Existentialism: a Philosophy of Hope or Despair?

EXISTENTIALISM: A PHILOSOPHY OF
HOPE OR DESPAIR?⁰

I DON’T suppose that anyone who has lived in Paris during
the two or three years that followed its liberation from
the Nazi occupation can ever think about that city in quite
the same way as the average tourist thinks about it or, for
that matter, as it is depicted in travel folders, magazine
advertisements and the cinema. For no war comes to an
end as abruptly as it is begun nor, surely, can any decree
or treaty or celebration bring to populations the profound
awareness that the long nightmare is over, that the time
for peace and normal living has at last aιτived. Misery has
its own inertia, and for many months the sense of loss and
abandonment continues; to each one there cling all tire
harsh memories of war and, too often, of enslavement.

It is hardly my intention to describe the Paris of that un-
happy time, but it has often struck me that one of the reasons
existentialism, or the existentialist movement, is so generally
misinterpreted is that its critics seldom take into account
the circumstances that surrounded its inception and develop-
ment. It is one thing to envisage ideas as the inhabitants of
books and lecture halls and classrooms, and another as an
intimate and inseparable part of our daily lives; and this is
just what existentialism was during that strange transitional
time in Paris when the vast mantrap of oppression was sud-
denly lifted from a whole city and left its population squint-
ing and bewildered under the sharp white light of freedom.
I do not mean that Paris was full of existentialists, that the
flower vendors and housewives and bus conductors were all

° A public lecture delivered at the Rice Institute on October 11,
1953.

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