Darshan Singh Maini - Philosophical Anthropology. 5-Mittal Publications NEW DELHI! 10059 (India) (2000)

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Encyclopaedia of
Anthropology
Vol.5. Philosophical Anthropology
Darshan Singh Maini
1
\
The Encyclopaedia of Anthropol
ogy in seven volumes deals with
the nature and position of Anthro
pology as a subject among vari
ous fields like culture, social,
political, cognitive, genetic,
philosophy and peace etc. It ex
plains its development, theoreti
cal orientation and methods, its
social and cultural backgrounds,
fundamental concepts, civilisation,
kinship system etc.
The science of anthropology grows
as members of previously non-par
ticipating cultures come to share
in the gathering and interpreta
tion of data, the building theory .
We learn objectivity by studying
other peoples gain insight by the
studies that others make of us and
achieve responsibility by applying
the results of our rapidly chang
ing, evolving world. Each volumes
in this encyclopaedia brings to
gether significant contributions
with some aspect of a science that
is increasingly complex, vital and
related to the future.
Rs. 700 (per vol.)

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Y
f-
PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Thi s One
THE EDITOR
Darshan Singh Maini is professor of Anthropology in Montreal. He received his
Ph.D from Yale University and has carried out archaeological research in Europe.
His current interests embrace the comparative study of ancient civilizations and the
history of archaeology.
Professor Maini has received various awards including the Caxton Contemporary
Archaeology for his sustained contributions to the social sciences.
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DnRSHnN Singh Maini
Mittal Publications
NEW DELHI! 10059 [India]
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Preface
The Encyclopaedia of Anthropology deals with the nature

and position of Anthropology as a subject among various
fields like culture, social, political, cognitive, genetic,
philosophy and peace etc. It explains its development,
theoretical orientation and methods, its social and
cultural background, fundamental concepts, civilization,
kinship system, etc.
Anthropology is both science and history. Therefore,
the strict history-or-science dichotomy is inapplicable to
anthropology. Scientific-nomothetic explanations cannot
be reduced to historical explanations as the latter, cannot
be reduced to the former. Any conclusion regarding the
impossibility of scientific-nomothetic anthropology is
simply a non sequitur because such a kind of
anthropology is possible, at least in principle, if not in
practice. The old bias in anthropology towards the study
of the rural and powerless is now being corrected, and
work is undertaken on elites and politicians as well as
those whom they lead. Leadership and power in the
Third World rest with social groups that are at once
indigenous and in a number of cases alienated firom
those over whom they preside.
The science of anthropology grows as members of
previously non-participating cultures come to share in
the gathering and interpretation of data, the building
theory. We learn objectivity by studying other peoples,
vi Preface
gain insight by the studies that others make of us and

achieve responsibility by applying the results of our
rapidly changing, evolving world. Each volumes in this
encyclopaedia brings together significant contributions
with some aspect of a science that is increasingly
complex, vital and related to the future.
Editor
Contents
Preface v
1. Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology 1
2. Philosophical Anthropology and the
Humanities 51
3. Existentialism 91
4. Michael Polanyi 120
5. Debate on Behaviour 130
6. Development of Daseinanalysis 138
7. Erwin Straus 151
8. Edmund Husserl 205
9. Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel 256
10. Maurice Merleau-Ponty 265
Index . 290
1
Introduction to Philosophical
Anthropology
We all know that we find ourselves faced with such

questions of existence and that these are real questions.
We are also aware that similar questions cannot be
avoided when we are responding to works of art and
other records of experience such as case-histories, or
accounts of crimes, suicides or accidents. If we read a
philosopher such as Roger Poole in Towards Deep
Subjectivity, we may learn, to our satisfaction, that we
have a 'fight' to a 'philosophical space': indeed, we have
an obligation to be philosophical, while the philosophers
have a responsibility to us, to mankind—an attitude we
shall find taken up emphatically by Edmund Husserl.
Marcel says it would be wrong to imagine that there
is anything like a dividing wall separating the
philosopher and the non-philosopher:
There really never has been such a wall, but today it
is especially difficult to see how any line of
demarcation, since literature—what everybody reads
or is supposed to be reading—is so full of
philosophical thought.
Moreover, he declares
Every thinking person, especially in our time, has at
least moments where he enjoys an elementary
philosophical experience...
This experience appears as a kind of vibration in the
presence of those great and mysterious realities
2 Philosophical Anthropology
which give all human life its concrete structure: love,

death, the birth of an infant and the like. There is no
doubt in my mind that every personally felt emotion
resulting from contact with such realities is like the
embryo of philosophical experience.
This, it will be clear to the English reader, represents a
different perspective of philosophy from that which
largely obtains in centres where philosophy is taught and
practised in Britain: it has the air of what we in our
insular way call 'Continental philosophy'. Gabriel insists
for example, on 'personal involvement': on the first page
of his book he says:
philosophy, like art or poetry, rests on a foundation
of personal involvement, or, to use a more
profoundly meaningful expression, it has its source
of its essential finality, has to be considered as a
personal response to a call.
There are two problems which perhaps we have
encountered over philosophy. Firstly, it can degenerate
into a caricature of itself. Secondly, it may seek to limit
itself to a very narrow discipline, by which it is possible
to avoid all the problems of life to which Marcel points—
by making them out to seem meaningless questions, by
treating them solely as problems of language and logic. I
thought I had come across such a caricature, when I
encountered a note in a publisher's catalogue, describing
a book by Peter Unger, A Case for Scepticism:
The author argues for this view that, not only can
nothing ever be known, but no one can every have
any reason at all for anything. A consequence of this
is that we cannot have realistic emotional ties to
anything; no one can ever be happy or sad about
anything. Finally, he argues that no one can ever
believe, or even say, that anything is the case.
One's response can only be to strike one's own breast
and declare, T refute it thus', and assert that such
Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology 3
detachment from common sense could only be spun in

the attenuated atmosphere of a philosopher's study.
The other form of caricature, which Marcel discusses,
is the treatment of philosophy as something that can be
displayed in an examination:
There is always the unfortunate possibility that the
teacher who has the job of getting a student ready
for his final comprehensive examinations will follow
the lead of his colleagues in history and the natural
sciences, simply preparing the initiate to give
answers to the written or oral questions he will have
to face. The frightful word 'cramming' expresses
admirably this sort of intellectual stuffing, which is
not only unsympathetic to philosophy but exactly its
contrary.
The genuine philosophical relationship, declares Marcel,
as Plato not only described it but lived it for all time, is
that of 'a flame awakening a flame'.
We may take a look at academic philosophy by
examining the description of the discipline from a
characteristic academic syllabus:
As philosophy is a subject which is not commonly
taught in schools, there is a very widespread
misunderstanding of what it is about. The popular
view of a philosopher as a man who has or pretends
to have special knowledge of and insight into the
'great problems' of mankind and of the meaning of
'life' is entirely false. His task is much more modest.
A philosopher is someone who tries to solve the
problems that men are presented with by rational
means and who is committed to reason and not to
'intuition', superstition, faith or mysticism. Many of
the problems of mankind (how to prevent or cure
cancer, for example, or how to harness nuclear
energy) are solvable by the understanding of the
workings of nature. These are the domain of the
natural scientist and not of the philosopher.
However, it is not possible to solve all problems by

the methods of science and those that are left over—
debated questions about morality, politics, religion,
truth, values, about the range of human knowledge
and its limits — all of these are the concern of
philosophy. It is the task of the student of
philosophy to examine them critically and to see
what rationally acceptable answers can be given. In
this task, it is of course necessary to study the
writings of previous philosophers from Greek times
to the present day. But the student of philosophy
studies these in a critical and not a reverential spirit.
The fact that a so-called 'great thinker' has put
forward a particular theory is not a ground for
taking the doctrine as true. Only those doctrines that
can stand up to critical examination are worth any
consideration. It does not matter who propounds the
doctrine. The basic of criticism in philosophy is
formal logic. Formal logic is to philosophy (and
indeed to all correct thinking on any subject) what
mathematics is to physics. It is clear that in a subject
which consists largely in the examination and
reconstruction of arguments (about moral questions,
about truth, about politics, about knowledge and so
on) expertise in the techniques of assessing
arguments is crucial. To. know what philosophers of
the past have said about moral conduct, for example,
does not make a student of philosophy. But to
understand what is involved logically in the moral
judgement of conduct, and to assess the reasoning of
past or present moralists by the rules of logic is to be
a student of moral philosophy.
There are two aspects of the first paragraph of this which
raise serious questions. For one thing, the 'popular view
of a philosopher' is perhaps more just than that of the
university philosophy department: there have been great
philosophers, and their efforts are worthy of respect. As
E.W.F. Tomlin has put it,
So long as our civilisation lasts, the names of
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas ... will

be remembered with undiminished and perhaps
increasing veneration. However lacking in formal
instruction, the reader who turns his attention to the
lives and works of the great philosophers comes into
possession of that which will last him all his life:
faith in the ability of the human mind to grasp, in
however fragmentary and fugitive a way, the essence
and infinite variety of reality and inspiration from
(their) struggles.
Tomlin quotes Whitehead as seeing the philosophers as
'individually powerless but ultimately rulers of the
world'. Marcel tells us that such a distinguished
philosopher as Martin Heidegger 'seems to be engaged in
a perpetual dialogue with the philosophers that preceded
him: not all of them of course, but with those he feels
close to—the great pre-Socratics, Plato and Aristotle, and
among the modems, mainly Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche'.
Heidegger's method, he has himself explained, consisted
precisely in clarifying his own thought through the
encounter with great philosophers he had studied
carefully. This does not seem to be an encounter
conducted in the same spirit as the approach indicated in
the above syllabus. Moreover, the response Tomlin points
to is one that is conceived in different terms from the
definition in that syllabus: in terms of rationally acceptable
answers.
'Critical examination' says our syllabus is to be
conducted in such terms, and the discipline is to be
extremely narrow: 'the basis of criticism in philosophy is
formal logic', and this is used in 'the examination and
reconstruction of arguments' . Philosophy is defined as the
attempt to 'understand what is involved logically in the
moral judgement of conduct' and the basis of the work is
to be 'reasoning', as a form of logic which is to
philosophy as mathematics is to physics.
In the light of this definition of philosophy, there

would be no room for Coleridge or Kierkegaard, Jesus or
St. Augustine to be considered philosophers. In Socrates
we find a belief that knowledge promotes virtue, that
truth, beauty an goodness are absolute values, that
reflection is superior to passion, and that there are things
that are fight and decent. None of these would stand up
to the kind of analysis proposed in the university syllabus
above. In Plato's Meno we find a recognition that 'how we
know' is a mystery that no philosophers have yet solved,
yet we know that we know: this problem is not one that
lends itself to the kind of narrow exploration proposed in
terms of 'reasoning' in that way of formal logic.
Undoubtedly, the late musical compositions of Gustav
Mahler are profoundly philosophical works: yet the great
perplexities, as the question, 'Must it be so?', followed by
the answer, 'It must be so!', sighed with such
overwhelming power in the music, do not lend
themselves to analysis of the philosophical kind defined
in the academic syllabus quoted. Does this then mean
that these aspects of philosophical exploration, evidently
related to our problems of being, are mere nonsense, or
beyond the powers of the mind to examine? Or does this
mean that 'philosophy' here has been defined as a narrow
sophistry, which has turned tail on its proper task?
'What can be expected of Philosophy?' is the title of
Marcel's first chapter. The history of philosophical
doctrines, he declares, is largely the history of the inner
demands of the human spirit. He sets the task of the
philosopher today to counteract the danger of
dehumanization, and to locate certain secret powers in
the human being: 'radiations of being'. His critics, he
says, might ask him, 'Aren't you hiding behind an empty
abstraction devoid of all concrete meaning?' He replied
that being is really the very opposite of abstraction.
Marcel has taken up a specific position in today's
world. In our lives we are treated in many ways he

declared very largely as if we were only a 'bundle of
instincts', or as if we were only the sum of our functions.
In consequence we tend to think of people in terms of
their functions—'the ticket-collector' for example—and so
we tend to become 'functional man'. This functional man
must be housed, fed and employed—and then his organic
needs demand that he is exercised, given medical
servicing, and a quantity of pleasure to maintain his
'functions'.
This functionalized world produces in us a 'stifling
impression of sadness':
The hospital plays the part of the inspection bench or
the repair shop. And it is from this same standpoint
of function that such essential problems as birth
control will be examined ... As for death, it becomes,
objectively and functionally, the scrapping of what
has ceased to be of use and must be written off as
total loss.
We live as if 'submerged by our functions', and so we
feel a deep unease, knowing that there is in this:
Some appalling mistake, some ghastly
misinterpretation, implanted in defenceless minds by
an increasingly inhuman social order and an equally
inhuman philosophy (for if the philosophy has
prepared the way for the order, the order has also
shaped the philosophy).
Here the word 'philosophy' has taken on a different
meaning. It no longer refers to the discussion of
meanings as the logical positivists discuss it, language
divorced from persons and their world. Marcel was a
Christian existentialist philosopher who was concerned
with the 'philosophy of being' —with problems of
experience, freedom, and the creativity of man. When he
uses the word philosophy he uses it in the old sense of 'a
philosophy of life' and a philosophy of man, that is, a
philosophical anthropology.
As we shall see, 'continental' philosophy offers an

escape from the limitations indicated by the academic
philosophy syllabus just quoted above. It is not a lapse
into irrationality to suggest that there is a realm we may
call the trans-rational — that kind of knowledge and
awareness which is not only independent of reason but
goes beyond it. There is, as Michael Polanyi has made
clear, 'another' way of knowing, and, indeed, all knowing
including science depends upon it. We may call it
intuitive intelligence, the 'intuitive grasp of the living
concrete', the product of 'the spirit of love'. We might call
it the 'female' way of knowing. We experience this
intuitive mode of philosophizing when we listen to the
music of Mozart, or look at the paintings of Leonardo da
Vinci, or Manet, or read Shakespeare. Indeed, come to
think of it, we experience it reading Nietzsche, or Pascal,
or St. Augustine.
In the light of the academic syllabus above, it is not
difficult to see how metaphysical speculation has come to
be virtually prohibited to philosophy. Indeed, there is
something in its tone which reminds us of the situation
that developed more or less between the two world wars,
in which philosophy nearly abolished itself. In his
'postlude' to his book The Western Philosophers, E.W.F.
Tomlin reports that the sceptical philosophers in these
days went so far as to instruct their students in
denouncing their own subject as a fraud. It was simply
the result of a disease of language. For such iconoclasts
there was only one justification for philosophy, meanly,
that philosophy itself should be reduced to logic, which
in turn should confine itself to the analysis of the
meaning of ordinary propositions about- matters of fact.
It was assumed that all propositions about the world, or
about anything else for that matter, that failed to stand
up to a specialized technique of dissection were
nonsensical. To be a philosopher you had to be a member
of this club, and you had to accept a certain language and

a certain specialist mode of approach to argument which
was quite separate from the language of normal
discourse. This separation of philosophy from normal
living and thinking, Tomlin believes, was vicious.
Philosophy, Tomlin insists, matters not because it is a
specialism but because it is a state of mind. If philosophy
abrogates its tasks of concerning itself with the good and
with truth, then the impulse that sustains civilization
itself could be threatened. If philosophy comes to imply
that those human values upon which it rests cannot be
said to exist, then civilization itself could come to seem
not to matter.
As A.N. Whitehead pointed out, this problem
originated with Descartes's dualism, his bifurcation of
Nature between the subjective (including mind and
secondary qualities) and the objective (that which is
measurable by mathematics and found in terms of
'primary' qualities). The triumph of this way of thinking
does not stop at assuming that such elements as colour
and beauty are untrustworthy. Truth and goodness, in
the same way, vanish into 'the eye of the beholder',
becoming 'subjective' in a pejorative sense and so
untrustworthy. Since 'secondary' qualities become unreal,
so do values, and thus civilization and culture become
non-realities. In Process and Reality Whitehead sought to
overcome this split by an analysis that now seems close
to those of 'continental' and phenomenological
philosophies. He analysed what he called the 'society' of
a-man-seeing-a-rose, a process that belongs neither to the
subjective nor to the objective, but is a living unity in
experience. Here was one indigenous attempt to put the
experiencing T back into the world.
Another Western philosopher who tried to overcome
the crisis was R.G. Collingwood. He sought to
demonstrate how philosophy can be of use—this being
possible —by abandoning the long servitude of

philosophy since the scientific revolution of the
seventeenth century to the methods of natural science.
Collingwood sought to bring philosophy into a historical
perspective again, while also seeking to restore teleology.
Apart from a few thinkers of this kind, however,
British philosophy has been characterized in this century
largely by its sophistry. The great philosophers of the
past, a Tomlin points out, have been conspicuous for their
open-mindedness. The analytical and positivistic
philosophers by contrast have been characterized by the
impression they have given that anyone outside their
methods and procedures is not a member of the
profession, not a philosopher, and cannot say anything
valid.
Because of this confident exclusiveness, in the whole
history of existentialism and phenomenology, there is one
shameful sterile and lifeless desert—this country. As
Herbert Spiegelberg points out, phenomenology, along
with existentialism, has less philosophical status in
Britain than in any other country outside Soviet Russia.
Phenomenology had no spokesman in either Oxford or
Cambridge, and few sympathizers elsewhere.
Spiegelberg points out that when phenomenology is
mentioned it is often with 'an animus which reveals that
there is more than sheer indifference behind the present
low ebb of its affairs'. Strangely enough, one of the most
hostile of British philosophers, Gilbert Ryle, once
recognized the efforts of some of the phenomenologists.
Of Heidegger he said:
I have nothing but admiration for his special
undertaking and for such of his achievements in it as
I can follow ... He shows himself to be a thinker of
real importance by the immense subtlety and
searchingness of his examination of consciousness,
by the boldness and originality of his methods and
conclusions, and by the unflagging energy with

which he tries to think beyond the stock categories of
orthodox philosophy and psychology.
But the rest of the review was full of severe stricture
and negative conclusions. Ryle concluded:
it is my personal opinion that qua First Philosophy
Phenomenology is at present heading for bankruptcy
and disaster and win end either in self-ruinous
Subjectivism or in a windy Mysticism ... I hazard this
opinion with humility and reservations, since I am
well aware how far I have fallen short of
understanding this difficult work.
This prophesy came true of German phenomenology of
the thirties, while Husserl's radicalized subjectivism
failed to produce the promised final system. As will
become apparent, there is a sense in which the 'old'
existentialism, as in the fashionable cult of Sartre, came to
a dead end, but, even so, this hardly justifies the kind of
animus displayed by Ryle in Philosophy magazine in 1946,
when he wrote of Husserl:
I do not expect that even the corporate zeal of the
International Phenomenological Institute [sic!] will
succeed in winning for Husserl's idea such of a
vogue in the English speaking world ... In short
Phenomenology was, from its birth, a bore. Its
over-solemnity of manner more than its equivocal
lineage will secure that its lofty claims are ignored.
Yet he said 'an off-shoot of Phenomenology known as
Existentialism ... may well be smuggled overseas in
someone's warming pan', but Martin Heidegger's 'graft
upon his master's former stock is not unlikely before long
to be adorning Anglo-Saxon gardens'. Besides this
animus-impelled dismissal, there is also the fact that one
dominant figure in English analytical philosophy,
Ludwig Wittgenstein, ignored phenomenology, though in
fact some say there may be a kind of unconscious
rapprochement between his later philosophy and

descriptive phenomenology.
The difficulties are not those of difficulties of
language or translation. There are clearly metaphysical
obstacles, and there is a 'pathology' of philosophy, just as
there is a 'pathology' of science. Merleau-Ponty, Straus,
and the phenomenologists, even Sartre in his perverse
way, confront the living mystery in the body, love, being
and death: as Poole puts it, 'The fact that we exist in
bodies of flesh and blood, and the fact that we think in
loops of intellection which vanish the moment they are
thought.'
Analytical philosophy could even be said to be a
defence against such problems. Marjorie Grene quotes
A.L. Melden in Free Action, who denies one can seek the
characteristics of a person or of an action as such, 'One
can say that one wants to know what these are, but one
can also bark at the moon/. Austin and Ryle, she says,
and philosophers like them, habitually approach
philosophical problems, only to turn their backs on them
as they came within range, 'Don't shoot when you see the
whites of their eyes!' seems to be these writers' tactics.
Kant, she declares has told us that the motives to such
speculation are inescapable, even if hopeless. But 'some
of us' not only want to pursue them and 'bark at the
moon'. We recognize that the still-powerful Behaviourist-
positivist position is full of 'conceptual and moral
inadequacies' and that we ought to seek in fundamental
reflection, to renew speculative daring and to justify the
beliefs about man and his freedom and dignity which we
continue to hold outside the psychological laboratory. To
shirk these issues is to fail to sustain the telos which
Husserl found in Greek thought towards the open pursuit
of truth. Erwin Strauss's work, for example, is a sound,
solid and richly fruitful prologue to the new, urgently
needed metaphysics, which must undertake a revisionary

and not a merely descriptive task. Straus has achieved an
international status. However his recovery and
rehabilitation of the phenomenal world of the senses in
their 'pathic' as well as in their 'gnostic' aspects has not
had the effect it should have had. By this is meant that
Straus shows how the living creature as subject is
involved in sensing, undergoing as well as doing (and in
this sense pathic). This view challenges the whole gnostic
view, based on 'scientific' approaches that adhere to the
Gallilean-Cartesian tradition, which asserts that the
senses are merely tools of knowledge and poor ones at
that. There is sensing as a mode of being-in-the-world,
and when it comes to man he is more than a mere
organism—he is a being with an T not tied to his body or
to any particular fixed location within it.
The first aspect of the new revolution in thought the
new philosophical anthropology which we must grasp is
that it deals with those questions that are the proper
subject of philosophy in the original sense. In one of his
masterly surveys of the various movements in this field,
Spiegelberg quotes, in his essay on Ludwig Binswanger, a
motto from Kierkegaard, 'Above all, let us hold fast on
what it means to be a man'. The essay to which this was
taken by Binswanger for a motto was published in 1930.
Its title was 'Dream and Existence' and it represented a
new breakthrough between phenomenology and
psychiatry. In it the author set out to try to develop a
'phenomenology of love' and a humanistic psychiatry
which could understand man in terms of health as well
as sickness.
There can be no question of Binswanger's intellectual
respectability: he was awarded the International
Kraepelin medal in 1956 and has received professional
honours from Spain, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and
France. He is only one figure in the widespread
movement that Spiegelberg traces and of which I gave a

historical survey in Education and Philosophical
Anthropology. Yet this movement so far has largely failed
to penetrate English thought. Even the series 'Studies in
Existentialism and Phenomenology' published by
Tavistock Press is now, I gather, 'defunct', and all the
books are out of print. In America, the marvellous
enterprise in this field by Northwestern University Press
has been through many difficulties, and even
Binswanger's Being-in-the-World is now out of print. In
the universities 'objective' reductionist psychology and
analytical philosophy dominate and tend to resist
attention to phenomenological disciplines.
Has this movement failed, then? The answer is, I
believe, that it has not yet begun; in books such as
Lomas's True and False Experience and Poole's Towards
Deep Subjectivity we find beginnings in Britain of a new
way of thinking along these lines, in which the work of
the older phenomenologists and 'new' existentialists is
being absorbed and interpreted at last for the Humanities,
and for training in medical care.
One of the primary difficulties is that of knowing
what to call ihe disciplines in which we are involved.
Binswanger, as Spiegelberg points out, did not refuse the
phenomenological label—but it did not accurately
describe the whole range of his interests. If we call his
contribution Daseinsanalysis, which was the title adopted
by Binswanger himself in the forties we have to recognize
that it is virtually untranslatable. Binswanger was
thinking of the term 'phenomenological anthropology',
which is perhaps less mystifying, but still daunting. This
discipline was to concern itself not with the essence of
man as a whole, but with phenomenological experience—
that is, 'how human Dasein is concretely experienced'. As
we proceed we shall have to engage with many puzzling
terms, such as Dasein itself, and the whole problem is that
of grasping what kind of philosophical alternative is

offered from this region of 'continental philosophy'.
Poole gives what he believes to be some of the 'major
structures' of subjective thinking:
Personal commitment, ethical concern, desire to treat
of the totality, necessity of taking account of the
perspectival variation and distortion, necessity of
taking account of variations in operative criteria, the
use of strange or unquantifiable collocations of
evidence of information (such as sheaves and
profiles), comparison, interrelation, description, as
well as sympathy, empathy and antipathy. These
tools are no doubt a strange lot, but in my view they
have a chance of dealing with complex problems in a
way that objective tools do not.
While here Poole seems almost apologetic on behalf of
these 'strange' disciplines, there is no need to be, since
many of them are being used even when those using
them are not aware of the implications: this is surely true
of those studying animal behaviour out in the field, for
example.
The truth is that everyone, scientists included, are
continually making appraisals of significance, and acting on
the basis of such appraisals. Meanwhile the empirical
procedures that science adopts, as Russell's exposure of
the inadequacy of induction theory shows, are
philosophically inadequate in the sense that they cannot
on their own principles account for themselves.
'Empiricism followed through to its own principles leads
to its own demonstration of its own inadequacy.'
Hume declared his understanding inadequate to the
task of solving the problem of giving an adequate account
of mind or person. It has been the task of recent
developments in philosophy to 'reflect afresh on the
character of human knowledge, and in particular of the
mind as knower'. However, this cannot be done within
the framework which Hume's principles allow.
It will be obvious that what is required is the

re-introduction into the picture of man of those
dimensions that scientific method has excluded. What are
these? Here we may go back even to Galileo. In a polemic
The Assayer Galileo reviles the unhappy Sarsi for quoting
poetry at him, since it was an irrelevant answer to a
scientific argument, but the grounds of his objection are
that 'nature takes no delight in poetry':
Fables and fictions are in a way essential to poetry,
which could not exist without them, while any sort
of falsehood is so abhprrent to nature that it is as
absent there as darkness is in the light.
This says Grene, is the perspective of modem objectivism.
By contrast with the 'mathematical language' of an
impersonal reason, poetry came to see tale-telling, at best
entertainment and invention, at worst obscurity and
untruth.
In this bare mathematical basis of nature there is
truth: all else is illusion Yet that 'all else' includes the
very roots of our being, and we forget them at our
peril.
Elsewhere Grene examined how Descartes's concept of
knowing depends upon a falsification of how we
perceive and learn, and on a separation of the knowing
mind from the whole being: and also from his
'revelation', thrust into a religion compartment to isolate
it from scientific attention. Hume's whole concept of the
person as an association of impressions and habits
derived from Descartes's principles represented a
schizoid separation of a reasonable automation from
passion, creativity and what Lawrence called 'the dark
gods'—indeed from the human being. When we examine
the Cartesian-Humean perspective in the philosophical
tradition we find that, when pressed hard, scientific
induction, empiricism, cannot account for itself, except by
gesturing towards something 'other' as the basis for its
evaluation of truth. R.B. Braithwaite virtually confesses

that there is a sense of values derived from an 'ought'
that ought not to be there.
'All that is left out' by Cartesian-Humean scientific
philosophy is, in fact, the area of 'all else': and in the light
of this analysis, it is science itself that begins to look
inadequate—certainly less than 'the sole medium of truth
and light'. This brings us to the centre of the pressing, if
not yet clearly realized, contemporary dilemma. At the
end of all empirical investigation, the questions of
interpretation remain—the final questions that are not
only questions of the interpretation of data, but, as with
the Newtonian universe, questions of inter-relation and
system which arise virtually before the data is acquired.
Is the universe, as we look at it, utterly without value
and meaning, since our consciousness emerged in some
way out of it to look at itself and find meaning in it?
These ultimate questions empiricism cannot tackle,
and its own methods in fact depend upon elements
excluded from its view of the world. It is these 'tacit'
elements and other aspects of science (such as its faith in
the pursuit of truth) which have been investigated by
Michael Polanyi.
In the new development of thought we are discussing
we find scientists who not only re-discover 'secondary
qualities' but the wholeness of man in whom knowledge
resides. Discussing the work of Adolf Portmann. Grene
summarises his concept of a 'life world'. There is of
course the 'world of science' the articulate discipline in
which we live, at whatever level; but there is also another
life world:
The world in which, from infancy, we come to live,
and the human world shared by all members, of all
cultures, does of course include the surface of experience,
the colours, the sounds, the rhythm of movement that
confront us on all sides. But it includes also our feelings,

our desires, our dreams, the creative aspirations of artists,
the vision of saints and prophets, even the delusions of
the insane.
After the scientific revolution following the great
seventeenth century achievements, the universe then
consisted only of disparate objects in space, which man
could observe and measure, but to which he could give
no coherent order. His existence consisted of the
registering of sense impressions which he could not trust,
and the source of any principles he brought to bear on his
data obtained by mensuration could not be explained.
The data was often won by painstaking faith and effort.
However, empiricism could give no adequate explanation
of the source of the principles by which the selection or
interpretation of data was made, since it was not based
on experience. If the choices between possible
interpretations in science are ethical, then there is nothing
on which to base the choices, except the idea of the 'sort
of society we want'; and here we encounter an ought. So
what is this to be based on, if God is dead? Or if we
discount the vision of saint and poets as mere delusions,
on what are values, goals and the sense of meaning to be
based?
The effects of this compartmentalization and
alienation in science has been, over the centuries, to make
the pursuit of the meaning of life, and the ontology of
being, seem an 'unreal' or 'inauthentic' activity. The effect
on the churches has been disastrous. All they can hope to
do is in some way to modify the outcome of science and
applied science—as (today) by reminding man made rich
by technology of his duty to the 'undeveloped
countries'—without being able to impinge in any real
way on the 'march' of science. The much more radical
question is to whether man should regard his world as
the scientist and technologist do is by no means accepted

as the business of the church. Man now uses science to
put into practice a generally hedonistic philosophy of life:
it is by a simple pragmatism that we justify abortion for
instance. How shall we deal with problems such as
euthanasia? Or the genetic possibility of seeking to
determine sex before birth? The church either shrinks
from these subjects or regards them as inevitable
consequences of scientific advancement—and finds itself
taking the mechanistic model of life as fact. On what
other source of values can we rely?
The effects of the empirical tradition of 'scientific
method' and the philosophical movement to which it
belongs is deeply nihilistic, because it has paralysed the
relationship between man and his universe, and has led
to a radical alienation of man from his world and himself.
It is this paralysis and this estrangement that the whole
existentialist—phenomenological movement is trying to
heal. It should be clear from our many ecological
problems that we urgently need to restore man's sense of
at-one-ness with the world—a restoration that could
generate a new sense of moral responsibility to 'life' that
might overcome the nihilism to which the scientific
revolution has led.
Of course, it is the area of psychiatry in which this
healing work is professionally conducted as a practice,
and significantly it is here that existentialism has. made
big strides. So one more useful introduction to the
problem in general terms is the work of Viktor Frankl,
who held Freud's old chair at Vienna as Professor of
Psychiatry. Frankl's existentialism grew out of his
experiences of the Nazi concentration camps which he
saw as having been created by nihilism. He writes of how
people have come to feel life is meaningless because:
Nihilism has held a distorting mirror with a
distorted image in front of our eyes, according to
which they seemed to be either an automation of

reflexes, a bundle of drives, a psychic mechanism, a
plaything of external circumstances, or internal
economic environment. I call this sort of nihilism
'homunculism' for it misinterprets and misunder
stands man as a mere product 'nothing but' the
resultant of a parallelogram or inner drives and
outer forces.
What is missing from this picture is the capacity for
'option choice ... dedication to a higher goal and the like'.
Under the influence of this model 'man becomes more
and more like the image of the man he has been taught
about'—a point that is confirmed by Marcel's remarks:
Apart from ... academic and theoretical nihilism
there is also a practical, as it were, 'living' nihilism:
there are people who consider their own lives
meaningless, who can see no meaning in their
personal existence and therefore think it valueless.
Frankl expanded his views in more detail at the famous
Alpbach seminar, held by Arthur Koestler and J.R.
Smithies in 1966. He raises the central question that
emerges from the dilemma of the 'scientific world view'
on Newtonian-Cartesian-Humean principles. Against a
model of man broken down into functions and fragments
Frankl exerts a plea for wholeness:
We are challenged by the question how to maintain
or to restore a concept of man that does justice to the
humanness of man and more specifically to the
one-ness of the human person—in the face of the
scattered data, facts and findings as they are
furnished by a thoroughly compartmentalised
science.
The existentialist impulse to restore wholeness to man,
healing the Cartesian divisions and the Humean
fragmentation, is no easy task. As Marcel says
So I am inevitably forced to ask: Who am I - I who
question being? How am I qualified to begin this

investigation? If I do not exist, how can I succeed in
it? And if I do exist, how can I be sure of this fact?
Marcel declares that, contrary to common opinion, he
does not believe that on this plane the cogito can help us
at all.
Whatever Descartes may have thought of it himself,
the only certainty with which it provides us concerns
only the epistemological subject an organ of objective
cognition ... the cogito merely guards the threshold of
objective validity, and that is strictly all; this is
proved by the indeterminate character of the /.
We have seen how Grene emphasizes this indeterminate
nature of the self. 'Is it not a mistake, asks Marcel, to
divide the question "Who am I?" from the ontological
"problem" taken as a whole ... To raise the ontological
problem is to raise the question of being as a whole and
oneself seen as a totality'. 'The I am is, to my mind, a
global statement which it is impossible to break down
into its component parts.' Existentialism is thus
concerned with the 'science of being' but recognizes the
extreme difficulty of giving such an account of existence,
not least because one clement is creativity and one's
involvement as a being in knowing. As Marcel puts it:
To sum up our reflections at this point, we find that
we are dealing with an urge towards an
affirmation—yet an affirmation which it seems
impossible to make, since it is not until it has been
made that I can regard myself as qualified to make
it. It should be noted that this difficulty never arises
at a time when I am actually faced with a problem to
be solved. In such a case I work on the data, but
everything leads me to believe that I need not take
into account the / who is at work—it is a factor
which is a presupposed and nothing more. Here, on
the contrary, what I would call the ontological status
of the investigator assumes a decisive importance.
This kind of problem, of the participation of the knower

in knowing, is (as we have seen) a major preoccupation
of Polanyi. When we turn to Husserl we shall find a new
emphasis on the inner reality of the T who is involved in
perceiving the world, and a recognition that, if we are to
give an adequate account of being, we must study
consciousness itself.
This brings us to the need to study meaning—and in
doing so, existentialism (and phenomenology, or
phenomenological existentialism) restores the dimension
of man's moral being, so seriously lost in accounts of man
derived from natural scientism.
As Ernest Cassirer points out, the principal aim of all
the theories has been to prove the unity and homogeneity
of human nature. However, if we examine the
explanations which these theories were designed to give,
the unity of human nature appears extremely doubtful:
Every philosopher believes he has found the
mainspring and master faculty ... But ... all the
explanations differ widely from, and contradict, one
another. Each individual thinker gives us his own
picture of human nature. All these philosophers are
determined empiricists: they would show us the facts
and nothing but the facts. But their interpretation of
the empirical evidence contains from the very outset
an arbitrary assumption ... Nietzsche proclaims the
will to power, Freud signalises the sexual instinct,
Marx enthrones the economic instinct. Each theory
becomes a Procrustean bed on which the empirical
facts are stretched to fit a preconceived pattern.
Owing to this development our modem theory of
man lost its intellectual centre. We acquired instead a
complete anarchy of thought ... Theologians,
scientists, politicians, sociologists, biologists,
psychologists, ethnologists, economists all
approached the problem from their own viewpoint ...
this antagonism of ideas is not merely a grave
theoretical problem but an imminent threat to the

whole extent of our ethical and cultural life.
Cassirer quotes Scheler, 'we no longer possess any clear
and consistent idea of man'. While this is so, the
debasement of man by his reduction to a functional
organism continues—as in our culture today, and we
have no standard by which to judge the effect on our
ethical life.
If we examine the prospectus of any university, we
find it is true, as Ernest Cassirer goes on to say, that
psychology, ethnology, anthropology and history have
amassed an astoundingly rich and constantly increasing
body of facts, and that our technical instruments for
observation and experimentation have been immensely
improved, and our analyses have become sharper and
more penetrating. Yet the material cannot be organized,
'our wealth of facts is not necessarily a wealth of
thoughts' — the data does not provide its own
interpretation so:
Unless we succeed in finding a clue of Ariadne to
lead us out of this labyrinth we can have no general
insight into the general character of human culture;
we shall remain lost in a mass of disintegrated data
which seem to lack all conceptual unity.
Cassirer goes on to title his next chapter 'A Clue to the
Nature of Man; the Symbol', and he begins with a
discussion of a philosophical biologist, Johannes von
Uexkull. Using his concepts and terminology, Cassirer
suggests that in looking at the human world we find a
new characteristic which appears to be the distinctive
mark of human life. Man's functional circle is not only
quantitatively enlarged —it has also undergone a
qualitative change:
Between the receptor system and the effector system,
which are to be found in all animal species, we find
in man a third link which we may describe as the

symbolic system ... As compared with the other
animals man lives not merely in a broader reality; he
lives, so to speak, in a new dimension of reality.
Instead of defining man as an animal rationale, Cassirer
concludes, we should define him as an animal
symbolicum. By so doing we can designate his specific
difference, and we can understand the new way open to
man—the way to civilization.
The post-Kantian philosopher like Cassirer then,
developing a philosophical anthropology, is still an
empiricist, looking at the facts of man's existence.
However, his empiricism includes attention to signs,
symbols, man's symbolic imagination and intelligence,
and the 'ideal world' which is 'opened to him from
different sides from religion, art, philosophy, science'.
This view, of course, has been developed by Cassirer's
follower. Susanne Langer, in her Philosophy in a New Key,
declares that it is the power of making symbols which
makes man lord of the earth. Our interest in the mind has
shifted from the acquisition of experience, the domain of
sense, to the uses of sense-data, the realism of conception
and expression. She quotes A.D. Ritchie, who asserts in
The Natural History of the Mind, 'The essential act of
though is symbolisation'. She herself declares that she
believes that there is a 'primary need in man, which other
creatures probably do not have, and which actuates all
his apparently unzoological aims, his wistful fancies, his
consciousness of value, his utterly impractical
enthusiasms, and his awareness of a "Beyond" filled with
holiness. This basic need ... is the need of
"symbolisation"? Yet this supposes a subjective
experience which needs to be symbolized and demands
an existential philosophy.
Those of, us who concern ourselves with the
Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology "25
Humanities do so because we believe that our work has a

value to human civilization, which must in the end mean
to each man's individual existence. Moreover, we believe
that, in open Socratic dialogue, more and more of truth
may emerge. However the truths that we seek are of the
subjective realm as well as of the outer world of reality,
such as is explored by 'objective' disciplines.
The success of the scientific revolution has led us to
feel that the 'objective' study of reality has a validity
which 'subjective' explorations do not have, since so
many of the subjects the latter kind of discipline deals
with seem 'unreal'. The word 'subjective' has even come
to have a pejorative sense. Yet, as we shall see, Edmund
Husserl pointed out that our era of civilization still
belongs to the original telos of ancient Greek civilization,
and in the original impulse there is to be found an
attention to truth as whole —including 'inner' or
'subjective' reality. The Greeks recognized two kinds of
experience, 'urcap (hupar) and orap (honar), as E.R.
Dodds has pointed out. It is our recent civilization, since
the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, which
has divided the pursuit of truth, to the neglect of the
disciplines of attention to the subjective world. Michael
Polanyi, as a scientist turned philosopher, has questioned
our belief in the predominance of the goal of 'objectivity':
he showed that all knowledge was only made up of
persons knowing, collating their natural descriptions—
'men doing something'. Our knowing is rooted in
intangible and ineffable 'tacit' powers, and rooted in
commitment: it can never be separated from the
subjective life of scientists and other thinkers. To deny
validity to any form of knowledge except the 'objective' is
thus to deny implicitly the very roots of knowledge itself,
and even to threaten the very grounds of science by
scepticism.
The great value of the various movements to which I
propose to attend here is that they set out to heal the split
between 'objective' and 'subjective' disciplines. This split
Edmund Husserl saw as the crisis of our era. He saw
that in our addiction to the 'objective' we are creating a
world in our own image which, since it is devoid of the
very aspects which make life worth living, is one in
which it is impossible to live.
In this book I hope to explore further the work of a
number of thinkers who have expressed dissatisfaction
with the prevailing views of man and the world, and seek
more adequate ones. Some of them are Christians who
object to the functional view because man was made in
God's image, and has potentialities that should not
therefore be denied. Only some, however, have the
particular experience of 'revelation' that makes a person a
believer. Others are atheists or agnostics. Here the
important thing to grasp is that the are not just two
alternatives (religious-believing-person on the one hand;
atheistic-materialistic-person on the other). There is a
need to recognize dimensions other than the purely
materialistic or reductionist: a need to recognize the
existence of consciousness; man as the animal symbolicam,
the symbolizing animal who is driven by a need for
meaning; levels of being; and the strange and as yet
unexplored mysteries in existence—such as the strange
truth which science can never explain or explain away,
that we are here at all. To ponder these aspects of
existence, to discuss meaning and values, to discuss
man's moral being is a perfectly valid activity which
everyone may join in, and ought to join in, whether or not
he has experienced 'revelation' or has a faith, or not. This
is quite clear, for example, from the work of Martin
Buber. To discuss these aspects of man's being, in
appropriate disciplines, is not in any way a retreat into
'mysticism' (as some scientists might declare), or into
some idealistic philosophy, or even into 'religion'. It is a
simple recognition that certain very real things in our

world, (like falling in love, or the way a woman responds
to her baby, or what happened when Beethoven
composed Piano Sonata No. Ill, or what happens to us
as we listen to it, or our each sense of awe at the stars)
belong to a certain realm in which man transcends his
functional existence and enters into body-mind, or 'whole
being', activities which need to be studied in appropriate
ways. In fact, science itself is now entering into such
disciplines by, for example, studying the facial
expressions, gestures and social postures of lions and
monkeys and other animals, their 'kind of consciousness'.
So, as Poole emphasises, what we are concerned with
may be seen as a search for a better and more adequate
realism: a better rational account of our world, which
includes all that we mean by 'subjectivity'. Moreover, it is
necessary to insist that when we are dealing with man,
we must never lose sight of such dimensions of his
existence. Atheist, positivist, agnostic, Christian, or
believer in some other faith all may equally and
legitimately join in, and share, in the exploitation of what
we may call man's 'spiritual dimension'—using the word
in its humanistic sense—without any need to accept first
the existence of some transcendental realm of 'entelechy
'or 'soul-stuff. The existence of man's moral being is a
clear fact of experience: yet its workings cannot be
explained in terms of the principles of chemistry, physics
or organistic biology, as some humanists think—what we
urgently need is a philosophy of being which is not
reductionistic and which does not cling to what Polany
calls the 'false goal' of objectivity.
This then calls for new disciplines of thought and
study, as I have tried to show in my previous work. In
general we may call these philosophical anthropology.
Behind this there will be a philosophical biology.
Psychoanalysis contributes to philosophical anthropology
insights obtained in the long exchanges between therapist

and patient, in which the therapist builds up an
experience not only of the single patient, but of universal
subjective human problems.
The philosophical movement which tries to deal with
man and his experience in a whole way, fully embracing
his subjectivity, is existentialism. Here, however, we shall
have to make many qualifications, because up to now
existentialism too has tended to be a very sombre and
pessimistic philosophy, which culminated in nihilism and
a sense of the futility of human life, and of all philosophic
effort. In this book I want to lead on to the 'new'
existentialism, and we shall have to work quite hard to
see how it moves on from the 'old' existentialism, which,
although it began in trying to challenge the grey
dominance of the scientific, functional, view of a man,
found itself unable to find its way out of a nihilistic
impasse as frustrating and blank as the philosophies it set
out to oppose.
The 'new' existentialism is bound up with pheno
menology—a discipline that pays attention to the study of
the phenomena of consciousness, employing especially such
disciplines as semiology, (the study and interpretations of
symbols) and heuristics, (the study of the nature of
knowledge). We will also need to look at the
post-Kantian philosophers concerned with one of Kant's
most important questions 'What is man?' —such as
Langer and Cassirer, who have looked at man as the
animal symbolicum, the culture-using creature.
The terms are forbidding (we could talk of
phenomenological existentialism), and these disciplines
have their own jargon (and mysterious terms such as
'nothing noths'). Some books that are important in the
movement are almost unreadable for a lay person. Yet the
heart of the whole movement is sound, and the
complexities of language and argument may be excused
since they arise from the intensity of the struggle to grasp

those new complexities which this movement has
discovered in our everyday existence—even in seeing and
hearing, in perceiving our world and acting in it, not to
speak of our relationship with ourselves, our inner
fantasies, and our experience of our bodies. On of the
excitements of the new movement is that it sets a series of
strong doubt against all the old simplistic theories: of
how we see and sense; how 'the brain' 'works', and how
behaviour may be explained in mechanistic terms,
Moreover, it offers us the chance of finding new
capacities in ourselves, a new sense of our creativity, our
capacities for vision, and new opportunities to find
'authenticity' and freedom, as well as new
responsibilities. It restores 'intentionality', and the
creative elements, to our perception. It is quite clear to
those who have done only a little work on these wide
philosophical developments that they are what thousands
of people have been looking for, and an escape from
stagnation and morbidity, in prevailing attitudes to
human nature.
In Education and Philosophical Anthropology one
explored these matters very much in the role of
impresario, trying to bring these important aspects of
'continental' philosophy to the attention of those working
in the humanities who will, find a new freedom in these
perspectives. I have made considerable use of the work of
Marjorie Grene, who is a disciple of Michael Polanyi, and,
of course, of that of others such as Herbert Spiegelberg,
Rollo May, and Abraham Maslow.
In the light of Karl Stern's important work on
philosophy and psychology, it seems important that
Marjorie Grene is a woman professor of philosophy. She
displays a certain kind of feminine courage—the courage
to have what Keats called 'negative capability', to
entertain doubts, and to allow the dissolution of
paradigms. In my previous book I summarised her

objections to Descartes, and it is again of great
significance that Descartes's errors can be seen, as by
Stern, to have a psychopathological origin, in his dreadful
experience as an infant of rejection by the mother.
Perhaps it takes such a woman philosopher to
indicate the limitations of the British mode of
commonsense thought about the nature of thought and
reality, as embodied in the atomistic traditions of Locke
and Hume, and to be willing to accept that existence and
perception as far more complex than the commonsense
view. Until we overcome our limitations in the
commonsense mode, we cannot find and realize that kind
of freedom and authenticity which can enable us to
realize our existential potentialities. The work of Marjorie
Grene is as important as that implies.
Thinkers such as Locke were concerned to eradicate
scholastic nonsense, and to stick to 'common sense', to
'ordinary language'; the consequence of this was in the
end to leave 'neither nature left to know nor mind to
known it'. Because of this development, of what is now
called 'scientific method', we have reached a point at
which nature is 'an invisible billiards game played by
chance against necessity ... a world without life', in which
there is no-one to see it.
This fundamental misconception of the relationship
between ourselves and 'nature' is one that affects all our
thinking. In much modem thought and writing, we find a
kind of paralysis caused by some failure of the
relationship between the T and the world: the T does
not seem to belong in the world, while the world is not
one in which the T is at home. Psychology, as it is
pursued in the university, is more often than not a study
of certain phenomena, but again not of the T in the
world, while philosophy is often the study of certain
chopped-off artefacts, amputated from the existence of a

self, in the world, in space and time. This separation of
the T from nature may be traced back to the scientific
revolution, and essentially to Newton. Newton was
deeply influenced by Descartes, and was imbued like him
with the confidence of a mathematical genius in the
capacity of the rational mind to grasp the truth of things.
It is very important to see how limited is this view, and
how, in its effects, it has led to a moral dilemma, because
it has led to a disastrous split between what seems real
(that which will be seen and measured) and what seems
unreal (values, meaning and consciousness which cannot
be 'validated'.) The critical fault of the Newtonian-
Cartesian tradition is that it believed that the
mathematical insight 'could not be read from the mind
itself, but from the perceived phenomena.' Yet even
mathematics is only man doing something.
Where 'is' the mathematizing mind? And where 'is'
extended matter? To us, now, there is a scientist looking
at a world, his world, in which he exists at a certain place
and a certain time. 'Science is something done by
scientists'. Even in looking at phenomena such as the
distance between two points Descartes does not allow for
the movement of the geometer, in time, from one to the
other. In his thinking, knowledge is clear and immediate,
as it never is in life. In Descartes only the will of God
holds the mathematicizing mind and extended matter
together, and he does not give any adequate account of
the complex process of knowing.
This is the problem at the heart of 'scientific method',
and it haunts us still in many areas. Science is the one
unchallenged authority in our world. We try to use
science to give us answers to our deepest human
problems. Yet so long as its disciplines aspire to strict
'objective' methods, as thinkers such as Husserl and
Polanyi have declared, science can answer none of our

serious questions at all, and so can solve none of our
human problems, because it cannot find man in his
wholeness as an T knowing the world.
As long ago as 1937 A.N. Whitehead gave a series of
lectures, on the commonsense notion of the universe
which crystallized in men's minds some 350 years ago. If
we examine this notion and what has happened to it
since, he says we find that, on the one hand, every item
in it has been abandoned but, on the other, practical
thinking, even the underlying conceptions of science in
general, still rely unthinkingly upon it.
The commonsense notion of the universe is the
Cartesian view: 'the grand doctrine of Nature as a
self-sufficient meaningless complex of facts—the doctrine
of the autonomy of physical science'. However, when we
open up the assumptions on which this view rests, we
find that a whole area of reality is excluded. Necessarily
abandoned from this picture of nature as a complex of
facts are all that we really experience everyday:
The colour and sound were no longer in nature.
They are the mental reaction of the percipient to
internal bodily locomotions.
The effect upon us is to make our sense-perceptions
appear untrustworthy:
When we perceive the red rose we are associating
our enjoyment of red derived from one source with
our enjoyment of a spatial region derived from
another source. The conclusion that I draw is that
sense-perception for all its practical importance is
very superficial in its disclosure of the nature of
things.
Here 'perception' is used in the empirical sense: a study
of Merleau-Ponty's account shows that he sees perception
as a much more active engagement with the world,
including aspects to which Whitehead gives the names
'causal efficacy' and 'presentational immediacy'. The

phenomenologists are seeking to restore wholeness and
creativity to perception, and are thus trying to restore
secondary qualities to the philosophical picture. This is
refreshing for the poet who has always felt threatened by
the hostility to experience in the scientific view.
While the abandonment of secondary qualities was 'a
severe restriction to nature' it seemed a justified one, for
sense-perception is in a sense 'artificial'. There is always a
kind of delusiveness about sense, as we can tell by
various experiments. It is significant, and an aspect of the
scientific revolution, that empirical psychology spends so
much of its time on experiments to show that we cannot
trust our senses, this again is anti-poetic, since the poet's
experience of the world is developed from trusting his
senses.
However, one important consequence of the
recognition of the delusive nature of sense-perception
was the recognition of the important fact (which brings
us to Hume) that sensory awareness never carries its own
interpretation. You cannot make sense of what you see or
feel or measure simply in forms of what is seen or felt or
measured. Yet this, of course, is exactly what science
often declares we must do—as when it declares that the
human consequences of certain influences must be
measured in terms of the 'facts'—as in criminology,
sociology, sexology, and so on, which concentrate on
mechanistics or statistics from which cause-and-effect
patterns may be measured. Science of this kind
continually hallows measurable data, as if these could
speak clearly and unequivocally for themselves. This
point is made forcibly by Poole, who uses the term
'alchemy' when discussing Professor Eysenck's use of the
'data' from interviews. In truth, there is always a
'strategy' in the interpretation of facts, based on
principles. However the principles by which the facts are
interpreted cannot come from the facts themselves but

must come from the realm of values and meanings.
What Newton created was a view of the world based
on the commonsense doctrine of space and local motion.
However, as Whitehead says 'the forces which he
introduced left Nature still without meaning or value.' In
the essence of a material body—in its mass, motion and
shape—there was no reason for the law of gravitation.
Although the notion of stresses was a fundamental factor
in his concept of Nature, and although he isolated the
stresses indicated by his law of gravitation, Newton left
no hint why in the nature of things there should be any
stresses at all. He greatly increased the systematic aspects
of nature by introducing stresses according to the law of
gravitation, instead of a welter of detailed data about
motion. Yet he left all the factors of the system—in
particular mass and stress—in the position of detached
facts devoid of any reason for their compresence:
He thus illustrated a great philosophical truth that a
dead nature can give no reasons. All ultimate
reasons are in terms of aim at value. A dead nature
aims at nothing.
However 'necessary' this was for the advancement of the
physical science, it has gradually had a profound effect
on human beings' feelings about themselves in the
universe, not least as they have lost the capacity to hold
on to their faith—albeit hidden away in a separate
compartment. Even faith and God, hidden away in the
area of revelation and intuitive faith, could not survive in
a universe in which 'a dead nature can give no reasons'
and 'aims at nothing'. This great philosophical
predicament has been re-stated in our own time by
Jacques Monod though he simply declares that 'science is
objective' and that everything in nature happens by
chance and necessity. From the world of such a science it
comes to seem that even things that happen in the
discussion of man's cultural and moral being must seem

to happen by chance and necessity, too—and that man's
life is without meaning or value. There is no place in this
universe for man's achievements and aspirations, for the
creative gains of consciousness. Characteristically,
Jacques Monod in his inaugural address to the College de
France, declared that the works of Shakespeare were the
random product of atomic agitations. Yet of course, it
must be evident, as soon as we look at the simplest
organism under the microscope, that the very essence of
life is that it 'strives', whatever that may mean, as
'inorganic' entities do not: it is capable of success and
failure: there are 'higher beings' capable of knowing.
How did these things come about by mere 'agitations'?
David Hume demonstrated that sensory awareness
never carries its own interpretation: on this foundation
every philosophy since should be built. How barren is the
combination of Newton and Hume:
A field of perception devoid of any data for its own
interpretation, and a system of interpretation, devoid
of any reason for the concurrence of its factors.
As Grene points out, science since Hume and Newton,
has rejected absolute space and the isolated bits of matter
moving in it—everything in Newton's commonsense
universe is gone. Yet science still retains in its conception of
method the presuppositions of that cosmology.
This is the great dichotomy that science fails to
examine. Scientific method' still means the procedures
appropriate to the universe as if the Cartesian-Newtonian
view of 'extended matter' had never been altered. As
Whitehead said, 'The result is to reduce modem physics
to a sort of mystic chant over an unintelligible universe'.
Whitehead refers to various forms of astrological belief,
as to portents in the heavens and their relationship to
husbandry:
This mystic relation of observation, theory and

practice is exactly the present position of science in
modem life, according to the prevalent scientific
philosophy.
Such a situation is a reductio ad absurdum and
unacceptable as a foundation for philosopical reflection.
Yet nearly forty years have gone by since Whitehead's
lectures and the main developments in modem
philosophy have nevertheless continued to base
themselves on this inadequate foundation. On the one
hand we are tormented by the need for a sense of
meaning in existence; on the other, science collects 'data'
which seems increasingly to press upon us not only a
meaningless universe, but also a sense of the
impossibility of making any sense of it at all. In this, the
worst aspect of all is the feeling that philosophy—the one
activity authentically devoted to the pursuit of 'truth'—
makes us feel that there are no truths, while making
those sources of truth and meaning which belong to
intuition, body-life, and the sense of being in existence in
the universe appear untrustworthy and seemingly
inauthentic.
Grene traces this dilemma back to Hume. His most
fundamental philosophical document, A Treatise of Human
Nature, stated definitely the plain, commonsensical view
of the human mind which still seems to be sponsored by
the authority of science:
it is a conditioned-reflex sort of mind in which
associative mechanisms generate roughly satisfactory
habits of belief ... separable sense impressions, their
imagined and remembered counterparts: these are
the elements which build themselves up by a sort of
mental chemistry (the 'gentle force of association')
into a workable workaday world.
The objection to this Humean mind is that it disposes
with creativity and man's capacity for transcendence as
well as with all those dark, intractable, embodied,

mysterious, irrational and Cimmerian regions of existence
which have been explored by psychoanalysis since Freud,
and which are the area in which the poets work. Our
mysterious bodily existence is not 'there': it is simply
excluded from recognition.
Yet the Humean view attracts because it is so
humdrum: there is no nonsense about it:
'Superstition and enthusiasm' have been banished.
The pretensions of theology, metaphysics, even
political myth are brushed away, and the everyday
wants of decent, sensible people are allowed to work
themselves out as nature and the shadow, custom,
provide.
Psychotherapy has established clearly that we can never
accomplish rational control over our nature: we can only
hope to educate ourselves painfully towards better
insights. On this issue Grene quotes Keynes on Bertrand
Russell: his was a simple, impossibly rationalist view
with its roots in Hume:
Bertie in particular sustained simultaneously a pair
of opinions ludicrously incompatible. He held that in
fact human affairs were carried on in a most
irrational fashion, but that the remedy was quite
simple and easy, since all we had to do was to carry
them on rationally.
Hume's impulse was to 'get rid of all the insanities' so
that 'what is left is sane'. This impulse, with its implicit
denial of the perplexities of living, is still with us, in
'scientific' approaches that seek to get rid of the dangers
of being.
The Cartesian clear and distinct idea with its ...
suspension between mind and world has been
transmogrified into a precise, delimitable image, an image
of passive immediacy, and it is out of such units and such
units alone that all knowledge must be built.
This concept of knowledge as built out of units of

'passive immediacy' is still the predominant one, behind
much psychology and its uses, as in 'behavioural
objectives'.
Although Hume's is a world of no nonsense, it is a
world of no sense, either, because there is no one in it.
The self, he says is a bundle of impressions. As Grene
says there is quite literally, on his principles, nothing else
for the self to be. Associative mechanisms cannot make a
person. If there is, on Hume's view, no logical necessity
to what I know, neither is there any responsible agent to
assert to my knowing it. Habits just happen: sets of
sense-data looked at one way make physical systems,
looked at another make physiological or psychological
ones. The mind is capable only of perceptions; all
perceptions are separable. How shall we account for the
togetherness even of that bundle of them which we may
designate a 'mind' or 'self? Hume confesses this 'too
hard for my understanding'. Yet this Humean man,
devoid of volition and responsibility, is still the man of
'scientific' psychology. Moreover, Hume's deep essential
scepticism has become a dogma — the dogma —in
philosophy in Britain and America, 'doubt of which is
held to be dangerous, if unintelligible, dogmatism'.
This sceptical orthodoxy is still grounded in a
completely Humean assessment of the nature and limits
of our intellectual powers: 'Percepts organised by habit;
that is, still, and more than ever, for contemporary
philosophers, the acknowledged pattern of the mind'.
This is true of the crude behaviourism of the twenties.
Bertrand Russell, in his Inquiry into Meaning and Truth,
was only translating Hume's, epistemology into the
language of modem logic. Grene says R.B. Braithwaite
admitted that he was assimulating the complex deductive
theories of modem physics to Hume's 'constant
conjunction' pattern. John Dewey's pragmatism was
wholly dependent on Hume's principles: logical

positivism was an attempted formalization of them;
recent analytical philosophy tries to repair this rigidity
and make them again more flexible.
However, the result has been a kind of
imprisonment: a way of avoiding the real problems of life
in philosophy:
Linguistic usage, which is now so popular a theme
for philosophic discourse, is but a sub-species of
Humean custom. It is a particular subspecies—for
when one comes up against an uncomfortably
serious problem one can turn it into a question of the
use of words and so evade it. This trick—supported
by a superficial pretence of putting verbal habits into
the context of other habits—is used over and over,
with admirable virtuosity, to bestow an air of
problem-solving on what is at bottom a technique of
problem-dodging ... Stripped of its flesh and blood,
the skeleton of Hume's system, its bare, unattractive,
conditioned-reflex logic presides over the
trivialisation of philosophy.
Russell and Braithwaite were two modem empiricists in
the Humean tradition. Russell superimposed a physicalist
theory on Hume's phenomenalist base. Hume's
scepticism, said Russell, with regard to the words of
science resulted from (a) the doctrine that all my data are
private to me (all my data are sensations or impressions)
together, with the (b) discovery that matters of fact,
however numerous and well-selected, never logically
imply any other matters of fact. Something else must be
required to make sense of this data:
What is needed is some way of giving probability (not
certainty) to the inferences from known matters of fact to
occurrences which have not yet been, an perhaps will
never be, part of the experience of the person making the
inference. If an individual is to know anything beyond
his own experiences up to the present moment, his stock
of un-inferred knowledge must consist not only of

matters of fact, but also of general laws, or at least a law,
allowing him to make inferences from matters of fact: and
such law or laws must, unlike the principles of deductive
logic be synthetic, i.e. not proved true by their falsehood
being self-contradictory.
Induction makes sense, or is knowledge, only if we
know some principles, not inductively derived, which
validate it. Yet this makes the empirical theory of
knowledge which Russell is expounding formally
self-contradictory. Where do these principles come from?
They cannot be derived from 'experience': his
psychological atoms can only form judgments by getting
themselves habitually connected together to form an
'inductive' judgment—so that 'deriving from experience'
depends upon the principle itself. We must know
something beyond and therefore experience, according to
Russell. So, Russell simply remains what Grene called an
'unhappy empiricist'. He admits:
Although our postulates can be fitted into a
framework which has what we may call an
'empiricist' flavour ... it remains undeniable that our
knowledge of them, in so far as we do know them,
cannot be based upon experience, though all their
verifiable consequences are such as experience will
confirm. In this sense, it must be admitted,
empiricism as a theory of knowledge has proved
inadequate, though less so than any other theory of
knowledge.
Grene finds that Braithwaite allows that, by Humean
principles, all meaningful factual statements, which are
after all just associations arising out of experience, must
be confirmable in experience. Yet by Hume's atomic
principle, they are never really confirmed. The reliance of
the empiricist is thus not on such confirmation, but on
'shocks' such as Russell refers to when he says:
Scientific method, I suggest, consists in eliminating

those beliefs which there is positive reason to think a
source of shocks, while retaining those against which
no definite argument can be brought.
This means that statements of fact can be falsified, 'and it
is this possibility which is really the heart of the so-called
verifiability theory of meaning or of truth'.
The laws of science are reliable because, if they were
not so, experience would falsify them: we would be
shocked out of them. This could happen, it is true,
only at what one might call the sensory root of a
theory: but it could happen. But no single experience
can decisively and unequivocally falsify a statement
of probability. Physicists assign a mathematical value
to the probability that, under given experimental
conditions, an electron will have such a location.
Supposing it doesn't: the probability is unaffected.
Grene finds that, in the end, what is involved in ultimate
decisions— as (say) between the 'significance' or
'non-significance' of a correlation in physics or the social
sciences—is a strategy:
A strategy, however—and here is Braithwaite's
embarrassment—has to be chosen, and it has to be
chosen on the grounds of evaluation of prospective
advantages, of goods and evils: of, in Braithwaite's
words, 'the sort of future we want'. Thus we cannot
avoid, he says apologetically, the intrusion of an ■
ethical element into induction ... oughts where,
strictly speaking, oughts ought not to be.
It all depends in the end on 'What kind of society we
want'. Grene's analysis of the work of Descartes and
Hume thus enables us to see that in their philosophies
one cannot find the knower as agent. Evaluation, such as
Braithwaite demands ultimately as a part of the process
of induction, requires a responsible person to evaluate,
'choice demands an agent'. However since Braithwaite is
a Humean, where is this evaluating person, since in
Hume's system there is an implicit denial of 'a more than

associative person'? It was the Calvinistic puritanical
person whom Hume sought to denote, in his
anti-fanatical fanaticism. His utilitarian chemistry of
pleasures and pains can, if one doesn't look closely,
'account' for the everyday behaviour of people whose
needs are obvious and 'natural'. Yet this kind of chain of
associative mechanisms proceeding by habit could not
make the choices Braithwaite says the scientist must
make. This model—which remains he essential model
underlying much that calls itself 'scientific' today—is not
a man: certainly not a free man making interpretations of
his world with a sense of responsibility to it. The passive
model composed of sense-impressions, with no active
and creative I-in-the-world at the centre, from Descartes
and Hume, lies behind the failure of our thinking to cope
with the deepest moral problems of our life today.
This introduction to the debate reveals at once the
impulse behind Grene's work in philosophy. The
essential 'model' of man behind traditional British
philosophy and psychology is the Humean one: a chain
of associative mechanisms, a mere product of particles
and laws, derived from the empirical-materialist concept
of knowing. However, such an entity is not a free human
being, capable of making interpretations of his world, and
engaged in a dynamic sense of ethical responsibility to it.
In truth, every human being who knows is exercising
freedom, and even the scientist is an embodiment of
commitment and passion—devoted to the pursuit of
truth. It is this that Grene brings out in The Knower and the
Known, the existentialist impulse of which work attends
to the problem of what freedom is, and what our moral
responsibilities are as knowers. It is this kind of concern
that the new modes in philosophical anthropology draw
to our attention.
It will be asked why I have not, in this exploration of
'continental' philosophy and its relevance to such subjects

as English, referred to recent fashions in cultural analysis
and literary criticism such as structuralism,
post-structuralism and deconstructionism. The reasons is
that while the accounts of philosophical anthropology
excite me and seem to me to offer new perspectives and
possibilities, I do not find this so of most of the literary
theory I encounter. I also believe that the new forms of
literary theory are wrong at the deepest level, because
they are another form of futile application of methods
based on positivism and deductive analysis to subjective
phenomena. They are not really phenomenological
disciplines, although their subjects, such as creativity,
knowledge, consciousness, symbolism and perception,
belong to that realm, and cannot be understood except by
such disciplines.
As Tzvetan Todorov has said:
Deconstruction is a 'dogmatic scepticism' ... which
means that it reunites the worst of two worlds. It is a
scepticism in that it considers knowledge and
judgment, truth and justice, to be impossible. But it is
also dogmatic, since it decides in advance what each
text means: namely nothing.
Deconstructionist exegeses, he says, are extremely
monotonous in consequence, because the outcome is
'always-already' known. There is nothing wrong with a
discipline that examines the structure of a literary work.
Yet the point of any such discipline can only be to
enhance and debate the strange living process that
happens when we read a text or listen to a piece of
music. Again, I would want to quote Gustav Mahler: 'All
commentary is disgusting'. But the literary theorist seems
to have a different purpose: as Todorov says,
post-structuralist approaches seem to seek two outcome
to their work—to show that the meaning of a work of art
must be 'nothing' or 'anything'. Like philosophical
scepticism, this kind of literary theory tends to make it

seem that nothing can be achieved, between the
individual and the reality of the world, and in this it is
like the analytical dead-end into which logical positivism
eventually found itself:
It is impossible to know the world: only discourse
exists, and discourse can refer only to other
discourses ... literature is an 'endless naming and
renaming of the void'.
Like 'objective' approaches in the sciences, the effect is to
lead to a sense of the impossibility of avoiding
contradictions, and then to a sense of the futility of the
attempt to find values and to discriminate:
As no discourse is exempt from contradiction, there
is no reason to favour one kind above another, or to
choose one value in preference to another ... any
behaviour that orientates itself according to values
(criticism, struggle against injustice, hope for a better
world) becomes, in the deconstructionist perspective,
quite pathetic.
The effect, as Todorov declares, is to undermine the
humanities, just as scientific scepticism undermines the
very foundations of science. In the political associations,
of course, such tendencies in literary theory exert this
scepticism on values such as justice, and declare them
'bourgeois epiphenomena': Todorov quotes Foucault:
The idea of justice itself is an idea which in effect has
been invented and put to work in different societies
as an instrument of a certain political and economic
power or as a weapon against that power.
These theories tend to be anti-humanistic, and lead to the
kind of developments of which Polanyi warned in his
remarkable essay 'Beyond Nihilism'. The reason is the
same: the fundamental denial of consciousness, and
man's creative capacities, because of the choice of
paradigms in which these cannot be found.
The T is not there, engagi ig with the world through

what Leavis called 'the iving principle' —those
manifestations of positive sensing and seeing which
Erwin Straus sought to restore to our conception of
ourselves of which S.T. Coleridge was so powerfully
aware, and which are the object of attention of
philosophers Eke Husserl and philosophical biologists
such as F.J.J. Buytendijk. Language is reduced to 'codes'
and both author as being and reader as being are excised
from consideration. As Wilbur Saunders says, in a
valuable essay on the whole tendency:
There is no place in his scheme for the creative
transformation of a code or a code convention ... It's
the old, old story; the new objective science which is
to replace our deplorable subjectivities is radically
moulded by the subjectivities which are likely to find
it congenial.
Culler seems to want the self to be like this: it 'appears
only in social contexts': 'the "I" is not given, but comes to
exist in a mirror stage which starts in infancy, as that
which is seen and addressed by others'. In the
background of this view we may find the limited idea of
the 'mirror stage' of Jacques Lacan, a view that was used
by D.W. Winnicott to give a much more creative and
complex view of the way in which 'being' emerges from
the capacity of the mother to 'be for' the child, so that he
come to find the world and act creatively in it, from the
original encounter. Once again, we have the difference
between paradigms that are capable of finding life and
being, and those that cannot.
Behind much of the new literary theory, of course, is
linguistics and linguistic psychology. But as Wilbur
Saunders asks, are the methods so far developed to
bridge the ground between philosophy and the
psychology of speech behaviour 'subtle enough for, or
even appropriate to, the analysis of the effects of which
literature is made up'? Analysis of the new kind

concentrates on 'systems' and 'codes'. It tends to ignore
the historical dialectic, and the interpenetration between
the 'personal' and the 'social': it seeks 'impersonality' and
blanks out the personal. In this, of course, it is groping
towards that 'objectivity' which Polanyi declared, in
science, to be a false goal. We must concern ourselves
with language rather than parole and we must see the
connection between the signified and the signifier as
'arbitrary': these principles, which tend towards that kind
of denial of commitment and engagement with
experience by the T, arise from the impulse to devise a
'scientific' theoretical approach that has the validity of a
positivistic discipline and the essential failure to find a
phenomenological one in this sphere. This is not a new
realism, as it offer's to be, but a failure that may be
paralleled by many others discussed in this book—to find
the 'category of life'. It is this failure that makes the
present work necessary. For as Geoffrey Strickland says,
in his study of these literary theories, Structuralism or
Criticism?:
The grounds which justify the scientist in relative
and justified confidence in the truth of what he says
cannot possibly be reproduced by the student of
literature. Any degree of certainty and any doubts it
will be reasonable for him to entertain about what he
says will have to be justified by wholly different
criteria. One of the most obvious reasons is that the
object of literary study, unlike that of the natural
sciences, is ... 'non-natural' and not 'natural'
meanings. Its object, in other words, is the subjective
and intentional activity of other minds.
That is, it belongs to consciousness, and 'objective'
approaches based on the natural sciences cannot find this
realm. Yet there are many who believe that in the end
they must only find that kind of 'materialistic' truth.
Strickland's words 'natural' and 'non-natural' are taken
from an essay by H.P. Grice on 'Meaning', in which he

argues that 'non-natural' meanings are 'intended
meanings', which are in turn defined as meanings that
depend on someone's recognition of an intention. This, of
course, opens up the whole area of living intentionality
which is so disastrously missing from 'objective'
approaches as Husserl was to indicate: he declared that
'meaning is an intention of the mind' and it is the
implicit denial of that element in human life which
makes so much literary theory today inimical to freedom
and the exploration of human truth.
Perhaps the question of values has been left in the air
so far. If these cannot be based on empiricism, and they
are menaced by analytical literary theory, where can they
come from? If empiricism cannot provide its own
principles, on what are these to be founded? If science, as
Polanyi believes, is rooted in passion and commitment,
whence do these flow in the man doing science?
The shortest answer I know to such questions is a
short critical notice by John Wisdom in his Philosophy and
Psychoanalysis, a review of Science and Ethics by C.H.
Waddington et al. Again, it is a question of finding
subjective realities and the disciplines, to deal with them.
Waddington's problem is that he 'cannot venture to
say definitely that the good or evil in a state of affairs is
a matter of what that state of affairs is and of how we feel
and shall feel towards it'. 'The combination of a
transcendental ethic ontology with his positivistic
epistemology works havoc'. Oughts cannot be derived
from what is. Waddington's book caught Wisdom's
interest because it included comments by a number of
people doing psychotherapy. However, Wisdom is
doubtful about Waddington's attempt to find in
psychoanalysis a scientific basis for ethics. It is the
analysand who discovers most about ethics from
psychoanalysis, and his discoveries, like discoveries of
beauty in pictures and music, are as much alterations in

oneself and one's object as discoveries.
Wisdom suggests two ways in which values are
created and established. They come from the inner
experience of an individual engaged in 'ethical living',
and they are upheld by the collocation of naturalistic
descriptions.
On the first way he quotes H.V. Dicks from his
Clinical Studies in Psychopathology who speaks of that kind
of inner dynamic, to which Marion Milner pays attention
at the end of her The Hands of the Living Cod, and to
which E.K. Ledermann attends in Mental Health and
Human Conscience. Dicks speaks of:
A task to be fulfilled by the individual within
himself—a process of psychological growth and
unification—the resolution of conflict, to give it its
modem name. The discovery of oneself, the finding
of the centre from which we cannot err, of the 'still,
small voice' of the 'Golden Flower' ... of the
thousand-petalled Lotus, etc. etc., by whatever name
this precious self-realization and acceptance has been
called — this is nothing less than the aim of
psychotherapy, within the limits of the patient's
powers.
In being psychoanalysed, says Wisdom, one find oneself
engaged in 'ethical practice' not 'logical practice', but
'accepting and rejecting persons, acts and feelings, and ...
sifting these acceptances and rejections'. He sees this as a
version of the original development of the ethical scene,
brought out as it is by the mother in her infant.
The mother says, 'How would you like it?' i.e. 'How
much is your complaisance due to the fact that it's you
who are pulling the cat's tail and not vice versa?' And in
this she is not merely putting something into the child but
bringing out the uneasiness which lurks in him as it did
when biting her breast he laid waste his world and with
it himself.
Throughout one's life there are many siftings to be

undergone: the sense of uneasiness which has its origins
in the infant's fantasies of how his destructiveness might
destroy others, and his world is developed into the
adult's moral sense and his continual weighing of
considerations. Out of our each engagement with the
problem of ethical living, we bring together, in the
criss-cross of utterance between us, creates values.
Just as 'real redness' is constructed from redness to A
and redness to B and so on, so 'satisfactoriness is
constructed from satisfactoriness to A, to B, to C. Thus
'rightness is constructed from really seem right to A, to B,
etc., and really seems right to A is constructed from
seems right to A at first blush, still seems right to A after
review, comparison, etc.'. It is the business of the
transition from 'seems for the moment acceptable and
right to A' to 'seems right and acceptable to A' that one is
concerned (i.e. in ethical living). This Wisdom calls a
'naturalistic and anti-transcendental metaphysic of ethics,
i.e. ultimate description of ethical activity'. Goodness is
related to our reactions to significant experiences, such as
the grace of a dancer and our feelings for these:
Her grace is a matter of the patterns she gives to our
eyes and the lift she gives to our hearts. So there is no
problem of how we know she's graceful.
Wisdom's essay is a valuable one, because it makes
clear that the creation of values is analogous to the
existence of a poem, our possession of it, and the
establishment of our estimations of it. These too only
exist in that 'criss-cross of utterance between us', and yet
they are real. Their reality however, is phenomenological,
and exists only in consciousness. They exist—poetry,
literary judgments and values—only in the collocation of
naturalistic descriptions, not as facts in the empirical way.
Part of our philosophical preoccupation now must be to
see that such entities are realities, only not in the way of
physics or chemistry: their 'thisness' is of a different

order from the 'objective' account of 'what is', because
they belong to being. The values we create are hot
'merely' subjective: by collocation we establish them as
realities as we establish the nature of the colour red. Yet
they are subjective realities, and it is the reality of the
subjective realm with which we must concern ourselves.
Philosophical Anthropology
and the Humanities
In our education and through our cultural atmosphere

today, it is implicitly conveyed that the scientific pursuit
of truth must cancel out any meanings we try to import.
'Man thus sees himself to be like a little boy who
continually repairs and rebuilds his sandcastles at the
edge of the sea, only to see the waves continually
washing them away'. The humanities have no real
rationale in this situation. Philosophical anthropology,
however, reveals that we no longer have to sit down
under this predicament. Even though the logical
positivist may have supposed that it was essential to base
philosophy on the certainties of science, in science itself
those certainties have dissolved, while in some of its
areas science seems to have reached a border with
metaphysics.' Even in the remarkable account given by
Karl Popper of the nature of scientific knowledge, it seem
that there is only the possibility of error: no real account
of knowing is displayed there, as Grene has argued. The
nature of knowing, with all its elements of subception, as
the mysterious integration of clues from the tacit
processes of perception and apprehension, yet remains to
be explained.
The cloudy and intractable inner processes with
which the creative artist collaborates, sometimes in deep
uncertainty and even a kind of dread, are now
recognized as essential dynamics in all knowing, and in
seeking the truth of the world. That truth must include,
as it did for the Greeks, the investigation of the subjective

life and consciousness—and in this the serious artist has
a primary part to play, as have the studies of man and
the Lebenswelt in the humanities.
The new thinking in existentialism and
phenomenology offers to redeem the humanities. There is
little sign that the universities for the most part are even
aware that their studies of man need redemption. This
important revolution has, so far, made little or no impact
at the level, say, of university psychology, philosophy or
science departments. What does science have to say
about reason and unreason or about us men as subjects
of this freedom? The mere science of bodies clearly has
nothing to say: it abstracts from everything subjective. As
for the humanistic sciences, on the other hand, all the
special and general disciplines, of which treat of man's
spiritual' existence, that is, within the horizon of his
historicity; their rigorous scientific character requires, we
are told, that the scholar carefully exclude all valuative
positions, all questions of the reason or unreason of their
human subject matter and its cultural configurations.
This insight into the 'conceptual and moral
inadequacies' of 'scientific' approaches to life and human
existence is only just beginning to be taken seriously.
In 1933-4, as Grene points out, R.G. Collingwood
wrote up a series of lectures as The Idea of Nature. These
should have marked as crucial a turning point in Western
philosophy as had Descartes's Meditations. Collingwood
said that something like Aristotelian teleology was
'widely recognised' in science, and that 'the conception of
vital process so distinct from mechanical or chemical
change has come to stay'. Collingwood pointed out that
Renaissance thinkers saw nature as a machine, with final
causes outside it, not within it. However, today thinkers
are emerging who see the analogy not as between nature
Philosophical Anthropology and the Humanities 53
and machine, but between nature and historical process.

The concept of evolution was bringing back a new
introduction of teleology—not as in Aristotle, in the sense
of natural things moving continuously from some
principle in themselves to some goal, but in terms of a
process of becoming, directly, towards some higher form—
'that is, a more efficient and vividly alive form of life'. It
is as if evolutionary development were being pulled
forward towards new forms.
A universe that is oriented in a dynamic way
towards the multiplicity of forms' is quite different from
the purely quantifiable, dead nature of Galileo and
Newton, and this should have brought a significant
reform in our whole view of the natural world:
Nearly half a century later (since these lectures were
given; forty years since the book was published), there is
little sign of any such revolution penetrating science or
psychology, for the reasons explored by Kuhn. Although
established theories (such as evolutionary theory) cannot
explain the phenomena, there seems to be no other
possible alternative, and scientists become afraid of the
gulf that opens. As Kuhn shows, trouble arises when a
phenomenon occurs which resists explanation on the
grounds of the existing paradigm. Scientists then strive to
assimilate the anomalous phenomenon to the otherwise
powerful framework. At a time when (as Stem declared)
knowledge is masculinized, a male-analytical paradigm
predominates over one which belongs to being and being
for.
Grene makes the analogy with the paradigm behind
the phlogiston theory in the history of chemistry. If a
combustible substance is burned in a close retort until
burning stops, the phlogiston theory declares that the air
is now saturated with phlogiston.
Today scientists (operating from a different

paradigm) would say the 'the oxygen in the vessel is
exhausted'. However, the 'facts' are explicable in either
theorv: Priestley's mice hopped about gaily when the bell
jar was full of 'dephlogisticated air', and died when it
was full of phlogiston. When Lavoisier demonstrated
that, in combustion, the resulting substance was heavier
than the original material, the supporters of phlogiston
had to postulate that it had 'negative weight'. This was
not 'unscientific' but a desperate attempt to preserve the
paradigm. It is not only given theories but a whole 'set'
of a particular science in a particular period that moulds
the way in which its practitioners see their problems and
their solutions. Such faith, as Polanyi has shown, lies
behind all science: in the end it depends on giving
authority to the works of those considered fit to decide,
on subjective grounds, on the principles and strategies by
which data are interpreted.
Phlogiston theory collapsed, and a new (oxygen)
theory took its place. Even so, the Gestalt change takes
time: for a time two theories can overlap. No scientific
paradigm can ever be established once and for all; but a
paradigm will be upheld while it can last.
So, conceptual reform comes hard. Collingwood's
idea of restoring a kind of teleology to biology, in the
recognition of processes in nature 'towards' or 'for'
something, challenged the model of the universe as a
machine. The trouble is, as Grene says, that the denial of
teleology fits smoothly into the metaphysical paradigm of
the world machine. To the objective' scientist such talk
smacks of the revival of scholastic absurdities which
science has overcome since the seventeenth century,
triumphantly. Yet the assertion that the world is a
machine is a bare statement unsupported by an adequate
cosmology.
The idea oi teleology should not be misunderstood:

phenomenology is not talking about conscious purpose in
nature. It simply recognizes that 'life strives'. When we
being to look into the matter, we have to go back once
more to Descartes. Descartes bifurcated the problem into
'extended matter' on the one hand, and the cogitating (or
planning) mind on the other. From this developed the
idea that either natural events must be wholly undirected
(Monod's world of chance and necessity) or they must be
planned ('Nature's purpose...'). Yet 'plans' or conscious
purpose are not only principles or order: the problem is
that the world is 'full of order' (as Polanyi observed) and
seems to be 'striving' towards goals. Whatever can these
things mean?
It possible that there are 'trends' which need to be
recognized as dynamic in matter, in the nature of things?
These may be goal-directed patterns in nature which are
outside the range of conscious purposes. As for
evolution, it may be an 'achievement' (but 'whose
achievement')? Grene points out that, despite:
Our alleged modernity, we are still Cartesian
enough to find the concept of an achievement by
populations, by 'life' itself, extremely odd.
What is required in an examination of phenomena to
see if they need some kind of teleological language to
describe them, and some attempt to give a philosophical
account of the whole problem: of phenomena not as mere
'sense-data' but as telic phenomena. This will have an
ontological impact: if 'Nature', in some sense of the
word, is to be ranked among the 'causes that act for the
sake of something', this will have consequences for what
we believe about 'being' and how we investigate it. In
philosophical biology, there does seem to be a need to
recognize some 'innovative principle' without which the
development of life cannot be understood.
To be sceptical of teleological approaches is still

'scientific', even if it means denying what is as plain as
the nose on one's face. To some, even to criticize
scientific dogmatism is to threaten science (in Monod we
find simple abuse hurled at thinkers such as Teilhard de
Chardin and Michael Polanyi who speak of other
possible explanations than that of 'chance and necessity'):
To be sceptical of such dogmatic denial, on the other
hand, we are constantly told, is to deny altogether the
cogency of 'scientific method'.
This stalemate, whereby science sees any teleological
approach as 'unscientific' yet accuses anyone who attacks
its scientific dogmatism of menacing its methodological
cogency, arises from the traditional view of mind and of
the Universe. The feeling that the universe is intractably
dead cannot be separated from the feeling that the 'self
is but a passive recipient of impressions, and this is the
view of the universe derived from Newton and
Descartes, and the view of the mind and 'self from
Hume:
In the Cartesian universe, in which, the minds of
scientists and philosophers still dwell, the knowing
mind, wholly secure and self-aware in its wholly
explicit and self-guaranteeing knowledge, is the
fitting counterpart of the one-level, one-sort, spread
out, physical world, which by its nature it is
equipped to know. These two Cartesian realities
have shrunk in our time to a shadow of themselves,
but such as they are tautologies or sense data on the
one hand, space-time co-ordinates on the other they
constitute, for many people, the total furniture of the
universe.
We are taught this model of ourselves and our universe
all the years of our school life, and it is enshrined in
popular science and general philosophies at large. The
very effectiveness of scientific applications of positivism
seems to confirm the general philosophy of existence

derived from science.
The trouble is that, if we begin to look at
being-in-the-world as it really is, it becomes at once
unspeakably complex. The works of the main
protagonists in the new philosophical anthropology are
therefore very difficult to absorb. On the whole, from
discussions with scientists, it seems they simply carry on
with their work and do not have the time or energy to
question its basic assumptions. Comfortable reliance on
established paradigms makes it easy to avoid wrestling
with new and disquieting ideas, especially from alien
sources. So in England, the number of people who have
read even one of the most important works, such as
Merleau-Ponty's The Phenomenology of Perception, must be
tiny. Husserl's Ideas is extremely difficult, while his Crisis,
though more accessible, can be read only slowly and
with the greatest difficulty. Yet the revolution depends
upon our bringing into our life and experience the gist of
these complex works.
Fortunately, a number of areas of thought are
converging, and so insights in Husserl are echoed by
Polanyi, whose thinking in turn echoes Merleau-Ponty,
whose thinking is influential in Grene. One concept that
pervades the whole trend in thought is that of
'intentionality'. Natural scientistic approaches fail to find
the creative dynamic in man. Husserl re-emphasized the
'intentional' elements in perception, and this emphasis is
noted by Merleau-Ponty. This can be related immediately
to the investigation of the creative nature of thought by
Polanyi, who, in his most important work, Personal
Knowledge, develops his theory of 'tacit knowing': all that
happens in us, by way of dynamic processes of exploring
the world, beneath the actual aware processes of
recognizing, describing, and acting on reality. He
distinguished between 'focal' and 'subsidiary' awareness.
Not all our knowing is concentrated and explicit: a great

deal else happens as we learn which is not focussed.
Merleau-Ponty's account of the phenomenology of
perception distinguished between 'positing' and
'non-positing' consciousness. His approach to experience
may be compared with the behaviourist account:
To experience a structure is not to receive it into
oneself passively: it is to live it, to take it up, assume
it and discover its imminent significance. Thus an
experience can never bear the relation to certain
factual conditions that it would bear to its cause and,
even if consciousness of distance is produced for a
certain value of convergence and a certain size of
retinal image, it can depend upon these factors only
in so far as they figure in it. Since we have no express
experience of it, we must conclude that we have a
non-thetic (i.e. not explicitly posited) experience of it.
We often experience an opinion about something,
Merleau-Ponty says, 'which is not a provisional form of
knowledge destined to give way later to an absolute form
but, on the contrary, both the oldest and most
rudimentary, and the most conscious or mature form of
knowledge' and opinion that is primary in the double
sense of 'original' and 'fundamental':
This is what calls up before us something in general, to
which positing (thetic) thought doubt or
demonstration can subsequently relate in affirmation
or denial. There is significance, something and not
nothing, there is an indefinite train of concordant
experiences, to which this ashtray and its
permanence testifies, or the truth which I hit upon
yesterday and to which I think I can revert today.
Merleau-Ponty restored the problems of perception and
knowing to being-in-the-body, at this here-and-now of
time, and including what he called the 'ante-predicative'
dynamics, of shadowy groping, towards what cannot yet
be apprehended explicitly, and certainly not yet spoken
of. It is with a kind of delight that the poet (and one

imagines, any artist) greets the restoration of these
processes of existence to the model of man exploring his
world, since they are the dark processes he lives with, as
he faces his blank page (or musical stave, or canvas).
In the Cartesian model there is an implicit contempt
for, and dismissal of, what cannot be explicitly known or
immediately apprehended, and this is daunting to the
artist. Once this myth is despersed, the atomicity of
Cartesian time is dispensed with too. We know we do
not live in a series of disconnected beads of time, but in a
much more creative flow of time and in a more confused
and complex mode of space.
Discussing Husserl's concept of intentionality,
Merleau-Ponty says:
Husserl uses the terms protentions and retentions for
the intentionalities which anchor one to an
environment... I do not pass through a series of
instances of now, the images of which I preserve and
which, placed end to end, make a line.
Cartesian science consists of intellectualized 'instances of
now'. Yet this is an abstraction from time: even in
measuring one moves from one end of the tape to the
other, through time and space, and so all Cartesian
mathematics and geometry (on which the whole of
physics is based) is really based on a falsification. It is not
that this renders the whole of science or physics false,
because scientists are only too aware of the falsifications
until they turn to themselves. We know that:
With the arrival of every moment, its predecessor
undergoes a change: I still have it in hand and it is
still there, but already it is sinking away below the
level of present: in order to retain it, I need to reach
through a thin layer of time. It is still the preceding
moment, and I have the power to recapture it as it
was just now, I am not cut off from it, but it would
not belong to the past unless something had altered.
It is beginning to be outlined against or projected
upon my present, whereas it was my present a
moment ago. When a third moment arrives, the
second undergoes a new modification; from being a
retention it becomes the retention of a retention, and
the layer of time between it and me thickens. Time is
not a line but a network of intentionalities.
Such passages of writing in Merleau-Ponty are gratifying
to those concerned with the arts. Set as Grene sets them,
against Descartes's theories, they reveal that it is one's
searching in the structure of time itself which generates
that 'natural light' which Descartes held to be so
self-contained and eternal. That is, it is by engagement
with time that we achieve what we know: 'We are
always beyond ourselves in the venture of knowing, the
task of finding and giving as best we can significance to
our world, the world which is always beyond us at the
horizon...' Knowledge is 'neither an end or simply a
beginning', but 'a stage of life's way':
We are not in some incomprehensible way an
activity joined to a passivity, an automatism surmounted
by a will, a perception surmounted by a judgment, but
wholly active and wholly passive, because we are the
upsurge of time.
Anyone who has written a poem, or painted a
picture, or worked on a personal relationship, or,
engaged in a piece of scientific research, will understand
the implications of these passages from Merleau-Ponty:
'•ime is the foundation and measure of our spontaneity'.
Living things, as Grene emphasizes, require the future as
primary.
As we have seen, a central principle in Heidegger's
existentialism was time the time of Being and Time.
However Heidegger's future was death, the cessation of
life and indeed all the 'old' existentialism depends upon

dread and death, to give existence meaning. When we
examine the quest for meaning in the 'old' existentialism,
the way death broods over it seems to deny all meaning:
in it, we are always focused on our death as the outcome
of our time. This is so because, for the old existentialism,
the universe remains Newton's dead one, and the self
remains Hume's focus of sense impressions, while time
remains 'the Cartesian independent instant and... the
Newtonian absolute time which flows uniformly in one
direction'. In the 'old' existentialism our relationship with
the world still belongs to the Cartesian myth of total
explicitness: as Wilson says all that Sartre did was to
introduce an existentialist variation on the theme:
'Man is a cartesian robot with consciousness, but his
consciousness is mechanical, like the rest of him...
According to Sartre, there is no T that directs
consciousness: consciousness is T, and it is an
emptiness, a mere condition for the unity of
experience'.
In the 'new' existentialism, as Husserl put it, 'to be
conscious is to be conscious of something'. By contrast
with Cartesian, Humean (and Sartrean) passivity, we
have 'the tension of the act of tacit knowing in which we
attend from the clues which we know only subsidiarily
to the object of our focal attention'. We are reaching out
from ourselves to the world, and by the same token
reaching out from past to future: but a future of
unfolding potentialities in life.
Grene insisted that knowing is learning and that
learning is a 'telic' phenomenon: it is for something, it
draws us towards a solution. It represents a 'pull from
the future': In the past unsolved problem, the developing
embryo: the dance half-performed, the melody half-sung,
the nesting behaviour in the course of enactment:
everywhere in the living world the same future-drawn
structure is evident.
In the world of the 'new' existentialism, the

predominant theme, then, is not of a universal tension
towards death (as in Heidegger, Freud and Sartre) but
'openness to the future':
Each protension, each foreshadowed end, is indeed
definite and limited, and its achievement or the
failure to achieve will be definite and limited as well.
Yet the number and variety of kinds of telos is open
and unlimited (Ibid).
Grene relates the idea to ideas of Whitehead (who spoke
of 'prehension' or the lure of form as yet unrealized). It
would seem to be confirmed by Milner's reporting of that
'formative principle', which she finds in her patients, and
Maslow's emphasis on man's striving towards a 'higher
nature', gaining in his 'peak-moments' a creative sense of
meaning.
Of course, the flow of time (as measured by natural
science) goes on, to one's individual death. However
Grene is pointing towards a 'lived time' that can (as
Mahler showed, and as Eliot said) conquer time by
yielding a meaning that transcends it:
In every comprehensive entity, a skilful
performance, a life's history, the growth of an
institution... something not yet born is striving towards a
being that pulls it forward to maturity.
Here we have philosophy striving to rectify the
alienation of the intellect and to make our thought once
more at home in the world. Whitehead, Polanyi,
Merleau-Ponty and Husserl have done a great deal to
make this possible. In their work they complement each
other in an extraordinary way. Merleau-Ponty himself
was much stimulated by an idea of Whitehead's, that
knowing is a form of life: for the latter, too, living things
am more real than other things.
So, we conclude our investigation of the 'new'

existentialism by noting that it belongs to a process
whereby it is not 'matter' or 'things' or brutal functioning
organisms, or death which are the most real, but
creativity, as an aspect of nature and the universe. A
fundamental principle of the universe expresses itself in
our learning, and our search for meaning and knowing
itself is a form of life.
The philosophical ideas have been examining
announce quite clearly the end of an era, the era of 'belief
in the universal applicability and efficiency of
mathematico-physical science' as Tomlin calls it. One
trouble with this era has been its very self-confidence has
led to meaninglessness, to that situation in which science
has stripped the world of meaning, as Husserl says,
involving an 'indifferent throwing away from the
questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity'.
There have been reactions in the past, against the
mechanist school, as in the Romantic Revival. As Tomlin
makes clear, the poet Coleridge saw 'that the rise and fall
of civilisations had something to do with metaphysical
propositions'. Many thinkers, from Masud R. Khan to
Viktor Frankl and the Christian existentialists have
pointed out that, since the Industrial Revolution there has
been a fatal tendency in man to think of himself as a
machine. This has had catastrophic consequences in the
sphere of morality:
It is clear that you cannot long continue to believe in
materialism without modifying to some extent your
thoughts and even your habits in conformity with the
beliefs that you hold. If, for example, you sincerely
believe that your own mind is no more than a machine,
your thinking will tend on the whole to become
mechanical: or, to put it more accurately, these faculties
which, in the light of your philosophy, are either
nonexistent or largely irrational such as imagination win

tend imperceptibly to atrophy.
We have seen how Gabriel Marcel and Jaspers
examined the problem of the effects on us of regarding
ourselves as functional machines. One of the effects was
to make moral values seem irrelevant, since there is no
place for them, in the dimensions of a functional machine
existence. Polanyi sees the solution to our problem in a
new perspective that of what he calls 'integrative
knowledge'. The current scientific outlook has
increasingly insisted—that function and purpose could in
principle be eliminated from physiology if we could
describe all organic processes as a mere sequence of
topographic configurations. Polanyi declares that such
topographic facts are meaningless and become parts of
physiology only be serving as clues to functional
achievements which are the physiology of living beings.
We understand living beings in terms of their
functional existence in the world: their positionality.
There are clues here, from chemistry and physics (for
example, molecular biology) but they are only clues.
Living things require an intergrative study of their
creative existence:
Nor is the intergration of biological clues to their
meaning a process like drawing mathematical
conclusions from strict premises. The clues include
unspecifiable shapes, colours, sounds, touches and smells
essential to biological identifications, and their
integration is a tacit operation transforming our sight of
the living being to which they point.
To those we may add those modes of perception
discussed by Merleau-Ponty and Buytendijk. Such
'integration of clues' into the understanding of living
things must be present and recognised to be present in
our apprehension of all levels of life: of the lebenswelt.
If Polanyi was right, that life transcends chemistry

and physics, then we enter a new phase of relationship
between man and his universe, and a new episode in
knowledge, in which we need to find a new
responsibility to existence. It -will take a long time for the
new perspective to penetrate into our minds, in the
fullest sense. For example, we need a new politics,
because philosophical anthropology lends no support to a
politics of radical scepticism, of the kind examined in
Polanyi's essay 'Beyond Nihilism' in. This realism based
on scientific scepticism still dogs radical movements, and
often these reveal a failure to take account of
consciousness. We must concern ourselves with whether
society offers the opportunity for individuals to realize
their potentialities, to assert their freedom in an
existentialist sense, and to establish meanings. We need
to recognize the primary need to symbolism, in order to
work on problems of the meaning of life, and in this,
evidently, consciousness is a central question: we cannot
be indifferent to the effect of culture on consciousness,
and so on intentionality. Behind such problems are wider
issues, of the need to re-examine our relationship with all
other creatures, with the earth, and Nature. Here a new
revaluation of evolutionary theory and the philosophy of
biology is important, to seek ways of recognizing the
'telic' elements in life and evolution, and the recognition
of a 'gradient' in life. We need to see human life and
culture as belonging to the creative- impulses in life,
towards greater order and complexity, towards 'forms
not year realised'. We need, in short, a radical
reconsideration of our philosophy of being and of
thought, to refind and reassert our creativity.
This also means a rediscovery of our moral life. If
we contemplate the 'gradient' in life, said Polanyi, as we
move up the scale we become increasingly involved in
kinship to living things: our kinship to living things
facilitates our comprehension of them, but the depth of

which we participate in them flows from the richness of
their significant particulars.
From this complex apprehension of the multifious
forms of life, we must go on to take in the complexity of
man's cultural and poetic existence: man's culture is the
most complex meaningful body in the universe and
hence for a man to know even his share of it amounts to
a participation by his whole person.
From Polanyi's analysis of the nature of knowledge,
it is clear that there is nothing other than men trying to
make sense of their experience, and in this there is
always the question to be recognized of the participation
of the knower: whenever science deals with an object of
deep interest to us, it relies on our participation. The very
act of perception involves participation. It is an
integration of largely unspecified clues, carried out tacitly
by„our sense of coherence. In knowing a living being, we
intergrate its topography into the working of its functions
and this implies an appreciation of those functions.
This in turn involves the recognition of the
responsibilies which knowing brings: knowledge by
participation, so firmly grounded, makes a clean sweep
of the claim that, in order to be valid, knowledge must be
established objectively without relying on personal
judgement. And this restores our confidence in moral
principles that are ultimately known to us by our
commitment to them.
Folanyi asserted and maintained he had
demonstrated that the claim of science that its results are
strictly detached and impersonal are unreasonable, while
the pursuit of the ideal of strict objectivity 'obscures the
very essence of human existence.' The fact of our
inevitable participation in knowing, even in the stictest
science, 'alone offers the grounds for securing moral

values from destruction by a strictly objective analysis.'
We must now build up a truer world view in which
the grounds of man's moral being can be re-established.
For this alone can save modem man from the alternatives
of blind violence and paralysing self-doubt.
We may make parallel assertion about the Arts and
Humanities, since these are now shown to have the same
imaginative and intuitive basis as science. Moreover, if
we accept from Polanyi and the other thinkers in
philosophical anthropology that consciousness and the
knowing mind are greater realities than the stones and
particles, and that imagination is not only the basis of
science but of a much wider kind of knowing, then we
may begin to see the foundation for a new critical
approach to the arts and humanities. Behind many of the
nihilistic and sceptical dynamics of the arts today lies a
false assumption of a metaphysical kind derived from
positivistic science. The cult of meaninglessness and of
the spurious view that there can be no meanings or
values tends to cut us off from the high achievements of
the past; where today can we find the kind of pursuit of
meaning we admire in Mahler, Shakespeare, Anna
Karenina or Dickens' works? Often, despite the general
feeling that 'science' has shown the world to be
meaningless, we read descriptions of the world which fill
us with awe and fascination—as when we read the
account given by Grene from G.P. Baerends of the
activities of a digger wasp. Phenomenology has
significantly not made greater inroads into the
'philosophical' scene in America that in Great Britain.
There has, however, been a considerable increase in
interest, in the area of psychotherapy. Spiegelberg gives a
thorough and remarkable survey of the movement
throughout the world, in his The Phenomenologicai
Movement. It is clear from this that the important figures
in recent years in America are Carl Rogers, Gordon

Allport, Paul Tillich, and the psychotherapists' associated
with the volume on Existence. The predominant influence
in this volume is that of Binswanger, and that is why this
chapter immediately follows the preceeding one.
Spiegelberg examines the historical development in
more depth. Binswanger and Roland Kuhh have both
declared that the new American enthusiasts for the
phenomenological approach to psychiatry suffer form a
lack of background knowledge and understanding of the
European antecendants, particularly of the work of
Heidegger and Husserl. There may be, says Spiegelberg,
some truth in but phenomenology itself believes in 'going
back to the things selves', and so we need to look at what
the American phenomenologists have made of it in their
own dimension. Moreover, May's own two opening
chapters in May et al. are themselves an attempt to
overcome the deficiency, which is in a large measure due
to the lack of good translations, while many important
papers are simply not yet available at all in English.
Spiegelberg makes the important point that it is
possible to find the influence of Franz Brentano in
William James, whose own work may be seen to have
phenomenological elements, though he never uses the
word. Brentano gave a course of lectures on descriptive
psychology at the University of Vienna in 1888 and 1889
and in these he used the words 'Descriptive Psychology
of Describing Phenemonology'. Husserl called Brentano
'my one and only teacher in Philosophy'. Brentano's
messianic impulse was to bring about a 'universal
revolution, a better, a fundamental reformation of
philosophy' in the service of mankind.
After an intensive study of the work of John Stuart
Mill, Brentano came to believe that psychology could be
the proper lever for the necessary reform of philosophy
and for the restoration of a scientific metaphysics. His

standpoint in psychology, he declared, was empirical,
'experience alone is my teacher'. 'But,' he went on, 'I
share with others the conviction that a certain ideal
intuition ("ideale Anschauung") can well be combined with
such a standpoint."
Brentano sought a characteristic which seperated
psychological from non-psychological, or 'physical',
phenomena. In discussing this he suddenly introduced
the key term of the whole existential-phenomenological
movement—'intentionality'.
Every physical phenomenon is characterized by
what the scholastics of the Middle Ages called the
intentional (or sometimes the mental) inexistence of an
object, and what we should like to call, although not
quite unambiguously, the reference (Beziebung) to a
content, the directedness (Richtung) toward an object
(which in this context is not to be understood as
something real) or the immanent-object-quality
(immanente Gegenstandlichkeit). Each contains something
as it object, though not each in the same manner. In the
representation (Verstellung) something is represented, in
the judgment something is acknowledged or rejected, in
desiring it is desired, etc. The intentional inexistence if
peculiar alone to psychical phenomena. No physical
phenomenon shows anything like it. And thus we can
define psychical -phenomena by saying that they are
such phenomena as contain objects in themselves by way
of retention.
Here we find the springhead of the pheno-
menological movement, in the recognition of the 'I can'
element in human perception. Bretano saw that
psychological phenomena are always acts, experience of
undergoing as well as of doing, states of consciousness as
well as merely transitory processes. In this moment he
opened up all these 'tacit' and subjective involvements in

knowing, since explored by Polanyi (and which the
positivists such as Bertrand Russell and the latter William
James tried to get rid of).
Bretano tried to develop a new descriptive
psychology and was also seeking for a sound ethics,
based on a concept of 'self-evidence': to him certain
emotive acts had the peculiar characters of rightness and
wrongness attached to them. In this perhaps he lies
behind the attempt to establish an ethics by naturalistic
descriptions":
It is the concept of intentionality that links Bretano
with William James, and with the American
receptivity to Husserl. Husserl himself was generous
in acknowledging his debt to William James. 'For the
help and progress which I owe to this excellent
investigator in the field of descriptive analysis have
only aided my emancipation from the psychologist
position'. Husserl took the term 'intentionality' and
the general idea behind it from Brentano, to which
he gives specific credit. However critics have
observed that for Husserl the term 'intention' takes
on a different meaning from that used by Bretano,
who used it to mean relatedness to an object. Husserl
used it for the creativity in our acts, rather than a
static directedness, Spiegelberg argues that this
concept of intentionality could have come from
William James Principles of Psychology, where he
spoke of the goal of the mind as 'to take cognisance
if a reality, intend it, or be 'about it'. 'The connections
are made clear by. Spiegelberg's remark, 'in the case
of Husserl's doctrine of intentionality, James's
chapter on Conception was an important directive
stimulus in the transformation of the Bretano motif.
Certainly there was contact between Stumf, a
Bretano student, and Husserl and James, between
1896 and 1889.
So in the spirit of James's bold and open-minded

psychology, with the possible influence within it of ideas
from Bretano and Husserl to do with the mind's creative
dynamics, there was a chance for phenomenology to take
root. Another important figure was Gordon Allport,
Professor of Psychology, Department of Social Relations,
Harvard University. Allpon studied in Berlin and
Hamburg between 1922 and 1925, in the Gestalt School of
Psychology, and he in his psychology has always
emphasized the importance of subjective phenomena as
seen by the experiencing subject. He has stressed the
importance of the ego in contemporary psychology and
his work has strong phenomenological undertones. In his
Terry lectures, Allpon distinguished between the Lockean
and Leibnizian tradition in psychology (a distinction
discussed by May in his introductory chapters and refers
to phenomenology as an important branch of the
Liebnizian tradition in its emphasis on the person as a
source of acts.
In his appraisal of May et al. (1958), Allport says:
existential psychology tells us that Western man, in
freeing himself from the drive-pressures of hunger,
disease and fatigue, has run headlong into a vacuum
where boredom and meaninglessness unsurp his being.
Only by transcending this existential vacuum can he fill
his life with significance and motive. Alienation is a fact,
the capacity for a self-transcendence is a fact: man's
potentiality to achieve a responsible world-design is a
fact. The present volume will assist psychiatry and
psychology to deal with these facts in theory and in
practice more competently than they have done in the
past.
This shows that Allport is anxious to restore the lost
balance in psychology and how he recognises that May et
al. goes far beyond the psychology of drives, and beyond
ego-psychology, offering a firm basis in philosophy and
psychology for thinking about new possibilities in the

study of man. If only England had an established
psychologist of the stature of Allport!
Apart from articles and books by individuals such as
Donald Snygg and AN Combs,' the most important
other figure to 'discover' phenomenology was Carl
Rogers. Rogers was a clinical therapist, who was also
influenced by Kierkegaard and Buber. In a massive piece
of research undertaken at the University of Wisconsin,
The Therapeutic Relationship, Rogers and his colleagues
attempted to measure the impact of 'subjective' or
phenomenal factors in therapy. They did not mention
phenomenology, but the underlying hypothesis is that
certain factors in the therapist's attitude, when perceived
by the patient, make the decisive difference for the
therapeutic change in him. These factors are:
1. Congruence in the therapist, as between his
experience and behaviour.
2. Accuracy of 'empathy'.
3. Unconditional positive regard.
It is the patient's perspective of the therapist's
perspective that 'works'. Here of course, the entites are
those of phenomenology; for example, the therapist's
understanding not only of the patient's feelings, but his
inner world. Rogers's work has contributed a great deal
to the therapists' attempts to break through to people
locked up in isolation. By trying to communicate to the
patient some of his experience of the situation and of the
patient, the patient comes to be aware of the phenomenal
world of the therapist—which includes him, so since he
sees that he is reflected' he becames aware of the
possibility of being understood, and so isolation is
broken. A colleague of Rogers is Eugene T. Gendlin, who
expanded on Rogers's work, in deploring the inadequacy
of logical positivism, and in seeking a more positive,
existentialist kind of philosophy. Gendlin places special

emphasis on meanings and symbols, as aspects of
creative experiencing. He is especially interested in the
work of Husserl, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty.
In the work of Rogers and Gendlin, therefore, we
have an important movement towards existentialism and
phenomenology in America. Rogers himself declares:
I was surprised to find, about 1951,... that the
direction of my thinking and the central aspects of
my therapeutic work could justifiably be labelled
existential and phenomenological. It seems odd for
an American psychologist to be in such strange
company. Today these are significant influences in
our profession.
The most influential figure today in existential
phenomenology in America is undoubtedly Rollo May.
May began his career as an artist in Europe and his
writing has never lost its concern with creativity, while
much of what he says is of interest to the creative writer.
In the thirties he was much influenced by Kurt Goldstein
and by Paul Tillich, the Christian existentialist who wrote
The Courage to Be. It was his contact with Erwin Straus at
the Lexington Conference on 'Phenomenology: Pure and
Applied' that brought him into explicit discussion of
phenomenology. '
May's interest in the movement can be said to have
originated in his personal experience as a victim of
tuberculosis. He saw anxiety as both the problem of the
age and the basic symptom of neurosis, concerns which
prompted his book The Meaning of Anxiety. The question
of how to meet anxiety leads to the question of the
development of the self—a theme pursued in Man's.
Search for Himself. May asserts in this creative
self-consciousness against the loss of the centre of values
in our society, the loss of the sense of self and the loss of
the sense of tragedy.
At this point May came into contact with the new

European movement in existentialist philosophy and
psychology and in 1958 he published two important
essays in May et al. The first is on 'The Origins of
Significance of the Existential Movement in Psychology'
and the second is on the 'Contributions of Existential
Psychotherapy' What is most useful in May's work is the
historical perspective he was able to give to the
movement, in relation to the intellectual history of
Europe. Here, of course, we find the powerful influence
of Binswanger as well as that of Tillich.
May traces back to Kierkegaard and Nietzsche the
rejection of the positivist assumption that reality can be
comprehended in an abstract, detached way. He quotes
Cassirer on the era of the 'autonomous sciences'—each
science pursued its own direction, with no unifying
principle, especially with relation to man. The modem
theory of man lost its intellectual centre. There was a
multiplicity of the particular sciences, but what came to
be lost was any clear and consistent idea of man.
However, May warns us, existentialism was by no
means anti-intellectual. Thee anti-intellectual movements
of our time which place acting above thinking must not
be confused with existentialism. Kierkegaard and the
other existentialists are seeking a reality underlying both
subjectivity and objectivity. He indicates the closeness of
existentialist thought to present-day depth psychology by
quoting Tillich:
Reality or being is not the object of cognitive
experience, but in really , existence' is reality as
immediately experienced, with the accent on the inner,
personal character of man's immediate experience Tillich,
'Existential Philosophy' in the Journal of the History of Ideas.
The importance of the existentialist movement for
May is that it concerns itself with 'rediscovering the
living person amid the compartmentalisation and

dehumanisation of modem culture'. He says that when
one reads Kierkegaard's profound analysis of despair and
the anxiety of Nietzsche's insights into the dynamics of
resentment, guilt and hostility such as arise from
repressed emotional powers, 'one must pinch himself to
realise he is reading works written seventy-five to a
hundred years ago'.
May traces the origins of the existentialist movement
back to 1841, when Schelling gave his lectures before an
audience including Kierkegaard, Burckhardt, Engels and
Bakunin. In it Schelling intended to overthrow Hegel's
vast rationalistic system, identifying abstract truth with
reality. Kierkegaard went back to Denmark to write his
Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Marx opposed Hegel's
emphasis on abstract truth and developed a criticism of
modem industrialism based on the defence of human
qualities against a money economy which turned people
and their qualities into things. A new impetus to
existentialism came in the 1880s with the work of Dilthey
and Nietzsche.
Later Husserl, Heidegger and Jaspers tried to
undercut the subject-object cleavage. May noted the
similarities between these developments and the 'process
philosophies' of Whitehead and William James's
pragmatism. May also notes that one of the most severe
problems of conveying the essence of existentialism is the
misleading titles of certain books: Wahl's A Short History
of Existentialism is short but no means a history of
existentialism, just as the book by Sartre published under
the title of Existential Psychoanalysis has very little to do
with psychoanalysis or, for that matter, existential
therapy.
May refers to Sartre, Jaspers, Marcel, Berdayev,
Ortegay Gasset and Unamuno in Spain, but points out
that many of the works are not available in English,

while others such as Buber, whom one might associate
with the movement, do not wish to be called
existentialists.
In all this confusion, May finds Paul Tillich The
Courage to Be a most valuable presentation of
existentialism, as an approach to actual living, rather than
a book about existentialism. Here, May has an interesting
footnote about the problem of religion. Tillich has both
rational norms —and religious norms, which some
readers will be unable to accept. The religious ideas,
however, can be seen as an authentic existentialist
approach, whether one agrees with them or not. Tillich
rejects (on Nietzchean lines) the idea of God as an object:
The theistic arguments for 'the existence of God' are
not only beside the point, but exemplify the most
deteriorated aspect of the Western habit of thinking in
terms of God as a substance or object, existing in a world
of objects and in relation to whom we are subjects. This
is 'bad theology' Tillich points out, and results in 'the
God Nietzsche said had to be killed because nobody can
tolerate being made into a mere object of absolute
knowledge and absolute control'.
May also makes some illuminating comments on the
elements in contemporary art which 'show what is now
in the souls of many Americans as disruptiveness'. May
sees the existentialist movement as a way to the truth of
our predicament, however unpleasant, but full of creative
potentiality: 'existentialism is an attitude which accepts
man as always becoming, which means potentially in
crisis'. May here quotes Pascal, who expresses the Dasein
experience simply and beautifully:
When I consider the brief span of my life, swallowed
up in the eternity before and behind it, the small
space that I fill, or even see, engulfed in the infinite
immensities of spaces which I know not, and which

know not me, I am afraid, and wonder to see myself
here rather than there: for there is no reason why I
should be here rather than there, now rather than
then, Pensees of Pascal , New York, Peter Pauper
Press. Pensees was originally published in 1670.
This expresses what existentialism calls 'humanness', the
essential contingency of human existence. The ultimate
question we face is 'being there', or more accurately,
'being where?. Nor can we take refuge in any superficial
explanation of time and space. If we are to experience
being in the existential sense, we must become starkly
aware of our existence in such terms, and this must
generate in us a deep shaking anxiety. May here quotes
an American scientist who expresses his positive
existentialism thus:
It is the greatest possible victory to be and to have
been. No defeat can deprive us of the success of having
existed for some moment of time in a universe that seems
indifferent to us. May also saw the current interest in Zen
Buddism and Eastern philosophies as being related to the
need for a new ontology of being.
Surveying the way in which both existentialism and
psychoanalysis grew out of the same cultural situation,
May compares the ideas of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and
Freud. His central theme here is the 'loss of
consciousness' as the central tragic problem of our time,
which is one of predominance of forces which destroy
personal consciousness, not least by juggernaut processes
of conformity and collectivism. Nietzsche, May declares
put his finger on the central issue, which was the need
for the individual to be able, courageously, to live out of
the potentialities of his own particular existence. He
quotes Kaufmann's summary of Nietzsche's belief:
Man's task is simple; he should cease letting his
'existence' be 'a thoughtless accident'. Not only the use of
the word Existenz , but the thought which is at stake,

suggests that this essay is particularly close to what is
today called Existenzphilosophie. Man's fundamental
problem is to achieve true 'existence' instead of letting
his life be no more than another accident. In The Gay
Science Nietzsche hits on a formulation which brings out
the essential paradox of any distinction between self and
true self. 'What does your conscience say?—You shall
become what you are. 'Nietzsche maintains this conception
until the end, and the full tide of his last work is Ecce
Homo , Wie man wird, was man ist - how one becomes what
one is'.
Individuality, worth and dignity, are not gegeben ,
that is, given us as data by nature, but aufgegeben that is,
'given or assigned to us as a task which we must solve'—
an attitude developed in the psychology of Viktor Frankl.
Freud, says May, was obviously influenced by
Nietzsche, who, like him, saw how repressed emotions
could generate 'bad conscience'. However Freud
distrusted the abstract speculations of philosophers, and
sought to deal with human problems of despair, anxiety
and the fragmentalized personality, in terms of natural
science and the homo natura. In this, says May, he placed
serious limits on psychoanalysis. In truth, Freud's ideas
are actually found in Kierkegaard in greater depth and in
Nietzsche in greater breadth. Freud, however, made them
disciplined, orderly and teachable.
May then invokes Binswanger's criticisms of Freud,
that while he explored the Umwelt he failed to
comprehend the Mitwelt of man's relationship with
himself. In his structures he tended to objectify the
personality and to suggest determinism and the passivity
of the ego.
Freud's underlying belief was that reason was our
salvation but to him it was technical reason. His great
contribution was his effort to bring man's irrational

tendencies into the light, in an attempt to overcome
fragmentation. However in its increasing technical nature
and organic theory, psychoanalysis came to make the
fragmentation worse. May believes that psychoanalysis
and psychotherapy threaten to become part of the
neurosis of our day rather than part of the cure, because
their techniques assist in standardizing and giving
cultural sanction to man's alienation from himself rather
than in solving it, or even by becoming part of the
mechanization of man. This is now calculated and
controlled (as by the use of depth psychology in
advertising) with great psychological precision on a mass
scale.
The existentialist movement in psychotherapy
protects against this Freudian tendency to identify
psychotherapy with technical reason. It stands for basing
psychotherapy on an understanding of what makes man
the human being. It stands for defining neurosis in terms
of what destroys man's capacity to fulfil his own being. It
unites science and ontology, by its emphasis on 'man as
the being who is human' and in the larger issues of
philosophy is striving to oppose the tendency to
subordinate reason to technical problems, to make man
in the image of the machine. Science, Nietzsche warned,
was becoming a factory, and the result would be ethical
nihilism. It is against this ethical nihilism that
existentialist psychotherapy strives.
The meaning of the fundamental contribution of
existential therapy, in its understanding of man as being,
is explored by May in 'Contributions of Existential
Psychotherapy' and in his books Love and Will and Power
and Innocence.
t
For May, existence is experienced most explicitly in

the T am' experience, the an of contact with and
acceptance of the fact that 'I am'. In this, his psychology

has evident parallels with that of Winnicott, at the centre
of whose approach is the 'I am feeling'. Winnicott's work
was an attempt to give intellectual and rational
recognition to the strange dynamics of encounter and
love, especially in mothering and child care.
As May says, what we are talking about is an
experience every sensitive therapist must have countless
times a day:
It is the experience of the instantaneous encounter
with another person who comes alive to us on a very
different level from what we know about him.
'Instantaneous' refers, of course, not to the actual
time involved but to the quality of the experience....
when the patient himself steps in, we often have a
sudden, sometimes powerful experience of
here-is-a-new-person, an experience that normally
carries with it an element of surprise... We may have
it with friends or loved ones. It is not a once-
and-for-all experience, indeed in any developing,
growing relationship it may—probably should, if the
relationship is vital—occur continually.
This 'grasping of the being' of another person occurs on a
different level from our knowledge of specific things
about him. Of course, it is useful to know about the
patterns of a person's behaviour, including the
inter-personal behaviour, his social 'condition' (in Sartre's
sense) the symbolism of his actions, and so on; but all
these are on quite another level from the immediate,
living person. (A fact which sociology, for example,
might ponder, since it seldom manages to penetrate to
this area of spontaneous individuality).
Like Winnicott, May allowed himself to be aware of
the disturbing (as well as satisfying) aspects of encounter:
The encounter with the being of another person has
the power to shake one profoundly and may
potentially be very anxiety-arousing. It may also be

joy-creating. In either case, it has the power to grasp
and move one deeply.
The therapist may defend himself against the anxieties by
focussing on only certain mechanisms of behaviour. This
will lead to a radical distortion of reality, for one does
not then see the other person. In psychotherapy,
technique must be subordinated to the fact of the reality
of the two persons in the room. Over this, May invokes
Sartre's emphasis in Being and Nothingness where he
declares that if we consider man as capable of being
analysed and reduced to original data, to determined
'drives' or 'desires' supported by the subject as properties
of an object, what happens to him? He becomes a sort of
determinate clay which must receive the desires
passively. Or he is reduced to a bundle of these
irreducible drives or tendencies, a bag of functions. In er
case, the man disappears. We can no longer find 'the one'
to whom this or that experience happened: Sartre says
Either in looking for the person we encounter a
useless, contradictory metaphysical substance - or
else the being whom we seek vanishes in a dust of
phenomena bound together by external connections.
However, if we leave this 'bundle of drives' picture of
man, and talk about 'being' and Dasein, people begin to
feel we are talking about some kind of misty mysticism
and that this is unscientific. In our culture, says May, we
seem to think that a thing or an experience is not real
unless we can make it mathematical, reduce it to
numbers, or segmentize it. Yet, what does this mean
except reducing something to an abstraction — to
persuade ourselves it is real?
So, when phenomenological approaches are
denounced as 'mysticism' we really have a kind of
osbcurantism, seeking to avoid the issue. Of course, we
cannot segmentize or mathematize 'being', 'love' or
'consciousness': but there can be no doubt that they exist

and should be studied rationally. "There is another kind
of resistance, May points out: the West lacks the sense of
the ontological. As Marcel said, if modem man is worried
by ontological demands, demand of being:
It is only dully, as an obscure impulse... Indeed I
wonder if a psychoanalytical method, deeper and
more discerning than any that has been involved
until now, would not reveal the morbid effects of the
repression of this sense and the ignoring of this need.
May himself has shown himself to be very much
concerned with the need for being, in Love and Will which
is about the paralysis of creative potentialities in a
dehumanizing and even schizoid society) and in Power
and Innocence. In 1958 he refers the reader to Erich Fromm
Escape from Freedom and David Riesman's The Lonely
Crowd.
Daseinsanalyse, says May, is composed from Dasein,
sein (being) plus da (there), which indicates that man is
the being who 'is there', in the sense that he can know
who he is and can take a stand with reference to that
fact. The 'there' is moreover not just any place, but the
particular 'there' that is mine, the particular point in time
as well as space of my existence at this given moment.
Man is the being who can be conscious of, and therefore
responsible for, his existence. It is this capacity to become
aware of his own being which distinguishes the human
being from other beings.
May refers to Binswanger's phrase, 'Dasein choosing'
this or that, meaning 'the person-who-is-responsible-
for-his-existence choosing'. In English, he says 'being'
connotes a static substance. We need to keep in mind the
verb form, implying that someone is in the process of
'being something'. 'Being' should be understood as
referring to potentia, the source of potentiality:
We can understand another human being only as we

see what he is moving toward, what he is becoming,
and we can know ourselves only as we project our
potentia in action'. The significant tense for human
beings is the future—that is to say, the critical
question is what I am pointing toward, becoming,
what I will be in the immediate future.
Being is not given to man as its capacity to become an
oak is given to the acorn. Man must be responsible for
himself, if he is to become himself. Moreover, he knows
that at some future moment he will not be: he is the
being who is always in dialectical relationship with
non-being: death. In this definition of being, May is
evidently using concepts from Sartre and Heidegger, but
as transformed by Husserl and Binswanger.
At this point May quotes a moving account by a
patient, of her discovery of the 'I am' feeling which had
been denied in her by her parents:
It is like an axiom in geometry—never experiencing
it would be like going through a geometry course not
knowing the first axiom. It is like going into my very
own Garden of Eden where I am beyond good and
evil and all other human concepts. It is like the
experience of the poets of the intuitive world, the
mystics, except that instead of the pure feeling of
and union with God it is the finding of and the
union with my own being. It is like owning
Cinderella's shoe and looking all over the world for
the foot it will fit and realising all of a sudden that
one's own foot is the only one it will fit. It is a
'Matter of Fact' in the etymological sense of the
expression. It is like a globe before the mountains
and oceans and continents have been drawn on it. It
is like a child in grammar finding the subject of a
verb in a sentence—in this case the subject being
one's own life span. It is ceasing to feel like a theory
towards oneself.
May distinguishes between the discovery of new

'powers' by a patient, and this 'ur experience'—this basic
conviction—which this particular patient declared was
his saying to Descartes, 'I can therefore I think, I feel, I
do'. 'Powers' can be compensations, unless there is a
feeling that acts are rooted in the individual's own
existence. It is not true, May insists, that as soon as one is
'accepted' of someone else, the experience of one's own
being follows automatically. Such an attitude might even
lead to passivity; the crucial question is what the
individual himself develops in the context of acceptance
(the immense efforts involved for some may be studied
in case-histories such as those recorded in In the Hands of
the Living God , by Marion Milner; Sybil , by Flora Rheta
Schreiber, a history of multiple identity; The Colours of
Rage and Love, by Marie Von Naevestad,; and in
Winnicott's Therapeutic Consultations in Child Psychiatry.
A further most significant observation by May is
that 'being is a category which cannot be reduced to
introjection of social and ethical norms'. It is, to use
Nietzsche's phrase 'beyond good and evil'. To the extent
that my sense of existence is authentic, it is 'precisely not
what others live told me what I should be'. The
ontological sense is not a super-ego phenomenon: it
always presupposes Eigemvelt, the 'own world'. Though
interwoven with all kinds of inter-relatedness, its basis is
not the product of social forces.
Thus the 'I am' experience is not to be confused with
the functioning of the ego, which has such a passive role
in Freudian psychoanalysis, modifying between the id
and super-ego. To May, that way of thinking still belongs
to the subject-object dichotomy. The ego is conceived of
as a weak product of either the more primary natural
forces of the id which are unwillingly civilized, or as the
product of economic forces (in Marxism) of the
submersion of the individual as 'one among many' in the
sea of conformity in Heidegger's terms and those he

influenced such as Sartre. This idea of the ego as weak
and passive is itself, declares May, a 'symptom of the
repression of the ontological concern'.
May finds that existence takes on vitality and
immediacy the more we develop a tragic sense, in the
confronting of the fact of death, of non-being. The reality
of death is denied in Western societies, by belief in
'progress' or by turning it into statistics. The truth is that
'in the midst of life we are in death', which does not
mean only that we will die, or are likely to die at any
minute, but that all our being stands under the cloud of
nothingness. The existential analysts hold that the
confronting of death gives the most positive reality to life
itself. Death as an irrelative potentiality singles man out
and, as it were, individualises him to make him
understand the potentiality of being in others as well as
in himself when he realises the inescapable nature of his
own death.
Non-being is also manifest in conformism, being
swallowed up in das Man, with a corresponding loss of
potentialities. In discussing these ideas, which obviously
derive from Heidegger, May goes on to raise the question
of whether man can assert any meanings successfully
against death and nothingness.
In this, May shows himself to be a confident
therapist who recognized that whether or not a person
can believe in the possibility of meaning is related to the
degree to which he can tolerate the hate and emptiness of
himself The capacity to confront anxiety, hostility and
aggression in oneself is related to the capacity to confront
death. It is this problem which Gustav Mahler worked
out in his later works. Severe anxiety, hostility and
aggression are states and ways of relating to one's self
and others that may destroy being. Yet it is no solution to
the problem of life to take flight from all situations that

might generate anxiety. There is a 'normal' kind of
anxiety which is different from neurotic anxiety as Paul
Tillich has said, 'the self-affirmation of a being is the
stronger, the more non-being it can take into itself. It is
by coming to terms with our mortality and negative
dynamics that we may embrace ourselves, in all our
reality, as human beings.
At this point in his essay on 'Contributions', May
went on to discuss the work of Goldstein, Boss and
Minkowski. Unfortunately there will not be enough space
in this volume to do full justice to these thinkers. Kurt
Goldstein studied brain damaged patients and found that
some had lost the ability to abstract, and to think in
terms of 'the possible'. They were tied to the concrete
situation in which they found themselves, exhibiting
compulsive orderliness, holding themselves at every
moment to the immediate situation, rigidly. Unless they
could hold to this tangibly present situation, they felt the
self would dissolve. By his work on these patients,
Goldstein established, as it were, a neurological basis of a
new kind for recognition of the normal and natural
capacity of man to transcend his immediate situation,
since these people, who could not escape from the
immediate, had lost the capacity to sustain a human
identity by physical damage. A human being who was a
mere composite of substances cannot so transcend
himself, or find a future, so a psychology which sticks to
such a model can never find that which is most 'real'
about our existence: our capacity to transcend the
boundaries of the present moment in time. May quotes
Nietzsche 'man is the animal who can promises'. In her
discussion of Goldstein, Grene relates his concepts to
those of Portmann, Plessner and Buytendijk, and finds
him closer to the behaviourists, though it is also clear
that his approach transcends theirs by recognizing
something like Plessner's 'positionality'. Goldstein speaks

of 'the expression of different attitudes of the organism to
the environment' and the hierarchical organization of
living things in which man is unique. His examination of
the consequences of defects in the organism, as through
brain damage, is discussed in terms of the reparation of I
and world', 'it puts the organism more at the mercy of
the world, makes it more of an automaton'.
Medard Boss argued, like Ian D. Suttie, that Freud's
practice was right but his theories were wrong. Boss tried
to re-interpret Freudian concepts in an existentialist way.
Transference should be seen in terms of perception and
relatedness to a world. The patient transfers his attitudes
to his parents to the analyst because he has never
developed beyond the limited and restricted forms of
experience characteristic of the infant, in such
relationships. Repression and resistance should be seen in
terms of the patient's capacity to accept his own
potentialities and his own freedom. Freud saw repression
as related to bourgeois morality, in the face of which the
patient strove to preserve an acceptable picture of
himself, and so held back ideas and desires which
bourgeois moral codes found unacceptable. Repression,
in the existentialist view, may involve the inhibitions of
bourgeois morality; but a much more positive view of the
problem is to examine what it is that inhibits the
patient's freedom. Why does he not accept his
potentialities? The primary question is not psychic
determinism (in introjection of bourgeois morality, or
parental inhibitions as embodied in the super-ego) but
how the patient relates to his freedom to express
potentialities in the first place.
Resistance, Boss says, represents the working out of
a tendency in the patient to become absorbed in the
Mitwelt, in compromise, to slip back into das Man, the
anonymous mass, and to renounce his unique and
original potentialities. 'Social conformity' is a general

form of resistance' in life: and in therapy it may even
take the form of a patient's meekly accepting the
doctrines and interpretations of the therapist! Boss tried
to place these dynamics, observed by Freud, on an
ontological basis and to see them in terms of the
existence of the patient. He wants to 'throw overboard
the painful intellectual acrobatic of the old
psychoanalytical theory which sought to derive the
phenomena from the interplay of some forces or drives
behind-them'—according to the model of homo naturans.
Boss holds himself a loyal Freudian in asking for the
patient to reveal all that comes into his mind: but his
emphasis is quite different, in that he seeks to reflect and
to hold release potentialities—an approach which seems
close to that developed by Winnicott. The therapist is the
vehicle and medium, through which the patient sees
himself.
May is interested in the work of Eugene Minkowski
because he was struck by the relevance of the time
dimension in the understanding of psychiatric patients.
This problem was investigated by Bergson, and may be
related to Whitehead's philosophy of process and Grene's
analysis of problems in time-in-existence. Minkowski
points out that a certain depressed schizophrenic could
not relate to time and that for him each day was a
separate island with no past and no future, the patient
being unable to feel any hope or sense of continuity with
the morrow. This patient had a terrifying delusion that
his execution was imminent, and this had much to do
with his incapacity to deal with the future. Minkowski
rejected the traditional interpretation of this situation
which would be that the patient could not temporize
because he had this delusion. He asked, 'could we not...
suppose the more basic disorder is the distorted attitude
towards the future, while the delusion is only one of its
manifestations? As Abraham Maslow says, 'attachment to

the concrete is a loss of the future': from the work of
Goldstein and Minkowski, we find that patients in
psychiatry may suffer a failure of the sense of time
emerging in a creative way. The relevance of this to our
philosophical predicament is evident: Cartesian time is
time as a sequence of islands, and loses sight of the
future. Moreover, it is clear today that our schizoid
society has, at a radical level, in many ways, lost hope in
the future. Thee aspects of our predicament become clear
when we apply, as May does the concept from Husserl of
intentionality.
In psychiatry, May is a major interpreter of the
Husserlian view that 'consciousness is defined by the fact
that it intends something, poir.ts toward something
outside itself - specifically, that is intends the object.
The conception of the relationship between the
individual and his world as one dynamic and creative—
in which 'cognition, or knowing, and cognition or
willing, go together' —is developed by May into a
profoundly new ethical position and thus a position of
belief in human nature and policy for the recovering of
humanness:
Just as consciousness is the distinctively human
form of awareness, so decision and responsibility are the
distractive forms of consciousness in the human being
who is moving towards self-realisation, integration,
maturity.
May uses the word 'decision' in a special way. This
energy creates a new dimension, from personal will and
wish, and from our responsiveness to others - and our
responsibility to others. He used Buber's term 'significant
other' for those who are important to us in realizing
long-term goals. This is the value or principle emerging
from psychoanalysis:
If the point were not self-evident it could be

demonstrated along the lines of Sullivan's
interpersonal theory of psychiatry, Buber's
philosophy and other viewpoints. They all point out
that wish will, and decision, occur within a nexus of
relationships upon which the individual depends not
only for his fulfilment, but his very existence.
May's achievement is that he has put love, in this sense,
into the centre of the discussion of what creative
dynamics of being we can assert, in the Dasein dimension
against nothingness.
It should be added that there is now in America
quite a strong following of the movements delineated
here. There is the human science movement, and there is
a whole department of psychology made up of those
dedicated to human Science of a phenomenological kind
in Georgia. The work of Parry Gilmore and David Smith
at the University of Pennsylvania among others shows
that many in America have already seen the relevance of
these developments. There is a professional organization
and a journal, Phenomenology and Teaching. There are
other theorists not dealt with here, such as George
Gadamer and Clifford Gertz. There are several groups
trying to apply the findings of psychoanalysis to
literature at the University of MacMaster, Hamilton,
Canada, and mention should be made of the work of
Andrew Brink.
Existentialism
Existentialism in one of its strands of development died

before it took hold as a contribution to the redemption of
thought, and fell itself into nihilistic fashion. Today, alas,
if we say the word 'existentialist' to anyone, they
immediately think of a certain kind of stark, gloomy, and
pessimistic attitude to life, which has been propounded
through thousands of plays, films, novels and extremist
statements. If students were asked to write essays on the
word 'existentialism' these essays would include phrases
such as 'man is a useless passion', 'hen is other people',
'dreadful freedom', 'nothingness astir', 'alienation',
estrangement', 'absurdity' 'condemned to be free',
'illumination through anguish' and 'man is waste matter'.
Existentialism is associated in most people's mind with
an atmosphere of gloom and despair perversion the
sanctification of crime or violence as a possible authentic
solution to life's problems: the use of mescalin or LSD;
the cult of insanity or the rejection of the family. At best
this 'old' existentialism urges on us a kind of stoical
endurance of life before death overwhelms us. Many of
these developments however, rather than representing a
new direction, seem in the end worse than the 'natural
science' view of man, against which originally
existentialism revolted because of its implicit nihilism.
So we begin from the dismal recognition that one
form of existentialism—that represented by Sartre—has
ended in sterility. In this existentialism there has been no
92 Philosoplucal Anthropology
new development for many decades. The standard works

following on from Kierkegaard are Heidegger and Sartre.
Later, Sartre wrote his Critique of Dialectical Reason, which
is less an attempt to develop existentialism than an
attempt to develop a compromise with Marxism.
If we are seeking a philosophy of existence to help
overcome a sense of alienation, in a universe to which we
do not belong, the 'old' existentialism seems unlikely to
help us. It tends to imply that the world is not only
indifferent to man, but if anything actively hostile. Man
is thrown into the universe, and is abandonne: there is no
God, for this existentialism is an atheistic humanism.
Even to those existentialists for whom there is a God, He
can be no comforting intermediary or saviour. The lonely
individual has to find God without help. There are no
values outside man—outside man's ordinary, everyday
consciousness. Man is free, as Sartre says, but what is he
to do with his freedom. He can do anything he likes: but
freedom for anything is freedom for nothing. Man is free
the world remains empty and meaningless. To Sartre, in
this gloomy picture, love inevitably ends in sadism,
masochism and indifference. Other people in relation to
one, or in social living, are inevitably inauthentic, while
existence is nauseous—the impingement upon one of the
pressing materialistic nature of things, or one's own
embodied existence as waste matter. It is thus hardly
surprising that Sartre himself fell into a kind of paralysis
of soul in the end, as he expressed at the end of Words:
My retrospective illusions are all in pieces.
Martyrdom, salvation, Mortality, all are crumbling:
the building is falling in ruin. I have caught the Holy
Ghost in the cellars and flung him out of them.
Atheism is a cruel, long-term business; I believe I
have gone through it to the end, I see clearly, I am
free from illusions... for about ten years, I have been
a man who is waking up, cured of a long,
Existentialism 93
bitter-sweet madness, who cannot recall his old ways

without laughing, and who no longer has any idea of
what to do with his life. I have become once again the
traveller without a ticket that I was at seven... I have
renounced my vocation, but I have not unfrocked
myself. I still write. What else can I do?
Yet this man became an intellectual leader in the West, of
a cultural fashion, and a political stance—even though he
himself became the epitome of a sense of futility. One
may admire in Sartre a certain courage, in his rejection of
bad faith. However, though we must be careful of ad
hominem arguments, if we follow Karl Stern, the
psychotherapist, who examines the subjective roots of a
tradition of philosophy in the West to which Sartre
belongs., there is a strong pathological element in Sartre's
view of existence: clearly, I would believe, a schizoid
element.
Sartre, Heidegger, bad faith and Mitsein

In examining Sartre it becomes evident that central issues
in existentialist philosophy are the concepts of meeting,
encounter, togetherness, sociality. This may be related to
the wider problem of how we are aware of our identity,
and how we deploy ourselves on earth. There was once a
time when people had a text hung in their living room
saying 'Thou God seest me', and, in that God was aware
of them, they felt secure in their identity. From Martin
Buber's philosophical anthropology we learn how
human, consciousness grows out of encounter, 'having a
presence in the being of the other'. In his philosophy,
presumably, the ultimate meeting, and the ultimate
confirmation, is with God.
In Kiekegaard's original existentialism, the 'stages
on life's way' are steps in a journey from the world to
God. The ultimate confrontation of the individual with
his maker motivates and guides him on his pilgrimage.
Give up the palaces of Hegelian speculation for a full
awareness of dread, of one's despair, of one's

solitariness—and the only way this may be done is to
find God.
However, in the atheistic existentialism of Heidegger
and Sartre, God is dead, and it is the absence of God that
impels their philosophical concern with the individual
quest. The lonely individual is thrown into a threatening
world, his circumstances are senseless, and his life is
ultimately absurd. Somehow he must forge a self that is
his own, out of these unpropitious circumstances, by
self-creation.
However, in Sartre's existentialism, there is no hope
of the individual forging this self from togetherness. Nor,
of course, does the (existentialist) individual have any
'essence' to which he can turn as a standard or model. In
the philosophy of Sartre, the traditional concept of
human nature was itself a by-product of the idea of God
the maker of Heaven and earth. Now God is dead, man
must make himself out of the brute facts of his own
particular situation, by sheer will.
However, Sartre claims at least, existentialism is not
materialistic (though for him it offers, ultimately no
escape from being or being made into an object).
Although Sartre has always been close to the Marxists, he
argued that existentialism provided a more philosophical
basis for revolution than Marxism.
Although in the end Sartre seems to leave us with
no choice but to uphold our subjectivity, hopelessly, in
the face of attempts on all sides to make us into an object,
we are, as his kind of object, in our own shoes, so to
speak, at least in our own bodies. In struggling with
Sartre, as we shall see, Merleau-Ponty was able to give us
more hope.
What we are not, at least, to Sartre is a product of
Existentialism 95
impersonal material and social forces, in which

consciousness and culture are mere 'superstructures'. In
Sartre the concept of the body is central to the analysis of
consciousness:
But it is this body and these factual conditions as a
facet of this personality that are significant, not
personality as such, reduced in general to an
epiphenomenon of abstract material laws.
As a matter of fact, Sartre raises the same objections
to Freudian psychoanalysis, which seeks to see conscious
symptoms as expressions of universally recognizable
subconscious patterns. To Sartre, this was to avoid the
problem of the individual consciousness itself, and this
theme has been pursued (albeit in a much more positive
way) by the existentialist psychotherapists. In L'Etre et le
Neant, Gallimard, 1943, Sartre says:
What interests the (existentialist) psychoanalyst first
of all is to determine the free project of the single
person starting from the individual relation which
unites it to these different symbols of being. I can
love viscous contacts; have a horror of holes, etc.
That does not mean that the viscous, the greasy, the
hole, etc., have lost their general ontological
significance for me, but, on the contrary, that,
because of that signification, I determine myself in
such and such a manner in relation to them.
The existentialist psychoanalyst is concerned not so much
with explaining away conscious motives in terms of their
subconscious origins but with the free use of symbols
made by this individual.
So, by contrast with Marxism and Freudian
psychoanalysis, Sartre's existentialism rejects attempts to
reduce consciousness to a materially determined
cause-and-effect phenomenon. Yet there is no free will in
itself existing inwardly in Stoic fashion, as Grene insists.
96 Philosophical Anthrjpology
There are only the afflictions and achievements of the

existing, embodied individual. While there is no such
individual self apart from conditions of life (class, social
situation, economic situation and so on), the individual's
situation does not constitute the self. To the existentialist,
materialism is an endeavour to avoid liberty, and to seek
excuses for rejecting a freedom one dare not face.
This desire to show human values as derived from a
total and desperate human situation, without benefit of
God, or any basis in natural science, raises enormous
problems of how we know what is right for us.
In this debate, Heidegger's contribution was the
concepts of 'authentic' and 'inauthentic' existence. If a
man allows his choices to be made for him, or assumes
he is determined by impersonal forces of any kind, then
he has slipped into 'inauthentic existence'. Heidegger
declares that an isolated T without others is a false
abstraction— it never really exists because we find
ourselves always in the world with others. So we must
take as our starting point man in the world; we are flung
into this world.
To Heidegger sheer facts exist only for 'scum, offal
or a cabbage'. For me they are always my facts, which I
must transcend in some direction, if only in the direction
of flight, of madness or of self-destruction.
At once, we begin to see the doubtful element in
Heidegger's existentialism, since such an attitude would
give acceptance (as it has in decades since) to the
dynamics of hate and moral inversion. On the other
hand, it does, or ought, to enable us to understand such
acts as terrorism or suicide, phenomenologically: they are
attempts to find meaning. 'Circumstances become
circumstances only for the consciousness that tried to
make of them something other than mere circumstances.'
Existentialism 97
Togetherness, Mitsein, in Heidegger's philosophy is

chiefly an aspect of forfeiture, of inauthentic existence.
We are free to choose, but we are also free not to
choose. We can allow others—the 'mob' or whoever—to
do our choosing for us. We have chosen not to choose.
As Margaret Weldhen points out, while discussing
Heidegger, this is largely the state of people today, who
allow the 'media' to condition the and to form their
attitudes, in total inauthenticity.
For Heidegger, as for Sartre, there is no easy escape,
and ultimately no escape from inauthenticity. To
Heidegger there is only responsible acts in man making
himself, but these acts are not yet what they aim to be.
Yet we have literal and inescapable responsibility for
what we do. We are what we have contrived to
accomplish, recognizing that we meant to do certain
things, but failed to do them.
So these are the facts of my situation, meaningless
except for the meaning I give them: this need to live out
our each personal hell of guilt and purgatory is bereft of
the idealist's escape and the materialist's excuses ('I am
this way because...') In this there is 'dreadful freedom'.
Beyond this is a deeper dread: in this existentialist
world without God or grace, there is, ultimately, only
nothingness. Sartre speaks of 'Je suis mon propre neant' 'I
am my own nothingness': Heidegger of 'Das nichts
nichtet', 'Nothing nothings' or 'nothing noths'. In the end,
all our concern with human meaning and freedom 'goes
into the dark' —and the beginning of the claim for
existential freedom is in the recognition of man's
essential meaninglessness, non-entity and insignificance.
Inauthenticity belongs to the 'forgetful of existence':
one forgets, through distraction, the ultimate tragic
problems which ought to compel one to seek to live 'a
lifetime burning in every moment'. Once one looks

beyond the banality of everyday existence—all one sees
is one's life stretching towards the tomb. So, man often
only springs to 'authentic existence' when faced with his
death.'
To Heidegger, the awareness of my death is the
inevitable end towards which my freedom projects itself.
This is being to death. Death utterly negates all meaning:
yet it is only in awareness of this that I can rise above
destruction and become authentically myself. This
contrasts with Sartre's attitude: to him his own death
seemed more real to others than to himself. What makes
him say 'man is condemned to be free' is the gulf
between the bare facts of existence and the task of
fashioning something from them in one's agonized
liberty. Yet it is characteristic of human freedom that it
cannot bear to face its own truth.
While in Sartre's philosophy the things that
surround us and even our own bodies are repulsive, in
Heidegger ordinary life is despicable. Again, we may
suspect a schizoid condition in the philosopher himself:
his view of life once more is deficient in 'peak moments',
in transcendent moments of joy. It may be true that
Mozart wrote such poignantly beautiful music because he
was in constant contempk.tion of death, but it is also true
that the normal individual experiences from time to time
in ordinary existence the kind of gladness and delight in
being alive that is also expressed in Mozart—but which is
singularly missing, evidently, from the experience of
Heidegger and Sartre.
Heidegger's 'human existence', Dasein, which
becomes of such importance in the hands of the
existentialist psychotherapists, is in his philosophy,
continually lost in the 'one'. What one does, thinks and
becomes is substituted for the genuine resolve of the
Existentialism 99
isolated and liberated individual. We surrender our

freedom to the scattered and distracted demands of the
day: taking care (besorgen) of the things we habitually
take care of.
In this there is something like Sartre's 'bad faith': the
distractions blur the dichotomy between my freedom and
the mere contingency on which it is founded —my
nothingness. So, we escape our freedom, in a pretence
that values are there in things, instead of being aware of
the need for us to create them as (unjustifiably) carriers
of our freedom. However in Sartre's view there seems to
be, as Stern argues, a pathological element. It is as if
Sartre was trying to persuade us to accept what is
essentially a schizoid attitude to experience, full of
insecurity and the inability to trust in one's world or to
find any meaning in one's experience. Although to the
psychotherapist this might seem to be an attitude to
experience based on 'false self defences, on a need to
exert a continual hostility to a meaningless world in
order to feel real, to Sartre it seems the only true way of
existence. The kind of sense of happy, meaningful being,
which most people experience in their ordinary existence,
full of 'peak moments' as Maslow called them, seems to
Sartre the most inauthentic form of 'bad faith'. Drop
one's intellectual defences against the world, as by being
just content in it, and malignant forces will implode one,
or one will collapse from internal emptiness. The whole
failure of the 'old' existentialism stems from this
paranoid-schizoid element. The whole edifice depends
upon an emphasis on the individual being without any
sources of meaning except his own will, exerted behind
'barriers against dread'. Yet to most people these normal
engagements with the world are what life is, and they
are meaningful: they do not have this feeling of a need to
defend a central kind of antipathetic thinking against
them. When the assurances of the 'trite and everydav
values' collapse, Sartre says:
I emerge alone and in dread in the face of unique

and first project which constitutes my being; all the
barriers, all the railings collapse, annihilated by the
consciousness of my liberty; I have not, nor can T
have, recourse to any value against the fact that it is
I who maintain values in being; nothing can assure
me against myself; cut off from the world and my
essence by the nothing that I am, I have to realize the
meaning of the world and of my essence: I decide it,
alone, unjustifiable, and without excuse.
The failure of the 'old' existentialism lies in what is a
system built on hate: on the inversion of the patterns of
normal existence based on love and 'creative reflection'.
It is obvious from this passage that Sartre maintained a
ruthless determination that the ultimate freedom in the
face of nothingness shall have no 'justification'. Everyday
existence is a fraud: to be truthful one must distrust and
reject all those values that seem to be created in it,
clinging only to one's determined dread. Liberty may in
Sartre's opinion be at one with creativity, but it seems a
strange creativity that rejects all meaningful engagement
with the world.
Sartre found his concept of free will rooted in the
unhampered liberty of the Cartesian God who is bound
neither by truth nor by good, but makes them both. It is
strange to think that his dogged nihilistic self-making
dynamic is a return of the God whom Decartes shoved
into his separate compartment, cut off from the positivist
entities to which he reduced the v.orld and the Self. In
that compartment God died: but now returns as the self
determined by win to realize the meaning of the world
and one's essence, but without hope, and in total
isolation, declaring that man may have a conscience—but
even in this he is a 'useless passion'.
Such philosophies are, extremely dangerous
politically, because they cannot find love, and are full of
Existentialism 101
hostility. Heidegger's idea of freedom led him to

recommend subjection to Hitler's Reich: Sartre's led him
to endorse terrorist violence without regard for its aims.
The most positive element in Heidegger's
philosophy is his emphasis on our inevitable and
inescapable guilt, and thus on conscience:
The call of conscience has the character of calling
existence to its properest capacity of being itself, and
that in the manner of calling it up to its properest
guiltiness.
However, this raises the question: what happens when
Heidegger's individual resolves to throw off everything
that others (the 'mob', conventions) press upon him by
way of inauthenticity? What about the Mitdasein, 'existing
with', or existing-together-with-others problem?
The answer is clearly 'Next to Nothing'. My freedom
is mine, and the awareness of it admits no intruders,
for it is 'freedom to death', and from my loneliness
in face of death no one can save me; nor can I, if I
would, save or even pity another.
Again, we have a philosophy that cannot find the
possibility of mutual freedom, of human beings standing
face to face, enriching one another's existence, enabling
one another's freedom.
What is missing is the central concept in the
psychoanalytical delineation of human morality: concern.
According to Heidegger: I can only care for others in any
genuine way in so far as I refer my care for them
essentially and completely to my own free projection of
myself. It is uncomfortable to find in Sartre's ideas of
moral interaction parallels with those of Max Stirner, the
egoistical nihilist 'the other my food!'. In Heidegger's
philosophy people are always means, too, to a free man.
They are debased to tools by the rare man of character
who has risen to the level of a richer, genuine existence,
who has resolved in ruthless independence to fashion a

life-towards-death, a freedom on his own pattern. This
seems unpleasantly close to Stirner. It must surely make
social and political life impossible? As with Stirner, 'the
final victory... is celebrated by the desolate laughter of
the egoistic monarch'.
This raises the whole question of the value of the
'old' existentialism. As if terrified of the tragic
predicament of man which they uncovered (or, one
might suggest, terrified of their own schizoid sense of
futility) the 'old' existentialists found a source of meaning
in some other absolute. As R.W.K. Paterson says in his
book on Max Stirner:
The free self-assertion of the solitary individual who
preserves his finite integrity by refusing the world's
schematized values with a vehemence which reduces
them to meaninglessness— thus there embodies
several of the concepts which elsewhere find ready
employment in the hands of Kierkegaard and
Jaspers, Heidegger and Sartre... Stirner, the absolute
rebel, distinguishes himself by his inflexible
resolution to abide wholly within the impoverished
but free domain described by these concepts, without
succumbing to the perennial temptation to seek
solace or relief outside them. Each of the leading
existentialists, perhaps dismayed by the appalling
conditions of the enterprise on which they have
embarked, has in the end tamed to a source of
significance beyond and outside the subjective circle
which they have described.
The Kierkegaardians leap into the awaiting arms of their
God, while the atheistic existentialists, the Sartres, into
endorsing communism, or in some other moral or social
absolute, to discover a private exit from the 'bleak
Amphitheatre':
Even Heidegger... seems at last to seek shelter in a
Existentialism 103
kind of mysticism of Being. What is truly astonishing is

that the leading representatives of atheistic existentialism
should have failed to see—or, if they have seen, to
acknowledge—in Stirner's Unique One the one finished,
historical instance of that total encounter with
nothingness from which they have themselves recoiled.
The Unique One, claims Paterson, is 'simply
carrying through to its inescapable conclusion the project
which lies at the heart of existentialism itself.
As Paterson suggests, this requires a rejection of all
commitment: the nihilistic egoist 'has no vocation and
follows none'. The existentialist seeks to confer
significance an value on an apparently meaningless and
purposeless world into which he has 'fallen', and even
this would be unacceptable to the egoistical nihilist, who
simply affirms the truth of nihilism, as a condition to be
realistically willed and lived. Yet certainly a nihilist
would reject the kind of path Heidegger has followed
since Being and Time:
The role of the philosopher during the present dark
night of Being, this 'time of need' after the death of
God and the destruction of traditional metaphysics,
according to Heidegger, is to act as the guardian or
'Shepherd of Being'. By purifying himself from
worldly concerns and keeping himself open to 'the
quiet voice of Being', the philosopher should seek to
make the dimension of 'the Holy' once more present
to the world, to bear inward witness, in 'obedience'
and 'sacrifice' to the 'mystery' and 'grace' of Being,
through the long crisis of its eclipse.
Heidegger's nihilism thus degenerated into an almost
religious mysticism, in which the philosopher takes a
kind of sacramental role.
Nevertheless the world is lost—the world in which I
may engage as a free and creative individual. The first
part of Being and Time genuinely turns its back on the
104 Philosophical Anthropolo^}/
Cartesian-Humean world of res cogitans and res extensa, to

plunge directly into human existence in its entirety.
Apart from one reference to a possibility of authentic
caring for the everyday things of the world 'Mitsein
characterizes Heideggerian Dasein only on the level of
forfeiture': ordinary daily living or living with others is a
loss of one's own authenticity. The one rare existential
hero is cut off from 'the contemptible das man from
whose distracting influence the rest of us never escape'.
Heidegger dismissed as despicable all that is ordinary:
For Heidegger, as for his hero Nietzsche, the norm is
the deformity, and only the rare soul who hates and
repels the norm can be said to live authentically.
Recognizing that this is an ad hominem argument, Grene
points out that the two geniuses Heidegger most
admired, Nietzsche and Holderlin, both went mad. While
it may be an ad hominem argument, it is most relevant—
for in this attitude we have a clear demonstration of
schizoid superiority, of the assumed (defensive) assertion
that a structure built on hate is superior to that based on
love. 'Heidegger's 'being-in-the-world' demands
arrogance and hatred as the road from me to thee' as
Grene points out.
The 'new' existentialism seeks to correct Heidegger's
view of man as being inevitably in relation to the world
in terms of inauthenticity. Straus, for example, seeks to
restore to philosophical biology the structure of all
sentient living, human and animal, not only of our
relatively self-conscious living, as the foundation of
knowledge and of action. He seeks to reinstate man in
nature, and so to exorcise the I persistent Cartesian
ghost', by finding a more adequate conception of our
relationship to others and the world than Heidegger's
Dasein or Sartre's pour-soi which is forever alienated from
every other. The new existentia'ists distinguish existence,
as the singular being of the questioner, from Dasein in a
Existentialism 105
new sense —as dual being, as 'loving communion',

liebende Wirheit. The 'new' existentialism can find being
as an inward source of one's true existence, and can find
love, as a source of meaning.
We have to take what Buytendijk has called 'the risk
of knowing Dasein' (das Wagnis der Daseinserkenntnis) if
we are to study this 'dual' existence. That is, we must not
fear ordinary being-in-the-world as Sartre and Heidegger
do, and we must take the risk of acknowledging the
being of the individual existing being as questioner and
of the real relationship of two individuals in mutual
question and response.
Man is a questioning being, the only being, as
Heidegger has argued, for whom Being is in question.
But he is also the only being whose questions can be put
to rest through participation of the world of the mind—a
world constituted by the union of persons in mutual
understanding of the more than personal.
The insights here give the lie to the repugnance
Sartre and Heidegger feel for Mitsein, for 'the other' and
relationship. It is quite clear from many sources that not
only are culture, speech and symbolism derived from
'liebende Wirheit', but also consciousness itself. Even that
consciousness by which I become aware of my dreadful
freedom and exert it—in making myself together with
that conscience by which I accept my guilt and my tragic
state —is the product of love, creative reflection,
togetherness and the civilized sharing of existence in
which the capacity to symbolize and know develops.
Creative subjectivity is the creation of inter-subjectivity,
and the fault of the 'old' existentialism was to reject this
truth in favour of an egoistical nihilism which, in the
end, no 'old' existentialist has been able to bear, without
plunging into some radical inauthenticity.
Rollo May speaks of the confusion caused at large

by the identification of existentialism with the writings of
Sartre:
Quite apart from the fact that Sartre is known here
for his dramas, movies, and novels, rather than for
his major, penetrating, psychological analysis, it must
be emphasised that he represents a nihilistic
subjectivist extreme in existentialism which invites
misunder-standing, and his position is by no means
the most useful introduction to the movement
If Sartre's kind of existentialism isn't a good introduction
to the movement, how then shall we approach it?
Existentialism began as a movement to heal man's
soul. As Nietzsche said ten years before Freud's first
book, the disease of contemporary man was that 'his soul
had gone stale', he was 'fed up' and that all about there
was 'a bad smell... the smell of failure... the levelling and
diminution of European man is our greatest danger...'
This 'bad smell' may be smelt powerfully in the West
today, and it is a manifestation of frustrated needs, or
blocked potentialities, a loss of a sense of man's creative
dynamics. It was these that Nietzsche analysed in the
work, in terms which may be related to Freud's own
work on man, civilization and its discontents. Yet Freud
too seemed to despair of the effective socialization of
man.
How can we discover a foothold by which to reject
the 'old' existentialism and find the path to a new and
effective resistance to nihilism and despair? The answer,
surely, is in the application of existentialist thought to
psychotherapy. Obviously, when a therapist is trying to
help a patient, he is unlikely to draw from him a healing
sense of meaning in existence if he imprisons the patient
in a sense of the futility of ever achieving the Dasein—a
sense of meaningfully 'being there' —because of the
indifference of the universe, the nauseousness of bodily
Existentialism 107
existence, or the absurdity of choice and action. The

actual confrontation of therapist and patient, in full
recognition of mortality and man's tragic predicament, is
a manifestation of care and so of liebende Wirheit, of that
loving communion which reveals the uniqueness of the
individual and, so, potential meaning. To put it another
way, the work of Sartre was freely erected on a system
that belonged to hate: the influence of psychotherapy has
restored the elements of love.
So, we get a better historical perspective of the
development of the existentialist movement from the
work of the existentialist psychotherapist, and here shall
follow closely the account given by Rollo May in the
symposium Existence—a New Dimension in Psychiatry.
To appreciate this new dimension, let us consider
the therapist in his consulting room. An ordinary general
practitioner can examine the patient as an organism, and
diagnose and treat him according to the findings of
medical science. He may make allowance for emotional
factors, but under the domination of the positivistic
paradigm will be inclined to seek a 'hormone profile' and
to use drugs to 'correct' a physical state. If the patient
comes to the doctor about irrational fears, impotence or
the inability to eat, the medical man should be able to
recognize that he may be dealing with consciousness and
the body-mind wholeness of a human being. This human
being exists in a dual dimension—both a natural object
and yet more than a natural object, because of that
additional 'level' or dynamic of being as the animal
symbolicum, as a being. Questions of meaning come into
the matter—as Freud pointed out, by showing how
symptoms, like dreams, can have a meaning. The doctor
may be faced with a problem of consciousness, which
requires a phenomenological solution.
Out of this extra dimension of human existence
arises a philosophical problem: in the sphere of physical

disorders, forms of treatment are more or less susceptible
of empirical proof—theoretically at least. If a man has a
streptococcus infection, the doctor treats it with penicillin
and all is well: the antibiotic does what it did on Sir
Alexander Fleming's plates. However, if a patient suffers
from anorexia nervosa, and there appears to be no
physical cause, how shall he understand this
psychosomatic disorder? We may have a problem of
meaning, a life problem. How can we even speak of
'treatment' and 'cure'? What we may have, as we know
from Freud's analysis of the symbolism of such disorders,
is a question of body meaning: expressing perhaps a fear
of taking 'bad stuff into himself with food, or perhaps
there is a problem of 'body image'? How can a doctor be
sure, even if he recognizes that he is concerned with
meaning expressed in a psychic disorder, that he is
seeing the patient as he really is? As May adds 'Are we
seeing merely a projection of our own theories about him?
The doctor needs, in some way, to be able to 'exist in' the
patient's world if he is to have any chance of knowing
him. But what does this mean? While the doctor wants
still to be 'scientific', it is obvious that, in treating psychic
or psychosomatic disorders, he will be using imagination,
semiology, projective identification, the study of
meaning, and other subjective disciplines.
It has been this kind of problem that has led the
psychiatrists and psychologists of Europe for over a
hundred years to seek to devise a new philosophy and
new disciplines, leading to an existentialist movement
which pre-occupies itself with the elements of meaning,
will, and the quest for the Dasein—that is, the sense of
having been meaningfully there in the world before being
swept into nothingness by death—as a philosophy of
being which can attend to our primary spiritual needs.
Ludwig Binswanger, who is one of the most important
theorists of existentialist psychotherapy wrote:
Existentialism 109
The existentialist research orientation in psychiatry

arose from dissatisfaction with the prevailing efforts
to gain scientific understanding in psychiatry...
Psychology and psychotherapy as sciences are
admittedly concerned with 'man', not at all primarily
with mentally ill man, but with man as such. The new
understanding of man, which we owe to Heidegger's
analysis of existence—he is a mechanistic a
biological, or a psychological one.
The existential movement in psychoanalysis thus arose
out of the very problem discussed earlier: the failure of
the 'scientific world-view' to find man, and the
inadequacy of the account of experience given by natural
science. Moreover, as Binswanger implies, an intellectual,
systematic theory is not enough: what is needed is a new
mode of understanding, by responsiveness and insight. So,
it is important to grasp at the onset that existentialism of
this kind is not so much a theoretical philosophy but a
whole approach to man, largely centered on the problem
of meaning, and concerned with the search for realizing
one's potentialities, and the explanation of the meaning
of one's being.
As May points out, in his historical survey, the
interesting thing about this existentialist movement was
that it grew up spontaneously in different parts of
Europe among a diverse body of researchers and creative
thinkers in historical processes of which gave account in
Edncation and Philosophical Anthropology.
One of the problems opened up by these thinkers,
especially in the field of therapy, is that of the
relationship between theory and practice, between '
psychology' and 'life'. This problem was discussed in
Britain by Ian D. Suttie in his important book The Origins
of Love and Hate. The existentialists, phenomenologists
and Daseinsanalysts came to distrust abstract theories of
human make-up, especially the way in which Freudian
psychoanalysis came to use the theory of the unconscious

as a carte blanche on which almost any explanation could
be written. As Straus put it, 'unconscious ideas of the
patient are more often than not the conscious theories of
the therapist'.
So their main concern was to re-examine theories
that they believed tended to hinder the therapeutic work
in which they were engaged. The problem was that those
therapists who also adhered to strict systems tended to
judge patients' lives in terms of their short-comings, as
against a conceptual yardstick. They wanted to try to
understand the life history of the individual in terms of
'modifications of the total structure of the patient's
being-in-the- world'. The problem of treatment was that
of finding in what way a patient had come to be deviated
from his condition humaine, from his true self, his own
authenticity. Of course, the problem remains of who is to
determine this 'true self and this 'authenticity', and
how—a problem intelligently discussed in Lomas, in
existentialist work of psychotherapy. Lomas says:
The true self, is that which develops directly from
the original being of the child. It is imperfect and
ill-defined but it remains roughly true to our innate
potential. When, beyond a certain degree, the true self is
so crushed or impoverished by the environment, it
develops, for its own sake and for the sake of others, an
alternative or false self which appears to function
adequately.
Obviously, if psychological problems are looked at
like this, the underlying processes cannot be examined in
terms of structures and systems related to functional and
organic 'natural' processes: questions arise of
potentialities, creativity, truth to oneself, one's sense of
oneself in time, in the here and now, and one's
relationship to others and to society. However, as the
Existentialism 111
existentialist movement grew, so did resistance to it,

because it was felt that existentialist psychotherapy was
ail encroachment of philosophy into psychiatry, and no longer
had anything to do with science. This, as May points out, is
a hangover from the long battle to separate
'psychological science' from metaphysics and so to the
problems we have looked at. It is also a remnant of the
separation of scientific method from the person and from
ultimate questions of the meaning of life, man's destiny,
and such matters.
Husserl's phrase 'Back to the things themselves/ is a
maxim which the existentialists concerned with therapy
have tried to apply. They felt that traditional scientific
approaches tended to obscure rather than reveal what
was going on in the patient. The new approach was
intended not to be less but more empirical, and this must
be emphasized as a feature of all existentialist and
phenomenological 'movements. Far from being a retreat
into mysticism or idealism or what not, they are, an
attempt to be more truthful, and to develop a more
adequate realism, not least by attending to the nature of
lived experience and the Lebenswelt. In this respect, May
insisted, existentialism in psychotherapy 'stands squarely
within the scientific tradition in its widest sense'. It is
based on the attempt to understand human experience by
the disciplines of the Geisteswissenschaften as for example,
by combining phenomenological disciplines such as those
manifest in the work of D.W. Winnicott or F.J.J.
Buytendijk in the consideration of infants.
Its knowledge of man by historical perspective and
scholarly depth, by accepting the facts that human
beings reveal in themselves in art and literature and
philosophy, and by profiting from the insights of the
particular cultural movements which express the
anxiety and conflicts of contemporary man.
One has only to read the main thinkers in the movement,
says May, to see with what intellectual probity and

scholarly discipline these students of man explore their
fields. They represent, he believes, a uniting of science
and humanism.
As we have seen, every scientific method rests upon
philosophical presuppositions: we need to open up the
philosophical basis of 'medical science', often merely
assumed and unexamined. If we then compare that
science with existential psychotherapy, it becomes clear
that there is no 'intrusion' of philosophy, since
philosophy of a kind has always been there:
It is a gross, albeit common, error to assume naively
that one can observe facts best if he avoids all
preoccupation with philosophical assumptions. All
he does, then, is mirror uncritically the particular
parochial doctrines of his own limited culture. The
result in our day is that science gets identified with
methods of isolating factors and observing them an
allegedly detached base a particular method which
arose out of the split between subject and object
made in the seventeenth century in Western culture
and then developed into its special
compartmentalised form in the late nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.
This 'split' as we have seen, is deeply rooted in the
scientific tradition, and May associates it with the way in
which psychiatry and even psychoanalysis often cling to
'technique' while displaying impatience with endeavours
to search below such consideration to find the
foundations upon which all techniques must be based. In
psychology in England and America the predominant
modes have been, because of the intellectual climate,
essentially atomistic, in a tradition favouring
Behaviourism, stimulus and response systems and animal
psychology; how these fit into the Cartesian-Humean
picture is obvious. As Gordon Allport points out, the
continental tradition has been Leibnitzian. The Lockean
Existentialism 113
tradition sees the mind as passive, as a tabula rasa a

model that fits in, of course, with the Cartesian-Humean
model in which the object of attention is not the T but
mensurations, sense-impressions and cogitations. In the
Liebnitzian model the mind has a potentially active core
of its own and perception in an active process. The major
new movements in psychotherapy have all been
spearheaded by Europeans who have developed in the
context of this more dynamic view of mind.
We now have, in psychotherapy and psychology, a
profound crisis, in which there is a conflict between those
working with people in difficulties, day to day and those
who cling to intellectual theories of a functional kind. In
some areas, such as the treatment of schizophrenia, there
is a determined search for a physical cause, if not the
physical cause. In Britain and America psychiatry is
dominated by physical approaches. In this crisis
existentialism is the attempt to understand men by
'cutting below the cleavage between subject and object
which has bedevilled Western thought and Science since
shortly after the Renaissance.'
As May points out, the existentialist way of
understanding human beings didn't begin with the
existential psychotherapists. It was the approach of
Socrates in his dialogues, St. Augustine in his
depth-psychology analyses of the self, Pascal in his
search for 'the heart's reasons which the reason knows
not of. However it began specifically with Kierkegaard's
protest against the reigning rationalism of his day.
A definition of existentialism, despite the confusion
that surrounds it as a fashionable mode, is easy enough:
it is the philosophy that declares as its first principle that
existence is prior to essence. In such a philosophy we
proceed from the givens of our experience in the body
and being, and proceed from there to discuss our
ultimate intuitive awareness of essences and eternal

truths.
Kierkegaards's rebellion was against Hegel, in
whose logic we move from being and essence to actuality
and existence, or as Grene says rather through existence to
the higher synthesis of both in Mind. To Kierkegaard this
was absurd:
Out of pure logic, pure thought, can come no
movement of any sort, for movement implies change,
time, non-being. Least of all can pure thought
produce the movement of emergence into actuality,
into the hard, resistant, senseless fact of what is,
forever distinct from the conveniently definable
nature of what might be.
Hegelian speculation is an academic game, belonging to a
dream-world of trivial play with palaces in the mind,
while one lives alongside these in one's hovel. The player
of Hegelian games with essences neglects his own soul,
which dries up and shrivels. This indicates the specific
meaning Kierkegaard gives to 'existence':
Not the sense-perception of a Thomas (Aquinas)...
not even the more 'subjective' but equally uniform
impressions of Hume, but just the unique,
inexpressible that of any one conscious beings's
particular existence—such is the actuality that
Kierkegaard and his twentieth century successors
agree in referring to when they declare, as their first
principle, the priority or existence over essence.
Yet in attention to this that of any one conscious being's
particular existence, existentialism is the expression of
profound dimensions in the modem emotional and
spiritual realm, and this is shown in many aspects of our
culture, not only in psychology and philosophy: as May
points out, Van Gogh, Cezanne and Picasso may be seen
as existentialist artists, as may Dostoevsky, Baudelaire,
Kafka and Rilke. We now see many authors in literature
Existentialism 115
as existentialists: Shakespeare and Blake, for example and

even such an unlikely figure as George Crabbe. Turner is
certainly an existentialist painter, and Mahler was quite
aware of himself as an existentialist composer.
The word 'existentialism' often seems liable to
become so enlarged in scope as to threaten to lose its
meaning: one of our problems is to sustain definition. A
useful definition which used before is by Nicholai
Berdayev:
I am an existentialist because I believe in the priority
of subject over the object, in the identity of the
knowing subject and the existing subject; I am
furthermore an existentialist because I see the life of
men and of the world torn by contraries, which must
be faced and maintained, in their tension, and which
no intellectual system of a closed and complete
totality, no immanentalism or optimism can resolve. I
have always desired that philosophy should not be
about something or somebody, but should be that
verv something or somebody, in other words, that is
should be the revelation of the original nature and
character of the subject itself.
Existentialism is a tragic philosophy, in a positive sense.
In its ruthless exploration of existence, existentialism
accepts fully the ultimate problem of death, of our
inevitable nothingness. Continually beneath the surface
of our life is the threat of a meaninglessness which
underlies significance—a substratum of nothingness, as
Grene says 'as clearly exhibited in contingency as such as
death, the ultimate contingent'. This contingency, in
Sartre, Heidegger and Camus, is taken to be the basic fact
of human existence. Man must recognise that he is not
the object of a constant living attention of God or
Providence: in the universal sense he is insignificant. He
is somehow not 'necessary': man is an accident, a useless
passion.
This was a novel dynamic in modem thought, and it

was originally introduced by Kierkegaard. However the
realization was not confined to Kierkegaard: it is
eminently audible, for example, in the Ninth and Tenth
symphonies of Gustav Mahler and believe it is expressed
in the paintings of Turner. In the renewal of attention to
ultimate questions of existence Kierkegaard contributed a
fresh source of philosophizing, 'implying not merely a
reorganisation of philosophic categories but a renewal of
philosophic vision,' as Grene puts it (my italics).
The point at which the 'new' existentialism may be
distinguished form the 'old' is over the question as to
whether there is anything which may be set against
death in the quest for meaning in life. The 'old'
existentialism never found what in terms of human
meaning could be asserted against death: it never found
the Dasein. Existentialism originated in Kierkegaard's
protest against the predominant rationalism of his day.
Hegel had identified abstract truth with reality, and
Kierkegaard declared that this was an illusion and
amounted to a philosophical trick. Truth exists, he
declared, 'only as the individual himself produces it in
action', and this is clear as a principle in Sartre's
existentialism. Kierkegaard and the existentialists who
followed him were opposed to the rationalists and
idealists who would see man only as a subject—that is, as
having reality only as a thinking being. They sought to
overcome the subject-object division.
Thus existentialism is not, either, a materialist
philosophy. Indeed, it has concerned itself a good deal
with fighting the tendency to treat man as an object,
whose existence may be quantitatively calculated and
controlled. The movement is highly critical of the
tendency in our world to subdue man's being to the vast
industrial and political collectivizations of today, making
him into an anonymous robot to serve these. In this,
Existentialism 117
existentialism must be directly opposed to those

Behaviourists such as Pavlov and B.F. Skinner, who seek
to understand man in terms of a functioning animal in
objective terms, in order to control him, in order to 'cure'
him of his most destructive impulses by manipulation.
Altruistic as this impulse may be, the existentialist sees it
as a menance to man's being, which is bound' up with his
freedom and his capacity to find authenticity and
meaning, in the dignity of his autonomous and unique
existence. So far, so good. The question now arises of
whether his assertions of his freedom and authenticity
are anything more than ultimately futile.
Even the 'old' existentialism, it has to be said,
chooses to exert this freedom and authenticity even in
despair, even in the recognition that there is no hope of
establishing ultimate meaning in this way. To control
people by conditioning or other processes based on an
'objective' model of man would deprive them of the
meaning and the realization of their each potentia. It
would deprive man of the only reason for surviving and
so perhaps menace even survival itself, by destroying
intentionality, the only thing that makes life worth living.
Both old and new forms of existentialism place freedom
in the forefront.
This of course brings the 'new' existentialism into
direct conflict with strict Freudianism, in which there is a
residue of determinism—our choices and acts being
largely determined by life and death 'instincts'. This is
made clear in the work of Viktor Frankl, who pondered
the problem over his incarceration in the concentration
camp at Auschwitz. Faced with imminent death, and the
daily possibility of choosing death, he asked himself for
what it was that people were willing to die. Fie could not
believe any man would die for Freud's I model' which is
essentially based on natural science, 'quantities of
excitation' and their economic tendency towards
118 > Philosophical Anthropology
'equilibrium'. It was when a man's urge to meaning was

threatened that he was prepared to die—life without
meaning, or the chance to find it, being intolerable.
So the existentialists—old and new—are equally
opposed to the idea of man as a collection of static
substances or mechanisms, drives or impulses: that is to
any such reductive theory of man derived from a
somewhat mechanical nineteenth century natural science.
May quotes one of the early existentialists of the
sociological wing, Feuerbach, 'Do not wish to be a
philosopher in contrast to being a man... do not think as
a thinker... think as a living real being. Think in
Existence'.
The word existence comes from the root exsistere,
meaning literally to stand out, to emerge, and in this we
may see the intentional notion at the heart of existentialism.
The human being is to be seen not as a static object, or a
collection of attributes or sensations, but as emerging and
becoming. Whatever may be said about my material
substance, as described by anatomy or chemistry or
physics, I exist. I am in existence, in space and time, at a
given moment, and my problem is how I am to be aware
of this, and what I shall do about it. In this approach
there is obviously a clearly different attitude to human
truth since it immediately restores the dimension of
man's moral being, and his creativity, and thus questions
of his spiritual capacities, meaning and values, since such
questions can no longer be ignored in our awareness of
ourselves and in our decisions as to what we shall do
about our lives.
Of course, in opening up the question of 'What is
Man?' in these terms, existentialism is not saying that
men must not, or should not, be studied in terms of
'drives' or patterns of behaviour. However it challenges
any exclusive view of man based on such physicalist
Existentialism 119
approaches, and declares that what may be called drives

or dynamics can never be understood in any given
person except in the context of the primary fact that here
is Someone who can say T, who exists.
The study of such problems in human beings
requires an ontology, a science of being, in which the
concept of 'being' is not static but inseparable from the
consideration of the potentia, of what the individual has
within himself or herself to become. Moreover, while
strictly 'objective' minds tend to reject disciplines such as
existentialism as 'woolly, or 'vague' or 'inexact' there is
no sentimentality or sloppiness in this recognition by
existentialism of these realities in human existence—they
are primary and fundamental, as is clear in the way
certain people cannot go on living unless they solve these
root problems of existence.
Michael Polanyi
Phenomenology wants first to be a philosophy that

re-examines all pre-suppositions of human knowledge
and practice. The revolution it seeks is taking place here
and there within science. In the work of Binswanger, for
example, we find philosophical ideas from developments
in psycho-therapy being applied to science itself and
connections being made between the idea of
being-in-the-world and the philosophy of science. Von
Weizsacker, like J.J. von Uexkull, says Binswanger, prides
himself on 'having consciously introduced the subject as a
matter of biological research and on having obtained
recognition for it as such'. Von Weisacker rejects the
'external substantial dualism of psyche and physics' and
believes in replacing it by 'the polar unity of subject and
object'. As we have seen, this is a central issue in
phenomenology; and it is a crucial problem at a time
when biology hopes soon to explain an life's mechanisms
by micro-reduction.
Binswanger quotes Goldstein:
'If in biology we see a science dealing with
phenomena that can be established by analytical
natural-scientific methods alone, we have to forego
all insight which grasps the organism as a whole,
and with it actually any insight into the life processes
at all'.
Goldstein's emphasis was on the wholeness of the
organism and this involves 'ken'. 'Biological insight is the
continuous process through which we experience
Michael Polnm/i 121
increasingly the idea of the organism, something of a

'ken' which is always based on the grounds of very
empirical facts'. The scientist's problem, however, is that
if he departs from strict 'analytical natural scientific'
methods, and relies on 'ken' he may feel lost and
threatened. 'Insights' are to him a strange basis for a
scientific discipline. Yet, where living creatures are
concerned, if Goldstein is right, strict 'objectivity' would
mean he could not understand living processes. What is
the answer?
The answer is to be found in the profound work of
Polanyi, the conclusion of which is quite simply that
knowledge can never be wholly impersonal. There is
never a situation in which knowledge could all be
written on an enormous blackboard and exist 'out there'
in an objective way. Knowledge is always persons
knowing:
'Even the publically Confirmed and reconfirmed
statements of science are rooted in the concensus of
professional opinion, in the accepted conceptual
framework of a given generation of those considered
comptetent to judge.
Moreover, the knowing mind is always tb.e whole person.
Polanyi's view of knowing is at one with the
existentialist-phenomenological approach, because to him
the relation between -the knower and the known is that
of a 'being in a world. Knowledge of comprehensive
entities, such as of another living being, or a poem, or a
game, is a kind of indwelling. The subsidiary awareness
of the details of a face serve as clues to the focal
awareness of who it is. Polanyi discussed experiments on
subception, and suggested they show the significance of
subsidiary factors in perception. As Grene put it:
My awareness is not a separate subjective 'in-itself
but at one and the same time an assimulation of
what is beyond. This interpretation of 'self and

'world' is not only a central characteristic of mind: it
is what mind is
Here Grene is invoking Polanyi's insistence in Personal
Knowledge, that only persons can succeed in knowing
anything. There can be no knowledge unless there are
persons. So when it comes to knowing 'life' the biologist
must include himself in his explanations. Polanyi also
indicates that there cannot, even in the exact sciences, be
knowledge without the personal commitment of the
scientist.
If we accept Polanyi's view of the .involvement of
the knower with the known, the knowledge of
Newtonian 'hard, impenetrable particles' would be
impossible. As Grene put it, 'a one-level universe leaves
no room for the knowledge of that universe'. She quotes
a passage from Straus, which makes it plain that having
seen the nature of the scientist's knowing, and being so
obliged to include it in the world, the philosopher must
realize that it is impossible to account for such a world in
the dimensions of physicalism. Under the title 'Physics
Refutes Physicalism' Straus wrote:
The physicist's observations begin and end within
the field of human action. In it and from it he develops
the mathematical and physical conception of space. The
personal relation of the observer to his environment
differs in principle from the spatio-temporal relations of
things observed. If the observer's relations to space and
time corresponded to those in which the observed objects
and their ultimate hypostatisations, such as atoms and
electrons, are conceived, defined, and measured, he could
never devise a system of physics.
The existence of knowledge has ontological
implications: 'there is something other than bits of
matter: there is at least knowing mind', as Grene puts it.
Michael Polanyi 123
There is a persistent dream among philosophers,

physicists, molecular biologists, psychologists and others,
that 'some day' all biology will be reduced to physics and
chemistry. Science is applied mathematics, and as the
more backward sciences advance, they move inexorably
closer to this single model.
The Darwinian model, with its concepts of function
and survival, is one of a one-level world, in which there
are bits of matter moved by mechanical laws, and
nothing else. Wholes are explicable by analysis into their
parts, and events by their precedent events, which are
their causes. Yet the practice of biology as well as of our
ordinary, everyday handling of living things, continues
to resist conformity to this simplistic archetype. There is a
gap between the ambition to explain everything to its
units, and the way living things are observed and
described as acting wholes, with the result that there is
much conceptual bafflement in this field.
As we have seen, there is no clear, direct and
immediate knowledge, such as Descartes implied.
Knowledge cannot be wholly explicit: there are always
these tacit and subsidiary elements, and those aspects of
indwelling Polanyi has explored. The world is more
complex than we have realized, and too often has science
insisted that, because formulae can all be written on one
line, beings too must be all of one sort. Knowing always
entails personal elements, entails the apprehension of the
whole in terms of its parts: both focal and subsidiary
awareness. To be real the philosophy of biology must
recognize that there is this ambiguity in all knowledge of
living things by living things.
If we accept Polanyi's arguments, this means a
refutation of the dominant scientific world-view. As
Polanyi says, it sets free a vast area -of the universe for
renewed consideration. Almost everything of interest to
man is now seen to lie beyond explication by physics and

chemistry:
The vast majority of our vital concerns transcends
the love of inanimate nature. The existence of most things
in the universe must be based on principles that are
missing from the current scientific world view.
The recognition that this is so has moral and
philosophical implications far beyond science. The vision
of science which Voltaire, Diderot and Condorcet
projected over all human affairs promised the free
pursuit of individual happiness. Pleasure became the
scientific measure of morality, of justice and freedom.
The movement of scientific enlightenment which spread
through Europe became in England Jeremy Bentham's
pragmatic utilitarianism. There grew a vision of man set
free by the new philosophy of science, with a belief in
the unspoiled nature man. This new philosophic view
lies behind today's belief in a secular intellectual life, the
vision of progress, the right to progress, by the self
determination of the individual, and the self-
determination of society. There is a metaphysic behind
these beliefs, passionately held, which yet tends to be
sceptical of values because they are 'subjective'.
A new reasonableness has generated a society
which, despite its evils, is more free and humane in some
areas than any that has existed before. But the same
scientific enlightenment, which has released an unlimited
passion for moral progress, has also undermined the very
foundations of moral principles. Behind the dilemma lies
the exclusion of man's moral being from the universe of
Newtonian science:
About the middle of the past century the view
began to spread that science, which had been so far the
guide to moral progress, actually demonstrates that all
moral claims are illusory. Perhaps the change was due to
Miclwel Polanyi 125
a sharpening of the scientific outlook by such statements

as Laplace made in the early nineteenth century. For if all
that is real in man consists in his atoms obeying the laws
of physics, moral values can only be subjective feelings.
Here is the connection between the assertion by
Crick and Watson that the 'information content' of DNA
can be reducible to the laws of physics and chemistry. If
this can be done, we can, it is hoped, also reduce the
problems of morality and meaning in existence, and
develop a new morality based on science. The same
problem is raised in Monod's dogged objectivism. Yet, as
others have pointed out, if 'life' were thus reducible to
the laws of physics and chemistry, meaning and values
have no existence. In any case, values cannot be based
merely on 'data'. What is the answer? If Polanyi is right,
that life transcends chemistry and physics, then we enter
a new phase of relationship between man and his
universe, and a new episode in knowledge, in which we
need to find a new responsibility to existence. Polanyi
discusses the whole development of fasnatical
immoralism in the twentieth century, rooted in scientific
scepticism and its political catastrophies. In Russia the
mechanistic view of man, spread by popular German
writers, convinced many that in the light of science all
human values were illusory; and this nineteenth-century
tendency lay behind the Russian Revolution. Trugenev
described the trend in his Fathers and Sons. He called the
hero of his novel, the student Bazarov, a 'nihilist' and
makes him declare that 'a nihilist is the man who bows
to no authority... There is no single institution of our
society which should not be destroyed'.
Behind Bazarov we may detect the influence of Max
Stimer,' but the foundations of this nihilism are in
'objective' science. The idealism of the Russian
intellectuals came to be embodied in a self-less devotion
to total destruction. In modem movements, both

communist and fascist, declared Polanyi, we find:
Idealism... embodied in ice-cold violence... for...
modem scientific scepticism had taught them to
despise liberation and humanitarian ideals as frauds
trusted only by fools... just as the self-determination
of society was converted into merciless violence, so
the self-determination of the individual was turned
into a hatred of all traditional morals... Nietzsche
faced the fact that the scientific outlook had no place
for moral values and declared that our fearless
rejection of all established values was itself our own
supreme value.
From this Nietzschean 'realism' developed the idea
expressed in continental literature that 'evil is more
honest than good, because it cannot be suspected of
hypocrisy'. This matches the schizoid impulse to prefer
hate to love, because love is so dangerous, and so to
Sartre:
The current praise of the Marquis de Sade as a great
moralist and the recognition of Jean Genet, a hardened
criminal, as a saint, then followed logically. All these
monstrosities were conceived as ultimate refuges of the
soul to save its authenticity from compliance with an
intellectually dishonest, hypocritical society.
As we have seen, this rejection of the 'intellectual
dishonesty' of good has its own intellectual dishonesty.
There is a view of authenticity which may be based on
love and the true self - as the most valid subjects of
realistic attention: Buytendijk and Binswanger show this.
So, Polanyi saw the solution to our problems in a
new perspective that of what he call 'integrative
knowledge'. The current scientific outlook has
increasingly insisted that function and purpose could in
principle be eliminated from physiology if we could
Michael Polanyi 127
describe all organic processes as a mere sequence of

topographic configurations. Polanyi deleares that such
topographic facts are meaningless and become parts of
physiology only by serving as clues to functional
achievements which are the physiology of living beings.
We understand living beings in terms of their
functional existence in the world. There are clues here,
from chemistry and physics (for example molecular
biology) but they are only clues. Living things require an
integrative stud of their creative existence:
Nor is the integration of biological clues to their
meaning a process like drawing mathematical
conclusions from strict premises. The clues include
unspecifiable shapes, colours, sounds, touches and smells
essential to biological identifications, and their
integration is a tacit operation transforming our sight of
the clues into the sight of the living being so which they
point.
To these we may add those modes of perception
discussed by Thorpe, Portmarm, Plessner and Buytendijk.
Such 'integration of clues' into the understanding of
living things must be present, and recognized to be
present, in our apprehension of all levels of life.
As we move up the scale, we become increasing
involved in kinship to living things:
Our kinship to living things facilitates our
comprehension of them, but the depth of which we
participate in them flows from the richness of their
significant particulars (ibid).
And from this complex apprehension of the multifarious
forms of life, we must go on to take in the complexity of
man's cultural and poetic existence.
Man's culture is the most complex meaningful body
in the universe and hence for a man to know even
his share of it amounts to a participation by his

whole person (ibid).
By knowing, in whole terms thus, we find the answer to
those moral inversions and forms of nihilism whose
fervour menances us today. They are based both on false
ideas of the universe, and of knowing. This is the answer
to the perversions of morality by the ideal of strict
objectivity. Polanyi has shown that:
Whenever science deals with an object of deep
interest to us, it relies on our participation. The very
act of perception involved participation. It is an
integration of largely unspecified clues, carried out
tacitly by our sense of coherence. In knowing a living
being, we integrate its topography into the working
of its functions and this implies an appreciation of
those functions (ibid).
This in turn involves the recognition of higher levels, and
at last the cultural 1'fe of man:
Knowledge by participation, so firmly grounded
makes a clew sweep of the claim that, in order to be
valid, knowledge must be established objectively
without relying on personal judgment. And this
restores our confidence in moral principles that are
ultimately known to us by our commitment to them.
So, we can conclude with the passage quoted from
Polanyi at the onset. Polanyi asserts (and claims to have
demonstrated) that the claim of science that its results are
strictly detached and impersonal are unreasonable, while
the pursuit of the ideal of strict objectivity 'obscures the
very essence of human existence'. The fact of our
inevitable participation in knowing, even in the strictest
science, 'alone offers the grounds for securing moral
values from destruction by a strictly objective analysis':
We must now build up a truer world view in which
the grounds of man's moral being can be
re-established. For this alone can save modem man
Michael Polaiiyi 129
from the alternatives of blind violence and

paralysing self-doubt.
The whole new existentialist, phenomenological
movement, without any lapse into irrationalism,
mysticism or into some new religion, offers disciplines by
which man may try to being to understand his world, in
terms of his inevitable involvement or participation in it.
In this new knowing there are no grounds for scepticism
or nihilism, for what man finds is his responsibility for
contributing to those evolutionary or developmental
processes of which he is the most complex and 'highest'
product. His future is the future of all life: his
responsibility is a responsibility for the ongoing creativity
of creation. It is an awful challenge; but it demands, like
the himwnitas of the Greeks, and science and philosophy
themselves at best, only hard work attention to the
nature of the world, and a confidence in conscience. Out
of these we should be able to find our freedom and
authenticity, as never before.
Debate on Behaviour
Having pursued the stream of philosophical

anthropology which leads on through psychotherapy,
one now to turn back to the wider sphere of man's place
man's Nature. The existentialists and phenomenologists
have taught those working with patients in distress to see
human nature in a new way. At the centre of man's
being is his need for meaning and his 'intentionality'.
However this kind of new perspective has also become
evident in philosophical biology, as Grene makes plain,
when she discussed a number of European philosophers
of biology including Buytendijk and Plessner.
The questions which arise, as from Erwin Straus's
analysis of Pavlov and other behaviourist approaches to
psychology and human nature, are obviously related to
the question of 'behaviour'. What does 'behaviour' mean?
How Buytendijk's approach to behaviour bears on
man is discussed by Spiegelberg. Heidegger figures
prominently in Buytendijk's phenomenology of the
encounter. With Binswanger, he accepts Heidegger's
conception of human Dasein as being-in-the-world, but
thinks that care (Sorge) is more characteristic of the
female than the male mode of being-on-the-world. Marcel
is close to his social ideas, but Buytendijk rejected Sartre's
existentialism in so far as it implies the denial of the
existence of values, which Scheler had impressed upon
him as having an objective existence. Buytendijk is
concerned with freedom in a situation, and, while he
never agrees with Sartre, the latter's ideas about
Debate on Behaviour 131
consciousness and emotions obviously influenced him. So

too did Simone de Beauvoir's ideas about the second sex,
though he disagrees with her also.
Buytendijk's closest associate in France, however,
was Merleau-Ponty, and in his books he makes use of
this writer's philosophical anthropology, especially in
Buytendijk. Buytendijk said of Binswanger:
In unsurpassable manner Binswanger has further
developed and overcome Heidegger's fundamental
ontology by showing that Dasein is in itself loving
encounter, openness (Erschlossenheit) of you for me
and of me for you in the we.
Buytendijk's closeness in interests and approach to Straus
is obvious, despite differences. We have said enough to
show that this Dutch phenomenologist belongs to the
new positive existentialism.
Buytendijk started as a biologist. From the beginning
the psychology of animals had aroused his interest, and
early on in his career he sought to understand the basic
phenomena of life in such a way that the usual
descriptive or explanatory approach would not suffice.
Although Buytendijk never ceased to be scientific, he
insisted in the Introduction to his academic speeches
(Academisch Redevoeringen, Dekker & Van de Vegt, ), that
'Life is and remains a mystery', and stressed this again in
Buytendijk. He seeks to rehabilitate:
The great tradition of German anthropological
meditation (Besinnung) which is still anchored in
reverence (Ehrfurcht) before the human in all its
manifestations and in the unconditional love for
everything that bears the human face.
Buytendijk believes that psychology has a special mission
in the development of a new self-interpretation of man,
for which Husserl's phenomenology has laid new
foundations. Buytendijk's concern is to deepen the
conception of man, widen man's scope, and liberate his

potentialities. (He has, says Spiegelberg, a sense of the
joie d'existence, for the sensous richness of life as
expressed in play, even studying le football
phenomenologically.)
During the First World War Buytendijk received a
psychiatricneurological education, after which he taught
biology in Amsterdam, during experimental work on
animal behaviour and writing a book on animal
psychology. He was much influenced by Viktor von
Weizsacker,' This philosopher introduced him to the
concept of the Gestaltkreis as the cyclical unity of
movement and perception, found throughout
Buytendijk's work on attitudes and movements. Von
Weizsacker also introduced him to concepts of biological
subjectivity -that 'understanding of the human requires
respect for the phenomena' and that 'flexible (beiuegliche)
mental participation' which makes it possible to combine
discursive, scientifically secured knowledge into a
plastically meaningful unity'. In this Weizsacker reflected
Scheler, to whom he was indebted, and through Scheler
Buytendijk came to know Plessner, who had studied with
Husserl.
One major preoccupation which Buytendijk
developed in the late twenties was with the expressive
movements of the face, as one way of comprehending
creatures in their situation. Buytendijk and Plessner
studied mimic expressions to prepare the ground for the
study of the spontaneous behaviour of animals and—
humans in its psychophysical neutrality, where it reveals
an 'original identity of intuitability and intelligibility'. As
win be evident, this kind of concern could be much
enriched by absorbing ideas from Merleau-Ponty, of the
body as subject, and of being-in-the-world.'
Most important in the present context is
Debate on Beltavionr 133
Buytendijk's work on encounter. This relates to the most

important aspects of the 'new' existentialism and
phenomenology, and takes us into the heart of the new
perspectives. Buytendijk's clearest statement on 'meeting'
(Begegnung) is given in a paper 'Zur Phanomenologie der
Begegung'.
We cannot study encounter as the objectivist does. It
is not one item in the indifferent catalogue of
spatio-temporarily perceived objects. As a mode of
being-in-the-world it can only be understood if we share
it, if we ourselves live encounters with others and so
approach our subject by participation as well as by
observation.
Encounter is a way of being in the world. It belongs
to Mitsein, 'togetherness', the sociableness of human
beings. We can work empirically in studying this, but
'without the foundation in our own being, our own
existential participation in encountering others, we
should have no access to the phenomena we set out to
investigate'. It is because 'social scientists' don't see this,
Grene believes they are endlessly squabbling about 'facts
and values'.
Buytendijk starts from this fundamental existentialist
insight, and then seeks to go on to be empirical. The
individual chooses his way of being in the world; he
makes his world the world it is by his projection of it.
His choices are made, however, in a world which has its
concrete historical existence, and it is out of this world
that those come with whom he has his meeting. The
individual chooses to meet another, he does so in the
style of his society, and he can only do so if he finds the
other person already there seeking encounter.
Things are simply there, but encounter demands a
certain reciprocity. There is a parallel between encounter
and perception. Here Buytendijk's theories again relate
closely to those of psychoanalysis, especially of

Winnicott. 'In order to perceive things we have to live
them' (MerleauPonty). Moreover, the insights here are
most insightful of the arts, and our present problems of
recovering creative perception. Things 'show themselves,
withdraw, approach, play games with us - and so are
able to encounter us'.
If, as Merleau-Ponty says, 'perception is the original
faith which binds us to a world as to our fatherland;
preceived being is the antepredicative being toward
which our whole existence is polarised', then we have
lost our faith, as the contents of any modem art gallery
testify. 'The thing' he goes on, 'offers itself to perceptive
communication like a familiar face whose expression we
immediately understand.' This expression, Buytendijk
comments, is 'the language of things' and the reason why
they speak to us and encounter us.
How does specifically human encounter originate,
asks Buytendijk? He suggests that its beginnings are
foreshadowed in the child's first play activity his playing
with his mother's breast: here, too, is the origin of
intentionality:
Already in the first play of the nursing infant and in
all later variants of this play with elastic, swinging
objects, there is a condition of being moved while
moving oneself while being moved.
This double activity in play is, as in every authentic
human encounter, the expression of a two-fold
intentionality. That is, we do something, reach out to the
other in a grasping gesture, and surrender ourselves in
such a way that something can be done to us. We choose
activity and at the same time passivity:
In this ambiguity of existence, in which doing and
suffering, grasping and being grasped rise up out of
the unambiguous nature of unconscious life, the
child enters into the sphere of ambiguous world.

Thus we already meet the ambiguous structure of
genuine encounter, in a shadowy and elementary
form, in the first erotic play of the moving, touching
lips, tongues, and hands of the nursing infant.
This early double movement, with and against the object,
'seeks surrender to the quality and Gestalt of the other
(object or person)': we could read these passages
alongside Martin Buber's Distance and Relation, or
alongside Winnicott's remarks on how positive is infant
aggression. Buytendijk says:
The baby with his rattle displays a mixture of
adaptive and aggressive dynamic, and his encounters
with his toy prefigure our encounter with persons, in
evolving tension and relaxation, expectation and
surprise, grasping and being grasped, movement
with and against, watching and showing oneself,
listening and making oneself heard, surrender and
liberation.
In human existence there is not only the meeting of
things, or response as of animal to animal, making
signals expressing lure or threat, but there is also
something essentially different. This is where Buytendijk
introduces, 'loving encounter' of person with person,
liebende Wirheit, loving we-hood. It is possible to find 'the
other.'
As we have seen, this marks the fundamentally
different attitude in the 'new' existentialism and
phenemonolgy. Seeking a more whole and realistic view
of man as one of the creatures in the world, these
philosophical scientists cannot accept as realistic the
philosophies of isolation, alienation and despair, of Sartre
and Heidegger. They do not find with Heidegger that
Mitsein is an aspect of inauthentic existence or with Sartre
that each pour-soi is for ever alienated from every other.
Binswanger distinguishes between Heidegger's
existence as the singular being of the questioner, and
Dasein (human being) as dual being, as liebende Wirheit. In

Plessner's terms, this is to separate the relation of the
inner to the outer from the shared world. Buytendijk
emphasises that to know human existence we must take
the risk of knowing Dasein' (das Wagnis der Dasein
erkenntnis) but we must also (as Grene points out) take
the risk of acknowledging the reality of the relation
between two individuals in mutal question and response
—of love, in fact. 'A world constituted by the union of
persons in mutual understanding of the more than
personal'.
Buytendijk argued that to acquire language an infant
must have learned to be with others in loving encounter.
The work of Chomsky recognises the natural dynamic in
■fve infant to use language: how much recognition is there
in this that the realization of these potentialities in the
child depends on encounter and love, in the mother's
creative reflection in play of his capacities for discourse?:
The child's first immense step towards humanity,
therefore, consists prior to his first words or his first
step, in his first true encounter with another human
being.
The sign of this encounter is the smile which marks the
child's entry into the intellectual world. (Plessner called
the smile the 'miming of mind': der Mimic des Geistes):
It expresses that distance from natural being and a
the same time identification with a new, yet alien
being, which constitutes humanity. To the smiling
infant the other is not a threat but an invitation—an
invitation to find himself in the other, to reach out
beyond himself and be restored to himself at a new
level of being human.
This is an exact description of Winnicott's 'creative
reflection' and can be related to his key essay, The
Location of Culture. (It is also a paragraph Sartre could
never have written: his response to the infant is to talk of
being sewn up in a sack as if taking on one's humanness
is a form of imprisonment.)
The infant comes to himself, argues Buytendijk,

hesitantly and shyly, through the other, in the loving
reciprocity which he expresses by giving smile for smile.
On this ground of mutuality, and only on this ground,
the life of mind, with its personal, 'objective' content, can
take root. Knowledge is rooted in love, also.
Buytendijk's argument here makes much use of
Merleau-Ponty and his feeling about bodily, spatial
existence. Through the body, the person presents himself
in his body.' A human body is not put together our of
pieces of stuff by an external agency and then used for
the purposes of communication. Qua human body it is
the self-presenting of a person. We do not need faith or
belief in others to encounter them: they meet us directly
by their very being as we meet them:
Every human encounter is in some way reciprocal.
We don't believe we are encountering some one, any
more than in perception we 'believe' in the thing
character of objects ... reciprocity is the condition of
real encounter. Buytendijk.
There is always ambivalence 'when two freedoms meet'
and there is a multiplicity of styles of encounter and an
infinite variety of meetings: it is through these that we
become human. 'Existence is actualised only in
communication':
The reciprocity of the gaze, of friendly gestures, of
the smile, or on the contrary of contemptuous
supercilious, or hostile grimaces and postures: these
are the media in which, in embodied question and
answer, human beings come to full awareness of
their existence in the world.
Such thinkers in this movement mark a concern to
make the 'reassimilation in reasonable terms of human
nature to the living world', and this means less nothing a
totally new view of man in Nature.
Development of Daseinanalysis
In Ludwig Binswanger's first book Introduction to

Problems of General Psychology, it is found that general
psychology, being naturalistic, could not give an
adequate account of man. It treated him as a subject-less
aspect of objective 'nature' and so did not choose to find
his concrete existence.
In psychology Binswanger could only find odd
excursions into phenomenological psychology in the
phenomenological parts of Jasper's psychopathology. So,
he turned to philosophy—not least to try to understand
man in health as well as in sickness. He tried, from
philosophy and psychology, to construct a 'pheno
menology of love'. In this, in the spirit of Husserl, he
sought not to be anti-scientific, but to make psychiatry a
more rigorous science.
Bingswanger was a personal friend of Freud, who in
his History of the Psychoanalytical Movement refers to
Binswanger's clinic at Kreuzlingen as one of two
institutions which had opened their doors to
psychoanalysis, in the early twenties. However
Binswanger became increasingly sceptical of Freud's
theories—his dissatisfactions at first expressed only in
unpublished manuscript, as he grappled with the
philosophies of Heidegger and Husserl, and tried to
reconcile Freudian theory to these.
Binswanger developed an anthropology on
Heideggerian foundations, and so, when he came to give
an address on the occasion of Freud's eightieth birthday
Development of Daseinanalysis 139
in 1939, he was severly critical of Freud's impulse to rest

his concept of man on natural science. Binswanger
regarded Freud's attempt to define man as homo natura in
terms of the natural sciences as one-sided. Yet he still
tried to accommodate Freud's man in his own
comprehensive anthropology.'
At first, Binswanger felt that Freud offered the best
chance to understand what it means to be a man.
However he was already groping towards the distinction
between what in Freud belongs to the analysis of meaning
and that which sought to develop a metapsychology,
based on a reduction of all human qualities to the
functioning of an organism to be found by objective
naturalism.'
In exploring this problem Binswanger's progress
reads like a history of the phenomenological movement
itself, and it is traced in fascinating detail by Spiegelberg.
It was about 1922 that a study of the descriptive
phenomenology of Brentano and Husserl removed from
Binswanger's eyes the 'naturalistic cataract' so he could
begin to see in the other dimension. Other influences
were felt at Kreuzlingen which was visited by Pfander
and Husserl himself, the latter giving a lecture on
phenomenology, which Binswanger found 'over
powering'. Another influence was Paul Natorp. Each of
these contributed to the new perspective. Brentano
introduced the idea of intentionality. Paul Natorp had
offered in his General Psychology/ According to the Critical
Method an idea of psychology as the science of the
subjective, of the contents of consciousness
(Bewussteinsinhalte). However, Natorp believed that the
ego was not a matter of direct experience but something
to be assumed as a necessary postulate, and this
problematic reconstruction did not satisfy Binswanger.
Husserl's over-powering lecture gave him a solid
foundation, showing the link between the subjective act
and the intentional object to which it was directed, thus

bridging the gap between subject and object, a split that
Binswanger regarded as 'the cancer of psychology and
philosophy'.
In his early work, Binswanger contrasted
phenomenology with natural science, by stressing its use
of a special kind of intuiting (Anschauung) other than
sense experience. He also illustrated Husserl's
Wesensschau, 'essential intuition' by a discussion of the
artist's grasp of the essential nature of his subject, in a
special section of his Referat dealing with Flaubert, Franz
Marc and Van Gogh. In this we see the way in which the
phenomenological movement seems to revindicate the
disciplines of the creative artist. There is no need of the
artist to feel that his intuitions of the world are in some
way inferior to those of science - however much the
scientific tradition itself has implicity disparaged them.
The fundamental principle of the phenomenological
method is analysis confined to what can be found in
consciousness. Binswanger gives as 'criteria' for
distinguishing essential insights from merely factual
experience Husserl's phenomenological reduction, the
bracketing of natural reality, or the suspension of belief
in reality, and the abstraction from individual cases.
Binswanger also begins to discuss the application of
phenomenology to psychiatry, in terms of the use of
concepts of intersubjectivity. What can the therapist do,
when patients' accounts of their own experience are
confused and puzzling? The therapist can project himself,
thus entering into their experience (by einleben,
self-projection). This kind of attempt to identify with the
patients' phenomenological world of consciousness is of
the kind made so successfully by R.D. Laing in his work
on schizophrenics. Binswanger was working on such
ways of working, taking up ideas from the studies of
Eugen Bleuler, and trying, through the analysis of
meaning, to find a better tool for the understanding of

psychopathological disorders.
Heidegger's Sein und Zeit was originally published
in 1927, and in this were several ideas that appealed very
much to Binswanger. Binswanger apparently declared
later that his interpretation and utilization of Heidegger
was based on a misunderstanding but one that was
productive. Heidegger's Daseinsanalytic was an attempt to
use the ontological structure of human existence as an
access to the interpretation of the meaning of being as
such. Despite his abandonment of the attempt, and
despite the essential nihilism of Heidegger's philosophy,
Binswanger's work became the nucleus of a new and
creative interpretation of human being. Binswanger took
his most productive ideas from Heidegger's preparatory
analysis of human existence. The most important idea
here was the characterization of human existence as
being-in-the-world.
The 'intentional object' of Husserl's phenomenology
now became a full world, and consciousness became
Dasein. It is primarily, if not exclusively, by the analysis
of a specific 'thing-in-being', namely human being
(Dasein) that being can be understood. In Heidegger
Being assumes an active role, revealing itself to or hiding
itself from thinking, and even determining the fate of the
things-in-being. Heidegger distinguished between
various constitutions of being (Seinsverfassungen) such as
existence (Existenz), moods (Stimmungen), concern (Sorge),
and being-towards-death (Sein zum lode).
Binswanger's selection from Heidegger's philosophy,
however, was very specialized: he takes little interest in
being-towards-death, or guilt in Heidegger, through he
does pick up concepts such as facility, humanness
(Geworfenheit) and 'Care' (Sorge).
Binswanger was a practising therapist, and his

practice (like Freud's, was based on love— the
warm-hearted encounter between doctor and patient. So
Binswanger came to find the Daesinsanalytik of Heidegger
unsatisfactory. Heidegger failed to include the social
dimension in his analytic, except for a brief reference to
co-existence, in which das Man appears as a form of
inauthentic existence. Moreover, Martin Buber, who
visited Kreuzlingen, continually argued that human
existence was rooted in ecnounter. In his next work,
Grundformen und Erkenntnis menschlichen Daseins ('Basic
Forms and Cognition of Human Dasein') Binswanger
seeks to present a new phenomenological anthropology
of basic forms of human existence, with their roots in
'being-together' (miteinandersein von Mir und Dir)
subdivided into Wirheit (we-hood) in dual loving and in
the participation of friendship.
Binswanger distinguishes between two modes of
human existence, the second of which Heidegger almost
altogether ignores: existence, the single being of the
questioner, and Dasein as dual being, as 'loving
communion' (liebende Wirheit) a way of being which
dispenses with puzzlement and fear.
The other aspects of being discussed by Binswanger
are the mere being together of an impersonal 'one' with
an impersonal 'other' in plurality, based on the way in
which we relate to one another in our social dealings and
the togetherness of one's relation to oneself in the
singular mode, for example, in self-love in relation to
one's own private world.
The influence of Martin Buber on such thinking
should be obvious.
As we shall see, these concepts are developed by the
Dutch philosophical biologist F.J.J. Buytendijk. They
originate in Heidegger's recognition of man as a
questioning being (the only being for whom Being is in

question). He is also the only being whose questions can
be put to rest by participation in the world of mind. This
world, of meaning, of philosophy, is evidently the
product of inter-subjectivity, since it is constituted by the
'union of persons in mutal understanding of the more
than personal'. This brings us to the risks involved—
what Buytendijk called the risk of 'knowing Dasein' (das
Wagnis der Daseinserkenntnis). There are two risks, that of
acknowledging the being of the individual existent as
questioner and that of acknowledging the real relation to
two individuals in mutual question and response.
Buytendijk seeks the extension of philosophical
anthropology into regions in which the possibilities of
meaning have to be discussed, in terms of the individual
finding meaning in his own (solitary) existence, and also
through his inevitable dependence on 'the significant
other'. These questions were originally opened up by
Binswanger's rejection of Heidegger's rejection of
togetherness, though he did not deny 'care' (Sorge). To
the psychotherapist, however, this kind of care seems to
be a consequence of a failure in the authentic social
existence in liebende Wirheit. The main function of
Binswanger's love or sense of encounter in we-hood is to
overcome the conflict between love and care.
Because of his interest in love and inter-subjectivity
Binswanger was interested in meanings and symbols. He
emphasized imagery and metaphor as indispensible for
phenomenology. In contrast to discursive and scientific
language, these embody the authentic (eigentliche)
language of phenomenology and (Daseinsanalyse.)
However there is a difference from Freud:
phenomenology does not require elaborate interpretations
of dreams as being mere symbols for unconscious
realities.', Dreams can speak for themselves. This is a
new and important emphasis in psychotherapy, on the
creative dynamics of the psyche. It is also a rejection of

the 'naturalistic' view, which tends (as in Freudian
metapsychology) to regard the 'id' and its drives as 'more
real' than the phenomena of consciousness, symbols and
metaphors. These last ,express' the primary realities of
the brute, in double-meaning and symbolic terms.
From this attention to meaning, Binswanger went on
to make another important emphasis in psychotherapy—
one which surely has influenced Laing. He rejected any
division between neurotic and psychotic disturbances. To
Binwanger intuitive understanding even of the world of
the psychotic was possible through his study of his inner
life history, using as much subjective material as was
available but interpreting it in a more imaginative way.
He believed that in the light of Heidegger's insights there
were no completely meaningless experiences, since all are
integral parts of the structure of being-in-the-world. This
calls for a kind of interpretation that is no mere
recording: it requires a theory of investigation (which in
fact Binswanger never produced though urged to do so
by Heidegger) of the relationship between the symbol
and the symbolized in psychoanalysis.
Binswanger's other important contribution was that
of insisting that dual we-hood is more basic than isolated
self-hood, and his relation of this to modes of knowing:
In contrast to objective knowledge, which can only
'build cognitive walls around love', knowledge of
Dasein is to find its ground and foundation in the
being together of me and you.
His knowledge of Dasein starts from the experience of a
loving togetherness in which we must be totally engaged
in an encounter involving a we-experience, in which we
are rooted in our own being, yet from which we 'vault
beyond' our own Dasein. One can imagine the horror
with which Heidegger would regard such a statement,
for him Mitsein is an aspect of inauthentic existence.
The reference to 'vaulting beyond' is combined with

an appeal to loving imagination (Einbildungskraft),
literally, 'he power of inbuilding, through which we can
build love into ourselves.
Whatever philosophical weaknesses there may be in
Binswanger's attempt to introduce a generous does of
love into Heidegger (his references including the
phenomenologies of Goethe and Husserl as well as the
existential analytics of Heidegger), his psychological
insights here confirm the observations of therapists such
as Guntrip and Winnicott. These observations are that
there are forms of knowing which belong to 'being' (and,
they would say, 'feminine element being') as well as the
more analytical modes which belong to doing (or 'male
element doing'). There are also ways of becoming which
depend upon being for—as when (in the psychology of
Winnicott) the infant develops his latent potentialities in
the context of the mother's 'creative reflection' a process
imbued with imagination, and a variation of liebende
Wirheit. The Winnicottian account of the stage of concern
is also relevant.
In Daseinserkenntnis Binswanger found an imagi
native realization of essential insight, where the knower
is no longer a non-participant observer: such knowledge
cannot be attained by effort but comes (and here
Binswanger uses a late Heideggerian expression) as a
favour or grace. It is incompatible with the phenome-
nological reduction, and Binswanger seeks to sustain
recognition of the 'objective' world.
What about the 'unconscious'? Binswanger did not
doubt its existence, but found it difficult to place
philosophically. He believed that the solution lay in a
better phenomenology of consciousness. 'Only he to
whom the structure of consciousness is unknown talks of
the unconscious.' Husserl said that the so-called
unconscious 'is anything but a phenomenological

nothing, but itself a marginal mode (Grenzmodus) of
consciousness."
So Binswanger follows Husserl towards going 'back
to the things themselves'. The interpretation of dreams
was not so much a theory as a process based on our
experience of the life of other persons. Psychoanalysis has
given us a new heuristic method, in its emphasis on the
'ethereal world'—the world of phantasy and dream.
However Binswanger is anxious to distinguish
clearly between existential analysis and strict Freudian
psychoanalysis, because Freud approaches man with the
sensualistic-hedonistic, or pleasure-principle, idea of the
natural man, homo natura. In discussing at length the case
of Ellen West, he rejected the Freudian view that wishing
in the pleasure-principle sense of hunger for pleasureable
sensation is the 'basic vector of meaning in which Freud
harnesses man'.
Existential analysis approaches human existence
'with no other consideration than the uncontestable
observation that man is in the world, his world'.
Freudian psychoanalysis is based in a complete taking
apart of being-human as such, and on a natural-scientific
biological construction. Man to Freud is at bottom a
driven or drive-dominated creature, his nature driven
instinctively. Since the primary concern in this is
libidinous instinctuality, sexuality is seen by Freud as the
history-forming force within the individual life-history.
Existential analysis is in direct contrast with this. It
seeks to work out being-human in all its existential forms
and their worlds, in its being-able-to-be (existence) being
allowed-to-be (love) and having-to-be (thrownness).
In Freudian psychoanalysis, the picture of man is
lost in a theoretical scheme of an 'apparatus' of psychic
Development of Dascinanalysis 147
mechanisms. So psychoanalysis tends to constrict and

flatten (Verflachen, meaning also reduce, impoverish, even
degrade) the existential-analytic-forms, by reducing them
to the place of its one-sidedly naturalistic viewpoint.
In existentialist analysis, the method is pheno-
menological. Being-man is not considered objectively,
that is as a thing-in-being, a thing 'on hand' like other
object, but rather the phenomenon of his being-in-the
world is investigated, and this requires attention to
freedom and love.
To indicate this wholeness of the phenomenon,
Binswanger loaded the word Dasein with so many
connotations (says Spiegelberg) that it seems liable to
break down under the strain. Heidegger used Dasein of a
being in relation to an entire world, not merely in
relation to specific intentional objects. In his psycho
therapeutic work Binswanger found this fruitful, in
interpreting the contexts of his patients' existence. Dasein
involved for him a way of moving in a world. This may
be seen in his analyses of dreams of ways of living and
moving in a characteristic space. Failures of such
movement are discussed as Verstiegenheit (to have lost
one's path in climbing a mountain); Verschrobenheit
(screwiness) and Manieriertheit (mannerism). To obtain a
real understanding of a person, one has to study
primarily his world, not his organism or personality set
apart from his world. Self and world are correlative
concepts. The various 'worlds' for Binswanger are not
separate worlds, but regions within the comprehensive
world of the person (Umwelt, the non-personal
environment; Mitwelt, his social relations to others;
Eigenwelt, his private world. In the case of Ellen West
there is the ethereal world, the tomb world,' and the
world of praxis.)
In some patients' worlds death plays a special role:
148 Philosophicnl Anthropology
in other there is a critical relationship between the home

world (Hcimat) and 'eternity'. In Lola Voss the
dominating theme was that of dreadfulness (das
Fttrchterliche): with Suzanne Orban there was a terror of
the primal scene developing into a full-scale delusion
affecting all other areas of the Dasein. In examining the
symbolic meanings of these dynamics Daseinsanalyse puts
a number of basic categories at the disposal of the
analyst.
These include spatiality. In our projection of our
world we assign room to the various items that occupy
such space. Temporality is also a projection of our being:
in the case of Ellen West her different 'worlds' display
different kinds of time. Her ethereal or dream-world
shows a fantasy-based inauthentic future, her world of
the tomb the predominance of her inauthentic past in
which nothing new can happen. Her world of practice
suffers a disintegration of time and is falling apart.
By contrast with the distintegrative elements of such
disturbance, love exerts in Binswanger's phenomenology
a creative significance in space and time. Love is best
expressed in the embrace that implies the mutual
yielding. Love also has a characteristic temporality a
timelessness that Binswanger, relates to eternity - not
infinite duration, but a certain indifference to the flux of
time according to past, present and future, very much in
contrast to the temporal concerns of care. Love takes us
beyond the world of one's own self to the world of
Wirheit, as a form of being-beyond-the-world (uber-die-
Welt-hinaussein). This is being not in an absolute beyond,
or a supernatural beyond, but in a being-beyond in the
'eternal now' (ewigen Angenblick) of love.
In this one may find a certain tendency towards
mysticism, and also a generous romantic lack of realism
(Binswanger uses poetic evidence from Goethe, Robert
Development of Dascinanalysis 149
Browning and Elizabeth Browning). On the other hand,

he concludes in the case of Ellen West that her eventual
suicide was a kind of liberation, which was the answer to
an insoluble conflict on interpretative conclusions which,
applied to schizoid individuals such as Sylvia Plath, has
led to the idolization of delusions. Is to understand
always to commend as valid?
Binswanger gave us guide-lines for Daseinsanalysis:
1. Daseinsttnalyse understands the life-history of the
patient, not in the light of a theory but as a
modification of being-in-the-world.
2. It lets the patient experience how he lost his way
and like the mountain guide tries to lead him back
and restore him to the common world, re
establishing communication.
3. It treats the patient neither a* a mere object not as a
mere patient but as existence"or a fellow man.
Therapy means encounter as opposed to a mere
contract (Freudian transference is a form of such an
encounter). This idea—as Spiegelberg pointed out—
was derived from a Colleague of Martin Buber,
Hans Trub; Heilung durch Begegnung.
4. Daseinsanalyse understands dreams not by
interpretation but by direct reading the expression
of a being-in-the-world. It can thus reveal to the
patient his way of being-in-the-world, and set free
his real possibilities. In this there is no distraction
between conscious and subconscious, since these
developments may take place at all levels.
It uses additional psychotherapeutic methods, but always
to enable the patient to understand human being and to
release his potentialities.
Binswanger continued to seek a solid foundation in
psvehiatry in its ambivalent position between mere
biology and the humanities. Phenomenology, he hoped,

would provide the key for this. However psychiatry has
to be based on experience, for which Daseinsanalyse
provides the empirical-phenomenological investigation,
with its way of knowing Binswanger called
Daseinserkenntnis.
The most important contributions made by
Binswanger, as is evident form May ei ah, were his
emphasis on love, meaning and freedom; 'so deeply
founded in -the existence of freedom as a necessity in
existence that it can also dispense with freedom itself.
This kind of paradox illuminates much in poetry and the
human soul.
Erwin Straus
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was the author of the first

philosophical work in French to have the word
'phenomenology' in the title. He takes off from the final
phrases of Husserl's work, and moves in a very different
direction from that of Sartre. Indeed, these two were
important contestants, Merleau-Ponty being the more
serious and radical philosopher. Them was a time when
they were friends: Sartre intervened on Merleau-Ponty's
behalf at a riot of their classmates in the twenties:
Merleau-Ponty defended Sartre against Marxists such as
Lukacs and Catholics such as Marcel. They collaborated
closely in Le Temps Modernes until 1950 or so, but in The
Adventures of Dialectics Merleau-Ponty criticized Sartre's
'Ultra-Bolshevism' severely, and dissociated himself from
Sartre's pro-communism. Sartre and his mistress dropped
Merleau-Ponty's name from their joint publications, and
Simone de Beauvoir made a bitter attack upon him in les
Temps Modernes, declaring that Merleau-Ponty was
dealing with the Sartre of an earlier period, and a
position he had since transcended. However the article
did not answer Merleau-Ponty's real criticisms.
We may go straight to the underlying difference by
examining the in which philosophy and politics are
related. What Merleau-Ponty challenged essentially was
Sartre's diagnosis of the social world as an inevitable
conflict between people who are essentially hostile to one
another, who are 'hell' to one another, in that they
menace one another's freedom: we might say,
ad hominem, his schizoid tendency.
Merleau-Ponty declares, by contrast with Sartre,

'History is other people'. By substituting history for hell,
Merleau-Ponty points not to endless conflict in the world
but to the realization of meaning between human beings.
In the Preface Merleau-Ponty declares 'we are
condemned to meaning'—a statement very different from
Sartre 'we are condemned to 'freedom', implying that we
are obliged to make choices which may be responsible to
'man' but which are essentially futile. The difference, as
Spigelberg emphasises, does not mean that
Merleau-Ponty denied Sartre's doctrine of freedom,
though he contests aspects of his claim for absolute
freedom: it is rather that he places a greater emphasis on
the fact that our existence is 'essentially imbued with
sense'. Merleau-Ponty rejects the doctrine of a
meaningless opaque being-in-itself in a world whose
meaning depends entirely on human 'freedom': meaning
is not merely a matter of choice, but is created and is
possible by the activity of reason:
One cannot say that everything has sense or that
nothing has sense, but only that there is sense ... a
truth against the background of absurdity, an
absurdity which the teleology of consciousness
presumes to be able to convert into truth, this is the
primary phenomenon.
Merleau-Ponty strives to find a new unity between the
objective of the traditional sciences and the subjectivism
of the kind of philosophy represented by Husserl. He
undertakes to reunite the subjective and the objective in
the primary phenomena of the world, as given in our
lived experience.
He challenges the point of departure of Sartre's
phenomenology; the Cartesian cogito in its subjectivism
(an aspect of which, as we have seen, Husserl pursued,
as he believed Descartes had not). Merleau-Ponty set out
to purge phenomenology of this residual Cartesianism,
Envin Straus 153
while preserving Husserl's best basic intentions (as we

have seen, Heidegger had tried this, but had fallen into
negative paths, by his particular solution of the problem
of finding the 'other' and sacrificing transcendental
phenomenology in the process). Like Husserl, Marleau-
Ponty began as a scientist, and this means that his
writing is extremely difficult to read (as, for example, by
comparison with Sartre). However his first appointment
at the Sorbonne was in psychology and specifically in
child psychology, so his work has come to be of Special
interest in phenomenological psychology.
Merleau-Ponty's best work is on questions of
perception and sensation, of which he develops
phenomenological reinterpretations. One of his particular
concerns may be linked with Husserl's rejection of
psychologism and seen in relation to Straus's mammoth
work on the rejection of behaviourism. Merleau-Ponty's
first major contribution was the phenomenological
reclamation of the concept of behaviour from its
impoverishment at the hands of a narrow behaviourism.
To him behaviour needs to be examined in its
complex form, taking into account both external
and internal phenomena, consciousness and movement,
in, inextricable interfusion. His major work, The
Phenomenology of Perception, is a philosophical work on
perception following the Husserlian injunction to 'return
to the phenomena'. In it he seeks a way out of the usual
impasse in psychology of perception and sensation, and
he studies perception as the way in which we are related
to the world. Perception is an existential act by which we
commit ourselves to a certain interpretation of the 'sense'
of experience as it presents itself to us»" How this
develops from Husserl's phenomenology will be obvious.
Husserl, indeed, appears in the second sentence in
Merleau-Ponty's Preface. Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty
declares, is the study of essences; and, according to it, all
problems amount to finding definitions of essences: the

essence of perception, or the essence of consciousness, for
example. Yet phenomenology is also an existential
philosophy, which puts essences back into existence, does
not expect to arrive at an understanding of man and the
world from any starting point other than that of their
'facticity'.
Merleau-Ponry is with Husserl in declaring that
phenomenology is a transcendental philosophy which
places in abeyance the assertions arising out of the
natural attitude, the better to understand them. This does
not mean that reality is denied:—it is a philosophy for
which the world is always 'already there' before
reflection begins. All its efforts are directed at
re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the
world and endowing that contact with a philosophical
status, trying to give a direct description of our
experience as it is. It is searching for a philosophy which
is a rigorous science, but not founded on casual
explanations, or those from objective science.
Phenomenology is also a 'style of thinking' and
existed as a movement before it became a philosophy. It
remains a 'problem to be a hope to be realized', because
methods of applying it have yet to be worked out.
It is a method of describing, not of explaining or
analysing. Its psychology is descriptive, and thus rejects
natural scientistic psychology:
I am not the outcome or the meeting point of
numerous casual agencies which determine my
bodily or psychological make-up. I cannot conceive
of myself as nothing but a bit of the world, a mere
object of biological, psychological or sociological
investigation. All my knowledge of the world, even
my scientific knowledge, is gained from my own
particular point of view, or from some experience of
Erwin Straus 155
the world without which the symbols of science

would be meaningless. Merleau-Ponty.
Already we become aware of the similarity between
Merleau-Ponty's point of view and that of others who
have explored the 'tacit' foundations of science, such as
Michael Polanyi. Science is but a 'rationale' or
explanation of the world: it can never have, by its nature,
the same significance qua form of being as the world that
we perceive. A radically different view of myself is thus
required:
I am not a 'living creature', nor even a 'man', nor
again even 'a consciousness' endowed with all the
characteristics which zoology, social anatomy, or
inductive psychology recognise in these various
products of the natural or historical process—I am
the absolute source, my existence does not stem from
my antecedents, from my physical and social
environment: instead it moves out towards them and
sustains them, for I alone bring into being for myself
(and therefore into being in the only sense that the
word can have for me) the tradition which I elect to
carry on, or the horizon whose distance from me
would be abolished ... if I were not there to scan it
with my gaze.
Already, we have ah emphasis which, if we accept it,
should radically alter our attitudes to (say) the
relationship between social class, education and
background over crime or mental illness: individuals are
never merely 'the product' of their antecedents or the
conditions of their existence. It is morally inadequate to
see human beings according to scientific points of view,
by which 'my existence' is a 'moment of the world's', not
least because these take for granted the other point of
view, namely that of consciousness, through which 'at
the outset a world forms itself round me and begins to
exist for me'. Every scientific schematization is an
abstract and derivative sign-language. To return to things
themselves is to return to that world which precedes

knowledge.
The relationship of this to the later Husserl will be
evident from the previous section. However, says
Merleau-Ponty, this is not a return to consciousness in
the idealistic manner, of Descartes or Kant, who detached
the subject, presenting consciousness as the condition of
there being anything at all. Merleau-Ponty's method is
'analytical-reflection':
Analytical reflection starts from Our experience of
the world and goes back to the subject as a condition
of possibility distinct from that experience, revealing
the all-embracing synthesis as that without which
there would be no world.
The world is there before any possible analysis of mine:
the real has to be described not constructed or found:
My field of perception is constantly filled with a play
of colours, noises and fleeting tactile sensations
which I cannot relate precisely to the context of my
clearly perceived world, yet which I nevertheless
immediately 'place' in the world, without ever
confusing them with my day-dreams. Equally
constantly I weave dreams round things. I imagine
people and things whose presence ,is not
incompatible with the context, yet who are not in
fact involved in it: they are ahead of reality, in the
realm of the imaginary. If the reality of my
perception were based solely on the intrinsic
coherence of 'representations' it ought to be forever
hesitant and, being wrapped up in my conjectures on
probabilities, I ought to be ceaselessly taking apart
misleading syntheses.
However, this does not happen. The real is a closely
woven fabric'. It does not await our judgement before
incorporating the most surprising phenomena, or before
rejecting the most plausible figments of our imagination.
Perception is not a science of the world, it is not even an
Enuin Straus 157
act, a deliberate taking up of a position, it is the

background from which all acts stand out, and is
presupposed by them.
These quotations are enough to demonstrate the
particular density and complexity of the thought of
Merleau-Ponty. It is more embodied than Husserl, and
his philosophy, like consciousness in it, is 'engaged' in
the world: it cannot and must not detach itself from the
essential 'incarnation' in it. Merleau-Ponty was critical of
Sartre's political activities, however, and his emphasis on
embodiment is not a belief that the philosopher should
rush headlong into ill-considered enterprises. His
problem, says Spiegelberg, is to find a proper balance
between involvement and detachment, of philosophizing
in the world, without becoming engulfed in it:
In this context the figure of Socrates acquires a new
symbolic value for Merleau-Ponty, as that of a
philosopher, neither a revolutionary nor a
conformist, obeying and disobeying at the same time.
This delicate balance characterizes also the ambiguity
of Merleau-Ponty's 'a-communism' in its ambivalent
position between Marxist action and Hegelian
contemplation.
Merleau-Ponty was (as Spiegelberg points out) an atheist
(though not as aggressive a one as Sartre) and yet he wag
positive or 'optimistic' though obviously not the latter in
any sense of placing hopes in the betterment of man's
material life through 'progress'.
The basic difference here is that Merleau-Ponty
cannot accept Sartre's view that the contradictions
between the self and others are beyond remedy. In Sense
and Non-Sense he declares that because of this Sartre's
dialectics is 'truncated' (tronquee). It stops with an
antithesis that cannot be resolved, as we have seen. It is
caught between a Cartesian subjectivity and the 'opacity
of a meaningless objectivity'. To Sartre the synthesis of
consciousness (the for-itself) and being (the in-itself)—a

synthesis that he identifies with the meaning of God—
constitutes a contradiction in terms.
To Merleau-Ponty, the first half of the problem is
soluble: he undertakes to reunite the subjective and the
objective, in the primary phenomena of the world, as
given in our lived experience. Then, without God, he
finds the second kind of synthesis conceivable:
He finds it realised 'every moment under our very
eye in the phenomenon' i.e. in our being-within-
the-world (etre-du-monde - 'being alive') Merleau-
Ponty's universe is one of potential unity in which
finite sense confronts the contingent, the ambiguous,
and the risky, but where man has a fighting chance to
enlarge the area of meaning.
Without God Merleau-Ponty yet finds the quest for
meaning possible. Here we may make a further
observation. I have suggested that Sartre needed 'endless
violence' as a way of sustaining his sense of meaning and
identity. Merleau-Ponty, in criticizing Sartre for not doing
justice to the 'mediations' between subject and object,
and to the synthesis of history, clearly implies that
Sartre's activism blinds him to a whole range of
phenomena, notably those of unity prior to our
constituting acts.'
Merleau-Ponty's 'embodiment' is a preoccupation
with the embodiment of meaning, freedom and dignity.
His man is not 'waste matter, but a 'radiating centre.
Merleau-Ponty steps beyond Sartre, locked in his
schizoid fear of meeting, and beyond Husserl in his
solipsistic perplexity about 'the other', by declaring
roundly:
"There is no difficulty in understanding how I can
conceive the other ... For the 'other' to be more than
an empty mind, it is necessary that my existence
Erwin Straus 159
should never be reduced to my bare awareness of

existing, but that it should take in also the awareness
that only one may have of it, and thus include my
incarnation in some nature and the possibility at
least of a historical situation. The Cogito must reveal
me in a situation, and it is on this condition alone
that transcendental subjectivity can, as Husserl put it,
be an intersubjectivity.
It is possible to develop thus from Husserl, a sense of
how we meet other human beings. Indeed, later,
Merleau-Ponty says that the phenomenological world is
not pure being, but the sense which is revealed where the
paths of my various experiences intersect, and also where
my own and other people's intersect and engage each
others like gears. It is thus inseparable from subjectivity
and intersubjectivity, which find their unity when I either
take up my past experiences in those of the present, or
other people's in my own.
The account Merleau-Ponty gives of philosophy is
both more concrete and more dynamic than Husserl,
without losing control. It communicates, however, a
sense of the complexity and mystery of existence which
is full of creativity:
We witness every minute the miracle of related
experiences, and yet nobody knows better than wc
do how this miracle is worked, for we are ourselves
this network of relationships..
The world and reason are not problematical, though we
my say they are mysterious, yet the mystery cannot be
dispelled by any 'solution'—'it is on the further side of
all solutions:
The unfinished nature of phenomenology and the
inchoative atmosphere which has surrounded it are
not to be taken as a sign of failure. They were
inevitable because phenomenology's task was to
reveal the mystery of the world and of reason.
'Because we are in the world, we are condemned to

meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without it
acquiring a name in history'. Again we have the feeling
that this writing is 'like poetry'.
As we have seen from Grene's discussion of time,
the new philosophies of Polanyi and Merleau-Ponty
move forward beyond the Cartesian myth of total
explicitness and the Cartesian atomicity of time. We have
the 'tension of the act of tacit knowing in which we
attend from the clues which we know only subsidiarily to
the object of our focal attention'. As Spiegelberg points
out, intentionality plays a new role in Merleau-Ponty. Its
main function is to reveal the world as ready-made and
already 'there' (deja la) while later he aims at an
'enlarged' conception of intentionality which applies not
only to our conscious acts, but underlies our entire
relation to the world an our 'comportment' toward others.
Grene, discussing Polanyi 's theories, speaks of the
directness of our focal attention as moving from the
proximal to the distal pole of tacit knowing, as a
'reaching out from ourselves to the world - and by the
same token a reaching out from past to future, a reaching
drawn by the focal point of attention, which is future'.
By this account, in which Polanyi and Merleau-
Ponty coalesce, 'knowing ... is essentially learning ... a
telic phenomenon'. Living in time in this way, exploring
the world by reading out into the future, towards the
reality we are striving to know, is 'telic': 'time itself, as
lived time, is telic in structure'.
We remember how, in Heidegger, we are drawn
towards a future which is death, and only this (as in
some of Camus's work) can give meaning. A quite
different feeling about-reaching out for meaning in the
time emerges in Polanyi and Merleau-Ponty. In their
work we find Husserl's 'protensions' biting into the
Erwin Straus 161
future. This is only possible because of the escape in

phenomenology from the 'atemporal' world of Descartes.
For Descartes, as we have seen there is no stretch of time.
There are only the instantaneous beads of it, each
independent of the other. Even in the picture of the self,
my present consciousness on the one hand res extensa on
the other, we have the 'geometer's vision', 'the vision
that was needed to lay the groundwork of Newtonian
mechanics'.
However this picture is 'false to the root structure of
experience as lived', and it was Merleau-Ponty who has
demonstrated this, by his way of examining embodied
experience:
It is my 'field of presence' in the widest sense - this
moment that I am spending working along with, behind
it, the horizon of the day that has elapsed, and in front of
it, the evening and night—that I make contact with time,
and learn to know its course. The remote past has also its
temporal order, and its position in time in relation to my
present, but it has these in so far as it has been present
itself, that it has been 'in its time' traversed by my life,
and carried forward to this moment. When I call up a
remote past, I reopen time, and carry myself back to a
moment in which it still had before it a future horizon
now closed, and a horizon of the immediate past which
is today remote. Everything, therefore, causes me to
revert to the field of presence as the primary experience
in which time and its dimensions make their appearance
unalloyed, with no intervening distance and with
absolute self-evidence.
This kind of philosophical writing is like poetry
because of its embodied quality, its attention to whole
experience. But it also conveys a creative attitude to
experience, quite different from (any) that found in the
psychology laboratory:
It is here that we see a future sliding into the present

and on into the past. Nor are these three dimensions
given to us through discrete acts: I do not form a
mental picture of my day, it weighs upon me with
all its weight, it is still there, and though I may not
recall any detail of it, I have the impending power to
do so, I still 'have it in hand'.
Our future is not made up exclusively of guesswork and
daydreams:
Ahead of what I can see and perceive, there is, it is
true, nothing more actually visible, but my world is
carried forward by lines of intentionality which trace
out in advance at least the style of what is to come ...
(Ibid).
There follow the passages discussed above, around the
subject of Cartesian time. In them, we find that
beautifully expressed concept Merleau-Ponty is
developing, of creative existence in time, 'We are the
upsurge of time'. As Grene says 'Protensions are
temporal arches, curved times reaching back from their
goals to the steps that lead on to them'. Though we
cannot make our time stand still, yet we will make him
run. There is, of course, ,physical' time, but intentionality
enables us to make something new out of our time.
Merleau-Ponty's point of view, in the chapter on
'Temporality', time is not part of the objective world. Past
and future are dimensions of our own subjectivity: they
can occur in a subject that is a temporal being, but
capable of an ecstatic outreaching of temporality, by an
'operative intentionality' that underlies the intentionality
of the conscious act. This may also be seen as one aspect
of the inseparability of subject and world—a recognition
of interdependence settles the unprofitable controversy
between 'idealism' and 'realism' and replaces it with a
new dynamic—whose account of experience is manifest
throughout literature.
Enuin Straus 163
From this doctrine of incarnated but creative

consciousness, where subject and world determine each
other reciprocally, we move forward with Merleau-Ponty
into a reformulation of the existentialist idea of freedom.
To Sartre, freedom is either 'absolute' or non-existent, a
desperate formula which has led to enormous waste, of
radical energy, in 'endless hostility' rather than any
advances in political, or social, or personal freedom.
Sartre's politics have no future.
For Merleau-Ponty the given situation stands for a
great deal more than Sartre's limited concept of man in
the world, which doomed him to develop ever new, but
futile, free choices of new meanings to be negated as
soon as born, by absurdity and uselessness. For Merleau-
Ponty, the given situation is part of the essential
involvement of man as a being within the world.
'Even before any choice is made this situation has
meanings which we may be able to change but not
ignore. We never start from zero'.
As is clear (of course) from any psychoanalytical case
history, we do not make a first and fundamental choice
in any situation, as in the Sartrean paradigm. There is
within us a moral dynamic rooted in relationship and
there are values, embodied in the human world all
around us. It is not only we who choose the world: it is
just as much the world which chooses us.
History forms the background for every act:
Between an objectivist determinism and absolute
freedom of idealist reflection the phenomena
themselves reveal existence as conditioned freedom
within a given style of life.
This we will discuss below, over Marxism, but here it is
important to stress that, whereas in Sartre we have the
feeling that freedom remains suspended in nothingness
to Merleau-Ponty, 'we are always in the full, in being,
like a facp, which even at, rest, even in death, is always

condemned to express something'. We are mingled with
the world and with other people in an inextricable
intermixture (in confusion). However freedom lies
somewhere between our engagement' in history and the
disengaging freedom of our acts.
As for Merleau-Ponty's implications for society, the
first approach to the social world is by the
phenomenology of perception, beginning with the
perception of our own body. This body is primarily a
focus of varying perspectives of other human beings. In
Sartre, the other's gaze enslaves me by making me into
an object: the gaze is by no means menacing in
Merleau-Ponty. A gaze can menace, as Merleau-Ponty
makes plain in his chapter on 'The Body in its Sexual
Being.' In Merleau-Ponty there are meanings in the body
which belong to positive inter-subjectivites. In Universities
Quarterly, Roger Poole quoted this passage from The Prose
of the World:
I am watching this man who is motionless in sleep
and suddenly he wakes. He opens his eyes. He
makes a move towards his hat, which has fallen
beside him, and picks it up to protect himself from
the sun. What finally convinces me that my sun is
the same as his, that he sees and feels it as I do, and
that after all there are two of us perceiving the
world, is precisely that which, at first, prevented me
from conceiving the other (autrui) namely, that his
body belongs among my objects, that it is one of
them, that it appears in my world. When the man
asleep in the midst of my objects begins to make
gestures towards them, to make use of them, I
cannot doubt for a moment that the world to which
he is oriented is truly the same world that I perceive.
If he perceives something that something must be my
own world, since it is there that he comes into being.
Poole comments that 'there may be moments in the
Erwin Straus 165
history of philosophy where a traditional conundrum is

solved, not by an act of intellection, but by an act of
moral sympathy, and I believe that this is one of them'.
Poole declares that this chapter, 'Dialogue and the
Perception of the Other', are for him a 'liberation';
certainly they move on significantly from the later
Husserl, to make it clear how we find and meet 'the
other' by way of a 'kind of common human
embodiment':
The moment the man wakes up in the sun and
reaches for his hat, between the sun which bums me
and makes my eyes squint and the gesture which
from 'a distance over there brings relief to my
fatigue between this sweating forehead and the
protective gesture which it calls forth on my part, a
bond is tied without my needing the decide
anything.
The style of thinking represented by Merleau-Ponty is, as
Poole says, new, refreshing, challenging—even having
charm. His prose is full of great humanness, and in this
conveys a recapturing of that telos in philosophy, which
Husserl believed to have been lost. Poole believes
Merleau-Ponty appeared like a 'new Aristotle, offering us
the method and style of two thousand years of thought
to come'. This is so because, with Husserl, he represents
the:
final break with Cartesian rationalism, and showed
us how to embark on the study of those immense
and complex problems of meaning, language the
body, signs, intersubjectivity which face us, the
problems which we have recently come to recognize
as authentically our own.
The Prose of the World a posthumous work, deals with the
relationship between language and expression. It declares
first the embodiment is the primordial condition of all
language, all expressiveness whatever. 'It is through the
fact of our embodiment that we recognise the signs of
others and bestow meaning upon their words, acts, and

intentions'. Secondly, all language transcends the signs in
which it is expressed:
The actual brute written characters are only black
dots on the page, but we 'intend' their meaning
down over them, giving them a meaning,
interpreting them on the basis of our common
humanity with the subject who wrote them. Likewise
with the world of signs of our fellow men because
we know what it is like to be a human being,
incarnated in a subjective tissue of lived behaviours,
and therefore find no difficulty in according a sense
to what we see coming from others.
This kind of approach to 'linguistics', arising evidently
out of the tradition oi existential phenomenology, is
evidently very different from the approach to truncated,
lopped off, fragments of language of logical positivism,
or linguistics of the structural kind. Incarnation and
intentionality are the central dynamic concepts.
In Merleau-Ponty is also found a delicacy, a 'respect
in front of the sayable and unsayable' noticeably
'missing' from the 'intrusive and superior assertiveness'
(as Poole calls it) of the 'objective' behavioural linguistics
experts and sociologists:
Aware of his own subjectivity and embodiment as a
controlling factor in the analysis, the
phenomenological analyst proceeds with caution and
deference in the face of a task which is complex and
daunting.
One hopes that this delicacy and respect may find its
way back into literary criticism, and into the teaching of
the arts. So, too, one hopes that the deeper motive may
find its way there:
For underlying all the analyses of differential
elements in style, and the infinite signifying
possibility of any one word, phrase or brush-stroke,
Erwin Straus 167
we recognise that there is a profound meditation on

human freedom itself, the freedom to choose
signification from a mass of inert particulars which
lie around us only waiting to be deployed by an
embodied subject.
In this Merleau-Ponty penetrates to the very faculty of
making signifying choices which even thinkers such as
Chomsky takes for granted. For Merleau-Ponty is not
really dealing with what we know as 'language' at all,
but, unlike modem linguistics, he is dealing with the
incarnation, the embodiment, which makes all
expressiveness possible in the first place:
Everything refers back to the body. The body itself,
of course, the actual flesh and blood, is not what is
of interest, but the body as a signifying and freely
choosing sign. 'Me body is a cluster of meanings, a
mode of expressiveness, which brings a world into
being and includes others into its meaningful sphere.
The body of other people in the world does the same
for us. We are constantly cutting across the edges,
the envelopes so to speak, of other people's bodily
expressiveness... interception, meanings... And our
own body, similarly wrapped in its own cocoon of
meanings, established our meanings in the world,
meanings which are picked up in a kind of
criss-cross dialectic by other embodied
counter-subjects in the world.
This embodied intersubjectivity is better understood by
animal ethology in the study of the lions or baboons than
it is in the study of linguistics by those who study
'broken off language, in analytical philosophy or
linguistics.
As Poole insists the central thought-dimensions,
which differentiates all phenomenological thinking from
all behavioural, psychologistic or ,objective' thinking, is
the concept of intentionality. It is this assertion that a
worlcl is brought into being by the kind of intentionality
168 Phihsophical Anthropology
brought to bear upon it, which makes the pheno-

menological investigation so rich, and links it with the
problem of freedom. Phenomenology assumes the
creative presence of human freedom or perception and
thought:
Intentionality is, crudely spelled out, the presence of
freedom in meaning conferring in the perceiving
subject. The subject as observed by the
phenomenologist confers meaning on the world, and
in doing so, implicitly asserts his freedom.
This brings us finally, in discussing Merleau-Ponty, to
politics. It is strange how little discussion (at least in
England) is given to the political significance of the
conflict between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and the way
in which the latter simply fell into a dead silence, while
the former sank deeper and deeper into pointless
schizoid activism.
When Merleau-Ponty heard of the Stalinist camps he
became so radically disorientated that there were two
years of tense silence between the two editors of Le Temps
Modernes. Merleau-Ponty could not bear to name the
possibility that the cause of the Left was utterly
underminded by what he now began to know of Stalin's
Russia. 'Sartre hung grimly on, hoping for a word which
would release him, too, into authenticity, but no word
came'. The whole split is discussed in Sartre's Situations
IV, Merleau-Ponty, Gallimard, 1964.
Sartre recounts how Merleau-Ponty, meeting Simone
de Beauvoir, said 'But I am more than half dead'. He was
at the time distressed by the death of his mother in 1952.
This grief was added to his feeling that he could not be
true to a Marxism that would not remain true to itself,
and, if one could not honestly be on the Left, where
could one be?
Enuin Straus . 169
Sartre had tried to humanize Marxism. He criticized

what he regarded as 'dogmatic Marxism'. While firmly
adhering to basic Marxist teachings, he thinks that the
majority of modem Marxists have distorted Marxist
doctrine, so that no place is left in it for the individual.
He accepts Marx's view that 'the mode of production of
material life generally dominates the development of
social, political and intellectual life' — 'without
reservations'. However he rejects the narrow
interpretation of this by Marxists, and tries to introduce a
little existentialism into Marxism. Man is not a product of
conditioned reflexes —a passive product of his
environment. Because the accepted that he is, says Sartre,
Marxist dogmatists have Marxism of its human content,
and this requires an 'existentialist intervention'.
The main task of existentialism, as Sartre saw it, was
to humanize Marxism, to find a place in it for the
individual. Marxism is the 'dominant philosophy' of our
age and all existentialism can hope for is an enclave
inside it. As soon as Marxism has incorporated the
human elements it ignores at the moment, it will have
ended its task.
Philosophically, Sartre's position is absurd, for he
did not give up the Marxist conception of historical
materialism, and this leaves the individual no role, and
no freedom to do anything other than accept what the
dogmatists tell him. Of course, Marx said that the
dialecetical laws of history work through human praxis.
Sartre picked this up and asserted that praxis is an
assertion of the human need to 'surpass the present/ to
project oneself towards what is not yet realized or
achieved. In praxis man projects oneself towards future,
towards his own possibilities. He transcends the
immediate conditions of his existence and tries to
improve or change those conditions.
Sartre then introduced the concept of 'scarcity'.

There will be a time when all those conditions which'
limit our freedom are overcome. However, as we have
seen, Sartre's belief as an existentialist was that the quest
for freedom ontologically speaking was for ever doomed.
There was a permanent and unbridgeable gap within the
for-itself due to the for-itself's lack of 'coincidence with
itself: the pdur-soi, projecting itself constantly towards its
self-completion' self-fulfilment, is destined to remain for
ever unable to finish itself. The coincidence with itself
can never be achieved, and the for-itself within
consciousness can never become something else. Freedom
is conditioned by this for ever futile striving for what can
never be realized, because the for-itself is 'unobjectifiable'
and 'lacks' itself as an object. To overcome this 'lack'
would mean destroying freedom: freedom and scarcity
go hand-in-hand.
The whole goal of Marxism, taken to justify its
offences in the meantime to values and freedom, is an
end in which freedom will come to pass. Freedom is a
historical category, and the goal is the emancipation of
man from his alienation in the existing class structure.
Real freedom cannot be achieved before the structures of
society has been radically changed and the conditions of
scarcity overcome. However, this would mean the end on
freedom, by Sartre's account, another huis clos.
How shall these views be reconciled? Of course,
they cannot. Moreover, Marxism regards its goal as one
from which no individual can deflect it one jot. The
contradictions of capitalism inevitably lead to the
overthrow of the ruling class, and the establishing of a
classless society. Only then will man be free. This makes
man simply a product of 'economic and class forces':
when the structure is changed, the superstructure will
automatically make freedom possible. In this historical
materialism, existentialist talk of how man should not be
Erwin Straus 171
made into a thing, or its emphasis of freedom as the

primary essence of man, is so much nonsense, and will
be ruthlessly brushed aside as 'idealism'. Certainly, when
we move beyond Sartre's nihilistic ideal of being I
condemned to freedom' to Merleau-Ponty's 'condemned
to meaning', we find the whole question of giving
meaning to the world brutally denied by the Marxists.
There is no meaning for them (with their 4 scientific'
approach to history) except the subjugation of all facts,
values and meanings to the certain ultimate goal of a
'classless society' in which, by some magic, all the old
human woes of inauthenticity will disappear: a belief a
reading of Alexander Solzenhitzyn's The Cancer Ward or
For the Good of the Cause (one might suppose) should
dispel for ever and ever.
If I am free, or can be free, what sense is there in
talking of historical necessity? Of course, a better
economic organization might bring a wider choice: but it
could also lead to a life which could be intolerable
because of its lack of meaning-, and what of the
relationship between man and nature in general? The
tragic problem, and that of meaning?
As Pivcevic says:
The problem, briefly, is this: if we are really free,
then Marxism is not necessan/. We may choose to
adopt Marxism, but we need not do so, and no one
has the right to blame us for not choosing it. Nor
indeed can anyone prove us 'wrong'. If, however,
Marxism is the voice of history itself, as Sartre
assures us then our opposing it makes no sense. The
only sensible thing to do is to accept it. But what
remains, in this case, of our freedom?.
This is Sartre's dilemma. What freedom is there in praxis,
if the end is determined anyway? He has no answer to
such questions. Surely we must see that in its belief
in a Golden Age, Marxism is simply a version of
bourgeois-capitalist belief in progress an optimistic faith

that mere melioration of our material circumstances will
make our lives happy, meaningful and free at last? Of
course, when in the mass people are living in misery a
goal of a decently ordered, fair society is primary—
simply so that man can begin to be men. In Africa this
primary struggle for basic rights is going on now. We
know too well the contradictions of capitalism, its
unfairness, and the way in which it makes it difficult or
impossible for men to find their free roles and realize
their potentialities. Certainly, it would seem, we need a
new politics which is not deterministic, and which
recognises the primary needs of being.
In Merleau-Ponty's politics, history forms the
background for every free act. Freedom can only be
exerted within, a given life style. According to Marxist
objectivism, the revolutionary movement is a matter of
strict determination: according to Sartre, political decision
and action are a completely free project. According to
Merleau-Ponty, the rise of class- consciousness in the
revolutionary project emerges from a realization of the
situation by existing individuals who see themselves as
working men in typical communication with the world
around them. There is an experience of a certain style of
being and of being-within the-world. The transition to
class consciousness takes place when workers sense a
solidarity between themselves and others. 'Social space
begins to polarise itself, one sees a field of the exploited
group taking shape'. The revolutionary project is not the
result of a deliberate judgment, but a decision 'ripens in
co-existence before erupting in worlds an relating itself to
objective goals'.
Merleau-Ponty's freedom starts from the situation in
which I exist and over which I have no control. My
choice is at first not a conscious one but a pre-conscious
or existential:
Enoin Straus 173
It is I who give a direction, significance and future to

my life, but that does not mean that these are
concepts [concus]: they spring from my present and
past, and in particular from my mode of present and
past coexistence..
It is never possible to distinguish clearly the part of the
situation and the part of freedom. 'We are mingled with
intermixture'. There is an ambiguous situation, but this
does not abolish the fact that there is the 'engagement' of
history together with the disengaging freedom of our
acts.
It is clear from Merleau-Ponty's subtle and delicate
concept of the free self in the world, between what must
be accepted, and what must be claimed in terms of one's
one meanings, that he must in the end come into
collision with the essential determinism of dialectical
materialism and Marxist 'objectivity'. His pheno
menology points to a new politics, but it is one that is
likely to be too human for those who find palatable
Sartre's schizoid intellectual structures, despite their
confusion. As Spiegelberg says, Sartre's existentialism is
incompatible with any type of orthodox dialectical
materialism: yet he sought to reform Marxism, even
bringing up to this task his perverse idolization of moral
inversions, perversion and criminality in Jean Genet,
whose Journal d'un Voleur he calls 'the history of a
liberation'. As Polanyi points out, for Sartre and Simone
de Beanvoir it was the ruthless moral inversionists who
became their moral heroes, because their (schizoid) purity
exposed 'bad faith' and 'the bourgeois hoax' of society's
values.
This liberation, based on pseudo-male doing, itself
rooted in hate, was a dead end. Merleau-Ponty fell into
silence, confronted by the problem of the massive
destruction of freedom by Marxism. Yet his work is an
embodiment, incarnation, and engagement, in relation to

freedom, and really far more seminal than Sartre's ideas
only given time for them to be absorbed and understood.
He asked for a politics greater in perspective than that of
the 'class struggle' or the achievement of the 'dictatorship
of the proletariat', requiring a new and more creative and
meaningful relationship between men and the whole
world, rooted in being, and concerned with the meeting
of freedoms.
Perhaps one of Merleau-Ponty's most important
essays is that on 'The Metaphysical in Man'.
Metaphysics begins, he says, from the moment,
when, ceasing to live in the evidence of the object—
whether it is the sensory object or the object of science—
we apperceive the radical subjectivity of all our
experience as inseparable from its truth value. It means
two things to say that our experience is our own. Both,
that it is not the measure of all imaginable being in itself,
and that it is none-the-less co-extensive with all being of
which we can form a notion. Here Merleau-Ponty's sense
of the duality of the cogito runs parallel to Winnicott's
emphasis on the mixture in us of union and separateness.
Merleau-Ponty expresses his own positive sense of
'encounter'. The recognition of an individual life in
oneself, which seems absolutely individual and
absolutely universal to me, animates all past and
contemporary lives and receives its entire life from them,
'of a light which flashes from them to us' - this is
metaphysical consciousness. Metaphysical consciousness
has no other objects than those of experience: this world,
other people, human history, truth, culture:
But instead of taking them as all settled, as
consequences with no premises, as if they were
self-evident, it rediscovers their fundamental
stangeness to me an the miracle of their appearing.
Erwin Straus 175
The history of mankind is then no longer the

inevitable avent of modem man ... it is not empirical,
successive history but the awareness of the secret
bond which causes Plato to be still alive in our
midst.
Merleau-Ponty suggests that we should not see rivalry
between scientific knowledge and metaphysical knowing,
for metaphysical thought 'continually confronts the
former with its task'. A science without philosophy would
literally not know what it was talking about.
To do metaphysics is continually to verify the
discordant functioning of human intersubjectivity, 'to try
to think through to the very end the same phenomena
which science lays siege to, only restoring to them their
original transcendence and strangeness'. As we have
seen, induction has been found to be baseless. What,
then, about 'reflection', which means so little to the
analytical philosopher? Merleau Ponty suggests that it is
questionable whether two ways of knowing are really
involved at all: is there not 'rather one single way of
knowing, with different degrees of naiveteor
explicitness'? This is a point that reveals how close
Merleau-Ponty is to Polanyi, and is more refreshing to
the poet who is also concerned with 'metaphysics in
action':
The glory of the evidence such as that of successful
dialogue and communication, the common fate which
men share and their oneness, which is not merely a
biological resemblance but is a similarity in their most
intimate nature— all that science and religion can
effectively live in here brought together and rescued from
the ambiguities of a double life.
We can, that is, meaningfully seek a purpose in life.
Tomlin reached a similar conclusion, quoting A.N.
Whitehead, 'Apart from metaphysical presupposition
there can be no civilisation'. The repudiation of

metaphysics (as by the positivists) was a treacherous act
which threatens civilization. Merleau-Ponty's work is a
major contribution to what Tomlin calls 'the necessity of
maintaining a tradition of metaphysical thought'.
In Merleau-Ponty there are a number of footnotes
referring to the work of Erwin Straus. It is obvious that
he was influenced by Straus's conceptual reforms, while
Merleau-Ponty on his part indirectly conveyed some of
the ideas of the philosophical biologists further abroad.
The whole history of the movements of these ideas has
yet to be written, though Spiegelberg and Grene have
achieved prodigious initial tasks, in outlining the history
and the connections of one thinker with another, which
in some instances began through hearing lectures, being
directly taught, or simply studying one another's works.'
In all this there are a number of main streams: one is that
which leads towards a revision of psychotherapy, while
another is directed more towards the development of
new forms of philosophical anthropology, with the wider
new philosophical biology in the background. Some
belong to both streams, and Straus bridges them, not
least by his explosive demolition of behaviourism and
empirical psychology. Straus begins from the same
question as Husserl and Merleau-Ponty: the scientific
study of behaviour has been hamstrung since its
inception by Cartesian heritage. Philosophical thoughts,
discoveries, and modes of seeing have slowly spread
from a small group in ever-increasing circles; they
dominate—though mostly unnoticed and often distorted
—the thoughts and language of the average man. Both
specialists and the 'average man' are tied by their
questions to tradition and prejudice; so that 'plain
description', which is the answering of questions, is
determined by questions which are prescribed to us by
historic actuality. The questions we ask determine what
Enuin Straus 177
will appear to be particular and remarkable in the

phenomena. We need, obviously, to examine how our
habits were formed, of asking and answering questions
about the nature of the world and perhaps trying to find
other questions and other ways of answering them.
Straus starts from a critique of psychological theory,
in particular of Pavlov. In its underlying metaphysic,
conditioned reflex theory is still Cartesian, and in this
depends upon a Cartesian time-atomism, so that
Cartesian thought is cut off from the structure of
experienced time. This kind of psychology, Straus says,
adopts certain decisive tenets of Descartes, without
further question, and this has made it impossible for
psychology to investigate phenomena fundamentally and
without prejudice.
Descartes, for example, declares:
I am a thing that thinks, that is to say that doubts,
affirms, denies, that knows a few things, that is
ignorant of man, that wills, that desires, that also
imagines and perceives; although the things that I
perceive and imagine are perhaps nothing at all
apart from me and in themselves, I am nevertheless
assured that these modes of thought that I call
perceptions and imaginations, inasmuch as they are
modes of thought, certainly reside (and are met with)
in me.
Sensations, then, are a mode of consciousness along with
true knowledge, judgment, imagination and volition.
Sensation to Descartes is a deficient mode of knowing,
for knowledge is clear and distinct: sensation falls short
of this. In Descartes and Hume sensing is suspect.
Sensations deceive.
Consciousness, (cogitato) of which both sensation
and cognition are modes, encompasses 'everything that is
in us in such a way as we observe it directly by our own
effort and have an inner knowledge of it'. 'Whatever
uncertainty there may be about sensations, what is

indubitable (as we have seen) is that I feel the sensations':
that cannot be false. What we must believe in is 'what is
in me called feeling (sentire): and used in this precise
sense that is no other thing than thinking (cogitare)'.
Sensation is thus a mode of consciousness in
reference to the self-conscious ego, and not in relation to
the object. The ego, however, in which sensations and
imaginations occur, is the pure ego: it is not the
psychological or phenomenal subject and certainly not
man in his corporality.
Descartes' concept of the ego is thus ambiguous, and
modem psychology has taken over this ambiguousness.
What is real is our clear and direct knowing, and our
sensations. What is sensed are the ideas of those qualities
that occur in consciousness (colours, light, smells, tastes,
sounds). These sensations give rise to the belief that we
perceive certain things entirely outside our
consciousness, that is, the bodies which produce these
ideas in us. Yet Descartes's position is totally subjective.
There are two things we can be sure of: our own
thoughts, and ideas perceived through the senses - and
these are the same.
It is inferred with a high degree of probability that
these sensations are dependent upon bodily processes,
and that there is a relationship between them and
material things 'out there'. Descartes derived his final
reason for the supposition from a proof of the existence
of God who cannot be a 'cunning deceiver'. However in
examining his theories, we cannot but be aware that
'sensations as such—correctly understood as... are—modi
of consciousness—are abysmally remote from the being
of external things: and equally remote is the ego from the
world'.
Erwin Straus 179
Moreover, in his Sixth Meditation, Descartes,

declared, 'I am entirely and absolutely distinct from my
body and exist without it'. The formulation of pure
thoughts, for Descartes, is not related to the function of
the brain.
Sensations, however, in this paradigm, happen to us
in such a way that we are totally passive. It is very
important to grasp that this is an idea of how man
'works' in his world taken over by today's psychology as
the basis of its operations. This is called 'objectively'
dealing with 'facts'—even though the fundamental ideas
behind it, derived from Descartes, are extraordinarily
subjective, so that the mind is hardly in contact with the
world at all.
One of Descartes's works, as Straus points out, is a
strictly mechanistic work called VHomme. He described
in this how sensations are produced by external stimuli.
Motions caused by external objects in the sensory organs,
nerves, and brain provide for the soul (because it is
closely united with the machine of the body) the occasion
of apprehending the various ideas of colour and light.
Thus, sensations come about against the will of the
subject: they are alien to it. Sensations do not have any
direct communication with the ego, nor are they in direct
communication with the world. The subject contemplates
the ideas within the body, while it is itself at rest, not in
a state of becoming. The contact between mind and body,
between consciousness and corporal existence, is
characterized only by a complete lack of communication.
This disconnection or fragmentation lies behind
Descartes's essentially mechanistic theory, which
provides the roots for the Pavlovian doctrine of reflexes,
for Descartes's 'system' resembles his in many ways. It
provides much food for reflection: that the essentia1
,model' of man underlying official communist ('scientific
socialist') thinking about the reality of man, and that

underlying the politics of a B.F. Skinner, should be one in
which there is no intentionality, and in which the body is
nothing more than a machine, while sensations are
attributed to motions within the body in something like
'animal spirits', including impressions in the mind,
disconnected from the essential 'ego'. God help the world
if it comes to be manipulated on the basis of such absurd
concepts!
In Descartes's theory, 'being alive is not a particular
mode of being'. The mind is radically severed from the
physical world. Sensations participate in the extra-
mundane character of the mind, but have no reality. In
themselves, sensations and ideas, and as ideas, they are
inert, static, pure. They are but momentary; but of course
in Descartes time is composed of moments anyway.
By his interpretations, Descartes generated the
empirical tradition in the development of psychology.
What the 'objective' study of perception and the psyche
must do is to penetrate to the ultimate units of experience
as presented: sense, atomic facts or elements (as in
chemistry and physics). Everything else is a 'super
structure' upon the primary givens. Thus, the tradition
came to accept a reduced and purely passive Cartesian
simple which must be the isolatable unit of knowledge,
the building brick out of which an aggregate equivalent
to 'experience' could be constructed.
The mind is reduced to a ghost. So the single
elements of 'experience' became separate impacts of
isolable physical events on separate nerve-endings. This
kind of thinking still dominates ideas about 'the brain';
'to understand man, the doer, we must understand his
nervous system, for upon it his actions depend'. As
Straus declares, this would mean we would have to
exclude Socrates, Plato, Augustine, Luther, Sophocles,
Erwin Straus 181
Shakespeare, Caesar and Napoleon from the ranks of

those who could understand man the doer.
The widespread search for the 'neuro-physiological
basis of mind' is, Straus declares, a metaphysical exercise.
A distinction is made between two ontological levels - a
genuine and a spurious one. Full reality is granted to the
nervous system and its function, while experience is
interpreted as a kind of phantasm, at best an assemblage
of purely secondary qualities somehow related to the true
events within the nervous system:
In theory, the structure and function of the nervous
system is the primary agent; but through a nasty trick,
nature limited our direct experience to a deceptive
surface.
Consciousness, in this neurological approach, is
reduced to a shadow existence, a mere accompaniment to
nervous processes. Cartesian dualism is replaced by a
one-and-a-halfism of the real thing and its shadow.
As we have seen discussing the empirical tradition
from Galileo down, this is a manifestation of a rejection
of 'all that we are'. It is pathological in its derealization
and scotomization of all that is known to poetry (and
psychoanalysis) or indeed, in ordinary life.
'Unfortunately', says Straus, 'those shadows are all that
we immediately possess', and we may see Galileo's
mathematical idealizations and Decartes's machine man
as unreal abstractions invented in order to deny the
actual living complexities of existence. Yet this
,empiricism' is supposed to be 'rigidly realistic'! It is time
for those who dare to recognize the indivisible and
primary reality of human experience to expose the
absurdities of this so-called 'scientific' account of man.
In his Preface Straus gives a hilariously comic
account of the consequences, if we accept the 'objective'
account of human 'doing'. A man enters an office to buy

a ticket. How could an understanding—even the most
perfect understanding—of the nervous system improve
this situation? Should the traveller understand the agent's
nervous system or vice versa, or should his nervous
system understand the nervous system of the agent?
Would this not imply that his nervous system (each
nervous system) must understand itself? Must we
substitute for these human beings their action and
interaction in biochemical and biophysical terms at the
molecular or nuclear level?
What is the common ground on which such
divergent chains of events can be brought together? Who
is to perform the comparison? As Straus continues, we
begin to see the force of Husserl's remark that scientific
explanations answer no serious questions at all; or we
may Polanyi's point that an account of the topography of
all the atoms in the universe would answer no serious
questions at all, either.
The 'comparison' Straus referred to could only be
'the scientist'. However to understand 'the doer' we must
understand 'his nervous system. The scientist can claim
no privileged situation: we must lift his mask and turn
our attention to his cerebral apparatus —the real 'actor' is
the drama of experience, according to the neurophysicist.
One nervous system now observes another:
At this moment, a transformation of catastrophic
dimensions occurs. The laboratory as a well-illuminated
environment furnished with visible and tangible
instruments disappears; gone are the experimental
animals and subjects; gone is the observer himself—at
least as we know him in everyday life. Nothing is left but
the invisible machinery of the observer's nervous system,
equipped with receptors and efferent pathways, with the
synaptic apparatus, and all the efferent pathways
activating muscles and glands.
Enuin Straus 183
The nervous-system-observer 'receives stimuli', but

has no relations to another nervous system, organism, or
fellow man as objects of observation or communication.
The efferent impulses do not know the synaptic
connections that achieved them. The observer cannot
even hear himself-, it is only that efferent impulses act on
organs to produce certain sounds, and these phenomenes
are nothing but a set of stimuli that may release another
set of responses, and so on.
All these complexities of being-in-the-world which
Merleau-Ponty explored are gone:
A legion of eminent scholars is busy these days
demonstrating that and how 'information' is coded and
decoded by the machinery of the nervous system.
Fascinated by the job to be done, spellbound by the
magic of a venerated metaphysics, they completely forget
to investigate their own situation.
The central problem in this Laputan situation is an
amazing and imponderable confusion of stimuli and
objects. 'Stimulus' is a central concept in behaviourism
but whenever it is used there is a likelihood that it will
be misused, signifying things rather than stimuli.
In the philosophy of Husserl and the pheno-
menologist, we, as experiencing creatures, relate to
objects. This is surely self-evident, from ordinary
experience. The supposed relationship between 'stimuli'
and 'receptor' is radically different. Stimuli are pure
physical agents (beams of light for example) unsustained
by any secondary qualities - they are neither audible,
tangible or visible. All we are concerned about is what
happens in the 'nervous system' as a reaction to the
stimulus—so stimuli have no existence apart from that
nervous system.
However we do not live in a world of stimuli. The
wall over there, the writing pad, pen and the ink, are not
'stimuli'. The light reflected off my paper might be called
a stimulus, but only once it has acted on my receptors.
Stimuli precede response: nothing happens until they
make something click. So, no one can handle, or
manipulate stimuli: they are out of reach.
In Merleau-Ponty's world, as an experiencing
being-in-the-world, I can, and do, stetch out my hand
towards my pen on the desk. If my behaviour is thought
of as response to stimuli, it could be that hand moves out
according to some stimuli which sets off my
motor-response: but how does my hand move towards
that pen? A motor response cannot be directed towards
optical stimuli already received in the past. What is that
pen then? It is an object in the world, not a 'stimulus'.
Apply this to the behaviourist experimenter with his
rats. His assumption in his experiments is that nothing
happens until a stimulus activates. How can he do his
work, according to the hypothetical'events of which,
according to his own theory, behaviour (including his
own) consists?
Since 'stimuli' can neither be observed nor
manipulated but exist only in the response of the nervous
system, and since they cannot be experienced (since we
have no category 'to experience'), how can experiments
be conducted? Since stimuli are events in the receiving
organism, how can they be shared between the 'subject'
and experimenter? These are in a sense rhetorical
questions, directed at exposing that stimulus-response
theory is nonsense, because even in conducting a
stimulus-response experiment the experimenter depends
at every stage on complex processes in himself and his
animal subjects which cannot be accounted for by his
theory:
Envin Straus 185
Those stimuli which provoke responses in the

experimental animal never reach the eyes or ears of
the observer. Stimuli cannot be shared by two
organisms.
So, what can the behaviourist psychologist do? He must
either recognize himself (and his subjects) as
experiencing creatures sharing a world of visible and
audible things, or he must explain itself in terms of
stimulus and response. If he declares for the latter, he
must recognize that two of stimuli and responses occur,
one in the subjects and one in self. The observation he
reports in his scientific papers must be understood as his
(or 'his brain's') response to all the stimuli that acted on
his receptors.
Nevertheless his response is not identical with the
subject's response, which functions as a stimulus in
relation to the observer. Obviously, this cause of his
response cannot at the same time be an object of his
observation. It is nonsense to say that the observer's
response is caused by stimuli which comes from the
response of the subject to stimuli, and this cause is the
object of his observation. So this way of explaining the
work is absurd.
So says Straus, let us try the other explanation. An
observer makes an observation. An observation is not a
simple process of recording, like that made by a
barometer with a pen on a chart. The observer, with his
silent questions and his anticipation of possible answers,
is a participant in the experiment, active even when
watching a scene through a one-way mirror.
In this, Straus is making the same kind of emphasis
as Polanyi makes with his concept of the 'tacit' elements
in knowledge, an his distinction between focal and
subsidiary knowledge. In Merleau-Ponty, as we have
seen, there is a recognition of the 'tension inherent in
tacit knowing' by which 'my world is carried forward by

lines of intentionality'. In an experiment, the scientist is
as necessary in his presence as the spectator in the
theatre which makes the play a show, 'he sets the scene,
calls in the actors, raises the curtain... (then) withdraws. to
the parterre to watch the outcome'. He is not involved
but he is affected.
In science, no less than in everyday life, we take our
capacity to see, to observe, to describe, for granted. In
psychology we must overcome this blindness, this
taking-for-granted, for it is a 'naive prethematic attitude'
and it must be made thematic by taking account of our
own situation; we deal with persons and things, animals
and plants, with objects, not with 'stimuli'. This insight is
familiar to everyone in everyday life, in the 'life-world'
('Lebenswelt': Straus uses Husserl's term). It needs to be
brought into science, to dissolve the Cartesian delusion:
That we see things in their own right, over there at a
distance, that they present themselves to us without
being incorporated like air and food; that they are, so to
speak, here and there at the same time is the paradox of
sensory experience.
Yet whatever the paradox, sense and sensory
experience belong to the, the greatest gift nature has
bestowed on man and animals' for it brings ,ontological
enrichment'.
Yet this enrichment has been implicitly disparaged
by 'science'; the Lebenswelt in which things are
experienced is not to be distrusted or ignored: it is what
makes acts of observing and measuring possible. Who
(asks Straus) does the neurophysicist mean when he says,
'We must understand the nervous system', so that man
can be explained away? The 'we' indicates a being who
cannot be explained away as a nervous system. Who are
'we'?—you and I who stand around in the Lebenswelt:
Enuin Straus 187
Schematic representations of the nervous system are

not unusual in psychological texts. Nobody seems to
wonder that those few black line in a printed diagram
could represent pathways in a —no, in the—nervous
system. Obviously, stimuli could not do that. The
question how something could represent something else
is not even asked.
The immense complexities of historical development,
of consciousness, of the sense of identity, of symbolism,
of intersubjectivity and communication lying behind the
possibility of a 'chart' of a concept called 'the nervous
system' are facts that the neurophysicist thrusts aside.
So, Straus directs himself to presenting these to
scientific debate 'to decipher the unwritten constitution
of everyday life'. He writes in the spirit of Husserl but
not in the letter, since, as he explains, he does not accept
the transcendental reduction. However in revealing the
depth of human experience, instead of reducing it, he
hopes to work in the spirit of Husserl's 'Back to the
things themselves!'.
So Straus stands for life against the inheritance of
death or deadliness in the Cartesian mode. 'I am certain
that I am a thinking thing'. (Sum certus me esse rem
cogitatem). The res cogitans confronts the res extensa. From
the evidence of the cogito sum, and after that from the
validity of mathematics, and from everything that has
been recognized clearly and distinctly, we comprehend
what the being of the res cogitans is. In this Descartes
raised human knowledge above itself, so as to use the
perfect and complete knowledge of a standard in order to
veil the psychological problems of knowing and sensing.
In Hume the sensing subject, as we have seen, is a
bundle of perceptions, not a living human being.
Straus declares roundly that 'we conceive sensing as
a mode of 'being alive' (Lebendiges Sein). If sensing is a
mode of being alive, this being alive must also be directly

apprehended in sensing itself. The active, living nature of
sensing has been lost in traditional approaches. The
subject disappears, in the attention to sensations. The
'sensory data' are indicators of the existence of objective
general data in objective space and objective time. The
subject can manifest himself only as an individual when
deceived: thus we speak disparagingly of the 'merely
subjective'. Impressions leave only physiological traces
behind, while the subject remains unchanged — as
sensations march past him in a long procession:
True, they are arranged in proper order as to the
one-after-the-other of objective time: but they are as such
timeless and, as many people believe, spaceless qualities.
The relation of the subject to sensing is a mere 'having':
the subject has sensations, but he does not sense. It is a
strange world of the dead that is supposed to be the
beginning and the foundation of psychic life.
Straus declares that, if sensing is neither knowledge
nor a mechanical event but a mode of being alive, it must
be understood as a 'category of becoming':
Becoming implies change and modification; all
becoming is a becoming different. It implies direction
and continuity.
An experiencing being moves not among 'stimuli' but in
a surrounding field within which things approach it and
it approaches things. ('It' here meaning both a man hands
a dog: 'responding to stimuli'). The basic experience of
the experiencing being is what Straus calls the 'I-Allon'
relation, where Allon means not just other persons but
the organized totality of objects within which the living
being moves.
'Objective' psychology (ever since William James, as
Straus demonstrates) has defined itself in such terms that
it preoccupies itself with what in fact are highly abstract
Erwin Straus 189
concepts and not at all the 'alls' of the I-Allon relationship

to an experiencing being; nor are they even objects.
Empirical psychology incorporated the categories of
thing-ness in the space-time order of physics. How this
happened should be clear from remarks that have been
made above, of the influence of Descartes and Hume. In
them time is atomistic while (as we have seen from
looking at Merleau-Ponty) experienced time is simply not
like that. There are no discrete perceptions, no distinct
impressions, while 'ideas' 'impressions' and 'objects' are
not separated as they become in physics, and in
computability.
Laboratory psychology is always seeking to quantify
the activities of consciousness. Such Humean psychology
pushes on towards a physiological psychology for which
the assumption of separated impressions is no longer
problematic. For that very reason the inner connection of
experiences remains an everlasting enigma:
What is it that separates experiences from each
other? It cannot be space Then what about time? The
assumption of a plurality of experience requires that
the single experiences are separated from each other
by an interval of empty time. He denies the
substatiality of time as well as experience of time
independent of sensory impressions. Time is
composed of 'indivisible parts' which are given with
the sensory impressions. In between, there is nothing
is experienced.
Hume could not explain the order of time each other? It
cannot be space. Then what about time? The assumption
of a plurality of experiences requires that the single
experiences are separated from each other by an interval
of empty time. He deneis the substantiality of time as
well as experience of time independent of sensory
impressions. In between, there is nothing is experienced.
This doctrine of elements in psychology, this

reduction of the data of psychology to the order of
tone-after-the-other' of experiences is not the result of
inadequate observations: it is the fulfilment of a demand
of the mathematical natural sciences. Actually the time
atomistics of science originates in theology! Descartes
derived his theory of time from the interrelation of finite
and infinite substances, from the relation of God, while
this theologically-founded doctrine of the atomistic
structure of time best suited the needs of mathematical
science. The eternally created things are finite. There is
no continuity, no continuum, no becoming. Only the
discontinuous can be exactly measured and counted.
Furthermore, each single moment, having been created
finite and limited, can be entirely understood because it
can be entirely surveyed. It is an event that has already
taken place.
From this investigation of the origins of
experimental and behavioural psychology in the
atomistic philosophies of Hume and Descartes, we may
begin to understand the deadness of our philosophical
tradition. For one thing, the whole theory originated in
Descartes's struggle to split off God and to preserve
Catholic theology, in the origin of mathematical
physics—so that this physics which now so assertively
proclaims its godlessness has radical absurdities around
the question of events in time, which are the legacy of
religious obscurantism!
Then, each moment, each event in space and time, as
observed in physics, is over, is past, is complete, as a
dropped-off fragment of the continuum. Whatever
implications this may have for physics, it is disastrous
when we turn to 'the category of life', because it is such a
falsification of experiencing—omitting the dimension of
becoming which is the primary aspect of the life of every
experiencing being. No wonder 'psychology' (even
Erwin Straus 191
Gestalt psychology, which adheres to physiological

psychology) is so dead. And, of course, its deadness is
self-perpetuating:
If man is seen as a mere thing among things, there is
no reason, and indeed no justification, to abandon a
mechanical interpretation.
In this there is a 'metaphysical depreciation of the
world of the senses'. This again has been given an
impetus by religion for the world of the finite and the
temporal of the transitory world of evil.
Straus set out to 'vindicate sensory experience',
'sensory qualities will therefore have to be understood
and explained on the basis of the true being': We must
comprehend sensing as 'a mode of living being'.
To re-examine the problem of perception, Straus
declares, we must abandon the myth of 'sense' or
'impressions' and examine the processes by which we do
in fact find ourselves in contact, through sensory
channels, with the world around us. Straus uses the word
Empfinden, sensing', rather than 'perception'.
In traditional theory sensory experience is
interpreted as the result of the interaction of two bodies.
We may find this in elementary text-books about seeing,
or about eye and brain. Sticking to fragmented processes
and objects, the conception of perception is one of the
'sender' producing in the 'recipient' a phantom-like
perception. The sensory data do not belong to the outside
world of objects: they 'represent' them, though it isn't
clear how, and to 'whom'. While they 'represent' an
object, they are said to be 'objective'—they belong to the
subject.
Since these 'perceptions' represent the outside
world, but belong to the subject, they cannot be an object
of action. They are simply like shadow images, carried in
the consciousness and everyone has this private gallery

of such perceptions. The collector himself is not part of
his collection. He owns it, he has it, but he does not
belong to it. This astonishing separation of the
experiencing T from the chopped up bits of data is
evident in any 'scientific' (positivistic) book. These speak
of 'the eye' telling 'the brain' and of 'messages' or
'information' passed to 'the synapses' and 'feedback
loops' and so forth. The 'person' is never mentioned
while (as Straus elsewhere argued) the 'brain' comes to
be spoken of as if it were a separate, judging person
inside the person, as if it has had its Own mother,
education and whole-life experience.
Sensory experience, in this kind of physiological
Psychology, in classical theory, does not include the
experiencing being. The content of sensory experience is
reduced to the appearance of a more or less distorted
replica, a counterfeit of the outside world. Seeing is
acknowledged as a physiological process, but not as the
relation of seeing beings, to things seen:
The relation I-Allon is slashed. 'Me Allon alone is
left, but in a profoundly mutilated form. Perceptions are
many; they follow one another in the order of objective
time. They do not belong together in a meaningful
context; they stick together through synaptic welding.
Positivism from Hume to Skinner preaches the gospel that
sense is repeated nonsense.
In the work of Straus and Buytendijk, an idea of
sensing is developed which adds a dimension to
traditional modes. Straus devised a distinction between
pathic and gnostic modes of being in space. The pathic
mode is more primitive and pervasive: it characterizes
the animal's original sensing of the qualities of his
environment. This pathic mode is directed to the how:
the immediate tones, feelings, appearances of
Envin Straus 193
environmental happenings. The gnostic is directed to the

what of the environment—it develops through the
elaboration of perception, in its cognitive aspects, into
knowledge. Sensing is primarily pathic. We are immersed
in living nature, and in contact with it, together with all
the animals. We express a style of living in contact with
it, in a pattern that includes our relationships with other
living creatures. One of the important aspects of Straus's
work is that, as a philosophical biologist, he saw a
continuous process of development from animals to man.
We, and some other higher animals, have abstracted from
the animal-Allon relationship a 'perceptible world of
stable, manipulable and (for us at least) intelligible kinds
of objects'. However, the primary, pathic sensing is the
ground on which alone the gnostic achievements of
perception can develop.
Grene speaks of the difficulty both of assimulating
the conceptual reform represented by this new view, and
also of the great difficulty of getting the new ideas across,
and discussing them in relation to one another. However
these difficulties can be best discussed in relation to the
philosophical inheritance in which we are imprisoned. In
their accounts of man's relationship with the world,
Descartes, Locke and Hume offered us only what Grene
calls 'skeletal surrogates'. Traditional empiricism has
developed from Locke's reduction of our multiplicity of
experience to single separable ideas. These for him were
the 'real givens', pieces of mental content whose originals
were resident in some material but unknown X, and from
which the mind could be manipulate, abstract from, or
return to for its intuitive knowledge, such as it was, of
the 'real' world.
In the Newtonian revolution, and the enlightenment
of the Royal Society, the dead dogmas and useless
learning of scholasticism were rejected in favour of this
common sense view of how we experience the world.
Natural philosophy found motion, solidity and weight to

be real, because measurable. The rest of our experience of
the world - colour, smell and sound - was reduced to be
'secondary'; these could not yet be 'explained'.
The phenomenological movement, as we have seen,
began from the insight that what the science of Descartes,
Locke and Hume represented was an impoverishment in
what Grene calls 'the life-world as lived, of that
comprehensive horizon of earth-bound experience which
Descartes had distilled to a geometer's two-halved
paradise'. That is, our idea of man in the world was
reduced by 'natural philosophy' to a thin skeleton of
mathematical idealizations, which could be preserved
only by a radical split between real 'measurable objects'
and all else that we know to belong to experience, from
colours and moods, to hate and despair.
When we drive or walk into the desert, or sail the
sea, we feel differently in our world, in ways that cannot
be reduced to 'ideas of sensation'. In our quantitative
way of thinking, we are always trying to work out the
difference between the experience of the noise of a family
squabble and that of a Mozart quintet, in quantitative
terms. In questions set to education students one will
find assumptions implicit that such differences can be
reduced to an alleged atomic base (this is also true of
what are called 'behavioural objectives' in education). A
quantitative approach on these lines implies an
'intellectual super-structure', on the one hand, and a
'merely subjective' feeling tone on the other.
If we return in a Husserlian sense, to the 'things
themselves', the mood on the sea or that induced by a
piece of music are not merely inferred from the discrete
sounds or the colours and forms of the sea. Yet if we seek
to look at such experiences in their wholeness, we
cannot have stringent methods, a problem Poole bravely
Erwin Straus 195
admits. Straus, moreover, refused to entertain the

phenomenological reduction, the 'bracketing' of all
natural knowledge to find the 'pure' structure of the
life-world. If we do that, may we not be merely dealing
with our own personally slanted descriptions, and
substituting these for what is truly universal? That,
declares Grene (as does Poole) is better than clinging to
the Cartesian skeletons, because we are at least plunged
into the 'rich multi-dimensionality of our experience'.
Strangely enough, as we proceed in following
Straus's theories, we find differing points of view
between Straus and Binswager.
Straus himself, as one of the 'new' existentialists,
develops from Heidegger, whom we have discussed as
one of the 'old' nihilistic existentialists. Heidegger
developed the concept of 'being-in-the-world'. A Dasein
is an experiencing being, who represents a concept
differing totally from the Cartesian abstraction of a
distinction between res cogitans and res extensa.
Heidegger insists that we must consider human being in
its entirety.
Now, as we have seen, Heidegger recognizes that
the problem of existence was one of finding meaning in
existence, which is what made him an existentialist.
However to him, while he makes one passing reference
to the possibility of authentic fiirsorge, man is destined to
be predominantly frustrated in this. For him Mitsein
characterized Dasein 'only on the level of forfeiture'.
Heidegger only saw the authentic existence as one to be
achieved by the rare existential hero, utterly cut off from
the contemptible das Man, in the dismissal of all that is
ordinary:
For Heidegger ... as for his hero Nietzsche, the norm
is the deformity, and only the rare soul who hates
and repels the norm can be said to live authntically.
Now this kind of rejection of ordinary living,

ordinary 'togetherness' and being-in-the-world could not
do for psychotherapists. So, Straus finds in Heidegger no
place for life, for the body, for the 'animalia': and he
believed that Heidegger had overlooked man's struggle
with nature, which to Straus is to be thought of in terms
of man being an insurgent against pre-human nature. For
Straus, even the name Dasein is unsuited to designate
man. To Straus, because of this, Heidegger's being- in-the
world lacked 'gravity'.
Straus's 'experiencing being' is human or animal. It
is the structure of all sentient living that he wishes to
re-vindicate, not only of self-conscious living, before
seeking to give a more adequate account of knowledge
and action. However, Straus also parts company with
Binswanger, who was a close friend and colleague (the
German collection of Straus's essays Psychologie der
menschlichen welt is dedicated to Binswanger). Binswanger
tries to develop a philosophical anthropology from
Heidegger's Daseinanalytic, taking over from him ideas of
the intentional directness of consciousness, and the
impulse to overcome the split between subject and object.
He takes the idea of the Dasein ,as an experiencing being,
and other ideas of an existentialist kind:- 'worldliness'
spatiality, facticity, thrownness (Geworfenheit) fallenness,
and 'care' (Sorge) However, Binswanger sought to
develop an antithesis to Heidegger's nihilism: a
'phenomenology of love'.' Love has been 'freezing in the
cold' outside Heidegger's picture of human existence.
Binswanger was the warm-hearted advocate of a new
type of psychiatry based on the loving encounter
between doctor and patient. Here, too, was the influence
of Buber who came to Kreuzlingen four times to discuss
with Binswanger the dialogue between I and Thou.
Binswanger explores concepts of Miteinandersein
(being together) of me and you, sub-divided into Wirheit
Enuin Straus 197
(we-hood) in dual loving and in the participation of

friendship. To Binswanger the authentic social existence
is in loving we-hood, libende Wirheit, loving communion-
and 'care' was a derivative of this, if not a defective
mode of it. As we shall see, Binswanger developed these
theories from Husserl. Binswanger seeks to overcome the
conflict between love and care (care, that is, in the sense
of dread or fear, Sorge). The method he used was the
phenomenology of Husserl:
Only in this foundation was it possible to interpret
Dasein ontologically and anthropologically, and to
explicate its structure as that being in which there is
essentially the possibility of understanding being.
However, Straus was not satisfied with this. He felt (says
Grene) that Binswanger had simply taken Heideggerean
being-in-the-world, 'the very essence of which demands
arrogance and hatred as the road from me to thee, and
injected into it, with sublime incompatibility, a generous
dose of love'. As we have seen, Straus increasingly saw
man's relation to the world as one of an T opposed to
the world, to what he calls the Allan. Straus rejects the
empiricist concept of sensation in favour of a theory of
sensing (Empfinden) as the fundamental sense-mediated
road that links object with experiencing organism, and he
contrasts this with the more sophisticated and cognitive
sensory awareness of objects in perception.
The most important implications of Straus's attempt
to substitute for the unsatisfactory models of empiricist
psychology a concept of an experiencing being in its
relationship to a surrounding world are in the areas of
time-and-space, the mind-body problem, and the problem
of 'universals' as Grene makes plain. We have looked at
the difference between the chopped-up bits of time in
'objective psychology'. As Straus points out, this kind of
concept, whether from Lockean philosophy or orthodox
empirical psychology, can contribute nothing to problems
like those found in psychotherapy, such as infantile

amnesia. On this subject Straus says 'the subject of
remembering is a human being who forms his life history
within the temporal horizon of personal time'.
This makes sense to psychoanalytical theory, and in the
light of the work of Merleau-Ponty, Minkowski,
and Heidegger-dealing as it does with 'lived time'.
Alternatively (as Grene indicates) it is reminiscent in its
metaphysical implications of Whitehead's philosophy of
process. All these investigations of being-in-time make
intelligent, insightful, philosophical and psychological
sense. The theories of bits of time in objective'
psychology make no kind of sense at all, since the bits
are held together by nothing. Yet what psychology
department will throw the question open, and have its
non-sense challenged? Examination of the problem of
lived time leads Straus to make some fascinating
remarks, about the inability of the baby to remember: it
does not have a 'stabilized preserving order' to give a
sense of continuity:
The baby lives from one moment to the next in the
narrowness of his temporal horizon. A baby experiences
the world basically in relation to himself. The early
tendency to put things into his own attitude to the world.
He lacks specification. There is an obvious lack of
self-reflection; yet, this is what is required to sever the
order of one's existence from the order of the
environment. In short, there is a lack of a stabilising
preserving order, of a scheme in which events are to be
registered in order to be recalled in latter days.
This historiological explanation explains why infant
memories must be so difficult to obtain. It also provides
valuable insights for literary criticism and therapy and
could be closely related to Winnicott's theories of the
earliest stages of infant experience.
Erwin Straus 199
Straus's contributions to feelings about space cannot

be briefly summarized without doing violence to his
concepts. They will be found of great interest by those
interested in the visual arts, dance and poetry. For
example, Grene quotes a long passage from Erwin Straus
of evident relevance to Yeats's last stanza in his famous
poem Among
When the spatial structure changes, as happens in
dance, the immediate experience of .confrontation also
changes that tension between subject and object which
ecstasy completely dissolves. When we turn around
while dancing, we are, from the very start, moving in a
space completely at odds with oriented space. But this
change of spatial structure occurs only in pathic
participation, not in a gnostic act of thinking,
contemplation or imagining. That is to say presentic
experience actualises itself in the movement: it does not
produce itself by means of the movement, etc. To read
such pages in Straus is to realise that this kind of
philosophy this kind of psychology, because it deals with
living bodies in space, and the meaning of their
explorations of space, is by no means inimical to poetry,
but exercises the mind in that kind of examination of
experience which is poetry. Moreover, like poetry, as
Grene says it rouses us from our dogmatic slumber:
The space that extends before us is, thus, a metaphor
of the approaching future; the space that lies behind is a
metaphor of the past that has receded from us. When we
hear something, we have already heard it.
Such remarks by Straus suggest new ways of
thinking about space and time, in ways tied to concrete
psychological insights, and these, as structured
descriptions of phenomenal realities, serve 'as the coping
stones of a sounder metaphysic'. Certainly they help to
heal the Cartesian fragmentation.
The soundness of Straus's anti-Cartesian thought is

perhaps best demonstrated by his essay on man's upright
posture. The anatomical and physiological facts of this
are on old theme of physical anthropology. Straus
examines the meaning of this posture for human
existence. It involves a specific attitude towards the
world, a special mode of being-in-the-world. The distance
of our bodies from the ground means we can move
freely, but also means more danger. We are more distant
from things and so can look at them from afar. We are
also more distant from our fellow men, and this pen-nits
us to meet others 'face to face' for various social
relationships.
Besides the pathic elements there are the gnostic
elements of the field of vision, in the co-operation
between sight and hands, and in the development of
intuition that comes with this posture: to look out
towards infinity, and to be able to contemplate things for
their own sakes in their 'what-ness'. This is also the
beginning of man's sense of the image and the visual
arts.
Not only is this an achievement of the species, but is
an achievement for each individual: we have to learn to
walk and speak. There are other manifold significances in
the upright posture. In standing, we put ourselves at a
distance from the Allon, as in the three ways specified
above. Also the upright posture leads to man's spiritual
development:
Animals move in the direction of their digestive
axis. Their bodies are expanded between mouth and anus
as between an entrance and an exit, a beginning and an
ending. The spatial orientation of the human body is
different throughout.. ..Man ... moves in the direction of
his vision. He is surrounded by a panorama by a space
divided into world regions joined together in the totality
of the universe. Around him, the horizons retreat in an
Erwin Straus 201
ever growing radius. Galaxy and diluvium, the infinite

and the eternal, enter into the orbit of human interests.
If we reject the mind-body dualism of Descartes, and
adopt a new conception of a 'lived body', then we must
move into such explanations, even if they appear
'unphilosophical' and mere excursions into anthropology.
Then again, it may seem that if we explore the particular,
given-to-me sensation known and easily demonstrated to
be infallible, may we not fail to find universals'.
Sensation cannot qualify as knowledge:
It presents us with the particular, meaningless, this:
but only through the comprehension of general
concepts, like existence, can we know that the
presented datum not only presents itself, but is.
Straus believed Philosophy has been unfair to sensory
experience. Sensing is not a delusive blooming buzz of
meaningless particulars on which we must turn our
backs to find 'reality'. It is an all-inclusive road of access
to the world. The mind can spin 'Gnostic, abstractions
and separate itself from the immediate immersion in
pathic modes. Yet thought can also itself range out and
return to the )iere and now, and so grasp the world in its
generality. This experience of generality is also to be
found in animals, otherwise they could not experience
signals as they do. The very fabric of sentience is this
sense of generality, and this points -to a kind of
consciousness ' in animals. However sensory experience
is not knowledge, not even an inferior brand of
knowledge, to Straus. Perception—Wahrnehmung—is
cognitive and grasps things in their objectivity as things.
Empfinden grasps only the here and now:
In sensory seeing the thing is for me, for me here
and now in a passing moment. But after the step to
the world of perception, this being-there-forme is
apprehended as a moment in a universal, general
chain of events.
Perceiving, and not sensing, is a knowing. Normally

we live in both spaces: routinely we sense, reflectively we
perceive. Thinking involves the capacity of transposal
from one's actual position to a merely imaginary one,
something for which Straus has coined the term
'excarnation'. This does not mean a new dualism, but it
does show that Straus does not mean a man in whom
mind and body coincide. 'Man is an organism, but he is
more than a mere organism—namely, a being with an I
not tied to his body or to any particular fixed location
within it'.
I have not dealt specifically in this discussion of
Straus with his rejection of Pavlov, but it should be read.'
In the light of the new whole sense of man's being in the
world, in Straus and Merleau-Ponty, it will be apparent
that by contrast 'objective' psychology is derived from
highly abstract and distorted notions. So, says Straus,
when we examine Pavlov's 'realism' we find his theory:
is not, as he claims, objective and empirical, but on
the contrary totally permeated by unexamined
metaphysical and epistemologic assumptions. Pavlov
exemplifies well the thesis that those who cry loudest
against philosophy are most often the victims of
naive philosophical speculation.
Pavlov believed that 'on this very path will be realised
the final triumph of the human intellect'—triumph over
the mechanism and laws of human nature. The same
impulse to explain and control the mechanism of the
psychic life is found in B.F. Skinner:
Thus mankind is to be saved by conditioned reflexes.
Pavlov apparently does not see that he seeks to
improve the present brutality of interpersonal
relations by an even worse brutality namely by that
of mechanical training which would destroy
humanity altogether together with freedom and
moral responsibility. Let us hope, therefore, that we
are spared these wonders of training.
Erwin Straus 203
Man can become happy, according to the Pavlov, by

mechanization, only because he himself is nothing but a
complex structure of mechanisms, a thing among things.
Painstakingly, existentialists and phenomenologists such
as Straus have demonstrated the absurdity as well as the
conceptual and moral inadequacies of this view. Yet
education departments entertain such nonsense as
'behavioural objectives', never having heard of The
Primary World of Senses, let alone tried to read it.
In it, Straus explores in detail the fallacies in
Pavlovian experiment and theory—seeing confused with
excitation by stimuli, and so on. Pavlov's dogs needed an
initial period of 'orientation' before his experiments
would work, and the kind of dog that must and can
orientate cannot be the dog simply (and only) responding
to 'stimuli' of the experiments. Boundless, 'objective'
experiments - today absorbing huge sums of money, and
conducted by people who do not read or think about
phenomenological exposures of their imposture - are the
order of the day.
Objective psychology passes by the objective,
measureable data of physiology, which, if examined,
would show how confused many of its theories are.
Moreover:
Instead of pausing for an examination of the
strength of the theoretical foundation, all good is
expected to come from ever-new test arrangements.
Instead of clarifying the decisive problems, the continued
experimentation leads only to greater confusion. The
theorist is often accused of boundless speculation. In
Pavlov's case, we may - with no less justification - speak
of boundless experimentation.
So we may speak of every psychology laboratory in
the world: continued experiment leading to ever
increasing confusion—even as the doubts of a Liam
204 . Philosophical Anthropology
Hudson, a John Shorter or a John O'Neill (in sociology)

remain unexamined at depth—in the light of Straus's
immense and devastating work.
Finally, it should be noticed that Straus makes an
implicit criticism of Freud, and contributes a great deal
towards the phenomenological insight into what goes on
in patients' minds. Like Merleau-Ponty, he was an
original (as Spiegelberg says) and defied pigeon-holing.
His insights were essentially to do with meaning: for
example, I included his essay of A Historiological View of
Shame in The Case Against Pornography because he
illuminated in it with great economy the menace to
creative privacy and to freedom in the objectifying and
enslaving gaze of the voyeur—thus illuminating a whole
anti-human dynamic in our sick culture.
His writing, as Spiegelberg declares, has all the
charm and appeal of the sudden inspiration, and few
phenomenologists have combined so much of the artist
with the scientist.
8
Edmund Husserl
Husserl is an anti-Cartesian philosopher, and yet in a

fundamental sense he is also a Cartesian. By contrast with
scholasticism, which never questioned fundamentals,
Descartes thought that philosophy must begin with
universal doubt. Whereas scholasticism had rested on the
testimonials of sages and the Catholic Church, Descartes
taught that the ultimate test of certainty is to be found in
the individual consciousness.
From these beginnings developed many strange
conclusions. Bishop Berkeley's doubts led him to suggest
that perhaps the world exists only as he was looking at it:
Hume was determined to build up an account of
experience out of the units of experience—the only
entities which were for him undoubted, and this results
in a 'null-point philosophy' as Grene says from which
there is no egress. Kant declared that all philosophy dealt
with one branch or another of the question 'What is
man?' How can we know what man is, if we restrict our
knowledge to non-living nature and so eliminate man
himself, knowledge and all, from the object we are
concerned to know? Even Kant identified knowledge
with mathematically expressed knowledge: it depends
however on forms imposed by mind, and what these
depend on finally is the T that carries as
self-consciousness all the concepts of consciousness. Yet
Kant never solved the problem of placing man in nature
in this sense, or found the experience of persons—never
really explored his own question. 'What is man?'—
because he could not escape from the essential dualism in

Cartesianism.
In Cartesianism there is an extended physical
universe, and there are minds fit to know it (and God
who made it)—but nothing else. However, how can we
know something as different from ourselves as this great
mass of res extensa and its laws? Descartes trusted God
and the mathematical mind: whatever the mind is,
somehow it mathematizes. In Kant this kind of theory
becomes a belief that there are inner experiences which
do not add up to a thinking substance, and outer
experiences which do not add up to extended things in
themselves. These are, says Grene, united by the fact that
subjective experience takes on objectivity through the
active imposition of categories by the mind. What is the
mind? It is either Hume's succession of impressions or,
behind this, 'transcendental subjectivism' but here again,
wherever one look§, where is the T in the world,
experiencing and knowing? For each of us there is the
question, 'who is it that is knowing?' What is Descartes's
'thinking substance'? Kant did not accept that concept:
knowing for him was an activity, imposing forms on
things. But does this mean that 'it is all in the mind'? And
how shall we know the T? The T that is imposing the
forms on the world cannot be known by the principles of
knowing which exclude the living thing, and man as a
living-knowing organism in a world of living organisms.
Kant stuck at the Cartesian world view in the end:
distinguishing still between an outer and an inner sense:
between the world spread out in space, independent of
the secret thoughts, the 'modes' of consciousness, of
feelings, ideas and volitions, within.
Husserl was a Cartesian in the sense that he say that
if all we can trust is the human consciousness, then the
thing to study is consciousness. This is what he meant by
saying 'back to the things themselves'—back to the things
Edmund Husserl 207
of the mind, the phenomena of consciousness. The

parallel with existentialism will be clear: phenomenology
belongs to the same desire to examine existence rather
than essence, total experience rather than abstract
speculation about human nature: the moment-by-moment
experience of the thinking and existing being in the
here-and-now.
In his last, unfinished, but most accessible work,
Husserl declares that there is a crisis of the sciences in
Western Europe, even of the positive sciences, including
pure mathematics and the exact natural sciences, as well
as in concrete humanistic sciences such as psychology.
Beginning with the latter, Husserl speaks of the enigma of
subjectivity, a question inseparably bound up with the
enigma of psychological subject matter and method.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, people
came to be concerned not only with the scientific
character of the sciences but also with what they, or
science in general, had meant and could mean for human
existence: 'Merely fact-minded sciences make merely
fact-minded people'. Science of the 'fact-minded kind'
excludes in principle precisely 'those questions which
men, given over in our unhappy times to the most
portentous upheavals, find the most burning question of
the meaning or meaninglessness of the whole of this
human existence.'
As Poole points out, Husserl was fascinated by the
problem of meaning. He began as a mathematician and
became dissatisfied with all those disciplines that
belonged to empiricism, positivism, nominalism and
psychologism. He felt that while logic dealt with meaning
it failed to find the subjective element in knowing and
man's creative capacities to confer a meaning on the
world: intentionality. Husserl's concern with subjectivity,
meaning and intentionality, it should be emphasized,
were not the expression of any vague mysticism,
animism, vitalism, or what not. It is most important to

confront the dogmatic positivists and physical scientists
with the fact of his indubitable qualifications for
questioning the thinking on which their whole confident
structure is based, and asking for it to be completely
rebuilt. Husserl wanted a free inquiry, free from
presuppositions of any kind, into the nature of experience
and consciousness, conducted in a rigorously scientific
manner. By wanting to go back to 'the things themselves'
he sought to study the things of the mind as given
unquestionably in mental experience. He gave a series of
lectures in 1907, later published as The Idea of
Phenomenology and in 1913 he published Ideas for a Pure
Phenomenology and Phenomenological Philosophy, outlining
the method which he spent the rest of his life ceaselessly
trying to improve and make explicit. He also aspired to
write a popular introduction, but never succeeded, and it
must be said that, until the work of Grene, Poole,
Spiegelberg and May, his movement has been badly
served. Of course, Husserl's work influenced Heidegger,
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, providing them with concepts
such as Dasein ('being there'); the sense of the, embodied
experiencing subject; and the need for a new ontology, a
science of being. Some, like Sartre, made use of him for
their own purposes while failing to recognize his really
revolutionary dynamic.
I shall now try to give a brief account of what Husserl
said in The Crisis a book that should be read by anyone
trying to understand the 'new' existentialism, and
phenomenology.
The crisis that Husserl found in Western science
centres on the question: ought not questions of the meaning
of human life to be susceptible of rational investigation?
Do not these questions, universal and necessary for
all men, demand universal reflections and answers
based on rational insight? In the final analysis they
Edmund Husserl 209
concern man as a free, self-determining being in his

behaviour toward the human and extra-human
surrounding world (Menschentum) and free in regard
to his capacities for rationally shaping himself and
his surrounding world. What does science have to
say about reason and unreason, or about us men as
subjects of this freedom?
The mere science of bodies, he declares, clearly has
nothing to say: it abstracts from everything subjective. As
for the humanistic sciences, in these the scholar must
apparently exclude from his work all valuative positions,
all questions of the reason or unreason of their human
subject matter and its cultural configurations. Science—as
an approach to the world handed down to us from the
Greeks—ought to concern itself with human freedom, but
it does not and cannot.
As we have seen, the scientific tradition has
continually excluded from rational, from authoritative
consideration, 'all that belongs to being alive'. Husserl
begins from a fundamental criticism of this exclusion:
But can the world, and human existence in it,
truthfully have a meaning of the sciences recognise as
true only what is objectively established ... and if history
has no more to teach us than that all the shapes of the
spiritual world, all the conditions of life, ideals, norms
upon which man relies, form and dissolve themselves
like fleeting waves, that it always was and ever will be
so, that again and again reason must turn into nonsense,
and wellbeing into misery?
Husserl thus begins with an attack on the essential
nihilism, the moral inadequacy, of objectivity.
There was a time, he declares, when the sciences did
not ban specifically human questions from their realm.
When science could deal with such human questions it
could claim significance in the completely new shaping of
European humanity, which began with the Renaissance.
The positivistic restriction of the idea of science meant that

it lost this leadership.
The renaissance turned back to revive 'ancient
humanity' and the essential characteristic of this classical
inheritance was the 'philosophical' form of existence. The
Greeks set the direction, inspired by a belief in the
dignity of man and his ability to understand the world he
lives in and to control it. Theoretical autonomy is
followed by practical autonomy:
For this renewed 'Platonism' this means not only that
man should be charged ethically but that the whole
human surrounding world, the political and social
existence of mankind, must be fashioned anew, through
free reason, through the insights of a universal
philosophy.
Ancient philosophy stood for the science of the
totality of what is '(das Scieiuie)—an examination of all
meaningful questions.
In asserting our right to our each 'philosophical
space', phenomenology is seeking another Renaissance as
Poole has pointed out. Poole believes that Merleau-Ponty
and Husserl, with the former as the new Aristotle, are
'offering us the method and style of two thousand years
of thought to come'. These two philosophers represent
the 'final break with our narrow Cartesian Rationalism'
and show us how to embark on the study of those
immense and complex problems of meaning, language,
the body, signs, inter-subjectivity which face us.
Philosophy and science for the Greeks were there to help
man in the Lebenswelt, the world we live in: now thought
must undergo a rediscovery of this purpose.
Several times in the history of European philosophy,
this inner telos or direction inspired by the Greeks came
to be distorted or lost. The positivistic concept of science
in our time is, historically speaking, a residual concept. It
Edmund Husserl , \ 211
has, says Husserl, dropped all the questions which are

now considered under the heading of 'metaphysics'—and
yet these are problems of reason in all its particular forms.
These are questions of the nature of knowledge, of true
and genuine valuation, of ethical action. All these
'metaphysical' questions, taken broadly—commonly
called specifically philosophical questions—surpass the
world understood as the universe of mere facts.
Positivism has decapitated philosophy by excluding
from rational examination questions of the meaningful
order of being and thus of problems of being. Yet there was
a time when it was felt that metaphysics was the 'queen
of science' and out of this developed the ardent desire for
learning, the zeal for the philosophical reform of
education and of all of humanity's social and political
forms of existence that made up the Enlightenment.
A growing feeling of failure, however, set in and
there is in philosophy, says Husserl, a whole period
stretching from Hume to Kant of passionate struggle for a
clear, reflective understanding of the true reasons for this
century-old failure, which has taken the paths I have
examined above, of searching for the I-in-the-world, and
an ontology, a science of being.
Although philosophy has gone on searching for the
answer to the problem, after the seventeenth century it
became sceptical about the possibility of metaphysics,
which was also in a sense a collapse of the belief in
'reason' as episteme. It is reason which ultimately gives
meaning to everything that is thought to be, in relation to
what is meant by the word 'truth'. If man loses faith in
the pursuit of truth and the understanding of 'what is',
then he loses faith in his himself, in his true being, which
includes his 'struggle for existence'.
This meant that philosophy lost its telos. Husserl
believes that Greek humanity was the first breakthrough
into what is essential to humanity as such, its entelechy.

'the becoming of what is potential':
To be human at all is essentially to be a human being
in a socially and generatively united civilisation; and if
man is a rational being (animal rationale) it is only insofar
as his whole civilisation is a rational civilisation, that is
one with a latent orientation towards reason or one
openly orientated toward the entelechy which has come
to itself, became manifest in itself, and which now of
necessity consciously directs human becoming. Philosophy
and science would accordingly be the historical
movement through which universal reason, 'inborn' in
humanity as such, is revealed.
This feeling, we vaguely have when we sense what an
ancient university stands for or come into contact with
manifestations of Ancient Greece, whether the plays of
Sophocles, or Greek sculpture. A university, for example,
ought to be a centre of becoming, of entelechy. At the
birth of Greek philosophy, man came into his own, in a
sense—and the meaning of the Renaissance was bound
up with this realization of man's soul-stuff, his capacity
to pursue a true and genuine human nature. It remains to
be discussed, as Husserl says, whether European
humanity bears within itself an absolute idea, as
compared with 'China' or 'India'. Certainly the
Europeanization of all other civilizations seems to bear
witness to such an idea.
This kind of pursuit of the true nature of things, as in
ancient philosophy, conceived of a rational infinite totally
of being with a rational science systematically mastering
it. An infinite world is conceived not as one whose
objects become accessible to our knowledge singly,
imperfectly, and as it were accidentally, but as one which
is attained by a rational, systematically coherent method.
In the infinite progression of this method, every object is
ultimately attained according to its full being-in-itself.
Edmund Husserl 213
However in the modern period dawned a different

idea: of a science that is rational and all-inclusive; an idea
that the infinite totality of what is in general is
intrinsically a rational all-encompassing unity that can be
mastered, without anything left over, by a
correspondingly universal science. What made this
possible was a mathematical natural science—Galilean
science.
Ancient philosophy conceived the idea of knowing
the world as a whole, by reason, by studying the nature
of things in their whole being. The new science seeks to
idealize nature in the sense of making it into a
'mathematical manifold' (Mannigfaltigkeit) and so to
substitute an abstract picture of the world for the world
itself—to master it in this way, leaving nothing over, by a
universal science.
In normal living, outside science (in our own
'philosophical space') we sense things and respond to
their appearance, and this counts for us as the world that
actually is. Of course, in dealing with one another we are
aware of the discrepancy between what Husserl calls our
various 'ontic validities' (Seinsgeltungen: 'those things
which we accept as existing'). However, because we each
experience the world differently, we don't believe there
are as many worlds as people we come in contact with:
we believe in the world, whose things appear to us
differently, but are the same.
Is there not in the appearances themselves a content
we must ascribe to true nature? Must not this include
what geometry, what the mathematics of the pure form of
space-time, teaches us about the shapes it can construct—
with the self-evidence of absolute^ universal validity?
That this was so seemed obvious (Selbstver-
standlichkeit) to Galileo-unquestioned by him. Galileo
didn't (like today's physicists) work in the realm of pure
symbolism: he was concerned with a mathematical
knowledge of nature, in a new sense—what may be

called a 'pure' sense. To establish this pure reality beyond
personal contact with things in the world Galileo enters
into an act of mathematical idealization: of pure
mathematics, which only has to do with bodies and the
bodily world through an abstraction, that is it has to do
only with abstract shapes within space-time.
In the actual world we are not in contact with these
'pure' shapes—only with bodies that are 'coloured,
resinous, gritty, smelly, dry, pleasant'. While these are
manifestation of an 'objective' world, Galileo's world
became one in which mathematically substructured
idealities came to be surreptitiously substituted for the
only real world, the one that is actually given through
perception, experienced and experienceable.
One of the consequences of this was an idea of
perfection:
Technology progresses along with mankind and so
does the interest in what is technically more refined:
and the ideal of perfection is pushed further and
further. Hence we always have an open horizon of
conceivable improvement to be further pursued.
In consequence we have a tendency towards ideal or
pure shapes whose universal form is the co-idealized
form of space-time—in the place of real praxis—'that is,
of action or that of considering empirical possibilities
having to do with actual and really (i.e. physically)
possible empirical bodies.'
We regard the Galilean tradition as a more 'truthful'
account of reality, but Husserl argues that it suffers from
a profound unreality. Everything that makes up our
everyday world is 'sheared away' —the world of
sense-impressions, emotions and experience. Then, the
life-world ('the world constantly given thus as actual in
our concrete world-life') is measured for a 'garb of ideas'
('that of the so-called objectively scientific truths'):
Edmund Htisserl 215
Mathematics and mathematical science, as a garb of

idea, or the garb of symbols of the symbolic mathematical
theories represents the life-world, dresses it up as
'objectively' actual and true nature.
'It is through the garb of ideas that we take for true
being what is actually a method.' Husserl describes this as
a naivete, yet the whole philosophical revolution we are
dealing with here is concerned to make thinking people
aware of how this sleight-of-hand came about. Today, as
Polanyi and Grene demonstrate, the 'method' is confused
with the reality, and knowledge seems as if it were an
objective description which—if we had a big enough
blackboard—could all be written down, and would be the
world. How can we become aware of the radical problem
of how this sort of naivete became possible? Galileo
substituted a knowledge of the mathematical properties
of the world for that complete, total human world that
we know. Galileo counted himself richer for this act of
abstraction, reducing the world to a kind of shorthand
and was neither aware of nor regretful for what he did.
Meanwhile, Galileo was contemptuous of what he
called 'secondary qualities' and of poetry: of the latter he
said 'any sort of falsehood is so abhorrent to nature that
it is as absent there as darkness is in light.' As Grene
says:
It not only poetry in the narrow sense, the craft of
making verses, that is here exiled from reality, but the
whole work of imagination: myth and metaphor, dream
and prophecy. In the bare mathematical bones of nature
there is truth; all else is illusion. Yet that 'all else' includes
the very root of our being, and we forget them at our
peril.
Husserl was trying to open up the whole question of
the totality of human experience. As Poole points out,
Descartes intensified Galileo's reduction of the world to a
mathematical picture. Geometry alone is the key to
knowledge, and, while there is nothing 'clear and

distinct' in the worlds of the sense and subjectivity:
With regard to light, colours, sounds, odours, tastes,
heat, cold and the other tactile qualities, they are thought
with so much obscurity and confusion, that I cannot
determine whether they are true or false: in other words,
whether or not the ideas I have of these qualities are in
truth the ideas of real objects. Descartes,
In a footnote Husserl deplores the same tendency in
Locke:
It is a bad legacy of the psychological tradition since
Locke's time that the sense-qualities of actually
experienced bodies in the everyday, intuited
surrounding world of colours, touch-qualities, smells,
warmth, heaviness, etc., which are perceived as
belonging to the bodies themselves, as their
properties are always surreptitiously replaced by the
[so called] sense-data (sinnliche Daten,
Emfindungsdaten) ... these are also indiscriminately
called sense-qualities and, at least in general, are not
at all differentiated from [properties as such].
In Hume's associational psychology the world almost
disappears as something having properties in itself, while
the experiencing self fragments into sense impressions.
There is no self-in-the-world.
Husserl's concern is to restore wholeness:
All that is together in the world has a universal
immediate or mediate way of belonging together;
through this the world is not merely a totality
(Allheit) a whole (even though it is infinite).
Mathematics represented a step forward, in knowing the
real: but oughtn't there to be some other possibility of
finding the concrete world, rather than the idealised
'certainties' of pure mathematics and pure 'objectivity'
which don't find this concrete real world?
Edmund Husserl 217
The problem is that the actuality Husserl is talking

about can't be treated as the 'shapes'. There are other
qualities. The actuality he is attending to 'runs
uninterrupted through all changes of subjective
interpretation: all aspects of experiencing intuition
manifest something of this world.'
It becomes attainable for our objective knowledge
when those aspects which, like sensible qualities, are
abstracted away in the pure mathematics of
spatiotemporal form and its possible particular
shapes.
In short, what Husserl wants to do is to enlarge our
understanding of the world by a more adequate
empiricism which embraces all those subjective ways of
knowing and experiencing which find things in a
different way from abstracting modes of mathematical
science, based on an 'idealisation of the art of
measurement', in the Galilean tradition.
At this point Husserl examines the nature of scientific
measurement and points to those intuitive elements
which have been explored by Polanyi. Meanwhile we
stand under the spell of Galileo, and the distortions of his
view of the world and how we know it:
Being caught up in them [the spells of Galilean
science] we at first have no inkling of these shifts of
meaning—we who all think we know so well what
mathematics and natural science 'are' and do. For
who has not learned this in school?
We are, as Frankl argues, educated in the essential
nihilism of 'objectivity' which finds mathematical
idealizations, but no active self in the world.
Today, we need to analyse the motivation of science,
reflecting on the original meaning of the new sciences,
above all on that of the exact science of nature, an idea
that was of decisive significance for modern positivist
sciences, of modern philosophy, and indeed of the spirit
of modern European humanity in general. To a poet,

bewildered by the scientific account of the world, it is a
delight to read in Husserl of the need to return to naivete:
It will gradually become clearer, and finally be
completely clear, that the proper return to the naivete
of life but in a reflection which rises above the naivete
is the only possible way to overcome the
philosophical naivete that lies in the (supposedly)
'scientific' character of traditional objectivist
philosophy.
Galileo abstracts from the subjects as persons leading a
personal life; he abstracts from all that is in any way
spiritual, from all cultural properties which are attached
to things in human praxis. The result of this abstraction is
the separation off of the 'world' as 'things purely as
bodies', concrete real objects, the totality of which makes
up a world which becomes the Subject matter of research.
This idea of nature as a really self-enclosed world of
bodies emerges first with Galileo: a self-enclosed natural
causality in which every occurrence is determined
unequivocally and in advance. To this, of course, the
mathematization contributed. We have looked at the
effects of this on man's feelings about himself, and about
himself in his world. It also affected the whole feeling of
man about the universe. For one thing, it splits the world
into two worlds—nature on the one hand, and the
psychic world on the other.
Because of the mathematical element in the
measurement of spatiotemporal entities, leading to
theoretical and practical success in science.
The world must, in itself, be a rational world, in the
new sense of rationality taken from mathematics, or
mathematicised nature; correspondingly, philosophy, the
universal science of the world, must be built up as a
unified rational theory more geometrico.
Edmund Husserl 219
This impulse is still the predominant one, in analytic

philosophy, but out of this a number of problems arise.
Such a philosophy based on geometrical principles cannot
find the subjective, whole-world, experience of the
human being, nor can it find the psychic life. As we have
seen, it cannot find that experience with which poetry
deals, and nor can it deal with problems or meaning and
'humanity'.
In the seventeenth century, when these divisions first
appeared, the question of subjectivity did not disappear—
on the contrary, it came very much to the fore. For
example, Descartes did not, as a good Catholic, give up
God. If there were a principle of rationality in the
universe was this not God? Does not rational being, even
merely as the existence of natural bodies, in order to be
thinkable not pre-suppose rational theory and a
subjectivity that accomplishes it—that is, isn't rational
nature a product of God's mind? Doesn't nature
presuppose God as existing absolutely? Doesn't this mean
that within being-in-itself, psychic being takes precedence
as subjectivity existing purely for itself? It is after all, says
Husserl, subjectivity whether divine or human.
Descartes could have brought subjectivity to the fore.
What happened, however, was that a new kind of
psychology developed as a psychophysical anthropology
in the rationalist spirit.
In this kind of approach the 'soul', since it has been
separated from the physical body, is ascribed (since
Hobbes) a type of being which is similar in principle to
that of nature. Psychology aims at a progression from
description to ultimate theoretical 'explanation' similar to
that of biophysics—despite the Cartesian doctrine that
body and 'psychic substance' are separated by radically
different attributes.
This naturalization of the psychic can be traced all the
way from Locke to the present day: Locke's tabula rasa is
characteristic, a white paper on which psychic data come

and go, somehow ordered like the events of bodies in
nature. This idea was never thought out, and indeed, as
Husserl shows the whole naturalistic tradition is
confused. Yet it 'enters the stage impressively', and
claims to give the 'lasting formulation of a universal
science'. In any university, one finds the naturalistic
scientist proclaiming that he will explain (ultimately) all
modes of experience in terms of positivistic
sensationalism, or physicalistically orientated naturalism
—while he has no sense of the absurdities of such a
claim.
As Husserl shows, the arrogant claims arise inevitably
out of the rationalistic ideal—omniscience. The world is in
itself a rational systemic unity: its systematic form can be
attained, is indeed known and ready for us in advance, at
least insofar as it is purely mathematical. Only its
particularity needs to be determined, and unfortunately
this is possible only through induction, the path to
omniscience.
Everything must be approximated to the mathe
matical ideal: this involves the development of a
methodology, the refinement of measurements, the
growing efficiency of instruments. Moreover:
Along with this growing, more and more perfect
cognitive power over the universe, man also gains an
ever more perfect mastery over his practical
surrounding world, one which expands in an
unending progression. This involves a mastery over
mankind ... mastery over himself and his fellow man,
an ever greater power over his fate, and thus an ever
fuller 'happiness'— 'happiness' as rationally
conceivable for man. For he can also know what is
true in itself about values and goods.
Man is thus truly an image of God: God is the 'infinitely
distant man'. Fur the philosopher, in correlation with his
mathematization of the world and of philosophy, has in a
Edmund Husserl 221
certain sense mathematically idealized himself and, at the

same time, God.
Historically, however, says Husserl, certain snags
appear, especially in the sphere of naturalistic
psychology. In Berkeley and Hume appeared a
paradoxical scepticism, by which the models of
rationality came to be seen as psychological fictions.
Though a certain new way of looking at experience, the
very self-evidence of scientific work with its successes
came to become completely incomprehensible so that
scientific objectivism came to be transformed into
transcendental subjectivism. The ontic meaning (seinssinn)
of the pre-given life-world is a subjective structure
(Gebilde). The meaning and ontic validity (Seinsegeltung)
of the world are built up—of that particular world that is
which is actually valid for the individual experiencer.
What is primary in itself is subjectivity, understood as
that which naively pre-gives the being of the world and
then rationalizes or (what is the same thing) objectifies it.
By this process it comes to seem that 'it is all in the
mind', since the only apoditic entity is the subjective
ego—a strange end for the new objectivity!
As Husserl points out, the new thinking is here
threatened by absurdity. Colin Wilson uses here some
commonplace examples: perhaps the world is an illusion
which exists otfly as long as I am looking at it. After all,
I only know the world through my senses, and these
vary, and cannot be trusted. Hume then takes the
scepticism a step further. Not only are my sense-
impressions not to be trusted, but what I seem to learn of
the world from them. If I put a kettle on the fire, I assume
that it wiTf get hotter, but supposing this is yet another
trick? Supposing cause and effect is a confidence trick
and effects do not follow causes at all? To Hume even all
categories of objectivity are fictions. The origins of the
.fictions can be explained perfectly well psychologically in
terms of immanent sensationalism: even if we look at a

tree, there is nothing there but 'manners of appearing'. As
we have seen, the T is not a datum but a ceaselessly
changing bundle of data. Identity is a psychological
fiction, along with causality: reason, knowledge,
including that of true values, of pure ideals of any sort,
including the ethical—all this is fiction.
This, said Husserl, is the bankruptcy of objective
knowledge and Hume ends up, basically, in a solipsism.
Hume disguises his absurd result by avoiding the
questions:
Instead of taking up the struggle against absurdity,
instead of unmasking those supposedly obvious
views upon which this sensationalism, and
psychologism in general rests, in order to penetrate
to a coherent self-understanding and a general
theory of knowledge, he remains in the comfortable
and very impressive role of academic scepticism.
Through this attitude he has become the father of a
still effective, unhealthy positivism which hedges
before philosophical abysses, or covers them over on
the surface, and comforts itself with the successes of
the positive sciences and their psychologistic
elucidation.
The failure of English philosophy started with Hume;
that is, the tendency for philosophy to turn its back on
any real problem of existence which it sees coming, and
the paralysing effect of those positivist forms of
philosophy which will allow us to say nothing about
anything of importance: the trivialization of philosophy.
There was a moment when philosophy could have
taken another path, avoiding these absurdities and
evasions of the essential philosophical problems. As
Poole says, Husserl's whole argument is that a certain
direction was given to philosophy by the Greeks—a
certain kind of concern with the dignity of man, with his
potentialities, and his ability to understand the world he
Edmund Husserl 223
lives in. Philosophy and science were for the Greeks

disciplines to help man in his daily life, the Lcbenswelt,
the world we live in. At the moment when Descartes
became aware of the problem of consciousness,
something went badly wrong—so wrong that it is not yet
understood how disastrous this was.
It should have been quite clear to Descartes that there
were absurdities in the air, because of the unsolved
problems raised by his own investigations. He is not only
the founder of the modern idea of objectivistic
rationalism, but also of the transcendental motive which
explodes it: that is, the developing idea that everything is
a fiction. Unfortunately, he avoided pursuing the whole
problem by avoiding the exploration of his own
subjectivity, and (to use the psychoanalytical term)
scotomizing it, turning a blind eye to it, or having, as it
were, a blind patch on the retina where it was concerned.
He let slip, says Husserl, the great discovery he had in his
hands.
Philosophical knowledge is, according to Descartes,
absolutely grounded knowledge. It must stand upon a
foundation of immediate knowledge, knowledge capable
of clear demonstration, whose self-evidence excludes all
conceivable doubt. Every step in knowing must be able to
attain the same sort of self-evidence, and be apoditic in
this respect.
So, out of this conviction Descartes developed a
radical scepticism, which places in question all previous
sciences, even mathematics, and even the validity of the
life-world of sense experience. All the achievements of
meaning and validity were called into question. This is
the historical beginning of a 'critique of knowledge'.
Nevertheless in this pursuit of what in the end is an
absolutely rational philosophy, what is demonstrated?
The answer says Husserl, is the T. T the ego carrying
out the sceptical investigation am the one thing excluded

from the universal doubt:
No matter how far I may push my doubt, and even
if I try to think that everything is dubious or even in
truth does not exist, it is absolutely self evident that
I, after all, would still exist as the doubter and
negator of everything ... the apoditic self-evidence, 'I
am' is at my disposal.
Something else develops out of this: I exist and think, but
not even my own experiences may be trusted. Ego cogito -
cogitata qua cogitata. I may no longer (because of my
sceptical impulse) straightforwardly accept the validities
of my own being:
My whole life of acts—experiencing, thinking,
valuing, etc.—remains, and indeed flows on; but
what was before my eyes in that life as 'the' world,
having being and validity for me, has become a mere
'phenomenon'. ..all these determinations, and the
world itself, have been transformed into my
ideal. ..Thus here we would have included under the
title 'ego' an absolutely apoditic sphere of being
rather than one axiomatic proposition ego cogito or
sum cogitans.
The result of this is that the only sole absolute primal
self-evidence from which all scientific knowledge must
be derived (if philosophy is to be possible) is the T.
Descartes then excluded the living body: his ego is
determined as mens sive animus sive intellectus (the mind
either the spirit or the intellect). Yet the philosophizing
self is a whole man, a Welthabe, a world-knower, in
possession of the world. How does Descartes perform
this trick of dividing the knowing T—the entity whose
validity is alone capable of clear demonstration—from the
experiencing T?
This has, of course, become the central problem of
contemporary philosophy, certainly of phenomenology
Edmund Husserl 225
and existentialism—most thoroughly tackled, as we shall

see, by Merleau-Ponty, who put this T back into the
body.
In Descartes, as Husserl argues, this failure led to a
number of serious confusions. Descartes developed what
Husserl calls an epoche, from the Greek: a critical doubt,
about everything except the knowing T. Surely, this
critical doubt must be extended to me as whole man in
possession of my world—my exploration of my world
must be examined and questioned for its validity?
Suppose Descartes has taken over the Galilean idea of
a world of physical bodies in relation to one another,
known mathematically by the processes of pure thinking?
This knowledge must surely also be subject to critical
doubt, just as the realm of knowing by sensibility is also
subject to doubt (and easily shown to be delusory)?
Yet is this absolutely sure T knowledge a residuum of
the world? Is it in the body and a part of the world of
men in their bodies in the world? Apparently not. The
critical doubt of the T is the only thing that is clearly and
demonstrably valid: it must 'seriously be and remain in
effect.' This can only be possible by 'breaking' the total
world-validity of the T: that is, by putting it into
parentheses, by splitting it off from the intellectual
mind—T, which is not to be subject to doubt.
However, what about the 'soul'? This, like the body,
is reduced to a 'phenomenon'. Descartes' great discovery
suggests Husserl was the discovery of the ego, but then
his radicalism became corrupt, by identifying this ego
with the 'pure soul' which can have no meaning, except
as a soul in 'brackets', while the body goes into brackets,
too.
Later, with Hume especially, another entity comes in:
'natural common sense' which becomes phenomenal
reductionism. By a special kind of naumlautvete,
experience is reduced to an over-simple picture of

existence as an accumulation of sensations, an 'inside'
and an 'outside' and so on, concepts whose meaning is
doubtful.
Something 'truly great' was announced by the
discovery of the ego, and this, suggests Husserl,
introduced a new philosophical age and implanted
within it a new telos. With Descartes began a completely
new manner of philosophizing which sought its ultimate
foundations in the subjective.
Descartes himself, shaken perhaps by his own
discovery, did not take his path. Influenced by Galileo's
attention to measurable objects as idealized mathematical
'reals', he persisted in pure objectivism. Yet in what was
this objectivism grounded? At first the one apoditic
validity was the mens, the absolute ground of knowledge,
the knowing T. However by the confusions I have
examined, the mens itself came to be grounded with
everything else as a legitimate subject within the
sciences— in psychology: so it too came under the
scrutiny of doubt, and thus the path to transcendental
subjectivism is open—all is fiction.
Descartes should have been able to see that the
knowing T, since it was the only ground for valid
knowing, could not possibly turn up as a subject for
doubtful exploration, because everything in the world
derives its meaning from one's own psychic being, the
ego in the usual sense.
This happened because Descartes was converted to
the Galilean idea, and this kind of objectivity based on
the idealization of mathematical forms was in fact his
goal, in relation to which the breakthrough to the 'ego'
was supposed to be the mens. His philosophy became
corrupted because it slid into the Galilean way of
thinking as of a world that exists in mathematically
established terms, as pure shapes, apart from those
Edmund Husserl 227
looking at it. This is not, of course, to say the world only

exists when we are looking at it. The central philosophical
fact is that, as far as thought about man-in-the-world is
concerned, we must never forget that all knowledge
consists of man looking at, living in, and giving his
account of the world, and in this the ego is the only
apoditic entity, not the 'world's existence out there',
while subjecting the 'mind' to a reductive analysis as a
thing, when in fact it is our only validity that needs no
demonstration.
This brings Husserl to his central concept—one which
is also central to the whole new philosophical movement
I am describing in this book: intentionality . Descartes'
foundation-laying Meditations were really a piece of
psychology. The most significant element in them was
that essence of ego life, the fact that consciousness is
always consciousness of something: cogitatio having
something consciously (etwas bewusshaben) —in
experiencing, thinking, feeling, willing, etc., every
cogitatio has its cogitatum. Each of these is an act of
believing, ein Vermeeinen, and to each belongs some mode
of certainty—straightforward certainty, surmise, holding-
to-be-probable, doubting etc., and so we are here on the
way to theory of knowledge which involves the
distinction between true and false. In this, even at the
heart of Cartesian philosophy, we have a movement
towards a theory of full objective knowledge and also of
a 'knowledge which metaphysically transcends the ego'—
that is, engages itself with questions of meaning in
existence, as philosophy should, according to its telos.
However this was not to be the path of English
philosophy. In Locke the Cartesian cogitatio,
intentionality, is not there, and he does not recognize it as
a subject of investigation. In his naive naturalism the soul
is now taken to be an isolated space, like a writing table
on which 'data' comes and goes, and thi;;
data-sensationalism still dominates psychology one

speaks of 'perceptions' 'of things: but what is missing is
a valid concept of a consciousness which is conscious of
something, of 'this tree', as in a poem.
Without such a concept as intentionally philosophy
collapses into such absurdities as those of Bishop
Berkeley: if the sole indubitable ground of all knowledge
is sense-experience and its realm of immanent data, all
bodily things which appear in nature arc reduced to the
complex of sense-data in which they appear. Hume took
this further, and with him all categories of objectivity
become fictions, and even mathematics. A tree becomes
'manners of appearing'; the T becomes a ceaselessly
changing bundle of data—so that identity becomes a
psychological fiction.
As Husserl shows, the danger is that this does not
stop at trees and kettles. In Hume the world, nature the
universe of identical bodies, the world of identical
persons, objective science, objective truth, reason,
knowledge, true values, pure ideals of every art including
the ethical—all this is fiction. Not only is this the final
bankruptcy of objective knowledge and solipsism; it is a
scepticism that has a profoundly nihilistic effect upon our
feelings about being. Indeed, the difficulty of founding a
true ontology, a science of being, in our time is bound up
with the destructive effect of this sceptical trivialization of
all existence.
Kant's transcendental subjectivism was no answer to
this predicament. Kant was inclined to react against the
data-positivism of Hume, to outline a great, syste
matically constructed, and in a new way still scientific,
philosophy in which the Cartesian recognition of
conscious subjectivity works itself out in a form of
declaring that even the self-evidence of the positive
scientific method and its accomplishment is a problem.
He went back to subjectivity as the primal focus of all
Edmund Husserl 229
objective formations of sense and critic validities, the

imposing of categories and forms. In Kant there is a
conviction that the objective sciences are n"ot seriously
sciences at all—not cognitions of what exists in ultimate
truth, but as it were the imposing of ideas on an
unknowable world.
One has the feeling at this point that German idealism
is on the way up into a cloud from which the
philosophers will haul up the ladder and disappear
altogether. Fortunately we are in good hands, for Husserl
keeps us firmly on the ground in the world and declares
the Humeans and Idealists 'naive'. Kant didn't really find
Hume's problem:
How is the naive obviousness of the certainty of the
world, the certainty in which we live and, what is more,
the certainty of the everyday world as well as that of the
sophisticated theoretical constructions built upon this
everyday world to be made comprehensible?
Husserl insists that everything must be seen from the
position of 'my point of view who am now
philosophizing': for the scientist of nature all the truths
he attains are his own life-constructs developed within
himself. The naumlautvete Husserl attacks is 'no longer
possible as soon as life becomes the point of focus'. As we
have seen, Hume itself could not solve the problem, but
Hume's problem was as follows:
How is this most radical subjectivism, which
subjectivizes the world itself, comprehensible? The
world-enigma in the deepest and most ultimate
sense, the enigma of a world whose being is being
through subjective accomplishment, and this with the
self-evidence that another cannot be at all
conceivable—that nothing else, is Hume's problem.
Kant never penetrated to this enigma. In the third part
Husserl turned to it.
We move now into the second part of Husserl:

Husserl himself speaks of his difficulties in writing it, of
his 'insurmountable inhibitions', his faltering health, and
the feelings he about it, as if it were an incomplete
musical work. It is, of course, incomplete; and one may
detect in it, as in Mahler's later works, that strange
combinations of joy, and dreadful doubt, which assails
anyone who breaks new ground, in the attempt to
understand human existence.
The gist of Husserl's task in Part III is summed up by
Poole thus:
The world is thus replaced. It is not the spatial
support of mathematically known extensions, but a
world of interacting subjectivities which belong to
people, which they confer meaning upon and control
through their conferring meaning upon it.
As Poole points out, there are other works very much
along the same lines such as these, by, E.A. Burtt,
Thomas Kuhn and Michael Polanyi. All these add up to a
radical analysis of the nature of science, and exposure of
its attributes, involvements and prejudices as being in
need of epistemological, conceptual and moral
investigation, and a recognition that we see the world in a
positive sense, creating it as we do so, in terms which give
it 'our' meaning.
Ultimately, we need to reach that point at 'which we
find out that we are conferring meaning upon the worlds
rather than letting the world shove its meanings down
over us'. This impulse, to give meaning back to the
world, is the essence of the impulse of the 'new'
existentialists, and Husserl enables us to see that men need
never have lost the sense of meaning in existence. This
happened because the essential impulse of Greek
philosophy was lost while a new and direction was taken,
because of the failure of Descartes to investigate
subjectivity, while allowing the objectivity of Galileo's
Edmund Husserl 231
idealized mathematical structures to overtake the

universe in men's minds. It is hardly surprising that
Husserl experienced such anguish in trying to extract
philosophy from such long-engrained distortions: nor
surprising that his entanglement with Kant at the
beginning is almost incomprehensible.
The smoke begins to clear, however, when Husserl
begins to give his own account of the nature of
perception, in terms which we shall explore further in the
work of Merleau-Ponty and Straus. Kant could not solve
the enigmas of knowing, because his method was 'merely
regressive' declares Husserl that is, it is merely
theoretical. Let us return to the 'things themselves.'
Husserl seeks to overcome theoretical questions about
whether the properties of things are in them, or whether
they are in the mind, and so forth, by declaring that, even
in the Kantian manner of posing questions, the everyday
surrounding world of life is presupposed as existing—the
surrounding world in which all of us consciously have
our existence:
'Here also, in the world, are the sciences, as cultural
facts in this world, with their scientists and theories. In
this we are objects among objects in the sense of the
life-world, namely, as being here and there, in the plain
certainty of experience, before anything that is established
scientifically.
This is the emphasis pursued by Michael Polanyi and
others, who have investigated the 'tacit' elements in
knowledge, and the convictions that underlie knowing.
Husserl also points out that we are the 'ego-subjects'
experiencing this world, contemplating it, valuing it,
relating to it purposefully. Our relationship with things is
extremely complex, involving creative dynamics in time
and space, and in our minds and habits of conceiving,
valuing and perceiving. The surrounding world has only
the ontic meaning given to it by our experiencings, our
thoughts, our valuations, It can only be valid, in various

modes (that is certainty of being, possibility, perhaps
illusion and so on) becaus-1 we, who are the subjects of
validity, have the capacity to give things in the world
validity. We have come across things like that before. We
have developed (from the time our mothers introduced
the world to us) ways of giving the world validity by
habitual accumulations of experience, and we carry
within us ways of making things in the world actual for
us. Things, as it were, move towards us as we direct our
gaze at them: they come into a perceptual focus which is
full of potentiality:
If we are directed straightforwardly toward the
object and what belongs to it, our gaze passes
through the appearances toward what continuously
appears through their continuous unification: the
object, with the ontic validity of the mode 'itself
present'.
The process of perceiving is the primal mode of intuition,
and this is a process in time; 'i.e. not that which is
itself-there, but that which was-itself-there or that which
is in the future, that which zw7/-be-itself-there.' In all the
verifications of the life of our natural interests, which
remain purely in the life-world, the return to 'sensibly'
experiencing intuition, plays a prominent role:
For everything that exhibits itself in the life-world as
a concrete thing obviously has a bodily character,
even if it is not a mere body, as for example an
animal or a cultural object, i.e. even if it also has
psychic or otherwise spiritual properties.
In perceiving such bodies, our own living body is
constantly in the perceptual field quite immediately. Now
the questions:
Through which my living body nevertheless acquires
the ontic validity of one physical body among others,
and now, on the other hand, certain physical bodies
Edmund Husserl 233
in my perceptual field come to count as living

bodies, living bodies of 'alien' ego-subjects.
In my perceptual field I hold sway through everything
belonging to me as an ego in my ego-acts and faculties.
Yet this living self is, as a full ego-subject, a full-fledged
'I-the-man': and in whatever way we may be conscious of
the world as living with one another in the world. Our
world in our world, valid for our consciousness as
existing precisely through this 'living together'.
This is made clear in Martin Buber's philosophical
anthropology and Buytendijk's philosophical biology.
Humean consciousness and autonomous action in the
world depend upon 'meeting' as between mother and
child, in which nexus consciousness is formed. We are
able to perceive and know the world through a culture
and consciousness established by 'living together'. This is
clear from Winnicott's psychology. Of course, there are
crises, as when Captain Cook's ships sailed into an
Antipodean bay and the indigenous population could
not, from their kind of 'living together' consciousness, see
them. However it is important to recognize that all these
complex origins of consciousness are taken for granted in
all attempts to account for perception and knowing.
All consciousness is in constant motion, and is
sustained by living together with others, by reflecting on
ourselves and being aware of our subjectivity, which in
turn colours our capacity to see and relate to others and
the world. If we are 'scientists' this is no less true:
What correspondents to our particular manner of
being as scientists is our present functioning in the
manner of scientific thinking, putting questions and
answering them theoretically in relation to nature or
the world of the spirit; and the latter are at first
nothing other than the one or the other aspect of the
life-world which, in advance, is already valid, which
we experience or are otherwise conscious of either
prescientically or scientifically.
Scientists come together in a community of theory,

accomplished acts, or experience or reflections: they bring
life-worlds. These things may be the most obvious of the
obvious, says Husserl.
His emphasis is radical. It is the life-world an
experiencing individual brings, in trying to make sense of
the world and finds its 'ontic validity', which is primary,
This element is taken for granted in all science and
philosophizing: we bring to any problem 'a horizon of
what is the given case is indubitably valid as existing.'
Like all praxis, objective science pre-suppose the
being of this world, but it sets itself the task of
transposing knowledge which is imperfect and
prescientific in respect of scope and constancy into
perfect knowledge—in accord with an idea of a
correlative which is, to be sure, infinitely distant, i.e.
of a world which in itself is fixed and determined
and of truths which are idealister scientific ('truths in
themselves') and which predicatively interpret this
world. To realise this in a systematic process, in
stages of perfection, through a method which makes
possible in constant advance: this is the task.
Nevertheless, as science is now discovering, it is not easy
to divide 'objective truth' from that which is 'subjective'
and therefore 'merely relative'. The 'subjective-relative' is
supposed to be 'overcome'. Even as the scientist goes on
refining his work, 'the subjective-relative is on the other
hand still functioning for him' as the source of self-
evidence, the source of verification. As we have seen, in the
Cartesian philosophical picture, this self that explores the
world is the only true validity.
Science tried to 'deal with' this 'subjective sphere' by
psychology. Yet how can one allow the intrusion of what
exists in the sense of objective science when it is a
question of what exists in the life world as discussed
above?
Edmund Husserl 235
Will the contemporary scientist be able to see this

now he is so deeply locked in his paradigm? The
life-world is the universe of what is intuitable in
principle: the 'objective-true' world is in principle non-
intuitable 'logical' substruction. As we see, if we read
Jacques Monod, the idea of 'objectivity' dominates the
whole universitas of the positive sciences in the modern
period, and in the general usage it dominates the
meaning of the word 'science'. This already involves a
naturalism taken from Galilean natural science, by which
the scientifically 'true', the objective, world is always
thought of in advance as nature. The theoretical-logical
substructure is assumed to be the 'true' world—a
substruction of something in principle not perceivable
and experiencable in its own proper being. The
'subjective' on the other hand is distinguished by being
experiencable.
Yet nothing can be validated as 'truth' except by
being taken back to the realm of original self-evidences,
the life-world of the experiencing T'. All the
objective-logical self-evidences must be traced back to the
primal self-evidence of the life-world in which each
scientist 'lives' and works. The empiricist talk of natural
scientists may give the impression that the natural
sciences are based on the experience of 'objective nature'.
Yet the 'objective' precisely never as experiencable as
itself. 'Objective-scientific' ways of thinking in fact have
become today was obscurantist as the old scholastic
dominance from which modern science escaped.
Objective science, of course, has a constant reference
of meaning to the world in which we live, but the
theories and logical constructions of science are not
things in the world like rocks and stones and trees. They
are logical constructs emerging from the community of
scientific activity, whose logical ideality is determined by
theif telos— 'truth in itself. So though scientific
constructions are rooted in the life-world of the scientific

worker, they are also something different. The constructs
of science are pulled into the 'subjective-relative'
life-world. Science becomes (as 'truth') abstracts and
essentially subjective, since it exists in the 'mind':
And what becomes of the objective world itself?
What happens to the hypothesis of being-in- itself,
related first to the 'things' of the life-world, the
'objects', the 'real' bodies, real animals, plants and
also human beings within the 'space-time' of the
life-world... as they are in prescientific life?
Science, that is, is only one among many practical
hypotheses and projects which make up the life of
human beings in this life-world. How, however, is the
whole life-world to be investigated? We are absolute
beginners here, declares Husserl, and 'we can do nothing
but reflect, engross ourselves in the still not unfolded
sense of out task'. We face a strange and precarious idea.
The question is one of the relationship between
objective-scientific thinking an intuition. It also means
applying a critical epocheto scientific logic itself—a
philosophy of science. There is also a need to find more
adequate goals for philosophy: Husserl declares that
phenomenology represents 'the greatest existential
transformation which is assigned as a task to mankind as
such', that is, the exploration of the realms of subjectivity.
We can perhaps see Husserl's point in ordinary life, if we
think of a scientist himself He gets up in the morning
and goes off to his scientific work, on, say, the breathing
apparatus of the lugworm. Here, he enters the lifeworld
of scientific knowledge, its logical structures of
measurement and comparison. He may apply some of his
techniques to ordinary living—for example, by
calculating how much lawn grass seed he needs to sow,
to allow for a certain amount to be eaten by the
sparrows: or by putting a brick in his WC cistern to save
water, in an ecological crisis.
Edmund Husserl 237
However, he lives in a much larger life-world. In this,

he assumes it is good to be a scientist, to be paid for it, to
teach or not, to be a member of a scientific trade union, or
a teaching union, to vote labour or conservative or to join
the Society for Responsibility in Science. He makes
certain assumptions, willy-nilly, abou* serving society. He
invests money, and is buying a house. He loves his wife
and has complex forms of inter-subjectivity with her and
their children. He sends his children to state schools or
private schools: he is an atheist or a Church of England
believer, and his science will be affected by this. He is
worked about whether or no his children are lying, or
stealing, or are lazy or industrious. In discussing all these
problems he enters to some degree into metaphysical
thinking, and modes of contemplation and decision
disallowed very often by his 'empiricist' way of thinking.
His mind is split. In college or the laboratory he will
believe all those other problems of his subjective realities
and the life-world by which he deals with them may
eventually be 'explained away' by objective positivism.
There is nothing there that is not measurable and kickable
whether it is in terms of tensions or synapses. Yet, at
home, when he is distressed by hate or death, or in
raptures of love or ^musement, he implicitly accepts the
realm of subjectivity, in which he lives—and the larger
life-world which Husserl insists we must study as the
subject-matter of a science. The split in our scientist arises
because he has not yet learned to think in what
disciplines the whole of existence could be studied, if it
cannot be subdued to the methods by which he studies
lugworms. Of course, it cannot, because what he applies
to the lugworm is an idealized mathematical abstraction
by which the experiencing T cannot be found, as if in a
world in which the latter does not exist. Yet he knows
that all he (apodictically) knows is that he knows about
lugworms in that way.
He does not know his subjectivity in that way. How

could he know it? One might try to begin with the
observation made at the end of Husserl's Part Ilia; 'One
must finally achieve the insight that no objective science,
no matter how exact, explains or ever can explain
anything in a serious sense'. That is, the scientist is
probably confusing two activities. Of course, he may be
brilliantly finding out about lugworms, how they work,
where they live, how they developed, and how they are
related to other creatures. This adds to our knowledge of
the world.
Even at the end of his scientific life his deductions are
still not explanations: 'to deduce is not to explain'. His
lugworm work answers none of his serious questions at
all. Yet what he is asking in his whole lifeworld has to do
With the meaning of life, with questions of value and
purpose. This kind of metaphysical inquiry into
experience is perfectly valid, but is in a totally different
dimension.
To predict, or to recognise the objective forms of the
composition of physical or chemical bodies and to predict
accordingly all this explains nothing but is in need of
explanation. The only true way to explain is to make
transcendentally understandable. Natural-scientific
knowing about nature thus given us no truly explanatory,
no ultimate knowledge of nature because it does not
investigate nature at all in the absolute framework
through which its actual and genuine being reveals its
ontic meaning thus natural science never reaches this
being thematically.
This is by no means to underestimate the greatness of
science and the genius of those who have created
scientific knowledge. It is simply to say that, if we are to
examine questions of being and meaning, we will have to
develop other disciplines and there must involve
questions of subjectivity.
Edmund Husserl 239
To achieve this kind of investigation, there must be a

total change of the natural attitude: 'a total
transformation of attitude, a completely unique, universal
epoche'. What we shall set out to find is not the world in
terms of 'the universe of "actually" existing actualities'
but those which have actuality for us only in the constant
movement of corrections and revisions of validities
(Umgeltungen von Geltungen):
Nothing shall interest us but precisely that subjective
alteration of manner of givenness, of manners of
appearing and of the modes of validity in them, which in
its constant process, synthetically connected as it
incessantly flows on, brings, about the coherent
consciousness of the straightforward 'being' of the world.
It is a tall order to ask the scientist to come over to
this mode of knowing the world, not least because there
is a certain appealing immaturity in the very naivete of
the scientific world-view: often, the scientist wants the
world to be a simple machine. This may be linked with
the denial of woman, being, and the mother observed in
the scientific world-picture by Karl Stern. In the sheer
optimism of the scientific world-view there is no room, for
tragedy; that is, for the assertion of values that may
triumph over death. There is a concomitant denial of
these problems which belong to the subjective, to the
poetic, to being. Yet the above kind of discipline would
have made sense to J.M.W. Turner, D.H. Lawrence,
Vincent Van Gogh, Gustav Mahler, George Eliot or Leo
Tolstoy in such art, the world is known like that:
Among the objects of the life-world we also find
human beings, with all their human action and
concern, works and suffering, living in common with
the world-horizon in their particular social
interrelations and knowing themselves to be such.
All this too then shall be included as we carry out
our new universal direction of interest. A coherent
theoretical interest shall now be directed exclusively
towards the universe of the subjective, in which the

world, in virtue of the universality of synthetically
bound accomplishments in this universe, comes to
have its straightforward existence for us.
At first Husserl's prose seems baffling. This is hardly
surprising if it is true, as Poole suggests, he is reversing
three centuries of established approaches and recovering
that original telos inherited from Greek philosophy—of
understanding man-in-the-world, in his totality, in a fully
scientific way. The Galilean-Cartesian tradition has
seriously deflected this telos, and now the deflection, the
distortion, the loss of direction is built into thousands of
universities all over the world, directed at presenting to
millions of students in their formative years a view of the
universe which is essentially nihilistic, both in its
idolization of dead mathematical idealizations on the one
hand, and its scotomization of subjective reality on die
other. How shall we ever reform this situation? The
recent 'revolutions' in the name of 'alternative' modes of
living have shown themselves totally ignorant of the
problem of this real philosophical revolution, while their
eventual solipsistic nihilism simply echoes the essential
solipsism of objective philosophy, in the end, in its
failure to find the self-in-the world there is no essential
radicalism in much of today's so-called 'protest'.
Husserl's prose owes its density to that struggle he
was making to escape into new dimensions, and if we
desire a reformation of our thought about man we must
discipline ourselves to tackle it—for only through thought
and knowledge can we achieve our freedom by finding
our essential humanness.
The trouble is that, in the natural and normal world,
the 'subjective manifold' goes on, but there it remains
constantly and necessarily concealed. As in
psychoanalytical theory, much is being opened up that
we have taken for granted (such as the formation of the
Edmund Husserl 241
identity itself, and the child's autonomy). In philosophy,

asks Husserl, how, by what method, is it to be revealed?
A new science is required:
In opposition to all previously designed objective
sciences, which are sciences on the ground of the world,
this would bee a science of the universal how of the
pregivenness of the world, i.e. of what makes it a
universal ground for any sort of objectivity. And included
in this is the creation of a science of the ultimate grounds
(Grunde) which supply the true force of all objective
grounding, the force arising from its ultimate bestowal of
meaning.
In this we may use no sort of knowledge arising from
the sciences as premises, and we may take the sciences
into consideration only as historical facts, taking no
position of our own on their truth. Instead, we are to
study 'the conscious life of the subjectivity which effects
the validity of the world, the subjectivity which always
has the world in its enduring acquisition and continues
actively to shape it anew'.
This is a matter of a new sort of scientific discipline.
How do we begin this, and how do we progress? Much
depends upon self-reflective clarity carried to its limits.
There are no antecedents, and so the new beginning takes
place with a certain unavoidable naivete: 'Im Anfang war
die Tat' (in the beginning is the deed).
We must seek to considei the surrounding life-world
in its neglected relativity—the world in which we live
intuitively, together with the real entities (Realitaten). The
world is our subject of investigation as the ground of all
our interests and life-projects, among which the objective
sciences are one particular group, but these are no longer
to be privileged as they have been up to now. We must
consider the 'real entities' as they give themselves to us at
first in straightforward experience, and even consider the
ways in which their validity is sometimes in suspense
(between being and illusion, and so on). Our exclusive

task shall be to comprehend precisely the whole merely
subjective and apparently incomprehensible 'Heraclitean
flux':
We are not concerned with what the world, taken as
a totality, actually is what is general belongs to it in
the way of a priori structural lawfulness or factual
'natural laws'. We have nothing like, this as our
subject matter.
The Galilean-Cartesian ambition is cast off.
The dismissal of the pursuit of 'objective truth' may
fill the reader, accustomed to the satisfactions yielded
science, with alarm. What is left? One of our first steps,
says Husserl, will be that of filling in the empty
generality of our theme.
What is seen in seeing' is in and for itself other than
what is touched in touching. Even in such a normal act as
seeing, there are new differences arising in its manifold
course:
The pure thing seen, what is visible 'of the, thing, is
first of all a surface, and in the changing course of
seeing I see it now from this 'side' now from that,
continuously perceiving it from ever differing sides
... each side is for consciousness a manner of
exhibition of it ... while the surface is immediately
given, 7 mean more than it offers.
That is, as I go on examining a thing, I create a meaning
(in what Buber might call my 'mansions of
consciousness') which builds itself up from the aspects
presented to me:
I have ontic certainty of this thing as that to which
all the sides at once belong, an the mode in which I
see it 'best'. Each side gives me something of the
seen thing ... thus I 'get to know' the tiling.
So, what I see is not simply an object of my gaze: I have
Edmund Husscrl 243
consciousness of the thing. In seeing I always 'mean' it

with all the sides which are in no way given to me. Thus
every perception has 'for consciousness' a horizon
belonging to its object, (that is, whatever it meant in the
perception).
Here, the word 'horizon' is presumably a translation
of Gesichtskreis, which is made up of Gesicht, (face or
countenance) and kries, (a circle): a field of vision. That is,
it means a field of view, as one looks out from one's face.
The sentence is an important one in the Husserlian
account of perception because it implies that we cannot
consider 'looking' without seeing it take place within a
scanning of the world by consciousness, within which
there is a search, a creative intention, a desire to now the
world, the kind of unfolding quest to know which the
mother creatively reflects in her child.
This reveals at a stroke why so many 'objective'
approaches to perception are so inadequate: in
psychology laboratories, in the work of Pavlov and
Skinner—all fail to see perception as a dynamic of
consciousness in the whole being, not least in animals
with their 'kind of consciousness'.
In Husserl's method, to all forms of modality of
sense-perception things play their role as 'exhibitings of,
appearances,—manifolds, exhibiting of this shape, this
colour: as bearers of 'sense' in each phase, as meaning
something, the perspectives combining in an advancing 4
enrichment of meaning' and 'a continuing development
of meaning'. The expectation of 'what is to come' is
fulfilled: everything is taken up into the unity of validity
or into the one, the thing.
In face this is what is now happening in animal
ethology, where such 'whole' interpretations are being
made of (say) the behaviour of monkeys or lions. It is also
necessary to learn to apply it to inanimate things, and to
realize how dynamic all perception is:
The world exists as a temporal, a spatio-temporal,

world in which each thing has its bodily extension
and duration and, again with respect to these, its
position in universal time and in space. Perception is
only related to the present. But this present is always
meant as having an endless past behind it and an
open future before it. We soon see that we need the
intentional analysis of the recollection as the original
manner of being conscious of the past; but we also
see that such an analysis presupposes in principle
that of perception, since memory, curiously enough,
implies having perceived.
Perception's intentional accomplishment is making
something present:
... the object gives itself as 'there', originally there,
present. But in this presence, as that of the extended
and enduring object, lies a continuity of what I am
still conscious of, what has flowed away and is no
longer intuited at all, a continuity of 'retentions' and
in the other direction a continuity of 'protentions'
Without such processes, the object and the world would
not be there for us, and they exist for us only with the
meaning and the mode of being that they receive in
constantly arising or having arisen out of these subjective
accomplishments.
That is, in seeing, normal seeing, or especially
disciplined seeing, we make the world, and find meaning
in it.
In Meaning, Polanyi asserts that the world is full of
order and meaning, as many scientists have found. It is
only in the legacy of the dead world of Galilean-Cartesian
mathematics, without meaning because no-one is looking
at it, that we find a situation in which the world seems to
'thrust its meanings down on us', so that even the poet
supposes it is impossible to redeem it from
meaninglessness. For this apparent meaninglessness,
which daunts us, depends essentially our own failure (the
Edmund Husserl 245
failure of the established philosophy of science) to give an

adequate account of the nature of perception, and of
ourselves as conscious human beings. When we turn to
Merleau-Ponty and Straus we shall see what absurdities
this implicit denial of consciousness and of the
perplexities of the life-world has led.
Husserl next turns to further processes in perception
and knowing: the alteration of validity, for example—as
when we see what appears to be a crushed corpse on the
road, but on inspecting it closer we find it is a lump of
mud; or we see a man but on touching him find it is a
mannekin. We begin with an 'open horizon' of 'possible
perceptions'. These have an internal horizon (of
possibilities) and an external horizon, as a thing within a
field of things: between these we find the whole 'world
as a perceptual world'. Our waking life is a continual
comparison of these complex fields, of what we expect,
and what we see, which gives us a harmony in the total
perception of the world—sustained through constant
'corrections'—as when something that simply looked red
at a distance appears, when seen more closely, to be
spotted.
We also need to recognize that 'in our continuously
flowing world-perceiving we are not isolated but rather
have, within it, contact with other human beings. Each
one has his perceptions, his presentifications, his
harmonious experiences, devaluation of his certainties
into mere possibilities, doubts, questions, illusions.' Yet
'in living with one another each one can take part in the
life of the others':
Thus in general the world exists not only for isolated
men but for the community of men; and this is due to the
fact that even what is straightforwardly perceptual is
communalized.
In Donne's words, while 'let us possess one world,
each hath one, and is one': yet there is a common world
which we share and know we share. In this

communalization, too, there is a continual alteration of
validity through reciprocal correction:
In reciprocal understanding, my experiences and
experiential acquisitions enter into contract with
those of others... and here again ... intersubjective
harmony of validity occurs, establishing what is
'normal' ... but then, whether it is unspoken and
even unnoticed, or is expressed through discussion
and criticism, a unification is brought about or at
least is certain in advance of possibly attainable by
everyone. All this takes place in such a way that in
the consciousness of each individual, and in the
overarching community consciousness which has
grown up through social contact ... (the world) ...
achieves ... validity ... the world as the universal
horizon, common to all men, of actually existing
things.
If one attends to the distinction between things as
originally one's own' and as 'empathized' from others ...
then what one actually experiences originaliter as a
perceptual thing is transformed, for each of us, into a
mere 'representation of the one objectively existing
thing:
'The' thing itself is actually that which no one
experiences as really seen, since it is always in
motion, always, and for everyone, a unity for
consciousness of the openly endless multiplicity of
changing experiences and experienced things, one's
own and those of others. The co-subjects of this
experience themselves make up, for me and for one
another, an openly endless horizon of human beings
who are capable of meeting and then entering into
actual contact with me and with one another.
Such philosophy sounds like poetry. Or, rather/ perhaps
we could say that it sounds like how we feel about
people in the world if we are continually reading and
studying poetry and literature. It makes immediate and
Edmund Husserl 247
obvious sense to the literary man who knows our

knowledge of the world is made up like this. The
scientist knows it too, but is taught to distrust it by his
scientific philosophy and may try to substitute for it for
more naive abstractions of empiricism, which are only
one way of approaching whole experience.
Yet the fact that each person sees things and the
world as they appear to him never entered the
'philosophical purview' as Husserl calls it:
The correlation between world ... and its subjective
manners of givenness never evoked philosophical
wonder ... This correlation never aroused a
philosophical interest of its own which could have
made it the object of an appropriate scientific
attitude. Philosophers were confined by what was
taken for granted, i.e. that each thing appeared
differently in each case to each person.
Whatever exists, whether it has a concrete or abstract,
real or ideal, meaning, has its manner of self-givenness
and cannot be distinguished from the synthesis of
individual subjectivities and inter-subjectivities which
make it:
Every entity that is valid for me and every
conceivable subject as existing in actuality is thus
correlatively and with essential necessity an index of
its systematic multiplicities.
Anything that is—whatever its meaning and to whatever
region belongs—is an index of a subjective system of
correlations. Husserl put it in many ways, but what it
adds up to is the 'intersubjective constitution' of the
world, meaning that the world is composed of I modes of
validity for egos' a structure of meaning formed out of
elementary intentionalities. Here:
Intentionality is the title which stands for the only
actual and genuine way of explaining, making intelligible
... a continuum of retentions and protentions.
In this new phenomenology, says Husserl, one is soon

beset by extraordinary difficulties. It is a question of
finding one's way in an unknown world, where all the
concepts, all the ways of thinking and scientific methods
of objective science, are of no help. It is also necessary to
bring about a novel and yet scientific way of 'thinking
through the required method'
The first difficulty, however, is to face questions like
these:
Are not we also doing science? Are we not
establishing truths about true being? Are we not
entering upon a dangerous road of double truth?
Can there be, next to objective truth, yet a second
truth, the subjective?
There are dangers. The first thing is to recognize that in:
Every consciousness of something having the simple,
straightforward validity of existence, there lies an
aiming, one that is realized in the harmoniousness of
ever new ontic validities ... and, in the case of
intuition, realizes the 'thing itself. No matter what
variations we may find in intentionality ... they are
all variational forms of accomplishments which are
ultimately those of the ego.
The truths Husserl was after cannot be defined as 'truths'
as in 'objectivity'.
The philosopher cannot held fast to anything in this
elusively flowing life, repeat it always with the same
content, and become so certain of its thisness and its
being such that he describe it, document it, so to
speak, could (even for his owl' person alone) in
definitive statements ... But the full concrete facticity
of universal transcendental subjectivity can
nevertheless be scientifically grasped in another good
sense ... through an eidetic method.
The world is from the start taken only as a correlate of
the subjective appearances, views, subjective acts, and
capacities through which it is given its changeable- but
Edmund Husserl 249
unitary sense. The 'ego-poles' cannot be studied by

'objective psychology', but as 'the subjective aspect of the
world and also of its manner of appearing'. However,
universal intersubjectivity, into which all objectivity,
everything that exists at all, is resolved—can obviously
be nothing other than mankind: and the latter is
undeniably a component of the world. 'The subjective
part of the world swallows up, so to speak, the whole
world and thus itself too. What an absurdity!'
The problem is one that menaced Marion Milner
when as a scientist she encountered subjectivity Husserl's
answer was a commonsense one:
I am certain of being a human being who lives in
this world, etc. and I doubt it not in the least... The
method now requires that the ego, beginning with its
concrete world-phenomenon, systematically inquire
back, and thereby become acquainted with itself, the
transcendental ego, in its concreteness in the system
of its constitutive levels and its incredibly intricate
pattern of validity-founding. (Geltungsfimdierimgen)
Having arrived at the ego, one becomes aware of
standing within a sphere of self-evidence that any
attempt to inquire behind would be absurd. The T of the
cogito, through constant self-verification, together with
everything that it is for me, 'together with all sciences
and arts, together with all social and personal
configurations and institutions, in so far as it is just the
world that is actual for me'. There can be no stronger
realism than this, declares Husserl. From this 'correlation
between the world and the transcendental subjectivity as
objectified in mankind' it should be possible to study the
insane, children, animals, communal life, historicity,
problems of birth and death and 'the problem of the
sexes', also, the unconscious, dreamless sleep, loss of
consciousness—everything existing in the world common
to all. There is no meaningful problem in previous
philosophy which could not be arrived at by

phenomenology at some point along its way.
It is most important, when studying the whole new
development of the 'new' existentialism, to give
appropriate attention to Husserl, who has influenced so
many, from Heidegger and Sartre, to May and Lomas.
Yet, as the above account shows, this philosopher leaves
us with many problems. He introduces the revolutionary
need to develop 'subjective disciplines', to explore the
world of the subjective and the intersubjective, in terms
of a 'science of being'. In this, the most important
emphases are on the creative dynamics of perception, and
the recognition of the human 'I can' as a central truth in
the world.
However, as will have been seen in the last few
pages, Husserl too has in his philosophy some of the
qualities of German philosophy in general. With natural
science put 'in brackets' so that phenomenology must
include none of it, and everything grounded on
subjectivity, despite his emphasis on man as a
being-in-the- world and our intersubjectivity, isn't there
something solipsistic still about Husserl? Does he really
'find' the other? I believe this weakness of his work is
corrected by those who followed him, especially Ludwig
Binswanger, Erwin Straus and F.J.J. Buytendijk.
Significantly, this correction comes from psychotherapy
primarily, where a face-to-face dynamic is primary. In
Husserl, the private language, the idiosyncrasies, the
reiteration belong to the solipsism, which itself belongs to
the dangers involved, in escaping from those
long-established paradigms, bringing a tendency to throw
out the baby with the bath water. For, if we look at
natural science, it is obvious that in its so-called
'objective' disciplines there is much that is intuitive,
much that is really created in the terms demanded by
Husserl. This is evident if we read such works as
Edmund Husserl 251
Darwin's The Ecology of the Voyage of the Beagle or W.H.

Thorpe's Animal Nature and Human Nature: the scientist
whose life-work is viruses, glaciers or chimpanzees
develops a 'whole' feeling about these which is by no
means based only on Galilean and Cartesian principles,
but on the many 'faces' or manners of appearing of these
subjects, much of it based on subjective modes,
'corrections' and collocations between beings who have
experienced them.
At this point let me try to sum up the contribution
made by Husserl. In his philosophy the problem of
perception took precedence over all other problems.
Perception is the basis and origin of all operations of
consciousness. Consciousness is intentional. It 'ties its
own wonderings' (Ricoeur) to the 'things' to which it can
apply its consideration, its desire, its action: the 'I can'.
The world is 'world-for-my-life', environment of the
'living ego' and must be considered in terms of the 'living
present' where 'the pact between daily living and every
revealed presence is continuously renewed' (Ricoeur).
This view of the world differs radically from that of
the phenomenalist. The phenomenalist's aim is to find a
method of reducing all statements about objects to
statements about sense-contents. Husserl argues that we
must perform the 'phenomenological reduction' and
suspend all judgements about the spatio-temporal
existence of such objects. Instead, the phenomenologist
must analyse and describe the intentional structure, in the
way consciousness creates the world and the objects in it,
by complex processes of synthesis.
It is not that the world is only 'in' consciousness, not
that one constitutes the original material of the world (as
idealism tended to believe), but rather that there is a
progressive discovery that what one does create is
everything that one derives from the world. Every
activity of consciousness surges into a world that is
already there: but we are not concerned (as in Kant) with

the cosmological idea, but the subjective 'horizon' or field
of vision—the shaft of attention from consciousness
which creates our world, and, by correlation with other
horizons, the project of a total world'.
In this meaning, is brought to the forefront. Pivcevic
puts it like this:
Take, for example, a simple perceptual experience
such as my seeing this chair in front of me. I assume
there is something 'out there', an object called 'chair'
which I can see and touch and which I can use for
certain purposes. But suppose I now disregard the
transcendent object chair and concentrate on what is
immediately given in my experience of seeing a
chair. I find myself now at a different level and my
attitude changes. I am no longer looking at the chair
as an object 'out there' on which I can put my books
or on which I can climb to screw a bulb into the
lamp holder. I become aware of my having
something as an object which I recognise as a chair. I
do not merely have a chair-percept: my experience
does not consist merely of certain sensations. I
became aware of what the percept means.
In positing the 'neomatic content' of what I see (that is,
the perceived-remembered-expected-judged-as-such-
content) I am, as it were, stepping out of the immediate
existential context and entering a new relationship with
the world around me. I am also free to posit an ego as an
idealized projection of my own self. In this I am not
denying or ignoring the existence of anything. I am only
suspending existential considerations about objects
transcending experiences; or, in Poole's terms, I am
refusing to let the world shove its meanings down on
me, but insisting on exerting my own meanings on
things—as Van Gogh did on his chair, and Cezanne did
on his apples.
Edmund Husserl 253
Truth can now be defined in terms of what is evident

to the intentional consciousness. However, this
consciousness, Husserl was most anxious to make claim,
is not to be found or defined by psychologism, by any
'objective' psychology—one more reason for putting
natural scientism and its 'objective world' in brackets.
However, this leads to two problems. Although there
is nothing anti-scientific in Husserl, and, indeed, he seeks
a better empiricism, there has been an anti-scientific
tendency in phenomenology, creating a gulf between
philosophy and science. There is little to be gained by
regarding scientific methods as inferior philosophically,
by comparison with the 'existential dialectic': it is simply
that the philosophy of science requires re-examination,
and needs to be dislodged from the exclusive claims it is
making to be the one recognized authority over all
experience.
There is also the 'problem of others'. Once Husserl
had performed his phenomenological reduction, rejecting
all objective evidence of things in the world, the problem
was the question of 'other egos'. How can we find others,
apart from 'natural' evidence that they are there?
Empirically the existence of other people is a fact of
which I am immediately aware. But the empirical
certainty I have of the existence of others is part of
that 'natural attitude' I am asked to suspend.
Now I must try to explain 'the possibility of their
existence in an a priori way'. It is in this that the dangers
of solipsism lie in phenomenology. In reaction to this,
other phenomenologists such a Scheler have replaced the
idea of the transcendental ego' in Husserl with talk about
the 'person' being capable of intellectual and emotional
acts. Heidegger, as we have seen, discussed 'being-with-
others', but confronts found this Mitsein 'inauthentic',
while in Sartre the other only my freedom and merely
exacerbated my essential solitude—having a largely
negative function.
The trouble is that a belief in the interiority of man

inevitably raises the problem of how we penetrate into
the interiority of others and recognize them as fully equal
to ourselves. This is a subject pursued by other
phenomenologists and existentialists.
One point needs to be emphasized here: existential
phenomenology does not describe for the pleasure of
describing. As will be evident from my account above of
how existentialism arose—as a protest against rationalism
and a dehumanizing civilization—it is directed at a goal,
and Husserl is a major figure in the endeavour to
rediscover the telos of philosophy—the fulfilment of
humanness, and of creative knowledge of the world in
which man has his being, such as emerged in ancient
Greece. Existential phenomenology is concerned to
overcome alienation, to rediscover man's place in the
world, to recover the metaphysical dimension.
It signifies the creative and concrete approach to the
'ontological mystery' and Husserl's work brings to our
attention the unfolding concrete nature of our perceptual
and conscious existence. It also indicates the dynamic of
the human creative will. In disassociating the subjective
world of motivation from the objective universe, of
causality, said Ricoeur, phenomenology sought to:
Regain the sense of the spontaneity of the powers
which the moving body offers for action, in order to
regain, more subtly still, that necessity in the first person
which I undergo simply by virtue of being alive, born of
the flesh.
So phenomenology came to give an account of 'that
triple motion of motivation, spontaneity, and
lived-through necessity ... "I will"'.
This is a new dimension in philosophy, reintroducing
the whole question of freedom, because freedom is
constitutive of everything involuntary, including
Edmund Husserl 255
necessity, and this is a question that as we have seen,

could not be adequately tackled in terms of objective'
philosophy.
The question of freedom inevitably raises questions of
'others' and so in this we find the clue to the escape from
the latent solipsism in Husserl's philosophy—for
ontological phenomenology no longer has the ego at the
centre of its concern, but pays greater attention to a
'poetics' of the will, and thus to themes of responsibility,
guilt, innocence and spiritual discipline.
Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel
There were existentialists from the beginning who did

not share Sartre's nihilism. Karl Jaspers was a Protestant
but consistently maintained an agnostic position. Gabriel
Marcel was a Catholic Christian. Both recognise a
communication with others as necessary to authentic
personal existence: communication and transcendence
were essential themes to them. Jasper's way was not that
of the acceptance of beliefs, but he was 'open' to
anyone's choice of their way to transcendence. Perhaps
the most important aspect of the work of these two
thinkers is that they resist the effects upon man of the
mechanisation of society. As we have seen in quotations
from Marcel, to them our industrialised society, with its
mechanised patterns of life and communication, tend to
reduce us to 'functional man'. He and Jaspers are
concerned with autonomy, and the possibilities of
genuine 'meeting'.
The depersonalised world in which we live threatens
autonomy. Man belongs, Jasper insisted, to the moral
world of meanings and intention, not to the non-moral
world of casual laws and 'determined' being. What is
demanded of man as a moral being is that he act
responsibly in this world and communicate genuinely
with others.
As Marcel sees it, the characteristics of the 'technical'
view of the world are that by it we tend to understand
things in terms of some hold that human agents have on
us, some way of manipulating us. This parallelism in our
Karl jaspers and Gabriel Marcel 157
thinking about life generates an attitude whereby we feel

that the world can and should be manipulated by us, and
that it should, like some human-made machine, be
perfectible. So, even natural catastrophes seem to us like
unaccountable flaws in the 'machinery'. A similar
dimension affects our thinking about ourselves: in certain
kinds of attitudes to ourselves we are simply machines
that need to be perfected. Man comes to look at himself
simply as another object to be handled and to be put
right when the engine doesn't go properly.
The moral consequences of this technicism minimize
the 'interior life', and human aspirations are also reduced
to their minimum, the mechanical pursuit of
instantaneous pleasures, as in our general hedonism.
Marcel calls this 'le Anglo-Saxon having a good time'.
By contrast, evil seems simply a mechanical failure,
and anything we cannot put right by mechanical
techniques does not exist. There are no mysteries, and the
deepest problems of evil, such as hate, do not exist—an
attitude of mind one now encounters only too commonly
among the 'enlightened' over such issues as nihilism in
culture, or sexual morality.
Because of this functional view of man, society is
impoverished. By reducing man to an object of his own
techniques, we have turned society from a genuine
human community into an aggregate of deadened,
pleasure-seeking, pain-shunning units that bear no
spiritual relationship to one another. Marcel's answer lies
in the recognition of man's soul, and his true community
is in the church that finds and cares for the spirit.
Jaspers attacks mass industrialised man, Massemench.
The failure of our modem age is in the levelling down of
human differences by the application of the processes and
attitudes inherent in mass-production to human affairs.
While he accepts political democracy, Jaspers asserts a
'true aristocracy' —the communion of those few
individuals who recognize that the possibility of genuine

inner existence may be found in all men. These reach out
to one another in that achievement. As Grene points out,
his attack on mediocrity, on 'wearing down into
uniformity all that is in an individual', is a re-statement,
virtually, of John Stuart Mill's chapter 'of individuality' in
the essay 'On Liberty'.
Jaspers does not accuse positivistic science of being
necessarily destructive of meaning in human life, as
Marcel does. But he did recognize that positivism cannot
know, or live, itself. 'If I wanted to live positivistically, I
should not be myself: this I know more or less
consciously and have no rest.'
By contrast, Jaspers rejects idealism, since it fails to
recognize what cannot be avoided—the brutal facts of
reality or it dismisses facts as being trivial and irrelevant.
However, 'Without positivism there is no body, without
idealism no space for an objective and meaningful
realisation of possible existence.' To escape the dangers
inherent in both idealism and positivism, these two
Christian philosophers turn to existentialist ideas.
Marcel was an anti-Cartesian, and felt that one of the
great errors of Descartes was to substitute body in the
abstract for the older and truer conception of the flesh.
The 'flesh' in Christian doctrine implies not only the
body, but the cravings and fears that go with it—
eminently manifest in our technological society. But there
is more to human personality: the striving for being
rather than having. Yet we can grasp this only by the
disciplines of love. In love the other (toi), the 'thou',
becomes somehow part of one's self and at one with
one's self. The trouble is that love of this kind is difficult
to express substantially and convincingly—and so one
has something like sentimental sermons from Marcel. By
contrast with which Sartre's 'brilliantly inaccurate'
reasoning on the basis of hate is far more effective.
Karl Jaspers ami Gabriel Marcel 259
In recent psychoanalytical observations, the striving

for being rather than having, and the nature of the I-thou,
are given substance as ethical principles, in ways that are
not at all weak or vague. We must judge both the
atheistic Sartre and the religious Marcel on the basis of
this view of man.
To the unbeliever, however, Marcel's offering of a
theory of 'love' and the 'thou' is not enough to overcome
the bitter realism of works such as he Mur or L'Age de
Raison which provide generalized backing for Sartre's
theories. This is, of course the great problem that
wickedness and hate seem more appealing, because they
seem to offer better support for the identity—certainly for
the identity that has no fund of resources in God's love,
as Marcel has. To him the existential project, /' engagement,
can only be meaningful through God. And, since this
depends upon the concrete experience of faith, not
everyone can follow him in our era. Grene sees his
concessions to Thomism irreconcilable with his
anti-Thomist rejection of 'proofs of God' as necessary for
faith—the absolute, concrete, given fact of faith coming
first. Marcel thus displays that two-faced, ambiguous
quality to be found in much Christian philosophy: it
offers to deal forthrightly with philosophical issues on the
same plane, but then leaps back into a simple assertion of
the experience of faith, in the declaration that it does not
matter that its philosophical positions cannot be
reconciled.
Jaspers on his part was seeking to use existentialism
to modify the Protestant Kantian tradition. He dealt in
Philosophie with the knowable objective world open to
science: the experienced, but unknowable, process of the
individual's inner history; and the equally unknowable,
yet inexhaustible symbols of cosmic meanings variously
interpreted in culture. Objective reality subjects to rule;
and is knowable by them: existential reality is, withou
rules, absolutely historical. Substance is the permanent in

time, that remains, is neither increased nor diminished.
By contrast, Jaspers discusses a concept he calls Existenz.
Existenz is in the appearance of time vanishing and
starting up ... Existenz has its time, not time as such...
Existentially... there is no objectivity... but there are leaps
and new birth of Existenz in appearance.
Some of the concepts in Jaspers are Kierkegaardian—
for example, the unconditional character of the existential
resolve against the conditioned nature of the objectified,
sensory world. From these he develops the notion of
'boundary situations', in which the contingent facts and
the historical situation of an individual conspire to force
on him an absolute choice: in these boundary situations
'the meaning of our predicament becomes tragically
close'. He deals with four particular ones: death,
suffering, struggle and guilt. In certain moments of
awareness, existence is shattered by the realization of
what it cannot be, but only in these moments does it
come itself as what it genuinely is: the relation of these
ideas to Heidegger and Sartre is clear.
What is different in Jaspers is his emphasis on
communication and transcendence. In the direct
togetherness of two human beings they are striving partly
to realize the fulfilment of their deepest personal reality:
'possible existence' can only become real in union with
another self.
In communication, through which I know myself
touched (getroffen) the other is only this other: the
uniqueness is the appearance of the substantiality of this
being.
The statements of Jaspers on this theme may be
'clumsy', but again we shall see them given substance by
the work of later existentialists such as Viktor Frankl and
Rollo May. We may see how parallel concepts take
Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel 261
substance in art, such as that of Gustav Mahler, and in

this we may find what is wanted: weapons 'against the
somehow sophistical, yet extremely clever dialectic of
Sartre ... the desperate loneliness of Kierkegaard, or the
solitary arrogance of Heidegger.' Grene believes however
that Jaspers lacks 'vitality to carry into any convincing
issue whatever it is that he basically want to convey.'
Jaspers occasionally comes out with a striking
epigram, such as 'Wer nur die Menschheit liebt, liebt gar
nicht: wohl aber, wer diesen bestimmten Menschen liebt.' ('He
does not love at all who loves mankind only: he does
who loves this specific person.') Yet Jasper's writing,
Grene says, reminds her of Edmund Wilson's description
of Hegelian idealism: 'the Abstractions of the Germans...
are like foggy and amorphous myths, which hang in the
grey heavens between the flat land of Konigsberg and
Berlin, only descending into reality in vague truisms and
empty sentimentality', and their philosophies are by
comparison simply 'cheerful but dull'. What alternative,
which is just as urgent and authoritative as the desperate
and sometimes violent solutions of Sartre's kind of
promptings, can be created out of love? The 'old'
existentialism, according to Grene, provides 'no adequate
means of elevating the individual's search for freedom to
the status of a universal principle'. To Sartre, 'what, then,
is a value if not the call of that which is not ye?'
However, Grene goes on:
A value is also the appeal of what has been, and
perhaps one can say, very tentatively that what the
existentialists lack is a conception of something like
tradition or community on which to guard their view of
freedom.
Yet there is no place in Sartre or Heidegger 'for (such)
a general morality to take hold.'
The existentialists' account of the human situation,
their concrete apprehension of the nature of the
value-problem, its nature as a living, inescapable reality

for each individual person, illuminates at many points the
dilemma of ourselves and our time, perhaps even of
humanity. But its very concreteness, the very brilliance of
its insights, preclude a general solution.
The Kantian solution is not a solution because it does
not see the problem. His categorical imperative is to the
existentialists simply the product of bad faith.
This 'old' existentialism does not take us beyond
Nietzsche—faced with the choice between honest despair
or self-deceiving hope. 'We can face the problem of value,
or solve it, never having faced it.'
Existentialism is a courageous and an honest attempt
at a new morality ... once we have faced our freedom and
have seen the absurd necessity of our claim to be more
than things, once we have granted that 'man is
unjustifiable' we cannot consciously and willingly turn to
self-deception for our escape.
However, in the end, Grene sees the 'old'
existentialism as 'only a new, subtler, and more
penetrating statement of our own disheartment, a new
expression of an old despair.'
One writer, whom we have not much discussed, is
Albert Camus, Sartre's friend and colleague. His The
Outsider is on the Heideggerian theme of a man who had
fallen into inauthentic existence, whose life has become
unreal —even the death of his mother leaves him
indifferent. Only the prospect of his death at the end
makes him authentic and brings about the 'return to
existence'.
In Camus's novel it is also quite clear that the hero
has schizoid characteristics, and that again what is being
communicated is a schizoid view of existence. The
insights of the 'old' existentialism may be 'brilliant'; but
they are also products of an inverted morality and a
Karl Jaspers and Gabriel Marcel 263
psychopathological view of the world. When Camus tells

us the world is imbued with a malicious 'absurdity', it is
not merely indifferent to men but actively hostile, this
view has become paranoid-schizoid. The sense of existing
only in the realm of sensations, which one experiences in
The Outsider, is the experience of 'functional man' but it is
also that of the schizoid who feels himself an automaton,
who needs death, and 'being-for-death' to make him feel
human and real.
It is the schizoid individual who sees life as so
meaningless that the basic problem becomes whether one
should commit suicide or not. As did Sartre, Camus
escaped from the emptiness of the heavens and the
horror of one's nothingness by becoming obsessed with
the communion of men, social justice and a 'quarrel with
God'.
To Camus, there were admittedly 'peak experiences'
which people had. However, as Colin Wilson records, he
attributed no significance to them, since they were
'abnormal', and his philosophy was one for the normal
man.
This provides us with yet another clue as to what is
needed. Surely the 'old' existentialism failed because it
failed to recognize the primary realities in man's
existence: love; transcendence in terms of being and in
creating more than his mere quotidian existence; and the
achievement of a capacity for meaningful perception and
effective assertion (not futile or unjustifiable) of his
freedom in the world. The 'old' existentialism may be the
expression of an old despair: but some of the greatest
works of art have swallowed that despair, even
pessimism and nihilism, but still achieved transcendence,
in the sense of meaningfully having existed—King Lear,
for example, and Mahler in his late music.
While Marcel and Jaspers seem to fall back on false
comforts, Sartre and Heidegger, despite their evident
anguish and desire courageously to screw the problem of

existence to its sticking place, seem guilty of pride and
arrogance in their contempt for normal existence and its
positive values, and their subtle and wilful construction
of blockages to every possible creative solution. All that is
left, in the 'old' existentialism, seems to be will—a will to
freedom, but freedom for nothing. We know that this
doesn't fit our experience, and offers nothing to us, in our
quest for meaning and values. For this reason, the 'old'
existentialism fall into sterility and deadness. It persists
mainly in cynical and pessimistic artistic works that seem
to satisfy by conveying a false strength of nihilistic
despair, a new sentimentality, really, that avoids
responsibility to the human problem. Strangely, the best
effects of the 'old' existentialism have been in its
influence in psychotherapy, where it has been modified
by the need to love and care, while from this sphere it
has spread to the general realm of the phenomenological
understanding of symbols and the creative process of
mind. In the 'new' existentialism the investigation of the
creative dynamics of meaning has turned the course of
these philosophies of life towards a new and rich
ontology.
10
Maurice Merleau-Ponty
Maurice Merleau-Ponty was the author of the first

philosophical work in French to have the word
'phenomenology' in the title. He takes off from the final
phrases of Husserl's work, and moves in a very different
direction from that of Sartre. Indeed, these two were
important contestants, Merleau-Ponty being the more
serious and radical philosopher. Them was a time when
they were friends: Sartre intervened on Merleau-Ponty's
behalf at a riot of their classmates in the twenties:
Merleau-Ponty defended Sartre against Marxists such as
Lukacs and Catholics such as Marcel. They collaborated
closely in he Temps Modernes until 1950 or so, but in Tlie
Adventures of Dialectics Merleau-Ponty criticized Sartre's
'Ultra-Bolshevism' severely, and dissociated himself from
Sartre's pro-communism. Sartre and his mistress dropped
Merleau-Ponty's name from their joint publications, and
Simone de Beauvoir made a bitter attack upon him in les
Temps Modernes, declaring that Merleau-Ponty was
dealing with the Sartre of an earlier period, and a
position he had since transcended. However the article
did not answer Merleau-Ponty's real criticisms.
We may go straight to the underlying difference by
examining the in which philosophy and politics are
related. What Merleau-Ponty challenged essentially was
Sartre's diagnosis of the social world as an inevitable
conflict between people who are essentially hostile to one
another, who are 'hell' to one another, in that they
menace one another's freedom: we might say, ad
hominem, his schizoid tendency.
Merleau-Ponty declares, by contrast with Sartre,

'History is other people'. By substituting history for hell,
Merleau-Ponty points not to endless conflict in the world
but to the realization of meaning between human beings.
In the Preface Merleau-Ponty declares 'we are
condemned to meaning'—a statement very different from
Sartre 'we are condemned to 'freedom', implying that we
are obliged to make choices which may be responsible to
'man' but which are essentially futile. The difference, as
Spigelberg emphasises, does not mean that
Merleau-Ponty denied Sartre's doctrine of freedom,
though he contests aspects of his claim for absolute
freedom: it is rather that he places a greater emphasis on
the fact that our existence is 'essentially imbued with
sense'. Merleau-Ponty rejects the doctrine of a
meaningless opaque being-in-itself in a world whose
meaning depends entirely on hviman 'freedom': meaning
is not merely a matter of choice, but is created and is
possible by the activity of reason:
One cannot say that everything has sense or that
nothing has sense, but only that there is sense... a truth
against the background of absurdity, an absurdity which
the teleology of consciousness presumes to be able to
convert into truth, this is the primary phenomenon.
Merleau-Ponty strives to find a new unity between
the objective of the traditional sciences and the
subjectivism of the kind of philosophy represented by
Husserl. He undertakes to reunite the subjective and the
objective in the primary phenomena of the world, as
given in our lived experience.
He challenges the point of departure of Sartre's
phenomenology; the Cartesian cogito in its subjectivism
fan aspect of which, as we have seen, Husserl pursued,
as he believed Descartes had not). Merleau-Ponty set out
to purge phenomenology of this residual Cartesianism,
Maurice Merleau-Ponty 267
while" preserving Husserl's best basic intentions (as we

have seen, Heidegger had tried this, but had fallen into
negative paths, by his particular solution of the problem
of finding the 'other' and sacrificing transcendental
phenomenology in the process). Like Husserl, Marleau-
Ponty began as a scientist, and this means that his
writing is extremely difficult to read (as, for example, by
comparison with Sartre). However his first appointment
at the Sorbonne was in psychology and specifically in
child psychology, so his work has come to be of Special
interest in phenomenological psychology.
Merleau-Ponty's best work is on questions of
perception and sensation, of which he develops
phenomenological reinterpretations. One of his particular
concerns may be linked with Husserl's rejection of
psychologism and seen in relation to Straus's mammoth
work on the rejection of behaviourism. Merleau-Ponty's
first major contribution was the phenomenological
reclamation of the concept of behaviour from its
impoverishment at the hands of a narrow behaviourism.
To him behaviour needs to be examined in its complex
form, taking into account both external and internal
phenomena, consciousness and movement, in,
inextricable interfusion. His major work, The Pheno
menology of Perception, is a philosophical work on
perception following the Husserlian injunction to 'return
to the phenomena'. In it he seeks a way out of the usual
impasse in psychology of perception and sensation, and
he studies perception as the way in which we are related
to the world. Perception is an existential act by which we
commit ourselves to a certain interpretation of the 'sense'
of experience as it presents itself to us. How this
develops from Husserl's phenomenology will be obvious.
Husserl, indeed, appears in the second sentence in
Merleau-Ponty's Preface. Phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty
declares, is the study of essences; and, according to it, all
problems amount to finding definitions of essences: the

essence of perception, or the essence of consciousness, for
example. Yet phenomenology is also an existential
philosophy, which puts essences back into existence, does
not expect to arrive at an understanding of man and the
world from any starting point other than that of their
'facticity'. This word 'facticity' means the factual-being-of
Dasein, being-there-in-factual-existence.
•Merleau-Ponty is with Husserl in declaring that
phenomenology is a transcendental philosophy which
places in abeyance the assertions arising out of the
natural attitude, the better to understand them. This does
not mean that reality is denied: -.it is a philosophy for
which the world is always 'already there' before
reflection begins. All its efforts are directed at
re-achieving a direct and primitive contact with the
world and endowing that contact with a philosophical
status, trying to give a direct description of our
experience as it is. It is searching for a philosophy which
is a rigorous science, but not founded on casual
explanations, or those from objective science.
Phenomenology is also a 'style of thinking' and
existed as a movement before it became a philosophy. It
remains a 'problem to be a hope to be realized', because
methods of applying it have yet to be worked out.
It is a method of describing, not of explaining or
analysing. Its psychology is descriptive, and thus rejects
natural scientistic psychology:
I am not the outcome or the meeting point of
numerous casual agencies which determine my
bodily or psychological make-up. I cannot conceive
of myself as nothing but a bit of the world, a mere
object of biological, psychological or sociological
investigation. All my knowledge of the world, even
my scientific knowledge, is gained from my own
particular point of view, or from some experience of

the world without which the symbols of science
would be meaningless. Merleau-Ponty.
Already we become aware of the similarity between
Merleau-Ponty's point of view and that of others who
have explored the 'tacit' foundations of science, such as
Michael Polanyi. Science is but a 'rationale' or
explanation of the world: it can never have, by its nature,
the same significance qua form of being as the world that
we perceive. A radically different view of myself is thus
required:
I am not a 'living creature', nor even a 'man', nor
again even 'a consciousness' endowed with all the
characteristics which zoology, social anatomy, or
inductive psychology recognise in these various
products of the natural or historical process - I am
the absolute source, my existence does not stem from
my antecedents, from my physical and social
environment: instead it moves out towards them and
sustains them, for I alone bring into being for myself
(and therefore into being in the only sense that the
word can have for me) the tradition which I elect to
carry on, or the horizon whose distance from me
would be abolished ... if I were not there to scan it
with my gaze.
Already, we have an emphasis which, if we accept it,
should radically alter our attitudes to the relationship
between social class, education and background over
crime or mental illness: individuals are never merely 'the
product' of their antecedents or the conditions of their
existence. It is morally inadequate to see human beings
according to scientific points of view, by which 'my
existence' is a 'moment of the world's', not least because
these take for granted the other point of view, namely
that of consciousness, through which 'at the outset a
world forms itself round me and begins to exist for me'.
Every scientific schematiza'tion is an abstract and
derivative sign-language. To return to things themselves

is to return to that world which precedes knowledge.
The relationship of this to the later Husserl will be
evident from the previous section. However, says
Merleau-Ponty, this is not a return to consciousness in
the idealistic manner, of Descartes or Kant, who detached
the subject, presenting consciousness as the condition of
there being anything at all. Merleau-Ponty's method is
'analytical-reflection':
Analytical reflection starts from Our experience of
the world and goes back to the subject as a condition
of possibility distinct from that experience, revealing
the all-embracing synthesis as that without which
there would be no world.
The world is there before any possible analysis of mine:
the real has to be described not constructed or found:
My field of perception is constantly filled with a play
of colours, nojses and fleeting tactile sensations
which I cannot relate precisely to the context of my
clearly perceived world, yet which I nevertheless
immediately 'place' in the world, without ever
confusing them with my day-dreams. Equally
constantly I weave dreams round things. I imagine
people and things whose presence is not
incompatible with the context, yet who are not in
fact involved in it: they are ahead of reality, in the
realm of the imaginary. If the reality of my
perception were based solely on the intrinsic
coherence of 'representations' it ought to be forever
hesitant and, being wrapped up in my conjectures on
probabilities, I ought to be ceaselessly taking apart
misleading syntheses.
However, this does not happen. The real is a closely
woven fabric'. It does not await our judgement before
incorporating the most surprising phenomena, or before
rejecting the most plausible figments of our imagination.
Perception is not a science of the world, it is not even an
act, a deliberate taking up of a position, it is the

background from which all acts stand out, and is
presupposed by them. The world is not an object such
that I have in my possession the law of its making; it is
the natural setting of, and field for, all my thoughts and
all my explicit perceptions. 'Truth does not "inhabit"
only "the inner man", man is in the world, and only in
the world does he know himself.
These quotations are enough to demonstrate the
particular density and complexity of the thought of
Merleau-Ponty. It is more embodied than Husserl, and
his philosophy, like consciousness in it, is 'engaged' in
the world: it cannot and must not detach itself from the
essential 'incarnation' in it. Merleau-Ponty was critical of
Sartre's political activities, however, and his emphasis on
embodiment is not a belief that the philosopher should
rush headlong into ill-considered enterprises. His
problem, says Spiegelberg, is to find a proper balance
between involvement and detachment, of philosophizing
in the world, without becoming engulfed in it:
In this context the figure of Socrates acquires a new
symbolic value for Merleau-Ponty, as that of a
philosopher, neither a revolutionary nor a
conformist, obeying and disobeying at the same time.
This delicate balance characterizes also the ambiguity
of Merleau-Ponty's 'a-communism' in its ambivalent
position between Marxist action and Hegelian
contemplation.
Merleau-Ponty was (as Spiegelberg points out) an atheist
(though not as aggressive a one as Sartre) and yet he wag
positive or 'optimistic' though obviously not the latter in
any sense of placing hopes in the betterment of man's
material life through 'progress'.
The basic difference here is that Merleau-Ponty
cannot accept Sartre's view that the contradictions
between the self and others are beyond remedy. In Sense
and Non-Sense he declares that because of this Sartre's

dialectics is 'truncated' (tronquee). It stops with an
antithesis that cannot be resolved, as we have seen. It is
caught between a Cartesian subjectivity and the 'opacity
of a meaningless objectivity'. To Sartre the synthesis of
consciousness (the for-itself) and being (the in-itself)—a
synthesis that he identifies with the meaning of God—
constitutes a contradiction in terms.
To Merleau-Ponty, the first half of the problem is
soluble: he undertakes to reunite the subjective and the
objective, in the primary phenomena of the world, as
given in our lived experience. Then, without God, he
finds the second kind of synthesis conceivable:
He finds it realised 'every moment under our very
eye in the phenomenon' i.e. in our being-within-
the-world (etre-du-monde—being alive') Merleau-
Ponty's universe is one of potential unity in which
finite sense confronts the contingent, the ambiguous,
and the risky, but where man has a fighting chance to
enlarge the area of meaning.
Without God Merleau-Ponty yet finds the quest for
meaning possible. Here we may make a further
observation. I have suggested that Sartre needed 'endless
violence' as a way of sustaining his sense of meaning and
identity. Merleau-Ponty, in criticizing Sartre for not doing
justice to the 'mediations' between subject and object,
and to the synthesis of history, clearly implies that
Sartre's activism blinds him to a whole range of
phenomena, notably those of unity prior to our
constituting acts.'
Merleau-Ponty's 'embodiment' is a preoccupation
with the embodiment of meaning, freedom and dignity.
His man is not 'waste matter, but a 'radiating centre.
Merleau-Ponty steps beyond Sartre, locked in his
schizoid fear of meeting, and beyond Husserl in his
solipsistic perplexity about 'the other', by declaring

roundly:
There is no difficulty in understanding how conceive
the other ... For the 'other' to be more than an empty
mind, it is necessary that my existence should never
be reduced to my bare awareness of existing, but
that it should take in also the awareness that only
one may have of it, and thus include my incarnation
in some nature and the possibility at least of a
historical situation. The Cogito must reveal me in a
situation, and it is on this condition alone that
transcendental subjectivity can, as Husserl put it, be
an intersubjectivity.
It is possible to develop thus from Husserl Part III a
sense of how we meet other human beings. Indeed, later,
Merleau-Ponty says that the phenomenological world is
not pure being, but the sense which is revealed where the
paths of my various experiences intersect, and also where
my own and other people's intersect and engage each
others like gears. It is thus inseparable from subjectivity
and intersubjectivity, which find their unity when either
take up my past experiences in those of the present, or
other people's.
The account Merleau-Ponty gives of philosophy is
both more concrete and more dynamic than Husserl,
without losing control. It communicates, however, a
sense of the complexity and mystery of existence which
is full of creativity:
We witness every minute the miracle of related
experiences, and yet nobody knows better than we
do how this miracle is worked, for we are ourselves
this network of relationships..
The world and reason are not problematical, though we
my say they are mysterious, yet the mystery cannot be
dispelled by any 'solution'—'it is on the further side of
all solutions:
The unfinished nature of phenomenology and the

inchoative atmosphere which has surrounded it are
not to be taken as a sign of failure. They were
inevitable because phenomenology's task was to
reveal the mystery of the world and of reason.
'Because we are in the world, we are condemned to
meaning, and we cannot do or say anything without it
acquiring a name in history'. Again we have the feeling
that this writing is 'like poetry'.
As we have seen from Grene's discussion of time,
the new philosophies of Polanyi and Merleau-Ponty
move forward beyond the Cartesian myth of total
explicitness and the Cartesian atomicity of time. We have
the 'tension of the act of tacit knowing in which we
attend from the clues which we know only subsidiarily to
the object of our focal attention'. As Spiegelberg points
out, intentionality plays a new role in Merleau-Ponty. Its
main function is to reveal the world as ready-made and
already 'there' (deja la) while later he aims at an
'enlarged' conception of intentionality which applies not
only to our conscious acts, but underlies our entire
relation to the world an our 'comportment' toward others.
Grene, discussing Polanyi's theories, speaks of the
directness of our focal attention as moving from the
proximal to the distal pole of tacit knowing, as a
'reaching out from ourselves to the world - and by the
same token a reaching out from past to future, a reaching
drawn by the focal point of attention, which is future'.
By this account, in which Polanyi and
Merleau-Ponty coalesce, 'knowing ... is essentially
learning ... a telic phenomenon'. Living in time in this
way, exploring the world by reading out into the future,
towards the reality we are striving to know, is 'telic':
'time itself, as lived time, is telic in structure'.
We remember how, in Heidegger, we are drawn

towards a future which is death, and only this (as in
some of Camus's work) can give meaning. A quite
different feeling about- reaching out for meaning in the
time emerges in Polanyi and Merleau-Ponty. In their
work we find Husserl's 'protensions' biting into the
future. This is only possible because of the escape in
phenomenology from the 'atemporal' world of Descartes.
For Descartes, as we have seen there is no stretch of time.
There are only the instantaneous beads of it, each
independent of the other. Even in the picture of the self,
my present consciousness on the one hand res extensa on
the other, we have the 'geometer's vision', 'the vision
that was needed to lay the groundwork of Newtonian
mechanics'.
However this picture is 'false to the root structure of
experience as lived', and it was Merleau-Ponty who has
demonstrated this, by his way of examining embodied
experience:
It is my 'field of presence' in the widest sense - this
moment that I am spending working along with,
behind it, the horizon of the day that has elapsed,
and in front of it, the evening and night - that I make
contact with time, and learn to know its course. The
remote past has also its temporal order, and its
position in time in relation to my present, but it has
these in so far as it has been present itself, that it has
been 'in its time' traversed by my life, and carried
forward to this moment. When I call up a remote
past, I reopen time, and carry myself back to a
moment in which it still had before it a future
horizon now closed, and a horizon of the immediate
past which is today remote. Everything, therefore,
causes me to revert to the field of presence as the
primary experience in which time and its dimensions
make their appearance unalloyed, with no
intervening distance and with absolute self-evidence.
This kind of philosophical writing is like poetry

because of its embodied quality, its attention to whole
experience. But it also conveys a creative attitude to
experience, quite different from (any) that found in the
psychology laboratory:
It is here that we see a future sliding into the present
and on into the past. Nor are these three dimensions
given to us through discrete acts: I do not form a
mental picture of my day, it weighs upon me with
all its weight, it is still there, and though I may not
recall any detail of it, I have the impending power to
do so, I still 'have it in hand'.
Our future is not made up exclusively of guesswork and
daydreams:
Ahead of what I can see and perceive, there is, it is
true, nothing more actually "visible, but my world is
carried forward by lines of intentionality which trace
out in advance at least the style of what is to come ...
(Ibid).
There follow the passages discussed above, around the
subject of Cartesian time. In them, we find that
beautifully expressed concept Merleau-Ponty is
developing, of creative existence in time, 'We are the
upsurge of time'. As Grene says 'Protensions are
temporal arches, curved times reaching back from their
goals to the steps that lead on to them'. Though we
cannot make our time stand still, yet we will make him
run. There is, of course,physical' time, but intentionality
enables us to make something new out of our time.
Merleau-Ponty's point of view, in the chapter on
'Temporality', time is not part of the objective world. Past
and future are dimensions of our own subjectivity: they
can occur in a subject that is a temporal being, but
capable of an ecstatic outreaching of temporality, by an
'operative intentionality' that underlies the intentionality
of the conscious act. This may also be seen as one aspect
of the inseparability of subject and world—a recognition

of interdependence settles the unprofitable controversy
between 'idealism' and 'realism' and replaces it with a
new dynamic—whose account of experience is manifest
throughout literature.
From this doctrine of incarnated but creative
consciousness, where subject and world determine each
other reciprocally, we move forward with Merleau-Ponty
into a reformulation of the existentialist idea of freedom.
To Sartre, freedom is either 'absolute' or non-existent, a
desperate formula which has led to enormous waste, of
radical energy, in 'endless hostility' rather than any
advances in political, or social, or personal freedom.
Sartre's politics have no future.
For Merleau-Ponty the given situation stands for a
great deal more than Sartre's limited concept of man in
the world, which doomed him to develop ever new, but
futile, free choices of new meanings to be negated as
soon as born, by absurdity and uselessness. For Merleau-
Ponty, the given situation is part of the essential
involvement of man as a being within the world.
'Even before any choice is made this situation has
meanings which we may be able to change but not
ignore. We never start from zero'.
As is clear (of course) from any psychoanalytical case
history, we do not make a first and fundamental choice
in any situation, as in the Sartrean paradigm. There is
within us a moral dynamic rooted in relationship and
there are values, embodied in the human world all
around us. It is not only we who choose the world: it is
just as much the world which chooses us.
History forms the background for every act:
Between an objectivist determinism and absolute
freedom of idealist refaction the phenomena
themselves reveal existence as conditioned freedom

within a given style of life.
This we will discuss below, over Marxism, but here it is
important to stress that, whereas in Sartre we have the
feeling that freedom remains suspended in nothingness,
to Merleau-Ponty, 'we are always in the full, in being,
like a face, which even at, rest, even in death, is always
condemned to express something'. We are mingled with
intermixture (in confusion). However freedom lies
somewhere between our engagement' in history and the
disengaging freedom of our acts.
As for Merleau-Ponty's implications for society, the
first approach to the social world is by the
phenomenology of perception, beginning with the
perception of our own body. This body is primarily a
focus of varying perspectives of other human beings. In
Sartre, the other's gaze enslaves me by making me into
an object: the gaze is by no means menacing in
Merleau-Ponty. A gaze can menace, as Merleau-Ponty
makes plain in his chapter on 'The Body in its Sexual
Being' (from which I have quoted passages in my other
books to indicate the way in which, in the violation of
privacy as in pornography, the naked body can be
exploted, and the gaze used to enslave and reduce).' In
Merleau-Ponty there are meanings in the body which
belong to positive inter-subjectivites. In Universities
Quarterly, Autumn, 1974, p.499, Roger Poole quoted this
passage from The Prose of the World:
I am watching this man who is motionless in sleep
and suddenly he wakes. He opens his eyes. He
makes a move towards his hat, which has fallen
beside him, and picks it up to protect himself from
the sun. What finally convinces me that my sun is
the same as his, that he sees and feels it as I do, and
that after all there are two of us perceiving
world, is precisely that which, at first, prevented me

from conceiving the other (autrui) namely, that his
body belongs among my objects, that it is one of
them, that it appears in my world. When the man
asleep in the midst of my objects begins to make
gestures towards them, to make use of them, I
cannot doubt for a moment that the world to which
he is oriented is truly the same world that I perceive.
If he perceives something that something must be my
own world, since it is there that he comes into being.
Poole comments that 'there may be moments in the
history of philosophy where a traditional conundrum is
solved, not by an act of intellection, but by an act of
moral sympathy, and I believe that this is one of them'.
Poole declares that this chapter, 'Dialogue and the
Perception of the Other', are for him a 'liberation';
certainly they move on significantly from the later
Husserl, to make it clear how we find and meet 'the
other' by way of a 'kind of common human
embodiment':
The moment the man wakes up in the sun and
reaches for his hat, between the sun which bums me
and makes my eyes squint and the gesture which
from 'a distance over there brings relief to my fatigue
between this sweating forehead and the protective
gesture which it calls forth on my part, a bond is tied
without my needing the decide anything.
The style of thinking represented by Merleau-Ponty is, as
Poole says, new, refreshing, challenging—even having
charm. His prose is full of great humanness, and in this
conveys a recapturing of that telos in philosophy, which
Husserl believed to have been lost. Poole believes
Merleau-Ponty appeared like a 'new Aristotle, offering us
the method and style of two thousand years of thought
to come'. This is so because, with Husserl, he represents
the:
final break with Cartesian rationalism, and showed

us how to embark on the study of those immense
and complex problems of meaning, language the
body, signs, intersubjectivity which face us, the
problems which we have recently come to recognize
as authentically our own.
The Prose of the World a posthumous work, deals with the
relationship between language and expression. It declares
first the embodiment is the primordial condition of all
language, all expressiveness whatever. 'It is through the
fact of our embodiment that we recognise the signs of
others and bestow meaning upon their words, acts, and
intentions'. Secondly, all language transcends the signs in
which it is expressed:
The actual brute written characters are only black
dots on the page, but we 'intend' their meaning
down over them, giving them a meaning,
interpreting them on the basis of our common
humanity with the subject who wrote them. Likewise
with the world of signs of our fellow men because
we know what it is like to be a human being,
incarnated in a subjective tissue of lived behaviours,
and therefore find no difficulty in according a sense
to what we see coming from others.
This kind of approach to 'linguistics', arising evidently
out of the tradition of existential phenomenology, is
evidently very different from the approach to truncated,
lopped off, fragments of language of logical positivism,
or linguistics of the structural kind. Incarnation and
intentionality are the central dynamic concepts.
In Merleau-Ponty is also found a delicacy, a 'respect
in front of the sayable and unsayable' noticeably
'missing' from the 'intrusive and superior assertiveness'
(as Poole calls it) of the 'objective' behavioural linguistics
experts and sociologists:
Aware of his own subjectivity and embodiment as a
controlling factor in the analysis, the

phenomenological analyst proceeds with caution and
deference in the face of a task which is complex and
daunting.
One hopes that this delicacy and respect may find its
way back into literary criticism, and into the teaching of
the arts. So, too, one hopes that the deeper motive may
find its way there:
For underlying all the analyses of differential
elements in style, and the infinite signifying
possibility of any one word, phrase or brush-stroke,
we recognise that there is a profound meditation on
human freedom itself, the freedom to choose
signification from a mass of inert particulars which
lie around us only waiting to be deployed by an
embodied subject.
In this Merleau-Ponty penetrates to the very faculty of
making signifying choices which even thinkers such as
Chomsky takes for granted. For Merleau-Ponty is not
really dealing with what we know as 'language' at all,
but, unlike modem linguistics, he is dealing with the
incarnation, the embodiment, which makes all
expressiveness possible in thee first place.
Everything refers back to he body. The body itself, of
course, the actual flesh and blood, is not what is of
interest, but the body as a signifying and freely
choosing sign. The body is a cluster of meanings, a
mode of expressiveness, which brings a world into
being and includes others into its meaningful sphere.
The body of other people in the world does the same
for us. We are constantly cutting across the edges,
the envelopes so to speak, of other people's bodily
expressiveness... interception, meanings... And our
own body, similarly wrapped in its own cocoon of
meanings, established our meanings in the world,
meanings which are picked up in a kind of criss
cross dialectic by other embodied counter-subjects in
the wofld.
This embodied intersubjectivity is better understood

by animal ethology in the study of the lions or baboons
than it is in the study of linguistics by those who study
'broken off language, in analytical philosophy or
linguistics.
As Poole insists the central thought-dimensions,
which differentiates all phenomenological thinking from
all behavioural, psychologistic or objective' thinking, is
the concept of intentionality. It is this assertion that a
world is brought into being by the kind of intentionality
brought to bear upon it, which makes the
phenomenological investigation so rich, and links it, with
the problem of freedom. Phenomenology assumes the
creative presence of human freedom or perception and
thought:
Intentionality is, crudely spelled out, the presence of
freedom in meaning conferring in the perceiving
subject. The subject as observed by the
phenomenologist confers meaning on the world, and
in doing so, implicitly aserts his freedom.
This brings us finally, in discussing Merleau-Ponty, to
politics. It is strange how little discussion (at least in
England) is given to the political significance of the
conflict between Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, and the way
in which the latter simply fell into a dead silence, while
the former sank deeper and deeper into pointless
schizoid activism.
Sartre recounts how Merleau-Ponty, meeting Simone
de Beauvoir, said 'But I am more than half dead'. He was
at the time distressed by the death of his mother in 1952.
This grief was added to his feeling that he could not be
true to a Marxism that would not remain true to itself,
and, if one could not honestly be on the Left, where
could one be?
Maurice Mcrkau-Ponly 283
Sartre had tried to humanize Marxism. He criticized

what he regarded as 'dogmatic Marxism'. While firmly
adhering to basic Marxist teachings, he thinks that the
majority of modem Marxists have distorted Marxist
doctrine, so that no place is left in it for the individual.
He accepts Marx's view that 'the mode of production of
material life generally dominates the development of
social, political and intellectual life' - 'without
reservations'. However he rejects the narrow
interpretation of this by Marxists, and tries to introduce a
little existentialism into Marxism. Man is not a product of
conditioned reflexes - a passive product of his
environment. Because the accepted that he is, says Sartre,
Marxist dogmatists have Marxism of its human content,
and this requires an 'existentialist intervention'.
The main task of existentialism, as Sartre saw it, was
to humanize Marxism, to find a place in it for the
individual. Marxism is the 'dominant philosophy' of our
age and all existentialism can hope for is an enclave
inside it. As soon as Marxism has incorporated the
human elements it ignores at the moment, it will have
ended its task.
Philosophically, Sartre's position is absurd, for he
did not give up the Marxist conception of historical
materialism, and this leaves the individual no role, and
no freedom to do anything other than accept what the
dogmatists tell him. Of course, Marx said that the
dialecetical laws of history work through human praxis.
Sartre picked this up and asserted that praxis is an
assertion of the human need to 'surpass the present,' to
project oneself towards what is not yet realized or
achieved. In praxis man projects oneself towards future,
towards his own possibilities. He transcends the
immediate conditions of his existence and tries to
improve or change those conditions.
Sartre then introduced the concept of 'scarcity'.

There will be a time when all those conditions which'
limit our freedom are overcome. However, as we have
seen, Sartre's belief as an existentialist was that the quest
for freedom ontologically speaking was for ever doomed.
There was a permanent and unbridgeable gap within the
for-itself due to the for-itself's lack of 'coincidence with
itself: the ponr-soi, projecting itself constantly towards its
self-completion' self-fulfilment, is destined to remain for
ever unable to finish itself. The coincidence with itself
can never be achieved, and the for-itself within
consciousness can never become something else. Freedom
is conditioned by this for ever futile striving for what can
never be realized, because the for-itself is 'unobjectifiable'
and 'lacks' itself as an object. To overcome this 'lack'
would mean destroying freedom: freedom and scarcity
go hand-in-hand.
The whole goal of Marxism, taken to justify its
offences in the meantime to values and freedom, is an
end in which freedom will come to pass. Freedom is a
historical category, and the goal is the emancipation of
man from his alienation in the existing class structure.
Real freedom cannot be achieved before the structures of
society has been radically changed and the conditions of
scarcity overcome. However, this would mean the end on
freedom, by Sartre's account, another hnis clos.
How shall these views be reconciled? Of course,
they cannot. Moreover, Marxism regards its goal as one
from which no individual can deflect it one jot. The
contradictions of capitalism inevitably lead to the
overthrow of the ruling class, and the establishing of a
classless society. Only then will man be free. This makes
man simply a product of 'economic and class forces':
when the structure is changed, the superstructure will
automatically make freedom possible. In this historical
materialism, existentialist talk of how man should not be
Maurice Mcrknu-Ponty 285
made into a thing, or its emphasis of freedom as the

primary essence of man, is so much nonsense, and will
be ruthlessly brushed aside as 'idealism'. Certainly, when
we move beyond Sartre's nihilistic ideal of being I
condemned to freedom' ' to Merleau-Ponty's 'condemned
to meaning', we find the whole question of giving
meaning to the world brutally denied by the Marxists.
There is no meaning for them (with their 4 scientific'
approach to history) except the subjugation of all facts,
values and meanings to the certain ultimate goal of a
'classless society' in which, by some magic, all the old
human woes of inauthenticity will disappear: a belief a
reading of Alexander Solzenhitzyn's The Cancer Ward or
For the Good of the Cause (one might suppose) should
dispel for ever and ever.'
If I am free, or can be free, what sense is there in
talking of historical necessity? Of course, a better
economic organization might bring a wider choice: but it
could also lead to a life which could be intolerable
because of its lack of meaning-, and what of the
relationship between man and nature in general? The
tragic problem, and that of meaning?
As Pivcevic says:
The problem, briefly, is this: if we are really free,
then Marxism is not necessary. We may choose to
adopt Marxism, but we need not do so, and no one
has the right to blame us for not choosing it. Nor
indeed can anyone prove us 'wrong'. If, however,
Marxism is the voice of history itself, as Sartre
assures us then our opposing it makes no sense. The
only sensible thing to do is to accept it. But what
remains, in this case, of our freedom?.
This is Sartre's dilemma. What freedom is there in praxis,
if the end is determined anyway? He has no answer to
such questions. Surely we must see that in its belief in a
Golden Age, Marxism is simply a version of
bourgeois-capitalist belief in progress an optimistic faith

that mere melioration of our material circumstances will
make our lives happy, meaningful and free at last? Of
course, when in the mass people are living in misery a
goal of a decently ordered, fair society is primary -
simply so that man can begin to be men. In Africa this
primary struggle for basic rights is going on now. We
know too well the contradictions of capitalism, its
unfairness, and the way in which it makes it difficult or
impossible for men to find their free roles and realize
their potentialities. Certainly, it would seem, we need a
new politics which is not deterministic, and which
recognises the primary needs of being.
In Merleau-Ponty's politics, history forms the
background for every free act. Freedom can only be
exerted within, a given life style. According to Marxist
objectivism, the revolutionary movement is a matter of
strict determination: according to Sartre, political decision
and action are a completely free project. According to
Merleau-Ponty, the rise of class- consciousness in the
revolutionary project emerges from a realization of the
situation by existing individuals who see themselves as
working men in typical communication with the world
around them. There is an experience of a certain style of
being and of being-within the-world. The transition to
class consciousness takes place when workers sense a
solidarity between themselves and others. 'Social space
begins to polarise itself, one sees a field of the exploited
group taking shape'. The revolutionary project is not the
result of a deliberate judgment, but a decision 'ripens in
co-existence before erupting in worlds an relating itself to
objective goals'.
Merleau-Ponty's freedom starts from the situation in
which I exist and over which I have no control. My
choice is at first not a conscious one but a pre-conscious
or existential:
It is I who give a direction, significance and future to

my life, but that does not mean that these are
concepts [concus]: they spring from my present and
past, and in particular from my mode of present and
past coexistence..
It is never possible to distinguish clearly the part of the
situation and the part of freedom. 'We are mingled with
intermixture' (Ibid). There is an ambiguous situation, b^t~
this does not abolish the fact that there is tBe~
'engagement' of history together with the disengaging
freedom of our acts. -,-^K
It is clear from Merleau-Ponty's subtle and delica^"
concept of the free self in the world, between what must-'
be accepted, and what must be claimed in terms of one's
one meanings, that he must in the end come info
collision with the essential determinism of dialectical
materialism and Marxist 'objectivity'. His
phenomenology points to a new politics, but it is one that
is likely to be too human for those who find palatable
Sartre's schizoid intellectual structures, despite their
confusion. As Spiegelberg says, Sartre's existentialism is
incompatible with any type of orthodox dialectical
materialism: yet he sought to reform Marxism, even
bringing up to this task his perverse idolization of moral
inversions, perversion and criminality in Jean Genet,
whose Journal d'un Voleur he calls 'the history of a
liberation'. As Polanyi points out, for Sartre and Simone
de Beanvoir it was the ruthless moral inversionists who
became their moral heroes, because their (schizoid) purity
exposed 'bad faith' and 'the bourgeois hoax' of society's
values.
This liberation, based on pseudo-male doing, itself
rooted in hate, was a dead end. Merleau-Ponty fell into
silence, confronted by the problem of the massive
destruction of freedom by Marxism. Yet his work is an
embodiment, incarnation, and engagement, in relation to

freedom, and really far more seminal than Sartre's ideas
only given time for them to be absorbed and understood.
He asked for a politics greater in perspective than that of
the 'class struggle' or the achievement of the 'dictatorship
of the proletariat', requiring a new and more creative and
meaningful relationship between men and the whole
world, rooted in being, and concerned with the meeting
of freedoms.
Metaphysics begins, he says, from the moment,
when, ceasing to live in the evidence of the object -
whether it is the sensory object or the object of science -
we apperceive the radical subjectivity of all our
experience as inseparable from its truth value. It means
two things to say that our experience is our own. Both,
that it is not the measure of all imaginable being in itself,
and that it is none-the-less co-extensive with all being of
which we can form a notion. Here Merleau-Ponty's sense
of the duality of the cogito runs parallel to Winnicott's
emphasis on the mixture in us of union and separateness.
My experience, precisely as it is my own, makes me
accessible to what is not myself, that I am sensitive to the
world and others.
Merleau-Ponty expresses his own positive sense of
'encounter'. The recognition of an individual life in
oneself, which seems absolutely individual and
absolutely universal to me, animates all past and
contemporary lives and receives its entire life from them,
'of a light which flashes from them to us' - this is
metaphysical consciousness. Metaphysical consciousness
has no other objects than those of experience: this world,
other people, human history, truth, culture:
But instead of taking them as all settled, as
consequences with no premises, as if they were
self-evident, it rediscovers their fundamental
Maurice Merledu-Ponty 289
stangeness to me an the miracle of their appearing.

The history of mankind is then no longer the
inevitable avent of modem man ... it is not empirical,
successive history but the awareness of the secret
bond which causes Plato to be still alive in our
midst.
Merleau-Ponty suggests that we should not see rivalry
between scientific knowledge and metaphysical knowing,
for metaphysical thought 'continually confronts the
former with its task'. A science without philosophy would
literally not know what it was talking about.
To do metaphysics is continually to verify the
discordant functioning of human intersubjectivity, 'to try
to think through to the very end the same phenomena
which science lays siege to, only restoring to them their
original transcendence and strangeness'. As we have
seen, induction has been found to be baseless. What,
then, about 'reflection', which means so little to the
analytical philosopher? Merleau Ponty suggests that it is
questionable whether two ways of knowing are really
involved at all: is there not 'rather one single way of
knowing, with different degrees of naiveteor
explicitness'? This is a point that reveals how close
Merleau-Ponty is to Polanyi, and is more refreshing to
the poet who is also concerned with 'metaphysics in
action':
The glory of the evidence such as that of successful
dialogue and communication, the common fate which
men share and their oneness, which is not merely a
biological resemblance but is a similarity in their most
intimate nature—all that science and religion can
effectively live in here brought together and rescued from
the ambiguities of a double life.
Index
A Case for Scepticism, 2 Education and Philosophical

A Short History of Existentialism, Anthropology, 14, 29, 109
75 Eliot, George, 239
A Treatise of Human Nature, 36 Escape From Freedom, 82
All port Gordon, 68, 71 Existential Philosophical in the
Anglo-saxon garden's, 11 Journal of the History of Ideas,
Anna Karenina, 67 74
Baerends, G.P., 67 Frankl, Viktor, 19, 63, 260

Being and Time, 103 Free Action, 12
Berdayev, Nicholai, 115 Fromm, Erich, 82
Beyond Nihilism, 44
Binswanger's, Ludwing, 138 Galileo, 16, 214-215
Braith waite, R.B., 17, 38 Gendlin, Eugene T., 72
Brentano, Franz, 68 General psychology according to the
Brink, Andrew, 90 critical method, 139
Buber, Martin, 26 Genet, Jean, 173, 287
Buytendijk, F.J.J., 45 Gilmore, Parry, 90
Gogh, van, 114
Cartesian-Human Scientific Goldstein, Kurt, 73
Philosophy, 17 Grene, Elsewhere, 16
Cassirer, Ernest, 22-23
Clinical Studies in Heidegger, Martin, 5, 11
Phychopathology, 48 History of the Psychoanalytical
Coleridge, ST., 45 Movement, 138
Colling wood, R.G. 9, 52 Husserl, Edmund, 1, 25-26, 205
Concluding Unscientific Post script, Husserl, Eke, 45
75
Crabbe George, 115 Idea for a pure phenomonology and
Critique of Dialectical Reason, 92 phenomenological philosophy,
208
Deweys, John, 38 In the Hands of the Living God,
Dodds, E. R., 25 84
Dream and Existence, 13
29 1
Index
International Kraepelin Madal Power and Innocence, 79

(1956), 13 Principles of Psychology, 70
Introduction to Problems of General Process and Reality, 9
Psychology, 138
Rheta, Flora, 84
Jamps, William, 68, 70 Riesman's David, 82
Jaspers, Karl, 256 Ritchie, A.D., 24
Rogers, Carl, 68, 72
Khan, Masud R., 63 Russell, Bertrand, 38
Koestler, Arthur, 20 Ryle, Gilbert, 10
Kuhn, Roland, 68
Saunder's, wilbur, 45
Langer, susanne, 24 Sein and Zeit, 141
Lawrence, D. H., 239 Skinner, B. F., 180
Le Temps Modernes, 151, 265 Smithies, J.R., 20
Love and Will, 79 Solzenhitzyn's, Alexander, 285
Ludwing Binswanger, 13 Spiegelberg, Herbert, 29
Stern's, Karl, 29, 93
Mahler, Gastav, 6, 43, 261 Strauss's, Erwin, 12, 73, 151
Man's Search for Himself, 73 Strick land, Geoffrey, 46
Marcel, Gabriel, 64, 256 Suttie, Ian D., 109
Maslow, Abraham, 29, 89 Suttie, Ian D., 87
May, Rollo, 107, 260 Sybil, 84
May, Rollo, 29
Melden, A.L., 12 The Adventures of Dialectics, 151
Mental Health and Human The Assayer, 16
Conscience, 48 The Cancer ward, 285
Mill, John Stuart, 68, 258 The Colours of Rage and Love, 84
Milner, Marion, 84 The Courage to Be, 73
Minkowski, Eugene, 88 The Crisis, 208
The Ecology of the Voyage of the
Naevestad, Marie von, 84 Beagle, 251
Natorp, Paul, 139 The Gay Science, 78
The Hands of the Living God, 48
On Liberty, 258 The Idea of Nature, 52
The Idea of Phenomenology, 208
Paterson, R.W.K., 102 The Lonely, 82
Phenomenology and Teaching, 90 The Meaning of Anxiety, 73
Philosophy and Psychoanalysis, 47 The Natural History of the Mind, 24
Philosophy in a New Key, 24 The origins of Love and Hate, 109
Polanyi, Michael, 120, 155 The Phenomenological Movement, 65
Polanyi, Michael, 8, 17 The Phenomenology of perception,
Poole, Roger, 1, 278 153
Popper, Karl, 51 The Phenomenology of Perception,
Portmann, Adolf, 17 57
292 Philosophical Anthropolog}/
The Primary world of Science, True and False Experience, 14

203 Turner, J.M.W, 239
The Prose of the world, 165, 278
The Western Philosophers, 8 Uexkull, Johannes Von, 23
Therapeutic consultations in child Unger, Peter, 2
psychiatry, 84
Thorpes, W.H., 251 Whitehead, A.N., 9, 32
Tillich, Paul, 68, 73 Wilson, Colin, 221
Todorov, Tzvetan, 43 Winnicott, D.W., 45, 111
Tomlin, E.W.E., 4, 8 Wisdom, John, 47
Towards Deep Subjectivity, 1 Wittgenstein, Ludwing, 11
Darshan Singh Maim is professor
of Anthropology in Montreal. He
received his Ph.D from Yale Uni
versity and has carried out ar
chaeological research in Europe.
His current interests embrace the
comparative study of ancient civi
lizations and the history of archae
ology.
Professor Maini has received vari
ous awards including the Caxton
Contemporary Archaeology for his
sustained contributions to the so
cial sciences.
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The Encyclopaedia of Anthropology deals with the nature

gain insight by the studies that others make of us and

We all know that we find ourselves faced with such

which give all human life its concrete structure: love,

detachment from common sense could only be spun in

However, it is not possible to solve all problems by

Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas ... will

In the light of this definition of philosophy, there

world. In our lives we are treated in many ways he

As we shall see, 'continental' philosophy offers an

of this club, and you had to accept a certain language and

possible —by abandoning the long servitude of

conclusions, and by the unflagging energy with

rapprochement between his later philosophy and

needed metaphysics, which must undertake a revisionary

movement that Spiegelberg traces and of which I gave a

of grasping what kind of philosophical alternative is

It will be obvious that what is required is the

evaluation of truth. R.B. Braithwaite virtually confesses

confront us on all sides. But it includes also our feelings,

the scientist and technologist do is by no means accepted

which they seemed to be either an automation of

question being? How am I qualified to begin this

This kind of problem, of the participation of the knower

theoretical problem but an imminent threat to the

in man a third link which we may describe as the

Humanities do so because we believe that our work has a

simple recognition that certain very real things in our

insights obtained in the long exchanges between therapist

since they arise from the intensity of the struggle to grasp

paradigms. In my previous book I summarised her

chopped-off artefacts, amputated from the existence of a

Polanyi have declared, science can answer none of our

'causal efficacy' and 'presentational immediacy'. The

interpreted cannot come from the facts themselves but

discussion of man's cultural and moral being must seem

This mystic relation of observation, theory and

well as with all those dark, intractable, embodied,

This concept of knowledge as built out of units of

wholly dependent on Hume's principles: logical

of un-inferred knowledge must consist not only of

Scientific method, I suggest, consists in eliminating

Hume's system there is an implicit denial of 'a more than

'continental' philosophy and its relevance to such subjects

scepticism, this kind of literary theory tends to make it

The T is not there, engagi ig with the world through

literature is made up'? Analysis of the new kind

from an essay by H.P. Grice on 'Meaning', in which he

beauty in pictures and music, are as much alterations in

Throughout one's life there are many siftings to be

physics or chemistry: their 'thisness' is of a different

In our education and through our cultural atmosphere

as it did for the Greeks, the investigation of the subjective

and machine, but between nature and historical process.

Today scientists (operating from a different

The idea oi teleology should not be misunderstood:

To be sceptical of teleological approaches is still

seems to confirm the general philosophy of existence