Reflections on the Existential

Philosophy in T.S Eliot's Poetry

Pani, Prajna, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social
Philosophy

This paper is in response to

an angry cry from the torn edge of a world war, a

resigned anthem

to hopelessness. (1)

and attempts to define the nature and limits of the extreme human situat
ion of our time-
theexperience variously described as "existential finitude" (Tillich), "cos
mic exile" (Slochower),"ontological solitude" (Nathan Scott), "metaphysi
cal exile" (Camus), and exile in the imperfect"(Baudelaire). The terminol
ogical differences state the same experience as that of modern man'salie
nation from the ultimate ground of being and meaning. T.S Eliot moves f
rom depression andnothingness to a resignation to the inevitable. The vo
ice of moral and spiritual degradation,chaos of the age and loss of human
values is heard and provides scope to the transcendentalthemes in a refo
cused form offered by existentialism. The anger of the age flares up in th
e poemslike 'The Hollow Men' and 'The Waste Land' which tends to impl
y what is wrong in life is notabsolutely inevitable. T.S. Eliot detailed the a
lienation and meaninglessness in his poems andparticipated in the searc
h, exploring the philosophy of Existentialist thinkers, Buddhism,Hinduis
m for doctrines to explain and repair the fragmentation and meaningless
ness of modernculture.

Modern Existentialism is confined to human existence. The paper is an i

ntroduction to the maincurrents of existentialist thought which finds tra
nscendental treatment in T.S Eliot's poetry. Dueto approaches taken by p
hilosophers such as Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre, we encounteran
assortment on ontological possibilities. The potential for transcendence i
s linked to theresolution of the existential crisis and mental breakdown.
The fundamental aspects ofexistentialism provide the impetus for much
of the work of T.S. Eliot and his contemporaries.Kierkegaard's leap of fai
th, Sartre's hot rhetoric of existential choice, Heidegger's cooler image of
the heroic modern man, William James's will to believe, Paul Tillich's co
urage to be have beenEliot's energisers to get on with the search. Existen
tialism tells us of the conditions of existence,and to be aware of existence
is to know them. Economic slavery, triumph of science, materialisticapp
roach to life and preoccupation with the idea of the welfare state have pa
ralysed humanity. Inhis supreme conquest over material things, the indi
vidual has become a stranger to his own innerbeing and to the world. In t
heir efforts at systematisation, the so called 'intellectuals' havecreated ec
onomic man, political man, military man. The individual has lost his uni
queness, and adisorientation of personality has set in. Such a crisis alway
s leads to the ultimate human tragedy,the tragedy of meaninglessness of
life:

A sick, toss'd vessel, dashing on each thing. (2)

It is the realisation of one's true being and its destiny, not its standardisa
tion that is to beachieved if mankind is to be emancipated and saved fro
m its inevitable catastrophe. Theexistentialists believed in the ability, the
necessity of the individual to construct the self. Theybelieve life is given
meaning by individuals. Eliot evinced this existentialist trend in his thou
ght.He saw the vast horror of the world war and contemporary man bein
g cut off, alone, estranged,absurd. This limitation of modern man's existe
nce reminds one of the American nightmare, the"long day's journey into
night" (O'Neill). In one way or another, as Eliot says in East Coker III,"W
e all go into the dark". Nevertheless, against all evidence, this paper affir
ms the existence of atranscendent human nature and inherent meaningf
ulness. It is a conviction that the very powerof blackness, agony, and des
pair which threatens our existence is also a hope of making thejourney to
the end of night. It is here that Eliot and Nietzsche demonstrate the self i
n writing.
This paper offers Eliot's findings within the conditions and dynamics of
modern life theagonizing meaninglessness of the genti dolorose, the sorr
owful people in Canto III of Dante'sInferno. The bleaker aspects of existe
ntialism: alienation, nausea, absurdity, sanity, anomie,ennui (which Tols
toy brilliantly defined as 'the desire for desires'), anxiety, estrangement,
weightlessness, meaninglessness, purposelessness, and nihilism find exp
ression in T.S Eliot'spoetry. In this "the disillusionment and the wastelan
d" feeling created by war is voiced. In hisearly poetry, Eliot records the p
erceptions of psyche and historical time with an extremeprecision of tone
and phrase. In his later poetry, his mystic vision finds a verbal equivalen
ce interms of concrete symbolism and revealing paradox. His first import
ant poem, and themodernist masterpiece in English, was the radically ex
perimental 'Love Song of J.A.Prufrock'.T.S. Eliot quotes Einstein, "Weak
ness of the attitude is the weakness of the character". Prufrockepitomises
this statement; by failing to take action, he is forced to live a life of futile
wants andutter loneliness. 'The Waste Land' expresses with startling pow
er the disillusionment of the post-
war years. 'Four Quartets' becomes an assertion in desperation, a falling
off from the poetry ofexperience to the more prosaic, discursive mode of
"a man reasoning with himself in solitude",with a consequent loss of inte
nsity and even credibility. Unlike postmodern literature, however,moder
nist literature saw fragmentation and extreme subjectivity as an existenti
al crisis or aFreudian internal conflict. T.S. Eliot's later significant poems
are exquisite philosophical musingson the nature of time and history. El
iot's "timeless moments", those instants of blindingepiphany and heighte
ned existence that make the rest of life seem pathetically tame, are comm
onto all humans, as is the lament for the rarity of such experience in Bur
nt Norton:

Ridiculous the sad waste sad time

Stretching before and after.

The despair has been articulated by existentialist philosophers like Kierk

egaard, Nietzsche,Camus and Kafka. The poetry of T.S Eliot sees fragme
ntation and extreme subjectivity as anexistential crisis. The images of dr
yness and infertility dominate the earlier parts of 'The WasteLand'. The e
arth is seen as 'the dead land' with 'dull roots', a 'stony rubbish' in which
nothing willgrow. In this desolation there is no hope for life:

And the tree gives no shelter, the cricket no

relief

And the dry stone no sound of water.

These images of desolation are metaphorically linked to the lack of spirit

ual belief and lovelessrelationships in the modern world. In Section Two,
'A Game of Chess' an allusion to thesplendour of Cleopatra ('The Chair s
he sat in, like a burnished') is juxtaposed with thepretentiousness of the
neurasthenic woman. The world of fertility and love is replaced withalien
ation, loneliness and implied sterility:

My nerves are bad tonight ... stay with me Speak

to me.

The horror and destruction of World War I transferred these suspicions

of ultimatemeaninglessness from the realm of mere speculative philosop
hy into the reality of tragic personalexperience. Essentially, both the intel
lectual and the personal life of western culture becamedominated in part
by this timeless dialectic questioning meaning or meaninglessness of the
universe and human experience.

Literary expressions of Eliot and other modern writers like W.B. Yeats, J
oyce show connectionswith major figures-
Bergson, Proust, Kafka, Camus, Sartre, Heidegger, Nietzsche, to name ju
st afew. They have presented the tragedy of modern man obsessed with t
he own self only to find itcaught in the maelstrom of sociocultural forces,
metaphysically suppressed, scattered anddissolved into a stream of cons
ciousness with no centre of integration or orientation. In the socialcontex
t, the struggle for selfhood is equally if not more frustrating. This paper e
ndeavours toshow the influence of the existential philosophers on Eliot,
who moulded his shaping spirit ofimagination regarding the doctrine of t
ranscendence.
On reading T.S. Eliot one will gain a keen insight into a host of movemen
ts and trends in modernintellectual life-
existentialism being the key issue. In 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufroc
k', Eliotthrough Prufrock reflects and predicts the two dominant philoso
phies that shaped the twentiethcentury western civilization: Psychoanaly
sis and Existentialism. Eliot mourns the loss of chance,sobbing in existen
tialist despair, lamenting of passive indecision and inaction. In the openi
nglines, he says:

Let us go then you and I

When the evening is spread out against the sky

and following with the imagery of absolute

impotence,

Like a patient etherized upon a table.

It is in this way, that Eliot creates a sense of doing, and a sense of being d
ragged through theevening, tied to the back of a great fatalistic carriage.
Towards the end of the poem, Eliot writes

Now I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Am an attendant lord.

This is symbolic of the depersonalisation within the poem. Prufrock's pri

vate musingscommunicate the consciousness of an anti-
hero who dreads human contact and, especially,sexual intimacy, a man v
irtually castrated by his own inhibitions. "Prufrock" prefigures Joyce,Kaf
ka. To put it concisely, all twentieth century writers specialising in the pe
rsonal,psychological, even unconscious point of view are clearly indebted
to Eliot's groundbreakingeffort.

Eliot drew on Bergson's methodology for new poems in which he cultivat

ed indirect habits ofmind. He thought that the most important passage i
n Bergson's work had to do with thedifference between the heterogeneou
s qualities which succeed each other in our concreteperception, perceptio
ns which are continuous, and an underlying harmony which one should
beable to deduce. In the 'Love Song', Eliot has accepted the psychological
time of Henri Bergsonrather than quantitative measure of existence:

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred visions and revisions

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In 'Rhapsody on a Windy Night', time in the present is measured by the s

treet lamps, but there isalso a far more significant change in time betwee
n the past and present. On this point, Eliot hasto say this about Bergson's
view:

The past exists in the present, which contains the

future. The

concrete and ever present instant of duration is

life, for each of

us living individuals in his own time. (3)

In 'Rhapsody on a Windy Night' Eliot experimented with Bergson's meth

od of grasping truth notby means of analysis but by casting oneself on a c
urrent of immediate perception as it flowedthrough time.

Authentic experience may be realized in the experience of anxiety as well

as joy. The multiplelocations of the same experience in space and time s
uggest its transcendental status. For Proust,the experience comes up spo
ntaneously to repeat itself in the Present. In Eliot's 'Four Quartets'we fin
d a parallel sense to this experience. We can hear through memory the u
nheard music ofthe early days, and the deserted garden and the empty p
ool are brought to life by memory, which,through the present, holds the
m alive. There is a glad note that reality has after all been grasped:

Quick now, here, now, always

The poetry of T.S. Eliot is filled with despair, helplessness, hollowness or
separateness from anyhope of salvation: "For thine is the Kingdom" and
"Life is very long". Something fundamentalprevents the hollow men fro
m translating thought, however tepid into action. Faith, thesubstance of t
hings hoped for, is beyond them. It is this shadow, the inability to believe
inanything to the point of sacrifice, which prevents them from any actio
n that might earn thementrance into the next world. In 'The Hollow Men'
,

Between the desire

And the spasm

Between the potency

And the existence

Between the essence

And the decent

Falls the shadow.

Eliot seems to struggle with the possibility of faith. Ackroyd rightly says:

He was aware of what he called 'the void' in all

human affairs-the

disorder, meaninglessness, and futility which he

found in his own

experience; it was inexplicable intellectually ..

.and could only

be understood or endured by means of a larger

faith". (4)

Now to come to St. Augustine, he pointed a transcendent reality, in whic

h time is non-
existent.He held that Time was always passing and never is. Eliot's notio
n of time is also expressed in'Burnt Norton':

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future

And time future contained in time past

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

The fluidity of temporal experience is tentatively suggested in these form

ulaic lines, which alsolend themselves to theological constructions. One i
nterpretation of this experience supports areligious reading: "If all time i
s eternally present / All time is unredeemable". Eliot suggests thatthe ti
me that grounds metaphysics may be what separates the believer from th
e possibility ofpersonal redemption. The speaker strongly questions "a w
orld of speculation" that prevents usfrom coming to terms with time in s
ome way.

St. Augustine's notion of time is closer to the

moderns because it

stresses the subjective nature of the temporal and

allows for the

eruption of the eternal into sequential time. He

explained time as

a psychological phenomenon. He holds that "time is

in man's soul
 and that it is man's apprehension of time that
gives it reality". (5)

This paper is a reflection of the partial modification of the philosophies o

f Kierkegaard,Heidegger, Sartre and their influence shaping Eliot's notio
n of time consciousness. Eliot's notionof a timeless moment, whose pleni
tude abolishes duration, that eternal instant of whichKierkegaard spoke.
This seems to be an imaginative and partially intellectual insight whichre
produces on a lower plane some of the conditions of mystical intuition. A
sudden hint ofeternity is obtained, and the time process seems momenta
rily suspended. Such moments ofrelease free us from any eternal compul
sion; they are surrounded by '... a white light still andmoving'.

The early nineteenth century Danish philosopher, Kierkegaard, insisted t

hat ours is not a worldof tendencies and ideas, but of men, each of whom
is a mystery both in and to himself. HenceKierkegaard is thought of as t
he first existentialist. For him the most important thing in life wasman's
relationship to God. Reason could not prove either god's existence or his
goodness. Faithwas a leap in the dark to which men were driven by awe a
nd dread and anxiety. It is only intaking Kierkegaardian leap to faith; Eli
ot is able to embrace a transcendental signifier, whichserves as a source
of meaning and basis of hope. Some of Kierkegaard's later successors, for
instance the French philosopher novelist and playwright Jean Paul Sartr
e, are not men ofreligious belief but atheists; but the dread, awe, and anx
iety with which they regard what appearsto be the unnecessary and arbit
rary intrusion of human consciousness into the world-
man, 'auseless passion'-
makes them as eager as Kierkegaard to insist on the unique significance
of everyindividual human life.

Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Sartre have in their different ways assigned

a crucial role to anxietyfor the revelation of true being. Kierkegaard soug
ht to discover the recurrence of things ineternity, and he believed in the c
ontinuous integration of past and future in the present which,with the ex
ception of a more marked stress on the importance of the past, was very
close toBergsonian duration. He holds that the moment in time has an es
sential, not just an accidental,relationship to union with God. Therefore
Kierkegaard calls it the "Fullness of Time". Moreover,the conversion whi
ch takes place within man involves a transition as momentous as that fro
mnon-
being to being. Therefore, Kirkegaard calls it the "New Birth". Kirkegaar
d 's conception ofauthentic existence has been summarised as follows:

To be a person is to exist in the mode, not of being, but of becoming and

what a person becomesin his own responsibility, the product of his will. (
6) (Kierkegaard, 1988:106)

Repetition is an essential and recurrent ideal in existentialist thinking. In

repetition inheres theearnestness and reality of life. Eliot's use of the ide
a of 'Repetition' and 'Recollection' remindsone of Kierkegaard: When on
e does not possess the categories of recollection or of repetition thewhole
of life is resolved into a void and empty noise. (7) By repetition, Kierkega
ard does notmean the type of recurrence with which scientific laws are co
ncerned. It is not the repetition thatis characterised in 'Portrait of a Lady'
when the young man loses his self-
possession and isirritated when he hears a reiterated tune.

I remain self-possessed

Except when a street-piano, mechanical and tired

Reiterates some worn out common song

Like Proust, he considers repetition in the perspective of personal history

. It occurs throughgrace. Kierkegaard compares repetition and recollecti
on.

Repetition and Recollection are the same movement,

only in opposite

directions; for what is recollected has been, is

repeated backwards
 whereas repetition properly so called is
recollected forwards. (8)

Eliot adopts this sense of Repetition and

Recollection in weaving

the pattern of his poetry. Kierkegaard holds that

man can transcend

the temporal flux. Again he says that we can do

justice to human

history by defining the instant as the point where

eternity touches

time. History is the setting in which man

exercises freedom in

seeking a right relationship with eternity and

there is no way of

describing man's "present" without taking into

account the fact

that man transcends the present. The "instant",

viewed as an

atmosphere of eternity, may be called a finite

attempt to fulfil

time. To him man is a synthesis of the infinite

and the finite, of

the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and

necessity. This

conception of man is in harmony with Eliot's

conception that man is
 a product of the natural and supernatural.

A close analysis of Heidegger's lecture shows that he himself had not in

mind a theoretical andconceptual construction, but a way of philosophizi
ng that consisted in an "experience" andmoreover in an "experience of tr
uth". Heidegger was one of the first philosophers to denouncewhat he cal
led literally "the drunkenness of lived experiences". It is not only now tha
t everythingmust be an object of a "lived experience". It is this frantic que
st of lived experiences that shows inthe present time the human being ha
s lost "Being" and that he has become the prey of his chaseafter lived exp
eriences. In this context, Heidegger introduces the beautiful expression o
f"temporal escapings" that liberate us from the traps of the image of hori
zontality. In Heidegger'sopinion, we discover the different stages of the f
orgetting of Being, which go together with newunderstandings of truth, fi
nd an echo in similar transformations of the conquest of experience. Ifwe
accept the legitimacy of an enquiry regarding the historical transformati
ons of truth, weshould have no difficulties in developing a similar inquiry
regarding the transformations of theidea of experience. In the first stage
, truth is no longer what it was. In the second stage, theconcept of experi
ence is linked closely to the idea of a spatial and temporal crossing. Anex
perience can only be understood if we accept the corresponding itinerary
. T.S. Eliot's famousverses in 'The Waste Land' are worth remembering i
n the context, which describe theperegrinations of the pilgrims toward Je
rusalem:

We will not cease from exploration

And the end of all our peregrinations

Will be that we come back to where we started (9)

And then we will know the place for the first time. It is exactly this point
that Heidegger stressesin his early lectures. He emphasises the fact that
man can transcend time, he sees the totality ofhuman existence, includin
g knowledge as contained in the structure of temporality. Althoughman c
an never stand outside temporality, temporality stands outside itself by p
roducing what hecalls the three "ecstasies" of past, present, and future. T
he fully human way to approach theproblem of temporality is in terms of
historicity. Man as a being in history finds the meaning ofhis own existen
ce only by taking account of history of the race. For him, the repetition of
the pastin the present, is oriented forward toward the fulfilment of possi
bilities. Sometimes Heideggerinsists that this limit on human detachmen
t is a condition of existence rather than a product ofrecent history; only s
ensations of giddiness and despair hint a technology and inauthenticity.
Elsewhere in the 'Letter of Humanism', he argues that Marx correctly giv
es "the estrangement ofman" its "essential; dimension of history". The sa
d course that humanity has followed since thedawn of Western Philosop
hy now returns to "its roots in the homelessness of modern man". As aco
nsequence, America's self-
satisfied inheritance of the old European tradition is not only anincreasi
ngly dismaying "life style", but also another "dawning".

A brief analysis of the poetry of T.S. Eliot brings to the front the major ex
istentialpreoccupations-
anxiety, fear of nothingness, urban indifference, the absurd, loneliness a
nd aconfrontation with death. These are evoked with animated countrysi
de or urban scenes and withmythological and literary allusions. Allusion
s in T.S. Eliot's Poetry create a metaphoric structurein which bits and pie
ces of history, myth and literature create a dismal contemporary world of
memory. The Woman in 'Preludes' is trapped and limited by life's munda
ne pretensions and theonward march of time:

To early coffee-stands

With the other masquerades

That time resumes,

One thinks of all the hands

That are raising dingy shades

In a thousand furnished rooms.

T.S. Eliot touches on the limitations of time on the individual in 'Prufroc
k', 'Preludes' and'Rhapsody on a Windy Night'. The sections from 'Prelud
es' suggest that time limits the individualto its continual cycle. Prufrock a
dmits that he is incapable of predicting the future and thereforethe futur
e is risky and uncertain:

I am no prophet-and here's no great matter

The wisdom and pre-

existential anguish found in Eliot's poetry could only have been achieved
through much suffering. Eliot constantly displays his 'world-
weariness' towards life. Through'Prufrock' Eliot demonstrates the tireso
me, tedious nature of city life as the smile describes thestreet, comparing
it to a "tedious argument":

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

And saw-dust restaurants with oyster shells;

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Of insidious intent.

Living is portrayed more forcibly as painful in both 'Preludes' and 'Rhaps

ody' preparing for apedestrian life is "the last twist of the knife". In 'Prelu
des' the human condition is illustrated asone of suffering:

The notion of some infinitely gentle

Infinitely suffering thing.

The poetry of T.S. Eliot is filled with the despair of human condition. Elio
t invokes pathos inmany of his poems to depict the pitiful situation of ma
nkind in the modern world. For example,pathos is employed in 'Preludes
':
 I am moved by fancies that are curled

Around these images, and cling:

The notion of some infinitely gentle

Infinitely suffering thing.

In 'Rhapsody on a Windy Night' themes of decay and death permeate the

imagery as every streetlamp "Beats like a fatalistic drum", and the image
ry connected with the broken and rusted springconveys:

A broken spring in a factory yard,

Rust that clings to the form that the strength has

left

Hard and curled ready to snap.

The fact that there is nothing behind the child's eye suggests that the uni
verse is empty and lacksmeaning.

'I could see nothing behind the child's eye'

There are echoes of Kafka in Eliot's work, but our reading of Kafka notice
ably refines and divertsour reading of the poem. The fact is that each writ
er creates his precursors. His work modifiesour conception of the past, a
s it will modify the future, images and allusions resurface throughoutthe
poem transcending the divisions between narrators and narratives of the
past and present.This kind of recycled imagery makes sense in the light
of Eliot's vision of cyclical time, foralthough Eliot uses the cycle as the ce
ntral structural and thematic shape of 'The Waste Land',there is a sense i
n which this narrative and conceptual form symbolises a kind of stasis fo
r Eliot.Pessimism pervades the poetry of T.S Eliot. 'The Waste Land' is a
suitable example, a poemscarred by war, filled with images of impotence,
sexual and metaphorical.

'What is that sound high in the air', Eliot asks.

 Who are those hooded hordes swarming

Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth

Ringed by the flat horizon only

What is the city over the mountains?

Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air

Falling towers

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria

Vienna London

Unreal.

The participation of consciousness in divine presence means that we are

always both somewhereand nowhere; along with the nightmare workplac
e or city dominates expressionist drama as themechanism of bureaucrac
y does Kafka and a haunting automatism the London Eliot's 'TheWastela
nd'. Such generalisation of trauma and dissociation to a whole environm
ent, society, orlandscape is especially noticeable after World War I. In th
e wake of the Second World War,existentialist writers such as Sartre and
Albert Camus affirmed human freedom. The "immensepanorama of futil
ity and anarchy which is contemporary history" is an agonizing inescapa
bletask, whether in the work of our greatest writers such as Eliot, Kafka,
or in the mind and life ofany person who wishes to make moral sense of
being alive. Jean-
Paul Sartre, the most famousexistentialist philosopher, puts it this way:

We are condemned to be free. (10)

Freedom alone makes us human. Sartre always speaks of human conditi

on and his description ofit is the analysis of modern world. What Sartre
postulates as the radical freedom is identical withwhat T.S Eliot said abo
ut modern individual's loss of traditions, roots and orientations under th
econditions of 20th Century civilization. Sartre felt that human beings si
mply existed, and werealone. Meaninglessness and absurdity of life was t
he most basic discovery by the existentialistphilosophers. The absence of
eyes, the windows to the soul, frightening, but equally frightening isthe f
act that the people find themselves speechless, waiting to be conveyed ac
ross the River Styx,unable to see the future unless the "multifoliate rose",
Dante's symbol of paradise, "the hope onlyof empty men" should sudden
ly appear to save them. Sartre may capture the exhilaration offreedom ex
ercising itself in the immediacy of the present-
but can the subtlest explorations oftime compensate for the loss of eterni
ty?

Albert Camus, the great French writer of the century, is probably closer t
o Kafka in philosophicalorientation than in style, but Kafka's influence is
still immense. Hope and the absurd in the workof Franz Kafka, "the appe
ndix to Camus' influential essay, 'The Myth of Sisyphus', serves to linkKa
fka's ideas with Camus's own. Both authors treat 'existentialist' themes of
estrangement,death, absurdity, and anxiety as can be known from the di
scussion of Eliot's poetry. Kafkadepicted a meaningless bizaree world in
The Trail. Camus's most famous novels owe much toKafka; the trial in T
he Stranger clearly evokes Kafka's own trial, The Plague alludes to Kafka
too.Camus's Le tranger and T.S Eliot's description of an anti-
hero or alienated soul, running awayfrom or confronting the emptiness o
f the existence is drawn in comparisons. In the Love SongofJ.Alfred Pruf
rock, Prufrock fails to identify with the world of 'cakes and ale and ices'.
Thevoices of the world recede from him, and he ultimately declares that
he cannot hear themermaids singing. Here a comparison can be drawn w
ith Meursault in Albert Camus's novel TheOutsider. The two figures are t
he products of heightened realism, and this is reflected in thequest of tru
th. They can be seen as consecutive stages in the development of modern
man'spredicament.

The thought of Karl Jaspers, one of the foremost

philosophers of

existence, has been devoted to the explication of

man's situation
 in the world and the possibilities of his self-
transcendence. It

concerns itself with a general statement of the

principle of

philosophic categories which have given uniqueness

to Jaspers

thinking: existence, freedom, and history, and the

limit-situations

of death, suffering and sin. Writers shortly after

Jaspers's major

systematic work and before his analysis of the

problem of truth,

reason and existence, occupy a primary position in

the development

of his thought. Jaspers in his Man in the Modern

Age points to the

emergence of human masses, the dissolution of

traditional values,

and the rise of nihilism, as signs of what he

calls the

"despiritualisation of the world".

One might call the root nature of being awareness, an awareness that is c
oncerned about its ownbeing-in-the-
world. Jaspers's basic philosophic concern was with the concrete individ
ual, and hebelieved that genuine philosophy must spring from one's indi
vidual existence and address itselfto other individuals to help them again
a true understanding of their existence. The basic conceptof his philosop
hy is the "encompassing", an essentially religious concept, intended to su
ggest theall-
embracing transcendent reality within which human existence is enclose
d. Inspite ofambiguities and uncertainties, he had a yes to life and shared
an interest in existentially relevantknowledge and despised the empty sp
eculation of merely academic philosophy for its lack ofreference to reality
. Eliot's writings speak, using Jaspers's beautiful expression from philoso
phy Iof the "inaccessible ground of human awareness". This spiritual unc
onscious is within us, whichseeks meaning, and which cannot be known
analytically or as an object, but which underliesexistence. The lines from
the Vedas are also relevant to the context: "that which does the seeing,ca
nnot be seen; that which does the hearing, cannot be heard; and that whi
ch does the thinkingcannot be thought". Buddhists might call it the dhar
makaya or Budhhanture, and their practices,like those of existentialists s
eek to know it but do not analyse it materialistically or take it for athing.
Eliot's contempt is for people living unreal lives, engaged in willful distra
ction, who are'wasting' their 'sad time'. His exhortation is open to all, an
d refers to here and now in BurntNorton.

Quick now, here, now, always

Ridiculous the sad waste time

Stretching before and after.

T. S. Eliot was aware of the void in human affairs--

"the disorder, meaninglessness, and futilitywhich he found in his own ex
perience; it was inexplicable intellectually ... and could only beunderstoo
d or endured by means of larger faith". (11)

Eliot's poetry may be regarded as a deeper and more intense probing int
o the perennialquestions. In 'Four Quartets' we are transported to a veda
ntic landscape, where empiricaldistinctions of the temporal and eternal,
the particular and universal, birth and death, flux andstillness, light and
darkness, are obliterated and transcended. Eliot realised in language apo
tential route to salvation. He appears concerned primarily with "the still
point of the turningworld" where
 Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence.

His concept of "auditory imagination" implies one of the basic tenets of I

ndian Philosophy. Theauditory imagination operates on the level of the u
nconscious. Behind the word is the soundwhich reveals its truth to the m
ind which is attuned to it. Indian philosophers believed that everyword vi
brates with the meaning that is embedded in it. The mind in contemplati
on rests on theobject, more specially on the sound. Once the mind is still,
then a technique of contemplation canconnect the discipline with the ce
ntre of his being. This is the process of self realisation .TheVedas describ
e this primal sound "OM". Indian mysticism endows the word with the p
ower toawaken the consciousness to a realisation of the Absolute. The fir
st and final cause is bothnothing and absolute: in his equation of ontolog
ical plenitude and ontological vacancy is avirtually certain case of Buddhi
st influence on Eliot's developing philosophical position.

Caught up in a daily cycle of meaninglessness, victims repeat actions that

perpetually denyhumanity and rob life of hope. The depiction of the reig
n of a Fisher King, a vegetating authorityfigures over a sterile land. It sy
mbolises the impotence and fruitlessness of his kingdom which isnow re
duced to a dry bone. It is hoped that a worthy warrior can lift the curse th
rough a dualinitiation rite-
by entering the castle and explaining a series of obscure symbols, which t
he poetdepicts as the Buddhist triad "Datta, Dayadhvam, Damayata" (giv
e, sympathise, control). Eliotends the poem with the ritual call to peace, r
epeated three times in pattern with the Buddha'sthree part command. W
ritten over two decades after his early master pieces, 'Burnt Norton' is th
efirst of the 'Four Quartets', Eliot observes his typical stylistic patterning
with an erudite epigraphdrawn from Heraclitus and a division into five st
aves, a parallel of the movements of a musicalcomposition. Lulling the re
ader with repetition in "Time present and time past", "time future",and "
all time", the poet mimics a Buddhist chant, a compelling intonation that
, like self hypnosis,draws the reader into a veiled, mystic consciousness.
The mesmerising effect of these timeoriented phrases embodies T.S Eliot
's philosophical consideration of history, which comprisedtime and actio
n.

JITM, Centurion University of Technology and Management India

[email protected]

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Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com

Publication information: Article title: Reflections on the Existential Philosophy in T.S Eliot's Poetry. Contributors: Pani,

Prajna - Author. Journal title: Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy. Volume: 9. Issue: 1

Publication date: January 2013. Page number: 301+. © Ashton and Rafferty. COPYRIGHT 2013 Gale Group.