by Adel Beshara
6 A. Sa’adeh, Complete Works, Vol. 13, 1946.
7 Sayegh, Whither To?
8 Ibid.
9 SSNP, Nashrat Imdat al-Iza’a. (Beirut: 1947).
10 Sayegh, Whither to?
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.
16 Ibid.
17 Tess Wilkinson-Ryan, “Legal Promise And Psychological Contract.” (Wake Forest Law Review, vol. 47, 2012): 847.
18 Stewart Macaulay, “Non-Contractual Relations in Business: A Preliminary Study.” (American Sociological Review, vol. 55, 1963): 55-67.
19 Kwame Gyekye, Tradition and Modernity: Philosophical Reflections on the African Experience. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997): 126.
20 Sayegh, Whither To?
21 Ibid.
22 An American physicist, historian and philosopher of science whose controversial 1962 book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was influential in both academic and popular circles, introducing the term paradigm shift, which has since become an English-language idiom.
23 Sa’adeh, Intellectual Struggle in Syrian Literature. (Buenos Aires, n. p. 1941).
24 Fayez’s essay on Lucian of Samosata is a clear example. The essay was found among his archival papers.
25 The line seemed to move eastward when order and civilised life prevailed and vice versa. Sa’adeh later recorded in the Ten Lectures (75) that “If we browse through works of the historians of the world we will find that, except in rare cases, there is not one single definition for a single territory called Syria.”
26 Ibid, p. 75.
27 In that year he claimed that the existing definition of Syria’s boundaries was inadequate because it was extracted from foreign sources which had been written within the context of their own self-interest.
28 Ibid, p. 75.
29 Ibid, p. 76.
30 Ibid, p. 79.
31 Edith & E. F. Penrose, Iraq: International Relations and National Development. (London: Ernest Benn, 1978): 2.
32 The view that soil degradation in the Syrian Desert is the result of the combined pressure of adverse and fluctuating climate and excessive exploitation is questionable, because the population in the Syrian Badiya was diminutive and the climate in the Middle East did not witness significant changes in the last 5000 years. See A. Leroi-Gourhan, “Vegetational history in SW Syria and Lebanon during the upper Quaternary,” Sahi Institute of Paleobotany, special publication No. 5 (1974).
33 Historically, the hills overlooking the Mediterranean were once covered with evergreen forests from sea to mountain tops, but large-scale felling left them barren and covered by a degraded drought-resistant scrubby vegetation called maquis. Similarly, Upper Mesopotamia once had a complex system of irrigation that allowed almost the entire region to be cultivated in the third century AD until it started to break down owing to lack of attention and a plummeting population. See Fouad Abo, “Desertification and Water Management: The Challenge in the Middle East,” Paper presented at the AMESA 12th Annual Conference, Deakin University (Melbourne 1993). Also Eyre, S.R. (1986), Vegetation and Soils: A World Picture (London: Edward Arnold, 1975).
34 Grant P. Christina, The Syrian Desert: Caravans, Travel and Exploration (London: A & C Black Ltd, 1937), p. 6.
35 Ibid, p. 1.
36 Neolithic materials recently extracted from the Syrian desert indicate that prehistoric villages had flourished in it as early as the seventh millennium B.C. See A. Bounni & K. Al-As’ad K, Palmyra: History, Monuments and Museum, 2nd ed. (Damascus; n.p., 1988).
37 A typical example is Tadmor itself. Once a great seat of commerce and arts and a marvellous oasis with sources of fertility, Tadmor furnished a resting place between Mesopotamia and Bilad as-Sham and was a primary stop for caravans moving between the Gulf, Persia, and the Mediterranean. But the great “city of the East” has fallen, no more to rise. From an outlying military station of the Roman Empire, it has sunk into an “obscure town, a trifling fortress, and at length a miserable village.” See Samuel G. Green, Bible Lands (London: The Religious Tract Society, 1879).
38 The agrarian system of ancient civilisations (Sumerian, Assyrian, and Babylonian) provided, for over 2,000 years, an efficient technique in water management, siltation, clogging and soil salinization in Mesopotamia and its adjacent areas. See Fouad Abo, op.cit.
39 Quoted in Samuel G. Green, Bible Lands, p. 46.
40 Ibid. Many Western missionaries ventured into the Syrian Desert expecting two days’ dreary ride over arid sands, but were astonished to find, in the very midst of their route, a long grass that came up to their horses’ stirrups for many a mile.
41 Cyprus has been a valuable military station for Western powers, particularly Great Britain since the inter-war period. It was used as a launching pad for the attack against Egypt during the 1956 Suez Crisis.
42 Stavros Panteli, A New History of Cyprus: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day. (London: East-West Publications, 1984): 8.
43 Stanley Casson, Ancient Cyprus: Its Art and Archaeology. (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1937): l8.
44 Sa’adeh, The Ten Lectures, p. 94.
45 According to Francis Godolphin, the whole study of archaeology was certainly unknown to the Greek historians. Much of the material for the knowledge of pre-history was more accessible then than it is now, yet the Greeks were content to rely on folk-tales and poetic accounts of earlier history. “For the majority of the Greeks, indeed, the myth was history. They never bothered to find evidence of living conditions, religious customs, and artistic development...” See The Greek Historians: The Complete and Unabridged Historical Works of Herodotus (New York: Random House 1942), xvi.
46 Sa’adeh, Complete Works, vols. 15 and 16.
47 Labib Y. Zuwiyya, The Syrian Social Nationalist Party: An Ideological Analysis. (Harvard University Press, 1966): 86.
48 Importantly, both projects had given little, if any thought, to the question of legitimacy or credence. As Sonoko Sunayama remarked, the underlying interest behind them was largely regime consolidation and the desire for a weaker neighbour. See Sonoko Sunayama, Syria And Saudi Arabia: Collaboration and Conflicts in the Oil Era. (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007).
49 Sayegh, Whither To?
50 Sada an-Nahda, 2 March, 1947.
51 Sayegh, Whither To?
52 SSNP, Al-Nashrah al-Rasmiyah lil Harakat al-Qawmiyyah al-Ijtimae’yah. (Beirut: Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1947).
53 Ibid.
54 Sayegh, Whither To?
55 Barry Cooper, “Ideology and Technology, Truth and Power.” In Frederick Copleston and Anthony Parel, Ideology, Philosophy and Politics (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press for the Calgary Institute for the Humanities, 2008): 93-111.
56 John Plamenatz, “The Philosophical Element in Social Theory and Practice.” In Frederick Copleston and Anthony Parel, Ideology, Philosophy and Politics. (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press for the Calgary Institute for the Humanities, 2008): 65.
57 Frederick Copleston and Anthony Parel, Ideology, Philosophy and Politics. (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press for the Calgary Institute for the Humanities, 2008): 9.
58 SSNP, Al-Nashrah al-Rasmiyah lil Harakat al-Qawmiyyah al-Ijtimae’yah. (Beirut: Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1947).
59 Sayegh, Whither To?
5
The Question of Existentialism
One of the most peculiar and interesting aspects in the Sa’adeh-Fayez encounter is the conflicting perspective that developed after the initial explosion. Both Sa’adeh and Fayez characterized their disagreement as intellectual, but they differed on the substance and nature of the issues involved. The role of Existential philosophy is one example. While Sa’adeh had isolated the source of the disagreement to Sayegh’s leaning towards existentialism, Sayegh regarded the existential dimension as a negligible factor in the overall scale of things. His two letters in reply to Sa’adeh in December 1947 and his stateme
nt to an-Nahar in that month made no mention (or hardly any mention) of existentialism. Likewise, his monograph on the dispute Whither To? contained only a brief and passing remark on the subject.
Sayegh’s blink at the “Existential issue” in his encounter with Sa’adeh is bewildering. Not only did a very clear focus on Existentialist themes permeate most of his literary works after 1945, the year he completed his Master’s thesis on “Personal Existence” but evidence also exists that these themes extended to his Party writings as well. The stamp of existentialism is evident from the “personalist” spirit that pervaded Sayegh’s approach to nationalism after 1945 and from the increasing use of “existentialist” terminologies in his analyses and speeches. This seems to have been altruistically driven more to salvage the war-battered image of nationalism from further disfigurement than an attempt to undermine nationalism itself.
Naturally, this raises several questions concerning the role of Existential philosophy in the Sa’adeh-Sayegh clash:
Why did Sayegh veer toward existentialism?
Did Sayegh attempt to promote existentialist themes inside the Party? If so, when, where and to what extent?
Why did Sayegh undervalue the role of existentialism in his dispute with Sa’adeh?
Why did Sa’adeh regard the existentialist world view as irreconcilable with his doctrine of social nationalism?
Did Fayez harbor a hidden agenda or was he simply misinformed?
A brief outline of some of the key ideas and concepts of the existentialist worldview will help us toward the answers to these questions.
THE EXISTENTIALIST PERSPECTIVE
Existentialism originated from the nineteenth century philosophers Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), whose 1864 novella Notes from Underground is considered one of the first works of existentialist literature.1 In the 1940s and 1950s, it experienced a revival through the French existentialist writers Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus (1913-1960), and Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986), who wrote several scholarly and fictional works with existential themes (dread, boredom, alienation, the absurd, freedom, commitment, and nothingness). Other notable existentialist thinkers of that period include the Russian religious and political philosopher, Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948), the German thinker Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), and the Swiss psychiatrist Karl Jaspers (1883–1969).
Conceptually, existentialism is anchored on the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject: not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual. According to this outlook, humans define their own meaning in life and try to make rational decisions despite existing in an irrational universe. Existentialism focuses on the question of human existence and the feeling that there is no purpose or explanation at the core of existence. It holds that, as there is no God or any other transcendent force,2 the only way to counter this nothingness (and hence to find meaning in life) is by embracing existence:
Thus, the first effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and it places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders. When we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men.3
From this duality between existence and the individual person, several essential and basic beliefs, shared by most existentialists, have emerged:
Each individual—not society or religion—is solely responsible for giving meaning to life and living it passionately and sincerely or “authentically”.
There is no common human nature. The basic given of the human predicament is that we are forced to choose what we will become and to define ourselves by our choice of action: all that is given is that we are, not what we are.
Human choice is the central factor in the creation of all values. Despite the absence of pre-established objective values, we are entirely responsible for what we become, and this puts the future of humanity in our own hands.
Freedom is autonomous. That is to say, freedom, rather than being random or arbitrary, consists in the binding of oneself to a law, but a law that is given by the self in recognition of its responsibilities.
Existence precedes essence, which means that the most important consideration for individuals is that they are individuals—independently acting and responsible, conscious beings (“existence”)—rather than what labels, roles, stereotypes, definitions, or other preconceived categories the individuals fit (“essence”).
Pro-active: Man must not be indifferent to his surroundings. He must take a stand, make choices, commit himself to his beliefs, and create meaning through action.
To be an existentialist, then, it is to assume that people and things in general exist, but that things have no meaning for us except as individuals and that we create meaning only through acting upon them. Thus, we are the only ones who can decide what our life purpose is. No other being or force can decide for us: we are free individual agents. As Jean-Paul Sartre would say:
Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count on no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.4
If “existence” is the real frame of reference, then human reality or human subjectivity is the foundation of all thought and action. Man first exists. Then he encounters himself, surges up in the world, and consequently defines himself. In the course of this, each individual has not only the right to choice, but also “the duty to choose”. What he chooses is what gives life meaning, not vice versa. Hence, the responsibility of building ones future is in one’s hands, but because the future is uncertain, one cannot escape from anxiety and despair:
We are always under the shadow of anxiety; higher responsibility leads to higher anxiety. The pursuit of being leads to an awareness of nothingness, nothingness to an awareness of freedom, freedom to bad faith and bad faith to the being of consciousness, which provides the condition for its own possibility.5
FAYEZ, THE PARTY AND EXISTENTIALISM
As indicated earlier, Fayez and Sa’adeh attached varying importance to the issue of existentialism during their dispute. Sa’adeh maintained that Fayez’s endeavour to promote existentialist ideas inside the SSNP precipitated the dispute. In his December 1, 1947 letter to Fayez, Sa’adeh wrote:
After I sensed a possible resolution of the dispute with the government, I examined the events that transpired in the movement during my absence or in the literature circulating inside it, including new trends of thought and literary works. In the process, I read your book Al-Baath al-Qawmi (National Resurrection). To my astonishment, I found that, except for (1) the chapter “The Nation, its essence, its constituents, and its characteristics,” which is based on Nushu’ al-Umam (The Rise of Nations), (2) the chapter “The New Order - The New Society” which is consistent with the orientations of the social nationalist movement, and (3) some snippets in other chapters that are likewise consistent, the main chapters dealing with the ideological and social principles and the philosophy of the Social National movement and its basic teachings are predicated on an ideology that is totally at variance with it. These chapters and the general orientation of your literary and cultural activities are infused entirely with the outlook of Berdyaev and Kierkegaard on man and human affairs. This individualist personalistic outlook of Berdyaev and Kierkegaard, which regards individual personalism as the essence and end, is totally inconsistent with [the] outlook on which the Social National movement was created. In the chapter “The Objective,” you quote directly when you say “The personality of man (the individual) and its development is the ultimate objective of society” (meaning that society is nothing but a means to this end). You also state that it is wrong to speak of society as having a unique character because society is “only
the sum of its individuals.”6
It troubled Sa’adeh that Fayez had been using “the Party’s propagating agencies to disseminate [existentialist] ideas and views instead of the teachings of the movement for which these agencies were specifically created, and which, in every respect, revolve around society and not the individual or the individual personality.”7 The claim is serious and worth detailed investigation to determine its validity. As well as personifying Fayez as an ideological renegade, it makes him the real abuser of his powers and privileges: enough to render any person an object of detestation.
Rather than engage Sa’adeh in a serious discussion over the matter, Fayez took the shortest shortcut: he denied the allegation in a brief two-sentence statement without elaborating or providing evidence. But a shortcut, to repeat one of Charles Issawi’s pungent aphorisms, is not only the longest distance between two points: it is quite often the most perilous route.8 Fayez took the shortcut either because he regarded the allegation as unimportant or because the allegation represented a demand that Fayez was either reluctant to confront or unable to defend. The weight of evidence overwhelmingly favors the second possibility: Fayez deliberately tried to dodge the existentialist allegation raised against him because it was indefensible.
No concrete evidence exists of Fayez altering any part of the SSNP’s national doctrine. He did not quote directly or synopsize excerpts from existentialist writings and insert them into the Party’s literature. However, strong evidence exists to condemn him on the lesser charge of trying to instill an existentialist spirit in the Party or seeking to bend its outlook towards an existentialist direction. The evolving and shifting focus of his party writings between 1938 and 1947 clearly attest to this. Until 1944, the trajectory of his writings adhered strictly to the Party’s guidelines and principles. It exhibited all the marks of its ideological imperatives, utilized its distinctive vocabulary and expressions, and extracted heavily from Sa’adeh’s writings. After 1944, we discern the gradual unfolding of an existentialist dimension emphasizing moral choices like self-responsibility, integrity of character, personal development, self-awareness, individual freedom, and the inauthenticity of human life. Fayez does not extract from extant existentialist writings or mention an existentialist thinker by name. He simply attempts to recast the Party’s doctrines in an existentialist light or give them a subtle existentialist flavor. He shows this in four passages.