Living Existentialism

Essays in Honor of Thomas W. Busch

Hoskins, Berendzen

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781498298520
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Writing in the late 1990s about the tendency of encyclopedists to designate existentialism a finished project, Thomas W. Busch cautions that such hasty periodization risks distorting our understanding of the contemporary philosophical scene and of depriving ourselves of vital resources for critiquing contemporary forms of oppression, what Garbriel Marcel referred to as processes of dehumanization. We should recall that "existentialism made possible present forms of Continental philosophy, all of which assume the existentialist critique of dualism, essentialism, and totality in modern philosophy," and we should acknowledge that "existentialism remains capable of haunting today's scene as an important and relevant critic."Offered in honor of Thomas W. Busch after his more than fifty years of work in philosophy, the essays in this volume attest to existentialism as a living project. The essays are written by scholars who championed existentialism in America and by scholars who now seek to extend existentialist insights into new territory, including into research in cognitive science. The essays range from studies of key figures and texts to explorations of urgent topics such as the nature of freedom and the possibility of what Busch calls "incorporation," a sense of communicative solidarity that respects difference and disagreement.

Part One

Gabriel Marcel in Contemporary Context

1

Marcel and Derrida

Christian Existentialism and the Genesis of Deconstruction

—John Caputo

In Circulating Being Thomas Busch defended the thesis that, contrary to the received view, Existentialism was alive and well.1 Not as such—that much was true. It had suffered quite a shock from a critique of humanism from which it never quite recovered. So as a movement, it was a thing of the past. Instead, he argued, its survival can be seen in the way that so many central Existentialist claims have been assimilated by and become part of the working presuppositions of its very critics—notions like the Existentialist critiques of body/mind dualism, rationalism, essentialism and totalizing thinking. In a perverse sense, Busch has been proven right by the current wave of “Speculative Realism” spurred by Quentin Meillassoux, which today denounces post-structuralism itself for being just another round of humanism, a form of Kantian subjectivism, and for not being radically reductionistic, naturalistic, and scientific. But I am interested in a more philosophically interesting and even more unlikely confirmation of his thesis coming from the recent publication of Edward Baring’s The Young Derrida and French Philosophy,2 a careful study of Derrida’s early life and studies, going all the way back to 1948 when Derrida was only eighteen years old. Basing his book upon Derrida’s unpublished archival papers, Baring argues that the young Derrida was something of a Christian Existentialist with a particular interest in Gabriel Marcel and Simone Weil. Of course, at so early an age, we have all thought thoughts that we have long since abandoned, but in this case I think that what Baring has unearthed is genuinely significant. In the present essay I pursue this surprising and unlikely link between Marcel and Derrida which I hold is both significant for understanding the subsequent development of Derrida’s work and further support for the thesis defended in Circulating Being.

Heidegger, Sartre, and the Question of Humanism

First, we need to reconstruct the world in which the young Derrida—before Jackie became Jacques—entered philosophy. The issue that was grabbing all the headlines in French philosophy in the 1940s was the controversy over “humanism.” Is Marxism the true humanism, the only one that is seriously concerned with the economic well-being of human beings? After all, what could be more basic to human well-being than to have the food, shelter and clothing necessary to maintain human dignity? Or was it the case—as Bishop Sheen was reminding us weekly on a very successful program in the early years of American television—that what the Marxists were proposing was not so much basic as just plain base, nothing but soulless totalitarian materialism? Is not the true humanism found in Christianity, where the notion of the sacredness of each human soul before God was the only sure way to protect human freedom and dignity? Any number of major Catholic philosophers and theologians were engaged by this debate, one of the most significant contributions to which was Integral Humanism (Humanisme integrale) published by Jacques Maritain in 1936.3 Maritain and the medieval historian Étienne Gilson were the two sustaining pillars of the revival of Thomistic philosophy, and two of the greatest Catholic philosophers, of the twentieth century.

This was of course the heyday of French “Existentialism.” The movement had begun in the 1930s—the term could be traced back to Marcel’s Metaphysical Journal4—when it was dominated by French Catholics who were inspired by Kierkegaard’s brilliant if rather Lutheran-Augustinian meditations upon the individual standing before the white light of God. “Atheistic” Existentialism was historically a later inflection defended by Sartre and Camus. So the debate about the true humanism was also a debate about the true Existentialism. Did true humanism require God or did it demand the death of God? As you might expect, questions like that, which had been explored in depth by Henri de Lubac’s well-known The Drama of Atheist Humanism (1945),5 had among other things made for a great material for the philosophy courses Thomas Busch and I taught back the 1960s and 1970s, when we taught large numbers of Augustinian seminarians who needed to know this material for the theological studies they would undertake after they finished their baccalaureate degrees.

In a 1945 essay entitled “Existentialism Is a Humanism,”6 Jean Paul Sartre had thought to make a strategic intervention in this debate by arguing that atheistic Existentialism is the true humanism, the true Existentialism and the true Marxism! To pull off such a philosophical trifecta, Sartre had his work cut out for him, because he was anathema twice over—an atheist to the Christians and a bourgeois individualist to the Marxists. So Sartre sought a synthesis of Marxism and individual freedom by arguing that the revolution is impossible without it (shades of Badiou); the Communist decision is an existential one, made in the depths of existential freedom—otherwise we can just sit back and wait for the wheels of dialectical materialism to turn and it will come about all by itself. But to choose for myself (with subjective passion) is to choose for all men, as a collective (shades of Kant). In this way Sartre sought to dodge (1) the totalitarian complaint made by the Christians against the Marxists, (2) the other-worldliness complaint, the neglect of real economic suffering in the present, made by the Marxists against the Christians, and (3) the Marxist critique of him as a subjectivist.

Sartre could not have foreseen what would happen next. Heidegger intervened! He published a landmark essay entitled Letter on Humanism,7 which basically introduced us all to what came to be known as the “later” Heidegger. In those days Heidegger was taken—by Sartre and by everybody else—to be an Existentialist and his Being and Time (1927)8 was considered to be the theoretical masterpiece of the movement, upon which Sartre (and everybody else) had clearly been drawing. Not only was the very title of Sartre’s major work, Being and Nothingness,9 something of a riff on Heidegger’s landmark book but it actually would have served as a fairly good title of Heidegger’s famous 1929 lecture “What is Metaphysics?” which was all about Being and “the” Nothing, a text upon which Sartre was clearly drawing.10 Heidegger did not dispute Sartre’s central claim, that Existentialism is a humanism; in fact, he took Sartre at his word and went on to argue that Being and Time is not Existentialism and to that extent not humanism. What Heidegger said was absolutely prescient. He did not get into the debate about who is proposing the true humanism so much as to question the truth of humanism itself. In doing so Heidegger anticipated and antedated (1) the widespread critique of human subjectivity that would first prevail in structuralism, to which there were certain similarities in the later Heidegger; (2) contemporary environmentalism, which describes the present age as that of the “Anthropocene,” which was a very considerable part of Heidegger’s own agenda; (3) the study of evolutionary biology where human exceptionalism, classically embodied in the Aristotelian tree, with rational animals perched at the top, is considered a very misleading paradigm for scientific work on the animals that we all are.

Being and Time, Heidegger complained, is about Being and not about “human being.” The “analytic of existence” is not an existentialist analytic, but an existential-ontological one. The thesis defended in Being and Time “the essence of Dasein lies in existence” is an ontological one to be distinguished from the anthropological Existentialist thesis proposed in Sartre’s “existence precedes essence,” of which it seemed to be a clever transcription. Where Sartre wrote that we live on a plane where there is only humanity, Heidegger rejoined, “we live on a plane where there is only Being,” and then went on to offer an esoteric gloss on the German idiom “es gibt,” which literally means “it gives”—hence it gives Being as time, and time as Being. What gives? The “it” itself, which is not a human being, not a being at all, but Being itself, and is not even Being itself, since that is what is given, and so the “it” is what he called the “event” (Ereignis) of Being’s being given over the epochs from the early Greeks to the age...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Part One: Gabriel Marcel in Contemporary Context
• Part Two: Living French Existentialism
• Part Three: Beyond French Existentialism