What Is A Mazeppist? (Part Five)

To latter-day Romantic Orientalist, Victor Turner's liminal figure, and Norman Mailer's White Negro (a.k.a., American existentialist), we can add Ebrahim Moosa's recent appreciation of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058-1111 CE) as one who occupied the dihliz or "threshold position" with respect to various antinomies in Classical Islamic thought (see Moosa, Ghazali & the Poetics of Imagination, Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2005). In every case, we find ourselves strapped to the runaway stallion (or was it a mare?), wolves stalking us on every side. "To be a real existentialist (Sartre admittedly to the contrary)," Mailer wrote, "one must be religious, one must have one's sense of the 'purpose'--whatever the purpose may be--but a life which is directed by one's faith in the necessity of action is a life committed to the notion that the substratum of existence is the search, the end meaningful but mysterious...." It is difficult to read these words without hearing the echoes of Gabriel Marcel (whose little book The Philosophy of Existentialism is still in print). Marcel's work stands as a kind of intervention in the Sartrean existentialist trajectory--to "return" existentialism to the embodied hermeneutic that Kierkegaard had left us and that Sartre, very much the Cartesian, threatened to rationalize beyond recognition.

I happen to think that Sartre's own contributions to this early articulation of an embodied hermeneutic are under-appreciated. If nothing else--and Sartre added so much more--his trademark provocations were the sand in the oyster that produced Marcel's and also Merleau-Ponty's (especially significant) philosophical pearls.