Fichte’s self is above all reflexive; there is a self which is “an object for myself,”
as well as a “self-in-itself,” which displaces the old object-like thing-in-itself
overthrown by Idealism (Fichte, [1794–1797] 1982: 10). Fichte describes the
logical dialectic of the “striving” of self and the counter-striving of the not-
self.^19 The revival of the original élan of the Idealist revolution by the existen-
tialists, ostensibly anti-Idealist in their immediate surroundings, makes sense
when we recall that German Idealism was not merely a halfway house in the
secularization of dogmatic religion, but the ideology of the intellectuals at the
moment they struck for control of their organizational base. Fichte’s themes
of will, self-consciousness, and freedom are the manifesto of academic intel-
lectuals in their autonomy to create for themselves; their Idealism is a tacit
recognition that only in the realm of ideas do they reign supreme. It was this
perennial tool of creation via meta-critique that the German Idealists be-
queathed to the generations of their successors. Sartre and the existentialists
wielded it in the moment of their own special opening in the philosophical-lit-
erary marketplace of their time.^20
Fichte’s statements are not far from Sartre’s “futile passion” of the human
being striving to posit itself as absolutely founded, to become God (Sartre,
1943: 708). But the religious and valuational stance has drastically shifted. For
the existentialist the dialectic of unfoundedness is a tragic impulse to impossi-
bility propelling the doomed projects of human life; for the Idealist it was a
revelation of one’s individual participation in a glorious cosmic outflow. The
Idealists were transforming dogmatic Christianity into lay spirituality, assuring
a pantheist version of immortality. Conservative theologians, pioneered by
Kierkegaard and burgeoning to a full-fledged movement in the 1920s, had
struck back, reasserting a distinctive religious turf by making immortality and
salvation not cheap and automatic but difficult and anguishing. Heidegger had
provided an up-to-date philosophical underpinning for this theological stance;
but he continued the essential strand of theological hope, making Being full of
meaning, however elusive it is to grasp. Sartre radicalizes the religious tone;
with the full force of the modernist tradition of les poètes maudits, he declares
that the world is meaningless, and being is empty. The only meaning is that
which is created through human freedom.^21
Sartre’s accomplishment was to put the accepted postures of literary nihil-
ism and theological angst on the footing of technical philosophical argument,
built from the central themes of the great metaphysicians. It is not just that
some beings are empirically contingent while others are essences. Being itself
is profoundly contingent; there is no reason why anything should exist at all.
Christian theology, paralleling Buddhist and Hindu mysticism, had confronted
this issue in the unanswerable question why God (or primal reality) had created
the world in the first place. Sartre rejects all transcendent and mystical justifica-
778 •^ Intellectual Communities: Western Paths