of existentialists, which has sprung, for the most part, from the phenomenological school of Husserl[14] and seems due to lend its name to all philosophies to come for the time being. This is a victory over Hegel, or risks passing for one. Must we then admit that the old philosopher from Jena was grossly mistaken and that the speculative consciousness of the twentieth century has become insensitive to the demands of universal reason? This is a serious problem. It would therefore be beneficial to examine it coolly, to consider whether the belated success is real or simply due to a misunderstanding, to some arbitrary extension of the word “existence,” to some barely apparent yet profound deviation from the doctrine that, in the minds of its initiators, hardly seemed destined for such an illustrious fate. In fact, one should ask (before deciding whether this is indeed a victory over Hegel) whether the existential philosophy of our time at least prolongs the guiding thought of its initiators, or whether it has merely retained the name “existential” for a form of thought that—no matter what name one gives it—in essence intends to submit its teachings to universal reason. It matters little whether appearances are against Hegel; it matters more whether they are merely appearances. Does the new philosophy believe that man was made for the Law (regardless of the content of that Law) or, on the contrary, that the Law was made for man (man, and not the “person” or other artificial substitutes)? Has “success” come to those who carry forward the ancient belief proclaimed by Jesus or to those who, with Hegel, proclaim the absolute nothingness of man before something else: History, Law, Reason, Spirit, even God himself?
I do not know whether one will grant me that one can feel uneasy on this score, from an existential standpoint, of course. But if there is uneasiness, it is not unfounded. In fact, minds as acute as those of Berdyaev on the one hand and Bespaloff[15] on the other have noted the following: Berdyaev that, in opposition to Kierkegaardian philosophy, the philosophies of Heidegger and Jaspers,[16] for example, are philosophies of existence, about existence;[17] and Bespaloff that “existential phenomenology, under the auspices of Gabriel Marcel, Heidegger, or Jaspers, has been carrying out an insidious maneuver to regain firm ground; the existent has been eliminated and replaced by Existence.”[18] I do not think that one can dispute the relevance of these remarks. Jaspers’s admissions are sufficient proof. Here is someone who is seriously preoccupied with the “antinomies of Day and Night,” with sin, indeed with the “wrath of God,” someone who dares to call for “a philosophy which elucidates that which is unconditioned, historical, and hence not valid for everyone.”[19] But even when he directly tackles Kierkegaard and Nietzsche and their philosophy (which he is the first to call “a philosophy of the exception”), his immense admiration for these Masters does not prevent him from asking, courageously, what we others, who are not exceptions, can learn from them. His answer is: Nothing; they leave us empty-handed. And “since it (philosophy) seeks to be not a philosophy of the exception but a philosophy of the general . . . it does not consider itself to be true unless it is capable of transferring itself into the reality of the many.” Therefore, “on this philosophical path, we feel that we are once again in search of the peace of Kant, Spinoza, Nicholas of Cusa, and Parmenides, and that we are turning away from the incessant uneasiness of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche”[20]—and also away from the task we had set ourselves: that of shedding light upon that which is unconditioned, historical, and hence not valid for everyone.
This is what explains the inexplicable success of the second generation of existentialists. But how much of what is existential remains in this philosophy other than the term “existence” which, though certainly sharing the same root, is no longer present other than as “the lure needed to arouse the desire to take the bait”?[21] It is possible that I am being unfair. All of history is composed of misunderstandings, coverings-over, palimpsests: Ideas, living words, reveal their viability by the unforeseeable deviations they give rise to. And the words existence and existential, in and of themselves, have a considerable power of resonance. For what does not belong to existence? Berdyaev is doubtless right to tell us that the act of knowing is an existential act,[22] and that almost all philosophies have been existential, for have they not all, in fact, been philosophies about, of, dealing with existence? Sometimes, however, the historian is obliged to scratch the surface of the palimpsest to reveal the original text; he must find the original intention or design beneath the apparatus of conclusions. And anyone who seeks not a form of knowledge (indifferent to whether the truth be this or that) but the Golden Fleece because it is the Golden Fleece, the elixir of life because it is the elixir of life, has that much greater an obligation to do so. A huge gulf then separates philosophies of, about, dealing with existence from philosophies which are about and deal with knowledge, seen specifically from the standpoint of existence as unconditioned, historical, and hence not valid for everyone. It is urgently necessary to clarify this if one seeks to reveal, before it vanishes (if it has not already done so), both the originary and the original meaning of what is truly called existential philosophy and the role it has played or failed to play in the drama of Knowledge. One must decide which way to go: Do we really want to know what Knowledge thinks of the existent, or, for once, what the existent thinks of Knowledge? Is it existence, as always, or Knowledge, at last, that must be rendered problematic?
It would have been a very natural mistake to believe that an existential philosophy must be exclusively concerned with existence, and that the promotion of this word existence to philosophical dignity coincided with the discovery of an object that had remained terra incognita up to that point. But in this error, there is a strong dose of ingratitude and, indeed, of injustice. For if one regards existence as an object of knowledge, then it is clear that philosophy has never neglected it, and Hegel himself never forgot existence, or even the existent (das Seiende). One might even argue, without fear of exaggeration, that he concerned himself with nothing else. He describes it in the very same terms later used by Heidegger: as a wounded being, torn asunder, in need; as a finite being as well, the law of which is finitude. It is not das Seiende that Hegel neglects but rather its rights: “the idealism of philosophy consists in the nonrecognition of the finite as genuine being.”[23] The finite, the dismembered, the wounded exist, no doubt, but they have no say in the matter; if, however, they raise their voices, it will be understood as a sterile lamentation, a sentimental complaint, a mere reflection of needs and appetites. The existent is only of interest at the level of Spirit, which demands precisely the renunciation of every particular point of view for the sake of the concrete generality, such as the State, the People, History—each of which is, in its own way, Spirit incarnate.[24] Hegel writes: “From the pulpit, we often hear of the insecurity, the vanity, the inconstancy of temporal things; but each listener thinks, however moved he may be, that he will hold on to what is his. But should this insecurity appear in reality in the form of hussars with sabers drawn, and should all this cease to be a joke, then the same edified and moved listeners who had predicted all this will come to curse the conquerors. Nevertheless, wars take place when they are necessary; the harvested crops grow anew, and chatter falls silent in the face of the seriousness of history.”[25]
For Hegel, we see, insecurity, vanity, and inconstancy belong only to temporal things; History has no part in them, nor do “peoples,” culture, or philosophy—they float above these churning waters just like Noah’s ark. It falls to the hussars with sabers drawn to teach to the finite existent the seriousness that begins not only where the finite and the perishable cease but where finitude and perishability themselves cease as well. But here too one should not be too hasty to conclude that Hegel is indifferent toward the finite and the finitude of existence. In terms that Heidegger will later take up, he writes: “But if the accidental as such, separated from what surrounds it—if that which is linked to and has actuality only in its connection with something else—conquers its own being and a distinct freedom, that is, the prodigious power of the negative: It is the energy of thought, of the pure Ego. Death—if you want to put a name to this unreality—is the most terrible thing of all, and firmly retaining that which is dead requires the greatest strength. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks back in horror in the face of death and keeps itself pure from destruction, but that which endures death and maintains itself in death itself. Spirit wins its truth only in finding itself in absolute dismemberment. This power does not exist as something Positive that turns away from the Negative—as when we say of something that it was nothing or that it is false and then having discarded it we pass without further ado on to something else. Spirit is this power only when it looks the negative in the face and dwells with it. This dwelling with death is the magic power (Zauberkraft) that transforms nothingness into being.”[26]
Philosophy was therefore never disinterested in existence; it has always given itself the task of transforming this nothingness into being. Philosophy has always taken itself to be the Positive, just as it has always taken the existent for the Negative. If existential philosophy gives itself the same task, in what way does it differ from the philosophy that preceded it? If it still takes the existent for the negative and universal reason for the only positive, what good is an existential philosophy? It seems to me that the second wave of “existential” philosophers has failed to recognize the importance of this problem. No doubt they have replaced the term “negative” with that of “nothingness” and have kept firmly in mind the Kierkegaardian idea that the intuition of this nothingness is given to us by anxiety instead of being, as it is for Hegel, given to us through the argument that that which is not by and through itself its own foundation is the cause of its own destruction. But is this really a revolutionary approach? What good is it to substitute, in effect, an irrational approach for an intellectual intuition or a logical argument, what is the point of positing the “no” before negation, anxiety before logic, since this given, barely questioned, at the end of the day will give us only what would have been much easier to obtain—and at much less cost—by taking the speculative path: namely, that Existence precedes the existent, that existence is not just finite but finitude, that it is the negative destined to be crushed by the Positive for the sake of transformation into an authentic existence—that existence is nothing but Hegel’s Spirit, fallen to the rank of an adjective?
It is true that these themes claim to derive from Kierkegaard and not from Hegel; but it is equally true that Kierkegaard himself draws them from Hegel. However, in changing the terminology, Kierkegaard was not thinking so much of changing equipment as of changing orientation.[27] From the moment he poses the problem, he effects a total reversal of the speculative method: If anxiety really does precede logic, then the existent precedes Existence and the singular precedes the general. Anxiety no doubt reveals nothingness to us, but also the nothingness of this nothingness;[28] to take the existent for the “negative,” and nothingness as the means by which we will be given the positive, is to abandon the barely emergent positivity of the existent. So it is not anxiety that should be questioned; it is anxiety, rather, that questions. If there were any sense in making the existent cease to be an end point in order to become a point of departure, then it is urgent to preserve the existent as the very thing that puts forward the question. It seems to me that here resides the novelty destined to overturn speculative thought from top to bottom; for the existent, in questioning, shakes the foundations of metaphysics and calls knowledge into question. Whereas if it is always Knowledge that is questioning, as Heidegger thinks, then nothing has changed: The existent will have to tailor his answers to the questions posed, and that will be the end of him. In any case, we know that philosophy has always accorded decisive importance to the manner of questioning, rejecting any questions likely to “disturb its peace” (absurdity, infinite regress, “wondering at wonder,” “mistrust of mistrust,” etc.), and that Aristotle’s “One must stop!” assigns it unsurpassable limits.[29]
Thus any philosophy about existence takes itself in advance for the positive that deals with the negative and thereby forbids itself any discovery and any understanding from the point of view of the existent. For it must first ask, as Saint Augustine did concerning God, “Cui est credendum?” [In whom can one believe?] Who is that existent who is summoned to answer? How does he justify the credence in him he solicits? Who can assure us that other existents think likewise? And that his answer will be valid for everyone? Will he admit, since he is not causa sui [self-caused], that he is no more than the negative from which only the positive can extract a being? The paradox of such a philosophy is that by its very method it a priori forever denies itself the discovery—I won’t say of Existence, but most certainly of the existent; it will never be able to become existential. For it is up to the existent alone to make known his point of view; it is up to him to decide what is negative and what is positive; and what he discovers at the end of his questioning is that very thing which resists him, which stands in his way, namely: the idealism of philosophy, which consists in the nonrecognition of the existent as genuine being.[30] It is thanks to this resistance that all at once the very essence of universal reason reveals itself to the existent as the object of a critique that will have to verify reason’s rights, powers, and limits; only the existent’s passionate questioning of knowledge is capable of establishing a genuine critique of pure reason. If, instead of letting the existent question knowledge, it was the existent who was being questioned, then it would be pointless to appeal to anxiety; dwelling in nothingness then becomes a trap for us, that Zauberkraft, that magic power which transforms the existent into existence, into being, into a concept[31]—before the existent could even open his mouth. And Heideggerian existence will be determined, at the end of the day, by Spirit and by Culture;[32] it will culminate in Monumental, Archaeological, and Critical History;[33] poetry itself will become the megaphone of language, of dialogue, and finally of “the people.”[34]
It is thus extremely ambiguous to praise Kierkegaard, as Heidegger does, as being the one who has gone furthest in the analysis of the phenomenon of anxiety as a revelation of nothingness if this anxiety cannot bring us any other revelation than that which cognitive intuition is capable of making known to us, namely that (as Sartre will say) “Man is a useless passion” and that the “for-itself is effectively the perpetual project of founding itself and the perpetual failure of this project.”[35] For the audacity of the Kierkegaardian analysis consists in arriving at completely different conclusions: Anxiety (and this is why we resort to an irrational given) reveals to us the nothingness that universal reason conceals from us and has every interest in concealing from us; but this nothingness is not a nothingness of the existent but a nothingness within the existent. It is the fracture within the existent: sin, the “fainting fit of freedom”; it is that which takes on the appearances of universal reason by making nothingness into the general principle of philosophy for all time in order to prevent us from ever tearing ourselves away from it; it is History, Fate, everything that works to persuade man that he is “a useless passion.”[36] And Kierkegaard makes his own this thought of Hamann’s: “Diese Angst in der Welt ist aber der einzige Beweis unserer Heterogenität. Denn fehlte uns nichts, so würden wir es nicht besser machen als die Heiden und Tranzendental-philosophen, die von Gott nichts wissen und in die liebe Natur sich wie Narren vergaffen. Kein Heimweh würde uns anwandeln. Diese impertinente Unruhe, diese heilige Hypochondrie.” [“This anxiety in the world is however the only proof of our heterogeneity. For if we lacked nothing, we would do no better than the heathen and the transcendental philosophers, who know nothing of God and lose themselves in foolishly ogling beloved nature. No homesickness would assail us. This impertinent uneasiness, this holy hypochondria.”][37] Nearly twenty centuries distant, this thought echoes the Christian folly of Tertullian:[38] “I am blessedly impudent and happily demented.”[39]
I am not unaware of the sometimes rather fine nuances that distinguish from one another the various philosophies I am discussing; and I am in no way unaware of their merit and originality. I also think I detect in them, beyond the vague “something” that links them to genuine existential philosophy, a deliberate tendency to renew the question of the existent. But my task is to distinguish broadly among the trends and tendencies, among the multiple stands taken. I cannot concern myself with the value of these philosophies but only with their existential attitude. I am forced to denounce the degraded scholars who are apt to make us believe in the continuity of the existential problem; to denounce a label that conceals from us— and from them—the separation into distinct parts of this supposed continuity. I recognize that the motifs, the themes are still existential; but they are integrated into a completely different structure that renders them null and void. Why then draw back in the face of the “return to Hegel”? That would be clearer, more convenient. I know my solution is awkward; for in being taken through existential philosophy, Hegelian thought itself has been driven off track; it emits a desperate sound that we didn’t expect from it; it has lost its confidence. Thus, one of the most remarkable of our young thinkers [Jean Paul Sartre] reduces the entire “being” of the existent to a sort of lack; he makes this lack not only the exclusive basis of Nothingness but that which generates its own nothingness. He alone brings to light the thought or the value of Nothingness “nihilating” itself ex suae naturae legibus [under the law of its own nature], without in any way relying on some other hidden or noumenal reality. Culture, Spirit, and History, which in Heidegger’s thought still retain a bit of phosphorescence, are henceforth nothing more than useless passions. Only Nothingness exists; it is index sui et falsi,[40] which is why Sartre is much more justified than Heidegger in turning the Kierkegaardian question “Why is there nothing?” into a “Why, in sum, is there being?”[41] Entweder-Oder![42] There is no intermediary position between Hegel and Kierkegaard.
Should we attribute this trickling out of the existential stream into the sand to some sort of resistance, or should we simply attribute it to a lack of clarity on the part of the existential teachers? No doubt they were not very clear; they also often equivocated when confronted with the demands of “universal reason”; whoever posits Nothingness as original sin cannot claim to escape it. But even so, they said what they had to say. Yet their followers have taken advantage of this involuntary obscurity; they have let themselves be seduced by the discovery of Nothingness; but they themselves are defenseless when faced with the irresistible attraction of “universal reason.”
Another young French writer [Albert Camus], drawing on Kierkegaard and Shestov, and whose first book [The Stranger] has aroused great interest,[43] arrives at a conception of the “absurdity” of existence that could perhaps be summarized in this way: “existence is a useless passion.” He titles his book The Myth of Sisyphus (an existential title),[44] but he reproaches his teachers for having in effect betrayed their philosophy by fleeing from the absurd they had just revealed to us. Did they flee the absurd for an intelligible something-or-other? There is no other conceivable flight, for from the absurd to the absurd, there is no gap! However, it is not at all like that. For Camus reproaches their flight for defaulting on some sort of “trustworthiness”: intellectual honesty,[45] “metaphysical honor”—reestablishing at a stroke, in the face of Nothingness, Spirit’s being-identical. But if there is Spirit, if only in the form of “intellectual conscience,” then there is no absurdity in the world, and Sisyphus’s fate is perfectly intelligible. No philosophy that I know of has taken the trouble to challenge the apparent absurdity of history and the [supposed] nothingness of the existent; but if seriousness exists[46]—as reason, spirit, or metaphysical honor—then the claims, demands, and complaints of the individual are nothing but “chatter,” which must keep silent in the face of seriousness. It is impossible to posit the Absurd with universal reason’s assent; one must do without this assent, one must demolish “seriousness”; and that is why, for Shestov as for Kierkegaard, the Absurd is not beneath but is rather beyond Reason. It is not the absurd they are fleeing, but it would be just as incorrect to claim they are fleeing reason or “seriousness,” for they struggle against them,[47] and they appeal to someone who transcends the serious. Certainly one can, like everyone else, refuse to follow Kierkegaard and Shestov along this path, but in that case, one cannot not follow Hegel. But then how can one keep “the Absurd” in one’s company? Thus, it is not without humor that Camus appeals to “metaphysical honor”; it is not without humor that he invites us to not take Sisyphus’s fate as tragic, and to draw from his experience the clear and intelligible lesson Camus writes in the last line of his work: “We must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
But that is the whole problem![48] And it is from this very problem that existential thought is born. That Sisyphus imagine himself happy is all that Platonic, Stoic, or Hegelian thought could ask for; that he consent to “imagine himself” happy is all that noûs,[49] Spirit, or universal reason—or whatever—asks of him. Sisyphus thereby proves that he is not a misologue,[50] a denigrator of reason. He renounces the absurd. But after all that, what happens to the myth of Sisyphus? It is Sisyphus who has become a myth! He has vanished: to the benefit of universal reason. For what reason fears is precisely a Sisyphus who would refuse to imagine himself happy, who would despair of “seriousness,” who would appeal to the Absurd—quite rightly! Every form of acceptance, every form of fidelity or resignation either drives the absurd out of reality or impregnates the absurd with intelligibility. It is true Camus does not go that far; we will clearly see, a little later, that neither does Hegel; it is not Sisyphus whom they ask to imagine himself happy, it is we who are to imagine him so. That is much easier! And that preserves for us the possibility of a philosophy which goes “in search of peace” in turning away from what Jaspers calls the “incessant uneasiness” of Sisyphuses— whether they be named Kierkegaard or Nietzsche. Camus finishes his book with a masterstroke, but it meant neglecting to take into account the point of view of Sisyphus himself.
But we already know that we others have nothing to learn from Sisyphus: He leaves us empty-handed. We are left seeking a knowledge: “It is only because Nothingness is revealed to us in the basis of human reality that the complete strangeness of the existent can assail us,” says Heidegger. He adds: “It is only on the condition that its strangeness oppresses us that the existent awakens and arouses wonder. It is only because of wonder—that is, the manifestation of Nothingness—that the ‘Why?’ arises.”[51] And with the “why,” of course, comes transcendence, metaphysics. But what transcendence? What metaphysics? To which Sisyphus is one giving an answer? Notice this discursive shift. A strangeness oppresses us; and among the possible reactions of the existent to this “oppression,” the philosopher can only make out “wonder.” It is certain that wonder alone of all our intellectual acts is capable of opening up to us the path of speculative philosophy such as it has been understood up until now. But then what! Wonder is no longer a question, it is the answer itself; it accepts the event, resigns itself to it, takes it as necessary; after that, it matters little what one answers to its “why.” However, if there is a feeling of oppression, the tendency of the existent to want to bring to an end this intolerable presence (or absence) is more spontaneous than wonder; the more natural tendency of the mind is to seek a tool or a support, a means of fighting against the scourge. More immediate than wonder would be the search for a way out, the discovery of our impotence, and also the relation of our impotence to something which can. There will be time enough to wonder “why” after—when the danger has passed, when the oppression has been removed. The after is the privileged moment of speculative philosophy; it will think what has gone by, the “all done,” where nothing is unpredictable any longer because even the contingent futures have ceased to be futures; speculative philosophy moves backward, extracting the laws of what has been in order to draw up the ne varietur [not to be altered][52] charter. But existential philosophy is concerned with the thought of the existent during, involved in a Real as yet without form or structure; it is itself involved in this “during,” interested in its solutions. Whether it concerns fear, which has a definite object (the hussars with sabers drawn), or anxiety, which does not (. . . the Nothing!), existential philosophy struggles to find a way out; it does not have time for wonder. We can certainly imagine it happy! But in doing so, we cancel its problems. When Heidegger tells us “the question about Nothingness places us ourselves in question, we who are questioning,”[53] it is easy to fall into the trap, to not notice that this concerns the “us ourselves” who question and not the “us ourselves” who are oppressed! However, the answer we could get to this question interests only the “I think that I think” within us, and not the “I think that I am.” Kierkegaard writes: “The confusion thus results simply from the fact that one lives in a different category than that in which one places oneself when writing. Wretchedness of the writing profession!”[54] And the poverty of philosophizing![55]
To live in one category and to think in another: this is the critique aimed at speculative philosophy by which one recognizes the distinctive mark of authentic existential thought! We are far from Hegel, far from philosophia perennis [perennial philosophy]! But philosophia perennis in turn formulates some serious objections when it encounters existential thought, all the more serious in that they rely upon and are reinforced by commonsense experience. One need not be a “scholar” to know that our desires have no purchase on reality or that, at the very least, they quickly run up against their limit there! And that if, on the one hand, we are powerless to arrange things according to our wishes, on the other hand, we are masters in renouncing them and in governing our desires! We have all come up against some impossibility, and with the thoughtlessness of common sense, we have immediately decided that whatever appeared impossible to us was so in fact; from there to the distrust of the intellectual faculties which have the testimony of the senses against them is but a step, which has been taken. Obviously, there remained a resource: De omnia dubitandum [Doubt everything]![56] To doubt that our ordinary experience gives us access to the structure of things runs up against first principles! But these structures and principles are under philosophy’s protection. And in that case, wouldn’t it be better to keep silent? For discourse can only be fought by means of discourse, and that is a vicious circle.
Serious objections! I would in no way consider disputing their force! Not to diminish, neglect, or underestimate the self-evident truths of reason is the basic rule of all existential philosophy. Existential philosophy is even a bit too inclined to overestimate them, to take them as indisputable. For it is self-evident that they are disputable! In the first place, it is disputable that first philosophy[57] has the right to rely on the verification by experience, and on the enormous prestige of this experience over our naïve beliefs, when at the very moment it establishes metaphysical principles, and in order to give them a foundation, it has cleverly discredited this experience and denounced it as an “illusion of the senses.”[58] It is also disputable to rely on the prestige of principles that have been developed outside of and even against all experience in order to save the testimony of the senses! No doubt Knowledge in that way, and only in that way, obtains the right—for its truth—to be restrictive; but the procedure is not very scrupulous. However, existential philosophy (thanks to the revelations of anxiety) is led to see in this attitude something other than a stratagem of war. In this paradoxical collusion between the science of first principles and the experience of common sense, it believes it discerns a maneuver which goes beyond this simple confidence trick of homo philosophus [philosophical man], and which perhaps stems from some mysterious force—precisely that of Nothingness—a force which, according to Heidegger and Hegel, founds metaphysics. Nothingness, that is, the magical Power which “nihilates” the existent, transforms the contingent into the necessary, leaving us only the right to serve it—or remain silent. We are trapped within discourse; there is no way out. . . .
However, one cannot remain there, live there! With respect to the Unknown, Kierkegaard says, “To allege that it is the Unknown because of our inability to know it, and that even if we could know it, then it would be Unknown because of our inability to express it, this is what does not satisfy passion, even though it is not wrong to see in the Unknown its limit; but a limit is precisely passion’s torture and its spur.”[59] Is that an argument? In the eyes of discursive thought: certainly not. That the limit is a “torture” is a meaningless proposition. “Philosophy is the dry nurse of life, it watches over our steps . . . but it cannot nourish us,” Kierkegaard also says.[60] “Empty words and poetic metaphors,” one might reply; it is not philosophy’s job to nurse us! But philosophy would be hard-pressed to tell us whose role it is to nurse us. Could one get out of this impasse by arguing for an individual duration that is not valid for everyone, for a truth that rejects discourse and disarms it? Bergson tried this;[61] for him, too, the “limit” was a torture and a spur, but he wanted to make his thesis “valid for everyone,” and it collapsed. I fear that the same misfortune will befall Hartmann’s thesis of the “knowledge of the unknowable,”[62] and also Lupasco’s beautiful thesis, which demonstrates that the unknown is known: precisely as the unknown.[63] Once again, all that is left to existential philosophy is to cry out: “But once all is completely lost, once you have been refused that which was dearest to you, when no doubt any longer subsists to hold the soul in suspense and it wants to sink into death or weary indifference ‘because there is nothing more for it to do’—is there really nothing left?”[64] A cry, one will say; a moving cry, to be sure; but it is not a cry that will cause something to be where there is no longer anything. Obviously one should keep silent, were it not that keeping silent is still a way of speaking; one should accept the limit, were the limit not both a torture and a spur for passion. Of course, one should resort to wonder; but it is obvious that so long as the strangeness of the existent oppresses us, it is impossible to resort to wonder and to the “why.” Then you are left with the religious and with faith, the philosopher will say; and did you not speak of a “faith” that struggles like a madwoman for the possible[65] and of a God “for whom everything is possible”?[66] But faith is a matter for theology, and theology too is a science. Gilson,[67] who has given himself the task of reminding us of this fact, in his recent course dealing with “Theology and the history of spirituality,” will tell us—bolstered by the authority and wisdom of Tradition—that although everything is really possible for God’s will, not everything is fitting according to his wisdom. And, consequently, there is really nothing to be done when there is nothing to be done.
What will then become of the voice of the existent who cries out that it is impossible for him to live if his questions are not taken seriously—this immense cry of human misery and suffering throughout the ages, this lengthy waste of hope and of despair for which we search in vain for the faintest echo throughout the entire history of philosophy? There is no need to dramatize this theme; it is dramatic enough in itself. “Maledicta dies in qua natus sum” [Cursed be the day when I was born] cries the prophet (Jeremiah 20:14), and a poet—Shakespeare—answers him: “Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (Macbeth, 5.5). Here are some people who were not able to imagine themselves happy! One will say that such people are rare; that most of us are able to do so; almost all of us. . . . However, some are not able to. Must we then suppose that they belong to another metaphysical race? Is it necessary to banish them from the society of thinking people? To use against them the proverb Aristotle uses so often: “Poets always lie”?[68] But we feel that this would be unfair to both the prophet and the poet. We are bothered by their presence, perplexed by their question—and by “we,” I obviously mean the philosopher. But there is always a way of getting out of a difficulty; we will therefore imagine that the poet and the prophet are reasonable beings who will not remain unmoved by our arguments. And we will present them with these arguments—from Leibniz, for example: that particular evil occurs only in order to further the greater good of the whole; that God is unable to alter the order and economy of the universe, the product of his supreme wisdom, just to satisfy a particular good which would be detrimental to the general good; etc.[69] And if Leibniz does not satisfy or appease them, if they continue to demand that the Law be made for man and not man for the Law—well then! We will ask them to weigh Hegel’s profound meditation on tragedy: “The ultimate element (of tragedy) is not only unhappiness and suffering but the satisfaction of Spirit. The necessity of what befalls individuals can only then appear as absolute rationality and the soul is morally calmed. The soul is overwhelmed by the hero’s fate, but appeased in fact.[70] Only by means of this interpretation is ancient tragedy intelligible.”[71]
Here at last is philosophy coming to grips with human suffering, trying to maneuver this heavy mass, to address the questions it asks. Obviously, “cursing” the evil done by the hussars with sabers drawn would serve no purpose; that would be “chatter.” To sympathize with the fate of tragic heroes—or to become indignant with their torturers—would be worse. But to admit to being overwhelmed by the heroes’ fate and nevertheless to turn one’s back on them; to proclaim that their unhappiness is “absolute rationality” and to draw from this some “satisfaction of spirit”—what name would suit such an attitude? Is that not adding unhappiness to unhappiness, suffering to suffering, not to mention that one has betrayed truth and slapped it in the face? But what can the philosopher do? Often one feels that he enters the debate very much against his wishes; “and if all the pain in the world,” writes Lavelle, “left us no alternative save choosing between revolt and resignation, that would be to despair of the value of the world; but this pain can have meaning only if it nourishes the very ardor of our spiritual life.”[72] We see that for Lavelle, “the ardor of our spiritual life” is a noble last resort; how could one live if the pain of the world was for nothing? Perhaps he would go so far as to attribute absolute irrationality to unhappiness if only this irrationality could help the tragic hero! But that is not the case for Hegel; even if the pain of the world could be resolved by some means—should this means not be intelligible: a deus ex machina, indeed a deus pure and simple—he would not want it! A God (I mean a real one!) is the contrary of absolute rationality; he is far from being an appeaser; he gives no satisfaction to Spirit! We have seen that for Jaspers philosophy was “the search for peace”; for Hegel it is the search for satisfaction, for appeasement. And after that, Hegel’s translators write that “religiosity. . . is precisely the impatience, the greedy haste of the slave . . . as soon as he wants something, he wants everything, right away. . . .”[73]
I cannot develop here the significance of the link Hegel establishes between our need for the intelligible and our thirst for peace, for satisfaction, for calm. Even a superficial analysis should show that it is not only unhappiness and suffering that appear unintelligible to the philosopher but also “experience,” which Kant found more “irritating” than “appeasing” (Die Vernunft . . . wird durch [die Erfahrung] mehr gereizt als befriedigt),[74] “nature” (which Hegel reproached for being unable to attain the concept), and who knows what else? Science, too, seeks nothing but peace. Suppose, for example, that physics discovers, both in radiation and in matter, a continuous element associated with a discontinuous element. Is that not a beautiful discovery? Yes, but not appeasing! We lack a synthesis in order to “determine the link between wave and particle.” As long as such a link is lacking, we will be “overwhelmed” by this discovery but not “morally calmed.” Langevin explains: “The search for a determinism is to such an extent the essential motive of every effort of scientific construction that we must ask ourselves, when nature leaves a question without an answer, whether it would not be fitting to consider that the question is badly formulated, and to abandon the representation that gave rise to it.”[75] Thus, each time nature refuses to bend to the demands of our universal reason, it will be treated as empty discourse and poetic metaphor; we will remind it that poets are liars; we will consider our question to be badly formulated or that our question has not been answered. “Nature” had better consent to give us the link we wish for. The ultimate element of science is not only to reveal to us what is but to provide us with satisfaction of the mind. Only by means of this interpretation does science remain intelligible.[76]
In a novella by Turgenev,[77] at the very moment when his heroine, Marie Ilinicha, drops to the floor, the doctor of the district, terrified, cries out, “A doctor! Quick, a doctor!” The philosopher too is so little prepared to deal with the problems of the existent that more than once, he should cry out, “Quick, a philosopher! A real one!” But if a village doctor could really believe that another doctor, greater than he—a doctor from the county town, for example— would be able to do more than he, Hegel knows very well that there is nothing to be done against the seriousness of History; every cry for help is consequently mere “chatter.” Besides, the one needing to be cured is not the sick person, no more than it is a matter of curing “nature” of its discontinuous element; it is the philosopher, the scholar who must be helped to turn away from the incessant uneasiness of the exceptions. The sick person cries out for “The possible!”[78] but is drowned out by the voice of the philosopher, who cries out for “The intelligible!” It is true that there is not enough “possible” for the former, but there is equally not enough “intelligible” for the latter. Being continuously escapes his grasp; the slightest “unhappiness,” the slightest “discontinuity,” and Spirit, which wants to be subject only to itself (Aristotle’s autarkeotatos),[79] feels out of its depth: A God for whom “everything is possible” is the end of philosophy such as it has come down to us from the Greeks. It is absolutely imperative to prevent the tragic hero from turning away from the philosopher and toward someone who can, or at the very least who could. One must prevent him from discovering, besides the knowledge that satisfies the mind, the knowledge that causes it to despair. What would happen if he realized that knowledge possesses no quality capable of deciding what is possible and what is impossible since, moreover, it has never asked being for the “true” but only for the “good,” perfection, the satisfaction of the mind? I refer the reader to Shestov’s book, Le Pouvoir des clefs,[80] and particularly to the study “What is truth?,” where this great existential thinker shows us the philosopher, from antiquity down to the present, deliberately substituting the concepts of the good, of perfection, for the disturbing concept of being, replacing ontology with ethics—“intelligere [to understand] in no way means ‘understand,’ but to develop within oneself an attitude toward the universe that will allow one to acquire acquiescentia animi [peace of soul] or that summum bonum [supreme good] which was the goal and aspiration of all philosophers.”[81]
In other words, existential philosophy does not amount to an abandonment of knowledge or a sacrifizio del intelleto [sacrifice of the intellect] but is rather the search at long last for a genuine knowledge which will not turn its back on anything that is, whether it is a matter of “unhappiness” or of the “discontinuous.” And when “science” offers it a universe governed solely by necessity, or what amounts to the same thing, by the eternal and uncreated truths that would have been introduced, as Leibniz says, into God’s understanding without the consent of his will, I cannot see why existential thought—it too!—should not have the right to think that “nature” has here left a question unanswered, that nature has answered badly, or rather that we have questioned badly, and to ask itself whether it would not be fitting to abandon the questions that gave rise to this representation. There is little danger this method would be any more anthropomorphic than a research method that asks of truth only “appeasements” and that it fit the idea of perfection man creates for himself. If knowing falls under the intellect, what would “knowing that one does not know” fall under? The mystic’s “non-knowledge” is not ignorance but a mode of knowledge; even “becoming stupid” is an operation carried out by intelligence! Whatever one does, one cannot think outside of philosophy; keeping silent, turning one’s back on it, sidestepping it: this is still philosophizing. But one can reject this or that definition of philosophy. One can refuse to want to be a professional philosopher. One can refuse to submit to this or that technique, rule, or servitude that subjects it—for example, the principle of noncontradiction insofar as it is compulsory—always, everywhere, no matter when; even the best things have limits. In short, any thought that concerns itself with the possible and the impossible, with the origins and ends of things, with their reality or unreality, with the good or evil they have in store for us: any such thought is a philosophical thought, whatever position or side it takes. An idea that has weighed too long on our tradition wanted the philosopher to be recognizable solely by the fact that he is constrained by something, beginning with phenomena. But, says Nietzsche, “the true philosophers’ mission is to command and to impose the law. They say, ‘Thus it must be!’”[82] And for the philosopher who commands, truth little resembles Hegelian “nature”: the one cannot but the other, perhaps, refuses to rise to the level of the concept.
It is also possible that philosophy does not have to know a truth which is once and for all but can know a truth capable of changing, of being made and unmade, of becoming bored, perhaps; it is also possible that we have some effective influence on its procedures; that loving, crying, praying, indeed revolting or resigning oneself are acts that shape it to some extent. It is thus possible that philosophy’s overzealousness to obey and obey always has caused it to neglect to ask itself whether truth was not what philosophy had made of it, whether the constraining truth was something other than the fruit of our thirst for servitude—in short, whether there was not the possibility not of a morality but of a truth of masters.[83] If I had to give in my own words an encapsulation of Shestov’s thought on this subject, I think that I could allow myself to give it this daring formulation: “It is not man who was made for truth but truth which was made for man.” The old existential philosophy—of the Prophets, of Jesus, of Saint Paul, of Luther—here attains its maximum of speculative daring. However, it stems entirely from these two primary propositions that have lasted for two thousand years: “For God, everything is possible!” and dii estis et filii excelsi omnes—you are gods and children of the Most-High.
But are we really gods? Is it still necessary to appeal to the authority of the old Book? Certainly not, although Kierkegaard appeals to it more than once and almost always incorrectly; in order to support, for example, Socratic thought and the ethics of “Thou Shalt,” which could very well do without such support. But each time Kierkegaard’s thought breaks free of the Socratic grip (which rules over his “Christian,” edifying discourses, among others), it is the philosophy of the Book on which he relies, and not the authority of the Book. Its historicity, its source—genuine or supposed—matter little; only its thought counts. One can say of Kierkegaard, as one can say of Shestov, that in the Book they found their philosophy ready-made in advance, as it were; it responded to their question. Whereas even if it had been proclaimed by God (and was it not proclaimed by the God of Delphi [Apollo]?), the philosophy of Socrates, of Athens, would have left their question without an answer, would have abandoned the defenseless existent to History’s hussars with sabers drawn. Alone among books, the Book cracks under the pressure of an infinite possibility, open to Man, of an Absurd ready at every instant to break with “seriousness,” of a Power in which we are invited to participate; it alone reveals to us the meaning, the extent, and the solution of the mystery that makes the existent an alienated individual irresistibly pushed into succumbing to magic—the source of which is Nothingness, the motor of which is sin, and the vehicle of which is autonomous Knowledge. There is no doubt that faith in the historical revelations of a living God informs the Book; but its philosophy, its metaphysics can be considered in themselves and form part of a History of Philosophy, without thereby carrying with them the obligation to believe. For example, we know that Christian thought knew perfectly well how to disconnect philosophy and the authority of revelation; it followed the latter without following the former, and it then had to attach itself to Greek thought, which by contrast lacked the authority of revelation. The case of Shestov and Kierkegaard is completely different: If God had been presented in the Bhagavad Gita as one who disposes not of authority but of Power, it is more than probable that they would have given their belief to Brahmanic philosophy.
Enigmatic philosophy! Without terminology, method, or technique! Which offers us no rules for judging what is true; in which the “self” is not revealed as a Reason and whose legislation no longer depends on anything; which risks passing for empty discourse and poetic metaphor, and is even proud of the fact. Yet as soon as there is an existential thought in the world, even if only in germinal form, and even if it believes itself to be secular, it cannot but circle like a moth around this philosophy—of freedom, of the possible, of the absurd. Whether it likes it or not, existential philosophy is the daughter (or kin) of prophetic thought—that existential thought of Kafka at the end of The Trial, where his hero is handed over to the executioners (the hussars with sabers drawn) for a crime of which he is unaware and which they are concealing from him (the “Seriousness” of History): “Was there still any recourse? Were there objections that had not yet been raised? Certainly there were. Logic may well be unshakable. It cannot resist a man who wants to live.”[84] This universe of Kafkaesque thought, irresistibly oppressed by a magic—which forbids freedom without preventing escape, which blocks our passage through doors that yet remain open, which does not allow us to receive messages that nonetheless have been sent, which holds us enclosed in prisons without bars, which diverts us from drinking from a spring that nevertheless runs within reach of our mouth—does not belong to Athens.
Whether it likes it or not, this existential thought of Nietzsche’s (because it is existential) does not belong to Athens any more than does Kafka’s but is a daughter of the thought of Genesis: “Did not one finally have to sacrifice everything that consoles, sanctifies, and heals, all hope, all faith in a hidden harmony? Did one not have to sacrifice God himself, and through cruelty toward ourselves, worship stone, stupidity, heaviness, nothingness? To sacrifice God to nothingness—this paradoxical mystery of the final cruelty has been reserved for our generation; we all have an inkling of it already.”[85]
It is into a world without God, a world where we have killed God and where, as Nietzsche remarks, we have not even noticed,[86] that existential philosophy is born. The philosophy of Kierkegaard and of Shestov, which culminates in the murdered God, can lead one to believe (at least in the case of a thinker who is in a hurry—and who isn’t?) that this is merely a return to the lost faith out of weariness, the need for security and rest, and not (which is what it really means) out of a horror of rest, security, and certainty. One could believe that they are weary souls—and not dangerous souls (which is what they are) who want to shatter all tranquillity in order to restore, with the question, the possibility of the answer. One would be inclined to believe this is a religious crisis and not a philosophical crisis. But the problem is the same for those who seem to have found it as for those who, for their part, seem not to have found it. Both have but one concern: not to let their question evaporate—into “poetry.”
The task I have set myself here is simply to distinguish between what is and what is not existential philosophy. But this problem is itself linked to an infinite number of problems and objections I cannot hope to address or to resolve in these pages. Yet if one were to allow me nonetheless to indicate the specific signs by which one can recognize this philosophy, I would say that they are perceivable through the reaction produced when faced with a metaphysical proposition such as that of Leibniz, for example, who when he has to define the monad, states that it is closed and that it can have neither doors nor windows through which “sensible species” could penetrate.[87] Does this affirmation appease you? Does it calm you morally? Does it give your mind satisfaction? In that case, you are certainly a philosopher, but you are not, or are no longer, or not yet, an existent—in the existential sense of this term. You are no more an existent if it is enough for you to dream of those forbidden doors and windows; Kierkegaard writes in his Journal: “My history with her must not evaporate into poetry,”[88] by which he means: into Hegelian philosophy. (He did not always follow his own advice, and it is his evaporated thought that has caused some of the principal misunderstandings of existential philosophy.)
If, however, a limit is a “torture and a spur” for you, if you are one of those who has cried out—not all the time but even just once— that logic cannot resist a man who wants to live, if you are suffocating in a world that has neither doors nor windows and think it is metaphysics’ job to conjure them up, only then will your passion be existential. Obviously this passion does not rise to the level of the concept; but isn’t it rather bold, at the very least, to claim that it does not do so because of its impotence? That is a value judgment, but what place do values have in ontological judgment? Whatever may be the origins of the structure of the monad, there is also, in its intimate core, a secret will to break these structures, a will Leibniz did not think he had to take into account; and the act which resists has no less ontological force than that which represses. For each new will to repression, there will be that which again wants to break through this repression, and the repression of repression, and so on ad infinitum, eternally affecting the metaphysics of closure with a metaphysics of rupture, of freedom, of the absolute ready to spring into action at the slightest slackening, the slightest inattention. There will always be diese impertinente Unruhe, diese heilige Hypochondrie [this impertinent disquiet, this holy hypochondria]!
Could it be that impertinent disquiet and holy hypochondria are not “states of mind”—like peace, mental satisfaction, and the intelligible—but an instrument of research, the prolegomena of a method? Could the role of the philosopher be to maintain unrest in the existent? But is that not granting too much to a philosophy which has nothing to teach us, which is not a knowledge, which leaves us empty-handed? What does this philosophy, of which History could retain nothing but its failure, have to do with us, we others who are not exceptions! That is well reasoned! And irrefutable. But is it so difficult to get across the idea that existential philosophy does not begin before but only starting from the moment when all teaching ends, when Knowledge no longer answers our questions, when the hussars with sabers drawn have triumphed irrevocably? It is clear that as long as teaching is teaching us something, as long as Knowledge is answering our questions, and as long as it still remains within our power to engage the hussars; it is clear that as long as we are still in the kingdom of measurable things, of sicknesses that have known remedies, wars that one can still win; it is clear that as long as nothing essential has yet been lost forever—then we are within the domain of the possible, the absolute fief of positive philosophy. In that kingdom, the exception has not yet been born; an immense but fragile kingdom, at the mercy of the slightest disaster. Let the disaster happen! Will it still remain positive philosophy’s prerogative to measure reality’s extent by its own powers alone? And to declare unsurpassable the frontiers that it cannot cross? It is from this point onward—but only from here—that the philosophy which is unconditioned, historical, and not valid for everyone begins. This philosophy, by the very fact of its existence, inaugurates the critique of the theory of knowledge as formulated by positive philosophy, and assigns it its limits. Is it asking a lot of the philosopher to recognize (it is not necessary that he approve) the existence, at the heart of philosophy, of these problems, and the advent at philosophy’s borders, where a no-man’s-land[89] begins, of a new type of philosopher, differently equipped from a “technical” point of view since he is destined for another type of exploration? Is it a lot to ask of the philosopher at the moment when he runs up against the unintelligible or “unhappiness” not to turn his back on them, not to call them “chatter,” and especially not to “interpret” the problems he encounters with the sole end of obtaining as quickly as possible the “mental satisfaction” that nearly got away from him? Is the search of several millennia for this “satisfaction” not yet sufficient proof of the incurable suffering that the philosopher drags along with him and that he dares not contemplate? Yet it is at these exceptional moments, which do not always depend on us, that it perhaps does depend on us to open our eyes and to strain the whole of our will so that our monad is not closed and finite but open and infinite. It is only in these exceptional moments, which do not always depend on us, that it depends on us to face up to the magic Power that obliges us to dwell in Nothingness—this Nothingness that, contrary to the evidence of our inner experience (Sentimus, experimus [feeling, experiencing]), persists in demonstrating that there are neither doors nor windows in our little monad. It is then that the existent knows that his freedom is refusal—the refusal of everything that tends to enclose him forever in his own immanence and offers him only false exits, false transcendences—of the self over the self, of his knowledge over his existence, of universal reason over his knowledge, of a God parallel to his immanence who in turn cannot go out of himself. Etc.
But the Existent—perhaps that is saying a lot! That is a category almost as general as Existence; and this concept, too, should be sacrificed. The “exception” is not just any existent, although any existent is capable of becoming the “exception” at any given moment. A philosophy that is not valid for everyone means only, perhaps: not valid for every man as long as he is immersed in the ordinary conditions of life, where there is a ready-made answer for every question. But a plague, an earthquake, can suddenly rise up with its problems in the least prepared man, in the most banal life. Each and every one can become an “exception,” even if until then he had not even succeeded in grasping what that means; even if until then he had not the least desire to become one. Kierkegaard doubtless would have preferred to marry Regina Olsen and not to become an “exception”; Nietzsche doubtless would have preferred not to have had to go mad first before sending to Frau Wagner his telegram, “Ariadne, I love you”;[90] Ivan Ilyitch would have preferred being run over by a carriage to confronting the “revelations of death”;[91] Dostoyevsky would have preferred to live in a world without an “underground”;[92] Pascal would have preferred a chair to an abyss.[93] And in general, we would all prefer any form of servitude—indeed, we would prefer the hussars of “necessary war”—to the terrible experience of losing our bearings and our confidence in reason. It is easier to renounce all that is dearest to us in the world than to ask for an arbitrator between us and God, as Job did. But the experience that will make an “exception” of us and give us over to existential problems does not depend on us. Whether we wish to or not, we will have to go through its torments, we will have to attempt to deliver ourselves from them— and to listen to the promise. What promise?
“You are destined for a great Monday! Well spoken, but Sunday will never end!”
So says Kafka, who can nevertheless not stop himself from passionately awaiting the “great Monday”! For there it is, the voice that shouts in our ears: “You are destined . . . !” If the existent had neither doors nor windows, then where does this voice come from? And if it only comes from the existent itself, why, even then, would it be less legitimate than the voice that says, “Never!” Why should this passion alone be useless? Why would it alone have to desperately struggle to assert its rights? The struggle is not over; will it ever end? Yet it is the idea, the obsession, the strange voice of the “great Monday” that makes the Sunday of History so somber, so anxious, so long, so impatient to proclaim its “seriousness” and to send in the hussars against all those who sense that it is only—and can only be—nothingness.
For it would not be nothingness if it did not contain within its innermost structures the negation of self by the self, and if it did not know from a reliable source that History’s cruel hold over the existent is only a Zauberkraft (a magic power) which is that much more difficult to break in that it really is based on nothing.