Existentialism: a Philosophy of Hope or Despair?

16 The Rice Institute Pamphlet

object. And conversely, few of us are ever totally aware of
the absolute liberty which is at the source of our existence,
for such an awareness can never be a kind of knowledge but
rather a kind of feeling, perhaps, indeed, a kind of intuition
not unlike Bergson’s. To be aware of one’s liberty in this way
is to feel profoundly that each choice we make, being a total
manifestation of our liberty, is itself total and places our
whole being, as Sartre says, in question, like the spinning of
a roulette wheel when the chips are down. The specific emo-
tion that accompanies this revelation of our absolute liberty
is defined by Sartre as a sort of anguish—Heidegger calls it
“dread”—but to all intents and purposes they are referring to
the same thing. We feel dread, or anguish, when we have the
sense of advancing into the future as into a sheer emptiness
and, Uterally, that our existence has nothing to fall back on
except its capacity to go forward. It is an emotion, I am sure,
that we have all experienced at one moment or another, al-
though I suppose that, Uke our moments of fear, we do our
best to forget them. But whereas fear is always fear of some-
thing, anguish, or dread, is literally fear of nothing. It is the
awareness that we are “in suspense” or, to use an expression
of the poet Paul Valéry, of being “an ever future hollowness.”
It has the effect of stripping our existence of the respectable
attire with which our reason bedecks it.

Anguish, however, does not occur alone. By itself it may
perhaps best be described as a metaphysical emotion, if one
can speak of such a thing, but it is deepened by a sort of
moral uneasiness which accompanies it like its echo. For
clearly, unlimited Uberty implies unlimited responsibility. If,
for example, I go to war, I am responsible not only for my
own killing, but for all the killing and misery that the war
causes. If I stay home, I am responsible for all the havoc that

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