Existentialism: a Philosophy of Hope or Despair?



18 The Rice Institute Pamphlet

of action is so restricted that our liberty ceases to exist. As
paradoxical as it may sound, our liberty is inescapable. Man,
says Sartre, is condemned to be free. And yet it is true that
just as there were many Frenchmen in occupied France who
chose revolt by joining the underground movement—and
more likely than not without having entertained the slightest
notion of liberty as Sartre describes it—so there were many
who not only accepted enslavement but justified it. For since
few of us have the fortitude or the temerity to go through
life in perpetual anguish—not even, I suppose, an existentialist
philosopher—our perpetual tendency is to mask our liberty
to ourselves, to imagine that we do things because, in one
way or another, we have to do them. On one level our lives
are a series of actions, choices, projects, and on another a
series of justifications, and we place our faith in the latter,
although in a very deep sense, since to mask our liberty is at
the same time to mask our responsibility, we are guilty of a
sort of attenuated cowardice, something like the existentialist
version of original sin. Sartre calls it “bad faith.” And yet
cowardice—or “bad faith”—is the last thing of which we
would accuse ourselves. How is this possible? The answer
lies in Kierkegaard’s assertion that truth, when it is related
to the human, is always paradoxical. It is not enough to say,
as do traditional moral doctrines, that man is not one but two,
for example, good and evil, flesh and spirit, and so on. It is
truer to say that he is ambiguous: that when he is one he is
really the other, and vice versa. But this ambiguity is moral
only by extension. Necessarily, for the existentialist philos-
opher, every ethical question raises a metaphysical one—or,
better still, an ontological one. In reality it is our being itself
which is ambiguous.

What indeed do we mean by the word “being”? It is, I



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