Existentialism: a Philosophy of Hope or Despair?



22 The Rice Institute Pamphlet

really a humanism, whereupon his critics retort that if it is
a humanism it is a singularly pessimistic one. For one thing,
he has not tried to fit man into a larger scheme of things; he
has not, like Nietzsche and Bergson, assured us that he is
going on to a bigger and better future. Perhaps he would
subscribe to Baudelaire’s famous remark that “the world is
coming to an end—the only reason for it to continue is that it
exists.” Certainly few thinkers with existentialist leanings
would agree that the world is a better place today because
we have frozen foods and television, and that it will be a
better place tomorrow because television will be in color and
three dimensions. Nor, I think, would they condemn it be-
cause our wars are getting bigger and better and because
divorces and alcoholism are on the upswing. To do this re-
quires an objective view of history, a view which many his-
torians have claimed to enjoy, on the assumption that it is
possible for an individual to disengage himself from history
in order to judge it. But we have already seen that a major
theme of existentialism is that we
are engaged, totally and
inevitably: in other words, that our Uberty is manifested here
and now and nowhere else and at no other time. The lesson
of existentialism—one that may be applied equally to oc-
cupied France and to postwar America—is that the question
of the superiority of one age over another is beside the point;
that there is only one crisis, and it is tire one in which we are
involved and which we must assume and for which we must
provide the solution. It is like no other crisis because it is
our
crisis. The wars of Korea and Indo-China, the menace of
Commrmism, the hydrogen bomb, the rising cost of living:
these are somehow bound up with our existence as intimately
as tire clothes we wear, the houses we five in, the members
of our family, and even when we are least aware of them



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