Existentialism

In an altogether opposite order of things, let us take note of that suicide of reason — or "esoterism of stupidity" — which is existentialism in all its forms; it is the incapacity to think erected into a philosophy. Positivistic and democratic rationalism had to come to that.

The experience of the deceptive "liberty" which is propounded as an end in itself or as "art for art's sake" — as if one could be really free outside the truth and without inward liberty! — this experience, we say, is only in its beginning phase, although the world has already reaped some of its bitter fruits; for everything still human, normal and stable in the world survives only through the vitality of ancestral traditions — of "prejudices" if one so prefers — whether it be a matter of the West, molded by Christianity, or of any Nilotic or Amazonian tribe. To have some idea of what the free man of "tomorrow" might be like, the man starting from zero and "creating himself"(1)— but in reality the man of the machine which has escaped from his control — it suffices to take a glance at the very "existentialist" psychology of most youth. If the profound and "subconscious" imprints of tradition are removed from man, there remain finally only the stigmata of his fall and the unleashing of the infra-human.

To wish to replace reasoning by experience on the practical plane and in a relative fashion could still be meaningful; but to do so on the intellectual and speculative plane, as the empiricists and existentialists wish to do is, properly speaking, demented. For the inferior man, only what is contingent is real, and he seeks by his method to lower principles to the level of contingencies, when he does not deny them purely and simply. This mentality of the shudra has infiltrated Christian theology and has committed its well-known ravages.2

Relativism engenders the spirit of rebellion and is at the same time its fruit. The spirit of rebellion is not, like holy anger, a passing state and directed against some worldly abuse; on the contrary, it is a chronic malady directed against Heaven and against all that represents Heaven or is a reminder of it. When Lao-Tse said that “in the latter times the man of virtue appears vile,” he had in mind this spirit of rebellion that characterizes our century; yet, for psychological and existentialist relativism, which by definition is always out to justify the crude ego, such a state of mind is normal, it is its absence which is a sickness; hence the would-be abolition of the sense of sin. The sense of sin is really the consciousness of an equilibrium that surpasses our personal will and which, even while wounding us on occasion, operates in the long run for the good of our integral personality and that of the human collectivity; this sense of sin is a counterpart of the sense of the sacred, the instinct for that which surpasses us and which, for that very reason, must not be touched by ignorant and iconoclastic hands.

While those errors tending to deny objective and intrinsic intelligence destroy themselves by postulating a thesis which is disproved by the very existence of the postulate itself, the fact that errors exist does not in itself amount to a proof that the intelligence suffers from an inevitable fallibility, for error does not derive from intelligence as such. On the contrary, error is a privative phenomenon causing the activity of the intelligence to deviate through the intervention of an element of passion or blindness, without however being able to invalidate the nature of the cognitive faculty itself. A patent example of the classical contradiction here in question, one which largely affects all modern thinking, is provided by existentialism, which postulates a definition of the world that is impossible if existentialism itself is possible. We have to take our choice between two things: either objective knowledge, absolute therefore in its own order, is possible, proving thereby that existentialism is false; or else existentialism is true, but then its own promulgation is impossible, since in the existentialist universe there is no room for any intellection that is objective and stable.

Intelligent persons, provided they have not been artificially perverted, have certain ways of thinking and reacting, while unintelligent persons have other ways. Existentialism has achieved the tour de force or the monstrous contortion of representing the commonest stupidity as intelligence and disguising it as philosophy, and of holding intelligence up to ridicule, that of all intelligent men of all times. Since “scandal must needs come” this manifestation of the absurd was to be expected, there was no escaping it at the time when it had become a possibility; and if it be original to elevate error into truth, vice into virtue and evil into good the same may be said of representing stupidity as intelligence and vice versa; all that was wanted was to conceive the idea. All down the ages to philosophize was to think; it has been reserved to the twentieth century not to think and to make a philosophy of it.

If the normal functioning of the intelligence has to be subjected to a critique, then the criticizing consciousness has to be subjected to a critique in its turn by asking, “what is it that thinks?” and so forth—a play of mirrors whose very inconclusiveness demonstrates its absurdity, proved moreover in advance by the very nature of cognition. A thought is “dogmatist,” or else it is nothing; a thought that is “criticist” is in contradiction with its own existence. A subject who casts doubt on man’s normal subjectivity thereby casts doubt upon his own doubting; and this is just what has happened to critical philosophy, swept away in its turn, and through its own fault, by existentialism in all its forms.

Wearied by the artifices and the lack of imagination of academic rationalism, many of our contemporaries in rejecting it reject true metaphysics as well, because they think it "abstract" — which in their minds is synonymous with "artificial" — and seek the "concrete," not beyond the rational and in the order of ontological prototypes, but in crude fact, in the sensory, the "actual"; man becomes the arbitrary measure of everything, and thereby abdicates his dignity as man, namely his possibility of objective and universal knowledge. He is then the measure of things not in a truly human but in an animal way; his dull empiricism is that of an animal which registers facts and notices a pasture or a path; but since he is despite all a "human animal," he disguises his dullness in mental arabesques. The existentialists are human as it were by chance; what distinguishes them from animals is not human intelligence but the human style of an infra-human intelligence. The protagonists of "concrete" thought, of whatever shade, readily label as "speculations in the abstract" whatever goes beyond their understanding, but they forget to tell us why these speculations are possible, that is to say what confers this strange possibility on human intelligence. Thus what does it mean that for thousands of years men deemed to be wise have practiced such speculations, and by what right does one call "intellectual progress" the replacement of these speculations by a crude empiricism which excludes on principle any operation characteristic of intelligence? If these "positivists" are right, none but they are intelligent; all the founders of religions, all the saints, all the sages have been wrong on essentials whereas Mr. So-and-So at long last sees things clearly; one might just as well say that human intelligence does not exist. There are those who claim that the idea of God is to be explained only by social opportunism, without taking account of the infinite disproportion and the contradiction involved in such a hypothesis; if such men as Plato, Aristotle or Thomas Aquinas — not to mention the Prophets, or Christ or the sages of Asia — were not capable of noticing that God is merely a social prejudice or some other dupery of the kind, and if hundreds and thousands of years have been based intellectually on their incapacity, then there is no human intelligence, and still less any possibility of progress, for a being absurd by nature does not contain the possibility of ceasing to be absurd.

To sum up our exposition and at the risk of repeating ourselves, we say that all anti-intellectual philosophy falls into this trap: it claims, for example, that there is only the subjective and the relative, without taking account of the fact that this is an assertion which, as such, is valid only on condition that it is itself neither subjective nor relative, for otherwise there would no longer be any difference between correct perception and illusion, or between truth and error. If "everything is true that is subjective," then Lapland is in France, provided we imagine it so; and if everything is relative — in a sense which excludes all reflection of absoluteness in the world — then the definition of relativity is equally relative, absolutely relative, and our definition has no meaning. Relativists of all kinds — the "existentialist" and "vitalist" defenders of the infra-rational — have then no excuse for their bad habits of thought. Those who would dig a grave for the intelligence22 do not escape this fatal contradiction: they reject intellectual dis crimination as being "rationalism" and in favor of "existence" or of "life," without realizing that this rejection is not "existence" or "life" but a "rationalist" operation in its turn, hence something considered to be opposed to the idol "life" or "existence"; for if rationalism — or let us say intelligence — is opposed, as these philosophers believe, to fair and innocent "existence" — that of vipers and bombs among other things — then there is no means of either defending or accusing this existence, nor even of defining it in any way at all, since all thinking is supposed to "go outside" existence in order to place itself on the side of rationalism, as if one could cease to exist in order to think. In reality, man — insofar as he is distinct from other creatures on earth — is intelligence; and intelligence — in its principle and its plenitude — is knowledge of the Absolute; the Absolute is the fundamental content of the intelligence and determines its nature and functions. What distinguishes man from animals is not knowledge of a tree, but the concept — whether explicit or implicit — of the Absolute; it is from this that the whole hierarchy of values is derived, and hence all notion of a homogeneous world. God is the "motionless mover" of every operation of the mind, even when man — reason — makes himself out to be the measure of God. To say that man is the measure of all things is meaningless unless one starts from the idea that God is the measure of man, or that the Absolute is the measure of the relative, or again, that the universal Intellect is the measure of individual existence; nothing is fully human that is not determined by the Divine, and therefore centered on it. Once man makes of himself a measure, while refusing to be measured in turn, or once he makes definitions while refusing to be defined by what transcends him and gives him all his meaning, all human reference points disappear; cut off from the Divine, the human collapses. In our day, it is the machine which tends to become the measure of man, and thereby it becomes something like the measure of God, though of course in a diabolically illusory manner; for the most "advanced" minds it is in fact the machine, technics, experimental science, which will henceforth dictate to man his nature, and it is these which create the truth — as is shamelessly admitted — or rather what usurps its place in man's consciousness. It is difficult for man to fall lower, to realize a greater mental perversion, a more complete abandonment of himself, a more perfect betrayal of his intelligent and free personality: in the name of "science" and of "human genius" man consents to become the creation of what he has created and to forget what he is, to the point of expecting the answer to this from machines and from the blind forces of nature; he has waited until he is no longer anything and now claims to be his own creator. Swept away by a torrent, he glories in his incapacity to resist it.

22 Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Klages and others like them.

What is certain is that Aristotle’s teaching, so far as its essential content is concerned, is still much too true to be understood and appreciated by the protagonists of the “dynamic” and relativist or “existentialist” thought of our epoch. This last half plebeian, half demonic kind of thought is in contradiction with itself from its very point of departure, since to say that everything is relative or “dynamic”, and therefore “in movement”, is to say that there exists no point of view from which that fact can be established; Aristotle had in any case fully foreseen this absurdity. The modems have reproached the pre-Socratic philosophers—and all the sages of the East as well—with trying to construct a picture of the universe without asking themselves whether our faculties of knowledge are at the height of such an enterprise; the reproach is perfectly vain, for the very fact that we can put such a question proves that our intelligence is in principle adequate to the needs of the case. It is not the dogmatists who are ingenuous, but the sceptics, who have not the smallest idea in the world of what is implicit in the “dogmatism” they oppose. In our days some people go so far as to make out that the goal of philosophy can only be the search for a “type of rationality” adapted to the comprehension of “human realism”; the error is the same, but it is also coarser and meaner, and more insolent as well. How is it that they cannot see that the very idea of inventing an intelligence capable of resolving such problems proves, in the first place, that this intelligence exists already—for it alone could conceive of any such idea—and shows in the second place that the goal aimed at is of an unfathomable absurdity?

The existentialist will not ask, “What is this thing?” but “What does this thing signify for me?” Thus he will put the altogether subjective “ significance” in place of the objective nature, which is not only the height of absurdity but also of pride and insolence. As true greatness “ signifies” nothing for the little man, he will see in it only a kind of infirmity the better to be able to enjoy his own “ significant” inflat edness.

Man is often just an animal which — as if by chance —possesses a human brain. A cow is well aware in her own fashion that she exists and grazes where she will; that is not difficult to say in human language; but before the existentialists no one had the audacity to class as wisdom this perception of his own existence and of his freedom to choose between apples and pears.

There is a common mistake, and one characteristic of the positivist or existentialist mentality of our times, which consists in believing that the establishing of a fact depends on knowing its causes or the remedies for it as the case may be, as if man had not a right to see things he can neither explain nor modify; to point out an evil is called "barren criticism" and one forgets that the first step towards a possible cure is to establish the nature of the disease. In any case, every situation offers the possibility, if not of an objective solution, at least of a subjective evaluation, a liberation by the spirit; whoever understands the real nature of machinery will at the same time escape from psychological enslavement to machines, and this is already a great gain. We say this without any optimism and without losing sight of the fact that the present world is a necessary evil whose metaphysical root lies in the last analysis in the infinity of Divine Possibility.

XXXVI

"Existentialism" is a thinking
That no longer wishes to think;
this means the destruction
Of the true thinking that constitutes man.

The existentialist fanatics
Dislocate their brains for nothing —
it is only a case of Self-delusion and self-promotion.

For to think truly means: recollection.
Let the fools spin their foolishness.