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Introduction

I HAVE been invited to speak about the philosophy of existence.¹ Part of philosophy today goes by this name. The distinguishing term “existence” is meant to emphasize that it is of the present.

What is called philosophy of existence is really only a form of the one, primordial philosophy. It is no accident, however, that for the moment the word “existence” became the distinguishing term. It emphasized the task of philosophy that for a time had been almost forgotten: to catch sight of reality at its origin and to grasp it through the way in which I, in thought, deal with myself—in inner action. From mere knowledge of something, from ways of speaking, from conventions and role-playing—from all kinds of foreground phenomena—philosophizing wanted to find its way back to reality. Existenz is one of the words for reality, with the accent Kierkegaard gave it: everything essentially real is for me only by virtue of the fact that I am I myself. We do not merely exist; rather, our existence is entrusted to us as the arena and the body for the realization of our origin.

Already in the nineteenth century, movements with this turn of mind kept recurring. People wanted “life,” wanted “really to live.” They demanded “realism.” Instead of wanting merely to know, they wanted to experience for themselves. Everywhere, they wanted the “genuine,” searched for “origins,” and wanted to press on to man himself. Superior men became more clearly visible; at the same time, it became possible to discover the true and the real in the smallest particle.

If for a century now the tenor of the age has been entirely different—namely, one of leveling, mechanization, the development of a mass mentality and universal interchangeability of everything and everyone where no one seemed to exist any longer as himself, it was also a stimulating background. Men who could be themselves woke up in this pitiless atmosphere in which every individual was sacrificed as individual. They wanted to take themselves seriously; they searched for the hidden reality; they wanted to know what was knowable; and they thought that by understanding themselves they could arrive at the foundation of their being.

But even this thinking frequently degenerated into the frivolous veiling of reality that is characteristic of the leveling process, by perversion into a tumultuous and pathetic philosophy of feeling and life. The will to experience being for oneself could be perverted into a contentment with the merely vital; the will to find the origin into a mania for primitivism; the sense of rank into a betrayal of the genuine orders of value.

We do not propose to consider in its totality this loss of reality in an age of apparently heightened realism—an age out of whose growing awareness developed the soul's distress, and philosophizing. Instead, we shall attempt to recall by an historical account the tortuous route taken by this return to reality—a return that took many shapes—using as an example our relation to the sciences, an example that is inherently essential to our theme.

AT THE TURN of the century, philosophy was for the most part conceived as one science among others. It was a field of academic study, and was approached by young people as an educational possibility. Sparkling lectures offered vast surveys of its history, its doctrines, problems and systems. Vague feelings of a freedom and truth often devoid of content (because rarely effective in actual life) combined with a faith in the progress of philosophical knowledge. The thinker “advanced further” and was convinced that with each step he stood at the summit of knowledge attained up to that time.

This philosophy, however, seemed to lack self-confidence. The boundless respect of the age for the exact empirical sciences made them the great exemplar. Philosophy wanted to regain its lost reputation before the judgment seat of the sciences by means of equal exactness. To be sure, all objects of inquiry had been parcelled out to the special sciences. But philosophy wanted to legitimize itself alongside of them by making the whole into a scientific object; the whole of knowledge, for example, by means of epistemology (since the fact of science in general was after all not the object of any particular science); the whole of the universe by means of a metaphysics constructed by analogy with scientific theories, and with their aid; the totality of human ideals by means of a doctrine of universally valid values. These seemed to be objects that did not belong to any special science and yet ought to be open to investigation by scientific methods. Nevertheless, the basic tenor of all this thinking was ambiguous. For it was at once scientific-objective and moral-normative. Men could think they were establishing a harmonious union between the “needs of the mind” and the “results of the sciences.” Finally, they could say that they merely wanted objectively to understand the possible world-views and values, and yet again could claim at the same time to be giving the one true world-view: the scientific.

Young people in those days were bound to experience a deep disillusionment. This was not what they had thought philosophy was all about. The passion for a life-grounding philosophy made them reject this scientific philosophy which was impressive in its methodological rigor and its demands for arduous thought, and thus at least of educational value, but was basically too innocuous, too easily satisfied, too blind to reality. Demanding reality, they rejected empty abstractions that, for all their systematic orderliness yet seemed like children's games; they rejected proofs that proved nothing despite great ostentation. There were some who took the hint implicit in the hidden self-condemnation of this philosophy which took its own measure from the empirical sciences; they pursued the empirical sciences themselves; they abandoned this philosophy, perhaps believing in another philosophy that they did not yet know.

What enthusiasm gripped those students at that time who left philosophy after a few semesters and went into the natural sciences, history and the other research sciences! Here were realities. Here the will to know could find satisfaction: what startling, alarming and yet again hope-inspiring facts of nature, of human existence, of society, and of historical events! What Liebig had written in 1840 about the study of philosophy was still true: “I too have lived through this period, so rich in words and ideas and so poor in true knowledge and genuine research, and it has cost me two precious years of my life.”

But when the sciences were taken up as though they themselves already contained true philosophy, that is, when they were supposed to give what had been sought to no avail in philosophy, typical errors became possible. Men wanted a science that would tell them what goals to pursue in life—an evaluating science. They deduced from science the right ways of conduct, and pretended to know by means of science what in fact were articles of faith— albeit about things immanent in this world. Or, conversely, they despaired of science because it did not yield what is important in life and, worse, because scientific reflection seemed to paralyze life. Thus attitudes wavered between a superstitious faith in science that makes an absolute starting point out of presumed results, and an antagonism to science that rejects it as meaningless and attacks it as destructive. But these aberrations were only incidental. In fact, powers arose in the sciences themselves that defeated both aberrations, in that knowledge, as knowledge purified itself.

For, when in the sciences too much was asserted for which there was no proof, when comprehensive theories were all too confidently put forward as absolute knowledge of reality, when too much was accepted as self-evident without examination (for example, the basic idea of nature as a mechanism, or many question-begging theories such as the doctrine that the necessity of historical events can be known, and so on), bad philosophy reappeared in the sciences in even worse form. But— and this was magnificent and exalting—criticism still existed and was still at work in science itself: not the endless round of philosophical polemic that never leads to any agreement, but the effective, step-by-step criticism that determines the truth for everyone. This criticism destroyed illusions in order to grasp the really knowable in greater purity.