KOYRE, A. Present Trends of French Philosophical Thought

Present Trends of French Philosophical Thought

Alexandre Koyré

Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 59, No. 3. (Jul., 1998), pp. 521-548.

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Alexandre Koyre'

Introduction by Paola Zambelli

The paper that is published here for the first time was read to the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research by Alexandre KoyrC, probably during one of his first trips to the United States as a visiting professor in the fall of 1946 or in the fall of 1950.' Given its content and the secondary literature he quoted, the paper seems to go back to the end of 1946, when eight lectures were announced in the Bulletin of the New Scho01,~ but KoyrC probably read only the first of them, deciding to postpone the later ones, because the other subject chosen for his 1946 seminars at the New School ("Les philosophes et la machine") gained more interest and grew longer. He came back to the New School in 1950 to give some lectures on existential-

' We know from the Annuaire de la <5tme> Section des sciences religieuses <de 1'~cole des Hautes ~ t u d e s > (1947-48), 69-73, that in October-December 1946 Koyrk was invited by the Graduate Faculty of the New School, where he had taught courses during his exile (1941-45). In 1946 he announced there two courses, but he postponed the first one on "Contemporary French Philosophy" and gave only the second one on "Science and the Modem World." It appears likely that his essays "Les philosophes et la machine" and "Du monde de l'ii peu pr&s ii I'univers de la prkcision" (Critique, 1948) originated in these lectures. In this period Koyrk also visited the Theological Seminar of the University of Chicago (where he spoke on "The Actuality of Plato's Political Thought"), and he gave lectures at Columbia University, Harvard University, The Uni- versity of Notre Dame, St. John's College in Annapolis, and Swarthmore College.

The New School for Social Research, Bulletin, 4 (1946): "Dr. Alexandre Koyrk, professor at the Sorbonne, will give two courses (in English) this fall, of eight lectures. The courses, 'Present Trends in French Philosophical Thought,' and 'Science and Technics in the Modem World,' will be open to the New School as well as graduate students." The first course (with the subtitle "Existentialism, Personalism, and Rationalism: 8 Lectures Beginning in October. Dates to be announced"), was cancelled in Bulletin number 7, whereas the other one was "expanded to 15 lectures": given the title of the present manuscript and the fact that the lectures announced are 16, it is likely that this paper might have been read as the sixteenth lecture in 1946.

521 Copyright 1998 by Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc.

Alexandre Koyre'

ism in France, but this time he was the guest of Horace Kallen.3 But we read in this paper that Koyr6 had spoken in a series of seminars organized by Albert Salomon. It was determined that Koyr6 should speak on a broad subject-not only on Sartre's existentialism, but also on French philosophical trends in general in the first year after the Second World War. His American listeners were obviously interested in hearing about Sartre, Camus, Merleau-Ponty, and the development of the new existentialist school in France.

The result was that Koyr6 prepared a long paper--one that began by mentioning philosophers who had died in the War and the Resistance and concluded with an analysis of Sartre's ontology and ethics. In the archives of the Centre Koyr6 in Paris there are three originals of this paper: a longer manuscript which, though earlier in date than the other two, is more complete and provides the basis of my edition, and two shorter typescripts, possibly prepared by the author's typist with a view to publishing the piece in an American journal. In the first of the two typed versions several sentences, names, and words are missing in the typescript but were inserted into the text by an unknown hand. The second of the typescripts is complete in these points, but its preparation was interrupted for unknown reasons, and the copies (an original and two carbons) bear a final handwritten note: "Le texte s'arrCte 18." Happily, the present manuscript version continues to the paper's original conclusion.

Perhaps Koyr6, having temporarily mislaid the last pages of the manuscript among his many notes, decided not to publish the paper: The omission from the

The New School for Social Research, Bulletin, 8 (1950), n. 6, as a guest of Horace Kallen's course on "Basic Problems in Philosophy." The lectures were announced for 13 and 27 October and 17 November 1950: "Alexandre KoyrC: New Approaches in France to the Problems in Philosophy."

The manuscript consists of 15 sheets, some made up of strips glued together. As is always the case in the Archives KoyrC, located in the M u s k d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, it has no shelfmarks. Two partial typescripts are each of 12 pages. In response to my inquiry Professor Pietro Redondi and Mme BCnCdicte Bilodeau said they had not copied the MS when preparing for the 1986 KoyrC congress, and the air-mail sheets used for the two typscripts look aged. I am obliged to exclude from my edition some additional MS sheets containing single words or names. Clearly these were notes taken in the course of the discussion, because they mention two New School professors (Gumbel, Lowe). There is also a series of quotations translated into English from Sartre's L'ttre et le ne'ant (Paris, 1943) which had been prepared in Paris before Koyr6's trip (there is also a French MS copy of them) to be used in the seminar's discussion. The only scholar to hint at the existence of this paper, which is mentioned together with Koyr6's 1946 article in Critique, is GCrard Jorland, La science dans la philosophie. Les recherches e'pistemologiques de A. Koyre' (Paris, 1981), 132-33. Cf. Walter Kaufmann (ed.), Existentialismfrom Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York, 1956), and his "The Reception of Existentialism in the United States," in The Legacy of German Refugee Intellectuals, ed. Robert Boyers (New York, 1972). In this paper (first published in Midway, 1968) he does not mention KoyrC's lecture, but at several points seems to follow KoyrC's ideas (on Schelling's and Kierkegaard's great importance for twentieth-century existentialists; on Sartre's literary gifts; on Sartre and existentialism becoming popular, because people read his novels and plays instead of L'ttre et le ne'ant or Heidegger, etc.). I thank Prof. Roger Chartier, director of the Centre Koyr6 (Archives KoyrC) in Paris, who in his letter of 5 November 1996 very kindly authorized me to print this edition.

523 French Philosophical Thought

body of his published work is regrettable, since this is one of the few papers in which KoyrC took a position on contemporary philosophical problems. On the basis of his deep knowledge of Husserl's and Heidegger's philosophies, he was able to give a serious interpretation of Sartre. In dis- cussing Sartre, KoyrC predominantly used Sartre's polemical lecture L'existentialisme est un humanisme, read, and published in 1946 as a response to Catholic and Marxist critiques. This was certainly a simpler text than the bulky but more authoritative L'Ztre et le nbant. And perhaps it was to avoid taking this latter work in his suitcase that KoyrC-as he often did-prepared a selection of fundamental passages for his American trip, copying them first in French and then making what was their first translation into English (published below in an appendix).

No doubt, after five years of exile, KoyrC wished to familiarize himself with the work of contemporary thinkers, both French and German. Indeed, he had already been doing this, since just before the lecture in New York, KoyrC took part in a private debate with Jean Wahl, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Blin, Maurice de Gandillac, and Gabriel Marcel on the subject of Heidegger's philosophy. The last two speakers, together with KoyrC himself, published their papers from the exchange in a journal and later in a volume introduced by Wahl. In his contribution KoyrC emphasized Heidegger's ideas of "con- cern [Sorge, souci]" and of "being unto death [zum Tode sein]," writing that "Heidegger's man is a man without metaphysics and without religion." De Gandillac instead criticized KoyrC, since he saw in Heidegger "une perspec- tive essentiellement riligieuse." Gabriel Marcel, meanwhile, foung Hiedegger's "being unto death" to be ambiguous, and he connected it with the experience of death that had shadowed youth during World War I. For Marcel, the specificity of Heideggers concept made his philosophy seem less than universal, and so he preferred Sartre on this point.5

Also at this time Koyr6 was publishing in Paris an important essay on "L'Cvolution philosophique de Martin Heidegger,"6 in which he analyzed and translated passages of On the Essence of Truth, which was published by Heidegger more than ten years after he had presented it in 1930 at Bremen, Freiburg i.B., and elsewhere.' KoyrC attributed to On the Essence of Truth

"Un debat sur la philosophie de I'existence," Dieu vivant, 2 (1946). 121-26, repr. in Jean Wahl, Petite histoire de l'existentialisme (Paris, 1947),66ff, which also includes papers by Nicho- las Berdiaeff, Georges Gumitch, and Emmanuel Levinas.

Alexandre Koyr6, "L'Cvolution philosophique de Martin Heidegger," Critique, 1 (1946), 73- 82, 161-83. Koyrt wrote often in this journal in its first two years. It was founded by Georges Bataille, Eric Weil was its secretary, and Koyr6 was on the editorial board. I quote from the version reprinted in Koyrt, ~ t u d e sd'histoire de la pens6ephilosophique (Paris, 1961), 247-77.

'Koyr6 had reviewed Heidegger's Vom Wesen der Wahrheit (Frankfurt a. M., 1943) in the journal Fontaine, 952 (May 1946), 8 4 2 4 : "<L>'existence de l'homme, son Dasein, s'est av6r.k impuissante de porter le poid de I'ontologie fondamentale dont M. Heidegger a voulu le charger. De m e impuissance, ivrai dire, on se doutait d6jh depuis longtemps ...la non-publication du deuxikme

524 Alexandre Koyre'

not only "an important place in the work of M. Heidegger," but "an important stage in the evolution of his thought" and of his terminology. How- ever, KoyrC's criticism was sharp. Worse than with the traditional "reified" terminology of philosophy, KoyrC thought that in the language of Being and Time, which he called "revealing" [originellement de'couvrante], there was the possibility that Heidegger's philosophy would degenerate into a Gerede (i.e., "mere chatter [b~vardage]").~ A translator cannot reproduce "the perpetual word-play" of Heidegger, he wrote.g KoyrC analyzed several cases and traced their historical origins: Vorhandeheit in Being and lime is a "degradation" of Zuhandenheit, proving that Heidegger drew his inspiration from the pragmatists and from Henri Bergson.lo Maurice de Gandillac, who in the 1930s worked together with KoyrC in his seminars at the ~ c o l e des Hautes ~ t u d e s and was always very close to him, had just published his "Entretien avec Martin Heidegger" in Les Temps modernes. In the article he stated emphatically that the German philosopher was pleased that his work was untranslatable and that his main ideas were never exactly understood."

KoyrC, however, had been the first philosopher to call attention to Heideg- ger in France and to publish translations of some of his texts. In the Surrealist journal Bifir he wrote an interesting preface to Henry Corbin's first translation of Heidegger's What is Metaphy~ics?,'~ and in the first issue of his own jour-

volume de Sein und Zeit ne pouvait s'expliquer que par des raisons internes, B savoir par I'impossibilitt de tenir la promesse imprudemm&t donne% dans le premier."

KoyrC, Etudes, 249; cf. ibid., 256, n. 4: "<L>a terminologie de Vom Wesen der Wahrheit difRre profondCment de celle de Sein und Zeit. Ainsi on n'y trouve plus ni la Sorge (souci), ni le in-der- Welt-sein ..., ni la triade Bejindlichkit ..., Verstehen...et Rede, ni m&me la Geworfenheitet le Entwur f . . . M. Heidegger ne communique pas la raison de ces changements terminologiques. I1 se peut que elle se trouve dans son Ctude de Holderlin; mais il se peut Cgalement que M. Heidegger se soit a p e r p que la terminologie 'originellement dCcouvrante' de Sein und Zeit pouvait se transformer en 'Gerede' (bavardage) avec beaucoup plus de facilit6 encore que la terminologie 'rCifiCe' de la tradition. En effet la terminologie CsotCrique des oeuvres de M. Heidegger a certainement contribuk B leur popularit6 Ctonnante. L'CsotCrisme est plein d'attraits .... Plein de dangers Cgalement. Ainsi M. Heidegger s'est plaint rCcemment de n'avoirjamais--ou presque-CtC compris. Son cas illustre donc bien la thtse selon laquelle 'la diffusion d'une doctrine philosophique est fonction directe du nombre des contre-sens que I'on peut commettre B son sujet.' "

Ibid., 260, n. 3. l o Bifur, 8 (June 1931), 5-8. ' I De Gandillac, Les Temps modemes, 1 ( 1 946),713-16. See 715: ''<I>1 se sait intraduisible

et parle avec ironie d'une transcription japonaise de son oeuvre, entreprise nagukre sous les auspices de I'axe Berlin-Tokio. Est-ce la faute d'une langue CsotCrique? A I'en croire, personne n'aurait exactement dCcelC le vrai sens du Dasein."

l 2 Ibid., 252, n. 2: "L'outil ne devient chose que lorsqu'il est cassC ...On a B peine besoin d'insister sur I'origine pragmatiste et bergsonienne des conceptions de M. Heidegger. I1 faut remarquer toutefois que le travail ne forme pas une structure essentielle du Dasein: il n'est pas faber."


nal, Recherches philosophiques, he published the translation of The Es- sence of Reasons (Vom Wesen des Grundes).I3 But all that had happened before 1933.

In 1929 at a very early date for the diffusion of Sein und Zeit, Koyr6 invited Heidegger as a speaker at one of the famous conferences at Pontigny. That time he did not come;14 when the German existentialist came finally to France after World War I1 Koyr6 decided not to attend his lecture. "Hei- degger never went to France till 1955 .... This (Heidegger) meeting was a success: Gandillac, Gabriel Marcel, and a lot of other people attended. Some Catholics, Jean Wahl and, of course, I myself did not go there."I5 It was a political decision, because KoyrC's interest in Heidegger's philosophy was still alive. Soon after returning to France in 1945 Koyr6 had written to Wahl and Leo Strauss: "I am reading books (lots of Heideggerian stuff. All the youth here is e~istentialist)."'~ Among "the philosophy books that appeared during these year the most important, i.e. most spoken about are 'existential philosophy' <ones>. By the way, Heidegger wrote a letter to Brehier asking for news and practically offering c~llaboration."'~ In 1946 KoyrC wrote to Richard McKeon: "Everybody-the younger generation- is existentialist. Everybody talks and writes about Heidegger. Even I have had to yield to social pressure and deliver a paper on this s~bject."'~

In fact it was KoyrC who condemned and made known Heidegger's Nazism outside of Germany-a revelation that came as a surprise only for Victor Farias and his many readers. Thus Emmanuel Levinas later wrote:

l 3 Recherches philosophiques, 1 (193 1 -32), 83-124. l4 I quote from an unedited letter sent by Paul Desjardins to Koyrk on 4 June 1929 (for which

thanks to Mme Yvon Belaval), on the "prkparation" of the Dicade and on the six speakers sug- gested "h commencer par Heidegger. Croyez vous vraiment qu'il pourrait venir? Le rencontre de ce mttaphysicien avec des physiciens anglais tels que Whitehead ou Eddington serait grosse de r6vClations." Heidegger did not take part at this "dkade" (1-1 1 September 1929), whose title, Imago mundi nova. Imago nulla. Un univers sans figure et le courage de vivre, makes me think of From the Closed World and Koyrt's later works. Cf. Paul Desjardins et les Dicades de Pontigny. Etudes, tkmoignages et documents inidits, ed. A. Heurgon Desjardins (Paris, 1964), 406.

l5 Koyr6, Letter to Herbert Spiegelberg, Films-Waldhaus, 10 August 1956 (Paris, Archives Koyrt): "He was invited by Mme Anne Heurgon, daughter of Paul Desjardin, to Cerisy-la-Salle (Manche), achateau which she owns and where she organizes 'Recontres,' i.e. meetings of philosophers, artists, writers and so on."

l6 University of Chicago Library, Special Collections, Archives, Leo Strauss: Letter from Paris, 28 October 1945. Cf. Koyrt, Letter to J. Wahl, Paris, 8 August 1945 (Paris, IMEC: Institut pour la mkmoire de 1'6dition contemporaine): "Tout le monde ici est existentiel.Sartre, Merleau- Ponty, Polin, Tout le monde fait de la literature."

I' University of Chicago Library, Special Collections, Archives, Leo Strauss: Letter from Paris, 15 August 1945.

l8University of Chicago Library, Special Collections, Archives: M. Keon Papers: Letter from Paris, 7 May 1946. Cf. note 5 above.

Alexandre Koyre'

I learned quite early on-perhaps even before 1933-and certainly after Hitler's great successes at the time of the election to the Reichstag--of Heidegger's sympathy for National Socialism. It was the late Alexandre KoyrC who spoke to me about it for the first time, on his return from a trip to Germany.I9

Additionally in a 1946 review of On the Essence of Truth, KoyrC, as proof of Heidegger's "blindness," quoted "his hope, expressed in the famous Rektoratsrede, that Hitler's revolution, that the storm brought by it on the whole world, breaking the schemes of all-days existence, of Chatter (Gerede), of Fuss (Affairement), of common sense, will make possible an existence in danger and 'in the Truth.' "20

In 1946 KoyrC and Hannah Arendt were in agreement about Heideg- ger's responsibility for his political actions. In an article published in Parti- san Review2I-but changed when published in German in 1948,22 she wrote:

As is well known, he <Heideggen entered the Nazi Party in a very sensational way in 1933-an act which made him stand out pretty much by himself among colleagues of the same calibre. Further, in his capac- ity as Rector of Freiburg University, he forbade Husserl, his teacher and friend whose lecture chair he had inherited, to enter the faculty, because Husserl was a Jew. Finally, it had been rumored that he has placed himself at the disposal of the French occupational authori- ties for the re-education of the German people.23

In this period, Arendt, who had not yet visited her earlier lover and thus had not yet fallen again under his spell (as would happen in 1949), was

l9 Cf. Emmanuel Levinas, "Alexandre Koyd avait averti les frangais," Le Nouvel Observateur, 22-28: 1 (1987), 82. Cf. Victor Farias, Heidegger et le mzisrne (Paris, 1987). Cf. Koyd, l?tudes, 272, n. 1: "cO>n comprend bien comment M. Heidegger a pu, d'ktapes en Ctapes, en reduisant la masse des 'hommes historiques,' en aniver B identifier 1"homme historique' et donc le Da-sein avec la 'race arienne,' le 'peuple allemand,' Hitler, et, sans tomber dans le biologisme, devenir Nazi."

20 Koyr6, review of Heidegger (see n. 8 above), 844: "De 18 son espoir-insens6 sans doute et absurde, mais rien n'Cgale la perpicacit6 d'un philosophe si ce n'est son aveuglement-espoir, exprim6 dans sa fameuse Rektoratsrede, que la rCvolution hitlkrienne, que la tem@te qu'elle souffle sur le monde, en brisant les cadres de I'existence quotidienne, du bavardage, de I'affairement, du sens commun, rendra possible une existence dans le danger et 'dans la v6ritC.' "

21 Hannah Arendt, "What is Existenz Philosophy?'Partisan Review, 13 (1946), 34-56. 22 Arendt, Sechs Essays (Heidelberg, 1948). 23Arendt, Essays in Understanding 1930-1954,ed. Jerome Kohn (New York, 1994), 187. Cf.

De Gandillac, art. cit. notes 11, 12, and 24. Cf. note 16 above, on Heidegger who tried to get in touch with French professors in 1945.


very strict with Heidegger. She was too strict even for the taste of Karl Jaspers, as one can see from their corresponden~e.~~

During 1931-32, Koyr6, on the other hand, had not hesitated to speak of Heidegger as "a star having a brilliance of the first order in the philosophical heaven of germ an^."^^ To him Heidegger was "not an author of ephem- eral influence and celebrity," like some recent German cases. "The glory and influence of M. Heidegger are phenomena of a completely different nature from an infatuation (engouement)-as sudden as it is fleeting-for a Spengler or for a Keyserling." His works, "long-ripened and long-medi- tated (longuement mliries et longuement me'dite'es)," "have the mark of a strong, original, personal philosophical thought." "<C>ontrary to what is usually said, Heidegger's challenge is not at all to search for 'a reconciliation between transcendentalism and intuitivism, between historicism and absolutism,' Dilthey and Kierkegaard, Bergson and Husserl." KoyrC did not think highly of "reconciliation and synthesis (conciliation et synthdse)" in philosophical work. If

Heidegger's philosophy has become the meeting place (le point de repdre) towards which all that matters today in German philosophy tends and draws itself up, it is perhaps because he has been the first to dare, in this epoch of aprds-guerre, to bring philosophy down from heaven to earth, to speak of ourselves, to speak-in philosophy-of very "trivial" and very "simple" things: of existence and of death, of being and of nothingness; because he has been able to pose once more the problem of gnbthi seautdn, the problem of self and the problem of being: What am I? And what does "being" mean?26

As a student and friend of Max Scheler, Koyr6 appreciated these analyses of "trivial" problems, and he underlined that Heidegger's works were writ-

"Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers, Briefwechsel, ed. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner (Munich and Zurich, 1985), 60,especially Arendt's letters of 6 June and 6 July 1946. Jaspers-still unaware of Arendt's and Heidegger's intimate relationship-observed that when asking Husserl not to enter University buildings Heidegger had simply forwarded a circular. Arendt replied that his duty should have been to resign instead of sending this order to Husserl. It is possible that an after- thought caused her to suppress these lines in Sechs Essays.

Koyrt, preface in Bifur, 8 (1931), 5. Note that there is some irony in Koyrt's quoting this definition given by Fritz Heinemann, Neue Wege der Philosophie (Leipzig, 1929), since according to Heinemann, Heidegger "n'est m&me pas une Ctoile: c'est un soleil qui se ltve et qui de sa lumitre klipse tous ses contemporaines," i.e., "un de ces grand gtnies mttaphysiques qui marquent de leur influence une @node toute entihe." In the anonymous notes on the authors published by the Surrealists of Bifur (193 l), 169, one rezds on Heidegger: "Un des philosophes les plus importants de 1'Allemagne. A fond6 la philosophie du ntant. On raconte qu'il en eut la rtveiation grace ti la pratique du ski."

26 Bifur, 8 (1931), 6.


ten during the first ten years after the First World War. Possibly, KoyrC thought that in the previous decade in Germany Scheler had been an origi-nal and brilliant philosopher on these subjects, even if less systematic than Heidegger. The short and serious preface printed in Bifur caught the attention of at least two old Husserlian friends of Koyr6, Edith Stein and Hedwig Conrad-Martim2'

It was probably on account of his political aversion that from 1933 to 1946 Koyr6 did not write about Heidegger. But he kept himself up to date by reading Heidegger's works and also by corresponding with Corbin, Heidegger's first French translator who, staying in Germany, could visit him.28

Existentialism was a theme widely debated in Europe and especially in Paris at the end of World War 11. In the journal Europe, Henri Mougin observed that Heidegger was "like a god in France," because in the space of two months he had been interviewed five times.29 As a commuter between New York and Paris, Jean Wahl started once more to write on Heidegger and on the other "existentialists" in accordance with his own pre-war inter- e s t ~ . ~ ~Already in 1945, in the first issue of Les Temps modemes, the journal of the existentialist group, Merleau-Ponty wrote a review-article on "La querelle de l'existentialisme," in which he noted the silence that had surrounded Sartre's L'Ztre et le nkant, a silence which he declared "fin-

27 Edith Stein, Werke(Freiburg i.B., 1985), VIII, 123, Letter to Hedwig Conrad-Martius of 13 November 1932: "Haben Sie die kleine Heidegger Einleitung von KoyrC indessen bekommen?"

Zs Koyrt? to Henry Corbin, letter s.d. <February 1 9 3 6 ~ "Avez-vous correspondu avec Heidegger? Irez-vous le voir?" in Cahiers de ['Heme, 39 (1981) (="No sp6cial H. Corbin"), 330; ibid.:"cliParis> on HCgClianise et on Platonise. Et I'on est de plus en plus existentiel. A tel point que j'organise une contre-attaque. La contre-attaque (celle de Bataille) semble se disperser ne sachant pas ce qu'elle attaque-les attaqubs, en outre, ne se sont pas aperqus du fait (ni avant, ni aprks)." Koyrk speaks here of Georges Bataille, "Le Labyrinthe," Recherches philosophiques, 5 (1935-36). 364-72. The original of this and other letters are kept by Mme Stella Corbin, who very kindly permitted me to quote them.

29 Henri Mougin, "Comme Dieu en France. Heidegger parmi nous," Europe, 24 (April 1946), 132-38. I have already cited (n. 11 above) the very critical interview by De Gandillac, who noted that Heidegger still had no knowledge of the fundamental book by De Waelhens on his own thought (cf. note 33 below), as well as recent French works by Raymond Polin and Brice Parain. "Nous lui rappelons I'importance d'un Jean Wahl, d'un Gabriel Marcel." Gandillac refers to Heidegger's hope that "en raison de sa cClCbrit6 exceptionnelle, serait invitC prochainement, non seulement 2 Baden, mais 2 Paris. Naturellement les milieux 'rCsistants' de Fribourg s'indignent de cette magnanimitk." He mentions also Heidegger's politics: "le nouveau recteur de Fribourg, peu de temps aprks avoir signifiC li Husserl son arrgt d'exclusion, subit-il 2 son tour une sorte de dCmi- disgrlce qui lui sert aujourd'hui d'alibi." In the same issue of Les Temps modernes, l4 (January 1946), 717-24, Alfred de Towamicki published an interview very favorable to Heidegger as a political m a n - o f which de Towamicki was told to be simply the translator.

Cf. Jean Wahl, Existence hurnaine et transcendance (Neuchltel, Etre et penser. Cahiers de philosophie, 6, Juin 1944). Later Wahl would publish what KoyrC regarded as "un livre dkcisif': Vers la fin de l'ontologie. Etudes sur l'introduction dans la mttaphysique par Heidegger (Paris, 1956).

2'"

French Philosophical Thought 529

ished now, at the end of the war."3' After an article discussed here by Merleau-Ponty, the Marxist Henri Lefevre published his book on L'Existen- tialisme in 1946.32 From Louvain, Alphonse de Waehlens, who had already published a serious monograph on Heidegger in 1942,33 continued to write on Heidegger and Sartre in the new journal D e ~ c a l i o n . ~ ~

Another important exchange (after the two interviews pro and contra by de Towarnicki and de Gandillac) was published in Les Temps modemes. Karl Lowith published there an essay he had written as a private document in 1939, while he was also writing My Life in G e m n y Before and During the Third Rei~h,3~ and De Waelhens and Eric Weil responded to L o ~ i t h . ~ ~ Lowith asked why Heidegger had found during World War I1 "that large audience among the French intellectuals (cette nombreuse audience parmi les intellectuels francais)," and he set out to reconstruct Heidegger's political thought almost entirely on the basis of his "speeches and lectures," beginning with a serious analysis of the Rektoratsrede and even using some letters Heidegger had sent to his student L o ~ i t h . ~ ' His main thesis

"Maurice Merleau-Ponty, "La Querelle de I'existentialisme," LQs Temps Modemes, 1 ' (Oc-tober 1945), 344-56, which refers to discussions on Sartre by Gabriel Marcel, J. Mercier, and Henri LeRvre.

32 Henri LeRvre, L'existentialisme (Paris, 1946).Not much later Georg Lukacs's writings on existentialism were published and translated into French.

"Alphonse De Waelhens, La Philosophie de Martin Heidegger (Louvain, 1942),who was critical (IX) of the previous translations by Corbin, which included only short passages from Sein u n d 2 i t that he judged "henni:tiques."

"Alphonse De Waelhens, "Heidegger et Sartre," Deucalion, Cahiers de Philosophie. Edition de la revue "Fontaine," 1 (1946), 15-37; see 22:"C'est un mCrite essentiel de I'existentialisme fran~aisque d'avoir compris d&s le Joumal me'taphysique de Gabriel Marcel, qu'on ne saurait dtfinir I'existence humaine par ]'&re dans le monde, si I'on ne s'applique ii dkterminer le sens exact de notre corportitt." Here De Waelhens quotes "la philosophie du corps propre" of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty's Phe'nominologie de la perception. See also 34:"Sartre adresse ii la conception heideggerienne du n h t une objection capitale et, semble-t-il, bien fond&: il reproche ii Heidegger, d'abord de n'avoir pas vu au contraire de Hegel que I'esprit est le nCgatif ou en langage phtnomtnologique que le Dasein ne saurait &tre source du nCant sans &tre lui m&me ntantisant. I1 est incontestable que Heidegger n'a pas t t t jusque lii. Voici qu'apparait en pleine lumikre ce par quoi Sartre s'karte dkisivement de Heidegger."

''Karl Lijwith, "Les implications politiques de la philosophie de I'existence chez Heidegger," Les Temps Modemes, 214(November 1946). 343-60, esp. 359:"La fascination que Heidegger a exerct depuis 1920par sa rtsolution au contenu indetermink et par sa critique impitoyable n'a pas quitt6 sa personne et I'influence de son enseignement se fait sentir un peu partout.; 360:"la vtriti: de la pdsente existence allemande se trouve toujours, et m&me plus que jamais chez Heidegger en ce qui concerne la philosophie, chez Karl Barth pour la thblogie et chez Spengler pour la philosophie de I'histoire."

Alphonse De Waelhens, "LaPhilosophie de Heidegger et le nazisme," LQs Temps mdernes, (May 1947). 115-27; Eric Weil, "Le cas Heidegger," ibid., 128-38. "Lawith, "Les implications:' 343:"<L>es implications politiques immCdiates, c'est-&-dire

nationales-socialistes de la notion heidegenienne d'existence ... vont bien au d t l i de la personne d'Heidegger." "La possibilitt de la politique philosophique de Heidegger n'est pas nCe ii un 'dtraillement' qu'on pourrait rtgretter, mais du principe m&me de sa conception de I'existence qui combat B la fois et assume 'I'esprit du temps.' " Liiwith admits (357)that Heidegger did not follow

530 Alexandre Koyrk

was "that the immediate political (national-socialist) implications of Heideg- ger's notion of existence" have a historical meaning which did not con- cern only Heidegger himself.38 Lowith admitted Heidegger's greatness but announced his piece as "a defence of Heidegger's philosophical importance and a condemnation of his political attitude."

In the early postwar period Koyri was extremely interested in the texts of Heidegger and Sartre and in current discussions of them. But by 1961, when he reprinted from Critique his article on "L'Cvolution philosophique de Martin Heidegger," the interest had faded: he decided not to write on Heidegger's evolution in his most recent writings, "especially as regards its surpassing of metaphysics, so that it ends by making man the 'shepherd of being.' "39

Department of Philosophy, University of Florence.

racist (biologist) and antisemitic thought, but his conclusion is (359-60): "<C>e n'est pas que Heidegger n'ait pas Ct6 un representant distingue de la dvolution allemande, mais qu'il I'a CtC dans un sens bien plus radical que MM. Kriegk et Rosenberg."

Ibid.,344: "<C>em&me homme ii la pens& si actuelle a pourtant assimile dans son oeuvre la philosophie grecque et la thkologie scholastique. Son savoir il le tient de premikre main, pris aux sources m&mes." 347: "cL>'tlement primordiale de son action ne fut pas chez ses disciples I'attente d'un nouveau systkme, mais au contraire I'ind6termination du contenu et le caractkre de pur appel de sa lqon philosophique ....Le nihilisme intkrieur, le 'national-socialisme' de cette pure dsolution devant le NCant restaient d'abord caches sous certains traits qui permirent d'imaginer une preoccupation dligieuse."

39 Koyr6, ~tudes ,247ff; see 277, in a "Postscriptum," he refers to De Waelhens's and Wahl's books. Koyr6's attitude in the 1950s can be seen in his unpublished letters to Hedwig Conrad- Martius (Munich, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Archiv der Bayerischen Phhomenologen), in which, on 22 September 1954, he offers congratulations for the "Phsjlomenologische oder Philosophische Gesellschaft" established in Munich: "Esfreut mich ...dass die Phsjlomenologie nicht mit Heidegger identifizierd wird. Nun ist er vollig ungeniessbar geworden. Leider ist sein Einfluss machtig. Es wird in Frankreich immenv2ihrend iibersetzt. Selbst die letzten Sachen. An die Sorbonne halt man Vorlesungen iiber ihn. Grbslich! Und Husserl is nur als Transzendentalphenomenologebekannt: Cartesianische Meditationen und die Ideen ist alles was man von Ihm weisst. Daneben noch Jaspers...." Cf. Koyrk's interesting letter written 10 January 1957 to invite her to a Colloque de Royaumont "eine Woche lang iiber Husserl zu diskutieren ...Wichtig ist es aber nicht. Nur in der Sinne dass die 'alte Garde'4ottingen-auch vertreten sein sollte. Nicht nur die Freiburger und die Heideggeraner." See also an undated letter ~ 1 9 3 2 ~ "Ihre [Conrad-Martius's] Besprechung Heideggers hat micausserordentlich gefallen. Sie haben natiirlich sofort das tiefsten gesehen. Aber: ist nicht die ganze Wucht Heideggers darinn, dass es Atheismus ist? Trotz der abgestandenen Theologie, deren es in Sein undZeit zu vie1 ist? Es ist, so scheint es mir, der ersteversuch die Zeit wirklich ernst zu nehmen ohne auf die Ewigkeit zu recumeren. Ich glaube nicht dass, Sie recht haben ihm vorzuwerfen "die Thiiren" aufgemacht und sofort zugeschlossen zu haben. Er hat sie eben weit aufgemacht und unter ihnen eben das Nichts aufgefunden. Es kann natiirlichds ist ihm alles zuzuhauen-auch Gott wiederentdecken. Aber dann hort er auf bedeutend zu Sein."

French Philosophical Thought


Alexandre Koy re'

This is a rather large subject, so you will not be astonished that I shall not treat it in its entirety. French philosophy during the years of war and occupation was pretty active. Though there were some heavy losses: the death of Brunschvicg, <whose> posthumous book [...I, He'ritage de mots, he'ritage d'ide'es,' a book written when Brunschvicg was in hiding, and a book as "clear and serene as that of Condorcet," has appeared after the liberation of France; the death of Halbwachs, of Politzer, of Cavaillks, of Lautman shot by the Nazis, of others less well known ...; there was the ban on publications by Jewish authors, yet, in spite of this, there has been a surprising number of interesting and even important publications, both during and after the war.

It seems that for the elder generation of French philosophers-and that applies not only to philosophers, but to scholars in general-for the generation of men too old to take an active part in the underground movement-work, as if nothing happened, has been in the same time a means of escape and a means of resistance. They felt themselves <to be> asserting a spiritual tradition that could not be destroyed, and should not be destroyed, and should not be endangered by such contingent "accidents" as Vichy government or even the Gestapo.

Thus there have been a new translation of Plato by Robin, books on Plato, on Aristotle, on the medieval (Gilson) and modem philosophy etc., books on philosophy of science, books on sociology, psychology, logic (MCray, Serms): philosophy of religion, translations of philosophy classics. At the first glance <at> the bibliography of this period (Lavelle, Le Senne, Bachelard, Gilson, etc.) you could have the impression <of> wandercing> in a familiar landscape: yet this would be a completely false impression, because as a matter of fact, this familiar landscape has been completely upturned by the upsurge of existentialism and the revival of Catholic philosophy

Koyd never reviewed his text for publication, and since the English presents a number of problems (especially in the autograph version, which is the only one that survives for the first [lo- l l , 1.21 and last pages [19,1.1 Iff] of his paper), I have made corrections only in a few necessary cases and indicated my changes or additions with the signs < >, my omissions with [ I . There are a few notes or additions by Koyrk, which are indicated by parentheses (notes by KoyrC).

I Published in Paris, 1945. Charles Serms, Essai sur la signification de la logique (Thkse pour le doctorat d'Ctat, Paris,

1939); Idem, Traiti de logique (Paris, 1945).


(Fe~sard,~De Lubac, Blondel, Nedoncelle, G. Marcel). Under this double impact everything--even the "climate" of philosophy-has changed. Philosophy has become a socially <mighty> phenomenon.

Neither Catholicism nor existentialism are, of course, specifically French intellectual movements. Catholicism is universal ex definitione, and as for existentialism, though French existentialism possesses some specific fea- tures that distinguish it from and even oppose it to the German one, fea- tures that can probably be explained by different national traditions- Descartes, Pascal-it, too, is no more French than it is German. Existen- tialism as such is <a> European by-phenomenon, a definite phase of Western philosophical thought (and European thought, European civilization, at least until the recent-perhaps successful-attempts to destroy it, has been a unity). It originates more than a hundred years ago with Maine de Biran and Kierkegaard, and only has been rediscovered by the twentieth century now. Two thinkers that have been nearly completely neglected by the 19th century-but the 19th century, at least the second part of it, has been a dark age for philosophy-and after the rediscovery or simply the discovery of Kierkegaard in the 20th, it spreads, in Kierkegaard's wake, from country to country with the usual speed or delay with which ideas travel today. Thus existential philosophy has been, first, developed in Germany in the '20s and '30s by Heidegger and Jaspers, then-Kierkegaard having been translated into French during the long armistice between the World Wars- in France, some 15 years later.4 I have heard, by the way, that Kierkegaard has been, or is in the process of being translated into English. So, it is possible that in some 15 or 20 years you will have an existentialism in this country.

But to return to France, the rise or upsurge of existentialism has been extraordinarily rapid. It was simultaneous with Husserl's phenomenology<'~> becoming known in France (Husserl's last work, Meditations Car- tesiennes, being the text of the lectures he gave in the Sorbonne in 1929, which is now available only in the French translation): from Husserl to Heidegger!

The influence of Kierkegaard became decisive for Germany. In France, where Kierkegaard became known somewhat later, his influence joined that of Maine de Biran and Pascal. Thus, in France the trend of Heidegger toward an existential philosophy has been made already in the 1920s by

Father Gaston Fessard, La mithode de rejlexion chez Maine de Biran, supplement to Cahiers de la nouvelle journie (Saint-Amand, 1938).

Maine de Biran had been edited in the same time (note by Koyrk). Cf. Kaufmann, 'The Reception,"78: "Before World War Two, Kierkegaard was not widely known in the United States, but David Swenson and Walter Lowie had began their translations of his books; and by 1945 most of them, including all the major works, were available in English."


Gabriel Marcel and Jean Wahl. In the '30s the movement has been reinforced by the influence of phenomenology, Husserl first, then Heidegger. We may mention too, the works of Chestov-a work against philosophy in the name of religion.

In the '40s what ha<d> been a tendency became a flood. One is tempted to speak of a landslide, or of a flood-and it is certainly one of the most characteristic traits of the philosophic situation of today. By stating that everything is changed by the upsurge of existentialism, I do not want to say, of course, that all, or most, of the French philosophers have suddenly become existentialists (disciples of Jean-Paul Sartre). Philosophers don't change positions as easily as that, and the opposition to the existential philosophy is very strong. The academic circle is overwhelmingly hostile to it. So are the Catholics. So are the Marxists. But the younger generation- at least those who are not Marxists-is deeply influenced by it and therefore, in spite of the hostility and opposition I have just pointed out, the existentialism spreads and even infiltrates into the enemy camps. Thus two of the most gifted representatives of the school, Merleau-Ponty5 and Polin: have already been appointed as professors in the Universities of Lyon and Lille. Thus the Catholics, instead of holding against the error of existentialism the truth of Thomism, become themselves infected by the new way of thinking and either try to oppose to the atheist existentialism of Heidegger and Sartre, as Gabriel Marcel, a Christian existentialism-that of Pascal and St. Augustine--or even, as Prof. Gilson, in the latest edition of his well known book on St. Thomas, tr<ies> to explain to us that the Doctor Angelicus has been already an existentialist in the best and truest sense of the Only the Marxists are neither infected nor infiltrated, and either explain the existentialists away as easily as everything else, or more simply condemn it as Hitlero-Fascism (because its chief representative, M.

Just after his doctorat d'ktat Merleau-Ponty got a chair at the University of Lyon in 1945, and he stayed there until 1949, when he was hired at the Sorbonne and later at the Colltge de France.

Raymond Polin, after his doctorat d'Ctat in 1945, became professor at the University of Lille from 1945 to 1961, and later at the Sorbonne. Usually he is not considered an existentialist, but in his thkse d'ttat, La criation des valeurs (Paris, n.d. [1944]) he mentions and discusses Heidegger (12, 162-63,278) and also Husserl(3,20-21,69-67,85,108-9, 121, 125,228) and Scheler (38, 77-78,92-93, 136, 139-40, 149-50, 179-80,206,209) often.

'E. Gilson, Le Thomisme. Introduction c i la philosophie de Saint Thomas dlAquin, 5e Cd. revue et augmentke (Paris, 1945). chapter VII: "L'esprit du thomisme": after some long quotations from Maritain: "Rappeller que la philosophie thomiste est existentielle, dans le sens qui vient d'stre expliquC <par Maritain>, c'est s'opposer ?i la tendance trop naturelle qui Forte I'esprit humain ?is'en tenir au plan de I'abstraction" (506-7), Gilson concludes: "11 est donc vrai de dire qu'en ce premier sens la philosophie de Saint Thomas est existentielle de plein droit" (310-1 1). He does not identify Aquinas with Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Jaspers, "dont les tendances ne sont d'ailleurs pas toujours convergentes." "En tant que mktaphysique de I'exister, le thomisme n'est donc pas aussi une philosophie existentielle, il est la seule, et toutes les phCnomCnologies en qu&te d'une ontologie semblent inconsciemment mues vers elle comme par le dCsir nature1 de leur ultime justification."

Alexandre Koyre'

Heidegger has been a Nazi) or Trotskyism. <Be that> as it may [...I, the plain fact is that, in present day France, everybody every-where is speaking about existentialism. Not only professional philosophers-I mean professors and students of philosophy-but also the infinitely larger (and socially infinitely more important) literary circles. Articles about exis-tentialism appear not only in philosophical r e ~ i e w s . ~ (This is, for France, a quite unusual situation.) Philosophy, at least for the last 100 years, has always been in France an internal affair of philosophers, according to the rule: philosophica philosophis scribuntur, philosophers write for philos-ophers. The public at large-probably because philosophy is taught in the high schools and this teaching confers to the students a high degree of immunity-has never paid much attention to their writings. The tremendous interest for existential philosophy of the non-philosophers is therefore something quite new and can, in my opinion, be explained only by the concomitant influence of quite a series of factors:

1) the rather widespread dissatisfaction with the academic philosophy, even before the war. Both Bergson and Brunschvicg, with their idealism and optimism, seemed rather inadequate, inactucels>. The world as it is did not seem to fit into their categories; they seemed not to be able to give an answer to the most burning questions of the day. This feeling, that existed already before the war-Prof. Wahl's acute criticism of all traditional philosophy, the spread of phenomenology, the influence of Kierkegaard- was naturally reinforced by the experience of war and resistance. For the younger generation the theoretical life became an impossibility. Praxis has been felt as more important than theory.

2) the quite exceptional gifts of the leading spirit of French existentialism Jean-Paul Sartre, as gifted a philosopher as a novelist, playwright or political writer, has enabled him to translate his philosophy into literature-and literature has always played the most important part in French intellectual life-and to present his worldview and his analysis of man in the same time not only under the form of a highly technical, abstruse and difficult book L'itre et le neant, but in that of very successful novels and plays.9 This double and even treble presentation-a phenomenon nearly unique in the history of philosophy-has certainly a great advantage and contributed largely to make existentialism a socially important factor of French intellectual life. But it has some disadvantages, too: it is, even for the author, impossible to translate hard philosophical thinking and subtle analysis into images; such a translation is, of necessity, a mistranslation.

"As a matter of fact the philosophical reviews are mostly talking about something else, but <there is lot of talk about it> in literary magazines, in weekl<ie>s, and in newspapers: even the Monde (the Paris Times)has published an article on existential philosophy. So, by the way, has the New York Life" (note by KoyrB).

"Cf. Simone de Beauvoir, Camus, Caillois, G.Marcel" (note by KoyrB).


Now, in spite of the fact that Sartre's philosophical books have repeatedly been sold, very few people have read them-nor those of Merleau-Ponty and Polin-and, accordingly, the current image of Sartre's philosophy, as given by his novels and plays, is quite distorted. This "literary" presentation of existentialism has, moreover, led to the classification as "existentialist" of some writers, such for instance as Albert Camus. Camus, from the point of view of literary ability, is probably the most gifted of all French writers today, and though his essays, published under the title, Le mythe de Sisyphe,lo as well as his beautifully written novels and plays express the same nihilistic and pessimistic world-view as Sartre-the world is absurd and meaningless-yet as he is not a philosopher proprie dictu, and does not share the philosophical tenets of existentialism, he cannot be considered an existentialist in the strict meaning of the term.

3) that this world-view, this sentiment and this analysis of human life and being, as given by existentialists, in their black pessimism and utterly disillusioned and uncompromising nihilism are particularly consonant with his and our epoch-being, in fact, nothing else than an auto-interpretation of modem man, for whom (as Heidegger puts it) "being in the world 'is' being not at home" and who, in the same time, has no "home" outside of the world, because outside of the world there is nothing. Camus speaks about the "absurdity" of the world in which man is a perpetual "stranger" (his most impressive novel has this title)." As for Sartre, the world and being itself, not only the contents of the world and the things that are, but the very fact of being, appear to him as "absurd, superfluous, and therefore disgusting and nauseating."

4) finally, we must state that whereas academic philosophy reduced its questioning to partial problems, the existentialists, especially the French ones, in their interpretation of man and man's being, attempted, and this with great courage and energy, to deal with the central problem of philosophy (which according to Kant, who after all knew about philosophy, can be boiled down to) <i.e., to deal> with the question: What is man? Now, always according to Kant, this question implies, or is equivalent to three others, viz., What can I know? What may I hope? What must I do?, and it is interesting to note that whereas existentialists, generally speaking, give practically the same answer to the first two questions, i.e., <grant>ing12 to man knowledge and denying him all hope, they differ deeply in respect <to> the third. Namely, whilst the German existentialists, especially Heidegger, calls us finally to resignation and acceptance, the French existentialists have very seriously tried to give a positive answer to the terrific question of how to live and

loPublished in Algiers, 1942. ' I Albert Camus, L'etranger (Algiers, 1942). l2Koyr6.s MS: "according,"as in French: "en accordant."


what to do in midst of an absurd world; an answer which, as we shall see, is not so very different from that which was given us by classical philosophy, an answer that extols action and freedom.

The third of the four points I have just mentioned has very often <been> dealt with. Most of the critics of existential philosophy (in Germany as in France) have pointed out and tried to explain it or to explain it away-as the expression of the desperate situation of modem man, i.e., of the man who, having lost both God and the God-created cosmos, feels himself utterly lost or a homeless alien, in an hostile and meaningless world, in which he has nothing to fall back upon: nothing is left to him but his own precarious, finite, mortal and therefore meaningless and "nothingness" existence-or more con- cretely, as the Marxists do explain existentialism, as the expression of the dissolution of the bourgeois-capitalistic world and of the desperate situation of the European middle classes, that, having lost not only their earthly belongings but even all hope to recover them, and thus confronted with the "nothingness" of ruin, fall back, so to say, on their existence, <the> last piece of property of which they still are owners. Marxians add usually, that is just the time lag in the ruin of the bourgeois <and> capitalistic-economy in Germany and in France that explains the time lag in the spreading of existentialism in these two countries, and sometimes, as for instance Prof. del Vayo13 in one of the last issues of <The> Nation, opposes to the pessimism of the intellectuals the healthy optimism and realism of the working classes, as well as the fact that existentialism did not achieve any popularity in Russia. I would like, therefore, to point out that these explanations cannot be considered as criticism and cannot be used for the purpose of explaining away the factual analysis of human existence as given by "existential" philosophers. The "homelessness" of modem man is not a vicious distortion of a normal human attitude, and it is useless to oppose to him the Cosmos of the Greek or the God-created world of Thornism: unfortunately, there is no Cosmos and though it is (of this difficulty Kierkegaard is [...I a proof) not impossible, it is at least very hard to believe today in St. Thomas's world.14 Existential philosophy is just the recognition of the fact that, as Nietzsche has put it, God has died, and that therefore man can no more see himself neither as a citizen of this world nor even as a viator in hoc mundo;

l 3 Julio Alvarez del Vayo, "Politics and the Intellectuals," TheNation,vol. 163,28 september 1946, 346-47. Being the "European editor" of this paper, del Vajo was reviewing all Europe's lands and conditions at the end of World War I1 mentioning more than once existentialism, which he did not like ("as it stands today, existentialism for all political purposes, is a confusing, negative, self-defeating doctrine"). He speaks of French intellectual magazines, where "one found the same inevitable article on existentialism .... We are now witnessing another philosophical upsurge in France and in many other western countries."

l4 Koyre's MS (not his typescript) adds: "in a world where God is <known to> man by his absence."

French Philosophical Thought 537

he is not a citizen but an alien and simply because he is, in fact, not a viator but a peregrinator. This for the simple reason that his world has slipped away and that there is for him no other world. I would like to add too, that to the Marxist, the existentialist philosophy could reply that man<'s> being apt to deceive himself (in some sense the whole history of man is such a history of self-deception), it is perhaps necessary for him to be thoroughly upset and thrown out of his familiar "world in order to be able to see himself as he is, and that the healthy optimism of Marxists is nothing more than another of those self-deceiving creeds that have been produced by mankind in order to console itself and prevent it from seeing its "nothingness."

From all that I have said you have certainly recognized that, in my opinion, existentialism is a very earnest philosophical enterprise. I believe it to be ultimately erroneous. Still, it is not an attempt to be treated lightly. Besides, I would like to insist upon the fact that the method or, if I may use the expression, the strategy of existential philosophy is by no means new, but on the contrary follows the time-honored patterns of philosophy. Philosophers always speak about man and world, ask what am I and where am I, and as long as they believe to have a clear and certain conception of the world, they try to explain man from the world as a basis for explanation and trying to determine man's place in the world. But when the world becomes uncertain, or even disintegrates-these are the so-called critical periods-the philosopher turns to himself and, following the Delphic injunction to Socrates, "gnbthi seautdn," he questions the questioner. Thus Socrates himself. Thus Descartes and Pascal. Thus, in our time, Husserl and the existentialists. As a matter of fact, French existentialism presents itself as a continuation and a renewal of Descartes' endeavor, as a renewed and corrected analysis of the cogito.

Now, what is existentialism? Roughly speaking existentialism, at least modern existentialism (Heidegger and Sartre) can be defined as a doctrine or as a series of doctrines, which, in contradistinction-and in reversal-to classical philosophy, puts existentia (esse) before and above essence, which even sometimes-thus for man-denies the very existence of "essence" or identifies both making existence (esse) [...I the essence of man. It should be noted that in doing so the existentialists follow an old theological tradition according to which esse est ipsa essentia Dei. They only apply to man what the theologians said about God and obtain: esse est ipsa essentia hominis. Yet, as esse divinum is essentially different from esse humanum, the former having been imagined as infinite and the latter being essentially finite, it follows immediately that the characteristics of the esse humanum (that which Heidegger calls existentia<l> and Sartre's ontological moments) are by no means identical with nor even analogous to the characteristics of esse divinum, characteristics the theologians


have called attributes or perfections. Man is not God. He is only, as Sartre puts it, a "Dieu manque'." As such he is by no means a se et per se as the God of the theology, he is not the foundation of his own being, but that of his non being, of his nothingness. Man is not a causa sui as the Cartesian God, though, being free he determines himself in his being. He does not create himself, he simply-and stupidly-is in the world where he finds himself as a fact and he can only as Verlaine's Gaspar Hauser ask himself- "Qu'est-ce que je fais dans ce monde?," and complain-"Oh! Vous tous, ma peine est profonde," without even being able as Gaspar Hauser to add to his complaint: "Priez pour le pauvre Ga~par,"'~ because there is nobody <to> whom you could pray.I6

God as foundation of being: man as source and foundation of non being, of nothingness, the being through which nothingness appears in the world. God as: I am who I am; man as: a being that never is what it is and always is what it is not. The only one of the former attributes of God "that the existentialists recognize as belonging to man is freedom. But as we shall see, it is far from being a perfection." Quite on the contrary, to quote Sartre once more, man's freedom indicates an ontological defect in his being, a void, a nothingness, and it is by no means a blessing, as we are not endowed with freedom but condemned or even doomed to it.

The modern existentialism--of which I shall not attempt to trace here the history (cf. the papers of Prof. Jean Wahl in last year's New Republic"

'5Verlaine, "Gaspar Hauser chante" (Sagesse, III, N),in his Poisies, ed. by Michel Decaudin, Paris, Lettres fran~aises, 1980,285. The historical case of this enfant sauvage, supposed to be the heir of Baden royal family and killed in his youth, was very famous: cfr. Anselm von Feuerbach, Beispiel eines Verbrechens am Seelenleben des Menschen, 1852; Walter Benjamin, Kaspar Hauser, in his Gesammelte Schrifen, VIUl, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser, FrankfurtIM., Suhrkamp, 199 1.

l 6 Koyrk's MS adds as a draft (it is not unique, but I reproduce this one as an example): "ideal of an absolute = en soi etpoursoi. /The en soi is notpour soi, vice versa. No synthesis. The world too is a Dieu manque (Abortive god). En soi etpour soil God as eternity, man as time/ One could develop the whole existentialism out of this statement."

I7This date ("last year" = 1945), as well as the mention of del Vayo's article "in one of the last issues of <The> Nation," i. e. (cf. note 13) 28 September 1946, confirms that Koyrk was writing in 1946. Cf. Jean Wahl, "Existentialism: A Preface," New Republic, 1 October 1945,442- 44: '"There are at least two important ideas in Heidegger: the ideaof existence which he takes from Kierkegaard and the idea of of being-in-the-world, which he takes from Husserl, the great philosopher and his master, whom Heidegger, in the early days of Nazism, prevented from entering the university buildings of Freiburg, because Husserl was a Jew. It is the fusion of these two ideas which gives to the philosophy of Heidegger his particular colouring: existence being full of care because it is in the world and the being-in-the-world taking the form of dereliction, because Heidegger insists particularly on the isolation of existence also on the world from what we might call a formerly religious point of view. The consequence of these two ideas is that we have to destroy nearly all the common-sense philosophical ideas ... essence and substance ...<T>here is a kind of scholastic aspect to existentialism." "It was in the last years before the war that the influence of Heidegger made itself felt ..." Compare "the works of Sartre, of Camus (who has united his belief in the Absurd with a faith in action), of Bataille ...." Id., "Situation prksente de la philosophie fran~aise," in M.


and of Mrs. H. Arendt in Partisan ReviewI8)-though it is a very curious and a very interesting one-starts with Soren Kierkegaard's and Schelling's revolt against Hegelian philosophy. As Mrs. Arendt aptly puts it, Hegel, the last of the great philosophers, realized the old aim of philosophy and gave full meaning and content to the Parmenidean statement that being and truth are the same: tb gar autb esti nokmi te kai einai. His system presented a complete explanation of the world-nature and history: yet at a price, and at rather a high price, because in order to round up his system, that is, in order to explain its very possibility, Hegel not only has had to proclaim his philosophy as an embodiment of absolute truth, the final revelation of spirit and being to itself and thus the final goal of the whole history of the world-an eschatological attitude that links Hegel to the thinkers (and non-thinkers-Prof. Salomon spoke to us about Unamumo etc. last time),I9 but also to transform being into essence (or concept, or idea) and to explain away the individual, presenting it as a result of the impotence of nature (Ohnmacht der Natur) and as a mere "abstraction" of the whole. All rationalist philosopher<s do> it (only exception Leibniz); individual is abandoned to his own bitter fate or <to> the care of religion. Nobody did it so radically as Hegel.20 No wonder that Schelling protested in the name of the real being, pointing out that it is possible to deduce existence from essence, the fact of being from its qualification, though of course this real world is as content completely identical with its blueprint, that the blueprint of the world in God's mind differs toto coelo from the world created by him as Master of being. In brief, Schelling points out- and this is a statement that has been defended in modem French philosophy by E. Meyerson-that there is something irrational in being, that esse therefore can never be reduced to essence.

As for Kierkegaard, he protested in the name of the individual person and in his own name, refusing [...I to be robbed of this personal, unique, and all important-at least for him-existence, to be reduced to a mere play of categories. I am not a case of a general concept, I am an exception.

Farber (ed.),L'activitdphilosophique en France et aux Etats Unis, (Paris, 1950). II,39-40: "C'est ...en tennant compte de I'activitt de la revue Recherchesphilosophiques,fondte par Koyrt et ob parut le premier travail de Sartre, en mCme temps que Gabriel Marcel y ttudiait Jaspers et qu'on y traduisait Heidegger, que I'on peut comprendre le dtveloppement de I'existentialisme franpis."

'* Hannah Arendt, "What is Existenz Philosophy," Partisan Review, 1311 (Winter 1946), 34- 56, where she uses Jaspers's title and does a large review of "existential" thinkers all through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

I9Albert Salomon, a German refugee teaching at the New School, already in 1940 among all the referees to the Rockefeller Foundation was the most friendly and well informed on Koyrt. On Salomon cf. Ulf Matthiesen, "Im Schanen einer endloser &it. Etappen der intellektuellen Biographie A. Salomon," in Exil, Wissenschaf, Identitat, ed. I . Srubar (Frankfurt, 1988), 299-350.

"These sentences ("All rationalist ...Hegel"), already present in the MS, but difficult to read, are added in the second, corrected typescript. Koyrt cared for them.

Alexandre Koyre'

"I am I" is what Kierkegaard is saying, and not "<I am> a man." It is I who am; who lives, who exists, who shall die. It is my existence that is at stake, with my destiny, my necessity to make a choice, a decision about my relationship to the transcendent, the absolute, God. Thus Kierkegaard's existence, in contradistinction to the mere fact of being, becomes a specific possibility of man, which everyman enjoys, being man, an except i~n.~ ' Kierkegaard is usually considered to be a Christian philosopher, and in some sense he certainly is one, though he probably was not a man who really believed in God but only one who desperately wanted to believe in Him and who tried to recapture, by faith, the transcendent basis of human existence, to regain for it both meaning and dramatic structure. In spite of this or perhaps because of this, Kierkegaard gave us the most acute descrip- tion and analysis of what Christian existence is or should be in a world where God manifests the paradox of faith.

Now, to state that there is no essence of man does not mean to deny that man or man's being possess certain, quite definite, structural movements. Quite on the contrary: man's being forms a perfectly well defined pattern-it is even this pattern, this way of being that they define man- and it is the analysis of this pattern, that they call "condition of man," that is attempted by existentialist philosophers. To deny that there is an "essence" of man means therefore only that "man does not realize a certain fixed concept, formed by the divine understanding before his creation," in the way an artisan has the concept of the work to be done before the work is accomplished and according to which the thing-artifact-is made. "In the XVIII Century, in the atheism of the philosophers, the notion of God was dropped, but not the idea that essence e<xceed>s existence. This idea, we find it nearly everywhere, in Diderot, in Voltaire, and even in Kant. Man is conceived as possessor of "human nature." His human nature, which is the concept of man, is to be found in all men, which means that every man is a particular example of a universal concept, that of man; for Kant it results from this universality that the man of the woods, the man "naturalis," as well as the bourgeois are subjected to the same definition and possess the same basic qualities. Thus the essence of man precedes this historical existence that we encounter in nature."22

In contradistinction to this view, the existentialists, being consequent atheists, start by assert<ing> that "man exists d'abord" (first), is encountered, upsurges in the world and is defined or defines himself only afterwards. Now, if man, such as existentialism conceives him, is not definable, this is because d'abord (in the beginning) he is nothing. It is only later that he will be something (and he will be what he will make out of himself).

'' The following eight lines, given in the typescript, are missing in the MS. 22 Sartre,L'existentialisrne cit., 20-21.


Thus there is no human nature because there is no God to conceive it. Man only is, and not only is such as he conceives himself, but is such as he wants himself and as he conceives himself after the existence, as he wants himself after this ilan to existence, man is nothing else <than> what he makes himself.23

If we retranslate these statements in the language of traditional philosophy, we shall find that they express a radical opposition between two modes of being: 1. that of nature, of things, where operatio sequitur naturam, where a given nature "determines" beforehand the possibilities, the behavior of the things, and 2. that of man, where contrariwise natura sequitur actionem, where the act in all autonomy forms and determines the "nature." It is the same distinction that traditional philosophy expresses by opposing nature and spirit, or nature and freedom, or being and consciousness (selfcon- sciousness, cogito).

It is impossible to find in each man a universal essence which would be human nature. There exists nevertheless a human universality of condition. It is not a hazard that thinkers of today speak of human condition in preference to human nature. By "condition" they understand, more or less clearly, the ensemble of a priori limits that sketch his fundamental condition in the universe. The historical situations vary: man can be born as a slave in a pagan <society> or a feudal lord or <a> proletarian. That which does not change is the necessity for him to conceive of himself to be in the world, to be there working, to be there in midst of others and to be mortal. The limits are neither subjective nor objective, or better to say they have a subjective and an objective face. Objective because they are encountered everywhere and are everywhere recognizable; they are subjective because they are lived, experienced, vicues, and are nothing if man does not live them, i.e., if he does not determine himself freely in his existence in respect to them.

Action

"Man is nothing else than his project, he exists only in so far as he realizes himself,"" he is, accordingly nothing else than the ensemble of his acts, nothing else than his life.

Our point of departure is, as a matter of fact, the subjectivity of the individual and this for strictly philosophical reasons. Not because we are bourgeois, but because we want a doctrine based on truth and not a con- glomerate of beautiful theories, full of hope, but without real foundations. There cannot be, at the point of departure, any other truth than this one: je

23 Ibid., 21-22.Cfr. J.-P.Sartre, L'2tre et le niant, Paris, Gallimard, 1943 (I will quote from the 1957 reprint), Introduction, 111.

"Sartre, L'existentialisme, 23.

Alexandre Koyre'

pense done je suis, that is the absolute truth of the consciousness which grasps itself. Every theory that takes man outside of this moment where he grasps himself, is to begin with a theory that suppress truth, because outside this Cartesian cogito all the objects are only probable, and a doctrine of probabilities that is not suspended to a truth falls into nothingness. In order to define the probable we need the possession of truth. Thus, in order that there be any kind of truth, we need an absolute truth ....

<On the> second line, this theory is the only one that gives his dignity to man, the only one that does not make d i m > an object. All materialism has the effect to treat all men, oneself included, as objects, i.e., as an ensemble of determinate reactions that are in no way distinct from the ensemble of qualities and phenomena, that constitute a table, a chair, or a stone. We want precisely to constitute the realm of man as an ensemble of values distinct from the realm of matter. But the subjectivity that we reach here as truth is not rigorously individual subjectivity, because we have shown that in the cogito one does not discover only oneself, but also the others. Through the I think, in spite of the philosophy of Descartes, in spite of the philosophy of Kant, we grasp ourselves facing the other, and the other is just as certain for us as ourselves. Thus man who grasps himself directly in the cogito discovers also the others and he discovers them as the condition of his existence. He understands that he can be anything only as long as the others recognise him as such being. In order to obtain a truth about myself I have to pass through the other. The other is indispensable for my existence, just as he is for the knowledge that I have about myself. In my conduct, the other plays therefore a most important role.

Thus to state that there is no "essence" of man is, for the existentialists, simply a way to state human freedom, or (better to say) to explain the very meaning of freedom: freedom is not a mode of behavior, a quality or a property of man, freedom is a mode of being. One could say that man is fundamentally freedom, which means absolute self-determination, as Sartre express<es> it: "man is nothing else than a project that lives objectively," that "man is something which projects himself toward a future, and is conscious of doing so."25

Therefrom arise some very disagreeable consequences, because if man is free in the same developed sense, if he makes himself and thus is a kind of small causa sui, "existence comes before essence, man is responsible for what he is" ... "He bears entire responsibility of his existence." "And when we are


saying that man is responsible for himself, we do not want to say that man is responsible for his strict individuality, but that he is responsible for all the men."26

Man chooses himself-and by choosing himself he chooses all the others.... There is not a single one of our acts which, in creating the man that we want to be, does not create in the same time an image of man such as we deem that he must be. To choose to be this or that is to assert in the same time the value of what we are choosing (sub actione boni) and nothing can be good for us without being good for all. We assert this image as valid. Thus our responsibility is much larger than we could bear, because it ernbracoes the whole of h~manity.~'

Angoisse. Heidegger. Sartre. Angst for freedom. Choice. Responsabilite' I not death.

The existentialists declare that man is ancx>iousness: which means that the man who engages himself and who understands himself on account that he is not only the one whom he chooses, but that he is also the legislator who in the same time as he chooses himself is choosing the whole humanity, cannot escape the feeling <of> his deep and total responsability. True, there are lots of people who are not ancx>ious; but we presume that they are hiding their ancx>iousness, that they are fleeing it. Yet, even when it disguises itself, the ancx>iousness appears.

Who am I to be an exemplar to decide? Deception-non respconsibility>. No God, no essences, no laws. Determinism, self/deception, in order to alleviate the burden of Religion (God).

Facticite'. Geworfenheit De'laissement (Tout est permis)

It is very inconvenient that there is no God, because with him disappears every possibility to find values in an intelligible heaven; there cannot be an apriori good since there is no infinite and perfect consciousness to think it.... Dostojevsky has written: "if God did not exist, all would be permitted."28 This is precisely the point of departure of existentialism. In fact, all is permitted if God does not exist, and accordingly man is derelict, because he does not find nor in him nor outside of him a possibility to lean upon something (s'accrocher). He cannot find any excuse for himself. Because if existence goes before essence, he should not be able to explain himself by reference to a fixed and determined human nature; in other words,

Ibid.,24. "Cf.ibid.,76ff. 28 Cf.ibid.,37.


there is no determinism. Man is free, man is freedom. If, on the other hand, God does not exist, we shall never find before us values or orders that would legitimate our conduct .... We are alone .... Man is doomed to freedom, doomed because he did not create himself and nevertheless he is free, because once thrown in the world, he is responsible for all he is doing.

Man thus, without any help and without any support, is condemned to invent "man at every moment." Or as Ponge has formulated it: "man is the future of man."29

Jugement de ve'ritb-mauvaise foi-jugement moral

When I assert that freedom through every concrete circumstance cannot have any other goal but [...I will itself, if man has recognized that he, in his dereliction (de'laissement), is the being that posits values, cannot but want freedom as basis of all values. Not in the abstract: this means simply that each man de bonne foi has as ultimate meaning the pursuit of freedom as such (working, revolution, etc.) in concreto.

We want freedom for freedom and through each particular circumstance. And in wanting freedom we discover that it depends entirely on freedom of others and that freedom of others depends upon ours. True, freedom as definition of man does thereof depend upon the others, but since there is a commitment (engagement), I am bound to wish, at the same time as my freedom, the freedom of others. I cannot take my freedom as goal, if I am not also taking for goal that of the others. Accordingly, if on the level of total authenticity I have recognized that a man is a being, in whom essence precedes existence, i.e., that he is a free being that in diverse circumstances cannot but want his freedom, we have recognized also that I cannot but want freedom of others. Thus, in the name of this will of freedom, I can form judgments about those who intend to hide from themselves the total gratuitousness of their existence and its total freedom. Those who dissimulate from themselves their total freedom by the spirit of seriousness (esprit de se'rieux) or deterministic excuses, I shall call them cowards (18ches). Others, who shall attempt to show that their existence was necessary, whereas it is the very contingenc<y> of man's appearance on the earth, I shall call them the salaud (skunks). But cowards and skunks can only be judged on the level of strict authenticity. Thus, though the content of morals are variable, a certain form of this morality is universal.

29 Cfr. ibid.,38 where Francis Ponge is cited.


Appendix

The negativity p. 60:' the upsurge of man in midst of the being that beleaguers him, makes <it> that a world is disclosed. But the essential and primordial moment of this upheaval is the negation. Thus we have reached the first goal of this study: man is the being through whom the nothingness comes into the world.

Freedom p. 61: To the possibility for human reality to secrete a nothing that isolates him, Descartes, after the stoic<s>, has given a name. This name is freedom.( ....) Freedom is not a faculty of human soul that could be envisaged and described separately. What we have been trying to define is the being of man as far as he is conditioning the apparition of the nothingness and this being presented itself to us as freedom: thus freedom as the necessary condition of the nihilization (n&antization), of nothingness is not a property that belongs, amongst others, to the essence of human being. Besides we have already stated, that the relation of essence to existence is not, for man, similar to what it is for the things of the world. Human freedom precedes essence and renders it possible; the essence of human being is in suspence in his liberty. What we are calling liberty is therefore not to be distinguished from the being of human reality. Man does not start first to be in order to be free afterwards, but there is no difference between the "being of man" and his "being free."

p. 29: Thus we started from pure appearence and arrived in <the> midst of being. Consciousness is a being of which the existence posits the essence and vice versa, it is consciousness of a being of which the essence implies existence, in other terms, of which the appearance demands being. We can, of course, apply to the consciousness the definition that Heidegger reserves to the Dasein and say that it is a being for which it is in his being question of his being; but we should complement it and formulate it:2 consciousness is a being for what it is in its being insofar (as)this being implies a being other than itself.

p. 28: Consciousness is consciousness of something: this means that transcendance is a constitutive pattern of consciousness; i.e., consciousness is born directed on a being that it is not. This is what we are calling the ontological proof. It will be objected, of course, that this exigence of the consciousness is not a proof that this demand must have satisfaction. But this

Koyrk's English quotations are from Same's L'ttre et le nkanr (titles by Koyrk himself). ' The passages are taken from Part I: Le problkme du nkant. V. L'origine de la nkgation. There is the abbreviation for "circa" and a blank; it corresponds to the French words ''A peu

prks ainsi."


objection can not be recognized as valid against an analysis of what Husserl calls intentionality and of what he has missed the essential character. To say that consciousness is consciousness of something, that means that there is no being for consciousness outside of this precise obligation of being the revealing intuition of something, that is, of a transcendental being. The pure subjectivity, if it is given beforehand, not only fails to transcend itself, in order to posit the objective, but the pure subjectivity would annihilate itself. That what can be properly called subjectivity is the consciousness (of) consciousness. But this consciousness (of being) consciousness must qualify itself in some manner, and it can qualify itself only as revealing intuition. Otherwise it is nothing. But a revealing intuition implies the revealed. The absolute subjectivity can constitute itself only facing a revealed, the immanence can define itself only as the grasping of a trascendent.( ...) To say that consciousness is consciousness of something, is to say that it must produce itself as a revealing revelation of a being that is not, and that gives itself as already existing when it (consciousness) reveals itself.

p. 85:3 Human being is not only the being through whom negations reveal themselves in the world. It is also the being that can take a negative attitude toward Cibself. We have (...) defined consciousness as "the being for whom it is in his being question of his being in so far as this being implies a being other than himse&" But having elucidated the interrogative behavior we know now that this formula can also be written: "consciousness is the being for whom in his being there is consciousness of the nothingness of his being."

p. 1 The self cannot be grasped as a real existant: the subject can not be itself, because the coincidence with itself, as we have seen, causes that the self vanishes. But no more can it not be itself, because it is the indication of the subject himself. The selfrepresents thus the ideal distance in the immanence of the subject in respect to himself, a way of not being its own coincidence, of escaping the identity in spite of positing5 it asunity; in short, of being in a perpetually instable equilibrium between identity as absolute cohesion without any trace of diversity and unity as synthesis of a multiplicity. This is what we shall call selfiresence to oneself. The law of being of the for-it-self as ontological basis of consciousness is that of being itself in the form of presence to itself.

From Cap. 11: La mauvaise foi. I. Mauvaise foi et mensonge. On top of this sheet is written this french sentence: "n'est pas ce qu'il est et ce qu'il n'est

pas." This passage and all the following ones until the very last are taken from Part 11: L'ktre- pour-soi. ch. 1: Les structures du pour-soi.

But Sartre writes: "tout en la posant."


p. 120: The principle of identity is the negation of every kind of relation in the bosom of being. Presence to oneself, on the contrary, presupposes that an impalpable rift has glissed itself into being. If it is present to itself, then it is not quite itself. Presence is an immediate degradation of coincidence, because it presupposes separation. But if we ask now: what is it that separates the subject from itself, we are bound to confess that it is nothing. (...) The rift is, thus, the purely negative. The distance, the lapse of time, the psycho- logical difference can be grasped in themselves, and contain, as such, elements of positivity. They only function negatively. But the intra- consciential fissure is a nothing apart from that what it negates and cannot have a being only as long as it is not seen. This negative that is nothing of being (nbant d'ztre, nihil essendi) and in the same time, power of nihilization, that <is> the nothingness. We can nowhere else grasp it in such a purity. (...) Thus, the for-it-self must be its own nothingness. The being of consciousness as consciousness is to exist in a distance from itself as presence to itself and this distance zero that being carries in his bosom, that is the nothingness. Therefore, in order that there be a self, the unity of this being contains its own nothingness as nihilization of the identical.

p. 121: The for-it-self is the being that determines itself to exist in as much it cannot coincide with itself.

p. 116: The being of consciousness is a being for which there is in its being question of his being; this means that the being of consciousness does not coincide with itself in a complete adequation. This adequation-that of the in-itself- can be expressed by the following simple formula: the being is what it is. There is, in the in-itself, no single particle of being that would <not> be in <no> distance to itself. In the being, so conceived, there is not the slightest g e m of duality. We shall express this fact by saying that the density of the being in-itself is infinite. It is the full (plbnitude). The principle of identity can be said to be synthetic not only because its validity is limited to one particular realm of being, but still more because it concentrates in itself the infinity of density. A is A means: A exists under the condition of compression. The identity is the limit-concept of unification; it is not true that the in-itself needs a synthetic unification of its being: at the extreme limit of itself the unification disappears and passes into identity. The in-self is full of itself and one cannot imagine a more total fullness (plbnitude), a more perfect adequation of the contained to the containing: there is not the slightest void in the being, not the slightest rift, where the nothing could insinuate itself. The characteristic of consciousness, on the contrary, is to be a decompression of being. It is impossible, as a matter of fact, to define it as a coincidence with itself. I can say of this table: it is purely and simply this


table. But about my belief I cannot content myself by stating that it is belief: my belief is consciousness (of) belief. It has been often said that the reflexive glance modifies the fact of consciousness upon which it is directed. Husserl himself admits that the fact of "being seen" implies, for each Erlebnis its complete modification. Yet we believe to have shown that the primary condition of all reflexivity is a pre-reflexive cogito. This cogito, of course, does not posit an object. But if is nevertheless homologue<ous> to the reflexive cogito in that it appears as the the fundamental necessity for the non-reflexive consciousness to be seen by itself. It is thus6 fundamentally affected by the objectionable7 condition of existing for a witness, though the witness for whom conscious-ness exists be itself. Thus, because of the very fact8 that belief is grasped as belief, it is (grasped as being) no more than a belief, which means that it is already a troubled consciousness. Therefore the ontological judgment: "belief is consciousness (of) beliex' can by no means be regarded as a judge-ment of identity: subject and attribute are radically different notwithstanding the indissoluble identity of the same being.

Koyrk writes a note for himself: "compare." For "caractkre dirimant d'exister pour un t6moin." Koyr6 is uncertain between two

translations: "disturbing" or "objectionable." Koyr6 writes also "from the sole" (fact).

Documents

KOYRE, A. Present Trends of French Philosophical Thought