Angst, American Style

...If that does not qualify as cultural and intellectual history, what does...

...Fiercely Christian, he nevertheless denounced institutional Christianity, thereby becoming the patron saint of all those who think they are profound when they say, "I believe in God but not in organized religion...

...Like Pascal before him, Kierkegaard chose to interpret the Bible as though it did not begin with Creation, after which "God saw everything He had made, and behold, it was very good...

...He finds an "existential awareness," preceding existentialism, in an American Puritanism acutely aware of the pervasiveness of evil as well as the immense distance between God and man...

...One thinks of Martin Heidegger, who eight years after the fall of Hitler could still speak of the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism...

...One can prove that there can be no Christian existentialists, since existentialism portrays man as floundering in meaningless chaos— and then notice that in real life Christian existentialists abound...

...He is unquestionably a better novelist than de Beauvoir or Sartre...

...At times it seems that anybody who ever experienced a bit of unhappi-ness and concluded that life is no bowl of cherries qualifies as an existentialist...

...The fault lies with the author and not with the phenomenon he investigates...

...He never comes to terms with the dubious political influence of existentialism, even though that is precisely what ought to be staring him in the face...

...An adequate treatment of the topics Cotkin investigates remains to be written...

...Similarly one can prove there can be no Marxist existentialists, since existentialism insists on man's complete (and dreadful) freedom—only to discover that Marxist existentialists are thick on the ground...

...And it ought to be written, for we are not through with existentialism...

...Still, such tidbits are not worth having at the expense of information about Kierkegaard, a towering thinker who employed reason's power to expose reason's limits and did so with unmatchable wit and fervor...

...We can, with complete assurance, declare Samuel Beckett to be more of an existentialist than Dwight D. Eisenhower...

...Cotkin scants Heidegger on the shaky ground that Sartre and company reached these shores before him...

...And one thinks of Simone de Beauvoir, who found nothing to love about America except perhaps the novelist Nelson Algren, the nearly forgotten author of The Man with the Golden Arm...

...He was so alarmed by the advent of democracy that he did not scruple to advocate a hair-raising politics, becoming, as it were, a fascist before there was fascism...

...not done all that much to increase our happiness...

...Even so, the treatment of Kierkegaard is wholly inadequate, partly because Cotkin is forever dwelling on the reception of writers at the expense of what is received...

...The best, the noblest way, for us to react to such attacks is to discover what brought this disdain upon us and what, if anything, has merit in the charges we confront...

...Present as well was the gloom that attended the realization that the unconditional surrender of our enemies had Werner J. Dannhauser is a visiting professor in political theory at Michigan State University...

...Moreover, it is quite possible to go beyond its "flabby periphery" (as Leo Strauss did) and find existentialism's "hard core" in the thought of Martin Heidegger, who, as it were, arranged a meeting between Nietzsche and Kierkegaard...

...And, most unfortunately, as a thinker he was simply not on the level of Sartre or Merleau-Ponty...

...The New Yorker, Time, and the New York Times paid attention, and in 1946 Sartre on a visit was treated as a celebrity...

...An analysis of Karl Jaspers, neglected in this book, would probably strengthen that conclusion...

...Unfortunately, Existential America goes downhill rapidly after its promising start...

...One finds only the barest allusions to all this in Existential America, for Cotkin has no feel for the complexity of great thinkers and their thought...

...One learns, for example, as much about Hazel Barnes, Sartre's translator, as about Sartre himself...

...Cotkin introduces the affinities between de Beauvoir and Friedan toward the end of Existential America, in an effort to conclude on a positive note...

...He is favorably inclined toward Walter Kaufmann's association of existentialism with a heightened awareness of dread, despair, death, and dauntless-ness...

...They had heard of hell and evil even before they saw Sartre's No Exit...

...Existential America has very little to say about either Nietzsche or Heidegger...

...Writers in America have always been lacking in the sappy optimism that Europeans, especially French existentialists, liked to ascribe to the nation—and so, it is safe to say, have been most American readers...

...One is tempted to conclude, from the example of Camus, that well-meaning men make for second-rate existentialists...

...He does not consider it worth mentioning that H.L...

...We are surely not through with digesting Heidegger's thought, let alone moving past it...

...It was something of an over-determined event...

...Existentialism may not have an essence in the classical sense, but it is nevertheless recognizable tolerably well as a cluster of characteristics...

...Still, Camus has problems of his own...

...Existentialism has been good for African-American literature, he argues, so we find chapters on Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison...

...he does not seem to care that Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre is virtually unthinkable without Being and Time by Martin Heidegger...

...Cotkin hardly lays this suspicion to rest, granting as he does existentialist legitimacy to Walter Lippmann, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., Woody Allen, Paul Newman in Cool Hand Luke, and even Abraham Lincoln...

...But Cotkin does very little along this line...

...At first it looked like merely one of the passing intellectual fads the French have always been generous at offering us, but it proved to be more— much more...

...Lowrie, to be sure, commands attention as a crank who came to blame "a cabal of Jews and British jingoists" for World War II...

...Existentialists of the right and the left will most likely continue to attack the center—which is to say bourgeois life, also known as liberal democracy, also known as most of the rest of us...

...He was not as viciously anti-American as some of his fellow Frenchmen, but he was by no means averse to bashing America for its optimism and materialism...

...It proved good as well for artists like Bar-nett Newman, photographers like Robert Frank, and moviemakers like Martin Scorsese...

...Cotkin is at his best in tracing the recognition of the dark side of the human soul that characterizes the best of American literature in Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Dickinson, and others...

...He looked hard for "a third way" between American democracy and Soviet totalitarianism, even when there was none...

...Existentialism, in short, has been good for nearly everything, and thus Cotkin comes to a relatively cheerful conclusion: "In this frightening world, existentialism invites us to confront the tragic nature of existence and to place simplistic dichotomies and naive optimism behind us...

...Cotkin has trouble with just about everything concerning existentialism, beginning with its definition...

...One thinks of Jean-Paul Sartre and his twisted apologies for the Soviet Union...

...Existentialism does elevate courage above all other virtues, and it does specialize in analyzing extreme human situations...

...One thinks of Nietzsche, with his advocacy of slavery, praise of cruelty, and blistering contempt for parliamentary politics...

...Optimistic and benevolent, he seems to think that since existentialism is a good thing and America is a good thing, existentialism in America must be a very good thing...

...The hero of the book is Albert Camus, and one can readily understand why...

...In 1948 Karl Lowith could state, without a hint of irony, that "we are all existentialists, some consciously, some willy-nilly, and some without knowing it...

...What accounts for existentialism's easy triumph in America...

...When Democracy in America declared American poetry an abstract portrayal of democratic man, Tocque-ville was not at his best...

...It struck on many fronts, with highbrows savoring Hannah Arendt's pontifications in Partisan Review, while Vogue readers gazed at a full-page photograph of Albert Camus, easily the most handsome of the existentialists...

...Camus's politics are the most sensible of the existentialist pantheon, and he is altogether its most appealing figure, if only because he died young...

...One thinks, for that matter, of Betty Friedan, who in The Feminine Mystique likened the state of the American woman to incarceration in a Nazi concentration camp...

...In Existential America—a book heralded as the first full-length study of existentialism in America—George Cotkin begins with the sensible assumption that this country must have provided fertile ground for the new philosophy...

...What is more, in the Kierkegaard section, one learns more about Walter Lowrie, Kierkegaard's translator and biographer, than about Kierkegaard...

...In his search for an existentialism safe for domestic consumption, Cotkin does not, to be sure, completely overlook the philosophy's darker aspects...

...The traditional paltriness of academic philosophy in the United States contributed, as did our natural curiosity about a European cultural scene that the war had obscured for some years...

...If one counters Kaufmann's lust for alliteration and changes "dauntless-ness" to "courage," one might actually have a legitimate beginning for thought...

...That leaves Kierkegaard, who is not exactly slighted in Existential America, rating a two-chapter section entitled "Kierkegaardian Moments...

...That may be because he is impressed, even captivated, by the amorphous appearance of existentialism...

...One can't blame him, since existentialism came to America as something compatible with everything under the sun...

...That's not to say that Kierkegaard's thought presents no problems...

...Cotkin's lame excuse is that he is writing "a cultural and intellectual history rather than a history of philosophy...

...Mencken wrote a book about Nietzsche and that William James, justly admired by Cotkin, quoted Nietzsche unfavorably...