14 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
tivity, and therefore utterly different from liberty as we
ordinarily think of it, that is, liberty on the rational level.
Liberty in this sense, being objective, can readily be defined
in some way—usually as a collection of “rights,” although few
of us would be likely to agree exactly as to what those rights
are; and whether the definition is provided by Thomas Jeffer-
son or John Stuart Mill or Webster’s dictionary, it is some-
thing we say we “enjoy,” something that can be given to us
or taken away. This is not liberty as Sartre thinks of it. I
should hate to use, in so cursory and slender a summation as
this, the term “metaphysical,” but it would be difficult to
ascribe a more common one to a sort of liberty that is so in-
timately bound up with existence itself. Since man is nothing
if not experience, since at every moment of his history man
is acting in some way, then surely his main concern must be
to choose one sort of action among many. At every moment,
therefore, he makes a choice, even if his choice is so simple
as, for example, whether to light a cigarette or not to light a
cigarette, whether to read a newspaper or walk around the
block, whether to go to a concert or to a movie. Our constant
question is “Shall I or shall I not?”—and even should we sus-
pend the question, like Hamlet, or choose not to choose, we
have already made a sort of a choice, which consists in not
making one. Man is that creature who always chooses, and
the reason, simple enough, is that he is always in a situation,
he is always at the center of a network of circumstances in
which he cannot remain fixed except, of course, at the risk
of ceasing to exist. To put it in another way, man never “is”;
he is always “here” or “there”—a distinction the Gennan
existentialist Heidegger draws when he insists upon the dif-
ference in his own vocabulary between the verb “to be”—
sein—and “to be there”—dasein. For Heidegger it is the dasein