Existentialism: a Philosophy of Hope or Despair?



4 The Rice Institute Pamphlet

Nor should we neglect those whose works may be described
as existentialist in tone, in atmosphere, in significance, al-
though their authors were more certainly than not unaware
of any connection, if they knew about existentialism at all.
The Czech novelist Franz Kafka is often designated as an
unconsciously “existentialist” writer, and so are William
Faulkner, André Malraux, Dostoievski. With some reserva-
tions, the same thing may be said of certain aspects of the
work of André Gide, Stendhal, and Emest Hemingway.

There remains the first objection: that existentialism is not
French and that it is not new. As a self-conscious doctrine it
is, indeed, well over a hundred years old, its founder having
been the Danish religious thinker Spren Kierkegaard. Other
admittedly existentialist thinkers are the Germans-Edmund
Husserl, who stumbled into existentialism by way of a branch
of philosophy called phenomenology; Karl Jaspers, generally
considered to be a disciple of Kierkegaard; and Martin
Heidegger, a former rector and lecturer at the University
of Freiburg, to whom Sartre obviously owes a great deal.
France itself had an existentialist philosopher as far back as
1930 in the person of Gabriel Marcel, who belongs to what
may be called the Cathofic Wing. Furthermore, it has been
contended that just as there are unconscious existentialists
among creative writers, so there are unconscious existential-
ists among philosophers. Was Socrates the first existentialist?
The point has been argued, and I see no reason why it should
not be true. The same claim has been made for Nietzsche, for
Schelling, for the earlier Hegel, for Pascal and Descartes,
and even, with good reason, for Henri Bergson.

The plain fact is that whether one chooses to consider
existentialism a philosophy, or an anti-philosophy, or neither,
in one way or another its basic point of view has been an



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