- “It was unthinkable: to imagine nothingness you had to be there already, in the
midst of the World, eyes wide open and alive; nothingness was only an idea in my
head, an existing idea floating in this immensity: this nothingness had not come
before existence, it was an existence like any other and appeared after many others.
I shouted ‘filth! what rotten filth!’ and shook myself to get rid of this sticky filth,
but it held fast and there was so much, tons and tons of existence, endless: I stifled
at the depths of this immense weariness. And then suddenly the park emptied as
through a great hole, the World disappeared as it had come, or else I woke up.”
(Sartre, [1938] 1964: 134). Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus explicitly refers to Sartre’s
nausea as the absurd, following Sartre’s lead (Sartre, [1938] 1964: 129), and
succinctly sums up the nub of Sartre’s position (without attributing it to him):
“These two certainties—my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impos-
sibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle—I also know
I cannot reconcile them” (Camus, [1942] 1955: 38). This was published in 1942,
before Sartre had finished his 1943 masterwork, and before Camus personally
knew Sartre. The materials for combining the literary and philosophical traditions
must have been in the air. Sartre had already formulated the literary version of
metaphysical omni-contingency and unfoundedness in his 1938 novel, before he
had acquired the Hegelian and Heideggerian tools worked out in L’Être et le Néant.
For both authors, subsequent creativity was a matter of working out further
consequences from this starting point: for Camus, a lineage of literary and political
rebellion; for Sartre, a full-scale phenomenological dialectic of self-deception and
authenticity. - Maritain’s 1948 Existence and the Existent (which he published at age 66) argues
that Thomism is the only authentic existentialism (Herberg, 1958: 26–28, 155–
157; EP, 1967: 5:153–155, 160–164; Boschetti, 1985: 89; Friedmann, 1981–1983).
Among the theologians retrospectively labeled “existentialist,” Buber is the most
idiosyncratic. His academic parentage was mainline, as pupil of Brentano and
Dilthey at Vienna and Berlin at the turn of the century. As editor of a Zionist
journal during 1901–1926, he promoted Hasidism as the distinctively Jewish
contribution to universal religious experience. Buber balanced uneasily between
political Zionists and the secular Jewish assimilationists, writing in a universalistic
vein on the classics of Eastern and Western mysticism. After 1913 he converted
from mysticism to a religion of everyday Existenz (what Weber would call “inner-
worldly mysticism”), then shifting to the dialogue of I and Thou, which Buber
drafted in 1916 and published in 1923. Again, it was only in the late 1940s that
Buber became famous as an existentialist, and published in his old age works
(Between Man and Man, 1947; Eclipse of God, 1952) which brought out that
identification. Originally Sartre branched off from the network of this same theo-
logical transformation. Raised by his maternal grandparents, of the Alsatian
Schweitzer family of liberal Protestants involved for generations in secular peda-
gogy, Sartre would have known from childhood of the family’s intellectual star, his
cousin Albert Schweitzer. Schweitzer’s Search for the Historical Jesus in 1906 had
demolished the liberal interpretation of Jesus as an ethical teacher in favor a
historical picture of Christ as apocalyptic prophet. Schweitzer was trained by the
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