24 The Rice Institute Pamphlet
To this enigma there is, properly speaking, no solution. If
there were, it would not be a solution at all, but merely an-
other way of posing the enigma. There are no answers to the
questions that human existence raises except other questions.
This is why the existentialist philosopher, if there is such a
thing as an existentialist philosopher, is given to a form of
dialectic which reminds one of a mouse racing along the in-
side of a wheel. At every moment he is forced to refute what
he affirms and affirm what he refutes, to define one hom of
the human dilemma and simultaneously—if that is possible—
confess that its existence is absolutely contradicted by the
other. Basically, as an attempt to give a positive significance
to sheer nothingness and to build upon it a system of human
values—one that Heidegger, for example, has made in a bril-
liant and subtle essay, What is Metaphysics?—existentialism
is a scandal in the face of logic for, as St. Thomas has said,
“Everything which comes from nothing tends of itself toward
nothing.” The truth is that the existentialists, being com-
mitted to paradox, are themselves paradoxical. Their method
consists in a rigorous refutation of philosophical method, and
yet they insist on making the refutation philosophically. This
is why their accomplishment in this realm, it seems to me,
amounts largely to what the newspapers call, in another con-
nection, “a palace revolution.” Actually, by shifting the center
of gravity of philosophical investigation from questions about
ourselves to questions about our questions, they have moved
out of the realm of philosophy altogether, into the realm of
action. And yet then- very endeavor to achieve what amounts
after all to a kind of “relativism” of the absolute, an ιmeasy
pact between subjectivity and circumstance, or more broadly,
between idealism and materialism, is exceedingly dangerous
when, as recently in Sartre’s case, it is projected on the politi-