ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The following authors and publishers have kindly permitted me to use copyright material: William Barrett, What is Existentialism? (Partisan Review, Series 2, copyright 1947); Van Wyck Brooks, The Writer in America (E. P. Dutton and Co., copyright 1953); T. S. Eliot, The Hollow Men from The Collected Poems of T. S. Eliot (Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., copyright 1936), The Cocktail Party (Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., copyright 1950), The Confidential Clerk (Harcourt, Brace and World, Inc., copyright 1954); William Faulkner, A Fable (Random House Inc., copyright 1954); Erich Fromm, The Escape From Freedom (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., copyright 1941), Man for Himself (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., copyright 1947); Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (W. W. Norton, copyright 1932); Vyacheslav Ivanov, Freedom and the Tragic Life, translated by Norman Cameron (Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, Inc., copyright 1960); Thomas Mann, Introduction to Franz Kafkas The Castle, translated by Edwin and Willa Muir (Alfred A. Knopf, copyright 1949); Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman (Viking Press, copyright 1949).
THE PROBLEM OF MANS EXISTENCE
A very pretty Roman myth makes an admirable beginning for our inquiries. One day, the story goes, when Care was crossing a river, she noticed some clay on the bank. She took up a piece and began to fashion it. While she was still reflecting on what she had fashioned, Jupiter arrived on the scene. Care asked him to give this form of clay a soul, which Jupiter promptly did. But then a dispute arose between Care and Jupiter: each wanted to give his own name to the new creature. And while they were still arguing, Earth came along and insisted that her name be given to the creature, since it was she who had provided it with a body. The three thereupon called in Saturn to judge their dispute. Jupiter, said Saturn, since you have given this thing a soul, you shall receive this creature after its death; you, Earth, shall in the end receive its body; but since Care first shaped this creature, she shall possess it as long as it lives. And as for the creatures name, let it be called man (homo), since it has been fashioned out of earth (humo.)
As seen in the context of this myth, man is a composite of care and clay; for we must suppose that Care, in fashioning man, compounded something in his very nature which causes him to be unremittingly anxious about himself. In other words man is a creature who suffers from needless worries, from unreasonable doubts, and from causeless fears and he does this because it is in his very nature to do so, because he is man. As I shall soon make clear, this myth has touched the heart of the problem of human existence. However, it will be necessary to examine it from several points of view before we begin to fully understand what it means.
Let us begin by comparing the myth with one of the more recent ones being propagated by psychoanalysis. To be born, says Otto Rank, is to be cast out of the Garden of Eden. According to Rank, before he is born, man lives in a state of bliss. But, with the exception of his death, mans birth is the most painfully anxious experience which he undergoes. The experience of being born causes a profound shock to the helpless organism; a shock which involves not only physical separation from the mother, but also physiological hazards and changes of state. This painful experience sets up or carries with it the first and most fundamental feeling of anxiety which the individual ever experiences. Rank calls it the primal anxiety.
For Rank, this primal anxiety is the source of all the anxieties of death, doubt, and guilt which perplex man throughout his painful existence. But he goes even further: he states that not only all socially valuable creations of man, but even the fact of becoming man, arise from a specific reaction to the experience of his birth.
In the mythology of psychoanalysis, Care has been reduced from the role of artist to that of midwife, but her function is still about the same. In issuing man into the world, Care has given him that doubtful blessing, or that painful burden, which accounts for his humanity that is, his ceaseless and unrelenting anxiety.
Life is a dark saying, wrote Kierkegaard, the great prophet of existentialism, and perhaps there is some reason to agree with him. To Christians, however, all of this should seem familiar enough, for it contains many elements of the Christian concept of original sin. For this reason, I do not believe that many readers will find it at all surprising when I say that man, who is plagued by the constant uneasiness of anxiety, and by the dread which comes from causeless fears, is also the victim of a nameless guilt, for Christianity long ago traced the primordial source of this guilt in the story of the Fall.
According to the Christian myth, when Adam ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge, he brought upon himself the curse of consciousness, that he should know evil as well as good and particularly the evil of his own death. That the result of this knowledge was disastrous we all know far too well. In the Garden, Adam and Eve lived an idyllic existence. There was harmony between them; they had little to do; and they experienced none of the doubts, fears, and anguish which no man has escaped since their tragic error. In other words, they were as much a part of nature as small children and other animals. But, properly speaking, they were not yet human, and although their first free act of choice was unfortunate, to say the least, it was also a sign that they were emerging from the unconscious existence of the pre-human. Their action against divine authority, their sin, was also the first act of human freedom, the first human act. But the curse of this new freedom was that although man was still bound to nature by his body, his new-found consciousness was no longer limited to the unreflecting awareness with which nature goes about her work.
The preceding interpretation of the Fall, and a great deal more, I owe to Erich Fromm, who has brought me more than any other writer to view man from the existential point of view. In Man for Himself, Fromm explains that mans self-awareness, reason, and imagination have disrupted the harmony which characterizes animal existence, and their emergence has made man into an anomaly, into the freak of the universe. He is a part of nature, subject to her physical laws and unable to change them, yet he transcends the rest of nature. He is set apart while being a part; he is homeless, yet chained to the home he shares with all creatures. Cast into this world at an accidental place and time, he is forced out of it, again accidentally. Being aware of himself, he realizes his powerlessness and the limitations of his existence. He even visualizes his own end: death. Never is he free from the dichotomy of his existence: he cannot rid himself of his mind, even if he should want to; he cannot rid himself of his body as long as he is alive and his body makes him want to be alive.
Fromm goes on to say that mans reason is both a blessing and a curse, because it drives him to attempt to solve the insoluble dichotomy of his own existence. Man, in other words, is the only animal for whom existence is a problem which he has to solve and from which he cannot escape, for a mans life cannot be lived by repeating the pattern of his species by instinct, each individual must make his own life. As Kierkegaard points out, being a man is not like being an animal, for in man the individual is more than the species. Nor can man go back to the pre-human, even if he wanted to: he must go ahead and develop his reason until he becomes master of nature and of himself.
