Existentialism: a Philosophy of Hope or Despair?



20 The Rice Institute Pamphlet

his children, as a misanthrope or a social climber: when it
comes to analyzing our conduct, the psychiatrist proceeds to
delve into the past as though it were an organism, and ulti-
mately finds the key in some dark recess of which we our-
selves are unaware. What he finds, however, is merely an-
other sort of justification. To the existentialist’s affirmation
of man’s total responsibility, the psychoanalyst opposes a
doctrine of inevitable innocence, for the source of our be-
havior is always “somewhere else,” like a sort of baggage we
can never check. And yet the duality remains. For surely we
must never forget the pure “I” which, somehow, is carrying
the baggage. This “I,” once again, is our liberty. Since it is,
as we have seen, a sort of emptiness, perhaps not unlike Pas-
cal’s abyss, it has no characteristics whatever. Sartre calls it
the “for-itself” as opposed to essence, the “in-itself.” By this
he means that no man can ever “be” this or that, he can only
project to be this or that. Honest or dishonest, ill-tempered
or charming, cowardly or brave, these are like projects of
what we propose to be, and being projects they are per-
petually fiable to revision. At any moment we can choose to
be something else. Since human liberty is always intact, hu-
man character is never a reality, but merely a possibility. The
only reality is human action. The key to our behavior is not
to be found in the past but in the future, for whatever we do,
the character we seek to found is always in some way future
to our project to found it. This is why Sartre says of his own
characters that each one “after having done anything what-
soever, can do anything whatsoever.”

Finally, if man’s fundamental desire is to attain what we
may call the certitude of being, and if his very liberty is em-
ployed in a constant seeking of its own denial, then all our
justifications, all our flights, all our fabrications, are them-



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