More historical
than philosophical, George Cotkin’s Existential
America engages in a sustained analysis of the reception of European
existentialism within America, and also proposes the prevalence of many
‘existential’ themes in American philosophy and literature, both prior to, and
after, Kierkegaard, Sartre, Camus, etc., became household names. I put
existential in quotation marks to signpost my concerns about the
all-encompassing version of existentialism that results. The real merit of
Cotkin’s work does not lie in his attempts to establish the existential
credentials of Ralph Emerson, Herman Melville, William James, and Jonathon
Edwards, before the Kierkegaardian craze of the 30s, and then Richard Wright,
Ralph Ellison, Norman Mailer, Robert Frank, and even David Fincher’s recent
film Fight Club, after the
Sartrean/Camusian preoccupation had begun to dim. Such a methodology results in
existentialism being little more than any and every concern with the problems
of existence and contingency. According to this understanding, Plato and the
Stoic’s are clearly existentialists, and I think that the Franco-German
instantiation of existentialism involved a little more continuity than that,
notwithstanding the significant intellectual differences between Heidegger and
Sartre, as well as Sartre’s notorious breaks with both Camus and Merleau-Ponty.

Rather, the merit
of this book is in the persuasive analysis of the way in which existentialism,
in its European form, was taken up by American popular culture and high culture
alike, from radical student protesters to President Roosevelt during World War
Two. In particular, this book details the academic reception of Kierkegaard,
via the clergyman Walter Lowrie and his main collaborator David Swenson, in
stunning detail. Versions of religious existentialism get paid a lot of
attention in this book, perhaps an inordinate amount, although this partly
reflects the historical way in which Kierkegaard was received. In similar
detail, Cotkin describes Sartre and Beauvoir’s attempts to infiltrate the
American scene, this time via popular culture, as much as via academic
journals. In fact, Cotkin also suggests that French existentialism was partly a
victim of this very divide, as many academics reputedly refused to take Sartre
seriously because he so consistently graced the pages of Vogue, etc. In the popular culture, the emphasis was on the man
(the cafe gracing, angst-ridden intellectual without fixed abode), and on the
thought only insofar as it reflected the man. Incidentally, one of the
exceptions to this tendency, The Partisan
Review, home for many of the first English translations of French
existential works, has sadly just closed down. This journal, as well as the
academic anthologies and translations of Hazel Barnes and Walter Kaufman,
receive sustained treatment.

But as well as
this high-low divide causing problems for the reception of existentialism,
Cotkin also clearly shows how Sartre and Beauvoir’s politics were at least as
damaging for their ambition to become an intellectual force in America to a
similar extent to that which they enjoyed in France. Their rather trenchant
support for Marxism was greeted icily, and quickly turned many academics away.
In fact, political issues are quite thoroughly explored in this book. The
apoliticism of Kierkegaard and Lowrie is powerfully documented, and yet we also
see the Marxist leanings of Sartre and Beauvoir, as well as the way in which
Camus, in the 60s, was considered by many American student radicals to be an
example par excellence of the committed intellectual. Despite existentialism’s
ongoing concern with the individual, Cotkin hence illustrates that it clearly
had some political import. Of course, it is paradoxical that Camus, who was
admonished by Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and pretty much everyone else at Les Temps Modernes for what they took to
be his political equivocations in The
Rebel, was so influential on student radicals. In France, Marxist figures
like Louis Althusser were becoming dominant in the eyes of the students, and it
seems that it was partly the moderation of Camus, who claims that he belonged
to a party of those without a party, that appealed to Americans. Even Robert
Kennedy, following his brother’s assassination, turned to Camus for both solace
and inspiration.

What Cotkin also
seems to be attempting to do in this book, is to at least partly redeem
American culture from the criticisms that Sartre, Beauvoir, and to a lesser
extent Camus, made of it. According to many American thinkers, Sartre and
Beauvoir were full of derogatory preconceptions about the US on arrival, and in
their travels they simply filled in the blanks. They clearly thought that the
land of capitalism, optimistic and with a certain trite liberalism still
influential, would to be too superficial for existentialism to really take
hold. Cotkin resists this kind of understanding, and understandably so, and
instead suggests that American existentialism is actually to be commended for
refusing to fetishise nihilism. His implication is that perhaps certain French
existentialists did make this mistake. Moreover, his analysis of the cultural
politics of America and France, and the various preconceptions with which each
viewed the other, is timely given the recent UN resolutions. In the light of
September 11, Cotkin also suggests that there are resources within
existentialism that again warrant our consideration, just as they did in World
War Two.

Philosophically,
however, I think this book is somewhat lacking. There is little understanding
of what Sartre means by nothingness, which is taken as synonymous with
absurdity and looses its ontological meaning. Similarly, Camus’s advocation of
rebellion is sometimes painted as individualistic yet this is precisely what
Camus denies. In yet another transformation of the Cartesian cogito, in The Rebel, Camus states, "I rebel,
therefore we exist". These, however, are minor objections, and it is hard
to imagine a more detailed and thorough historical analysis of existentialism
than Existential America.

© 2003 Jack Reynolds

Dr Jack Reynolds,
University of Tasmania

Categories: Philosophical