The Unhappy Consciousness, Fondane’s most important philosophical work, came out in 1936.[1] As in the other selections included in this book, Fondane applies existential philosophy to the political situation while criticizing the rationalist philosophical tradition. In “Preface for the Present Moment,” he alludes to the economic hardships of the Great Depression and the ideological and political polarization of Europe between Fascism and Communism. He is sympathetic to Marxism regarding the urgent need for economic and social justice, but criticizes it for sacrificing individuals to a collective future.[2] Yet, if Marxism suppresses the individual, rationalist philosophy effectively denies its existence. Privileging universal reason over individual passions, traditional philosophy regards the individual as of no account. The alternative is existential revolt, “the very act by which the existent posits his own existence, the very act of the living being, seeking within and outside himself, with or against [rationally] self-evident truths, the very possibilities of living.”
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AS EVERYONE knows, the title of this book (The Unhappy Consciousness) belongs to Hegel’s austere storehouse of weaponry— snatched from the most formidable of philosophical arsenals.[3] In a time like ours, this title cannot fail to arouse in the reader the confused but tenacious idea of a reckoning with the current state of affairs, a state of affairs too obsessive and importunate for the mind to refuse to consider it and not be tempted to draw some sort of lesson from it. It is no mystery to anyone that our world—ideas, structures, economies, values—is at this moment waiting in line in front of the bankruptcy trustee’s office, and that man has never been under such insistent demands as he is today to find a way out within History and to link his fate to the passionate modification of the world as it now exists.
If at first glance this book does not give the reader what he hoped for, it should not be inferred from that that we are underestimating how pressing the danger is, or that we are turning a blind eye to the increasing threats of pauperization, war, and methodical stupidity and meanness, or that we think that we are sheltered from the convulsions of a culture that risks burying us alive in the debris of its collapse—or that from the heights of our ivory tower, we look down on man’s legitimate desire to try to forge by his own means, and on pain of suffocating, a desperate rescue operation. There is no contemplation, no purely speculative thought, which could deny human societies the vital right to put an end to a condition that has become intolerable for the vast majority of its members. However evanescent and precarious the fabric of historical, political, and economic events, we have to admit it is a formidable presence. And are we free not to take it into account? Are we not torn away from ourselves and forced to come out with an irrational and immediate reaction that propels us into streets seething with action, resentment, indignation, and rage? Are we not forced to submit ourselves to the maxim of primum vivere[4] and to relegate to second place those questions that had up until now been considered as first, however mortified we may be by the disturbances and anxieties that arise not just from the fact of being among men but also quite simply from the fact of being?
We are both political beings, as citizens of social unhappiness, and metaphysical beings, as citizens of human unhappiness. Primum vivere deinde philosophari would be an excellent maxim if philosophy were just—much as it thinks it is—a formal science, dedicated to knowing first principles, promoting value criteria, and reflecting on what happened in the past. But insofar as it is (in Shestov, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard—to speak only of modern thinkers), rather than insofar as it knows, philosophy is something other than a inspector of weights and measures—or as philosophy puts it: of self-evident truths. Rather, philosophy is the very act by which the existent posits his own existence, the very act of the living being, seeking within and outside of himself, with or against self-evident truths, the very possibilities of living. Consequently, can we insist on the importance and tragic nature of the situation, as well as on the extreme urgency with which it presses us for a decision, in order to claim for man—who, beyond the external and material obstacles (which he certainly did not wish for), runs up against internal and spiritual resistances (which he did not wish for either)—the no less legitimate right to see to the preservation of the essential thing that has been drowned out by the aggressive rush of the inessential, and to think twice before committing, through an unconditional act, the totality of a being who does not find himself reflected in it? Too many people these days proclaim at the top of their lungs that to kick up the slightest metaphysical fuss is tantamount to an insidious wish to defend the current order of compromised values; they make the distressed and profound cry of the living being equivalent to upholding a state of affairs that is as decrepit as it is iniquitous, and on account of which that same living being is the first to suffer.[5]
However just the collective insurrection against economic, ethical, and political reality may be, why is it absolutely necessary to want us to pay for that insurrection by forcing us to abandon the demands of our inner life, and by pointlessly and distressingly repressing a reality that is given and is present only in the most intimate and secret reaches of the individual? Even if metaphysical experience were only a privileged experience, having to do with the exception, in what way would that harm, I have to wonder, the majoritarian experience which, as majoritarian, brings everything into its network, including the exceptional? The collective ethical category we call “injustice” corresponds, on another human level, to the metaphysical category—just as unclear as the preceding—which we call “unhappiness.” Why, then, when the best among us are in agreement concerning the immediate problems of war, peace, and social justice, do some people think it incumbent on them to use various pressures and constraints for the sole purpose of making us believe that our destiny is completely exhausted by the demands and obligations of society? If the leaders of our civilization, in the name of a productive but necessarily simplistic tactic, decline to envisage our present reality as the first layer of a deeper reality, that’s their right! But it is our right to honestly declare the integrity and indivisibility of the unhappy consciousness, an unhappy consciousness that suffers throughout its whole extent, but not indiscriminately, from the lack of bread, of work, of freedom, of justice, but also from the hostile presence of unreality, of contradiction, of powerlessness, necessity, and death, and thereby from the Fatum [Fate][6] that inexplicably brings about the total alienation of man’s powers.
No doubt we have skipped a bit too quickly over the distance separating brute actuality (which one would be more willing to forgive us for neglecting) from thought actuality, which is not just an agitated chaos of an unformed concrete reality but a moment of a reality in movement, shot through with an intelligible current named the dialectic—a dialectic that wants to be not only a relevant explanation of social man through economic phenomena but also an exhaustive explanation of man pure and simple. I will not deny that the historical dialectic covers an important part of our reality, but still: Does it cover all our questions? Does it leave nothing out? Does it not leave behind insoluble problems that its own methods cannot fail to raise—and in particular the problem of the “human sacrifice,” which the dialectic’s development itself requires, demands, and commands? Is the dialectic, this blind and devouring force—albeit a teleological one—unaware that the contraries that it posits, surpasses, and negates[7] are not just simple and “convenient” abstractions but individual humans made of flesh and blood, which the [dialectical] surpassing impassively sends to their death?[8] Can a philosophy of the concrete[9] refrain from taking into account the human lives that are necessary to the formation of its concepts—even if those concepts should happen to be the best? I can see that a philosophy that sets out boldly to “change the world,” and not just to think about it,[10] necessarily has to resort to intelligible and manageable “concepts” (based on what men have in common, on what is identical for all of them: relations of production, for example, even more than ethical postulates and the principle of contradiction), and must also necessarily reject the singular, the exceptional, the individual and lived states of consciousness as being neither an object of clear thought nor an object of social interest.
Should this audacious form of thought finally decide “to change the world,” then it would be natural to see it establish institutions meant to regulate the common, statistical, and economic factors already alluded to, which underpin the concrete conditions that constitute its object. It is even natural to see it hope that considerable modifications of society will not take place without having profound and maybe even beneficial effects on the substance of this “singular” being it had to hold in abeyance. But it is at the least strange to see it make pronouncements about individual, singular, and exceptional factors of existence, and accuse the self’s inner life and lived anxieties of “abstraction” or deceitfulness—seeing that this inner life, this singular self and its agonies and its trances and its reactions and its powerlessness before metaphysical reality, did not enter into the formation of its concepts and consequently remain outside of the reality it apprehends. To act on elements one has omitted, of which one had not thought: therein lies a defect that taints historical dialectics with idealism. A philosophy of the concrete which is not just a revolutionary tactic and a politics of the present must first of all define the concrete that it takes as its object, and not fall into the naïveté of calling an “abstraction” precisely that which does not let itself be abstracted and which refuses to be part of the “system,” even if it means that this philosophy of the concrete must limit its Weltanschauung and deliberately concede to other techniques—to philosophies of the qualitative concrete—the responsibility for taking ownership of what is rightfully theirs. It is more “prudent” to want to be simply a clearly defined theory that has only society as its object than a confused and ambitious “religion” that preserves and maintains an obscure state of tension and conflict among men.
Refusing to grant to that which is the right to be eternally “that which is,” refusing to grant to “that which is” the predicate of “truth”: that, in sum, is—or at least should be—the dual approach of dialectics and metaphysics. But the techniques brought to bear are necessarily distinct, considering that they serve ends that are of a different order and a different scope in the two cases. In the one case, it is the outer bark of reality that is at stake; in the other, it is reality’s profound core. In the one case, it is the condition of man in society that is under consideration; in the other, it is the condition of man in reality. In the one case, man is measured externally as a useful and reasonable force; in the other, he is lived in the living fullness of his self, as a singular and absurd force. The quantitative movement that exhausts the reality of social man has no common measure with the qualitative movement that surges up from the darkness of the individual, just as the ethical commandment “you will sacrifice for the happiness of your fellow” has no common measure with the metaphysical commandment “you will persevere in your being”! But too often these views, under the internal pressure of a system, bear witness to some painfully felt loss of substance: Social man rightly takes offense that metaphysical speculation holds his earthly condition and his historical misfortunes in such great contempt; for our part, we take offense that the dialectic defines man “in his reality” as “the set of social relations,”[11] and so thoughtlessly sacrifices mere lived states of consciousness as “abstractions”—even though the dialectic, moreover, has to recognize “that production in general is also an abstraction.” But, Marx will add, “this abstraction is rational”—and so Hegel’s “concrete reason” comes back to us, this time in the form of “the rational concrete.” Must we be reminded that the “irrational” concrete also exists? Disallowed! It is easy to see that the misunderstanding is a long way from being resolved.
There is then a definite link, although an enigmatic one, between the unhappy condition and the unhappy consciousness. Social revolutions will never modify the deep structure of reality, especially since that is far from being their goal. No matter how much unhappiness is perceptibly modified in some of its sorest spots, it will remain mostly unchanged. Consciousness will not be relieved of its division with itself. The same problems will arise, and just as acutely, no matter how much order and social happiness have been achieved, and even though it is very important that they be pursued and achieved. Man will not be able to evade the eternal need to bring into question the meaning of his existence, for the simple reason that he cannot dominate his existence and his existence dominates him; he cannot give up the idea of wanting to possess the truth, for the simple reason that the truth cannot give up on him. The spur of a common unhappiness will always drive some people, born to pursue less easy solutions in desperate conditions, onto paths to which others can only commit themselves halfway.
At the extreme limits of any future society, there will thus always be a place for this permanent mobilization against a reality that is hostile, inexplicable, and absurd, and for a tenacious dual will to “rationalize” or “chaoticize” it, to negate it or to make it favorable, to tailor it to suit us or to make ourselves conform to it. Man will never abandon the search for a solution to this reality, and he will always strive to take hold of reality through an absolute fusion or “a derangement of all the senses”[12]—even if he believes that he can oppose reality through his abdication, his resignation, or his absence! It is even probable that a society completely free of material wants— if it ever comes to pass—will be all that much more suited than our own to give itself over completely and without misgivings to metaphysical anxiety. In any case, nothing will make us think that one only undertakes a struggle because one supposes that it will be easy and that its goals will be immediately achievable—or that man might refuse to engage in a struggle that much more serious, against an enemy that much more terrible, just because the chances of winning appear at first glance to be utopian and unlikely. As long as reality continues to be what it is, man will testify to his irresignation[13] in one way or another—by poetry, by cries, by faith, or by suicide— even should this irresignation be, or appear to be, absurdity and madness. Indeed, nowhere is it written that in the end, madness can never triumph over reason [avoir raison de la raison].
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In the studies that make up this book, we make no claim to an “objective” presentation of the leading ideas of the works under discussion for the simple reason that. . . . But we have many reasons for that, none of which, truth be told, is simple.
Indeed, it is not easy to admit that one day one wakes up to find oneself painfully dissatisfied with the answers, the proofs, the consolations, and the truths that are proffered on all sides in response to the distressing demands of our self—nor that in the inmost reaches of being, our trust in reason has been shaken—as if a slow and muffled earthquake had devastated consciousness, altering our mental map from top to bottom. Up until now, we had—like everyone— followed the “royal road” of philosophy. We agreed with Husserl when he openly declared that philosophy seeks only “the first and absolute self-evident truths that must and can support the edifice of universal science.”[14] We believed him and followed him as men of order, and were happy to join him in putting an end to the era of relativisms, Criticisms,[15] and spiritual anarchy. What could be more natural than to want to build an edifice of certainty that would be unassailable?[16] Or that one would be willing to sacrifice to it anything that could stand in the way of its construction? There was such great clarity there, so great that it was only belatedly we realized that behind this clarity lurked a terrible fear—the fear that these self-evident truths were neither true, nor first, nor absolute; the fear that philosophy was nothing other than a parapraxis, an obsessional neurosis, a shameful secret about which one had to keep silent at any price upon pain of foundering, of stumbling into anxiety, absurdity, and madness. No doubt, before building his edifice, Husserl saw this; it is because he saw this that he attempted, with incredible daring and power, to build the most desperate rationalist system. It is because he looked fear and danger in the eye that fear and danger marked him so deeply and indelibly that it seems to us that in Husserl, Reason itself went mad.[17] But what did he see that made him so defiantly and ardently confront this terror? He saw. . . that it was impossible to see.
The thing we had to keep silent about at any price—the terrifying secret of homo philosophicus—we slowly, and yet how passionately, made out in ourselves! Was it indeed possible that knowledge —pure wisdom, the ancient knowledge—had cheated so that we would forget it had evaded its first question, the first question of all: Why knowledge, anyway? Why first and absolute self-evident truths? Why self-evident truths that must and can support the edifice of knowledge? And what will we do with those self-evidences that must but cannot support this edifice? What good is this knowing that is founded on sacrifice? Did life need it in order to live? Was this knowledge necessary, indispensable to life? Or, rather, was it just the opposite: a refusal of life, a suicide, an attempt at evasion, something life did not want?
Without a doubt, the answers to these questions in a strange way come under the rubric of the absurd. They are indeed absurd, more than people think. But these questions, which call forth such crazy answers, are not for all that absurd themselves, and it seems there should be no major obstacle to their being asked. That at least is Bergson’s view in his latest book, La Pensée et le Mouvant: “The truth is that in philosophy, and even elsewhere, what counts is to find the problem and consequently to formulate it, much more than to answer it.”[18] Then we are on the right track! Unfortunately, for Bergson this statement seems to be nothing more than a proposal left hanging in the air; a simple reading of his The Two Sources of Morality and Religion would be enough to persuade us of this.[19] Such a proposal would require a dramatic divorce from the very conditions of all philosophy, and Bergson takes care not to see it through. Indeed, Aristotle was much more perceptive than Bergson when he cried out, “We have to stop!,”[20] or likewise Kant, who wrote, “It is already a great and infallible proof of wisdom and enlightenment to know what one can reasonably ask. For if the question is in itself absurd and calls forth pointless answers, not only does it cover with shame whoever asks it but it also has the drawback of leading the incautious listener into absurd answers” (Critique of Pure Reason, “Transcendental Logic”).[21] But it goes without saying that in practice Bergson was wary of his own proposal and studiously avoided covering himself with shame. Thus he has not asked any questions “which call forth pointless answers” about God and morality, just as no question that philosophy cannot reasonably answer has been raised for as long as philosophy has existed. It is because, as Aristotle and Kant so boldly saw, in philosophy it is only a matter of solving problems, and not of raising them, that we have had to move forward in clandestine fashion from “taboo” to “taboo.” It is because raising certain problems is a “taboo” operation for philosophy— when violating that taboo covers us in shame—that we have been obliged to go to war against philosophy. Whatever Bergson says, place no trust in his gambit; before raising a question that it is not within philosophy’s power to answer, think of Kant’s threats. But Kant himself was being discreet; for not only will you be “covered with shame” but a dark power instantly deserts you: The internal balance—the earth beneath your feet, the sky above your head—is upset; something deprives you of the help of the good, of virtue, of duty; the saving presence of certainty, of apodicity,[22] of the restful and unanimous agreement with men; before you can say a word, greatness, beauty, heroism flee from you; and the terrible eye that already burned Cain will pursue you and implacably accuse you of having “sullied your conscience” for having committed a crime against the laws of “intellectual honesty.” Questions such as “What is knowledge? From where does it derive its right to judge and to decree what is self-evident?” do not get raised in the daylight of wisdom but in a night that has suddenly become so black that you end up thinking you have gone blind. “Is Knowledge not virtue?” you ask. But everyone these days agrees in rejecting that clear Socratic intuition. “Then is knowledge happiness, fulfillment, the crowning glory of existence?” But here Nietzsche, that great phantom, rises up before you. Certainly he brandishes the threat of “unhappiness” over anyone who would “sully his intellectual honesty,”[23] but he cannot help warning us—as if something higher than “intellectual honesty” were driving him—that Knowledge has taken from us “all that is consoling, holy, everything that heals, all hope” in order to leave us worshipping “stone, stupidity, heaviness, and fate.”[24] After Nietzsche, others such as Freud naively confessed that science is all the greater for having the courage to teach us resignation in the face of “the hostile universe,”[25] and that the philosopher is only “renunciation’s public prosecutor”—that is, still a professor of virtue.[26] This virtue—which generally does not admit what it really is and which very adroitly disguises itself under the names of knowledge, reason, progress, and enlightenment—is found more abstractly in what Heidegger calls “the third form of transcendental activity: justification, legitimation, explanation.”[27]
I, too, have fallen into the trap of the “third form of transcendental activity”! The reader will take note of this and rectify it for himself! And nevertheless, although entirely against my will, the light shines within me, devouring, that light some would call night. Night? So be it! Marvelous and terrible night! Suffocating night, in which everything collapses, where thought finds nothing to cling to if not itself, “thought latching on to thought and tugging.”[28] This anguished thought is not yet free, but freedom is among its possibilities. It divines, it senses, that the most important thing[29] is not to build a science according to the measure of man but to raise man up to the level of his existence, to decide the outcome of the most terrible of conflicts. Brought back to itself, it becomes irritated with “self-evident truths” that “must and can” uphold universal science and finds a liberating flavor in those self-evident experiences which refuse to support this arrogant science. It is no longer an autonomous thought but a thought in solidarity with existence, which “participates”[30] in existence, and which cries out: “What need does existence have of being justified and legitimated, that is, of accepting a tribunal, even if this tribunal’s mission was only purely and simply to confirm the givens of existence?”
I know that well before Husserl, Kant had calmly replied to this cry (in the preface to the first edition of Critique of Pure Reason): “Our age is the true age of criticism; nothing can escape it. In vain does religion, by reason of its holiness, or legislation because of its majesty, claim to be exempt from it. In so doing, they arouse justified suspicions against them, and lose any right to that sincere esteem that reason gives only to that which can withstand its free and public examination.”[31] But truth be told, what would existence do with reason’s “sincere esteem”? This “sincere esteem”—assuming that it would be granted after a free and public examination—would it help existence to live? But it goes without saying that reason-virtue has other concerns in mind besides “legitimating” and “justifying” (or indeed, covering with “its sincere esteem”) the absurd needs of existence! It has no concern for existence and will not cease until it has built its “edifice,” as Husserl and Kant call it, or, as Kant also says, “until it has instituted a tribunal, which, in guaranteeing its legitimate claims. . . .”[32] In that case, what way out remains for existence, its case having been dismissed, having failed the free and public examination, with or without reason’s sincere esteem? Should it just withdraw from the contest and let knowledge build its edifice in peace? Will it accept hoping for a future “reconciliation” in one of those dialectical syntheses that will allow it a minimal but tolerable place? Does it not know that it will then place itself forever under reason’s jurisdiction and that, for as long as knowledge lasts, we must regard existence has having gone down with all hands on deck? All things considered, it would be better to refuse Knowledge’s “sincere esteem.” It would be better to save existence, even should we have to smash knowledge to pieces after overcoming it—and even though we should be smashed to pieces ourselves if we fail! . . . But a man who is more afraid of losing existence than of losing knowledge’s “esteem”—granting that he is an honest man—what right would he yet have to the noble title of philosopher? What sort of philosopher is it who admits not being able to gain satisfaction except at the expense of knowledge and who claims that truth is not the end result of a knowing (savoir) but of a being-able (pouvoir), not of an a priori self-evidence but of an actualized presence, not of something that one knows but of something that one lives? What sort of philosopher is it for whom freedom begins only where knowledge ends?
It is time to admit that the author of the present work did not come to philosophical research by the usual way of university studies (for which he hardly possesses the virtues, the discipline, and even less the mind!), and that he does not in the least think that he is bound to keep an onerous silence about an operation with respect to which his prime concern would be to strip off its seductive glitter at the first opportunity. That is the reason why he so inappropriately ends up raising questions that Poincaré had peremptorily declared “cannot be asked.” Whether our consciousness is unhappy is indeed one of those questions. Raising this question—nothing more than raising it—is already to set consciousness free; for it is thereafter free, if only to struggle against this unhappiness that shapes it and to recognize itself as distinct from that unhappiness. Consciousness is free to hope that one day the unhappiness will leave, just as one day it arrived.
That said, the reader will not fail to guess the motives that drove the author to avoid the “objective,” loyal struggle and the “free and public examination” that, under the statutes of legitimation, justification, and explanation, at the end of the day decide which questions cannot be asked. He “will grasp” that the author himself had to pass through the very mesh of the “third form of transcendental activity,” and because of that, he could only engage in a cunning tactic of hit-and-run guerrilla warfare, whatever returns he expects or whatever failure awaits him. Although driven by a pressure as affectionate as it was lucid, he did not set off on this path on his own account but was led onto it by a teacher whom he loves and reveres above all,[33] you will understand that he does not wish to share with anyone the responsibility that he fully assumes for his rash undertaking!