Introduction: Disputed Topics

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Heirs to the tradition deriving from Locke and his enlightened followers tend to be antipathetic to the varieties of philosophy that have appeared on the Continent — whether idealistic, materialistic, or existentialistic. Ideologically the English Channel is, as it were, wider than the Atlantic Ocean, and one might even say that the same climate of opinion that unites the Americans with the English alienates both from the turbulent atmosphere of Continental thought. British and American followers of Wittgenstein and Austin, for instance, who are sufficiently ethnocentric to find it natural, as one English writer does, to identify "modern philosophy" with "that present-day version of our traditional empiricism which is known as linguistic analysis" have remarkably little in common with the exponents of Existenzphilosophie who believe with Karl Jaspers that "the contemporary philosophical situation is determined by the fact that two philosophers, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche ... have continually grown in significance ... [and] stand today unquestioned as the authentically great thinkers of their age." Intellectual leaders but a few miles apart live in quite different worlds and "do philosophy" or philosophize, as the case may be, with astonishing indifference to each other. This is acknowledged at once by the above-quoted empiricist when she turns her attention to Sartre. "The 'world' of Ryle's The Concept of Mind," Iris Murdock writes, "is the world in which people play cricket, cook cakes, make simple decisions, remember their childhood and go to the circus; not the Existentialist world in which they commit sins, fall in love, say prayers or join the Communist Party."

Gaining acquaintance with the world of the existentialists requires considerable orientation, especially on the part of representatives of other standpoints who must proceed ab extra. However sympathetic such readers may be, still the insights that they encounter first are bound to seem strained and far-fetched until they can be placed within the mental context that constitutes their proper setting. Meanwhile this enveloping whole, being composed of these insights in addition to a great many still to come, is not initially available at all. This difficulty, known on the Continent as the "hermeneutic circle," is, of course, unavoidable. The reader can only hope, by gaining partial insights and patiently bringing them together, gradually to constitute the necessary whole.

If acquisition of the context required to make existentialism at least tentatively thinkable is difficult and slow, momentary exclusion, somewhat after the manner of Descartes, of disturbing preconceptions can be comparatively easy. One can for a time, in other words, experimentally call into question, or "bracket out" some of the familiar views that obscure and distort the existentialist outlook. Such a move in the direction of sympathetic understanding would seem to be especially necessary when one is confronted by an original thinker who, like Socrates, requires a radical questioning of entrenched beliefs. Naturally Existenzphilosophie makes no sense when taken together with the very doctrines which it denies, including, as it happens, several currently fashionable views which, through the medium of textbooks, anthologies, college outline series, and the like, have come to be taken for granted by an entire generation of students. It must be emphasized, however, that something less than refutation is here intended. The philosophies which Jaspers rejects are of course not houses of cards which collapse at a touch, and one cannot in a single chapter — in part for reasons which this chapter offers — demonstrate the falsity of half a dozen widely accepted views. In this introduction it must suffice to point out that none of the views here in question are sacrosanct, that all of them can meaningfully be criticized, that the existentialists who contest them have their reasons for doing so, and that, in contesting them they are, as a rule, in excellent company. To accomplish this much is, I believe, considerably to facilitate the understanding of Jaspers' philosophy.

Philosophy and Life

That philosophy should deal with life's problems is of course a very old-fashioned doctrine, and the reasons why ambitious academicians are chary of it are now generally known. Philosophy can only measure up to rational cognitive standards, and the techniques used in "doing philosophy" can only be reliable and teachable so long as philosophy is assigned to some limited field within which confirmation and disconfirmation are possible.

At the same time, philosophy's past cannot be ignored. "We find in some of the earliest philosophers, ..." as Walter Kaufmann reminds us, "a striking unity of life and thought. ... In the Socratic schools and in Stoicism a Utile later, philosophy is above all a way of life." The same, of course, could be said of the Epicureans. And for nearly two millennia Christian thinkers have assumed the relevance of philosophy to far-reaching human issues.

Even in Anglo-American countries today one may note a general reluctance to admit that philosophy has become effete. Many of the introductory textbooks in the field receive such honorific titles as The Enduring Questions (Rader), The Things that Matter Most (Flewelling), Living Issues in Philosophy (Titus), and Philosophies Men Live By (Davidson), or conceal behind as uninformative a title as A Modern Introduction to Philosophy a large number of classic pronouncements on such traditional topics as freedom, the mind or soul, God, and a priori knowledge (Edwards and Pap). The big questions are now as importunate as ever.

Jaspers does not believe that today's philosophers can meaningfully continue in the pre-Kantian manner: "To answer the question of the nature of ultimate reality by providing a picture or conceptual construct of the world in its entirety is, and has always been, a mistake," he says. But whatever our methodological innovations, philosophy need not relinquish its concern with the traditional problems, turning them over for consideration to preachers of innumerable faiths, self-appointed sages and seers, and those unscrupulous representatives of exotic cults who prey upon the poor in spirit. Since the "death of God," which the masses are now belatedly discovering, philosophy alone is left to provide a suitable foundation for the lives of "the great mass of denominationally nonbelieving youth." The faith for which philosophy's martyrs (including Socrates, Boethius, Bruno) were willing to die is not outmoded. Jaspers would still subscribe, with minor modifications at most, to the enthusiastic accolade which as a young man he placed near the beginning of his first...