Existentialism

The literary lion of Paris bounced into Manhattan last week for a brief lecture tour (stops at Yale, Harvard, Princeton). He put up at a genteel midtown hotel--partly because he could find no other lodging, partly because it did not matter: he has a bohemian preference for unpretentious surroundings; in Paris, the literary lion makes his den in the dingy, unheated Hotel Louisiane. Few Americans had heard even vaguely of earnest, ebullient Jean-Paul Sartre, novelist, playwright, essayist and prophet of the philosophy of life known as "Existentialism." But more were likely to become aware of him and his message.

Words & Ink. In Paris since liberation, Existentialism had called forth more words and more ink than any intellectual movement since Dadaism ushered in Europe's "lost generation" after World War I. Existentialism has its long-haired snobbish fringe, the butt of short-haired cartoonists (see cut). But the word has filtered down to everyman's and everywoman's level.

Concierges and shopkeepers asked their intellectual betters what Existentialism means (few can answer, but many try). In the overcrowded metro a working man has been heard to swear at a neighbor who shoved him: "Species of an existentialist!" At one of Prophet Sartre's recent lectures, an overflow mob of 2,000 was turned away, a small riot occurred, and women swooned.

The movement has its bible, the abstruse 700-page L'Etre et le Neant (Being and Nothingness), which Philosopher Sartre published in 1943. Its literature includes Sartre's Huis Clos (ClosedDoors), a drama laid in Hell with an infanticide, Lesbian and a military deserter as its chief protagonists. The cult's foremost disciple is Authoress Simone de Beauvoir, who lives in the same hotel on the same floor as the master.

Of Sartre, De Beauvoir has rhapsodized :

"He hates the country. He loathes . . . the swarming life of insects and the pullulation of plants. At most he tolerates the level sea, the unbroken desert sand, or the mineral coldness of Alpine peaks; but he feels at home only in cities. . . . He doesn't like raw vegetables or milk fresh from the cow or oysters on the half shell, but only cooked foods; and he always asks for preserved fruit instead of the natural product. . . ."

Preaching & Parties. The man who evokes this sentimental, semantic medley of adoration and respect is a little (5 ft.) youngish (40) bespectacled, homely, eloquent son of a French naval officer. Before the war Sartre was a relatively unknown professor of philosophy (1930-43). During the war he spent nine months in a German war prison, then emerged to play an active role in the Resistance (he served with the Communist-dominated Front National). Now he is France's most discussed writer: his temple, the respectably bohemian Cafe de Flore on the Left Bank. There he spends most of his writing and preaching day. Simultaneously he works on a philosophic book, a play, a novel, a host of articles.

Sartre's temperament is Gallicly gay. Once at a bibulous party the irrepressible prophet began boxing a dressmaker's dummy. Nearby, on an old-fashioned bed topped by a canopy, sat bravoing Authoress de Beauvoir. Suddenly Sartre landed a haymaker. The dummy hit the bed, shook loose the canopy on De Beauvoir's brunette head. Wags said that Sartre had crowned her Queen of Existentialism.

God & Man. The roots of Existentialism go back 100 years to Soeren Kierkegaard, the lonely Danish theologian and rebel who was obsessed by the one tragic question: how is human existence possible? In the face of the 19th Century's positivism which arrogantly asserted the triumph of man, Kierkegaard threw his tragic answer: man exists simultaneously on two irreconcilable planes, in time and in eternity. So man lives in insoluble tension ; in time he exists not as an individual but only as an irrelevant member of a species; in eternity it is only the individual who exists, without society, in ultimate loneliness. Because of this insoluble tension, Kierkegaard deduced, man exists in fear and trembling, in despair and tragedy. What makes human existence nevertheless possible, and overthrows despair, is faith. For in God the impossible is possible, the insoluble solved, time and eternity one, man free.

An agnostic, Sartre took Kierkegaard's concept of tension, threw out God. "Whether God exists or not," he says, "is of no importance in our philosophy. There is no communication between Him and us." Since God is at best irrelevant, Sartre holds, man is responsible solely to himself. "You are your life and nothing else," says a figure in Sartre's play Huis Clos. The author thinks he has capsuled his philosophy in that sentence.

Actually, not Kierkegaard but German Philosopher Martin Heidegger (a Nazi from 1932-34), begot Existentialism. Heidegger's ultimately cynical subjectivism rather than the Danish prophet's Christian profundity determined Sartre's concept of man's responsibility: "Man is free to act, but he must act to be free. If he fails to choose a social or political line of action, he is not a Being; he is Nothingness." Should, by chance, Christian ethics permeate man's action, Sartre does not mind--not because it is Christian but because it is moral.

Degradation & Dignity. Sartre's philosophy undoubtedly responds to the desperate need among modern pagans in Europe and elsewhere to find some rational justification for individual life and effort. But to the Christian philosopher, the gospel according to Sartre will appear hardly more than another faddist version of Materialism. And the critical mind of France seemed still to be at work in the weekly, Les Nouvelles Litteraires which castigated it as a "fad of ugliness--Sartre's books seem to be a transcription of the mental life of ignoble and tranquilly abnormal people . . . sickening mixture of philosophic pretentiousness, equivocal dreams, physiological technicalities, morbid tastes and hesitant eroticism . . . an introspective embryo that one would take distinct pleasure in crushing."

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