Existentialism: a Philosophy of Hope or Despair?



8 The Rice Institute Pamphlet

is the case of The Chips Are Down. Once again, it seems to
me, the real subject is liberty, whether it is moral liberty,
as in
The Devil and the Good Lord, or political liberty, as
in
Dirty Hands, or the relation of the liberty of one person
to that of others, as in
No Exit. In all, Sartre has written some
half-dozen plays, ranging in length from one act to the recent
and ambitious
Devil and the Good Lord, which runs for al-
most four hours. Their settings include mythical kingdoms in
medieval and modern Europe, France under the occupation,
the American Soutlr, and a drab furnished room which, the
audience soon discovers, is Hell. Altliough one or two of
them are spoiled, according to some critics, by a rather broad
streak of melodrama, their real interest lies in their characters’
probing of isolated situations, rather than that accumulation
of excitement from situation to situation which we call sus-
pense.

To all of this a complete account of Sartre’s activities
should join a large number of essays on everything from
labor unions to poetry (for in 1946 he became chief editor of
one of Paris’ most important revues,
Modern Times'), and of
course the works of a purely philosophical nature. The earliest
of these are relatively brief, and are concerned with special
problems relating to the imagination and, significantly, to
Husserl’s conception of consciousness as intentional rather
than structural. Sartre’s major work, which bears the forbid-
ding title
Being and Nothingness, appeared in 1943 and
turned out to be a huge tome of some 700 closely printed
pages. It is not recommended for fight summer reading, or
for any reading at all, I should imagine, unless one happens
to have mastered beforehand the perplexities of advanced
philosophical jargon. Suffice it to say, at this point, that here
Sartre, abandoning isolated problems in the field of ontology,
takes up the problem of being—or, if you will, human exist-



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