Existentialism: Hope or Despair? 21
selves manifestations of that liberty. So that we are not only
condemned to be free; at the same time we are condemned
to deny our freedom. This is why I have hinted earlier that
for the existentialist human existence is self-contradictory.
For it would not be strictly true to affirm that our existence
is our liberty, any more than one could say that it consists in
the suppression of hberty. In reality it is both at once, like
two mirrors whose absurd function is to reflect each other,
and we are led to the rather dismal conclusion that, exis-
tentially speaking, man is a failure, or, as Sartre says, “a use-
less passion,” for he is that being who affirms himself in deny-
ing himself, whose existence is manifested in tire negation of
existence. It is true that for Hegel, too, “there is nothing in
heaven and on earth which does not contain in itself being
and nothingness”; but his concern, after all, was with logic,
and this enabled him to build an extraordinary pyramid at
whose summit, magnificently enthroned, was God. One might
say that it was with the same scrupulous attention to prin-
ciple that Marconi constructed the first wireless. For the ex-
istentialist, however—and I am obliged at this point to go
back to Kierkegaard, for Sartre himself is mute on the sub-
ject—no structure, no matter how complex, can reach God,
because the space that separates us from Him is infinite. He
can only be reached by some sort of action absolutely op-
posed to logic, which can best be described as a sort of leap,
and this leap is our faith.
Generally speaking, however, Sartre avoids the religious
questions that existentialism raises, as manifest as they are,
and Rke Heidegger insists upon the necessity for the exis-
tentialist thinker to remain strictly in the sphere of human
subjectivity. This has led Sartre’s critics to object that existen-
tialism is a solipsism, to which Sartre himself replies that it is