Existentialism: a Philosophy of Hope or Despair?

Existentialism: Hope or Despair? 15
and not the sein which signifies human reality. We have al-
ready seen that this was Sartre’s most striking originality as
a novelist. For the existentialist writer man is concrete and
specific rather than, as for the classicist, abstract and uni-
versal; but his realism, instead of rising, as does that of Flau-
bert, from the wellsprings of positivism, has its source in hu-
man subjectivity. For since there is no such thing as an ab-
stract man, but always a man-plus-a-situation, then each of
us must be unique and irreplaceable, for at each instant our
liberty, to use an expression dear to Sartre, is “engaged”; at
each instant we must decide to do this or that.

It is, indeed, our decisions that give the world order and
sense. My cigarette, for example, is absurd except as some-
thing that I may or may not smoke. In the same way, the
world is absurd to Alice after she has gone through the look-
ing glass because, once in Wonderland, she is no longer the
center of her own situations but moves, so to speak, in the
periphery of some one else’s: tire mad Hatter’s or the Red
Queen’s. It is this same impression, that of being ourselves
and yet a pure object, that we encounter in our dreams. The
heroes of the Czech novelist, Franz Kafka, are also instruc-
tive in this regard. Because they have lost their liberty—that
is, the initiative of choice—they seem to have lost their foot-
hold on the universe. They are always, so to speak, on the out-
side looking in, and they wander about in their towns and
villages with the obscure awareness that they are familiar to
everyone, and yet that no one, not even one they love, is
familiar to them. The fact is, however, that Kafka’s novels
are as contrived and liberal in their fantasy as Lewis Carroll’s
tale, for they are based on a premise that is impossible. Yet
all of us, as we shall see, tend to deny our liberty; all of us
are possessed in some degree with the nostalgia to be a pure

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