Existentialism: a Philosophy of Hope or Despair?

Existentialism: Hope or Despair? 3
such as this one, for example-but in works of a creative and
a semi-creative nature. I have already hinted that existential-
ism is concerned with human liberty; I should add that it is
also, and by the same token, a philosophy of action. It is not
primarily a philosophy that seeks to interpret and explain;
rather, it seeks to lay bare the fundamental enigma of what
we are. And this, it seems to me, is precisely what constitutes
the specific function of creative literature. Certainly not all
literature can be said to be existentialist, and only a small part
of it may be said to be consciously existentialist, but surely
our greatest myths and stories are concerned less with answer-
ing questions than with asking them. It is false to suppose
that Oedipus, for example, solved the riddle of his own
existence—he merely made it clearer; and his riddle is our
own. It is foolish to think that Hamlet answered the question
“to be or not to be”; he merely posed it with passion and
urgency. And since existentialism, like literature, is committed
to interrogation rather than affirmation, it seems to me that it
finds its best expression in the novel and the drama, or even,
as in the case of Kierkegaard and Gabriel Marcel, in personal
diaries; although it is true that others, like Jaspers, Husserl,
and Heidegger, have remained what we may call pure phi-
losophers, and even Jean-Paul Sartre, with whom I shall be
particularly concerned, has attempted formal description in
at least one important work and a couple of lesser ones.
Finally, there are a number of novelists and playwrights of
postwar France who can scarcely be called philosophers, at
least in this sense, and yet whose work bears the existentialist
stamp. Most important among these, I think, are Albert
Camus, Maurice Blanchot, and Simone de Beauvoir, and
many are the little-known writers of the postwar generation
who have fallen under the influence of existentialist doctrine.

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