Existentialism: a Philosophy of Hope or Despair?

2 The Rice Institute Pamphlet

existentialists, or even looked like existentialists, presuming
it is possible to look like an existentialist. But there was some-
thing in the air, amid all the sadness and privation and
bewilderment, and I think that something was the convic-
tion-vague, it is true, and generally unformulated—that
through torture and peril and humiliation something in each
of us remains inviolate, something can never be taken away,
even temporarily, even for an instant, something like a hard
unalterable core at the center of the human spirit, that
may be called—perhaps for want of a better word—hberty.
And this was felt not only by those of the underground move-
ment who risked their lives to sustain it, but by those who
tried to go on living as best they could, who tried to make
the abnormal seem normal and the unnatural seem natural.
To be sure, it was felt more vividly by those who resisted,
because nothing brings truth into focus so sharply as peril,
and it was among the elite of these that existentialism first
emerged as a dynamic and eminently pertinent system of
human drought.

There may be some who will protest at this point that
existentialism is strictly speaking not a French philosophy
at all, nor even, indeed, a philosophy to begin with. Jacques
Maritain, for example, has remarked drat “the misfortune of
existentialism has been that it has risen and developed within
the realm of philosophy . . . and yet it is a philosophy against
philosophy.” To the second of these objections I would reply
that what has made existentialism so vital, or in any case so
influential, seems to Ue in its very stand against traditional
philosophy, and in the way it is committed to a form of truth
so close to the fundamental realities of human existence that
it defies ordinary analysis. Perhaps this is why the best of
existentialist writing is not to be found in tracts and essays—

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