Existentialism: a Philosophy of Hope or Despair?

Existentialism: Hope or Despair? 19
suppose, as vague a term as one can imagine, and most of
us would reply, as does the existentialist, that “being” is
what we are. Sartre calls it the “in-itself,” by which he means
that it is our way of thinking of ourselves as though we were
objects with fixed characteristics. From this point of view,
“man” is an “in-itself” in the manner of a chair, a stone, a dog,
a seashell; Uke each of these objects he may easily be gen-
eralized; he may be said to have the “essence” of a man in
the same way that we speak of the essence of a seashell, to
which all seashells would in some way correspond. This was
Plato’s conception, and to a large extent it is one we all share.
In any case, it is what we mean when we refer to our “char-
acter” or, more generally, to “human nature.” We even speak
of certain “laws” of human nature which we must all obey
at the risk of ceasing to be human. I once knew a man who
was so ill-tempered that he antagonized everyone who met
him, and when I asked him why, he looked at me as though
my question were foolish. I imagine that his reply, if he had
made one, would have been: “It is just the way I am” or “I
was bom that way” or even “I take after my father.” Similarly,
many of us are inclined to excuse criminals because, as we
say, it is their nature, they just can’t help it; or else we blame
their wickedness on their upbringing or their past environ-
ment, which amounts to the same thing. This tendency is
carried to absurd extremes, according to Sartre, by the psy-
choanalysts. It is true that for Freud, as for Sartre, man is
ambiguous, but in dividing him up, like a pie, into two un-
equal parts, one conscious and the other unconscious, he
committed the sophistry of explaining man as though he were
an object while affirming that he is a subject. As a subject,
each of us conducts himself in one way or another, as a
criminal or a model citizen, as a good father or one who beats

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