What Is A Mazeppist? (Part Six)

The importance of Sartre for the articulation of any existentialist position cannot be overestimated. His contribution was seminal. Though he recognized Heidegger's work as an important interpretation of Husserl's phenomenology, he was always selective in his incorporation of Heidegger's insights into his own thinking. This was, in itself, a great (but too often underappreciated) service to modern philosophy. In his selective use of Heidegger, Sartre was careful to quarantine the pernicious irrationalism (in the form of a secularized Apophatic Theology) that pervades Heideggerian discourse. In so doing, he immunized his own thought against a virus that renders far too much deconstructive criticism self-referential beyond repair. His vigilance on this score was driven by a Cartesian rationality and atheistic anthropocentrism. Merleau-Ponty then set about to undermine the dualism that Sartre's reliance upon Descartes imported into his ontology while Gabriel Marcel argued that Sartre's insights could be usefully appropriated without adhering to his atheism and anthropocentrism. Both projects (Merleau-Ponty's and Marcel's) remain unfinished and continue to be worth pursuing. European intellectuals, seduced first by the Siren call of Structuralism and then by Derrida's Heideggerian post-Structuralism, appear to have moved on to other things. American intellectuals have largely followed suit. Norman Mailer's invocation of the term "existentialism" in The White Negro was--and continues to be--highly suggestive of a way to pick up the threads that the heirs of these giants of 20th century Continental thinking left behind.