Existentialism: Hope or Despair? 23
they hover about the edges of our situations like a mist, dis-
tant and yet somehow imminent; and in this sense it is true
to say that every man is “haunted” by his historical obliga-
tions as by a ghost. Existentialism is a humanism and, indeed,
an optimistic one, when it declares that man is the fabricator
of his own destiny and that he is free to make of it what he
will. It takes on a distinctly less optimistic cast when it
affirms that his freedom is not relative but absolute, that man
must fashion his own time out of nothing, that his true his-
tory is not in his past but in his future, and that not statesmen
or generals or leaders of industry but each living human being
is profoundly and inescapably accountable for the way of the
world.
It seems, however, that we are drifting away from the
existentialist’s primary assertion that man is a “useless pas-
sion” and saying something that is exactly the opposite. For
if man not only chooses himself but chooses the world as
well, then there is nothing in the world that does not in some
way derive its significance from human liberty; our moral
sense itself may be said to spring from human liberty and its
inevitable concomitant, human responsibility. The truth is
that we have never wandered veιy far from the circle of con-
tradictions to which existentialist reflection is committed, if
indeed we have left it at all. Sartre’s humanism finds its nat-
ural limits in human absurdity. On the one hand man is in
the universe like a stranger at a ball to which he has not been
invited. In all that vast formalism—that cosmic ritual—we call
the universe, only man is unpredictable because only man is
free, and his liberty has all the impertinence of an informal-
ity, a breach of etiquette. And yet his liberty moves about in
that universe like a lord in its own domain, in a perpetual
project of creation and destruction.