Philosophical Writings

TRANSLATION BY MARYBETH TIMMERMANN
NOTES BY TRICIA WALL

What Is Existentialism?

I don’t know how many times during my trip to America someone made this request, which was also familiar to me in France: “Can you explain what existentialism is?” And my interlocutor, undoubtedly curious about any novelty yet sparing with his time and effort, would add, “in a few words” or “in five minutes.” I disappointed many amiable people and made several journalists unhappy by refusing to comply. Some doubted my intellectual capacities; others were suspicious of a doctrine that could not be summarized in one sentence. However, at the risk of disappointing once again, I must say right away that even an article is not enough to give an account of existentialism. I only intend to dissipate some misunderstandings here.

The first error consists precisely in believing that existentialism can be concentrated in one or two immediately efficient, simple expressions. It is not a martingale that guarantees winning at the game of life, nor a recipe capable of erasing the annoyances of existence. Neither is it the art of interpreting dreams, evoking spirits, or holding séances. One must not expect any of these distractions that are so agreeable in society. It is not a social phenomenon analogous to the zazou phenomenon,1 nor a political movement, nor a postwar fashion, even though it has social repercussions, it does include political implications, and fashion has both served and disserved it. Even less is it a predilection for scandal; the Parisian public who rushed to the first existentialist conferences in the hopes of seeing surrealist extravagances again were extremely disappointed to have to listen to a serious doctrinal lecture like a class at the Sorbonne.2 Existentialism is first of all a philosophy, analogous in many aspects to classical philosophies and discussed in places as austere and respectable as the French Society of Philosophy [La société française de philosophie], for example.3

No one would dream of demanding that the system of Kant or Hegel be dispensed in three sentences;4 existentialism does not lend itself to popularization any easier. A philosophical theory, like a physics or mathematical theory, is accessible only to the initiated. Indeed, it is indispensable to be familiar with the long tradition upon which it rests if one wants to grasp both the foundations and the originality of the new doctrine. How could you show the audacity of Einstein or de Broglie to someone who was unaware of Newton’s mechanics?5

The problem is the same here. Many criticisms addressed to us by uninformed minds are aimed at Descartes or Kant rather than existentialism.6 It is very often philosophy in general that is being questioned by attacking us. In truth, several years of study are needed to be able to detect existentialism’s original contribution to philosophy and to be in a position to discuss the validity of it.

However, the fact that nonspecialists, regardless of their incompetence, are interested in existentialism must have an explanation. Symbolic logic, for example, never incited such passionate disputes. The reason, in fact, is that although existentialism claims to rest upon the most serious theoretical bases, it also claims to be a practical and living attitude toward the problems posed by the world today. It is a philosophy yet does not want to stay enclosed in books and schools; it intends to revive the great tradition of ancient wisdom that also involved difficult physics and logic, yet proposed a concrete human attitude to all men. This is why it is not expressed solely in theoretical and abstract treatises but also strives to reach a larger public through novels and plays. This attempt disconcerts many people and makes them doubt that existentialism is truly a philosophy. But this is misunderstanding the truth of philosophy, which, particularly in France, has never appeared as a singular discipline but as a global vision of the world and of man that must embrace the totality of the human domain. Today, the ideologies that gain the approval of most French intellectuals, namely Christianity, existentialism, and Marxism, all have a common pretension of showing man in entirety.7 They all respond to the same need: in France and all across Europe the individual is seeking with anguish to find his place in a world turned upside down.

Pascal summarized the ambiguity of the relationship between the Universe and man in a famous and striking expression when he called man a thinking reed.8 From this definition, Christianity retains essentially the aspect of interiority: in the secret of his heart, by the purity of his intentions, and by the individual accomplishment of the ethics dictated by his conscience, man will attain his salvation in this world. On the contrary, Marxism emphasizes that man is a reed, a thing among things, definable by his relationship with the objective reality of the world.

Existentialism strives to hold both ends of the chain at the same time, surpassing [dépassant] the interior-exterior, subjective-objective opposition. It postulates the value of the individual as the source and reason for being [raison d’être] of all significations and all colors, yet it admits that the individual has reality only through his engagement in the world. It affirms that the will of free being is sufficient for the accomplishment of freedom, yet it also states that this will can posit itself only by struggling against the obstacles and the oppressions that limit the concrete possibilities of man. It resembles individualism in the sense that it seems important to it that each individual gains his own salvation, and that each individual appears as being the only one able to obtain it for himself. Yet it also resembles Marxist realism because only in working actively for the concrete triumph of universal freedom, by proposing ends for himself that surpass him, can the individual hope to save himself. Thereby existentialism also seeks a reconciliation of those two reigns whose divorce is so nefarious to men in our time: the ethical reign and the political reign. Ethics appears to existentialism not as the formal respect of eternal and supraterrestrial laws, but as the search for a valid foundation of human history, such as it unfolds on our earth. Politics is not, for existentialism, the simple adjustment of the efficient means toward an unconditioned end, but the perpetual and incessant creation and construction of the end by the means used to produce it. In other words, the task of man is one: to fashion the world by giving it a meaning. This meaning is not given ahead of time, just as the existence of each man is not justified ahead of time either.

Along with the idea of a God guaranteeing Good and Evil, existentialism rejects the notion of ready-made values whose affirmation precedes human judgment. By freely taking his own freedom as an end within himself and in his acts, man constitutes a kingdom of ends.9 Cut off from human will, the reality of the world is but an “absurd given.” This is a conception that appears to many people as hopeless and makes them accuse existentialism of being pessimistic. But actually there is no hopelessness, since we think that it is possible for man to snatch the world from the darkness of absurdity, clothe it in significations, and project valid goals into it. We very simply rediscover the wisdom of old Montaigne, who said, “Life is in itself neither good nor evil; it is the place of good or evil as you make them!”10 The fact is that the old labels, idealism-realism, individualism-universalism, pessimism-optimism, cannot be applied to a doctrine that is precisely an effort to surpass these oppositions in a new synthesis, respecting the fundamental ambiguity of the world, of man, and of their relationship.

Such a novelty, I repeat, can hardly be summarized; it reveals itself only by a direct intuition that must be sought in the works where it is presented, and that bears fruit only if one takes the time to let it ripen within oneself.

NOTES

1. “Zazou” is the name given to a group of flashy and elegant young French people in the 1940s who loved American jazz music.

2. Founded in 1257, the Sorbonne is one of Europe’s oldest universities and the first endowed college in the University of Paris system.

3. The French Society of Philosophy was founded in 1901, with the goal of bringing together scientists and philosophers in an atmosphere that promoted communication.

4. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) was a German philosopher and founder of critical transcendental philosophy. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), a German idealist philosopher, was the author of Phenomenology of Mind (1807), which Beauvoir read at the start of the Nazi occupation of France, in July 1940; see Beauvoir’s Journal de guerre, ed. Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), 339.

5. Albert Einstein (1879–1955), a German physicist, transformed scientific and philosophic investigation and earned the 1921 Nobel Prize in physics. Louis-Victor-Pierre-Raymond de Broglie (1892–1987) was a French physicist known for his work on quantum theory. He won the 1952 Nobel Prize in physics. “Newton’s mechanics” refers to concepts originated by Sir Isaac Newton (1642–1727), including his Laws of Motion and Law of Universal Gravitation.

6. René Descartes (1596–1650), a French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher, is considered the father of modern philosophy.

7. Marxism takes its name from the economic and political philosophy of Karl Marx (1818–83). It is also known as “scientific socialism” (as opposed to utopian socialism).

8. Blaise Pascal (1623–62) was a French scientist and religious philosopher. The “thinking reed” is explained in chapter 10, n. 1.

9. “Kingdom of ends” is the English translation of règne des fins, the French term for a phrase from Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals.

10. See Michel Montaigne, “That to Philosophize Is to Learn How to Die,” The Complete Works of Montaigne: Essays, Travel Journal, Letters, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1957), 65, where it is rendered as follows: “Life is neither good nor evil in itself: it is the scene of good and evil according as you give them room.”