Our purpose here is not to elucidate the genesis and essence of scientific explanation in modern times but rather its influence on our feeling of life. As is clear from the foregoing, the first and strongest effect is to mark our naive world as non-original, derivative. This is not to say that we are aware, at every step, that its qualities and structures “de facto” do not exist, that they are mere “phenomena”; but the whole of our lived-experiencing of things and of ourselves is branded with a character of non-originality and semblance, ft is a life remote from the true, creative world forces, distrustful of its own immediate understanding. To be sure, man himself, in his true essence, is also part of nature, part of an existent geometrical system obeying—though its composition often changes in concreto even in the eyes of science—a principle of comprehension that remains essentially the same and is merely purified from historical dross. As part of nature, man is viewed in relation to the system of possible actions he can receive and perform, i.e., of changes he can undergo and bring about, and these actions, in turn, are studied as to their objective lawfulness, in order to obtain an objective rule of the forces governing and constraining man without his awareness. From the standpoint of this understanding, the subjective feeling of freedom has no noetic value, it is a mere effectus non efficax. The frequently stressed contradiction between the feeling of freedom and the objective assessment of man is basically, for modern humanity, a conflict between the two worlds, the naive and the scientific. From the standpoint of scientific objectivism, of course, there is no conflict, since naive life has a priori, in competition with the principles of the scientific reconstruction of reality, no noetic value. The naive world, conceived of as a partial (albeit structural) image of nature’s reality, can contain nothing that cannot be objectively categorized and explained, it can never count as an argument against objectivism. The question is, however, whether it can indeed be conceived of in this way, and whether this conception itself does not always do violence to our original, natural life-feeling, which is a distinctive experience and, as such, may have a noetic claim worth considering. Important here is the feeling and recognition that, on the basis of the objectivist explanation of humanity, I ought in fact never to feel free; at least, freedom does not have the meaning attributed to it by naive man, it is not spontaneity of decision and liberty in disposing of my possibilities of cognition and choice but rather, e.g., independence from outside constraint. It is important then that, in this peculiar conflict without contact, the scientific view can induce a profound change in the very foundations of the life-feeling; man lives in the fundamental apperception of his unfreedom, he feels himself the agent of objective forces, perceives himself not as a person but rather as a thing. Without our explicit awareness, there has been a substitution of our lived-experiences, a confusion that can then easily blind us to their deeper nature. Without going outside himself, man has become reified, alienated from his natural life-feeling; he becomes—at least at the surface of his being—what he holds himself to be. We shall call this reification, this conception of man as a thing, as a complex of objective forces, self-alienation. Out of it follows yet another phenomenon: self-abdication. Self-abdication is a reliance on “nature” where man directs neither himself nor others from a personal standpoint but rather gives himself up to the impulses that carry him. Since he does not live out of himself—rather life is something he receives—the question of the overall meaning of life lacks all real significance; “meaning” here means following impulses, which is done automatically in any case. Reflection has no fundamental importance for life; it is wholly in the service of action, as every personal decision follows from a vis a tergo, a natural necessity underlying lived-experiences. Work and activity are not so much a means toward a freely grasped goal as rather, on the one hand, a means of satisfying natural or, better, nature’s tendencies, and, on the other hand, an escape from the vanity of reflection5 and other of life’s temptations: partly a vital necessity, partly a distraction. The lowered sense of self carries with it a weakening of the feeling of the threat posed to man by objective forces and of the uniqueness of life, a spreading of the objective barrenness into our very lived-experience. It is as if all the diversity of life were ringing with an unvaried tone of indifferent nothingness which makes all things equal and does justice to life’s pure seeming with its uneven distribution of interests and disinterest, lights and shadows.—The fact that even such consciousness of abdication leaves room for a stabbing anxiety (about the finitude of existence) is simply more evidence of the inner conflicts in which human self-alienation becomes entangled. Alienated man finds it difficult to enter into the spirit of his self-prescribed role, or rather, the role prescribed to him by the objectivist view of his essence; life within him flees this graveyard reconciliation, and as he is unable to free himself from his self-apperception, he endeavors at least to turn a blind eye and forget his situation in the thousand distractions so abundantly offered by modern life.
There is no need to further portray the consequences of this conception. Man is, to a certain extent, pliant, and he can attempt to live even in defiance of the natural order of his own being; but when this gets him entangled in dispiriting conflicts, it is clear that he does need unity. This then provides a first indication for our problem setting, showing the need for philosophy as a unity function for our splintered consciousness, blundering from the naive to the scientific world and back, living out its unfortunate existence in between the two positions experienced as opposites. The unity function has in itself a practical significance; it is clear that the conception we have just described is far too tolerant of the grosser tendencies of human nature and does not appear as suitable ground for the genesis and development of a strong self.