(3 of 6)
On the Continent, the philosophical revolt took a different form. Germany's Edmund Husserl developed a "descriptive science" that he called phenomenology. His method was to examine and describe a particular experience—at the same time mentally blocking off any speculations about its origin or significance, any memories of similar experiences. By this act of epoche, a deliberate suspension of judgment, Husserl felt that the mind could eventually intuit the essence of the object being studied. Husserl's bafflingly difficult approach influenced such modern existentialist philosophers as Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre.
What the existentialists emphasize about man is that he, alone among other beings, is a decision-making creature blessed, or cursed, with the freedom to choose among a variety of possibilities in an absurd and mysterious existence; to be truly human, man must accept this freedom and conquer the anxiety and despair that threaten it by "commitment" to a way of life. This message can be bracing, notably in the religious version of existentialism, in which the commitment is directed toward a spiritual goal. It can also be nihilistic, notably in the atheistic version, in which commitment is demanded for its own sake only and the despair of the human situation is emphasized more than its conquest.
Both movements, the logicians as well as the lotus-eaters, appear to do away with what has usually been considered the very heart of philosophy: metaphysics, the attempt to comprehend through reason the nature of reality. In The Conditions of Philosophy, a current examination of the discipline, Mortimer Adler charges that the analytic thinkers abandon "first-order questions" that metaphysics used to ask—such as the nature of being, causation, free will—and are concerned mostly with second-order problems of method. The existentialists, on the other hand, continue to ask large-size questions, but because of their man-centered approach they are indifferent to systematic thinking. Thus, for both movements, a question such as "What is truth?" becomes impossible to answer. The logical positivist would say that a particular statement of fact can be declared true or false by empirical evidence; anything else is meaningless. A language philosopher would content himself with analyzing all the ways the word true can be used. The existentialist would emphasize what is true for a person in a particular situation.
The War of the Schools