History of European Ideas

ISSN: 0191-6599 (Print) 1873-541X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rhei20

Anxiety in Translation: Naming Existentialism

before Sartre

Edward Baring

To cite this article: Edward Baring (2015) Anxiety in Translation: Naming Existentialism before
Sartre, History of European Ideas, 41:4, 470-488, DOI: 10.1080/01916599.2014.926658

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2014.926658

Published online: 25 Jun 2014.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 130

View related articles

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rhei20

Download by: [George Mason University] Date: 01 March 2016, At: 13:55
 History of European Ideas, 2015
Vol. 41, No. 4, 470–488, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2014.926658

Anxiety in Translation: Naming Existentialism before Sartre

E DWARD B ARING *
Drew University, Madison, NJ, USA

Summary
This article examines the international debate over the most appropriate name for what
became known as ‘existentialism’. It starts by detailing the diverse strands of the
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 13:55 01 March 2016

Kierkegaard reception in Germany in the early inter-war period, which were given a
variety of labels—Existentialismus, Existenzphilosophie, Existentialphilosophie and
existentielle Philosophie—and shows how, as these words were translated into other
languages, the differences between them were effaced. This process helps explain how
over the 1930s a remarkably heterogeneous group of thinkers came to be included
under the same label. The article then shows how the word ‘existentialism’ and its
cognates in other languages gained prominence because they were considered to
represent best the diversity and richness of the movement. In detailing this process the
article helps elucidate how existentialism emerged as an international philosophy in the
period immediately following World War II, and sheds light on the ambivalence with
which many have viewed both the term and the philosophy it represents.

Keywords: Martin Heidegger; Karl Jaspers; dialectical theology; transnational

intellectual history; Jean Wahl.

Contents
1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 470
2. The Kierkegaard Renaissance in Germany . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 472
2.1. Existence and Philosophy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 472
2.2. Existence with an ‘a’? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 474
3. Existential Translations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 477
3.1. Philosophy of Existence? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 479
3.2. The Société Française de Philosophie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 480
3.3. Sartre’s Existentialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 486
4. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 488

1. Introduction
The dizzying variety and complexity of the existentialist movement has long confounded
historians and philosophers. It resists easy analysis for at least two reasons. First, it cannot
be limited geographically. Routine accounts of existentialism trace its roots back to
Kierkegaard the Dane. Its most important figures in the inter-war period were Germans—
Heidegger and Jaspers—while it reached its full flowering in France after the War. To this
list an informed student might add a Russian brand of existentialism, finding roots in

*E-mail: ebaring@drew.edu

© 2014 Taylor & Francis

 Anxiety in Translation 471

Dostoevsky. Further, existentialism, or rather ‘esistenzialismo’, became a topic of intense

discussion in Italian philosophical circles in the period 1938 to 1943, that is, before Sartre
published Being and Nothingness.
Second, the movement was extremely diverse doctrinally. René le Senne, who did
much to promote the movement outside of Germany, argued in 1939 that existentialism
‘allows all traditions to contribute to the flourishing of the mind’.1 Existentialism is
commonly seen as comprising atheistic and religious varieties: the latter divisible further
into Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish versions. This diversity has been compounded, as
Jonathan Judaken has remarked in a recent essay, by the tendency of existentialists to cast
a wide net in their search for precursors.2 In a 1944 article, Paul Tillich identified
Schelling, Trendelenburg, Feuerbach, Marx, Stirner, Kierkegaard, and Schopenhauer as
philosophers of existence, while claiming as close relatives Bergson, Bradley, James,
Dewey, and even Plato, all in the space of a single page.3
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 13:55 01 March 2016

Some historians have tried to confront this difficulty by restricting their discussion of
existentialism to post-war France and especially the group around Jean-Paul Sartre.
Existentialism in this telling has its roots in Sartre’s adoption of the term in his 1945
‘Existentialism is a Humanism’ and is defined by Sartre’s catchphrase, ‘existence
precedes essence’. Accordingly, it is misleading to apply it to earlier figures. After all
both Heidegger and Jaspers, the most obvious candidates from the inter-war period,
repudiated the label. But we must remember that the application of ‘existentialism’ to the
post-war French context is not without its problems either: Albert Camus denied that he
was an existentialist;4 Sartre rejected the label before adopting it; even Gabriel Marcel,
who as we shall see apparently foisted it on Sartre, would later refuse it for himself.5
Moreover, in ‘Existentialism is a Humanism’, Sartre appropriated a term that was already
widely used.6 Though many have asserted that it was coined that year, the word
‘existentialism’ appeared regularly in articles and books before 1945, not only in France,
but also in Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, and even the United States. While,
to use Dominique Janicaud’s phrase ‘the Sartre bomb’ propelled existentialism to
prominence, that explosion was channelled and amplified by a pre-existing international
community of scholars who had already laid claim to the movement.7
This article aims to understand the construction of the existentialist community by
examining the contemporaneous debates over the most appropriate name.8 Such analysis
highlights existentialism’s international character, not as a contingent element, but as
essential. For even in France and Germany existentialism was in large part a foreign
import, and the processes of translation shaped its development. The history of

1
René le Senne, Introduction à la philosophie, second edition (Paris, 1939), 235. All translations are my own.
2
See Jonathan Judaken, ‘Introduction’, in Situating Existentialism, edited by Robert Bernasconi and Jonathan
Judaken (New York, NY, 2012), 1–33.
3
Paul Tillich, ‘Existential Philosophy’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 5 (1944), 44–70 (45–46).
4
Albert Camus, Essais, edited by Roger Quilliot (Paris, 1981), 1424.
5
After 1948 Marcel tried to distance himself from the moniker thinking that it related him too closely to Sartre.
He preferred the term ‘Christian Socratic’ instead; see Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A
Historical Introduction, fourth edition (Boston, MA, 1982), 458. Marcel first repudiated existentialism in French
in Gabriel Marcel, Le mystère de l’etre (Paris, 1951).
6
I have examined the means and effects of this appropriation in another article; see Edward Baring ‘Humanist
Pretensions: Communists, Catholics, and Sartre’s Struggle for Existentialism in Post-War France’, Modern
Intellectual History, 7 (2010), 581–609.
7
See Dominique Janicaud, Heidegger en France, 2 vols (Paris, 2001/2), I, 55.
8
In writing the article I have relied on a number of journal databases, including Persée, JSTOR, Google Scholar,
Gallica, PDCnet, DigiZeitschriften and PAO for full-text searches.
 472 E. Baring

existentialism thus requires us to expand the frame of our analysis beyond individual
national contexts. It requires a transnational approach that not only juxtaposes French,
German, English, and Italian developments, but also pays particular attention to their
interaction and the flow of ideas across borders.
Such a transnational study of existentialism helps explain both the expansive nature of
the term and resistance to it. The term ‘existentialism’ gained currency in the early 1940s
through the contested attempts to appropriate philosophical ideas expressed in other
languages: Danish, German, French, Italian, and English. The process of translation
required by such appropriation had two major effects: it tended to group together ideas
from multiple sources, effacing differences between them; but it also made many
ambivalent about the label.9 Existentialism was in an important sense borrowed and
haunted by its use elsewhere. To use a word that followed it around Europe, existentialism
was never truly authentic.
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 13:55 01 March 2016

2. The Kierkegaard Renaissance in Germany

The foundational translation for twentieth-century existentialism was that from Danish to
German. In the years after 1918, during a time of political and economic crisis caused by
four years of brutal war and the collapse of the Kaiserreich, Kierkegaard’s work resonated
amongst German thinkers. This was the period of the great ‘Kierkegaard renaissance’,
when figures as diverse as Karl Barth, Martin Buber, Karl Jaspers, Martin Heidegger and
Franz Rosenzweig turned to the Danish thinker. Kierkegaard’s appeal to existence in mid-
nineteenth-century Denmark as part of his challenge to the Danish Hegelians had served
to disrupt the totalising impulses in Hegel’s system.10 So too in Weimar Germany, it
helped express the sense of disruption and gnawing discomfort with the forces of
modernity.
Kierkegaard did not use the term ‘existentialism’, though he did produce something
like it in the subtitle of his Concluding Unscientific Postscript: ‘Mimisk-pathetisk-
dialektisk Sammenskrift, Existentielt Indlæg’. In the German translation from 1910,
the final part was rendered ‘Existentielle Einsprache’.11 Kierkegaard’s emphasis on
existence informed the first attempts to name the work of the heterogeneous group
of scholars who drew on his thought. In 1929, three alternatives entered into intellec-
tual circulation almost simultaneously: ‘Existenzphilosophie’, ‘Existentialismus’, and
‘Existentialphilosophie’.

2.1. Existence and Philosophy

‘Existenzphilosophie’ turned out to be the hardiest of the alternatives. The person who
supposedly introduced it in his 1929 Neue Wege der Philosophie, Fritz Heinemann, had a

9
After this introduction I will refrain from translating the various names used for the movement as well as the
adjectival and noun-forms of ‘existence’. When discussing a set of cognates in several languages, I will use the
English as a generic term.
10
For a useful overview of the German reception of Kierkegaard, see Heiko Schulz, ‘Germany and Austria: A
Modest Headstart’, in Kierkegaard’s International Reception, edited by Jon Stewart, 3 vols, (Farnham, 2009), I,
307–420. And while their reading of Kierkegaard is not central to his account, Peter E. Gordon draws out
fascinating philosophical parallels between Rosenzweig and Heidegger in his Rosenzweig and Heidegger:
Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley, CA, 2003).
11
Soren Kierkegaard, Abschließende unwissenschaftliche Nachschrift, translated by Christoph Schrempf
(Jena, 1910).
 Anxiety in Translation 473

long and successful philosophical career after World War II, and he did not lose many
opportunities to remind scholars of his contribution.12 But it is clear that there is not a
little self-promotion in Heinemann’s account. In 1929 we can also find the word in a
number of other publications, which gives the impression that it had currency before
Heinemann published his book.13 Moreover the person who would be most closely
associated with it, Karl Jaspers, would later assert that he had used the term in lectures
before and independently of Heinemann.14 To my knowledge, Jaspers first used the term
‘Existenzphilosophie’ publicly in his short and well-read book, Die geistige Situation der
Zeit, published in 1931.15 He made it his own in the 1937 lectures of that name he gave in
Frankfurt.16 For Heinemann and Jaspers, Existenzphilosophie took as its central task the
elucidation of human existence or Existenz, an emphasis on concrete human subjectivity,
which would rescue humanity from the objectifying sciences of sociology, anthropology,
and psychology.
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 13:55 01 March 2016

In embracing the term, Jaspers emphasised the philosophical nature of his work, and
in particular he excluded the appeal to determined revelations. But because Kierkegaard
had also found resonance amongst many theologians, this disciplinary restriction would
not work for everyone. Indeed in the late 1920s and early 1930s, many preferred
‘Existentialismus’ over ‘Existenzphilosophie’ because it did not make a decision either for
or against philosophy. In the first volume of his Die Dialektik in der Philosophie der
Gegenwart (1929), Siegfried Marck used the term to refer to a range of theorists, from the
dialectical theologians, through Georg Lukàcs and Paul Tillich, to Heidegger, gathering
together theologians and political theorists along with philosophers. Central to Marck’s
argument was the claim that many Existentialisten appealed to extra-philosophical
authority, and he criticised the dialectical theologians for submitting to the word of
God, Tillich for asserting a metaphysics of the ‘word made flesh’, and Lukàcs for
embracing the Marxist end of history.17 Of the Existentialisten, only Heidegger had
remained true to philosophy.18 Similarly Eduard Spranger, Professor of Philosophy in
Berlin, attacked ‘Existentialismus’ because it relied on faith, and withdrew its claims from
philosophical inspection. For Spranger, ‘Existentialismus’—and here he meant dialectical
theology—was the greatest contemporaneous threat to philosophical idealism.19

12
Fritz Heinemann, Neue Wege der Philosophie (Leipzig, 1929), 400. For his later claims, see Fritz Heinemann,
Existentialism and the Modern Predicament (London, 1953), 1; Fritz Heinemann, ‘Was ist lebendig und was ist
tot in der Existenzphilosophie?’, Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung, 5 (1950/1), 3–24 (3). For
Heinemann’s later career see Martin Woessner, ‘Anxiety across the Channel: Existentialism in Britain’ in
Situating Existentialism.
13
See Siegfried Marck Die Philosophie in der Dialektik der Gegenwart, 2 vols (Tübingen, 1929–1931), I, 146;
Heinrich Barth, ‘Ontologie und Idealismus’, Zwischen den Zeiten, 7 (1929), 511–40 (512); Erich Przywara, Das
Geheimnis Kierkegaards, (Munich, 1929), 16–17.
14
See the remarks in Karl Jaspers, ‘Nachwort zur zweiten Auflage’, in Existenzphilosophie, second edition
(Berlin, 1956), 86–90 (86). Jaspers also used the term in a letter written to Heidegger; see Karl Jaspers to Martin
Heidegger, 8 July 1929, in Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, Briefwechsel 1920–1963, edited by Walter
Biemel and Hans Saner (Frankfurt, 1990), 102.
15
Karl Jaspers, Die geistige Situation der Zeit (Berlin, 1931), 144.
16
Jaspers distinguished Existenz from Dasein by their relationship to transcendence; see Jaspers, Existenzphi-
losophie, 17.
17
For the dialectical theologians, see Marck, Die Dialektik in der Philosophie der Gegenwart, I, 104; for and
Lukàcs, see Marck, Die Dialektik in der Philosophie der Gegenwart, I, 133.
18
Marck, Die Dialektik in Der Philosophie der Gegenwart, I, 14. Marck still remained wary of Heidegger,
because his ontology restricted the dialectic that was so important for Marck. In the second volume of his work,
Marck suggested that he had first overemphasised the existentialist aspects of Heidegger’s work, which really
aimed to outline a metaphysics; see Marck, Die Dialektik in Der Philosophie der Gegenwart, II, 150.
19
See especially Eduard Spranger, Der Kampf gegen den Idealismus (Berlin, 1931), 37.
 474 E. Baring

In other circles, however, the way ‘Existentialismus’ bridged the gap between
philosophy and theology helped win it support. In 1930 the theologian Wilhelm Koepp
used the term in his short book on dialectical theology. Koepp presented his time as one
of crisis, a collapse into individualistic atomism after the trauma of war, but he saw hope
especially in the Jugendbewegung and considered that the Church could play a
determinative role in ushering in a new age. In particular he drew attention to the
salutary impact of the ‘crisis theologians’ like Karl Barth. Nevertheless he worried that
Barth’s method and especially his dialectic remained ‘ambiguous and obscure’.20 This is
where ‘Existenzialismus’ and especially Heidegger’s thought became useful; despite its
secular outlook, it offered valuable philosophical clarification of Barth’s insights.21 For
Koepp, a ‘theology of Existenzialismus’, as found in the work of Bultmann and Gogarten,
was an improvement on Barth’s version.22
Indeed for many the narrowly philosophical approach adopted by thinkers like Jaspers
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 13:55 01 March 2016

marked Existenzphilosophie as a flawed enterprise. In a 1933 article for the Dialectical

Theologians’ Zwischen den Zeiten, Erwin Reisner attacked Jaspers and other Existenz-
philosophen for pronouncing their theses in a ‘cold schoolmasterly tone from the heights
of their academic chair’.23 For Reisner ‘to reflect on existence means after all to conduct
oneself in an unexistentielle manner’.24 In place of Existenzphilosophie which only
‘theorised’ about ‘decisions’, Reisner proposed an ‘existentielle Philosophie’ which
would encourage us to reject the things of this world and answer God’s call: ‘Amen,
Come Lord Jesus!’.25

2.2. Existence with an ‘a’?

Reisner’s choice to defend an ‘existentielle Philosophie’ rather than ‘Existentialismus’ can
be explained by the developing conversation about Heidegger’s thought within dialectical
theology, developments that added a new dimension to the debate over the most
appropriate name for the study of existence. In addition to the question as to whether it
was best described as a philosophy or not, questions arose as to whether it involved
‘existentiale’ analyses (those that disclose the Being of entities) or only ‘existentielle’
(factual) ones. Because the vast majority of dialectical theologians opted for the latter over
the former, ‘Existentialismus’ (with an ‘a’) no longer seemed an appropriate name for
what they were doing, and by the mid-1930s it had dropped out of usage almost entirely.
Karl Löwith introduced the existentiale/existentielle distinction into the dialectical
theologians’ debate in 1930.26 The opposition can be traced back, however, to Heidegger
himself. Heidegger wanted to move beyond the factual and ‘ontical’ sciences, like history,
physics, etc., to grasp the ‘Being’ of the objects they studied—an ontology. For instance,
rather than simply uncovering the facts of history, he wanted to know what historicality

20
Wilhelm Koepp, Die gegenwärtige Geisteslage und die dialektische Theologie (Tübingen, 1930), 68.
21
Koepp wrote ‘Existenzialismus’ with a ‘z’, whereas many of the others wrote it with a ‘t’. I have not been
able to discern any significant meaning attributed to this difference.
22
Koepp, Die gegenwärtige Geisteslage, 77–79. See also Buber’s use of ‘Existentialismus’ to describe Hermann
Cohen’s later work in his obituary of Franz Rosenzweig for Kant-Studien 35 (1930), 517–522 (520).
23
Erwin Reisner, ‘Existenzphilosophie und existentielle Philosophie’, Zwischen den Zeiten, 11 (1933), 57–
78 (57).
24
Reisner, ‘Existenzphilosophie und existentielle Philosophie’, 61.
25
Reisner, ‘Existenzphilosophie und existentielle Philosophie’, 58, 78.
26
Karl Löwith, ‘Grundzüge der Entwicklung der Phänomenologie zur Philosophie und ihr Verhältnis zur
protestantischen Theologie’, Theologische Rundschau, 2 (1930), 26–64, 333–61; Karl Löwith ‘Phänomenolo-
gische Ontologie und protestantische Theologie’, Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche, 38 (1930), 365–99.
 Anxiety in Translation 475

[Geschichtlichkeit] was.27 But Heidegger realised that ontology remained elusive.

Because ontology is a pre-condition of the sciences (we cannot study history unless we
have at least some understanding of what historicality is), it could not be revealed
by them.
In Being and Time Heidegger tried to move beyond this impasse by analysing Dasein
(‘this entity which each of us is himself’).28 Applying the ontical/ontological distinction to
Dasein, Heidegger identified an ‘existenzielle Verständnis’, a factual understanding that a
particular Dasein has of its own choices, and an ‘existentialen Verstehen’, which
uncovered the ‘ontological structure of Existenz’, its ‘Existentialität’. But because, as
Heidegger argued, Dasein’s Being is ‘disclosed to it’, the former provides a point of
access to the latter.29 In what Heidegger called ‘formal indication’, and in contrast to other
forms of study, a factual analysis of Dasein’s existence could point to its ontological
conditions.
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 13:55 01 March 2016

Heidegger’s existentielle analysis of Dasein was thus simply a propaedeutic to his

main task—the questioning of Being. Nevertheless his strategy allowed two different
strands of his reception, which adopted different names. Those philosophers who
emphasised Heidegger’s ontological project and downplayed his focus on Dasein tended
to prefer ‘Existentialphilosophie’ to describe his philosophy. Marck used the term in his
1929 book, and it was adopted by many Catholic (especially neo-scholastic) thinkers, who
wanted to reassert Heidegger’s Catholic roots and the (albeit limited) convergence
between his and their ontologies.30 ‘Existentialphilosophie’ was the preferred term in the
Jesuit journals Scholastik and Stimmen der Zeit throughout the 1930s. In his 1933
Aufstiege zur Metaphysik Bernhard Jansen had a section on ‘Existentialphilosophie’,
written by his fellow Jesuit Alfred Delp, and the term took pride of place in Delp’s much-
discussed 1935 book on Heidegger, Tragische Existenz.31
In contrast, dialectical theologians were generally hostile towards Heidegger’s
ontology. Indeed when Rudolf Bultmann attempted to integrate Heideggerian motifs
into his biblical hermeneutics, other dialectical theologians, especially Emil Brunner and
Heinrich Barth, strongly resisted. They argued that Heidegger’s ontology was not open to
theological appropriation, and that the attempt to ground ‘ontical’ sin [Sünde] in
‘ontological’ guilt [Schuld] denatured it, foreclosing any appeal to the divine.32 Only to
the extent that existentialism restricted itself to purely ‘existentielle’ analyses, could it
provide resources for theology.33

27
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco, CA,
1962), 30–31; Martin Heidegger Sein und Zeit (Tübingen, 1937), 10–11.
28
Heidegger, Being and Time, 27; Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 7.
29
Heidegger, Being and Time, 32–34; Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 12–13.
30
Existenzialphilosophie was also used as early as 1913 to describe Schelling’s ‘positive philosophy’; see
August Messer, Geschichte der Philosophie vom Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts bis zur Gegenwart (Leipzig,
1913), 32.
31
See Bernhard Jansen, Aufstiege zur Metaphysik: Heute und Ehedem (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1933); Alfred
Delp, Tragische Existenz, (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1935).
32
See Rudolf Bultmann, ‘Die Eschatologie des Johannes-Evangeliums’, Zwischen den Zeiten, 6 (1928), 4–50;
Barth, ‘Ontologie und Idealismus’; Emil Brunner, ‘Theologie und Ontologie’, Zeitschrift für Theologie und
Kirche, 12 (1931), 111–22. The debate was recounted in an article by Catholic theologian Karl Wittkemper,
‘Existenzialismus und moderne protestantische Theologie’, Theologie und Glaube, 30 (1938), 644–55.
33
I discuss these debates and their broader ramifications in another article; see Edward Baring, ‘A Secular
Kierkegaard: Confessional Readings of Heidegger before 1945’, New German Critique, forthcoming
(124 [2015]).
 476 E. Baring

And while, as we have seen, the Existenzphilosophen opposed existentielle

Philosophie on several points, they aligned with it in their rejection of Heidegger’s
ontology.34 On this Jaspers was clear. Ontology, he asserted, ‘seeks an objectivising
[gegenständliche] clarification’. And because ‘Existenz’ was the condition for all the
sciences, it could not be their object.35 Though in the third volume of his 1932
Philosophie Jaspers dealt with metaphysics, his fundamental claim was that it was
doomed to failure: what Jaspers called the ‘Scheitern’.
The distance between Heidegger’s ontology and Existenzphilosophie is also visible in
a lecture with that title given by the Protestant philosopher Johannes Pfeiffer in 1932. For
Pfeiffer, Existenzphilosophie was valuable because it placed the ‘realism of human
Existenz’ at the heart of its investigations, and here Pfeiffer named both Heidegger and
Jaspers. That this presentation of Heidegger required Pfeiffer to neglect his broader
ontology was clear to the audience. For the book version Pfeiffer added a footnote to
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 13:55 01 March 2016

explain why he had presented Heidegger purely as an ‘ethical’ and ‘ontical’ philosopher
and not as a ‘methodic’ and ‘ontological’ one.36
Jaspers’s resistance to ontology explains his 1935 refusal of the term ‘Existentia-
lismus’ in the book Vernunft und Existenz. Reworking his criticism of ontology, Jaspers
rejected Existentialismus as the ‘talk as of a known [erkannten] object’.37 He feared that it
tried to limit the freedom of Existenz by constraining it within a conceptual framework.
This was clearly not Existentialismus as understood by Marck, Spranger, or Koepp. For
them after all Existentialismus did not even have to be a form of philosophy, let alone one
that ‘subsumed knowingly and judgementally the phenomena of the world under its
concepts’.38 Where they saw Existentialismus as an escape from the strictures of
philosophy, an opening to theology, Jaspers worried that it remained too bound by them.
In the German-speaking world of the mid-1930s, we can identify three competing
strands proclaiming the priority of existence: first, a group of dialectical theologians who
emphasised ‘existentielle’ analyses, and who remained sceptical about human philosophy;
second, a number of Existentialphilosophen, who emphasised the ontological implications
of existence; and finally, the Existenzphilosophen, who while embracing philosophy,
nonetheless resisted ontological readings. The labels were not always rigorously applied:
‘Existentialphilosophie’ was on very rare occasions used to describe Jaspers’s thought,39
‘Existenzphilosophie’, more often, used to describe Heidegger’s ontology.40 But in the
1930s in Germany the different names spoke to entrenched differences about the goals of
and methodology required for the study of existence.

34
Heinemann, Neue Wege der Philosophie, 376. For an extended analysis of the difference between
‘Existentialphilosophie’ and ‘Existenzphilosophie’, see Gerhard Lehmann, Der Tod bei Jaspers and Heidegger
(Heidelberg, 1938), 18–20, 88–92.
35
In Jaspers’s language it was an ‘Umgreifendes’ that made science possible; see Jaspers, Existenzphilosophie,
15, 18. Of course it is not clear that this criticism would apply to Heidegger’s ontology, which equally distances
itself from what he would call an ‘ontical’ and ‘gegenständlich’ understanding.
36
Johannes Pfeiffer, Existenzphilosophie (Leipzig, 1933), 58 note 10.
37
Karl Jaspers, Vernunft und Existenz (Munich, 1973), 54.
38
Karl Jaspers, Vernunft und Existenz (Munich, 1973), 54. In a review of this book for the Italian review Sophia,
Carlo Sganzini referred to the ‘esistenzialismo di Martino Heidegger’; see Sophia, 4 (1936), 136.
39
Wilhelm Ernst, ‘Die theologischen Begriffe in modernen Existenzialphilosophie’, Zeitschrift für systematische
Theologie, 10 (1933), 589–612.
40
See Theodor Droege, ‘Die Existenz-Philosophie Martin Heideggers’, Divus Thomas, 16 (1938), 265–94,
371–92.
 Anxiety in Translation 477

3. Existential Translations
In the German debate about Kierkegaard’s legacy, the name of the movement was a constant
concern, and the divisions gained great importance. In the first reception outside of Germany,
however, the differences were more often than not eclipsed, in large part through the process of
translation. Simply put, while ‘existentielle Philosophie’, ‘Existenzphilosophie’, and ‘Exis-
tentialphilosophie’ meant different things in Germany, they tended to be translated by the same
word. Moreover as a heterogeneous set of philosophers allied themselves with one or another
branch of the German movement—identifying common purpose in their disdain for
philosophy, in their ontological project, or in their concrete analyses of free human
subjectivity—they found themselves bundled together under an increasingly capacious label.
In France we see the various parts of the movement coalesce around the term
‘philosophie existentielle’.41 One of the first authors to use ‘philosophie existentielle’ in
French was Lev Shestov, first in 1933 and most influentially in his 1936 Kierkegaard et la
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 13:55 01 March 2016

philosophie existentielle.42 Shestov took his lead from Kierkegaard, especially the book
The Concept of Anguish, and he reiterated a version of Reisner’s argument: he opposed
existentielle to speculative philosophy in order to separate Jerusalem from Athens.
Shestov presented Kierkegaard’s philosophie existentielle as a paean to liberating
irrational faith rather than to stultifying rational knowledge (savoir).43
While Shestov’s hostility towards philosophy recalled in part the arguments of the
dialectical theologians, his compatriot, Nicolai Berdyaev, who used the term in his 1936 Cinq
méditations sur l’existence, positioned himself closer to Jaspers.44 He preferred ‘philosophie
existentielle’, because he saw it as ‘a way of knowing removed from objectivisation’, which
better promoted the human subjective freedom at the heart of his philosophy.45 Most
importantly, Gabriel Marcel marked the similarities between his and Jaspers’s thought in a
1933 article for Recherches Philosophiques, a text that was fundamental for the emergence of
European existentialism. And while Marcel did not use the term ‘philosophie existentielle’ he
did praise the way in which Jaspers had asserted ‘the supremacy of the existentiel’.46 Here
French philosophie existentielle tended towards the German Existenzphilosophie.
But ‘philosophie existentielle’ could also mean ‘Existentialphilosophie’. For instance,
when Delp’s work was translated into French for the Archives de philosophie in 1935, it
took the title ‘La philosophie existentielle de Kant à Heidegger’.47 The Thomist Jacques

41
For broader histories of the reception of German philosophy in France during this period, see Ethan
Kleinberg, Generation Existential (Ithaca, NY, 2005); Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other (Ithaca, NY, 2005);
Stefanos Geroulanos, An Atheism that is not Humanist Emerges in French Thought (Stanford, CA, 2010).
42
Shestov first used the term in a 1933 article; see Léon Chestov, ‘Dans le tareau de Phalaris (Savoir et liberté)’,
Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger, 115 (1933), 252–308 (305). See also Arnaud Dandieu,
‘Philosophie de l’angoisse et politique du désespoir’, Revue d’Allemagne et des pays de langue allemande, 6
(1932), 883–91 (885). Shestov’s 1936 book was translated from the Russian version with the title Киpкeгяpд и
эгзиcтeнциaльнaя филocoфия.
43
Léon Chestov, Kierkegaard et la philosophie existentielle (Paris, 1936), 36–37. Shestov suggested here that
his path to Kierkegaard came through the Germans, especially Barth’s school, Jaspers and Heidegger.
44
Berdyaev also refers to L’Existenzphilosophie and la philosophie de l’existence; see Nicolai Berdiaev, Cinq
méditations sur l’existence (Paris, 1936), 54.
45
Berdiaev, Cinq méditations, 55.
46
Gabriel Marcel, ‘Situation fondamentale et situations limites chez Karl Jaspers’, Recherches Philosophiques,
1 (1932/3), 317–48 (320–21). Jean Wahl also noted the similarities in the projects of Marcel and Jaspers; see
Jean Wahl, ‘Le problème du choix, l’existence et la transcendance dans la philosophie de Jaspers’, Revue de
Métaphysique et de Morale, 41 (1934), 405–44 (406).
47
Bernhard Jansen, ‘La philosophie existentielle de Kant à Heidegger’, Archives de Philosophie, 13 (1935),
109–57. The chapter had actually been written by Delp for Jansen’s book, Aufstiege der Metaphysik, but this fact
did not seem to be noted by the French translator, Fr. Lenoble.
 478 E. Baring

Maritain provided the most prominent example of this usage. In his Sept leçons sur l’être,
published in 1934, Maritain clearly headed towards the existential-ontological end of the
spectrum. His was the problem of Being ‘as such’, which for Maritain was not ‘essences’
as some scholastics had believed, but rather existence, accessed through an immediate
intellectual intuition and confirmed by rational analysis.48 For this reason Maritain could
declare that Thomist philosophy was a ‘philosophie existentielle’.49
These infelicitous translations pointed to a broader problem. When the difference
between the German ‘existentielle’ (ontical) and ‘existentiale’ (ontological) was not of
immediate and direct relevance, it was far easier to translate both of them in French by
‘existentielle’. Even when articles thematised the distinction, the temptation remained.
Take for example a 1936 essay, ‘La philosophie de l’existence dans l’oeuvre de Karl
Jaspers et Martin Heidegger’, by Marck, who as we saw had helped introduce the terms
‘Existentialismus’ and ‘Existentialphilosophie’ into German.50 In the essay Marck was
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 13:55 01 March 2016

quite clear about Jaspers’s resistance to ontology, and how this separated him from
Heidegger.51 Nevertheless, the translator Ernst Fraenkel rendered ‘existentiale’ as
‘existentielle’: the essay discussed Heidegger’s ‘analytique existentielle’ and made the
claim that the distinctive trait of Dasein was its ‘understanding of its existentielles
possibilities’, in both cases substituting the French ‘e’ for the German ‘a’.52 The effect of
all these conflations was that the French tended to lump where the Germans had split. If
Maritain, Shestov, and all those in between could embrace the same term, then
‘philosophie existentielle’ was a broad church.
While the French tended to subsume all differences under the title ‘philosophie
existentielle’, English-speakers tended to translate all terms as ‘existential philosophy’. As
a marker of the difference, compare the title of Delp’s interventions in French and
English. In French his essay purported to deal with ‘la philosophie existentielle’. The
English version, a 1936 essay for The Modern Schoolman, preserved Delp’s original
orientation; it had as a title ‘Modern German Existential Philosophy’.53 Ironically, the
success of the term ‘existential philosophy’ was helped by a number of translations from
the French context. Etienne Gilson’s 1941 God and Philosophy in English translation
promoted an ‘existential’ understanding of Aquinas.54
In the English-speaking world, we can again see how the extension of the term was
stretched in translation. One of the early proponents of existential philosophy in English
was Paul Tillich. As we have seen, Marck labelled Tillich an ‘Existentialist’ in 1929.

48
Jacques Maritain, Cinq leçons sur l’être (Paris, 1934), 26–28, 64.
49
Maritain, Cinq leçons sur l’être, 30. Maritain opposed this to the sense of existentielle used by modern
philosophers like Kierkegaard; see Maritain, Cinq leçons sur l’être, 31. He also discussed the work of Bergson,
Heidegger, and Marcel, but considered all to be simply introductions to the truly metaphysical work of Thomistic
philosophy; see Maritain, Cinq leçons sur l’être, 57–58,.
50
Siegfried Marck, ‘La philosophie de l’existence dans l’oeuvre de Karl Jaspers et Martin Heidegger’, Revue
philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, 121 (1936), 197–219.
51
Marck, ‘La philosophie de l’existence’, 208–10, 216.
52
Marck, ‘La philosophie de l’existence’, 211–13. Marck also briefly uses the word ‘existentialisme’ in this
essay, but only in passing, and it is hard to work out what he means; see Marck, ‘La philosophie de l’existence’,
217. See also the translation of Käthe Nadler’s essay, where we find the phrase ‘the object of the philosophie
existentielle is Being itself’; see Käthe Nadler, ‘Dialectique de vie, existence, esprit’, Recherches philosophiques,
4 (1935/6), 81–104 (90). Nadler also uses the term ‘existentialisme’; see Nadler, ‘Dialectique de vie, existence,
esprit’, 97. For Nadler’s position, where she showed her appreciation of the ‘French form of existentialphilo-
sophischen thinking’ in the Philosophie de l’Esprit group, see Käthe Nadler, ‘Die französische Existenzphilo-
sophie der Gegenwart’, Die Tatwelt 12 (1936), 162–66 (166).
53
Alfred Delp, ‘Modern German Existential Philosophy’, The Modern Schoolman, 13 (1936), 62–66.
54
Étienne Gilson, God and Philosophy (London, 1941), 65.
 Anxiety in Translation 479

Initially Tillich followed the German usage. In a 1935 article he referred to ‘existential
philosophy’ when discussing Bultmann’s reading of Heidegger.55 A decade later,
however, the term had taken on a broader meaning. In 1944, he constructed a history of
‘existential philosophy’ for the Journal of the History of Ideas, and argued for the
‘fundamental unity’ of the movement, an argument that was facilitated by the tendency of
the English word ‘existential’ to obscure differences visible in the German.56 In the body
of the piece, he grouped his own work under the term alongside Heidegger’s and
Jaspers’s, thus uniting what in German had been declared Existentialismus, Existential-
philosophie, Existenzphilosophie.57 Similar conflations can be seen in early reviews of
Shestov in England, where he was included alongside Heidegger, Jaspers, and Barth, as a
proponent of ‘existential philosophy’.58
The linguistic problems caused by the German ‘existentielle’ and ‘existentiale’
extended beyond the French- and English-speaking worlds. In Dutch, writers homed in on
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 13:55 01 March 2016

the form ‘existentieel’, in Italian ‘esistenziale’ gained priority, and in Spanish thinkers of
different stripes embraced the ‘existencial’.59 Whether they tended to fall on one side of
the divide or the other, scholars outside of Germany collapsed a distinction that had
previously been defended with great effort.60

3.1. Philosophy of Existence?

The difficulties caused by the ‘existentiell/existential’ opposition made the simpler form
‘philosophy of existence’ preferable for many. ‘Philosophy of existence’ in its various
guises—‘filosofia dell’esistenza’, ‘philosophie de l’existence’ or ‘existentie-philosophie’—
provided a convenient umbrella for discussing a range of figures: often Jaspers and
Heidegger, but also at times Barth, Shestov, Kierkegaard as well. This was how the
neo-Kantian Arthur Liebert used it in his articles on German philosophy for The
Philosophical Review.61 French philosophers also valued it for its inclusive quality.62
When Berdyaev used the term in his Esprit et liberté from 1933, it allowed him to skate

55
See Paul Tillich, ‘What is Wrong with Dialectical Theology?’, The Journal of Religion, 15 (1935), 127–
45 (136).
56
Tillich, ‘Existential Philosophy’, 65.
57
Tillich, ‘Existential Philosophy’, 58.
58
See Dorothy Emmett, ‘Review of Chestov, Kierkegaard et la philosophie existentielle’, Philosophy, 12
(1937), 359.
59
In Dutch, both Jaspers’s and Heidegger’s philosophies were often described as ‘existentieel’. See for example
A. H. de Hartog, ‘Empirie, Filosofie, Metaphysica’, Synthese, 1 (1936), 346–50 (348). For Italian, see for
instance Sofia Vanni Rovighi, ‘Filosofia e Religione nel pensiero di M. Scheler’, Rivista di filosofia neo-
scolastica, supplement ‘Religione e filosofia’, 28 (1936), 157–69 (161). For Spanish, compare ‘filosofía
existencial’ in its Thomist use in Wagner del Reyna, La ontología fundamental de Heidegger (Buenos Aires,
1939) especially 71–78, and in its Shestovian guise in Carlos Erro, Diálago existencial (Buenos Aires, 1937), 21.
60
The Spanish-speaking strand to this narrative mostly falls outside of the scope of this article, in part because I
have been unable to find electronic databases on which to construct my analyses. For a good overview of the
developments there, and especially of the work of Miguel de Unamuno, see Eduardo Mendieta, ‘Existentialism
in the Hispanic and Latin American Worlds: El Quixote and Its Existential Children’, in Situating Existentialism,
edited by Bernasconi and Judaken, 180–210. From the early 1930s, Unamuno was included in accounts of
existentialism. See the reference in Wahl, ‘Le problème du choix’, 432 note. Unamuno was identified as an
existentialist in Spanish by Julián Mariás, Miguel de Unamuno (1942). For the ‘existentialism sans nom’ of
Ortega y Gasset, see John T. Graham, A Pragmatist Philosophy of Life in Ortega y Gasset (Columbia, MI, 1994),
230–32.
61
Arthur Liebert, ‘Contemporary German Philosophy’, The Philosophical Review, 42 (1933), 31–48 (48). See
also Arthur Liebert, ‘Contemporary German Philosophy’, The Philosophical Review, 45 (1936), 26–60. Here
Liebert uses ‘philosophy of existence’ to designate Heidegger, Jaspers, Rosenzweig, and Buber.
62
It was introduced to the French debate in reviews of Heinemann’s book in the Revue de Métaphysique et de
Morale, 37 (1930), 13–15, and the Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger 112 (1931), 154–56.
 480 E. Baring

over differences with German thinkers with whom he wanted to associate.63 Indeed we
have seen how Marck used it in his French account of Heidegger and Jaspers, despite the
differences he saw between them. A similar function can be seen in Dutch. ‘Existentie-
philosophie’ became the standard translation of Shestov’s ‘philosophie existentielle’,
which enjoyed considerable popularity in the Netherlands, especially for those writing for
the review Synthese. But it also served to unify thinkers as different as Heidegger and
Jaspers.64 In Italian ‘filosofia dell’esistenza’ was used in the late 1930s and 1940s for
Luigi Pareyson’s book on Jaspers, a book on Marcel, and an article by the Christian
spiritualist Augusto Guzzo.65
Thus while ‘philosophy of existence’ seemed more neutral than other options, it
nevertheless confirmed the tendency to obscure the differences that were central in the
German-speaking world. And of course we should remember that, in that context, it was
not neutral at all; Existenzphilosophen were hostile to the anti-philosophical tendencies of
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 13:55 01 March 2016

the dialectical theologians, and to what they saw as the limiting effects of Heidegger’s
ontology, which did not adequately express its failure. Indeed it was for this reason that
Existenzphilosophie was attractive to heterodox Christians like Pareyson, Guzzo, and
Berdyaev; it refused to objectify the human spirit, while remaining recognisably
philosophical.

3.2. The Société Française de Philosophie

A crucial turning point in this story was a 1937 meeting of the Société Française de
Philosophie. Contributing to the discussion were some of the most important figures in
the European debate: Jean Wahl, Marcel, Berdyaev, Jaspers, Heidegger, Löwith, Levinas,
and Marck. Wahl initiated the evening with a paper on subjectivity and transcendence in
Kierkegaard, Jaspers, and Heidegger.66 His major question was whether it was possible to
secularise Kierkegaard’s thought, but the discussion that day also touched on the most
appropriate name for the movement. Wahl had already in 1934 declared the ‘philosophie
de l’existence’ to be a ‘negation of existentielle thought’.67 Wahl repeated this judgement
in the 1937 meeting. He wondered whether figures like ‘Rimbaud or… Van Gogh or…
Nietzsche (or… Kierkegaard) aren’t at once more “existentielles” and more truly
philosophical than the philosophes de l’existence’.68 Not simply describing freedom of
choice, they also chose. The remark is terribly important, not least because of its
secularising function. Wahl transposed the argument that Reisner had earlier made about
religion into the realm of the aesthetic. In doing so he both acknowledged and provided a
means to think through the relationship between the philosophy of existence and art and
literature, which were central to existentialism in France and elsewhere.

63
Nicolai Berdiaev, Esprit et liberté, translated by I. P. and H. M. (Paris, 1933).
64
See Synthese editors, ‘De Existentie-Philosophie van Karl Jaspers’, Synthese, 2 (1937), 202–09, which
referred to Pfeiffer’s Existenzphilosophie, and Synthese editors, ‘Otto Neurath: sijn Plaats in het huidige
Denkleven’, Synthese, 3 (1938), 1–9.
65
The earliest reference I have found is in Franco Lombardi, ‘Alcune considerazioni sulla situazione presente
della filosofia in Germania e in Italia’, Logos, 18 (1935), 234–72 (234). See also Luigi Pareyson, La filosofia
dell’esistenza e Carlo Jaspers (Naples, 1940); Augusto Guzzo, ‘Dopo la “filosofia dell’esistenza”’, Archivio di
filosofia, 7 (1939), 175–91.
66
See the account in Moyn, Origins of the Other, 182–6.
67
Wahl, ‘Le problème du choix’, 442–44. On this criticism of Jaspers, see also Jean Wahl, ‘Subjectivité et
transcendance’, Bulletin de la Société Française de Philosophie, 37 (1937), 161–211 (171).
68
Wahl, ‘Subjectivité et transcendance’, 163.
 Anxiety in Translation 481

Berdyaev addressed the name-question in his contribution. He too expressed his

preference for the ‘philosophie existentielle’ of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, because it did
not fall into the trap of trying to objectify experience: ‘Philosophie existentielle is the
expression of an existentielle experience’. In contrast, ‘the philosophie de l’existence,
although Jaspers says that existence can never be an object, makes existence the object of
the philosopher’s knowledge’.69 But the terms were clearly muddled in Berdyaev’s head;
a few minutes later, he referred to Jaspers’s rejection of ‘Existentialismus’ in Vernunft und
Existenz, asserting that ‘philosophie existentielle is not possible’.70 The terminological
confusion reached new heights when Jaspers made the same point but with different
words: ‘existentialisme is the death of the philosophie de l’existence’.71 In only a few
pages all of ‘existentialisme’, ‘philosophie de l’existence’ and ‘philosophie existentielle’
had been rejected as a form of objectifying thought, each time in favour of one of the
other variants.
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 13:55 01 March 2016

The most important contribution to the discussion was a letter written by Heidegger, a
letter that would soon be cited all over the continent. Heidegger definitively rejected the
term ‘Existenzphilosophie’, but not for the reasons given by Wahl and Berdyaev. The
difficulties they had elaborated concerning a ‘philosophie de l’existence’, he argued, did
not concern him because ‘the question that occupies me is not that of human existence; it
is that of Being as a whole and as such’.72 Levinas too highlighted Heidegger’s
ontological concerns. He suggested that Heidegger’s work could not be seen as
theological, because the theological attitude was ‘ontical’ and ‘existentielle’, while
Heidegger’s relied on an ‘existentiale’ understanding.73 This terminology was reinforced
the following year in the first major translation of Heidegger’s work into French. In his
introduction, Henri Corbin remarked on the ‘regrettable confusion between the notions of
existentiel and existential’, and ironically, given the role Corbin’s translation played in the
French reception, used this as a reason to avoid translating Dasein as ‘existence’, opting
instead for the controversial ‘human-reality [réalité-humaine]’.74
There were two major responses to Heidegger’s letter. One group of thinkers used it to
reassert the differences between existentiell and existential philosophy, differences that, as
we have seen, had been central to the debate about whether Heidegger’s philosophy could
be aligned with theology. Alphonse de Waelhens, a lay philosopher at the Thomistic
Institut Supérieur de Philosophie in Louvain, made the most important such contribution
to the French-language debate. In his book, La Philosophie de Martin Heidegger (1942),
de Waelhens referred directly to Heidegger’s letter and argued that though Heidegger had
wanted to provide a ‘theory of Being in general’, he had failed in this endeavour, because
he had been fixated on human Dasein.75 The failure of Heidegger’s ‘philosophie
existentiale’ was thus a result of his excessively humanistic and, de Waelhens implied,

69
Wahl, ‘Subjectivité et transcendance’, 187.
70
Wahl, ‘Subjectivité et transcendance’, 188.
71
Wahl, ‘Subjectivité et transcendance’, 196. Jaspers also made a similar remark about ‘philosophie
existentielle’ on the following page.
72
Wahl, ‘Subjectivité et transcendance’, 193.
73
Wahl, ‘Subjectivité et transcendance’, 194–95 (original emphases). It was also foregrounded by Emmanuel
Levinas, ‘Martin Heidegger et l’ontologie’, Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger, 113 (1932), 395–
431, (404 note).
74
Henry Corbin, ‘Avant-Propos du Traducteur’, in Martin Heidegger, Qu’est-ce que la métaphysique?,
translated by Henry Corbin (Paris, 1938), 9–17 (13–17). In translating Dasein as réalité-humaine, Corbin
inadvertently contributed to the humanistic and Existenzphilosophisch reading of Heidegger.
75
Alphonse de Waelhens, La philosophie de Martin Heidegger (Louvain, 1942), vi.
 482 E. Baring

Protestant presuppositions. In a similar vein, de Waelhens contrasted the misguided

‘defenders of philosophie existentielle’, including Wahl, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Sartre,
and Levinas, to the salutary ‘proponents of philosophie existentiale’, naming the Catholics
René le Senne and Gabriel Marcel.76
A similar attempt to reassert the differences was at the heart of a 1941 debate in the
newly founded American Journal for Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
between two émigré German philosophers. Julius Kraft had written a scathing attack on
‘existential philosophy’, casting it as a form of authoritarianism, because it purported to
deal with what lay ‘beyond knowledge’.77 An ‘existential philosophy’ might have made
sense for the religious Kierkegaard who relied on faith, but it did not for atheists like
Heidegger. In his response, Fritz Kaufman defended Heidegger by suggesting that Kraft
had ignored the distinction between the ontical and the ontological: ‘Heidegger’s ontology
of man is an Existentialphilosophie, not an existentielle Philosophie. Mr. Kraft blurs this
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 13:55 01 March 2016

essential difference by speaking indiscriminately of philosophy of existence and

existential philosophy without restricting “existential” to the particular sense in which
Heidegger uses this term’.78
The Italian Luigi Pareyson, who had studied under Karl Jaspers in Germany and
would become one of the most important early existentialists in Italy, discussed the
‘terminological difficulty’ posed by Heidegger’s work in a 1938 essay, later published in
his 1943 Studi sull’esistenzialismo. Heidegger’s distinction between ‘existenzielle (in
French existentiel)’ and ‘existenzial’, made the translation of the former by ‘esistenziale’
problematic.79 Instead Pareyson followed the example of the philosopher of science
Annibale Pastore, who had in 1933 rendered the opposition ‘esistentivo’ versus
‘esistenziale’.80 Pastore’s distinction was picked up widely in Italy. Amongst others, it
was used in the most important of the early Italian existentialist texts, Nicola Abbagnano’s
1939 La Struttura dell’esistenza.81
The attempts by de Waelhens, Kaufman, and Pareyson to divide the ontical
(existentiell) sharply from the ontological (existential) do not seem to have had a lasting
impact. De Waelhens’s preference for ‘philosophie existentiale’ had little effect on the
debate. The term was, perhaps, simply too ungainly in French to take hold, and it would
not have a long and distinguished career.82 Further, even as Abbagnano recognised the

76
de Waelhens, La philosophie de Heidegger, vi.
77
Julius Kraft, ‘The Philosophy of Existence: Its Structure and Significance’, Journal for Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research, 1 (1941), 339–58 (339).
78
Fritz Kaufman, ‘Concerning Kraft’s “Philosophy of Existence”’, Journal for Philosophy and Phenomeno-
logical Research, 1 (1941), 359–64 (363). At the heart of the debate was also the question of the relationship
between Heidegger’s philosophy and allegiance to Nazism. Kaufman argued for separation between the two,
while Kraft believed that the latter followed directly from the former. Kaufman’s argument aligned with that of
Walter Cerf in an earlier article for the journal; see Walter H. Cerf, ‘An Approach to Heidegger’s Ontology’,
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1 (1940), 177–90. For the use of ‘existentialism’, see Cerf, ‘An
Approach to Heidegger’s Ontology’, 186.
79
Luigi Pareyson, Studi sull’esistenzialismo, first edition (Florence, 1943), 200 note. Pareyson reworked here a
1938 article where the distinction can also be seen; see Luigi Pareyson, ‘Note sulla filosofia dell’esistenza’,
Gionale critico della filosofia italiana, 6 (1938), 407–38 (407). For the translation ‘esistentivo’, see Pareyson,
‘Note sulla filosofia dell’esistenza’, 415.
80
Anniable Pastore, ‘Husserl, Heidegger, Chestov’, Archivio di storia della filosofia, 2 (1933), 107–31 (120).
81
Nicola Abbagnano, La struttura dell’esistenza (Turin, 1939), 14.
82
I have found very few usages of the term. One exception is Karl Rahner, ‘Introduction au concept de
Philosophie Existentiale chez Heidegger’, Recherches de science religieuse, 30 (1940), 152–71.
 Anxiety in Translation 483

difference between Jaspers and Heidegger, he constructed his book as a mediation

between the two.
Nonetheless their arguments helped spur a second response to Heidegger’s letter. In
this case the goal was not to tease apart the different factions. Rather it was to find a name
neutral enough to accommodate the heterogeneity of the movement. Heidegger had
explicitly rejected ‘philosophy of existence’, and his letter seemed to make the name
‘existentiell philosophy’ unusable too. It is in this context that a term that had up until
then been used only rarely in France, and had been defunct for over five years in
Germany, saw a return to prominence: ‘existentialism’.
Outside of Germany, ‘existentialism’ was not of completely new coinage, particularly
in Italian and English, where the preference for ‘existential/esistenziale’ made it a
relatively obvious neologism. Italy can lay claim to the first book with ‘existentialism’ in
its title: the Christian idealist Luigi Stefanini’s Il problema dell’educazione: Giudizio
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 13:55 01 March 2016

sull’esistenzialismo, published in 1938.83 In English, it has several independent origins.84

Most proximately to our story, ‘existentialism’ had a brief career in the early 1930s as the
label for a movement in psychology, more commonly known as ‘Existential Psychology’.
In this usage, ‘Existentialism’ emphasised the primacy of introspection and givens of
sensation in opposition to behaviourist or Gestalt accounts.85 The first application of
‘existentialism’ to German philosophy seems to draw on this meaning. In a 1930 article
on ‘Husserl’s Phenomenological Idealism’, written for the Journal of Philosophy, Sidney
Hook argued that Husserl in The Formal and Transcendental Logic found a midway
between the ‘formalists’ and the ‘existentialists’. Against the formalists, who attributed
value to logic because of its internal consistency, Husserl argued for the dependence of
intuition on psychic acts; it is not independent of the world. Against the existentialists,
who believed in our immediate access to Being through experience, Husserl argued that
intuition only gives us access to the conditions of experience.86 For different reasons, the
word ‘existentialism’ appeared regularly in Liebert’s surveys of German philosophy. He
first mentioned existentialism in a discussion of dialectical theology, referring to both
Spranger’s and Marck’s books.87 For Liebert, existentialism was also tied to ontology, and
thus seems also to have served as a translation of ‘Existentialphilosophie’.88 In France

83
See Luigi Stefanini, Il dramma filosofico della Germania (Padua, 1948), 127, which is an almost direct
reprint of the 1938 book but is much easier to obtain. Stefanini gave ‘esistenzialismo’ a very broad meaning; he
applied it to Husserl, Heidegger, Jaspers, amongst others.
84
We can find it used as far back as Bernard Bosanquet, ‘On an Essential Distinction in Theories of
Experience’, The Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 3 (1894/5), 3–12 (10). Interestingly, Bosanquet was an
important influence on René le Senne, Obstacle et valeur (Paris, 1934), one of the first major existentialist works
in French.
85
See the article by Edwin Boring, ‘Titchener and the Existential’, The American Journal of Psychology, 50
(1937), 470–83. The term ‘existentialist’ was popularised by Robert Woodworth in his Contemporary Schools of
Psychology (New York, NY 1931), 18–43 (37). Woodworth’s reference gets picked up in the French, ‘recension
des revues’, Revue des Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques (1933), 160–192, (176).
86
Sidney Hook, ‘Husserl’s Phenomenological Idealism’, The Journal of Philosophy, 27 (1930), 365–80 (370).
87
Liebert, ‘Contemporary German Philosophy’ (1933), 32, 47.
88
See particularly Arthur Liebert, ‘Contemporary German Philosophy’, The Philosophical Review, 43 (1934),
27–47 (37).
 484 E. Baring

before 1939, the word ‘existentialisme’ had appeared predominantly in the work of neo-
scholastic philosophers.89
In 1939, however, ‘existentialisme’ was given a new lease of life by the very person
who according to de Waelhens was a leading figure in French ‘philosophie existentiale’:
the Catholic philosopher René le Senne.90 Again, Heidegger’s letter seems to have acted
as the catalyst. Le Senne cited it in the second edition of his Introduction à la philosophie,
which appeared in 1939.91 Le Senne argued that Heidegger’s claims there did not
preclude ‘existentielle’ descriptions of his philosophy, but it is perhaps because of the
letter that he decided to prioritise the word ‘existentialisme’ over ‘philosophie
existentielle’; his discussion of contemporary philosophy came under the headings
‘German existentialisme’ and ‘French existentialisme’.92 He also used the term in a
preface he wrote with Louis Lavelle for an edition of the Revue internationale de
philosophie dedicated to their ‘philosophie de l’esprit’ group later that year.93
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 13:55 01 March 2016

The fact that the term ‘existentialisme’ was already relatively well established in the
neo-scholastic community, and that it recalled more strongly than other terms the
Thomists’ ontological concerns, was surely not a coincidence. For le Senne, ‘existentia-
lisme’ served to build bridges between Thomists and other Catholic philosophers.94 Le
Senne included the Thomist Aimé Forest in his account of French existentialism and
argued that, though outside the movement, Maritain had equally ‘grasped existence as it is
given concretely’.95 While le Senne aligned him only cautiously with ‘existentialisme’,
Maritain adopted the badge with pride. In 1941, Maritain gave up on ‘philosophie
existentielle’ and declared Aquinas’s philosophy an ‘existentialisme’.96 In a 1947 paper at
the Roman Academy, he declared it ‘the only authentic existentialisme’.97
The Thomist appeal to the term ‘existentialisme’ in France helped promote it
elsewhere. The Dominican-run Tijdschrift voor Filosofie in Flemish-speaking Belgium
favoured ‘existentialisme’ over ‘existentie-philosophie’ in the period following its
founding in 1939, and de Waelhens again led the way.98 In Italy, ‘esistenzialismo’ was

89
See Joseph Dopp, ‘Review of Erdmann Schott, Die Endlichkeit des Daseins nach Martin Heidegger’, Revue néo-
scolastique de philosophie, 33 (1931), 422; L-B. Geiter and Th. Deman, ‘Bulletin de Philosophie’, Revue des
Sciences Philosophiques et Théologiques, 22 (1933), 660–695 (660); Marcel de Corte, ‘L’ontologie existentielle de
Gabriel Marcel’, Revue néo-scolastique de philosophie, 38 (1935), 470–500; Marcel de Corte, La philosophie de
Gabriel Marcel (Louvain, 1938), viii; Alphonse de Waelhens, ‘Descartes et la pensée phénoménologique’, Revue
néo-scolastique de philosophie, 41 (1938), 571–89 (571); Alphonse de Waelhens, ‘Une philosophie de la
participation: l’actualisme de Louis Lavelle’, Revue néo-scolastique de philosophie, 42 (1939), 213–29 (228);
Alphonse de Waelhens, ‘Un symposium de philosophie française’, Revue néo-scolastique de philosophie, 43 (1940),
66–95 (83, 89); de Waelhens, La philosophie de Heidegger, vi, 358. For de Waelhens, ‘existentialisme’ cut across the
‘existentiel/existential’ divide. In his essays and even in his book, de Waelhens applied ‘existentialism’ relatively
indiscriminately to figures such as Marcel, Lavelle, Jaspers, Jankélévitch, Buber, and Wahl.
90
For an argument linking ‘philosophie existentiale’ with ‘existentialisme’, see Édouard Bourbousson, ‘La
littérature existentialiste et son influence’, The French Review, 23 (1950), 462–73 (462).
91
le Senne, Introduction à la philosophie, 237 note 2.
92
le Senne, Introduction à la philosophie, 229–35. See also his use of ‘la philosophie existentielle’, in le Senne,
Introduction à la philosophie, 228, 232. In his 1934 Obstacle et valeur, le Senne described his work as idéo-
existentiel.
93
Louis Lavelle and René le Senne, ‘avant propos’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 2 (1939), 3–6 (5).
94
He also used it to assert common purpose with neo-Kantians and Bergsonians.
95
le Senne, Introduction à la philosophie, 229, 235, 236 note 1. Forest had published in le Senne’s Philosophie
de l’esprit collection.
96
Jacques Maritain, ‘L’humanisme de Saint Thomas d’Aquin’, Medieval Studies, 3 (1941), 174–86 (174–75).
97
Jacques Maritain ‘L’existentialisme de Saint Thomas’, in Esistenzialismo, edited by Charles Boyer (Rome,
1947), 40–64 (40).
98
Alphonse de Waelhens, ‘Kierkegaard en de Hedengaagsche Existentialisten: Enkele Notas’, Tijdschrift voor
Philosophie, 1 (1939), 827–51 (841–42).
 Anxiety in Translation 485

promoted by a number of Thomists including Luigi Pelloux, who edited the 1943 volume
L’Esistenzialismo: saggi e studi, and Cornelio Fabro, who wrote extensively on
existentialism in the Italian Divus Thomas and whose book, Introduzione all’esistenzia-
lismo, appeared in 1943. That year the term ‘existentialism’ also received a fillip amongst
American Thomists when Maritain’s 1941 essay was translated into English.99
Le Senne’s adoption of the term was also influential outside of France. Indeed,
Pelloux had first used the word in a 1941 article on le Senne’s ‘philosophie de l’esprit’.100
Moreover, it seems that le Senne’s usage prompted Pareyson. Up until 1940 Pareyson
preferred ‘filosofia dell’esistenza’, and seemed to lean closest to Jaspers’s reading,
emphasising the ‘personalism’ of philosophy, and the concepts of singularity and
situation.101 Indeed, in his 1938 essay, he had criticised Heidegger’s ‘impersonal’ and
‘indifferent’ ontology based on the primacy of the ‘esistenziale’.102 And yet having read
le Senne’s book, from 1940 he picked ‘esistenzialismo’ as his preferred term.103 Pareyson
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 13:55 01 March 2016

explained the difference a year later: Esistenzialismo, he argued, had ‘crossed the frontier
of the filosofia dell’esistenza such as it has been historically outlined’, coming to
assimilate ‘speculative complexes coming from totally different fronts’.104 Esistenzia-
lismo was thus chosen by Pareyson as a more capacious term to describe the Europe-wide
movement.105 He then adopted it as the title of his book, which appeared in 1943 and
became a touchstone for the Italian debate. Following Pareyson’s adoption, the word
‘esistenzialismo’ began to appear everywhere in Italy. In 1942 both Enzo Paci and Nicola
Abbagnano published books with the title Esistenzialismo, and we have numerous Italian
articles in the early 1940s taking ‘esistenzialismo’ as their focus.106
In the period before 1945 the word ‘existentialism’ found some of its most important
supporters in the Catholic philosophical community, helping bring together Thomists like
de Waelhens, Maritain, and Fabro, with Christian idealists like le Senne and Pareyson.107
It was valuable because while it retained the elasticity of previous terms, sheltering a
heterogeneous group of philosophers under its mantle, it remained untainted by
Heidegger’s rejection. Moreover the ‘a’ in the word served to suggest, if not require,
the ontological orientation that Thomists desired. But we should be hesitant about
assuming that it was for this reason a Catholic term. ‘Existentialism’ was fundamentally

99
Jacques Maritain ‘The Humanism of St. Thomas Aquinas’, in Living Schools of Philosophy, edited by
Dagobert D. Runes (New York, NY, 1943), 293–311 (297).
100
Luigi Pelloux, ‘La “philosophie de l’esprit”’, Rivista di filosofia neoscolastica, 33 (1941), 195–205.
101
See Pareyson, ‘Note sulla filosofia dell’esistenza’, 407–09. Pareyson argued that Heidegger’s ‘existenziale’
analysis—despite its emphasis on Jemeinigkeit, which for Pareyson was only an abstract possibility of
ownness—obscured the singular person that Jaspers highlighted. See also his suggestion that Heidegger’s work
‘tends to compromise and hide the evidence of spiritual experience of the most frankly existentialistico
character’; Pareyson, La filosofia dell’esistenza e Jaspers, vi.
102
Pareyson, ‘Note sulla filosofia dell’esistenza’, 421–23.
103
Luigi Pareyson, ‘Genesi e significato dell’esistenzialismo’, Giornale critico della filosofia italiana, 5 (1940),
326–37 (326–27). Pareyson’s essay draws heavily on le Senne’s analysis, and le Senne was a great friend of
Pareyson’s teacher, Augusto Guzzo.
104
Luigi Pareyson, ‘Panorama dell’esistenzialismo’, Studi Filosofici, 2 (1941), 193–204 (193).
105
See also Pareyson, La filosofia dell’esistenza e Jaspers, v.
106
The term was sufficiently important that it became the subject of a short series of critical notes by Norberto
Bobbio in the Rivista di Filosofia in 1941/2.
107
In French before 1939 it was almost exclusively used by Catholics. Non-Catholic uses of the term seem to be
dealing with other issues: as I noted in note 84 above, in 1933 ‘existentialiste’ was used to refer to the American
Psychological school, and in 1932 Jean Cavaillès used it to describe different schools of logic; see Jean
Cavaillès, ‘Les œuvres complètes de Georg Cantor’, La Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Étranger, 114
(1932), 421–54 (443). The only non-Catholic to use ‘existentialisme’ in its more usual sense in French during
this period was to my knowledge the German Marck in his 1935 article.
 486 E. Baring

connected to Heidegger, who was widely interpreted as an atheist across Europe, and thus
the Catholics remained wary of embracing the term wholeheartedly. In particular we
should be attentive to the self-consciously provocative nature of Maritain’s claim that
Aquinas was an existentialist. The Thomist use of ‘existentialism’ was an attempt to
influence an alien movement. It was an expression of excitement about developments in
modern philosophy that seemed to align with Catholic metaphysics, but also of anxiety
about a movement that could so easily be turned against them: Heidegger’s atheism
remained a constant threat. If before 1945 the Catholics have the best proprietary claim to
the word ‘existentialism’, we should remember that for them the movement remained
something dangerous and foreign.

3.3. Sartre’s Existentialism

Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 13:55 01 March 2016

This history helps us understand Simone de Beauvoir’s account of the first time that the
label was applied to Sartre:
During the summer [of 1945] in the course of a colloquium organised by the
éditions du Cerf – that is, by the Dominicans – Sartre had refused to let Gabriel
Marcel apply that label to him: ‘My philosophy is a philosophie de l’existence;
existentialisme, I don’t know what it is’. I shared his irritation […]. But we
protested in vain. We ended up adopting on our own account the epithet that the
entire world used to designate us.108
De Beauvoir was wrong to imply that this was the first time Sartre had been confronted
with the term; Sartre had already defended his work as an ‘existentialisme’ six months
earlier.109 The anecdote is significant, nonetheless, because it indicates how the term was
understood. Foisted on Sartre by a heterodox Christian thinker at a Dominican conference,
‘existentialisme’ was a label with deep roots in Catholicism.
This context helps explain why Sartre might have ultimately adopted the term. As we
saw, in de Waelhens’s 1942 book he had labelled Sartre a ‘philosophe existentiel’.
Moreover de Waelhens finished his book with a three-page excerpt from Sartre’s La
Nausée, which he thought best expressed the ‘central experience of all Heidegger’s
philosophy’.110 The prominent position de Waelhens accorded to Sartre was clearly not
meant as a compliment. Sartre had simultaneously misunderstood Heidegger’s project
(which was an existentiale not an existentielle philosophy) and expressed best the
essential rottenness that had led to that project’s failure.
While the claim that Sartre was a ‘philosophe existentiel’ may have made sense on the
basis of his 1938 La Nausée, it no longer seemed valid after the 1943 publication of Being
and Nothingness. This was, as the subtitle suggested, a ‘phenomenological ontology’, and
the introduction was entitled ‘The Pursuit of Being’.111 Sartre had read de Waelhens’s
book, which for him as for many others in France offered a valuable point of entry into
Heidegger’s still-untranslated Sein und Zeit. Even if it remained distant from anything de
Waelhens could endorse, Sartre had refigured his thought as an ontology and we can see
why he might think ‘existentialisme’ a better label. In any case, once Sartre claimed the

108
Simone de Beauvoir, La force des choses (Paris, 1963), 50.
109
Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘À propos de l’existentialisme: mise en point’, Action, 29 December 1944, 11.
110
de Waelhens, La philosophie de Heidegger, 367–69.
111
Jean-Paul Sartre, L’etre et le néant (Paris, 1943), 9. Emphasis added.
 Anxiety in Translation 487

term for himself in October 1945 in his famous lecture ‘L’Existentialisme est un
humanisme’, there was no going back.
Sartre’s choice of ‘existentialisme’ may have been instrumental in its canonisation—
and certainly it is because of Sartre that the word has the currency it has today—but this
does not mean that he ever truly owned it.112 For the word was useful for Sartre in part
because it allowed him to implicate in his argument a larger group of thinkers, a group
extending well beyond France’s borders, and whose most important member was Martin
Heidegger. Heidegger, however, was unwilling to be co-opted.
At the invitation of Jean Beaufret, Heidegger responded to Sartre’s 1945 lecture in the
1946 ‘Letter on Humanism’. As the title suggests, Heidegger’s letter takes as its major
focus Sartre’s appeal to humanism.113 But Heidegger was also highly critical of that other
element of Sartre’s title: ‘Existentialisme’. In the letter, Heidegger picked up many aspects
of the debate that we have discussed here. First, Heidegger refused those readings of his
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 13:55 01 March 2016

work that prioritised the ‘existenzielle’. Second, in opposition to Jaspers, Heidegger

rejected the claim that he presented Dasein as an object.114 But while these criticisms
make sense within the German context, Heidegger’s rejection of ‘Existentialismus’ is
clearly marked by the passage of that word outside of Germany and back.
As we have seen, ‘existentialisme’ rose to prominence due to concerns with the other
labels being applied in France to Heidegger’s philosophy, and Heidegger’s earlier letter to
Jean Wahl had played an instrumental role in its success over alternatives like
‘philosophie de l’existence’ and ‘philosophie existentielle’. Moreover ‘existentialism’
had gained traction more generally in Europe in part because it hinted at the ontological
concerns of the neo-scholastics, whose networks had helped ferry the term (and
existentialist ideas more generally) around Europe. The traces of this history are clear
in Heidegger’s 1946 response; he framed his resistance to the term ‘Existentialismus’
through a discussion of the differences between his thought and metaphysical thinking, of
which scholasticism was a prime example. According to Heidegger, for a tradition of
philosophy starting with medieval philosophy ‘Existentia [existence] means […]
actualitas, actuality [Wirklichkeit] as opposed to the simple potentiality as idea’.115 In
contrast, for Heidegger, ‘Ek-sistenz’ ‘means essentially standing out [Hin-aus-stehen] in
the truth of Being’.116 In consequence, the scholastic understanding of existence obscured
Dasein’s relationship to Being; despite their ontological pretensions, the scholastics were
forgetful of Being. Thomist philosophers may have presented themselves as better readers
of Heidegger because they recognised his overriding interest in Being, but Heidegger
refused the proposed alliance.
Heidegger’s discussion of scholasticism provided him with the means to attack Sartre.
Though Sartre might have reversed the traditional priority of ‘essence’ over ‘existence’,
this was not sufficient to undo metaphysics. As Heidegger argued, ‘the inversion of a
metaphysical proposition remains a metaphysical proposition’.117 Moreover, the ground

112
See for example Hannah Arendt’s distinction between French ‘literary’ existentialism and ‘Existenz
philosophy’; Hannah Arendt, ‘What is Existenz Philosophy?’, The Partisan Review, 13 (1946), 33–57 (33).
Arendt provides a fascinating history of Existenz philosophy, discussing in different terms many of the
distinctions at issue in this article, especially the opposition between Heidegger and Jaspers.
113
See Anson Rabinbach, ‘The Letter on Humanism as Text and Event’, New German Critique, 62 (1994),
3–38.
114
Martin Heidegger, Über den Humanismus, eleventh edition (Frankfurt, 2010), 17.
115
Heidegger, Über den Humanismus, 17–18.
116
Heidegger, Über den Humanismus, 17–18.
117
Heidegger, Über den Humanismus, 20.
 488 E. Baring

shared by Sartre and the Thomists might also explain why Heidegger expressed
discomfort with the terms ‘ontology’ and even ‘philosophy’.118 In place of such a
philosophy, Heidegger simply proposed ‘thinking [Denken]’.

4. Conclusion
Philosophers are generally uneasy with labels, and ‘existentialism’ has made many
particularly uncomfortable, in large part because the ‘-ism’ seems to denote formulaic
thinking. But the debates that brought the word ‘existentialism’ to prominence show a
more nuanced story. ‘Existentialism’ was never simply a default term, naming a closed,
rigid system. Rather it emerged out of an extended international conversation that
addressed the ultimate goals of the movement and its disciplinary presuppositions. As
different strands of the German Kierkegaard reception found traction abroad, the process
of translation elided differences that had previously been important. As a result, secular
Downloaded by [George Mason University] at 13:55 01 March 2016

and religious thinkers, those who embraced and those who rejected philosophy,
ontologists and proponents of human freedom found themselves grouped together. And
though ‘existentialism’ is today often discarded in favour of ‘existential philosophy’ or
‘philosophy of existence’, it is significant that it first arose because those terms were
considered incapable of representing fairly the variety and the richness of the movement.
And yet, current concerns with the term build on an ambivalence that characterised it
from the beginning. The product of multiple translations, existentialism could never be
embraced fully. French, Italian, English, and Russian existentialists amongst others
remained acutely aware that their work was beholden to its German sources. There was
always the risk that an authoritative figure, like Heidegger, would disown heretical
offshoots. But existentialism was foreign even for the Germans, and by 1945 doubly so:
existentialism was both Danish—an alterity that fragmented the German movement from
the beginning—and more recently French. For these reasons, existentialism cannot be
understood using the model of production in one national context followed by (even
transformative) reception in others. Rather, it was the product of numerous national
contexts simultaneously, an inverse Tower of Babel, where the differences between
Danish, German, French, Italian, and English, amongst others, allowed the construction of
a philosophical edifice. More than any other form of thought, perhaps, it deserves to be
called a ‘continental philosophy’.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Stefanos Geroulanos, Katja Guenther, Ethan Kleinberg, Peter Eli
Gordon, and the anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions. Erica
Ramirez and Hannah Vandenbussche helped me work through Spanish and Dutch texts
respectively. Research for this article was supported by a research fellowship from the
National Endowment for the Humanities and a Franklin Grant from the American
Philosophical Society. It was written predominantly while I was a guest researcher at the
Kulturwissenschaftliches Kolleg at the University of Constance in Germany.

118
Heidegger, Über den Humanismus, 49.