Conclusion: Angst, perversion and non-humanist existentialism

However, where does this then leave us in terms of our overall argument? Where does this leave us with regards angst and our attempt to develop a non-humanist existentialism in Sartre’s thought? The first thing to do, to answer this, is to re-iterate what function angst served in terms of the latter. For we said initially that the formulation we had developed regarding non-humanist existentialism remained excessively abstract. That is, we said that even after having broadened the meaning of man as perverse relation to world, by linking it to man’s flight from his past, it was still insufficiently concrete. And as such we said that we would look at how this self-relation is actually manifest in consciousness to address this. In other words, to make our formulation of man’s being more concrete we looked at how

‘consciousness continually experiences itself as the nihilation of its past being.’129

And continuing, we saw that for Sartre the experiential state in which this occurs, and where we have consciousness of our true being, is that of angst.

Consequently, we had now to enquire into this state. That is, to grasp the meaning of man as perverse relation more concretely, we asked what this state was and show how with it

127

Caws, P. Caws, Sartre [London: Routledge, 1979], p71,devotes slightly more space to anguish, though this is still only a single paragraph. He associates angst with the realisation of the breakdown of the world’s assumed order and stability. He also argues that Sartrean freedom ‘is not so much freedom of action...as freedom of attitude.’ [p70].

128

In this respect Grene, M. Grene, Sartre [New York: New Viewpoints, 1973], is wrong when she asserts that the feeling in angst that ‘I give meaning’ is one of ‘blind arrogance’. This is because this idea is rooted in the real nature of our situation here. [p136] Note also, like Desan and others, she dedicates only a few sentences to discussion of angst.

129

we had an apprehension of our being as such a relation. Yet in turn we said we could do this through the concrete example of vertigo. And in this way we had to show how Sartre’s

description of this revealed such ‘consciousness of nihilation’130

, such consciousness of our being as perverse modification of self and world. Were we successful in this though? In one sense ‘yes’. For, we began by noting that ‘the apprehension of myself as a destructible

transcendent’131

on the precipice, my fear, led to an attempt to realise safe conduct. However we also saw how this effort then necessarily involved the negation of my counter-possibles of unsafe conduct, and hence my recognition of them as really existing. And further this

apprehension of my counter-possibles as real for me led, we saw, to an awareness of myself as fundamentally constituted by possibility. In short, it led to an apprehension that ‘I am

indeed already there in the future’132

, that I exist as possibility. And it was this we said which was the significant point. For if I there apprehended myself as possibility then I must

apprehend myself as a perverse relation to self and world. This is because the being of possibility implies that which exists only through the world. That is, it implies that which comes about through, on the basis of, a transformation of what is given. And this

transformation is perverse in so far as it necessarily implies, and constantly intimates, the very thing it is attempting to escape.

As a result then we can say that Sartre’s example of the precipice serves its function. That is to say, it shows how through our intimacy with our counter-possibles and

apprehension of ourselves as possibility, we get ‘the apprehension of nothingness.’133 In other

words, the example shows how ‘angst’ is a real state corresponding to Sartre’s ontological conception of man as perverse relation to self and world. And this in turn addresses our more general question about angst. For if this example can thus show how, what we have said is, the nature of our being is manifest in conscious experience then we have rendered that abstract formulation more concrete. In other words, we have not only shown that our

conception of man as perverse can be verified by experience, but that the meaning of this can be enriched. This is because if we say that ‘anguish appears as an apprehension of self...as it

exists in the perpetual mode of detachment from what is’134

then the meaning of this is expanded. For we have seen here that our perverse relation to being is not only a flight from our past, but a movement toward an unrealised future. That is, we have seen the concrete 130 _{BN, p29} 131 Ibid 132 BN, p31 133 See BN, p29 134 BN, p35

meaning of our existing as a relation is in angst revealed as possibility. In short, it is revealed as both that which is the basis of our flight from self and that with which we affect the world. And it is also in this sense continuing, that the apprehension in angst is not to be confused with our initial pre-reflective intuition of self. For, whilst the latter existed simply as the awareness that we are only ever a relation to the world, the former discloses the meaning of this relation. That is, it discloses the relation as a perverse modification in which our

possibilities give meaning to the radical contingency of self and world.135

Yet with this have we then resolved the broader question with which we began this chapter? On one level the answer is ‘yes’. For if we began by trying to establish that Sartre’s phenomenological existentialism was, like Nietzsche’s existentialism, not humanist then we have in part succeeded. In other words, we have shown that Sartre has an alternative

conception of man to the independent subject-entity of humanism. And what this was first emerged from the intuition of pre-reflective experience that we exist as a relation to the world. Consequently the remainder of our chapter has been spent trying to make sense of this notion. We first did this by looking at real negation as the basis of that relation, and

concluded that we could render non-being, and hence man as relation intelligible by seeing him as a perverting modification of being. That is, we argued that ‘man’s relation to being is that he modifies it’; that he exists as the destabilising perversion of the world by non-being. Continuing though, we had to make this claim properly intelligible by connecting it to man’s actual existence. And we did this first by saying that man’s perversion of being is founded on a perverse flight from his own past, but also by suggesting there is a consciousness of this. That is, to render man as perverse relation properly intelligible we had to describe the manifestation of his ontological status in his concrete existence. And it is thus that by having shown how man has an apprehension of his true being in the state of angst that we have done this. In other words, with this we have shown how man as perverse relation to world

concretely makes sense, and thus how a non-humanist phenomenological existentialism can be defended.

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The difference between the original ‘intuition’, derived from pre-reflective experience, and anguish is also that angst is an immediate reflective apprehension of something. That is, it is not a subsequent ‘recovery’ of an absorbed experience where true apprehension is impossible. Nonetheless, angst is also still ‘pre-philosophical’ in the sense that it is a revelation rather than an understanding. In other words it is something that cannot be, without the aid of philosophy, properly ‘captured’ or articulated.