(I) The Existentialist Tree

The other day a young New Zealander touring at present the Continent, wrote to me, 'For good or for ill the existentialist approach seems to have made its way into almost every branch of life and thought on the Continent. Such a philosophy of despair, crystallizing as it does, thoughts of futility which must be in the minds of many people in our age, seems to me an extremely negative and dangerous contribution!' He was thinking of Sartre in particular. This is important to note, for existentialism covers a wide range of frequently contradictory views, ranging from militant atheism to orthodox Christianity and varying from an emphatic denial of the possibility of personal communion to an equally emphatic assertion of the reality of the 'we.' And though most existentialists are dependent in one way or another on Kierkegaard, Hegel's celebrated antagonist, there are others, like Gabriel Marcel, who cannot claim to be sons of this 'father' of existentialism. This simple fact alone throws a critical light on Emmanuel Mounier's recent attempt of constructing a family-tree of Existentialism.¹ In this tree, Kierkegaard appears as the formidable 'trunk', with Socrates and others as 'roots', while Sartre and Gabriel Marcel find a place among its numerous 'branches'. What then have Socrates and Kierkegaard and Satre in common? That they all said, 'Know thyself'? This would turn the tree into a rather shaky affair, and, in fact, it has not much life in it, for we are given no satisfactory criterion which would hold roots, trunk, and branches together. Still, there remains some justification in grouping a number of otherwise divergent thinkers (even though the selection itself is under dispute) under the common head of Existentialism. For they are all united in their reaction against Hegelian logic and metaphysics. They share a disbelief in the possibility of erecting a metaphysical 'system', and they are all pre-occupied with the ontological study of the concrete individual existent. In the following pages I shall confine myself to Satre's Existentialism. I begin with some general observations which, I feel, are necessary for the understanding of Satre's philosophy, and then I turn to some specific aspects of his thought which seem to me to be of general interest.