​Chapter 17. After Existence

One line runs under all of it. The will is naturelessness from inside; the will pressing outward is energy; energy given a definite gesture is the act; the act gone cold is residue; the residue standing apart and meetable is appearance; and appearance settled into the bare fact of being-there is existence. The line runs down to existence, the thinnest and latest film, the deposit reduced almost to nothing. Freedom lives at the top, in the act. Everything below is what freedom has left behind.

A whole tradition has gone looking for freedom near the bottom — to make existence the ground. The most serious of these attempts have to be met because each one sets up downstream of the act, among deposits, and each watches freedom slip back into nature for the same reason: it was looking in the wrong place. Freedom denied its one home, the act, and comes back wearing the shape of whatever rung the thinker stopped on.

Sartre comes first since he is the easiest to mistake for this. Existence precedes essence: the human is given no nature, no fixed kind he must be; first he exists, then he makes himself. Said that far, it is almost our sentence — no pre-given essence, naturelessness at the root. The parting comes a step later, at the point where Sartre lets existence go. It goes straight into the project: I am what I make of myself, the self flung ahead as the thing I am bound to keep authoring. The essence shown the door at the front returns through the back as a future, a self-to-be-made the human is condemned to produce. And freedom itself sets into a structure: the for-itself is free as its very mode of being, man condemned to be free, freedom the standing constitution of human existence. A standing constitution that reliably yields a kind of being is a nature. Sartre frees the human from the nature behind him and fastens him to two more, the project ahead and freedom as a structure within, for he halted at existence and never climbed to the act, and freedom with no act to live in had to be lodged somewhere. He lodged it as a property of existing. What cannot fail to occur is the steadiest nature there is. The freedom we hold here has no such address. It is performed or it is absent, carried by no structure between one act and the next, derivable from no constitution of the subject. Sartre's human is free by definition; nothing he does can cost him the freedom. A freedom that holds regardless of what the will does has stopped being a doing and become an essence.

Heidegger goes deeper and lands in the same country. For him existence is the way Dasein is: thrown into a world, open to it, structured by possibility and care, stretched toward death as the horizon that makes the whole hang together. This is richer than Sartre's, and it is later still. World, time, care, the horizon of death — every one of these has already been shown to be a coordinate of residue. Heidegger sets up where the deposit has finished unfolding into a world with time in it and an end ahead. Dasein is residue come awake to its own thrownness, the deposit grown able to ask after its being. The asking is real and goes far; it goes nowhere near the act, since it happens wholly inside the settled order it takes for the field of being. And the part that promises most, authenticity, leaks most: ownmost possibility, resolute being-toward-death, is a structure pointed ahead and shaped by an end, which is telos in sober clothing. Death is an event inside time, a coordinate-bound terminus, and the act is before time; to make being-toward-death the deepest horizon anchors the human in the settled order at the exact moment the anchoring is sold as freedom.

Gilson is the closest, near enough that the line has to be drawn with care. He makes existence act — actus essendi, the act of being — and so refuses to leave it a static property or a bare appearance. So far he is with us: being is act, a doing. Then the act, in his hands, is the act by which an essence is made actual. Esse actualizes essentia; the act brings a what into the condition of being real; it is ordered, through and through, to the existent it makes exist. The act serves the essence. Run the order the other way, as everything here has run it, and the act serves nothing and actualizes no essence: essence is what the act leaves behind it. Gilson kept the act in the employ of nature.

Maritain warms the same Thomist existence into a person — concrete, singular, known from within, the subjectivity no concept exhausts. He comes close to the thing we keep circling, the who with no what beneath it. And he keeps the person a bearer of nature. His person has its nature, is fulfilled through it, comes into its own in the love between people realized in and with what they are. The person answers as a who holding a what.

Four ways down the one line and a single remainder none of them can hold. Existence gives this much: something stands forth to be met. It never gives which one keeps standing forth across its changing faces. Presence, existence supplies. The who it cannot keep. What holds the who when the what is gone, and the appearances will not sit still, begins where existence fails.