ABSTRACT
Metaphysical systems, especially of the idealistic German type, are generally eyed with suspicion. Their offense consists in propounding high-sounding and vast ideas which impress the level-headed and practically minded man as unscientific. People feel bewildered by Existentialism because they are fortunate or inexperienced enough not to have encountered Nothingness. The experience of estrangement articulated itself against the background of a fading pantheistic trance. The social nature of estrangement is Karl Marx’s discovery. As a political writer and economist, he directed his criticism against capitalist society and its fundamental institution, private property. Marx, however, was very far from teaching Existentialism. For him estrangement was not the status of man’s natural existence but merely a phase, though a necessary one, of man’s historical life. According to him, the path of mankind inevitably leads through this void in order then to rise, through the revolutionary crisis, to “perfect Humanism,” the first authentic incarnation of humanity in communist society.
