FROM KIERKEGAARD TO SARTRE: DISTRUST OF SYSTEMATIC PHILOSOPHY
The term that immediately challenges us here is “Existentialism,” though there are some other dominant trends in contemporary thought (as, for example, symbolic logic). Existentialism, as everybody knows, has become so much a fashionable term that its substance appears all but eroded; it may mean practically anything to everybody, with the result that it means nothing precise and definite to anyone. Yet we have to admit that under the name of Existentialism, the most vital and genuine philosophical thinking is being carried on today. Further, that it has a common and valid core in all its forms. This common core consists, above all, in the rejection and distrust of the rationalistic systems of philosophy. This unites Sartre, Marcel, Heidegger with the ancestor they have in common, Sören Kierkegaard, whose opposition against Hegel was based, precisely, on the following premise: It is not within man’s scope to achieve, within a closed system of propositions, a fully sufficient reflection of the essential reality of the world; philosophy cannot, as Hegel claimed for it, change its proper title, which signifies “the loving quest for wisdom,” to “actual knowledge”; it is beyond human capacity to fathom the inconsistency of the world, to uncover the hidden consistency and to formulate it in a rationally constructed “synthesis.”
If, since the advent of Kierkegaard, the poetic essay and the philosophical journal have become the preferred media of expression for all forms of Existentialism, the reason for this is the conviction that an abstract, generalized thesis cannot reach to the depth of reality and that, contrary to its claim, no philosophical proposition can adequately express the “true being” of things.
In modern Existentialism this basic conviction has passed over from the narrow circle of professional thinkers into the general mentality of our present age. It finds expression in widely different attitudes, ranging from a believing reverence before the unknowable to complete agnosticism, and finally, to nihilism. It is important to notice that even in its extreme formulation, in the atheistic nihilism of Sartre (“There is no such thing as human n’y a pas de nature this element can be found. Sartre insists that one cannot speak of the nature of man in the same authoritative manner in which one speaks of the nature of some technical instrument, the design of which is known to us, whereas we do not know the design of man.