How to Think and Study Western Philosophy and Contemporary Chinese Thought and Culture

A Brief Introduction to the Relationship between Modern Western Philosophy and Modernist Literature

The close connection between literature and philosophy is a common cultural phenomenon in ancient and modern times and in China. Philosophy always influences literature as a theoretical system of worldview and methodology, and literature often illustrates a philosophical idea of understanding the world. Modern Western philosophy and modernist literature are also in communication with each other.

This paper attempts to analyze the close relationship between modern Western idealist philosophy and modernist literature, and roughly outlines the general connection between the two. In the author's opinion, this connection is centrally manifested in the following: both of them take the instinctive-psychological-consciousness structure of human beings, which is detached from the social practice, as the most fundamental essence of human beings; from the instinctive-psychological-consciousness structure of human beings -The two are both taking human instinctive-psychological-consciousness structure as the most fundamental essence of human beings, reflecting the relationship between human beings and reality in the capitalist society from the human instinctive-psychological-consciousness structure; taking the human instinctive-psychological-consciousness structure as the basis to grasp and describe things. intuition as the main method of thought for grasping and describing things. The philosophy of modern Western idealism is the theoretical foundation of the guiding ideology and thinking method of modernist literature.

I. The philosophy of modern Western idealism clearly believes that the most fundamental nature of human beings, which distinguishes them from animals, is determined by their instinctive-psychological-consciousness structure.

There is a tendency in modern Western philosophy to exclude the practice of sensibility and to strengthen the abstract nature of reason, even to the extent of reducing the nature of the human subject to a series of logical atoms, artificial language and symbolic information. However, what they call reason actually embraces sensibility; they abstract sensibility and practice. For example, Russell and Wittgenstein, the founders of logical positivism, both believed that the complex and diverse world is composed of indivisible logical atoms or logical facts. In Russell's view, the nature and relations of things are not independent of man, but are logical fictions of atomic facts perceptible to human experience. Wittgenstein claimed that everything in the world is made up of "atomic facts", i.e., the simplest primitive experiences combined in a fixed logical way. He simply denies the fact that the grammars of logic, the relations of logic, are nothing more than man's knowledge and grasp of objectively existing things and relations between them in practice. In turn, Carnap and Morris and others consider the world of existence as a system of words and symbols. According to Karnap, things exist within a linguistic framework, and the notion of "thing" is not a generic term for what exists. Morris, on the other hand, transforms Carnap's linguistic framework into his own symbolic information system. In his view, a person senses the existence of things because he is stimulated by symbolic information. Therefore, things are a kind of symbolic information existence. In fact, artificial language or symbolic information is only a reflection of objective things.

Another extreme of modern Western philosophy is to exclude the rational nature and strengthen the sensual instincts, even to the extent of reducing the subjective nature of human beings to the will to live, the will to power, the real experience, the psychological experience, the psychological continuity, the libidinal instincts, the freedom of choice, and so on. However, what they call sensibility actually embraces rationality, but only regards practice as abstract and intuitive existence. Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are both representatives of voluntarism. The will is only a psychological disposition towards the external objective world and the internal subjective world, which is formed and developed by human beings in practice. However, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche exaggerated and inflated this subjective tendency of man into the origin and foundation of the world. Schopenhauer believed that the will to live is the inner essence and core of each particular thing, as well as the essence and core of all things. The world is only a mirror of this will. Nietzsche further argues that the purpose and meaning of the will to live is to unleash one's power, and that life itself is the will to power. Therefore, the world is a manifestation of the will to power. They completely separate human will from material existence, human reason from human practice, and engulf everything in will. This is the most naked manifestation of subjective idealism. Dewey, the main leader of pragmatism, regarded man's real experience as the root of the world's existence. He covered everything with experience and proclaimed that experience creates everything. Husserl, the founder of phenomenology, regarded it as a fundamental fact that the world is both a physical and a psychological realm. Both domains can be traced back to the self, the cognizant subject who intuits the world through mental experience. Bergson, a stalwart of the philosophers of life, believed that the only real thing in the world is the living, developing ego; the ego creates everything in its practical activity. By development he meant the prolongation of the purely emotional mental states of the ego; by practice he meant the prolongation of mental states. In his view, the world is nothing but the sum of images or mental images created by the subject of the ego. Freud, the grandfather of psychoanalysis, believed that the world is determined by human mental behavior, and mental behavior is determined by the unconscious mental structure, which is determined by sexual instincts and sexual desires. Sartre is a famous existentialist philosopher. On the one hand he recognizes that human existence is the reality of the human being, on the other hand he says that human existence depends on the free choice of the human being. On the one hand, he says that man's free choice is limited by his environment, on the other hand, he says that man is always able to make free choices beyond his environment as far as possible. Therefore, Sartre believes that human subjectivity can, to a certain extent, transcend social history. The two tendencies of modern Western philosophy are the same, both of them leave the social practice of human beings, either from the rationality which is detached from the objective world or from the intuitive existence, and fall into the idealism which denies the decisiveness of social practice and the metaphysics which separates the rationality from the sensibility.

However, in the inverted form of idealism, they reveal the reality of man's individual existence and the structure of his dynamic instinctive-psychic-consciousness. The regular structures and forms of various objects are first preserved and accumulated in the practical activities of human beings in using, creating, renewing and regulating the tools of labor, then transformed into logic, language, symbols and cultural information systems, and finally accumulated and developed into the instinctive-psychic-consciousness structure of human beings. -The structure of consciousness. This is what produces and develops the socialized human subjective nature, which is fundamentally different from that of animals, or the dialectical structure of the subjective nature, which is the unity of the natural, social and conscious nature of human beings. In fact, the existence and development of human beings, that is, human beings continuously recognize and transform the objective world, and at the same time continuously recognize and transform the subjective world in the active social and practical activities, this principle has been distorted and inverted by the modern Western idealist philosophy.

The essential feature of modern Western literature is that it is based on the instinctive-psychological-consciousness structure of human beings and expresses the opposition between human beings and the reality of the capitalist society.

Sartre's novel "The Wall" is a barrier between life and death, between life and death, and the existence of the self. The novel focuses on four characters. Juan, a Spanish revolutionary fighter and innocent child, and Tom, a soldier of the International Column, who is arrested by the fascists and sentenced to death, to be shot at dawn. The Fascists send a Belgian doctor to watch them in their cell under the pretext of accompanying them. Juan's illusions of acquittal were dashed, but the fear of death changed him. Tom had killed six of his enemies and had no hope of surviving his capture. But he was also agitated and panicked. Ibrietta was the strongest, preferring to sacrifice herself rather than betray her comrades. But he was subconsciously trembling and sweating, and when he closed his eyes he saw the gun pointed at him. He was motivated to keep a clear head and not to give the enemy any chance to take advantage of him. But the false confession he made to fool the enemy turned out to be true by chance. When he heard the news that his comrade had been shot, he fell to the ground in a daze, and when he awoke, he laughed like a madman. The doctor is the only one who has no worries and is at peace with himself.

The psychological confrontation between the three victims and the doctor exposes the hideous face and cruelty of the fascists. Especially after sentencing them to death, but also to watch their death agony, but also attacked the fascist cold beastly heinous. However, Sartre, in a turn of the pen, not only transforms this living class antagonism into an inner antagonism between human beings, but also transforms this inner antagonism into an inner antagonism of the human ego, as in the case of Ibieta, the inner conscious fearlessness against the subconscious physiological instincts of fear. Here Sartre abstracts the real connection and the real opposition between man and man, leaving only the abstract relation between life and death, which is completely divorced from the real struggle between the revolutionary people and the fascists. Sartre describes:

The three of us looked at the Belgian because he was alive. He made the gestures of a living man, he had the worries of a living man. He was shivering in the cold in this cellar, as all living men shiver. His body is well nourished and at the mercy of his will. We, on the other hand, don't feel our bodies so much, and in any case, we don't feel the same. I wanted to feel my crotch, but I didn't dare. I looked at the Belgian, standing hunched over, his muscles at his disposal, he could look forward to tomorrow. The three of us, ghosts without blood, sat there and we touched him, sucking the life out of him like vampires.

Where is the essential truth of the struggle against fascism? Wouldn't it be more appropriate to say that Sartre inverted and distorted the struggle against fascism?

The American expressionist dramatist O'Neill's "The Hairy Ape," famous for expressing the loss of the human self and the problem of belonging, features Yank, a boilermaker on an ocean liner. The ship symbolizes the entire modern capitalist society, weighing heavily on the bilge workers, who use their flesh and blood as cogs in the machine. However, Yank has confidence in himself, believing that he is the driving force of society, turning everything in the world. The daughter of a big capitalist, Mildred, meets Yank and faints in fear, thinking she has met a hairy ape. Yank is determined to take revenge and restore the lost value and dignity of the human being. He tracks down Mildred, but is unable to approach her because of the high security. When he saw a gentleman or a rich man in the street, he went to jail in disgrace. He realized that it was the capitalists on top of him who made him lose himself. Immediately after his release, he approached the trade unions and asked for explosives to blow up all the factories, but he was thrown out. He had no choice but to go to the zoo to see the hairy monkeys. He tried to keep company with the monkeys, but the apes hugged him so hard that he was thrown into a cage with a broken tendon. He exclaims in agony that everything is confused and upside down. O'Neill uses a lot of inner monologue to shockingly express the contradictions and conflicts in Yank's inner consciousness in search of self and belonging, and he also strongly expresses the high antagonism between man and modern capitalist society with such contradictions and conflicts in his inner consciousness. But he attributes the antagonism between man and society to the antagonism between man and his own destiny, and the antagonism to the antagonism between the loss of natural harmony in man's inner consciousness and his inability to establish a new balance. O'Neill himself said that Yank is a symbol of the man "who has lost his past harmony with nature and has not been able to establish a new spiritual peace. Thus he is suspended in mid-air, not in the sky, not in the earth." (Note 1) He adds, "This was, and will always be, the theme of the drama, the struggle of man with his own destiny. Whereas in the past man fought with God, now it is man who fights with himself, with his past, with his belonging." (Note 2) The history of man is not the history of the development of his social relations, the development of his productive forces, the development of his practical activity in the creation of social history, but on the contrary, it is a struggle between the abstract man and the fate of the abstract man. How can there be any essential truth here?　Western modernist literature focuses on the expression of the inner opposition between human instincts, psychology and consciousness, and from here it deals with the opposition between man and reality in the capitalist society, realizing that the loss of man's ego and his belonging to it is a social problem. However, the one-sided reduction of the opposition of reality in the capitalist society to the inner opposition of human psychological consciousness necessarily obscures and conceals the real roots and sharp antagonisms of social contradictions and class relations. This fully demonstrates that its theoretical foundation is precisely the philosophy of modern Western idealism. Sartre originally promoted existentialist philosophy in his literary creations. O'Neill once said bluntly: "Today's playwright must dig deep into what he feels is the root of the disease of today's society - the demise of the old God and the failure of science and materialism ...... in order to discover the meaning of life, and to comfort those who are in the throes of the disease, and to comfort those who are in the throes of the disease, and to comfort those who are in the throes of the disease. in order to find in it the meaning of life and to comfort mankind in its fear and perdition. It seems to me that whoever wants to do something great today must put this big subject behind the many small subjects of his plays or novels." (Note 3) O'Neill's self-effacement suggests that he viewed dramatic writing as philosophical reflection from the perspective of the fundamental relationship between human beings and reality. When modernist literature invertedly and distortedly expresses the antagonism between man and reality, it inevitably reveals, in a twisted, obscure, contradictory, and painful way, such extremely negative and degrading psychological emotions and sensory stimuli as the frustration of being unable to do anything, the frustration of being unable to do anything, the darkness of not seeing the future, the wail of life being like a dream, and the cynicism of liberation, etc. These precisely show that modernist literature is not just a play, but it is also a drama, which is a philosophical reflection. These precisely show that the modernist literature is certainly a revelation of the crisis of modern capitalist society, but it is based on the philosophy of modern Western idealism which is opposed to Marxism, and it is itself a product of the crisis of capitalism, therefore, it can only show some aspects of the antagonisms of the capitalist reality in the form of the distortion of idealism at the most.

2. Modern capitalism is a society in which the conflict between labor and capital is developing sharply and the interrelationship between human beings and objects is highly alienated. Modern Western philosophy has prominently studied the alienation of the fundamental relationship between man and reality. There are many schools of thought, and the debate is intense. The understanding of the root causes of capitalist alienation can be summarized into three views: the subjective theory of psychological feelings, the objective theory of social conditions, and the theory of subject-object interaction.

Subjective psychological perception theorists give the phenomenon of alienation a philosophical and historical content, mainly from a medical and psychological point of view. They believe that alienation is the crisis of the ego caused by the disruption of the human being's psychological and spiritual equilibrium, by a split in the human being's self-identity. The developed subjective psycho-sensibility theorists regard alienation both as a personal psycho-spiritual feeling and as a product of the contradictory stimuli of the real society. According to Fromm, alienation is man's experience of external alien forces and dehumanization of his own nature. He says: "Alienation is a mode of experience in which the individual feels himself to be an outsider, or, as they say, he becomes alienated from himself. He does not experience himself as the center of the world of the self, the creator of his own actions - but his actions and the results of his actions become his masters, to whom he is subjected and whom he even worships." (Note 4)

Objective theorists of the social condition see alienation as a social relation, an inhuman social condition. According to Markuzzi of the Frankfurt School, the highly developed science and technology of the capitalist society force human instincts, desires, and thoughts to be transformed into channels for supplying necessities, and man becomes one-sided, engulfed in alienated existence. Etzioni considers alienation not only as a feeling of anger or dissatisfaction, but also as a manifestation of certain objective conditions; the roots of alienation lie not in relations between individuals and in inner mental processes, but in social and political structures. (Note 5) The objective theorists of the social situation pay much attention to the socio-historical features and roots of alienation, but do not really reveal the essence of capitalist alienation.

The theorists of subject-object interaction believe that under the conditions of contemporary history the absolute boundary between the subject and the object of society

has broken down, and therefore the features and roots of alienation should be examined in terms of subject-object interconnections, penetration, antagonisms, conflicts and transformations. The essence of human being is self-creativity, and human being creates society as well as self. The uncoordinated development of these two creative activities, their mutual antagonism and negativity, causes both the alienation of society and the alienation of man himself. Capitalist society strengthens and develops the antagonism and conflict between subject and object, the system of private property creates the separation of the worker from the means of production and the product of labor, the bureaucratic system creates the political disempowerment of the members of the society, the reality of the human being is seriously divided from the social essence of the human being that makes him human, and the human being becomes centrifuged into egocentrism. Especially in times of crisis, society is completely lacking in the power to control antagonistic conflicts and to synthesize the various divisive factors. It is no accident that people become psychologically deranged, disoriented and alienated. The American existentialist philosopher Tillich exposes the vicious circle of subject-object alienation in contemporary capitalist society. He says that such societies are conceived for the emancipation of man, but disintegrate under the bondage of objects of their own creation. The peace guaranteed by the technical control of nature by well-performing mechanical devices, by the fine psychological control of man, by the rapidly increasing organizational control of society, comes at a high price: all this is invented as a means for the sake of man, who becomes a means himself in the process of applying the means. (Note 6) Using the psychological and spiritual state of alienation as a mediator, Simeon searches for a socially integrated bond of alienation and the possibility of all kinds of alienation constituting a unity from various aspects of social life, such as economy, politics, consciousness, culture, language, religion and education. In his view, the integration of subject-object alienation is manifested in six aspects: (1) powerlessness, in which human beings create political, economic and other forces, but lose them and are controlled by them. (2) Meaninglessness, because man loses the power of the subject and is controlled by the power of the object, life loses its original meaning. (3) Normlessness, where the object controls the subject, where the individual and society are in confrontation, where everything is disordered and deranged. (4) Self-alienation, the person is caught in a state of disorganization and abnormality, and is alienated from his own nature. (5) Social isolation, people are alienated from their own nature, human society is no longer a unified whole of interconnected human beings, society is divided and isolated. (6) Cultural alienation, the alienation of man from his own nature, society is no longer a unified whole of human interconnectedness, mankind has lost the concept of **** the same cultural values. This school of thought does have a high cognitive value. However, it also studies alienation from the perspective of human psychological consciousness. If the theory of alienation in modern Western philosophy is examined and studied in an overall and comprehensive manner, it is not difficult to find that it is an important aspect of modern Western philosophy and, at the same time, a distinctive feature that clearly distinguishes it from the traditional philosophies of history. It is precisely because it studies the alienation of the fundamental relationship between man and reality in capitalist society that it contains, to a certain extent upside down, socio-historical content and social-critical value. However, the essence of the theory of alienation in modern Western philosophy is idealistic. Because it always leaves the study of alienation from the social practice of human beings and reduces all alienation ultimately to the inner opposition of human instinct-psychology-consciousness.

Western modernist literature is colorful and strange, but its important core aspect is also the expression of the alienation of the fundamental relationship between human beings and the reality of the modern capitalist society, which is based on the confrontation and alienation of the structure of human instincts-psychology-consciousness. and alienation. Austrian writer Franz Kafka fictionalized such a story in his novel "The Trial":

K, a senior employee of a bank, is suddenly arrested. For what reason? Under what criminal procedure? Nothing seems to make sense. The arresting officer was just following his superior's instructions. The Ombudsman admits that there are too many strange things like this. After his arrest, K. went home, went to work, socialized and met people. No wonder Kay thought it was all a mistake. At the preliminary hearing, K. pleaded his case for reform of the legal system. But he was ignored. He had to hire a lawyer, and was locked in endless litigation. The lawyers couldn't tell what K. was guilty of, because a person's conviction often depended, unexpectedly, on the occasional remark made by a random person. The only way to win is to pull strings, to get in front of people, to make deals behind the scenes. Everything is in the net, and everything is out of the net. The entire legal system is a tool for the ruling class to do whatever they want to the people. No one can stand up to it. "This vast institution may be said to be in such a delicate state of equilibrium that if anyone tries to change the order of things around him, he risks a fall and total destruction, while the institution can be restored to equilibrium by the compensatory action of its other parts, which are interrelated; it does not change at all, but on the contrary, it is likely to become even more On the contrary, it is likely to become more rigid, more vigilant, more severe, more cruel." As it happened, K., unwilling to grovel and lose his dignity, was quietly executed a year later. There was no verdict, no formality.

Obviously, Kafka's fictionalized story is a profound revelation of the legal institutions of capitalist society. The state and legal institutions are a political force separate from the human being and dominating the whole of society, formed with the development of private ownership and the deepening of class antagonisms. It represents the interests of the ruling class and its will governs everything. In capitalist society, this force has become more and more perfect and powerful. Since law and the rule of law are less blatant expressions of the will of the rulers, it is easy to create the illusion that they are representatives of justice for all of society. Kafka tears down the hypocritical veneer of law and legal institutions in capitalist society and angrily demonstrates that this force of coercive alienation denies and opposes the very nature of the human being. This is rare and has a reasonable cognitive value.

But this force of alienation is so mysterious in Kafka's writing. You can feel its existence, its domination over you, but you don't know where it is, what it is, let alone how to recognize it and change it. This alienating force has been abstracted into an illusory spiritual entity that exists apart from experience. As some researchers have pointed out, Kafka promotes a false philosophy of idealism and mysticism in which there is truth but no way to follow it.

The French absurdist dramatist Unescu's The Bald Maiden exposes in the same way the extreme indifference that prevents people from communicating with each other in a capitalist society. A man and a woman traveling together on a train from Manchester to London, who have lived together and have children, do not know that they are husband and wife. If this is the case with couples, how can it be any better with people in general. In fact, the extreme indifference to communication between people is a deeper reflection of the monetary interests of the capitalist society in human relations. But in addition to gender relations, Unescu rejects all existing human relations and transforms the social-historical relations between human beings into an abstract conceptual consciousness. Thus it is impossible to recognize and grasp the true nature and ultimate source of this indifference.

Western modernist literature has more fully exposed the general alienation of modern capitalist society, that is to say, more fully revealed the alienation of the fundamental relationship between man and reality in capitalist society, both from the aspect of man's object world (e.g., the state, the law, etc.) and from the aspect of man's world of his own self (e.g., the inability to communicate with each other, the extreme indifference, etc.). This is undeniable and has a deep cognitive value of socio-historical content. On the other hand, if the alienating forces and relations of reality are transformed into something mysterious and discursive from the instinctive-psychological-consciousness structure of human beings in isolation from the social practice, not only does it fail to reveal the essence of alienation and its root causes in the real capitalist society, but on the contrary, it obscures or even conceals the essence of alienation and its root causes in the real capitalist society. On the contrary, it blurs or even conceals the essence and the root of this alienation. It can be seen that modernist literature is closely connected with the philosophy of modern Western idealism. On the one hand, it accepts the guidance and influence of modern Western idealistic philosophy, and on the other hand, it enriches the alienation theory of modern Western philosophy. This philosophical foundation of Western modernist literature determines that its skepticism, exposure and criticism of modern capitalist society cannot be other than inverted, distorted and negative.

Thirdly, modern Western philosophy regards the human instinctive-psychological-consciousness structure as the origin and foundation of the world, and believes that human cognition originates from this structure, and therefore, in the phenomenon of intuitive objects of this structure, one can directly grasp and describe the essence of the objects. The essence of the object can be directly grasped and described in the phenomenon of the object visualized by this structure. The new, strange and bizarre artistic expressions of modernist literature are essentially the evolution of this idealistic method of thought in art.

The pioneer of pragmatism, William James, was one of the earliest exponents of modern psychology. James was one of the first to philosophically reflect on and summarize the findings of modern psychology. He argued that there are two types of consciousness in human beings, a rational consciousness and a completely different irrational consciousness, which exists in a latent form around the rational consciousness. The difference between the two lies in the fact that the former is conscious, logical and has a rational rational structure, while the latter is spontaneous, erratic and in a confused, fluid and uncertain structure. The two are closely related: firstly, they are intertwined and interpenetrated, there are irrational elements in rational consciousness and rational elements in irrational consciousness; secondly, they are influenced by each other and transformed into each other, through the choice of attention, irrational consciousness will be rationalized, and once the attention is disintegrated, rational consciousness will be irrationalized. Therefore, human consciousness is the unity of rational and irrational consciousness on the basis of irrational consciousness. It cannot be measured logically, but can only be described as a stream of thought, a stream of consciousness or a stream of subjective life. It is these streams of consciousness that man chooses according to the attention of his ego, and which constitute his reality.

Freud, who had observed and treated psychiatric patients for a long time, independently came to conclusions largely in line with those of James. He proposed that human consciousness is a multi-layered structure of self-control. The lowest level is the unconscious ego, which is y submerged beyond human perception. The ego is essentially an animalistic instinct and desire, governed by its intrinsic libidinal drive. The second level is the ego, which is capable of thinking and judging. The ego is the consciousness that regulates the relationship between the ego and the environment. The ego is a totally blind impulse, and therefore is always in conflict with its surroundings. The ego is aware of the constraints imposed by the real environment on the human being, and therefore always keeps the ego and the environment in balance. So the ego is the self-control of the self, which only adults have. The loss of the ego leads to a psychopathology of the human consciousness. The superego is at the highest level of consciousness. The superego is a consciousness that transcends the ego and the self and embodies the morality and conscience of the society, suppressing at the bottom of the consciousness the egoic impulses that are not allowed by the morality and conscience of the society. The superego is sometimes unconscious, but is generally the most conscious, and therefore plays a controlling role in the structure of human consciousness.

Husserl argued that the generalization of mental experience is not precise, and that the generalization of logical understanding depends on statements. He demanded that objects be described directly by means of the pure consciousness that resides in man. In his opinion, the structure of all things is the same, and the structure of consciousness and the structure of its objects are expressed in the identity of phenomenon and essence. Therefore, the intuition in consciousness can grasp and describe the essence of the object directly in the phenomenon. In fact, he is logicalizing and psychologizing the mental, understanding mental intuition in the sense of logical cognition.

James, Freud, and Husserl each argued for the ideological method of grasping the essence of intuition from different ways. James emphasized epistemology, stressing that human beings know and grasp the real world in the flow of consciousness based on irrational consciousness. Freud emphasized ontology, stressing that the real world is an outlet for human instincts and desires. Husserl favored methodology, emphasizing that man traces and describes the essential real world with his intuitive consciousness. This formed a system of thought and methodology centered on man's intuitive consciousness.

Other philosophers have extended, expanded and realized this system in different ways. According to Bergson, movement is the extension and synthesis of the psyche, and therefore does not occupy a specific space and time. This movement, which does not occupy a specific space and time, creates a mental combination of space and time, that is, mental or pure space and time. In Marcuse's view, in order to liberate man, it is necessary to change explosively the repressive structure of human instincts, to sexualize the normal non-sexual and anti-sexual relationship between man and his environment, and thus to universalize this sexual relationship and develop a new sexual civilization. Sartre believed that there are two worlds of existence. One is the external world of man, i.e., self-existence, which is contingent, absurd, and a vast nothingness; the other is the world of man's consciousness, i.e., self-existence, which is the world of reality, subjective, developmental, and practical reality. The world of the self exists as the opposite of the world of the self, and has meaning only through the existence of man as the self. What makes man a self-existent being is his own subjective creation. This subjective creation is what he calls free choice. Man always consciously chooses the possibilities that confront him in accordance with his sense of responsibility for social good and evil. And this consciousness and sense of responsibility is the inner experience, introspection and choice of human destiny which man himself prescribes to himself. In Sartre's own words, it is the conscious awareness of absolute truth. This tautology is a logical fallacy, but it fully reflects Sartre's view of intuitive consciousness as human existence. The artistic expression of Western modernist literature adheres to such an idealistic method of thought. It is therefore inevitable that it should invert and distort the nature of reality.

The stream-of-consciousness technique is a novelty commonly used in modernist literature. The short story "The Passage" by Oates, a famous American writer, focuses on the flow of instinctive-psychological-consciousness between the heroine Renee and an inspector of the U.S. Customs. The inspector is so critical, so repetitive, so often asking questions, that Renee is irritated and trembling with fear. In order to pass the examination, she put on a smile and a schoolgirl's accent, flattering and pleasing the inspector, for which she felt ashamed and disturbed. She remembered from the inspector what she had been told about body searches, and, anticipating that she would be asked to strip naked, she turned as white as death. By the end of the search, she was so weak that she wanted to vomit. The inspector is also in a state of flux of psychological consciousness throughout the process. The whole novel is full of the psychological activities of the characters, especially a lot of subconscious activities and physiological reactions that the characters themselves are not consciously aware of. At one time, it describes the instinctive-psychological-conscious activities of the characters, at another time, it combines the characters' past memories, present feelings, touches of what they have seen and heard, and dreamy reveries with free associations, and at another time, it uses the characters' direct and indirect The characters' direct and indirect inner monologue is used to pour out their heartfelt feelings. All of this constitutes a flow of consciousness structure with inverted chronological jumps, the convergence and penetration of the characters' psychological reflexes and the stimuli of the external environment, and the intertwining of levels. This structure radiates all of René's mental anguish and trauma of being suppressed and humiliated when he passes through the border, and expresses his feelings about his life.