Existentialism: a Philosophy of Hope or Despair?



Existentialism: Hope or Despair? 9
ence—as a whole, and exposes at length the underlying
themes of his doctrine. I suspect that there is an appalling
discrepancy between the number of people who have read
this weighty volume and the number of those who claim
to have read it. It has been called, perhaps a trifle ironically,
the Bible of Existentialism.

Clearly, then, the problem of existentialism, even from an
historical point of view, is a very complex one. It is difficult,
for one thing, to speak of any particular philosopher without
being concerned with what he owes to a wide variety of
others, starting with Socrates. It is difficult to tell, so far as
existentialism is concerned, where philosophy ends and litera-
ture begins. Finally, it is feasible to affirm that existentialism
may not legitimately be called a philosophy at all. And yet
one fact remains, and it is simply this: that were it not for
Sartre and what we may call the French School, most of us
should not have heard of existentialism at all; for it was Sartre
himself who saw that existentialism, unlike traditional phil-
osophical theories, has no validity at all unless it is anchored
in experience, and particularly the sort of experience that he,
Sartre, had undergone in a France where liberty had ceased
to be a slogan and became something you fight and die for.

The French are a disconcerting people. Not only have they
endowed Western Civflization with some of its purest and
most decisive ideas, but they insist upon wrapping them up
in whimsical packages. This, I suppose, attests to their irre-
pressible gaiety, or in any case to their sense of humor, but
it leads to a certain amount of misunderstanding. For ex-
ample, it gives to many people, Frenchmen as well as for-
eigners, the impression that French intellectual, literary, and
artistic history is very largely accomplished in the cafes by
boisterous and Iminhibited young men whose buoyancy is



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