Nine

Subjectivity and Philosophy

THE PROBLEM “existentialism and metaphysics” might at first glance look like a question to which there might be some definite answer. A second glance discloses an insuperable dificulty: there are no definitive texts in either metaphysics or existentialism. Without further qualification, neither of the titles names anything more than an aspiration of thought; but as soon as that aspiration is fulfilled we no longer have metaphysics but rather the metaphysics of . . . an Aristotle, a Descartes, a Kant, a Hegel, or a Whitehead. And existentialism is in the same boat: whose existentialism? Is there a single philosopher associated by others with that movement who now accepts the title? Some wish to see in all of this some progress, each thinker correcting or improving his predecessors; but I know of no predecessor who accepts the improvement. Perhaps these titles should be regarded more as Kantian Ideas, never exhaustible but illustrable in an infinite variety. In any event, without the possibility of canonical texts for either metaphysics or existentialism, we might usefully extract for discussion a theme that can be illustrated by a number of existential and metaphysical works. Let that theme be the dialectical relation between subjective existence and its subjective thinker on the one hand, and the absolute being of its metaphysician on the other. What could these two aspirations have to say to each other?

If by “metaphysics” we understand the effort to define and grasp absolute being, that, in other words, which is in and perhaps for itself, that which is not a part, moment, or phase of anything else; and if by “existentialism” one understands the effort to think existence as it is subjectively for an existing man—then indeed there was a pronounced antipathy between the two from the start. In one paradigmatic case Kierkegaard looked upon Hegel’s Absolute as impossible of realization. Who was to grasp it? An existing man could understand himself only after he no longer existed; and it is hard to imagine what help that could be. So long as there is subjective existence, then there is something unfinished and undecided. And so Hegel appears to Kierkegaard as a “comical” figure who forgot that he existed and, as alive, was not identical with God. But Hegel in anticipation was not without resources for a reply. If there are parts there must be a whole on pain of a mere part identifying itself with that whole. And so his entire effort was to comprehend how the parts presupposed the whole; subjectivity was indistinguishable from error in the domain of knowledge and from criminality in the domain of ethics. It is precisely from subjectivity that the philosopher must free himself. Hegel succeeded admirably in his own person; his answers to his critics suppressed the first-person pronoun and came out: “Philosophy can take no notice of your objection. . . .”

It would not be hard to multiply examples. For Nietzsche the metaphysical impulse was represented by Christianity with its God, eternal values, and otherworldliness. Nietzsche in revolt says: “Against the eternal, the value of the briefest, more perishable, the most seductive glints of gold on the belly of the Serpent, Vita.” Metaphysics in this light was nothing but an intellectual and vital degeneration.

The contemporary inheritors of existential thought continue in the same vein. For the Heidegger of Sein und Zeit Being is no longer absolute but is ultimately disclosed to existing man in resolute historical decision made in the light of death. For Sartre we can find nothing but detotalized totalities; man is wholly surrendered over to his world, must be wholly engaged “without transcendental escape-hatches,” is in anguished and perpetual flight from where he is to where he can never arrive. Again, for both, the final point of view is that of existing man; there can be no final survey since existence is always an unfinished project.

And yet, it is far from certain that these two apparently opposed directions of thought have not terminated the debate permaturely. If some existentialists insist upon the radical finitude of man’s life and conclude to the impossibility or irrelevance of metaphysics, it may be they are right for certain metaphysics but not all; or that they have not examined human existence with the care it deserves. I believe they would be right against any metaphysics that conceived its absolute on the model of anything whatsoever objective, that is, “nature,” “substance,” “eternal form,” “law,” or “principle.” I am urging not that there are no such things, but that they could not possibly illuminate lived subjective experience. Nor could any ontology that aspired to completeness omit subjectivity as an irreducible category. And if the term “Being” has a traditional connotation as what finally is, then the existentialists are right in insisting that either Being is so comprehensive as to mean nothing, or else, as naming what is, it is wholly inadequate to comprehend even the most elementary factors of subjective existence with its perpetual wrestling with what is not, with possible being, and with what ought to be. If Being aims at the essential and the necessary, again it renders itself irrelevant to subjective existence, where, if anything, “accidents” like birth and death become “essential” to its concerns, and where the necessary is precisely what can not be decided.

At the same time suppose that metaphysics is an expression of a deeper impulse of which such notions as absolute being are only figurative transcriptions? Perhaps metaphysics has been aiming at something final, but whose finality is ill conceived as a Being, like the famous sphere whose center was everywhere and circumference nowhere, variously used to describe the universe and God. If some forms of metaphysics look like pervasive category mistakes, is it not also clear, as Schopenhauer said, that man is a metaphysical animal, and that this aim at finality is not the historical product of certain mistakes made early in human thought? Perhaps, then, if we look again at human existence we might be able to see in its subjective form the roots of that very metaphysical aim which later translates itself into the effort to define “absolute being.” This seems fair, since if metaphysics wishes to conclude too rapidly to absolute being, perhaps the existentialists have also concluded too rapidly to some essentially finite character of human existence; human existence, too, is inexhaustible and unsurveyable, as Jaspers insists; no one can give an exhaustive account of it, even when he is called an “existentialist.” I should therefore like to tilt the discussion; instead of confining metaphysics to the pursuit of absolute being and ruling it out at once, perhaps if we chose a vaguer term, something like “finality,” we might discover the subjective roots of such a pursuit, something deeper than logical blunders. And if instead of assuming we already know the very essence of human existence either as Dasein or Pour-soi, we leave that an open question and look into modes of existence other than that of being “surrendered over to the world in care,” it is possible we may find embedded in subjective existence that very finality which otherwise looks dubious and problematical. For this project it would be promising to look at human existence in its provisional successes rather than its foundering and failure. And where can we begin to discover these successes? For me the least questionable formula would be that of André Breton, who defined surrealism as the celebration of love, poetry, and liberty. Following Breton no further than this formula, my own fondness for the phrase arises from the suggestion that perhaps in these very places we may find the roots of that impulse which made Schopenhauer see man as the “metaphysical animal”; at very least no one will be able to object that love, poetry, and liberty were invented by certain spurious reasonings of philosophers unacquainted with the blessings of modern logical analysis.

Love

It certainly requires no argument to establish the decisive importance of love for human existence; if we had found out we were metaphysically condemned to anguish, no doubt we would have given up the whole business long ago as not worth the candle. Strange that its importance has to be argued for metaphysics, which has preferred to discover reality everywhere else: in logic, mathematics, physics, astronomy, or in the faculties of perception and reasoning insofar as they are directed to that same physical or logical world. Perhaps the neglect of love by metaphysics could be traced to an initial error that regards love as an “emotion,” properly to be treated by psychology, rather than a mode of being of central importance to metaphysics. That mode of being, for all of its enigmas, can be sketched out simply for our present purposes: two are in love when each finds the other essential to his or her existence. Together they constitute a whole, in fact, an absolute whole, complete in itself. Aristophanes’ tale in the Symposium is instructive on the matter and says all that need be said: in the beginning there were only complete beings, so self-sufficient that even the gods were jealous of their independence and pride: so each was split; and historical existence is but the history of each half pursuing his other half. In love that other half is found and there is a temporary and provisional restoration of the primordial whole. And, no doubt, some such thing is what every lover would say: in the embrace there is that finality in which there can be no other or higher values, in which nothing external is needed or wanted; a finality within experience and time for which the rest of human existence is only a nostalgia. The poetry of love, where all this finds direct expression, dilates endlessly on the theme: lovers regard each other as “gods” and “goddesses”; in love they are in “heaven”; their love is “eternal”; it is the “meaning of life,” and so forth. From age to age and culture to culture the language is the same; it comes so close to religious enthusiasm and exaltation that churches begin to find it blasphemous. And the categories lovers spontaneously use are so outrageous to a metaphysics or epistemology based on the natural sciences or mere sense perception that they must be immediately explained away: reason has been clouded by passion. Even common sense has its own refutations: how could their love be eternal when they hadn’t met the day before yesterday and perhaps their eyes are wandering before they even finished their poetic phrases? How can they be in heaven, when as anyone can see they have just checked into the motel? How can they “know” each other, in the curiously ambiguous Elizabethan phrase, when they have only constructed each other out of sense data aided by logical connectors and, moreover, are notoriously subject to delusions? How can any such thing be the “meaning of life” when there are other pressing matters to attend to such as making a living, cooking, and politics? The truth would be that love is not so much subjective existence discovering absolute finality, as an illness, something like an “epileptic fit,” as Susan Sontag recently put it.

And yet, what do these criticisms amount to but misunderstandings basing themselves upon a metaphysics of the third person, observing certain objective phenomena and interpreting them under principles adequate only for objective phenomena seen third-personally? But the phenomenology of human existence must begin (and for me also end) with that existence as it is to those living it; for anyone to examine his own existence as if it were that of another is to introduce schizophrenia into the very heart of philosophic method. If we are condemned to regard things external to us impersonally and as objects, there is one form of being, happily, which is not external to us nor an object; that, of course, is ourselves. With the critical acceptance of the testimony of lovers, we may have the beginning of the solution to our initial question concerning the subjective roots of metaphysical meanings; the human mind would never in the first place have embarked on an effort to define and grasp something called the Absolute if it had not encountered a form of it in its own direct experience. In love, according to the testimony of the world’s lovers, human existence finds finality “for a moment” in value, in knowledge, and in being. This finality, I should emphasize, is found and is not a theory, hypothesis, or construct.

Poetry

If metaphysics has traditionally preferred to think about the whole universe to thinking about love, whenever it seeks to base itself on language and the a priori conditions for intelligible discourse, it habitually turns to the literal prose of daily scientific or logical discourse, and it shows a marked tendency to avoid poetry, which not by accident is the spontaneous language of lovers. If love has been taken to be an emotion rather than a mode of being, poetry equivalently has been taken to be noncognitive “emotive expression,” containing neither information nor analysis, neither true nor false but at best pleasing or displeasing: in effect it is, so considered, but a prolonged sigh or groan. Of if this seems too crude for belief, certain poetry may be admitted under the title of “rhymed science,” didactic verse such as that of Lucretius and the many rhymed versions of Darwin’s evolution in the nineteenth century. Here the “poetic” element resides in the external forms of rhythm, rhyme, and elevated diction. No wonder poetry is lightly taken by metaphysics; it is nothing but a metaphorical, hence confusing, way of saying what could be more clearly said in literal prose.

But this notion of poetry would be spurned by authentic poets as the very definition of bad poetry. Literal, scientific propositions, and those of metaphysics insofar as it apes the sciences, are propositions that are true or false about a subject matter which can be encountered independently of the proposition in question; in short, they are true or false about a world which is as it is independently of what the proposition or system of propositions says of it. When a sentence says of something how it is, and it is that way, then the sentence is “true.” On the other hand a poem is about nothing whatsoever which is or can be given independently of that poem. The play Hamlet is not and was never intended to be true or false about the historical Prince of Denmark. If it is about anything, it is about the Hamlet who is given to us in the play itself and there alone. And so with all poetry; Blake’s “Tiger” is hardly a contribution to zoology. And yet poetry is a disclosure, a disclosure of what is available to us only through it. Since its content is accessible only through the poem itself, the disclosure is not subject to correction, confirmation, or disconfirmation through independent observation, experiment, science, or history in general. In Hamlet I do indeed see something, persons in action and passion; Hamlet is, then, a disclosure and not a mode of blindness; but what is disclosed is accessible to us only through the poem itself. A disclosure of any form whatsoever falls under the general category truth, and so it is not surprising that poems are also judged as “true” and “false”; but these terms must be understood as equivalent to the poem’s own internal power and coherence of disclosure, that is, to the completeness of disclosure, rather than as true to some independent reality. In this sense when the terms “true” and “false” are used of poetry in general, including novels, they must be taken as synonyms for completeness and coherence of disclosure, a criterion internal to the poem and identical with the purely poetic value of the poem. Thus “false” poems are bad poems in purely poetic terms: a false Hamlet would be a Hamlet radically incoherent with himself or shown acting without intelligible motivation or with the relevant situation and consequences of his action incompletely given.

With the introduction of terms such as “coherence” and “completeness” as synonyms for truth and falsity within a poem, not much would need to be said to bring our discussion well within the sphere of the idealist conception of truth as systematic coherence. “Truth is the Whole,” Hegel said; and, so conceived, there is no separate, independent whole of which it is true. And so the Hegelian system itself might be conceived as a vast poetic whole to be measured only by its comprehensiveness and coherence; similarly, each poem taken by itself exhibits the same characteristics: each discloses for us a whole, the whole of that poem. As wholes, they are in principle forbidden from being additive in their disclosures. King Lear, Macbeth, and Hamlet could not have roles in a “larger play”; we are not invited to wonder what they were doing before they are disclosed to us; nor what their friends do after the final curtain is rung down. If, then, in scientific discourse we are introduced into a domain of speech and thought where each new proposition adds to our total knowledge of its subject, a domain that is endless, in poetry we experience a world, a final whole that needs completion or addition only to the extent that the poem fails in the disclosure of its own theme. And, finally, since we ourselves, as animalia metaphysica, have a nostalgia for something final and absolute, when we experience imaginatively and poetically what we have been looking for, we have a perfectly understandable joy; each poem in effect is a celebration of its own accomplishment, the disclosure of an absolute within human experience. Even tragedies, of course, are fundamentally celebrations not of the deaths of their heroes but of that final whole which for the Greeks was divine Fate, but which for us most often is the act of poetry itself in the creator as well as his audience, which now is renewed. Poetry, then, taken as including all the arts, is an experienced celebration of the disclosure of something final and absolute within existence itself.

Liberty

Both love and poetry are expressions of human freedom; if we were not free not to love, what would our love be worth? And if, as poets, we could not liberate ourselves from our own instinctive sympathies and antipathies for our characters, how could we perceive that finality within which they all have their essential justification? Both lovers and poets, then, enact what might otherwise look like only a conjectural condition of man: liberty. But liberty is enacted also in decision. Let us recall some basic factors in decision as they appear to one deciding, if not from the standpoint of an external observer, let alone a metaphysician already provided with a total “theory of being.” I cannot decide anything unless, of course, it appears to me that there is something to be determined by that decision; there must be alternatives now open that my decision will close. Further, I must make up my mind; that is, my decision decides what stand I shall take toward open alternatives. If my mind is already made up, then indeed I am not then deciding but already decided. And what is it I decide? For action, for what I shall do. And so my own action must appear to me open to my own disposition or I cannot appear to myself to be deciding anything. Finally, it must appear up to me, up to me and no one or nothing else. If it is up to me, then I must appear free to decide to myself. The freedom in question is a freedom from compulsion from anything not-me. But what counts as me and what as not-me? In the present context I would count as not-me anything I had not chosen or consented to; the question, then, is not some factual question as to the actual composition of me, which would lead into problems as to whether my body, my id, my inclinations, my desires are or are not to be reckoned as “parts” of me; the question is decided in this context by myself: if I consent to these determinants, affirm them, or if I decide according to a “moral principle,” then any of these factors, since they are determinant of me only through my approval or consent, must be reckoned as being “part of me”; in short, in the present context what is me and what is not is itself decided by my own free decision and is not an independent, scientific, or psychological question. Thus, a man who consents to slake his thirst is not aware that he is being compelled by an external force, thirst; he has made the thirst his by his consent to it. Vice versa, if he resisted, then the thirst would appear as “external” to him; but his resistance would at the same time demonstrate that he was free from its compulsion over him. If he resisted but succumbed anyway, either he was not free from his thirst, in which case it would no longer be called a decision but rather a compulsion, or he would have prima facie evidence that his resistance was in bad faith.

Decision, then, is one primordial locale of experienced freedom. Freedom, as Kant demonstrated, is nothing that can be illustrated in external experience or even in internal experience if that is understood as composed of “inner feelings”; freedom is not a feeling at all but, again, a mode of subjective being; being independent of external compulsion. There are feelings accompanying free decision, of course, but they can range everywhere from Sartrean anguish to the delirium and exaltation of a Nietzsche. The free man is in an ontological solitude, an origin without support; and that mode of being can be either dreaded or welcomed. But in either case we come back to our chief concern here: the mode of being that is freedom is itself formally identical with our old friend the Absolute. The Absolute also is in ontological solitude depending upon nothing else, since everything else is but a part or phase of it. In short, existing men in their subjective liberty are like so many gods; Descartes showed that our own freedom was infinite and therefore equal to that of God, although our understanding lagged far behind.

All of which may seem a somewhat romantic exaltation of commonplace occurrences. Is it really necessary to invoke something absolute to account for every daily decision? I do believe indeed that it is; but perhaps this contention can be made more plausible by considering decisions that are terminal. If our daily decisions hardly decide more than how prechosen goals might best be reached, let us call terminal those decisions in which I decide where I take my stand toward my own existence as such, that is, what I will die for. Here my freedom reaches its apogee; what I decide in favor of must appear to me as a “final value,” that which must unconditionally be. The unconditionality of such values can include the whole world, as in the old motto: “Let justice prevail or let the world be destroyed.” Or with Socrates, Luther, and Bruno we see examples of decisions that placed a final value on the question of the decider’s very existence. Our own question does not concern the wisdom of their decisions or any further analysis of exactly what it was that each felt he was deciding. All we need is the phenomenology of the terminal decision: to each something of final value was decided, the alternative to which appeared to him incompatible with the value of his own existence. And further, what was decided was in the domain of contingent existence. It would be foolish for a man to sacrifice his life to prove that there was or was not another planet in the solar system or to prove Gödel’s theorem. These matters are as they are and no man’s sacrifice can alter the evidence; on the other hand it may be decisive whether such problems can be discussed in society or whether political authority has any proper jurisdiction over them. And so the final decision decides subjective existence, seen now as having alternatives, one of which is finally to be rejected. In the unconditionality of such decisions a free man attaches himself finally to something absolute; in such decisions is it not apparent that metaphysics, aiming at the absolute, finds its subjective roots?