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Spencer Heath's

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Spencer Heath Archive

Item 548

Santa Ana, California

Commentary by Heath on a long article by William Barrett, professor of philo­sophy at New York University, in the Saturday Evening Post for November 21, 1959

 

 

 

WHAT IS EXISTENTIALISM?

 

The existentialist seems to make it his mission to denigrate rational science. He points out tritely that science is not the whole of human life, thus labors the obvious. If some purblind scientific specialist forgets his limitations are we thereby forced to set bounds to science itself? Nor must we be misled by the subjective existentialist who magnifies himself by shouting the limi­tations of his brother egotist. Both are exiguous, each in his particular field, but this does not bespeak any limita­tions of the fields themselves or either of them. And shall either of them be so arrogant as to lay down limitations for the other or even to assert without evidence that there are limitations.

 

Both human reason and human inspiration are better served by the postulate that science on the one hand and religion and the arts on the other are but different aspects due to unlike modes of experience and examination of the same and single universal. What advancement would there ever have been either in science or in art if either had been able fully to set metes and bounds upon the field of the other? The existentialist is but little concerned about any limitations to his own special domain. His gorge is against the corresponding arrogance of his opposite number and he thus plays up, by implication at least, his own relative superi­ority. And he calls upon poetry in the person of Robert Frost to declaim against the supposed arrogance of men of science, to wit:

“We are going to discriminate once and for all

.. what can be made a science of and can’t be made

a science of. And we’re going to settle that.

There’s a whole half of our lives that can’t be

made a science of, can’t ever be made a science of.”

And this bald assertion that some unspecified half-portion of “our lives,” some nebulous negative, cannot be or ever be made a science of, this, so our existentialist spokesman tells us, epitomizes the “central point of Existential philosophy with the simplicity and directness of insight that only a great poet can manage.” This “central point of Existential philosophy” plus “One final and central point common to the Existentialists,” namely, “their emphasis upon time and history as fundamental dimensions of human existence,” with the intervening admonitions that “There is no positive without a correlated negative” and “Being always involves non-being.”

These two “central points,” linked together by the two foregoing self-contradictory and unsupported associations, would seem to constitute their practical be-all and end-all for, says our spokesman, “Here, clearly, Existentialism emerges as a philosophy that summons us to responsible social action.” Just what kind of “social action” this may be, whether voluntary or coerced, does not appear — unless we are to identify it with the so-called “social action” with great earnestness proposed by the Marxian fellow travelers attached to various religious denomina­tions and pretending to speak for their popular rank and file. We are assured, however, “that this social action is subordin­ated by the Existentialists to the more human task of becoming an authentic individual in our own right” (note the plural our). Such are the contradictory terms in which “the exis­tentialist philosophers call upon us” at long last to face “the historic Challenge whether the coming epoch shall be the Age of Man or the Age of Mathematical Physics?,” implying that these two “ages,” like most existentialist conceptions, must be mutually exclusive and opposed. — Non sequitur.

Metadata

Title Article - 548 - WHAT IS EXISTENTIALISM?
Collection Name Spencer Heath Archive
Series Article
Box number 5:467-640
Document number 548
Date / Year
Authors / Creators / Correspondents
Description Commentary by Heath on a long article by William Barrett, professor of philo­sophy at New York University, in the Saturday Evening Post for November 21, 1959
Keywords Existentialism Science