Existentialism: Hope or Despair? 13
experiences. For the existentialist the source of our actions
does not lie in our reasons for them, but in something he calls
our “subjectivity,” in other words, some sort of pure con-
sciousness—Sartre calls it “non-thetic” consciousness—which
exists before any reasons we might supply to explain its exis-
tence. It is a little as though the existentialists were replacing
Descartes’ famous “I think, therefore I am” with a proposition
more fundamental still: “I exist, therefore I am.” Man may ask
the question “why” about many things with reasonable expec-
tations of finding an answer; he can never ask the same ques-
tion about himself because he is the question. He can never
affect the juncture between his subjectivity and his reasoning
about his subjectivity—he is always, as Heidegger puts it,
“outside of himself.” Fundamentally, therefore, existentialism
is an attempt to place our subjective selves at the center of
philosophical investigation. At the same time, it discredits tra-
ditional systems and theories about the universe on the
ground that these systems have never taken into account
the fact that they have their source in a particular human
being, in the pure “I” which thought them up. As Kierkegaard
has said, “Most Systematizers in relation to their system fare
like a man who builds a huge palace and himself fives next
door to it in a barn.”
I have, perhaps, oversimplified the question, but it may
serve to lead me to some of the themes which are a part of
existentialist doctrine. I think it is already clear that one of
these, at least so far as Sartre is concerned, is liberty. For
surely, if our actions are in some way anterior to our reasons
for them, then it must follow that they can be restricted by
absolutely nothing, and the fundamental reality of each hu-
man being is that he is totally and unconditionally free. It is
not enough to say that liberty is subjective: it is our subjec-