Emmanuel Levinas once remarked that both everyone and no-one is an
existentialist: everyone, because traces of the doctrine can be found in very
many thinkers; and no-one, because nobody will publicly admit to the title
(with the honourable exception of J.-P. Sartre). The editor of this particular
publication, Charles Guignon, takes a minimalist approach to characterising
existentialism in his introduction to this collection of critical essays and
includes here two interpretive essays each on Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger
and Sartre. (By ‘minimalist’ I simply mean there is no Camus, Marcel etc.) Guignon
includes in his introduction biographical details for, and a philosophical
sketch of, each of these key modern thinkers and also introduces the main
themes of each essay.

 The first essay, ‘The Knight of faith’, by R. M. Adams, most
meticulously examines one aspect of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling:
namely, the notion of the ‘absurd’, which it locates in the general strategy of
making the movement of ‘infinite resignation’ whilst simultaneously having
faith in the restitution of the resigned object (p.28; the noted Kierkegaard
scholar G. Malantschuk offers a fairly similar account of ‘the absurd’ in his Kierkegaard’s
Concept of Existence (Marquette University Press, 2003)). Faith thus
incorporates continuing resignation in order to distinguish it from a more
aesthetic, and more commonplace, appreciation of finite goods. This is a
complicated but rigorously consistent and interesting interpretation (arguably:
reconstruction) of one aspect of the argument of Kierkegaard’s Fear and
Trembling. The second essay on Kierkegaard is Louis Dupre’s ‘The Sickness
unto Death’, a meditation upon Kierkegaard’s critique of the decline of
authentic individuality in the modern age, a critique precisely aiming to
restore that category for expressly religious purposes. (Particularly intriguing
was the suggestion that Max Stirner may have had some influence on Kierkegaard
here (p.37)). In a very detailed exegesis, Dupre examines how Kierkegaard
relates despair to sin and how the latter notion is itself related to selfhood
and individuality. But Dupre also signals some important omissions from
Kierkegaard’s account, such as any mention of original sin, and (an important
omission for a Christian thinker, one might think) the neglected place of collective
religious practice.

After these very detailed and dense exegetical readings comes a rather
more conversationally pitched essay on Nietzsche: ‘A More severe Morality’, by
R. C. Solomon, which aims to defend Nietzsche from the charge of utter immoralism.
It does so by suggesting that Nietzsche subscribes to a morality of practice
rather than of principles, and that when Nietzsche criticises ‘morality’ it is
only the latter and not the former that he is referring to (p.61). This seems
plausible enough but perhaps Nietzsche’s extreme individualism, also influenced
by, or at least suspiciously paralleling that of, Max Stirner (as the present
reviewer has argued in Subjectivity and Irreligion: Atheism and Agnosticism
in Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2003). Ch. 6) may endanger any attempt to tie
Nietzsche to a (to any) particular set of collective practices. After all, in
section 18 of the third essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche
characterises the ‘noble’ type as those who strive to be apart and who are ‘basically
irritated and unsettled by organisation’. Be that as it may, the next essay on
Nietzsche is A. Nehamas’ detailed study ‘How to Become what One is’, a text
Nietzsche scholars may be familiar with already as it appears as a chapter in Nehamas’
well known book Nietzsche: Life as Literature, as well as finding a home
in the Oxford Readings in Philosophy volume on Nietzsche. Its argument
is essentially how we can ‘become who we are’ when Nietzsche no longer believes
in the self. Its conclusion is that becoming who you are involves organising
your ‘tastes and traits’ in a particular manner (pp.84-85). This is the
acceptance of all you have done €“ Nietzschean amor fati €“ and its ‘harmonisation
into a coherent whole’ (p.86). In a footnote (pp. 98-99), Nehamas acknowledges
in his Nietzschean ‘structural’ rather than Cartesian ‘substantial’ account of
the self a debt to Harry Frankfurt’s thesis of personhood constituted by
second-order volitions. However, given this link, does not this mean that Nehamas
is also vulnerable to Watson’s subsequent critique of Frankfurt €“ namely, that identifying with one’s second order desires is
ultimately arbitrary when one can have third-order, fourth-order etc. desires ad
infinitum?

 ‘Intentionality and World: Division I of Being and Time‘ by
Harrison Hall is an exposition of Heidegger’s break with Husserlian
phenomenology, most particularly with the notion of intentionality, which
Heidegger now reads in terms of practical intentions (p.106). But we
also, Hall argues, have a familiarity or competence with things in general (p.111).
There is no broader context from which to understand this, our most basic sense
of things. (This convincing interpretation of early Heidegger could, I thought,
be fruitfully related to many of the obscure but engaging theses of the post-Kehre
Heidegger, where a dramatic change in our apprehension of reality is hoped
for). The second essay on Heidegger is also on Being and Time (no doubt
because it is Heidegger’s most existentialist text, certainly compared with the
later work): the editor’s own ‘Becoming a self: The role of Authenticity in Being
and Time‘. Like Nehamas’ earlier contribution, Guignon draws upon Frankfurt’s influential theses on personhood to explain how we
can constitute €“ without discovering ‘deep down’, as it were €“ an authentic self.
A distance from Frankfurt becomes starkly evident in Heidegger’s stress upon
recognising our death, which then imports a certain coherance and continuity to
our choices, now made against a finite horizon, and thus to our lives (p.128).

 The final two essays are on Sartre. "Sartre’s early ethics and
the Ontology of Being and Nothingness" by T.C. Anderson opens up a
space for a Sartrean ethics by teasing apart the nonthetic project to become
self-caused, i.e. God, from a reflection which can break away from this doomed
project (which some commentators have seen as blocking an ethics). Anderson also examines how Sartre can exalt the notion of
freedom in his post-Nietzschean universe bereft of objective values. The final
essay is ‘The Sartrean Cogito’, a very clearly argued paper on a complex topic
by D. Leland, which finds Sartre’s various presentations of a ‘non-positional
consciousness of consciousness’, which grasps without objectifying, to be in
conflict. Leland provocatively sees Sartre’s phenomenological description here
to be distorted by ontological considerations.

    In sum, then, this is a collection of detailed and scholarly papers
on the existentialists (and the proto-existentialists, Kierkegaard and
Nietzsche). The readings are, for the most part, interestingly reconstructive
and are therefore to be recommended for philosophical readers interested in any
or €“ as is admittedly less likely €“ all of the philosophers of existence
included here.

© 2004
Matthew Ray

 Matthew Ray, Bristol, UK

Categories: Philosophical