Abstract
‘In the beginning is relation’, declares Buber in I and Thou (18). We are all, in Sartre’s phrase, contingent ‘existences-in-the-world-inpresence-of-others’, existing either authentically or inauthentically with our fellow men. As Macquarrie elaborates,1 the existentialist regards authentic being-with-others as that mode of relation to another which promotes existence in the full sense, allowing one to stand out as human in freedom and responsibility. Conversely, inauthentic being-with-others depersonalises and dehumanises. Therefore existence with others is judged authentic to the degree to which it permits individuals the freedom to become the unique persons they wish to make of themselves: true community allows for true diversity.
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Notes
Paul L. Wiley, Conrad’s Measure of Man (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1954), pp. 128–9.
H. M. Daleski, ‘Victory and Patterns of Self-Division’, in Conrad Revisited: Essays for the Eighties, ed. Ross C. Murfin (n.p.: University of Alabama Press, 1985), p. 120. Raval too comments that ‘the very crux of the narrative turns upon the conflict generated by Heyst’s divided loyalties. He is a man torn between… allegiance to the self of universal detachment… and his spontaneous adherence to the call of the human community’ (‘Conrad’s Victory’, p. 420).
See Mary Warnock, Existentialism (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 118.
Seymour L. Gross, ‘The Devil in Samburan: Jones and Ricardo in Victory’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 16 (June 1961): 81–5.
See Michael Hamburger, ‘A Craving for Hell’, Encounter (October 1962): 33.
Martin Seymour-Smith, introduction to The Secret Agent (Harmondsworth: Penguin English Library, 1984), p. 29.
See Fredric J. Masback, ‘Conrad’s Jonahs’, College English, 22 (February 1961): 328–33.
See Christopher Cooper, Conrad and the Human Dilemma (London: Chatto and Windus, 1970), p. 153.
See Paul Wohlfarth, ‘Der Gattenmord in Der Geheimagent von Joseph Conrad’, Monatsschrift far Kriminalpsychologie, 26 (February 1936): 523–31.
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© 1991 Otto Bohlmann
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Bohlmann, O. (1991). Being with Others. In: Conrad’s Existentialism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374003_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374003_4
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