Self-Encounter: A Study in Existentialism (1961)

So [Music], so [Music], so [Music], existentialism is both a philosophy and a mood. As a mood, I think we could say that it is the mood of the 20th century, or at least of those people in the 20th century who are discontent with things as they are. It expresses the feeling that somehow or other all of those systems—whether they be social, psychological, or scientific—which have attempted to define, explain, and determine man have somehow missed the living individual person. Existentialism feels that we must return to man, and in returning to the individual man and his

experience, we must also ask our question: What is man? For once again, the definitions which have been provided—and it seems as though in the 20th century everyone is giving definitions—those definitions of man in terms of his physiology, psychology, or the study of his social behavior again bear no more relation to the real individual than the printed description of the antics of a lover bears to love. Existentialism is concerned especially with what the Spanish existentialist Unamuno has called the tragic sense of life. The tragic sense of life is something which philosophers, for the most part, have

neglected, for they have been concerned above all else with providing some sort of rational explanation which would include and smooth away everything. But the existentialists feel that the old problem of evil has not been explained away; that the fact that man dies has not been taken care of; that the rational promises of immortality are not enough; and that man's suffering, simply because he is man, needs to be explored. Again, one of the best presentations of the existentialist mood, at least in my opinion, is found in the work of a non-existentialist author, namely Eugene O'Neill. In

his play *A Long Day's Journey Into Night*, the character Edmund speaks these words: "It was a great mistake my being born a man. I would have been much more successful as a seagull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death." Now what O'Neill is expressing here is really the feeling that it is difficult simply to be human—difficult because to be human means somehow or

other to be separated. To be separated from one's environment, to have a little gap even between oneself and whatever one thinks one is. Consequently, it is a little difficult to see just how one can be related to other people or to this alienated world—difficult not to feel that one is constantly overshadowed by the possibility, well, the certainty, of a death which one can never quite comprehend. There are, of course, many facets to the existentialist mood, and it would be more accurate to say that even in the philosophy there is not an existentialist philosophy but rather

many existentialist philosophies; for within existentialism we have included widely different people. We might begin perhaps with the Dane Søren Kierkegaard, who lived over a hundred years ago but who wasn't really appreciated or very significant until our own day. And we would have to include people like Gabriel Marcel, who was a Catholic, and Will Herberg, who was a Jew, and the controversial Paul Tillich—these on the religious side. But there are the humanistic existentialists too, those who deny that there is any God. The most well-known of these probably is Jean-Paul Sartre, and his close associate Simone de

Beauvoir is again a figure familiar to many people. I would include here Albert Camus, for although Camus has said he is not an existentialist, he works on the same premises as de Beauvoir and Sartre. He asks the same questions, and frequently the answers that he gives are absolutely acceptable to de Beauvoir and Sartre; sometimes, I myself would say even better and entirely consistent with their premises. Perhaps the most fundamental view in existentialism, whether religious or humanistic, is what Sartre has declared to be the one unifying factor. The one unifying statement, says Sartre, which every existentialist

would agree to is this: "Existence precedes essence." It would be very easy to shrug this off and say, "Oh well, this is an abstract bit of philosophical jargon. What does it mean to me?" What it means in non-technical terms is this: that man is different from the rest of creation and that he is not born with an essence; that is, there is no overall definition as to what man is or ought to be. For man, if he has an essence at all, has simply the essence of freedom; and if his very essence is freedom, this

means that his being is to determine what he wants to make of himself. Therefore, as Sartre puts it, man exists first, and as an individual, strictly speaking, there is no mankind except retrospectively. But the individual man exists, and by his life, by his actions, he determines not only his own essence but he helps to contribute to what will have been the essence of mankind. As William James would put it, we will know what man was when the last man has had his last say. As early as 1921, we find in a play by the Italian

Pirandello an investigation of this problem of what the reality of the human might be. I'm referring to the play called *Six Characters in Search of an Author*. In the scene which concerns us, we find that one of six characters has appeared to the director. He has insisted that their comedy, which has not yet been written, should be performed instead of the one which the director had in mind. And then the father raises very embarrassing questions as he talks to his director—questions which the director does not... "Quite know how to answer. I should like to ask

you to abandon this game of art, which you are accustomed to playing here with your actors. To ask you again, quite seriously, who are you? Well, if this fellow doesn't have a nerve. A man comes here who calls himself a character and asks me who I am! A character, sir, may always ask a man who he is because a character has a real life of his own, marked with special characteristics. For this reason, a character is always somebody, but a man—I'm not saying you now—may very well be nobody. Yes, but you are asking these questions

of me, the director, the boss. Do you understand? But only to know if you, as you really are now, can see yourself as you once were, with all the illusions that were yours then, with all the things, both inside of you and outside of you, as they seemed to you then. Well, sir, if you think of all those illusions, which mean nothing to you now, of all those things which don't even seem to you to exist now, whereas once they were for you, don't you feel that the very earth under your feet is sinking away?

When you reflect it in this same way, this you, as it seems to you now, this present reality of yours, is fated to seem a mere illusion tomorrow! Well, well, and where does all this take us anyway? Nowhere! It's only to show that if we characters have no reality beyond illusion, then you too cannot count over much on your reality as it seems today, since, like that of yesterday, it may prove a mere illusion tomorrow. Oh, excellent! Next, you'll be saying that you, with this comedy of yours, you have brought me here, are more true

and real than I. But of course, without a doubt! Oh, really? But I thought you understood that from the beginning. More real than I? If your reality can change from this, can change the same as anyone else—no, sir, not ours! Look here, our reality doesn't change! It can't change! It can't be other than it is because it's already fixed forever! It's terrible! Ours is an immutable reality that should make you shudder when you approach us, if you are truly conscious of the fact that your reality is a transitory and fleeting illusion, taking one form today

and another tomorrow, an illusion of reality in this fatuous comedy of life, which never ends nor can ever end because if it were to end tomorrow, well then all would be nothing! Oh, for God's sakes! Will you at least stop this philosophizing? Let us try and shape this comedy, which you yourself have brought us here. You argue and philosophize a bit too much, my dear sir. But believe me, I feel what I think, and I seem to be philosophizing only to those who cannot think what they feel because they blind themselves with self-sentiment. I know

that to many people such self-blinding seems much more human, but the contrary is really true, for a man never reasons so much or becomes so un-introspective as when he suffers. It's when he suffers that he seeks to find the reasons for his suffering, to find out whether it's just or unjust that he should have to suffer them. But on the other hand, when a man is happy, he takes his happiness as it comes and doesn't think about just as if happiness were right. An animal suffers without reasoning about its suffering, but take the case of

a man who suffers and begins to reason about it—and oh no, it can't be allowed! Let him suffer as an animal suffers, and then, ah yes, he is human! Oh, look here, you're off again, philosophizing worse than ever! I'm not philosophizing, I'm crying aloud the reason of my suffering. Pirandello is seen as existentialist in two ways. In the first place, Pirandello is saying that philosophy may indeed stem from the suffering of man because man finds that his very existence is somehow or other painful, and this is what Unamuno meant when he spoke of the tragic

sense. Besides this, Pirandello recognizes that man is not an entity or a thing, not even really a being; rather, he is a becoming, a constant changing, a process. And to be a process and to have this discrepancy at his heart means that man never quite knows who he is. Now Sartre has expressed this in far more technical terms by his famous distinction of two kinds of being. All of reality, he says, may be divided up into being-in-itself and being-for-itself. Being-in-itself is the kind of being which the things have, everything which is not conscious—the river, the

mountain, a rock, a tree, or even a man-created object. Such being involves no gap, no separation. The acorn can't reflect upon itself and say, 'I wonder if I want to be an acorn, or would it perhaps be more interesting to be an apple tree?' In fact, the acorn can't know what it is because it simply is! It can't reflect upon itself. As Sartre would say, it’s too full, too dense, too much, as he says, just a plentitude or a mass of being. The other kind of being, being-for-itself, is the being of consciousness, the being of

the human person. Sartre has startled the philosophical world in his definition of being-for-itself, for he says that being-for-itself is distinguished from being-in-itself only by this one thing: that consciousness, or being-for-itself, has the power of effecting a nothingness. This means that consciousness puts a kind of psychic distance between itself and its objects. As consciousness looks at a thing, it is the consciousness of..." The object, and Sartre says, that consciousness is always consciousness of something. One cannot imagine a consciousness which would not be consciousness of something. This means that, in one sense, consciousness is open: for my

consciousness is what it's conscious of, in the sense that it can't exist without things of which it's conscious. And yet, as I am conscious of the object, I'm also implicitly conscious that I am not the object. In other words, I have encased this object with this shell of nothingness, which means that I am implicitly aware of my awareness, and consequently, I know the world. I am aware of the world by knowing what I am not, and by knowing that one object is not another object. On the other hand, this means that consciousness is closed in

on itself too; for if I am aware of not being the object, then I can't escape from my own consciousness. I can't get outside it; I can never know what the world would be like independently of my knowing it. This interplay of being in itself, which is the being of something other than consciousness, and being for itself, is very interestingly given us in a scene from de Beauvoir's novel called "She Came to Stay." Francoise is sitting in front of one of the cafes of Paris, silently musing to herself, and suddenly she remembers something from far

back in her childhood. And like Proust, she sets out on the pursuit of time past. She felt a sudden anguish; it was not a definite pain, but she began to delve deep into the past to unearth a similar pain. Then she remembered: the house was empty. I was standing on the first floor, a little girl holding my breath. It was funny to be there all alone. It was funny, and it was frightening. The furniture looked just as it always did, but at the same time it was completely changed. It was thick and heavy and secret.

My heart seemed to turn over. My old jacket was hanging over the back of a chair. It was very old, and it looked very warm. It was old and worn, but it could not complain, as I, Francoise, complained when I was hurt. It could not say to itself, "I'm an old worn jacket." I tried to imagine what it might be like if I were unable to say, "I'm Francoise, I'm six years old, and I'm in grandma's house." Supposing I could say absolutely nothing. I closed my eyes. It was just as if I did not exist

at all, and yet other people would be coming here and they would see me, and they would talk about me. I opened my eyes again. I could see the jacket now; it existed, yet it was not aware of itself. There was something disturbing—a little frightening—in all of this. What was the use of its existence if it couldn't be aware of its existence? I thought it over: perhaps there was a way. Since I can say "I," what would happen if I said it for the jacket? [Music] It was very disappointing. I could look at the jacket;

I could see absolutely nothing but the jacket, and I could say very quickly, "I'm old, I'm worn," but nothing happened. The jacket stayed there, indifferent—a complete stranger—and I, I was still Francoise. And what if I became the jacket? Well then, I, Francoise, would never know it. Everything began spinning in my head, and suddenly I ran downstairs and I went out into the garden. Francoise emptied her coffee cup in one gulp; it was almost stone cold. She looked up at the clouded sky; she felt that the world around her was suddenly out of reach. The people

who were walking in the street were insubstantial; they were shadows. The houses were nothing but painted backdrops with no depth, and her friend, the bear, who was coming toward her now with a smile, was nothing but a light and charming shadow. He could not help her recover her place in the world; he would be just a pleasant companion and exile. De Beauvoir's little girl was feeling what I suppose every one of us at some time or other has experienced, and that is the frustration, the impossibility of really comprehending what the world would be like if

we were not there. If we try to find out what it would be like, even in our imagination, if we—a familiar scene—should not have us in it, or if, for example, we had just died and people were discovering our death, inevitably we find ourselves thinking of ourselves as being there and experiencing it, for we feel that somehow our other—we are positive factors. And yet, the whole point of the whole thing is that we are not there. All of this, of course, involves Sartre's idea that, as of for itself, man has within him this power of

effecting a nothingness. He introduces the image by one, which is quite in keeping with the tradition of Western philosophy. Have you ever stopped to think what a very important part the apple has played in human history? The first apple is, of course, the one that tempted Adam and Eve in the garden, and certainly this apple must have been a very succulent, desirable kind of apple. And then there was the apple that sent the Greeks off to Troy, and this one, we are told, was an apple made of pure gold. Sartre's image of nothingness also implies

an apple; nothingness, he says, lies coiled at the heart of being like a worm. I don't think it's an accident that there is a suspicion of rottenness and worminess at the heart of being, for man, according to Sartre, discovers this nothingness within himself in anguish and in despair. There is another image where... Sartre, I think, makes it a little easier to understand this difficult concept of how nothingness can somehow be real. Let us imagine, he says, that in the universe one day an atom is annihilated—not simply split, not transformed into some other species of energy,

but just absolutely annihilated. Now, if such a thing could happen, we can believe readily enough that the universe would never be the same again; there would be an absolute change in everything. Now, in the same way, being—being in itself without any consciousness to look at it and pronounce judgment on it—is just an undifferentiated mass. It has no significance; it is simply a fullness. And that's why Sartre can say that all we can really say about it is that, in its brute reality, it is there for all eternity. But the moment a consciousness comes in, then

there can be significance and differentiation, for a consciousness can balance one part against another by putting a distance between them, can say this object is not that object, and can also stand aloof from the world and bring it there before itself for judgment. Sartre has given several definitions of man; one of them is this: "Man is the being who is what he is not and who is not what he is." I think some people have felt that merely reading this sentence was sufficient cause for despair, and yet it isn't hard to understand. By saying that

man is the being who is what he is not and is not what he is, Sartre merely means that man has no fixed reality, that he is constantly in the process of making himself something, but that he never is quite the same as his particular acts. Sartre has also said that man never is; he is always about to be. And here we see the same view expressed with regard to the future, for at any given moment, man is living in terms of a projection of himself into the future—what Sartre calls "the project." It is just

as though each person carried around with himself a little shell of emptiness into which he projected what he was about to become. Suppose we think of it this way: I make a rendezvous with myself down there in the future. But who will show up at the rendezvous? Will it be the "I" who made the appointment, or will it be some new "I," which this consciousness has created out of the nothingness that it brings into the world? Another definition of Sartre's is that man is the being through whom nothingness comes into the world. This, like the

other definitions, sounds at first like something so totally abstract that it seems not to have anything to do with us as living individuals. But let's think of it as if we were trying to draw a picture of it. If one were to attempt a concrete picture of man as the existentialists and other of our contemporaries see him, I think the result would be reminiscent of one of the forms of Archipenko: a strange figure, partly organic, partly mechanized, with a hole in the middle, with bony excrescences jutting out into the distance, all of this set in

a background of melting or disintegrating time. [Music] The use of the scene from *Six Characters in Search of an Author* by Luigi Pirandello was made possible through the cooperation of the Mondadori Publishing Company and the Pirandello estate. The scene from *She Came to Stay* by Simone de Beauvoir was translated by Yvonne Moyes and Roger Senhouse and published by the World Publishing Company. The sculpture *Walking Woman* by Archipenko and *Shapes of the Desert* by Peter Worth, courtesy of the Denver Art Museum. [Music] [Music] So [Music] So [Music] Toward the end of the 19th century, Friedrich Nietzsche

declared, "God is dead," and he spoke the words in exaltation. But Dostoevsky said that if God does not exist, then everything is allowed. And here we see the underedge of tragedy and despair, for if everything is allowed, then can there be any right and wrong? If everything is allowed, how can man choose? How can man know how to live? Both Nietzsche and Dostoevsky have profoundly influenced 20th-century existentialism, so much so that it would be hardly an exaggeration to say that, for the whole of the humanistic movement, there is simply an exploration of the consequences of

this idea of the missing God. John Paul Sartre, in a play which is called *The Devil and the Good Lord*, has presented a scene which, interestingly enough, combines both the exultation and the despair. Here, toward the end of the play, two strangely disturbed characters meet to settle a wager. The priest Heinrich has been haunted by the guilty memory that he has betrayed his own city, and yet it is he who comes as victor in the settling of the bet, for the military leader Getz had bet that he could, for a year's time, do nothing but

serve God and achieve only good, but he failed, for somehow or other history and the world distorted his acts, so the good resulted only in men's suffering. As the scene progresses, there takes place a curious reversal: "Lord, if you refuse to grant us the means of doing good, why have you filled us with this goading desire for it? If you will not grant that I should become good, then why have you removed from me the wish to be evil? Strange, there's no way out of this. Why do you pretend to be speaking to him? You

know quite well if he won't answer, why this silence? He who manifested himself to the ass of the prophet, why should he not manifest himself to me? Because you are an important torture. The weak or modernize yourself; kiss the lips of a Holland or a leper." Die of fasting or die of excesses; God couldn't care less. Then who is important? No one. Man is nothing. Don't pretend to be so surprised; you've always known it. You cheated. You raised your voice to cover the silence of God and those orders you pretend to receive from Him. It

is you who send them to yourself. Myself? Yes, yes indeed, you yourself. I alone. Yes, you, I said you, I alone. Father, you're right, I alone. I supplicated. I demanded some sign. I said messages up to heaven. No answer. Heaven ignored my very name. Each minute I asked myself what I could be in God's eyes, and now I know the answer: God does not know me. You see that emptiness up there over our heads? That is God. You see that hole in the ground there? That is God too. The silence is God; the absence is

God. God is the loneliness of men. There was never anyone there but me. It is I who invented good. It is I who invented evil. It is I who accuse myself today, and I am the only one who can absolve myself. I, man, if God exists, man is nothing. If man exists—like, where were you going? I'm going away from you. I want nothing more to do with you. "Wait, Father. I'm going to make you laugh." "Be quiet." "But you don't know yet what I'm gonna tell you. It's not true; I know nothing. I don't want

to know anything. Heinrich, I'm gonna let you in on a colossal joke: God doesn't exist. He doesn't exist! No joy, tears of joy! Hallelujah, fool! Don't fight me; I'm bringing us deliverance. No more heaven, no more hell, nothing but the earth! Let him dare me a hundred times, a thousand times! As long as he exists, men have called us traitor and bastard, and they have condemned us. If God does not exist and there is no longer any way of escaping men—oh my God, this man is blasphemed! "I believe in you. I believe our Father, which

art in heaven. I prefer to be judged by an infinite being, not by my equals." "To whom are you speaking? You've just said he was deaf. No way now of escaping man. Farewell to monsters; farewell to saints; farewell pride. There's nothing left but man." In Gets, we can see Nietzsche's exaltation. For him, the thought that there is no God comes as a relief, almost a salvation. It delivers him from the crushing burden of trying to serve a remote being whose will he can never fully understand, and it sets him free to love mankind and to

serve men in the way that he himself thinks is best. If God exists, man is nothing; but if God does not exist, then man is free to choose what he wants to make of himself. But for the priest, Heinrich, the thought of God's absence brings only terror and despair. So long as God existed for Heinrich, then, although he might fear God's condemnation, he could at the same time hope for God's pardon. He could feel that if he admitted his guilt and repented, then God might see fit to pronounce him finally not guilty. But without God,

Heinrich is at the mercy of men. So long as he exists or is remembered, he will be guilty in the eyes of humanity. For Sartre, Gatz's attitude is ultimately the right one. And yet, in Sartre's work, as in the work of other existentialist writers, we generally see the negative side: the forlornness of man without God. Sartre has declared that he is the first person who has ever explored to the full the consequences of man's life without God. If God does not exist, then, says Sartre, man has nowhere to turn. It is, one might say, using

perhaps a rather strange analogy, just as if we would try to judge a Ford car without any Mr. Ford. So long as there is a Mr. Ford or one of his agents, then we have a model, we have a blueprint, and we can say that the car which is coming off the assembly line is a perfect Ford or an imperfect Ford; the right number of rattles, not enough rattles. But without a plan, one cannot judge a car. Without God, there is no plan for mankind and there is no final point of reference by which man

can judge his values or right or wrong, or declare that he has lived up to his possibilities or not lived up to his possibilities. Sartre feels that most men simply cannot face the burden of this self-creative life, and so they try to live as if there were a God. But this, for Sartre, is an evasion. Furthermore, it is not the right kind of sacrifice: Man denies himself so that God may exist, but there is no God, and man is a useless passion. One might well wonder why, since Sartre realizes how desperately man needs God, he

will not go the one step further and say that God is there. Perhaps the very desperation of man's need is one reason for such suspicion. He feels the concept smacks too much of self-fulfillment in the sense of wish fulfillment. But Sartre and other existentialists have, in any case, no intention of trying to prove that God does not exist. One cannot prove a negative, and we probably all realize that basically, each of us finds on non-rational grounds that the hypothesis of God is satisfactory and meaningful or not, and then afterwards we each want to hunt around

for reasons or for proof to uphold the position we have already chosen. On the other hand, one will find in existentialist works one very specific objection to the traditional concept of God, and this is an objection based upon the injustice. Of the universe! Why ask these writers? If God is all-powerful, does man have to suffer? If God is merciful, then how can He sentence man—any man, at all—to eternal damnation? In a later scene in Sartre's *The Devil and the Good Lord,* we see Sartre raising this kind of criticism of the concept of God in the

light of the injustice of the world. Here, a group of women has gathered in a cathedral; they are in mourning, bewailing the death of Catherine Getz's mistress, who died when Getz cast her off—in the name of righteousness. "Is she dead?" "Yes, may God receive her soul." "God? He'll refuse it!" "Hilda, how can you say that? She saw the flames of hell before she died! Suddenly she sat up, crying that she saw them, and then she died. Let us pray, my friends; pray for the forgiveness of this poor dead girl who saw the flames of hell

and is in danger of damnation. I do not know what Thou hast in store for me, and I did not even know that girl. But if Thou dost condemn her, then I shall refuse to enter Heaven! Dost Thou think a thousand years of paradise would make me forget the terror in her eyes? I have only scorn for Thy elect—idiots who have the hearts to rejoice while they are damned souls writhing in hell and poor people on earth. I know Thou hast the power to let me die without confession and suddenly summon me before Thy bar

of judgment, but we shall then see who will judge the other." Hilda's attitude reminds me of that of William James, who once asked how many people would be willing to accept an eternity of bliss if they knew that their everlasting happiness was being paid for by the never-ending torture of one damned soul? Very few of us would be willing to accept heavenly rapture on these terms. Then we can easily understand Sartre's criticism of men who are willing to accept an image of a creating God less merciful than men themselves. Albert Camus has voiced the same

type of criticism in his novel *The Plague.* There, the priest Ponsolu confesses that he is not able to understand how there can be any justification so that even eternal paradise could cancel out the sufferings here on earth of one innocent child. Now many people might say—perhaps rightly—that this type of criticism has meaning only for a fundamentalist, even an old-fashioned view of religion. In his play *The Flies,* Sartre has given a broader challenge to the religious concept. Here, he brings to our attention the question as to whether or not we may accept any idea of a

harmonious, rational universe sustained by an intelligent, guiding supreme being or spirit. *The Flies* is a most interesting thing. Sartre is retelling here the old Greek story of the unhappy house of Agamemnon. Clytemnestra and her lover killed Agamemnon, and then later Orestes came, the son, to avenge the crime. He killed his mother and her lover—but very reluctantly, only because the gods had commanded it. Ultimately, it is the gods who justify him. As Sartre tells the story, everything is different: Orestes kills because he thinks that he must do so in order to punish the evildoers, and ultimately,

he does not receive justification from the gods. Instead, he challenges and defies them. The most amazing scene in this play is probably the one where Zeus holds out for Orestes an overwhelming view of the whole universe lying there before him. The scene has always reminded me of the one in the Old Testament where God speaks to Job out of the whirlwind. But there are differences too—and important differences. In the Old Testament, God appeared because Job, seeking an answer to the problem of evil, had cried out to Him and asked for Him to come and explain.

In Sartre's play, Zeus appears voluntarily. Orestes does not really want him, and Orestes is given this vision because Zeus hopes, by means of it, to lure him—to win him back—so that by viewing the wonders of the universe, Orestes may arrive at what Zeus would consider a natural piety and reverence. "Orestes, I created you as I created all things. Now see! See the stars moving in the firmament—never swerving, never clashing! It is I who have fixed their courses according to the laws of justice. It is my work that living things increase and multiply, each according to

his kind. It is my work that the tides—innumerable tongues—creep in to lap the sand and then withdraw at the appointed hour. I make the plants grow, and my breath fans round the world the yellow clouds of pollen. You are not in your own home, intruder! You are like a sliver in the flesh or a poacher in his lordship's forest. For the world is good; I created it in accordance with my will, and I am goodness. The good is everywhere! But you, Orestes, have done evil—and that of which you are so proud, the evil which you

claim to have invented, what is it but a reflection in a mocking mirror? A phantom thing that would have no being but for goodness! Now return to yourself, Orestes; return to your saner self. The universe refutes you; you are but a mite in the scheme of things! Return to nature, nature's thankless sun, or else you must beware lest the seas shrink back at your approach, springs dry up as you pass by, rocks and stones roll out of your path, and the earth itself crumble under your feet!" "Let it crumble! The whole universe is not enough

to prove me wrong! You are the king of—" God's king of stone and stars, king of the waves of the sea, but you are not the king of man. Job saw man's littleness and bowed down in faith, but Orestes asserts himself as man. If we want to know the meaning of this assertion, we must realize what Zeus means. For Sartre, I don't think Zeus stands for God Himself, but rather for any idea that man may have had of God, particularly a belief in any principle whatsoever which is rational, which sustains the universe in an all-encompassing

order, and which gives man his natural, his right place and purpose. As Orestes rejects Zeus's vision, he is admitting that the order of the universe, its principle of harmony, are not in the universe itself but are there because man has put them there. He has so organized the world that he finds them there. In one way, we may say that this is the most thoroughgoing atheism that the world has ever known, and yet the strange thing is that if we hunt for parallel positions to Sartre's view, we will find them not as much in the

works of the humanistic philosophers, who for the most part have relied very much on scientific reasoning and upon this principle of order which Orestes is rejecting, but we do find a parallel in the work of religious existentialists, in the work of people like Kierkegaard, for instance. Now, this is not to say that atheism and a belief in God can ever be one and the same thing; they are natural opposites, of course. And yet, if one looks at the mood, the attitude toward living which is involved, then I think that the parallel between Sartre and Kierkegaard

is much closer than that of either one of them as compared with the outlook of the ordinary man on the street, whether that man is one who goes to church or not. There are two ways, in particular, in which I think Sartre and Kierkegaard are alike in this connection. One is their emphasis on subjectivity. It is obvious that for the humanistic philosopher, at least as Sartre views him, man must be shut up in his own subjectivity; he can't get outside, he can't find any non-personal, non-human point of view. But for Kierkegaard, too, this isolation within

the individual is complete. This is illustrated particularly well in Kierkegaard's discussion of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac. When Abraham was told, as the result of God's will, that he must sacrifice his son Isaac, he was in this kind of quandary: if the message is genuinely from God, then he must sacrifice Isaac, and it is the right thing to do. But if the message is not from God, then he would be committing what would be the very worst possible crime, judged on the basis of Abraham's own view of human ethics. But how is Abraham to know whether

the command is from God or not? If an angel speaks to him, how does Abraham know it's not a hallucination? And if God Himself speaks, how is Abraham to know whether this is really God or whether actually the command is the projection of Abraham's own inward evil wishes? Nobody but Abraham can decide, and Abraham cannot tell within his life whether he has done the right thing or not. The second way in which I think these two men are alike is in their emphasis on commitment. The either/or comes in here: either there is a God and

God and religion are the most important things, and man must do nothing but obey the religious command, or there is no God, and then man must take the total burden of responsibility for the world and for himself upon his own shoulders, with no one to give him any sign. Both men are absolutely the opposite of what we might call the Easter Sunday Christian. The commitment is total; it is a passionate choice. But here again, when man makes the leap in faith, he leaps without any knowledge that there is going to be anything but a chasm

of nothingness on the other side. Or if he refuses to make the leap, then he must stay on this side without knowing whether he was right or not. Kierkegaard feels that only the irrational is commensurate with the grandeur of man's need; Sartre feels that for man to leap is a betrayal of the human condition. As Orestes rejects Zeus, he is admitting his estrangement from nature. He goes forth into loneliness and exile, but these open spaces are at least not a prison; they are an open future. Orestes is moving on to freedom. But what is this

freedom? Zeus tells him what it is in no uncertain terms: "Impudence! Spawn! So I am not your king. Who then made you? You blundered! You should not have made me free. I made you free so that you might serve me perhaps, but it has turned against its giver, and neither you nor I can undo what has been done. At last! So that is your excuse? I am not excusing myself, no. Well, let me tell you, it sounds much like an excuse. This freedom, whose slave you claim to be? Neither slave nor master! I am my

freedom! No sooner had you created me than I ceased to be yours." This language is somewhat shocking to my ears too; in fact, I hardly understand myself. Yesterday I had an excuse—you were my excuse for being alive, for you would put me in the world to fulfill your purpose, and the world was an old panda praying to me about your goodness day in and day out. Then you forsook me. I forsook you. How? Yesterday I felt at one with nature, this nature of your making, and suddenly, out of the blue, freedom crashed down and swept

me. Off my feet, nature sprang back; my youth flew with the wind, and I knew myself alone—utterly alone—in this well-meaning little universe of yours. And nothing was left in heaven—no right or wrong, nor anyone to give me orders. What of it? Am I to admire a scabby sheep that has to be kept apart? Your vaunted freedom isolates you from the fold. It means exile, yes, exile. What do you propose to do? The folk of our ghosts are my folk; I must open their eyes. Poor people, the gift you make to them will be a sad

one—of loneliness and shame. You will take from their eyes the veils I had laid on them, and you will show them their lives as they really are—foolish and futile, a barren boon. Why, since it is their lot, should I deny them the despair I have in me? What will they do with it? What they choose. They are free, and human life begins on the far side of despair. If God does not exist, there is nothing left but men. But if God does exist, is there anything better for man to do—to serve Him than to follow

his own deepest spiritual aspirations and potentialities? For centuries, man has looked outside into the universe for an answer, but the universe has returned to him only his own image. It is not easy for man to come back and look only within, but if he can find the courage to do so, then perhaps on the far side of despair, a new life may begin. [Music] Foreign [Music] Scenes from The Flies were taken from the book No Exit, and The Flies, translated by Stuart Gilbert. The Devil and the Good Lord was translated by Kitty Black. Both books

by Jean-Paul Sartre, published by Alfred A. Knopf Incorporated. [Music] My [Music] The only philosophical problem that is truly serious, says Albert Camus, is suicide. To judge whether or not life is really worth living is to answer philosophy's most fundamental question. Now, I suppose that if we could somehow make a calculation of all the people who had committed suicide, we would find that a very small number, if any, had ever sat down and made a cold, rational calculation of the joys and the pains in life and then, because the answer was negative, had gone out and

thrown it all up. Yet at the same time, when we stop to think of the number of people who do commit suicide for a few reasons, or poor reasons, or no reason, and then, on the other hand, the people who will battle with what seems to us unbearable tragedy and cling on to the end, and even perhaps say it was good, it was worth it, then we wonder if, after all, the clue to all this doesn't lie in one's philosophical answer to this question of whether or not life itself is worth living. Obviously, our view

of suicide will vary greatly according to whether we put it in the religious context or the humanistic one. If we once assume that there is a God, and that He has given man a purpose, a place in a universe that has meaning, then the only attitude one can take logically is a negative one so far as suicide is concerned. But if we take the other point of view—if we assume that there isn't any overall purpose for the universe—then we have a different question. Now bear in mind, Camus, in his book The Myth of Sisyphus, puts

the question in humanistic terms. "I do not know," he says, "whether or not this world has a meaning which transcends it; but this I am fully aware of: that if there is a higher meaning, it is not one which it is possible for me to know. And if the meaning is not a human meaning, then how can it be a meaning at all for me?" In this case, the leap in question is no longer the leap toward God in faith; it is a literal leap over the precipice toward death. What one encounters if one assumes

that there is no higher meaning is what existentialist writers have called the absurd. Absurdity is a discrepancy, a gap between man's aspirations and that which he is capable, even at best, of achieving. It is the fact that when man appeals to the universe for meaning, or form, or unity, there is no answer. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus has described how we encounter the absurd in our everyday lives. Most of the time we go through without standing apart to ask questions, but suddenly—It may be in the midst of our seeming to be one with our

environment—that the stage, as it were, collapses, and we are left there against a backdrop of nothingness. In our lives, we know that we rise, we take the streetcar, we work four hours in the office or the factory, we eat lunch, we work four hours in the office or the factory, we take the streetcar, we go home, we sleep, and Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, all in the same rhythm, until one day the "why" arises in that weariness that is tinged with amazement. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] So [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] So

[Music] [Music] We encounter the observed when the "why" arises, but we meet it also in time. Mostly, we are carried along by time. We speak of later, tomorrow, when I get settled, when I get this done. But suddenly, one day, a man sits at a table and he looks in a mirror and he says, "I am thirty." Thus, he situates himself with regard to his youth. He asserts it, but he places himself also in relation to time. He admits that he stands at a... Certain point on a curve that he acknowledges having to travel to

its end, but what is at the end? Death. He was looking toward that tomorrow of death when, with all of his self, he should have been cringing from it. And that revolt of the flesh—that too is the absurd. Absurd comes not only from the inhuman universe; sometimes men too can secrete the inhuman. If we should suddenly see men's actions separated from this backdrop of meaning, they too become only mechanical and silly. It's as though we were watching, all of the time, a man in a telephone booth but could not hear what he said. He gestures;

he speaks excitedly. For him, there is a connecting link, but for us, it is foolishness; it is an incomprehensible dumb show. As Camille says, this discomfort in the face of man's own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this nausea is also the absurd. To meet nausea as a philosophical term is a very strange thing and something which I think could not have happened before the 20th century. But it is one of the most familiar concepts in existentialism. We all know nausea of this sort; it is a flat, stale taste in

our mouths when we realize that one part of us, at least, has no more reason for being here, is no more necessary than the brute things in the world around us. The most dramatic presentation of nausea can be found in Jean-Paul Sartre's novel, which is called simply "Nausea." In it, the hero is sitting in a park, and he experiences what he calls a "horrible ecstasy." It is the very opposite of the religious pantheistic ecstasy, where man feels himself happily at one with the universe, penetrated by God. Here, the things of the world seem to pour

in upon him, and he and they alike are, in the way they are, superfluous, unnecessary. Existence had suddenly unveiled itself; it was the very paste of things. This root was needed into existence, or rather the root, the park gates, the bench, the sparse grass—all that had vanished. The diversity of things, their individuality, were only an appearance, a veneer. This veneer had melted, leaving soft, monstrous masses, all in disorder, naked in a frightful, obscene nakedness. Superfluous detritus—it was the only relationship I could establish between these trees, these gates, these stones. In vain I tried to count

the chestnut trees, to locate them by their relationship to the statue, to compare their height with the height of the plane trees. Each of them escaped the relationship in which I tried to enclose it, isolated itself, and overflowed. To throw the chestnut tree there opposite me, a little to the left, detritus the statue, and I—soft, weak, obscene—digesting, juggling with dismal thoughts, I too was detritus. I had dreamed vaguely of killing myself, to wipe out at least one of these superfluous lives, but even my death would have been superfluous detritus. To troll my corpse, my blood

on these stones, between these plants at the back of this smiling garden, and the decomposed flesh would have been to troll the earth, which would receive my bones at last—cleaned, stripped, peeled, proper and clean as teeth. It would have been detritus. I was detritus for eternity, and without formulating anything clearly, I understood that I had found the key to existence, the key to my nauseas, to my own life. In fact, all that I could grasp beyond that returns to this fundamental absurdity: every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies

by chance. Had I but dreamed of this enormous presence? It was there in the garden, toppled down into the trees—all soft, sticky, soiling everything, all thick, a jelly—and I was inside. I, with the garden; I knew it was the world, the naked world, suddenly revealing itself, and I choked with rage at this gross absurd being. You couldn't even wonder where all that sprang from or how it was that a world came into existence rather than nothingness. It didn't make sense; the world was everywhere—in front, behind. Of course, there was no reason for this flowing lava

to exist, but it was impossible for it not to exist. I shouted, "Filth! What rotten filth!" and shook myself to get rid of this sticky filth, but it held fast, and there was so much—tons and tons of existence, endless. I stifled at the depths of this immense weariness, and then suddenly the park emptied, as through a great hole. The world disappeared as it had come, or else I woke up—in any case, I saw no more of it. Nothing was left but the yellow earth around me, out of which dead branches rose up. This experience is,

to say the least, unusual. It would be very easy for us to dismiss it with this complacent thought that our young hero is sick and, after all, thank heavens, we are not like him. But as Freud has said, the abnormal is only the exaggeration of the normal written large so that we can see it and understand. One of the functions of literature is to hold up before us these extreme situations so that we may see ourselves in them, just as though we were looking into a magnifying mirror. One place where I think, with less difficulty,

we all encounter and recognize the absurdity of existence is when we bump up against needless, meaningless suffering. Camus has explored this aspect of the absurd in his play "The Misunderstanding." Here, two women—a mother and a daughter—have murdered a wealthy guest for his money. The daughter discovers that it was really her own brother she had killed. When the young wife finds out what has happened to her husband, she is horrified and views it. As a tragic misunderstanding, but the sister will have none of this: it is no misunderstanding. This is the normal course of events in

life. Nobody has ever recognized that all of existence, all of suffering, all tragedy is pointless. Pretty, did I tell you? Yes, cheated. What do they serve, those blind impulses that surge up in us, the yearnings that wrack our souls? Why cry out for the sea or for love but futility? Your husband knows now what the answer is, at the charnel house, where in the end we shall lie huddled together, side by side. Try to realize that no grief of yours can equal the injustice done to man. And now, before I go, let me give a

word of advice. I owe it to you, since I killed your husband: pray your God to harden you to stone; it's the happiness He has assigned Himself, the one true happiness. Do as He does; be blind to all appeals and turn your heart to stone while there still is time. And if you feel you lack the courage to enter this hard-blind peace, then come and join us in our common house. Goodbye, my sister; you see, it's all quite simple: you have a choice between the mindless happiness of stone and the slimy bed in which we

are awaiting you. Oh God, I cannot live in this desert! It is on you I must call, and I shall find the words. I place myself in your hands; have pity on me, turn toward me, hear me, and raise me from the dust. O heavenly Father, have pity on those who love one another and are parted. What's this? Did you call me? Oh, I don't know, but help me, help me, for I need help. Please be kind and say that you will help me. No, but are suicide and stony indifference really the only alternatives? The

wife says that she cannot live in this desert, but Camus asked precisely this: can we or can we not live without appeal to any idea of higher purpose to guarantee us? Hemu points out that most people illogically mix up the idea of an external higher purpose and the worthwhileness of life. But there is no reason, he says, for us to feel that because the universe has no meaning, my own life cannot be worthwhile. How many of our everyday actions are really governed by the belief in the worthwhileness of the universe? Suppose we had in the

world or suppose that the world were a gigantic Chinese checkerboard with nothing but a heterogeneous assortment of marbles and a disorganized set of holes. Now, older philosophers have proceeded as though there were only two points of view one could take: either when confined by faith or by rational investigation that there is a pattern after all, underneath it all, or that there is nothing and we might as well give it up; it can't possibly be worthwhile. The existentialist takes neither view; he says, "I can create my own pattern; I don't need any other pattern. If this

is personally gratifying to me, if I can enjoy participating in it and sharing it with others, this is enough. This is the meaning and the significance of my life." Pragmatists too take much the same position, but they have a heartier stomach, and they don't worry all the time for fear someone suddenly shakes the board. But if we are going to say, "All right then, I create my own significance, my own worthwhileness," how can we do it? One answer is that we live the creative life, and one form of creativity is artistic creativity. In a later

passage in *Nausea,* Sartre shows us his hero, Rohan Taft, still worrying about existence, deciding now to leave the town where he had the horrible ecstasy. And we find him sitting in a café. "Your record, Mr. Antoine, the one you like so well, can I play it for you again for the last time?" Please, I said that out of politeness, but I don't feel too well disposed to listen to jazz now. There is this song on the saxophone, and I am ashamed. A glorious little suffering has been born, an exemplary suffering: four notes on the saxophone,

they come and go; they seem to say, "You must be like us, suffer in rhythm." [Music] The melody does not exist; it is even an annoyance. If I were to get up and rip this record from the table which holds it, if I were to break it in two, I wouldn't reach it; it is beyond, always beyond. Something—a voice, a violin note—through layers and layers of existence, it veils itself, and when you want to seize it, you find only existences devoid of sense; it is behind them. I hear sounds, vibrations in the air, which unveil

it. It does not exist because it has nothing superfluous; all the rest is supervised to it. It is, and I too wanted to be. I think about a clean-shaven American with thick black eyebrows, suffocating with the heat on the 31st floor of a New York skyscraper. He is sitting in shirt sleeves in front of his piano; he has a taste of smoke in his mouth and vaguely a ghost of a tune in his head. The moist hand seizes the pencil on the piano. That's the way it happened, that way or another way; it makes little

difference. That is how it was born. So two of them are said, the composer and the singer; they have washed themselves of the sin of existing—or not completely of course, but as much as anyone can. Can you justify your existence then? And why not? I just a little, couldn't I try? And naturally, it wouldn't be the question of a tune; but couldn't I—in another medium? It would have to... "Be a book. I don't know how to do anything else—a book, a novel—and there would be people who would read this book and say, 'Antoine wrote this,'

a red-headed man who hung around cafes. They would think about my life as I think about the negresses: something precious and almost legendary. A book, perhaps, one day thinking precisely of this hour, of this gloomy hour in which I waited for it to be time to get on the train. Perhaps I shall feel my heart beat faster and say to myself, 'That was the day. That was the hour when it all started,' and I might succeed in the past in accepting myself to write a book or to compose a piece of music—somehow redeeming to Rokhanta.

For it is to lift something out of the flux of experience and bestow upon it its own unique form, its own inevitable beginning, middle, and end. But this is not the only kind of artistic creation. A man may learn to find a creative pattern in his own life; and Sartre has said that the highest of all artistic creations is the construction of a freely chosen value system by which one is willing to live. Camus has derived three consequences from his confrontation with the observed. In revolt, a man asserts the worthwhileness of his own life in

the very face of the universe, which denies any purpose. In freedom, we learn that without any external purpose we are then—and only then—free to decide what will be the significance of our existence, not being determined by anything from the outside. And then there is passion. One might learn to cultivate full awareness so that he may derive from each moment all that it has to offer in the way of pleasure, of pain, but always of intensity. And we may learn to find it all somehow interesting. Camus tells of how, when he was a young man in

North Africa, he learned to love the beauty of this world for its very indifference, in a subdued ecstasy, totally unlike the ecstasy of Rokhanta. He found that there was a happiness and a truth of the sun and of the sea. I love this life with abandon, and I want to speak of it without reservation. It makes me proud of my condition as a human being. Yet people have often said to me, 'There is nothing in that to be proud of.' Yes, there is something: this sun, this sea, my heart leaping with youth, my body with

the taste of the salt still on it, and that immense setting where tenderness and glory meet in the yellow and the blue. Years later, Camille returned to the shores of Africa, sickened with the memory of war and destruction, trying to find out whether he might even yet find the solace of an ancient beauty. Here, I recaptured the former beauty—a young sky—and I measured my luck, realizing at last that in the worst years of our madness, the memory of that sky had never left me. This was what, in the end, kept me from despairing. Here, the

world began over again, every day, in an ever-new light. O light! This is the cry of all the characters of ancient drama brought face to face with their fate. This last resort was ours too, and I knew it now. In the middle of winter, I had last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer. The world offers us no reasons for living, but it may, if we let it, help us to find our lives more worth the living. Life by itself makes no sense, but it is ours to make sense of. If we confront

a blank canvas, we don't have to throw mud at it or kill ourselves; we may set about creating a painting—a painting which sets its own artistic laws, which provides its own reason for being. Of course, I think one has to go to others ultimately, and yet Camus is probably right in saying that we must confront the situation first, each man alone and for himself. In 'The Myth of Sisyphus,' he asked whether we could live without any external meaning. In a later work, 'The Letters to a German Friend,' he writes again on the same question: 'I

continue to believe that this world has no higher meaning, but I know that something in it has meaning, and that is man; for man is the one being to insist on having a meaning. This world has at least the truth of man, and our task is to provide man with reasons to justify him against destiny itself.' There are no reasons other than man, and it is man who must be saved if we want to save the idea which we form of life. [Music] The scene from 'Misunderstanding' is to be found in 'Caligula' and three other

plays by Albert Camus, translated by Stuart Gilbert. Other material was taken from 'The Myth of Sisyphus' by Albert Camus, translated by Justin O'Brien. Both books are published by Alfred A. Knopf, Incorporated. [Music] Um, [Music] bad faith for the existentialist is a form of original sin. One is not born in it, to be sure, but it is so prevalent in the world that it is almost impossible to escape the contagion of bad faith. Bad faith is a lie to oneself; it is a form of self-deception. Sartre has formulated the concept as foi. It is his belief

that most of us simply cannot bear the anguish of recognizing that we are free, and that because we are free, we are responsible for whatever we have made of our lives. And so he says we seek, by any means possible, to escape from the terror of this dreadful freedom by retreating into the serious." The serious world is a world where everything is absolute; in it, each man is born into his rightful place. He has his own privileges, which are his, and he knows how to behave because all is defined, and values too are clear and

absolute, just as clearly marked as articles on a bargain table, each one with its own price. But in reality, Sartre says we are not living in a serious world. In reality, our position is more like that of a player in a game. He is consented to acknowledge the state as worthwhile; he has agreed to abide by the rules, but he knows very well that nothing from outside the game forces him to be there or to choose these rules. Consequently, at any moment, he realizes he could change the rules of his game, alter the stakes, or

choose another game entirely. In this sense, we find that man is not identical with the role that he plays. Sartre has exploited this in a drama known as "Kean." Edmund Kean, the Shakespearean actor, has apparently ruined his career the night before by shouting abuses at the Prince of Wales, who was sitting in the audience. "Governor, if I tell them you're in your right mind, they'll put you in prison." "Prison? Because I'm in my right mind? What a world!" "Very well then, I shall go to prison." "If you go to prison, you'll never act again." "What

a fate! Oh governor, you mustn't let him." "So what do you want me to do?" "Well, if you're only just for a day or two." "What? Pretend to?" "Yes, Solomon." "Well, you were magnificent in Lear, my dear fellow!" "Even if I wanted to, it would be impossible. I can never act again." "You can never? Since when?" "Since last night. I've been thinking: to act, one must take oneself as someone else. I thought I was Kean, who thought he was Hamlet, who thought he was Fortinbras." "Yes, Hamlet does think he's Fortinbras!" "It's a secret!" "What a

series of misunderstandings! Fortinbras doesn't think he is anyone; Fortinbras and Mr. Edmund are alike. They know who they are, and they say only what is. You can ask them about the weather, the time of day, the price of bread, but never try to make them act on a stage!" "What's the weather like?" "Can't you see? The sun is shining!" "Is that your sun?" "I shall have to grow accustomed to it. Kean's sun was painted on a stage canvas." "Solomon, the London sky is a painted cloth! Every morning you opened the curtains; I opened my eyes

and I saw— I don't know what I saw! And the man himself is a sham! Everything is a sham around him! Under a sham sun, the sham king cried the tale of his sham sufferings to his sham heart. Today, the sun is real!" "How flat! Real light is— truth should be blinding, dazzling!" "It's true, it's true! I am a ruined man. I shall wait for the police here." "That's Richard III! Chair in this very chair! When you go, leave the street door wide open! I want the police to have free access, like the Gauls inviting

the Roman Senate." "Who told you I was thinking of that?" "It was in the new play you get me to read." "Oh my god, you are right! I am making a gesture! You know, my whole life is composed of nothing but gestures! There is one for every hour, every season, every period of my entire life! I learned to walk, to breathe, to die! Now at last, those gestures are dead, like so many dead branches! I killed them all last night at one blow! I will root them out, and if I cannot, I will cut off

my arms! Do you hear? Do you hear? Oh mountain, you are going to lead a hard life! You must learn to be simple, perfectly simple! Out of my life, or I will kill you!" "No, stay! You do not incommode me!" "No, you see, the man in the armchair was not me; it was Richard III. And that one is— well, it will have to happen by degrees. I will imitate the natural until it becomes second nature. As an actor, Kean can perhaps see the human situation a little more clearly than the rest of us; for as

he watches himself playing his roles, it is as though he looked into a series of mirrors, finding image upon image, and then discovering that he cannot decide which is the real king. The answer, of course, for the existentialist is that there is no real king, for one cannot say of a man that he is anything in the way that the tree is a tree, or a table is a table. There is, as it were, a little film of nothingness between a man and his acts. And here, according to Sartre, is where bad faith enters in.

It is just, says Sartre, as though men shifted back and forth between two meanings of the verb 'to be.' In the past, one was what one was; in other words, a man was what his acts made him be. But in the present and the future, then the situation is different. Facing the past, the man in bad faith will attempt to say that he isn't really what his acts would seem to have made him. For example: I have, let's say, cheated on my income tax, pocketed a few extra items in the supermarket, and yet I declare

I am not a thief, for I do not have the nature of a thief. Now, such bad faith is easy to detect, but what about sincerity itself? This may be a trap; it may prove to be a form of bad faith, for suppose a person..." Says, "I am an evil person. I am hostile to society. I am an outcast, and since I am a criminal or a thief, there's no point in my trying to be anything else, for this is what I am, and I can't change it." This becomes, perhaps, a more serious form of

bad faith—the seeming sincerity than the insincerity. One might recall the old story of the man who was made to feel, by an old-fashioned minister, that he was totally evil and depraved, as the limerick puts it: At Ipswich, when the preacher had quitted, a young man said, "Ah! Now I've hid it. Since nothing is right, I'll go out tonight, find the best sin, and commit it." But bad faith is not just an attitude toward oneself; it involves also an attitude toward others in general. We may say that bad faith consists in accepting absolutely the customs and

the outlook of the society around one, as though it were absolutely true for eternity. More than this, it consists in identifying a man with some accident of his situation—his social situation, his religion, his race, or what he happens to have done in the past. Simone de Beauvoir, in her book *The Ethics of Ambiguity*, discusses bad faith in connection with a society of oppressors and the oppressed. It is common, she says, for the oppressors to deny the oppressed education and everything which would help lift them above the level of sub-men. Then the oppressors look around them

and say, "But can I possibly be on an equal basis with such animals as these?" In prejudice, one can see most easily of all the structure of bad faith. The prejudiced man pins all others, other than himself, to some accident of birth, religion, or situation, and then he feels that he has, in contrast, a position which cannot be assailed no matter what he does. He does not have to win his place in the sun; he is what he is. He has the impenetrability of a rock. Sartre says that no man is ever simply an anti-Semite

or an anti-Negro, for example, but that anti-Semitism or one of the other prejudices is not an opinion one can change. The prejudiced man cannot be changed by showing him a ray of facts so that he will modify his opinion, but prejudice is a global attitude. The man who is prejudiced in one respect will be prejudiced in every other respect, for what he fears is the truth about man—that he is what he makes himself—and consequently he wants to keep men always attached to some mere accidental property of their being. We can see an especially amusing example

of this in Sins of the Fathers by Nekrasov. In one scene, a thief has been caught in the apartment of a very respectable householder. Below, the man of the house has just called the police. "Do I look like a murderer? What a misunderstanding! I admire you, and you think I want to cut your throat? I admire you! Let me look at the honest man in his full and splendid majesty. Suppose I were to tell you that I tried to kill myself just now in order to escape my pursuers? Don't try to get around me! Splendid!

And suppose I were to take a vial from my pocket, swallow the contents, and drop dead at your feet? Well, what would you say?" "I'd say the rogue had saved the law a job!" The quiet certitude of an irreproachable conscience: it is easy to see, sir, that you have never entertained the slightest doubt about what is right, of course, and that you don't subscribe to those subversive doctrines which hold the criminal to be a product of society. A criminal is a criminal. Splendid! A criminal is a criminal—that's well said! Ah, sir, there's no danger that

I'd touch your heart by telling you the story of my unfortunate childhood; it would do you no good. I had a tough childhood myself, and little you'd care that I'm a victim of the First World War, the communist revolution, and the capitalist system. There are others who are victims of all that—me, for example—and who don't stoop to thieving. You have an answer for everything. Nothing saps your convictions! Ah, sir, with that bronze forehead, those enamel eyes, and that heart of stone, you must be an anti-Semite! I should have known it. Are you a Jew? "No,

sir, no, and I'll admit to you that I share your anti-Semitism." "Don't be offended; cher is going too far. Let's say I pick up the crumbs, not having the good fortune to be honest. I don't enjoy your assurance; I have doubt, sir. I have doubts. That is the prerogative of troubled souls. I am, if you like, an aspiring anti-Semite. What about the Arabs? You hate them, don't you?" "That's enough! I have neither the time nor the inclination to listen to your nonsense. I ask you to go back in this room immediately and to wait there

quietly until the police arrive." "I'll go, I'll go back in the other room, but just tell me that you hate the Arabs. Yes, say it better than that, just to please me, and I'll swear to you it's my last question. They have to stay where they belong!" "Wonderful, sir! I take off my hat to you. You are honest to the point of ferocity!" After this brief tour of the horizon, our identity of views is claimed, which doesn't surprise me. What honest people we scoundrels would be if your police would give us the chance. In such

obvious examples as this, it may be difficult to see how bad faith can be even self-deception; but more often, the patterns of bad faith are more insidious. The most subtle of all, perhaps, is in a book by Albert Camus called *The Fall*. The title is applied ironically to the self-recognition of its hero. Clements was a brilliant defense attorney, and then, at the height of his professional and social success, he felt that everything was undermined, as he had come gradually to see that all of his loudly proclaimed love of humanity, all of his many acts of

altruism, were simply manifestations of self-interest, of self-love. So he gave it all up and went to a bar at the side of the sea, grabbing hold of anyone he could find to listen to him and launching into a long monologue of denunciation. In part, this was an attack against the whole human race, and Clements listed rather gleefully all of the crimes and atrocities of humankind. Sometimes he became more subtle, pointing out, for example, our inability to love. "Have you noticed," he said, "that death alone awakens our feelings? How we love the friends who have just

left us? How we admire those of our teachers who have ceased to speak, their mouths filled with earth? Then the expression of admiration springs forth naturally, that admiration they were perhaps expecting from us all their lives. But do you know why we are always more just and more generous toward the dead? The reason is simple: with them, there is no obligation. They leave us free, and we can take our time, fit the testimonial in between a cocktail party and a nice little mistress in our spare time. If they forced us to anything, it would be

to remembering, and we have a very short memory. No, it is the recently dead we love among our friends, the painful dead, our emotion ourselves; after all, that's the way man is, my friend. He has two faces: he can't live without self-love. But Clements' denunciation is not just of mankind in general. As he goes on, he delves more and more into the nature of a personal confession, showing how gradually in his life in Paris, he had discovered that every single act was really but one more stone in the monument of self-pride. The crisis, he said,

occurred one night as he stood on the bridge over the Seine. From a distance, he heard muffled cries for help, and out of fear of danger and even more dislike of the necessary discomfort involved, he failed to jump in and save the drowning woman. Then the image shattered, and he fled from Paris to his bar and his listening victim. *I have been practicing my useful profession here for some time. It consists, to begin with, as you know from experience, in indulging in public confession as often as possible. I accuse myself up and down, covered with

ashes, tearing my hair, my face scored with clawing, but with piercing eyes I stand before all humanity, recapitulating my shames without losing sight of the effect I am producing, and saying: I, I was the lowest of the lower. When I get to this, is what we are, the trick's been played, and I can tell them off. However, I'd like to be sure we're in the soup together; however, I have a superiority in that I know it. This gives me the right to speak, you see the advantage, I'm sure. The more I accuse myself, the more

I have a right to judge you. Even better, I provoke you into judging yourself, and this relieves me of that much of the burden. Oh, we are odd, wretched creatures, and if we simply look back over our lives, there's no lack of occasions to amaze and horrify ourselves. Just try, I shall listen, you may be sure, to your own confession with a great feeling of fraternity. We are not all alike, constantly talking into no one, forever up against the same questions, although we know the answers in advance. Then please tell me what happened to you

one night on the keys of the Seine, and how you managed never to risk your life. You yourself utter the words that for years have never ceased echoing through my nights, that I shall at last say through your mouth: "Oh young woman, throw yourself into the water again that I may, a second time, have the chance of saving both of us." A second time— but a risky suggestion! Just suppose, sir, that we should be taken literally. We'd have to go through with it; the water's so cold. But let's not worry; it's too late now. It

shall always be too late. Fortunately, the question is whether Clements, at long last, really is in good faith or not, whether his grim self-portrait is, as he intended, the proper mirror of all mankind. Some critics have said that it is, and that Camus, for his part in this book, has pronounced his own condemnation of men and that he is confessing the failure of humanism. One writer has gone so far as to say that the only logical step for Camus would have been to retreat into the church and to confess his need for divine grace—that man

cannot go it alone. But this is not what Camus did, and he has made it very clear that these are not the correct interpretations of The Fall. There are two things which destroy mankind, he said. The first is that conventional self-righteousness, which, in the name of the easily established morality of society, would pass dreadful judgments against men; and the other is cynicism, which, holding up before man some non-human standard of perfection, would deny to him any of his weaker aspirations for good. Camus says that his hero, with his guilty conscience, with his sense of sin,

represents the attitude in Europe which has condemned mankind, finally, which ends up by killing and by putting men into concentration camps. This would mean that Clements actually represented both of the attitudes: both the self-complacent virtue and what we...* Might call his days of grace and the cynicism at the time of his fall. Camus says, "I detest virtue that is only smugness. I detest the frightful morality of the world and I detest it because it ends just like absolute cynicism, in demoralizing men and in keeping them from running their own lives with their own just measures

of meanness and of magnificence. Perhaps we may say that good faith consists in accepting men in spite of their evil for the sake of their potential good. If this is true, then bad faith is any device which either pretends that the meanness is not there in man or that we should for any reason whatsoever give up our never-ending struggle to attain the magnificence." [Music] [Music] The scene from *Necrosoft* by Jean-Paul Sartre was translated by Sylvia and George Lafon. The scene from Sartre's *Keen* was translated by Kitty Black. Both works are published by Alfred A. Knopf

under the title *The Devil and the Good Lord* and *Two Other Plays.* [Music] So [Music] [Music] yes, now is the moment. I'm looking at this thing on the mantelpiece and I understand that I'm in hell. I tell you, everything's been thought out beforehand. They knew I'd stand here at the mantelpiece stroking this thing of bronze, and all those eyes intent upon me, devouring me. "What? Only two of you? I thought there were..." [Laughter] "More? So this is hell? I'd never have known it. Do you remember all those stories they used to tell us about the

brimstone and the fires and the torture chambers? The old wives' tales? No, there's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is other people." Hell is other people, so says Sartre in his play *No Exit*. I suppose that there are moments in our lives when, frustrated by the difficulties of intricate human relationships, we agree with him. In this play, Sartre makes his point by showing how any relation which two people can set up is always threatened by the presence of a third. Two people may come to accept each other even if in no better way than by

agreeing to respect each other's lives, but the third person is always entering in, bringing his objective point of view and consequently causing the whole structure to disintegrate. This, by the way, says Sartre, is the reason why lovers like to be alone. The very basis of the revelation of the other person's existence, according to Sartre, is the realization that someone is staring at me. We all know the experience. I'm sitting, let's say, on a bus—an almost empty bus—and I start talking to myself, or making some sort of awkward gesture, or laughing aloud. Then I look up

and I see that someone has watched me do it. We all know the feeling of embarrassment, but why is it there? It doesn't mean that we've been doing something reprehensible; it means, according to Sartre, that we feel that we are simply objects, that we have an outside for the other person to judge, something which we can't control. Perhaps the best example of this is one of Sartre's: suppose there is a man looking through a keyhole, watching something going on inside. Now, as he looks inside, as he watches this interesting episode, he is the only subject;

the people in the world are absolutely objects, like things in the world. But if someone comes down the corridor and finds him looking through the keyhole, then the situation changes, because then his embarrassment is not due to any bourgeois shame in having been looking through a keyhole, but it's because he feels too acutely that he is like the objects he has been looking at. And at once he realizes he's both subject and object in the world, and this is a very disconcerting experience. What happens in this encounter with others is that there comes into being

what Sartre calls a self for others. And this self for others, although it has no reality or true existence except in the mind of others, is nevertheless the thing by which I am seen and judged. For others, I am not the self which I am for myself, but I am that which they see, and I can never grasp the meaning of this self. Furthermore, I am accustomed to think of the world as being what I interpreted as being, but I realize sometimes in bewilderment and pain that my world is not the only world, that other

people have made of the world what they like, and I wonder then which is the real world. One of the best literary presentations which I know of this sudden encounter with the subjectivity or consciousness of another person—what Sartre refers to as "the look"—is given us in a novel by Simone de Beauvoir, one which is called *She Came to Stay*. In this book, a couple by the name of Françoise and Pierre, a closely knit couple, have invited a little girl, Xavier, a little girl from the provinces, to come and stay with them for a while. Now,

this little girl throws everything into confusion, not through the usual fatal triangle which novelists are so fond of dealing with, for Françoise never really doubts that she is first in Pierre's mind and will always be there. But Xavier will not allow any other consciousness to be called valid except her own. She pronounces her own judgments on the lives of Françoise and Pierre and suddenly makes them see themselves in their relationship as something totally new and strange. Françoise, in particular, feels defenseless before her and attacked. One evening, which is particularly difficult, Françoise just decides she cannot

stand it any longer; Laurette has been impossible. Françoise bursts into tears and rushes out of the nightclub. Pierre follows, trying to find out what on earth can be the matter with her. What's the matter? I don't know. Did I do something? No. Is it because of Xavier? Why did you cry, then? You'll laugh at me. It's because I discovered that she has a consciousness like mine. Have you ever felt someone else's consciousness in yourself? It's unbearable. You think I'm drunk? In a way, I am, but it doesn't matter. Why are you so astounded? If I

were to tell you I was afraid of death, you would understand. This thing, then, is just as real and just as terrifying. Of course, we know we're not alone in this world; we say these things just as we know that someday we're going to die. But when we begin to believe it, you feel that there's something scandalous in Xavier's existence. It only comes to me in flashes, you know, and yet you do feel that it occurs from time to time. It has to. You're amazing. You're the only living being I know who is capable of

shedding tears upon discovering in someone else a consciousness similar to your own. Do you consider that stupid? Oh no, no, of course not. Everyone recognizes his own consciousness as absolute. How can several absolutes be compatible? The problem is as great a mystery as life or death. In fact, it's such a problem that philosophers are breaking their heads over it. Well then, why are you so astounded now? What surprises me is that you should be affected in such a concrete manner by a metaphysical problem. But it is something concrete; the whole meaning of my life is

at stake. I don't say it isn't. Nevertheless, this power you have to live an idea, body and soul, well, that's unusual to me. An idea is not a question of theory; it can be proved, but if it remains theoretical, it has no value. Otherwise, I would never have waited for Xavier's arrival to find out if my consciousness were not unique in this world. I can readily understand this problem arising apropos, but I've never had any difficulty with you, since I barely distinguish you for myself. And besides, between us, there's reciprocation. How do you mean? As

soon as I recognize a consciousness in you, you in turn immediately recognize one in me. Now that makes all the difference. Perhaps, in short, that's what friendship really is; each renounces his preeminence. But what if either refuses to renounce it? Well, then friendship is impossible. Then what can be done about it? I don't know. Xavier never renounces any part of herself. No matter how high she placed someone else, even to the point of worship, that person would still remain an object to her. There is no remedy. One would have to kill Xavier in this battle

to the death of consciousnesses. Françoise finally does kill Xavier, and this is because she follows to its logical conclusion one way of resolving the subject-object conflict—in this case, what we might call a metaphysical murder. If we are going to have a struggle of subjects and objects, one obvious way of dealing with the problem is to decide that I will be the only subject. I will not tolerate anybody else as being a subject to look at me. This is, of course, the path of domination in the simplest form, what you might call staring the other person

down. We all know people like this—people who can't tolerate any other person's way of life, who have to tell everybody else just how to live, who can't see any point of view except their own. In its most extreme form, this is sadism. The sadist wants to capture and imprison the subjectivity of the other, the other's freedom, in his body. He wants to make the other feel that he is a thing at the sadist's mercy. By mental or physical torture, he tries to make the other feel that he is nothing except this panting flesh, dependent on

the sadist's slightest command. But the sadist fails. He can't help it. In the first place, he can never capture a subjectivity. The extent to which he can control the other person is only the degree to which the other person is made an object. Furthermore, the other person's look is always there. At the moment of the greatest torture, still, the victim may look at his tormentor, and in this look, the sadist is judged. A less bizarre way of remaining the sole subject in the world is the path of indifference, a kind of self-willed blindness. Sartre points

out that some people manage to maintain this state of blindness for almost a lifetime, going on forever with only occasional, brief, terrifying moments of the revelation of the nature of the other. Such a person doesn't hate others, but he acts as if they were nothing but objects, and by acting as if they're nothing but objects, he tends to imprison them in their roles—to treat the waiter as if he's only a waiter; the clerk in the store as if he's not a person but merely a clerk; and friends as if the friends are nothing except instruments

for a particular kind of pleasure for this person's subjectivity. But this path of indifference won't work either. In the first place, it's not only dishonest, it's dangerous, for at any moment, one of these objects in my world may suddenly look up at me, and I know that I have been judged. The look has been there, and I cannot erase it. In the second place, I'm impoverished. For myself, others are necessary to me if I am going to reveal to myself what I am, what my possibilities are, and insofar as I refuse to let the other

person pass judgment on myself, for others, I am restricting my own growth. Now, even more extreme than the sadist... Position and a kind of consequence of the failure of all of these efforts to be sole subject, there comes hate. This was Françoise’s way out for hate. Says Sartre, "Hate is basically the will to annihilate the other, to get rid of him completely." Again, it fails logically: if I'm going to annihilate the look of the other, I must annihilate all others, for I can never be sole subject unless there are no other people in the world.

But aside from the fact that this is impossible, it can't succeed anyway; there will always be the memory of the other person's judgment. I would always have to live with the knowledge of what I had been for others. The opposite recourse is naturally to accept myself as being an object, to make myself only an object. Here, the extreme form is masochism, the opposite of sadism. The masochist is the person who finds it somehow delightful to have pain and domination from the other. It isn't because he enjoys the pain or the defeatism; it's simply that it's

easier for him to let someone else be responsible for his being, rather than to try to take up the struggle of dealing with the world in which there are other people and being responsible for what one does. Rather surprisingly, Asadra puts love here as one way of making oneself an object. It is, of course, love in bad faith, and I should say that all these structures where we say that "hell is other people" are structures in bad faith. But before we try to consider just how love enters in here, we ought to look at another

scene from a de Beauvoir novel; this one is *The Mandarins*. Here, Henry and Paula are having breakfast. They have lived together for a long time, thinking that they were in love with one another, and yet there's something in this scene which shows us clearly that at least one of the two is getting a little bit tired and finding the affair grown stale. "What are you planning to do today?" "Nothing special." "But what?" "Well, I think I'll call my dressmaker and have her take a look at those beautiful materials you brought back, and after that..." "Oh,

I always manage to find something to do." "By that, you mean you have nothing whatever to do." "I've been thinking a lot about you during this past month. I think it's a crime for you to spend your days vegetating inside these four walls." "You call this vegetating? When you love someone, you're not vegetating, but loving." "Isn't a vocation." "You're wrong; for me, it is a vocation. I've been thinking over what I said to you the other day; I'm sure that I was right. You must start singing again." "For years I've been living exactly as I

do now." "Why are you suddenly concerned?" "But during the war, it was possible to be satisfied just to kill time." "The war is over now. Listen to me, you're going to tell Old Man Grape that you want to go back to work again. I'll help you choose your songs. I'll even write a few for you. I'll ask the boys if they would care to try their hand at it too. Just wait and see the repertoire we get for you! Whenever you're ready, Sabirrio will get you an audition. I guarantee that he can get you star

booking at the Club 45. After that, you're made." "Then what will I mean any more to you if you see my name on posters?" "Of course not; don't be foolish! Why is it that you're not willing to try?" "I try to write, and you want to try to sing. You have a talent for it. I'm alive, and I love you, and to me, that's not nothing." "No, you're just playing with words. Why don't you want to give it a try? Have you become that lazy, or are you afraid, or what?" "Listen, even if all those

vanities – success, fame – still meant something to me, I wouldn't start out in a second-rate career at the ripe age of 37." "Well, I sacrificed that tour of Brazil for you. It was a final retirement. I have no regrets." "Let's just forget the whole thing." "Yes, without consulting me, you're only too willing to make that sacrifice, and now you seem to be holding me responsible for it." "I have never been able to decide whether you really scorn fame or whether you were just afraid of not being able to attain it." "But your voice is

as beautiful as it ever was." "So are you." "Not quite, but I know exactly how it would turn out to make you happy: a handful of intellectuals would proclaim my genius for a few months and then goodbye!" "I might have been a star, but I missed my chance." "Well, it's too bad; let's just drop it." "But even if you can't take the world by storm, it would still be worth it! You have your voice, your special talent. Don't you think it would be interesting to try to get all you can out of it? I'm sure

that you'd find life much more satisfying." "I find life satisfying as it is now." "You don't seem to understand what my love for you means to me." "I do understand, but you won't do for love of me what I ask you to do." "If you had good reason for us..." "Can I do it?" "What you mean by that is you prefer your reasons to mine." "Yes, because they're better. You've been giving me a purely superficial point of view, wordy reasons that aren't really your own. Whatever your reasons are, I simply don't understand them." "All right,

let's drop it, but I'm telling you, you're wrong." "Are you going to work now?" "Yes." "On your novel?" "Yes." "Good." Paula wants to live for love alone, but what does this mean? Well, the doctor says it means she wants to be an object. But what kind of an object does she want to be? A fascinating object, such that Henry's freedom will be ensnared to the point where he can do nothing except consider this object and tend to it. It's a double evasion, as is made very clear in this scene. Paula's wanting to live for love

alone is, at least in part, due to the fact that she wants to escape the difficulties of a long career in which she's not quite sure of herself and her ability to carry through. And in the second place, what sort of love is this? Sartre says that love is a desire to maintain the other as subject so that one can be object before him. But is Henry really free? Because Paula wants him to be free only so long as he devotes his freedom to her, and this is not much of a freedom. Now, Henry is

wise enough to refuse. He is not going to be responsible; he wants her to live her own life and not make him the foundation of her being. Whether this is because he honestly feels this way or whether it's because he's getting a little bored with Paula, I'm not sure, but in either case, his attitude is more correct, let us say, than hers. It's rather amusing to think how couples we know fit into this pattern of Sartrean relationships. There are the strong ones, where you find two very strong personalities who seem impelled to destroy themselves by

this constant battle to the death of consciousnesses to see which one will come out as sole subject. And then there are the uneven ones—some of the successful marriages where the strong personality and the weak personality get along together; the strong one being sole subject and the weak one being so object. A balance, yes, but not really a healthy one. Offhand, it might seem impossible to have a relationship where two people would each be trying to be made an object, but I rather think it happens. I think we all know cases where two people seem to

find their whole reason for existence in each other's being, and yet there's something pathetic about them. There's a sense in which, although they live for each other, they seem not to be really living in the world. De Beauvoir maintains that there is bad faith in the social structure involving the relation of the sexes. In her book called "The Second Sex," she maintains that traditionally, men have tried to make women the second sex, the other sex, equating the human with man and then making of women the other. Some men, says de Beauvoir, do this cynically and

openly; women are toys, mere playthings. Others do it more subtly; they make of their wives or mistresses the reason for their being. Yes, but what she really is is a talking mirror, sending back not a true reflection of the man but the reflection which he has so carefully placed there. But this is all a broader thing than simply marriage or sex. We see it in family relationships, where parents love their child—oh yes, love the child so much that they devote their lives to creating him into exactly the object they want him to be, or on

the other hand, love the child so much that they have faced themselves completely, living only for and through the child, giving up all responsibility for life of their own. And we see it everywhere—in the employee-employer relationship, the student-teacher relationship, even in the many unequal friendships that we see around about us. If we were to leave things at this stage, I am sure that we would all feel profoundly dissatisfied. Human relationships are often, perhaps usually, like this, but do they have to be? Is there not a love or a friendship in good faith? Of course there

is, whether if we're existentialists or non-existentialists. We've seen the germ of it already in the two scenes from the de Beauvoir novels. We saw how Françoise and Pierre agreed that in friendship, one gives up this struggle for preeminence. One knows that when one recognizes the consciousness of the other, the other is also recognizing his consciousness. And whatever his motives, Henry at least wanted Paula to live her own life, knowing that unless they grew separately, they could not grow as a couple together. The basis of all relations in good faith is fundamentally this: respecting the other

as a free subject, valuing the uniqueness of others and of myself as well. It is a precarious structure; it is not an easy thing, for it means that one gives up forever the idea that one can predict and classify and fully understand the other, or that one oneself can be fully predicted and understood. But human relationships are interesting because of this element of mystery and the knowledge of change. The relation with others in good faith of two free subjects is not paradise—or if it is a paradise, it's a terribly busy paradise requiring constant vigilance—but it

is not hell either, and the very possibility of its existence perhaps helps us to realize that if hell is other people, it is a hell which we ourselves have created. [Music] The scene from "She Came to Stay" was translated by Yvonne Moyes and Roger Senhouse. "The Mandarins" was translated by Leonard M. Friedman. Both books by Simone de Beauvoir were published by the World Publishing Company. The scene from "No Exit" by Jean-Paul Sartre was translated by Stuart Gilbert and published by Alfred A. Knopf Incorporated. The painting "Sky Festival" by Gordon Wagner, courtesy of the Denver Art

Museum. [Music] So, in America today we... Are we living a paradox? We talk all the time about how important it is to gain freedom for everybody, and I think myself that we are quite honestly trying to achieve this ideal. And yet, at the same time, we are forever persuading ourselves that we are, by nature, not free. The psychologist tells us that we are merely the victims of our heredity and environment, or puppets directed by the unconscious forces within us. The sociologist says that we and our values are wholly sociologically conditioned, and the advertisers try their

best to make us want what they think we should want, and to hold that what they tell us is important to have is important to have, regardless of what we ourselves might choose. This satanic trio, as the existentialists would call them—Madison Avenue, the sociologist, and the psychologist—have persuaded many of us that we really are not free, and you will hear people arguing very vehemently that they are not free agents. The existentialists will have none of this. They maintain that man is free and that he ought to be free. But when they say that he is

free and ought to be free, they are not uttering a paradox, for they believe that it is only when man recognizes psychologically his freedom that he is in a position to fight for political freedom. They think that freedom from oppression is something which man ought to have, but that only when he is free will he work for it. This message was stated very early in a play of Jean-Paul Sartre's, *The Flies*. In the scene, there, Zeus is talking to Jesus, warning him that he ought to kill Orestes and his sister before they manage to kill

him in vengeance for his having murdered their father, my creature and my mortal brother. "For the sake of the order that we both serve, I ask you, nay, I command you to lay hands on Orestes and his sister. Are they so dangerous? Orestes knows that he is free. He knows he is free, and to lay hands on him, to put irons on him, is not enough. One free man in a city is like a plague spot; you will infect my whole kingdom and bring my work to nothing. Almighty Zeus, why stay your hand? Why not

fill him with a thunderbolt?" [Laughter] "Fill him with a thunderbolt!" Adjust those! The gods have a secret. Yes, once freedom has kindled its beacon in a man's heart, the gods are powerless against him. It is between men and men; it is for other men to decide, and for them only, whether to let a man go his gait or to throttle him. Zeus says that the man who knows he is free may prevail against heaven itself. But is there any psychology to support such a theory? Certainly not the behaviorists, with their theory that man is an

almost automatic system of stimuli and response, nor the Freudian doctrine either. But existential psychology does support the idea that man is free. Sartre, in his existential psychoanalysis, follows the general belief that freedom is not a proposition to be proved, but a fact to be experienced, and he appeals to our own experience in the present. We all know, or at least we've read in novels, about those sudden shifts in orientation—everything from the kind of thing that happens in a religious conversion to a simple reorientation of our loves and hates, our attitudes toward the people around us,

and toward our patterns in life. We do, as a matter of actual fact, make a new choice of ourselves from one time to another. Or, to use *Star Trek*, then again, you may all remember some time when you've stood over a precipice and you remember that vertiginous appeal from the depths below, almost compelling you to throw yourself over. And what's so horrifying about that experience is not the fear of falling, but the realization that nothing prevents you from going over. You could suddenly, despite everything in your past, give in and just go. Naturally, the determinist

says that this is all an illusion, that in reality, your decision to go over or not is caused. But what about this cause? Does it come from the past? The determinist always views the past as if he were a historian. It's very easy, since things have happened as they did happen, to look back and pick out the connections and the patterns. But this is to evade the real question, for the real question is whether these patterns, these connections, had to be what they were or whether they might just as well have been something else. If

the determinist is to be absolutely convincing, he must predict the future, and I know of no determinist who has pretended to do so. I think, in reality, we have two meanings when we speak of the past, and we don't always keep them separate. First, there is the past of our objective acts and events, and in this sense, the past was what it was, and it will never change. But there is another sense, and that is that the past influences us, and when we say that the past influences us, what we are doing is saying, "My

past is such and such." We are talking now about the meaning of the past, and this is something which we are constantly remaking every moment of our lives. If, at the age of 18, I was guilty of some shameful act, or for that matter, if I had a religious experience, it was what it was. But what is it now? Is it a determining force in my life, or do I regard it all as a momentary aberration? Do I refuse to look at it and involve myself in self-deception, or do I say, "This was the real"?

Me, and I'll always be that me. Only I can decide. The same thing happens if we look at the environment. We talk about being influenced by our environment. Well, let's take an example: Suppose you're born in a small town. There are many choices open to you. To take the simplest, you can either conform so absolutely to the mores of your small town that you become the very biggest frog in this little puddle, or you can make it an excuse: "What chance have I had, stuck in a place like this?" Or you can make it your

reason for working every bit as hard as you can and get to New York or Paris and start a new life. The same thing happens no matter what phase of our lives we're looking at. If our parents were over-strict, do we become what they tried to make us? Do we revolt hostilely and perhaps foolishly, destructively? Or do we take our background as a challenge to work out something new, which we can justify even before our parents' assurance? And even if it's a matter of a physical handicap—suppose I have only one arm. Am I going to

show I can be an athlete, despite all, or will I try to make myself something else? Now one might say, "Okay, I'll go so far," but this is to assume that man is always rational and conscious. But are there not unconscious influences? One of the whole Freudian school here. The existentialist takes a firm stand: He declares that the doctrine of an unconscious (capital U) is either a falsification or a device in bad faith. There's an illuminating scene about this in "The Mandarins." A psychoanalyst is talking with Paula, who had retreated further and farther from reality

until she finally had to go to a psychiatric clinic. They are talking about her so-called cure. "Are you sorry things have changed?" "That would be saying too much, but you can't imagine how rich the world was in those days. The least little thing had a thousand facets. I would have questioned myself about the revenue dress that man over there would have taken to be a dozen different people all at once." "And now the world seems rather flat to you?" "Not at all! I'm glad to have had that experience behind me. Now I can assure you

my life isn't going to be flat. I'm crawling with plans. Tell me about them, Paula." "I have decided to become famous. I want to go out, travel, meet people. I want love and glory. I want to live." "Are you thinking of singing or writing?" "Writing a book in which I'm going to tell about myself. I've given it a lot of thought. It won't be an amusing story, but I believe it'll create quite a sensation." "Are you planning on fictionalizing it, or are you going to tell it as it really is?" "Right now I haven't decided

on a form. It wasn't easy what I went through, but if you only knew how happy I am to have finally found myself." "You must have been through some pretty bad moments, Paula?" "Yes, indeed. There were days when everything seemed so funny I almost died laughing. But other days were pure horror. They had to put me in a straightjacket." "Well, Dr. Mardress is good, isn't he?" "Oh, he's wonderful! It's extraordinary with what certainty he found the key to the whole story, although I must admit I didn't offer much resistance." "Is the analysis over?" "Not completely.

The main part is done. I never told you about my brother, did I?" "Never. I didn't even know you had a brother." "He died when he was 15 months old. I was four. It's easy to understand how my love for Honore immediately took on a pathological character." "Henry was also two or three years younger than you, wasn't he?" "Exactly. That explains my... well, my childish jealousy gave rise to a feeling of guilt, which explains my masochism in connection with Honore. I made myself a slave to that man. I gave up all personal success for him.

I chose obscurity, dependence, and why? To redeem myself, so that through him my dead brother would eventually consent to absolve me. Well, I think I made a hero of that man, a saint. Sometimes I could burst out laughing just thinking about it." "Have you seen him again?" "Oh no, I won't see him again. He took unfair advantage of the situation." "I'm quite familiar with the kind of explanations Dr. Mardress has used. Yet to release Paula, it was necessary to reach back into the past in order to destroy her love. But I think those microbes can't

be exterminated except by destroying the organism they are devouring. Andrei's dead for Paula, but she's dead too. I don't know that fat woman with the sweaty face and the bovine eyes who's swilling scotch beside me." Anne is a very unconventional psychoanalyst, and obviously de Beauvoir has set up this scene to satirize the belief of the Freudians. There are many things here which we could comment on. For example, the new cured and adjusted Paula: Is she any better really than the earlier Paula who had her hallucinations? But the chief thing which is involved here is this:

The attack on the idea of the Oedipus complex as something which can be used to explain anybody at all—or if not the Oedipus complex, at least childhood experiences that have been forgotten and yet somehow determine us. And always, of course, the determinism is in terms of the unconscious. In Paula's case, we can see how ludicrous it all is. Somehow, or other, the idea that this brother, whom she had not thought enough of consciously even to have mentioned, has unconsciously been dictating her whole adult life. We somehow don't believe it, but before blaming Paula too much,

we should ask ourselves just how much of the modern world does live by the belief and the unconscious. Sometimes I wonder if people could do without the unconscious with any less difficulty than without the concept of God. It's such an alluring thing. It's so easy to say, “Well, my childhood experiences have undoubtedly made me this way; there's not much I can do about it. I don’t really understand why I do the strange things that I do, but this is the way people are. There's a real me somewhere down in the mysterious depths, and I can't

find this me, but it’s there, directing my conduct.” It's a very alluring way of avoiding the responsibility of doing something about ourselves and changing. Sartre feels and says that the concept of the unconscious is absolutely incorrect because it escapes the realization of what consciousness itself actually is. The personality is not, he says, as Freud would have it, like a many-structured building where we can start at the top and go deeper and deeper down until finally we end up finding real truth somewhere there in the depths of the cellar. Instead, consciousness, for the existentialist, is simply

a process whereby we relate ourselves to the outside world. Immediately someone may ask, “But this is nonsense, isn't it? How can I possibly say that all of me is conscious when I forget things, when I suddenly have things drawn to my attention I hadn't known before, and new insights, this kind of thing?” Well, of course, Sartre allows for levels of awareness. He argues that we do decide which parts of our experience we are going to make into our lives, which parts of our past we are going to remember, and how we are going to remember

them, what significance we're going to attach to them. This is all a matter of reflective consciousness and non-reflective consciousness—a matter of whether we concentrate on certain things or deliberately avoid seeing them—but never at any time, he tells us, are we determined by something which we could not, if we tried, grasp and understand. Sartre is naturally not the only existential psychologist; there are many in Europe and in America. Perhaps the movement of existential psychology in America is the most important aspect of existentialism here right now. The existentialists are not all alike in this field; they are

too much individuals, but they do agree that the significant thing about man is not those traits and instincts which he might share with the animals, with the famous white rats of the laboratory, for instance. It's the distinctively human qualities of a being who has in him somewhere a wellspring of freedom to decide what he will make of himself, a being who knows he will die and who can raise questions about why he is here. All of these existential psychologists feel that there is such a thing as over-adjustment and that man should find himself not by

adjusting to his society but by learning to value his own free uniqueness. Of course, there is another difficult question here: if we even say such a thing as existential psychiatrist, are we not implying that there is mental illness? And if there's mental illness, we can hardly deny that there is. Then how can we speak of freedom if a person has retreated from reality apparently completely? Can we say he's free in any sense at all? We might look at it this way: we recognize, of course, that there's more than one type of mental affliction. If a

person has suffered actual brain damage to the point where we would hardly say that he is a human being any longer, then to the degree that he is not a human being, he is not free. But so long as he is human, he is free. But the vast majority of mental illnesses are not caused by brain damage, and here I think we have a parallel with hypnosis. If a person is under hypnosis, he is subject to another's will, but a person can't be hypnotized against his will. And when he's in hypnosis, it is because he

has, as it were, willed to put himself under another's will. The existentialists say that in mental retreats also, the patient has will to escape from reality; both the quality of what he does and the mere fact that he has escaped depend upon his having refused reality. Sandra has an extremely interesting play that deals with this subject, The Condemned of Altona. Here, as in The Flies, the themes of personal freedom and responsibility and guilt are mingled with the political. Its hero, France, had retreated at the end of the war in Germany because he had practiced torture,

and he felt that he could no longer justify the torture since his country had been defeated. The end was no longer justifying the means. His sister, Laney, is encouraging him in his delusion as he sits in his oyster shell-filled room, giving messages to the 30th century. “The crabs before whom he thinks he is a defense for the 20th century,” he says, “I'm discovering the horrible truth: we're under observation all the time! We are, you, me, all the dead mankind. Be on your guard—they're watching you! Laugh while you can, my lady. The 30th century will arrive

like a thief in the night, and you will find yourself in the middle of them. What if we are already there? Where? In the 30th century? Be on your guard! If the crabs are watching, you can be sure they'll find us very ugly.” “How do you know?” “Crabs, like crabs, are totally natural.” “Suppose they were men in the 30th century?” “If there is a man left, he'll be preserved in a museum.” “And will the crabs do that?” “Yes, they'll have different...” Bodies, and therefore different ideas—what ideas, huh? What can you grasp? The importance of my

task, the exceptional difficulty? I'm defending you before judges who are having the pleasure of knowing. Working blind, you drop a word here to the judgment; it tumbles down the centuries. What will it mean up there? Do you know? Sometimes I say white when I mean to say black. Good God, they want to stop my morale! Yes, they do. Bad move; my morale is like steel. My poor friends, he'll do as he likes with you, representative of the occupation forces. You'll knock at the door; you'll answer it, and you know what he'll say? "I don't give

a damn." He'll say, "You imagine you're the witness, but you're not; you're the accused." What will you reply? "Get out! You're in their pay! You're the one who's trying to demoralize me." What will you reply? For twelve years now you've been prostrating yourself before this tribunal of the future, and you've conceded them every right. Why not the right to condemn you? I'm a witness for the defense. Who appointed you? History. It has happened, hasn't it, that someone believed himself to be appointed by history? It turned out to be someone else. I won't let that happen.

I'll put history into a mousehole. Shh, they're listening! You egg me on until I forget myself. I beg your pardon, listeners; my words have betrayed my thoughts. Challenge their confidence, please. That's your only weakness. Tell them they are not your judges, and then you'll have no one else to fear, neither in this world nor the next. Get out! I haven't finished cleaning up. Very well, I'm going to the 30th. Will you take your eyes off me? I will if you'll speak to me. You're driving me mad. You'd like that, wouldn't you? Very well, you want

to look at me? Then do so. But right, let's stop. Right, left, right! Please, speed up. What's the matter, my beauty? Afraid of a soldier? I'm afraid of despising you! Lightning, don't leave me alone! Do you want me to stay? I need you, Laney. I doubt that it will be the crabs who judge us in the 30th century, but France is right in saying that we will be judged by the 30th century and by any century, so long as there are men alive to look upon our actions and to judge them. The psychology of freedom

is harsh, pitiless, and almost a terrifying psychology, for it gives us absolutely nowhere to turn for excuse. We cannot blame our parents or our society; we cannot even take refuge in the idea that our mental afflictions have caused us to do what we have done, or that being an alcoholic is an excuse for our behavior, or that having any other kind of handicap has made it impossible for us to lead better lives. And this really puts man entirely on his own and alone. But it is a dignity that is involved here. Man has the burden

of the whole world on his shoulders, and if he can change, then there is hope. It is determinism that is the hopeless thing, for it says there's no way out; others have made us what we are, and there's nothing we can do. The philosopher Kant said that our sense of moral duty implies the freedom of our will: "I ought" means that "I can." The existentialists begin with the fact that I can change, but the choice as to whether or not I will change and how I will change rests with me alone, for I—and only I—am

responsible for what I have done. I am responsible for what I am, and for what I shall freely choose to be. [Music] [Music] So, [Music] the scene from "The Mandarins" by Simone de Beauvoir, translated by Leonard M. Friedman, is published by the World Publishing Company. The scene from "The Flies" was translated by Stuart Gilbert. The scene from "The Condemned Vowel Tona" was translated by Sylvia and George Lee. Both plays by Jean-Paul Sartre are published by Alfred A. Knopf, Incorporated. [Music] So, [Music] the existentialists state emphatically that man is free. But if every man is free,

then there exists paradoxically at least one limitation to my freedom, and that is the freedom of the other person. Thus, at the outset, we find a paradox: freedom and responsibility are inseparable. What does this word “responsible” mean? First of all, it means acknowledging oneself as the author of an act, so that if I have led a responsible life, this means that I am willing to admit that the life which I have led has been one in which at each moment I said to myself, in so many words or by implication, “This is the life I

have freely chosen to make.” I do not pretend that it could have been otherwise if other people had made it different. In this sense, it's easy for us to see that we are responsible for others as well, for in the course of my existence, I am bound to do many things which inevitably affect the life within which the other person makes his choices. Therefore, I am the author of the circumstances in which he has chosen. But "responsible" has another meaning as well, and this refers to the idea of obligation and recognizing an obligation, being willing

to answer a demand, whether it is spoken or unspoken. William James stated that we have all the elements of an ethical system the moment we have two loving souls on a rock, and this is all that it takes: just one person to exert a claim upon me which I am willing to acknowledge as in some way valid. The existentialists declare that one's freedom is responsible in both of these ways, that we should care for the other. Person, we should recognize the demand that he makes upon us. They start out by saying that I have to

recognize the other, for I need the other in order to know myself. As I develop gradually over the years, my idea of myself is inevitably influenced by the image of myself which I seem to see in the other person's eyes. As I judge him, I have to exert more or less the same judgment upon myself, and I am aware too that he is judging me. What he thinks of me is part of my data. I am trapped by my own imagination. Jean-Paul Sartre has dealt with this theme in his play, "The Devil and the Good

Lord." In one scene, a forest scene, Goetz and the priest Heinrich have met to settle a bet. Goetz had bet that he could do nothing but good for a year. He learns that he has miserably failed, that when he thought he was least acting, he had acted most. He finds out one other thing too: that he needs the other, and especially an enemy, in order to know who he is. The meeting takes place in the presence of Hilda, the girl Goetz loves. "Happy anniversary, Goetz." "Happy anniversary, Heinrich. The peasants are looking for you to kill

you." "I had to run to get here before them." "To kill me? The hell with it! They do me an honor. I thought I'd been completely forgotten. And why do they want to kill me?" "Last Thursday, the barons cut Nasty's army to ribbons. Twenty-five thousand did it; it was a complete rout! Twenty-five thousand dead! Should never have engaged in the battle. The initiation of the devil. We're all born to die, aren't we? They put the blame on me, of course. They say you would have avoided the butchery had you accepted the leadership of the troops."

"Getz!" "What is it?" "You cannot stay here." "Why not? I must pay Musentai." "But you have nothing to pay for! You are not guilty; you have no right to get yourself killed. That would be cheating." "Oh yes, cheating. Well, I've cheated all my life, haven't I? Begin the interrogation." "This is the moment; I'm ready." "Tell her to go away." "You will have to talk before me." "I will not leave him." "He's right, Hilda. This trial must be conducted in private." "But why let him put you on trial? Let us leave the village." "Hilda, I need

to have someone judge me every day, every hour. I condemn myself, but I cannot convince myself because I know me too well to trust in myself. I cannot see my soul anymore because it's under my very nose. Someone must lend me his eyes." "Take mine." "No, you cannot see me either. You love me; Heinrich hates me. Therefore, he can convince me. When my thoughts come from his mouth, then I can believe in them. As human beings, we live outside ourselves since nobody ever is or could be a Robinson Crusoe from the moment of his birth.

My being is affected at its very heart by my awareness of the other. I cannot judge him without knowing that at the same time, I am opening myself to his judgment. And I am aware that as I judge him, I will be called upon also to judge myself in the light of what I have thought of him. Simone de Beauvoir points out that in my relations with others, they enable me to escape the limitations of my own finitude. Life would be unimaginably impoverished if we were limited to just those things which administer directly and immediately

to our own needs. But through my interest in the other, I expand my own experience. I can even, in a sense, escape my own mortality; for I can make a meaningful part of my life the projects of others, until even what happens after my death is significant for me and makes my life worthwhile. Camus has attempted to connect the idea of revolt with the feeling of the oneness of mankind. When a man says, "I will go this far and no farther; I prefer to die rather than to suffer this shame or this suffering," then, says

Camus, he is asserting that there is something which transcends him, which is a value that is there for all of mankind. And human solidarity emerges, as Camus expresses it: "I revolt; therefore, we are." Sartre speaks about the "us" object and the "we" subject. It is perhaps easier to feel one with other people in the face of some common threat. In political terms, the "us" object emerges when you have an oppressed group facing conquerors or oppressors. But if the oppressed group suddenly asserts itself to throw off the yoke, then a "we" subject emerges as they try

together to accomplish a value that is the same for everyone. And in everyday life, we are constantly aware of the emergence of this "we," whether it be in the chamber music concert or the football team, where we accomplish not only something which we couldn't do alone in an external sense, but we develop our own capacities, our own potentialities in a way that we could never do by ourselves. Christianity and existentialism, the humanistic sort, both assert the infinite value of every human soul for different reasons, of course. For the Christian, all souls are infinite because they

were equally, metaphorically at least, the children of God. For the existentialist, the humanistic existentialist, there is no God to guarantee this equality, but the mere fact that no subjectivity is privileged and that all subjectivities are, from one point of view, isolated means that each one then is equally valuable. No one has any right over the other in any absolute sense; one cannot be logical, give any value to his own freedom without... thereby asserting an equal value for all other freedoms, individually and collectively. And if I say that the other person's activities are no more significant

than those of an ant, this is to say that all human endeavor is like that of the ant heap, including my own. One can, of course, refuse to acknowledge the responsibility, and the Christian can't, I suppose theoretically, say I believe in God, but I do not want His happiness; I do not accept His promise of heaven. But this is to be inconsistent and self-blinding. An existentialist, too, may choose to be self-blinding, but we can call him mistaken and dishonest. This perhaps seems a little too abstract; let's notice how de Beauvoir has worked it all out

in her novel *The Blood of Others*. This is laid in pre-war France. The two central characters are Jean, who feels perhaps too acutely his responsibility, and Alain, who can't get beyond the personal at all to feel that others even exist. They are talking together on the evening when they have heard the news that Austria has been annexed by Nazi Germany. "Or you take pleasure in tormenting yourself. After all, it's not your business." "Not my business? Well, I wish someone would tell me, what is my business?" "There's your own life. Don't you think that's enough?" "But

my life is made up with my relations to the remainder of mankind. Austria is part of my life; the whole world is part of my life. Quite, and these people who are passing us now are part of your life, because you see them. That doesn't mean that you're responsible for what happens to them." "That remains to be seen." "Oh, it's as though you imagine that you created the world." "One day I read, 'Each of us is responsible for everything and to every human being.' It seems so true to me. I don't understand. Of course, if

you look upon yourself as an ant, and an antique, you can't do anything about anything. I'm not saying I could have stopped the Nazis' invasion by stretching out my arms. Yet if we had stretched out our arms—maybe! But no one did." "Others are just as responsible as you; that's their business." "Certainly we're all responsible, but 'all' means each one of us. I've always felt that ever since I was a kid. My eyes are sufficient for this boulevard to exist; my voice gives a voice to the whole world when it's silent; it's my fault." "And you

still don't understand." "Yes, I understand. I didn't create the world, but I create it again at every instant by my very presence, and I see everything that happens yesterday through me." "Yes. What's wrong? Why should other people have rights over us?" "That's the thing I've been unable to understand." "It's not a question of rights; the others are there. One must be blind not to see them." "Then I must be blind." World War II begins, and still Alain cannot get outside her own tight little world. By using influence, she manages to get Jean transferred out of

the army and into a civilian job, and he is so disgusted he breaks with her completely. Then it is reported that the Germans are about to enter Paris. With hundreds of other parishioners, Alain flees in mad panic, only to find that there is nowhere to go and she has to return. As she is sitting with other refugees on a dusty road, she seems suddenly to hear Jean's words from the past, spoken to her now with a new meaning. "What are your husband and the others waiting for? To be given a gas coupon? And once they

have the coupon, will they get gas? When the gas comes, they aren't taking any more train travelers. Why do they tell us to go home if they won't help us to move? They say there's a famine in Paris, and here they'd rather we died on our feet. The others are there; one must be blind not to see them." "Are you from Paris?" "We come from one of the suburbs. I'm with these people who have a car; they may find some gas and be able to start off again. Would you like them to take you?" "They

take us. Well, I don't promise anything, but there is a chance. You must wait a little bit; they've given me 10 liters; we'll be able to get out of this place. They say it's easier to get food further ahead." "Please, would you mind if I gave my place to the young woman who's over there with her child?" "Oh, I'll manage if you'll be so kind to take my suitcase with you." "This young woman? Yes, that child of hers will die if you don't take it away." "What about you? It's impossible to carry an extra person

in this car." "I know. I told you; I managed, and she'd better get ready. Come on, get in!" "Aren't you coming?" "Goodbye, thanks." Alain has taken the first steps in the direction toward recognizing her responsibility for others, but as the novel develops, she has to go further. She can see that a particular other is there and a part of her life, but she can't somehow feel the reality of the big events which are going on around her. She tries now to take refuge not in the personal but in the impersonal. "It's all a force of

history, the march of history," she says. "What have I to do with it? I can't stop the march of history. What have I to do with the Russians or the Germans or any other nation which tries to enter into some other country? I, as an individual, must simply submit to my destiny." But as time goes on, Alain finds that no matter how impersonal she may feel... The force of history is the people who suffer are real. A concrete event broadens her horizons: her childhood friend, a Jewish, is about to be arrested and is likely to

be sent to a concentration camp. She seeks help from Jean, whom she hadn't seen for a long time, and she tells him there that she wants to work with him in his resistance group, for she has come to know the existentialist lesson that history is carried on by people who live the history. Consequently, the war which comes is my war; the peace, whether shameful or prosperous, is my peace by my very choosing. Not to do anything to stop events; I am allowing them to happen and furthering them on their progress. She then also finds the

answer to another question she had wondered about throughout her life: whether one could find any meaning to it, whether it was all worth living. No intellectual answer had ever seemed to satisfy her, but as she works in the resistance movement, she comes gradually to know that life has meaning. It is worthwhile for me at that instant when I find something for which I am willing to die. As it turns out, Elin does give up her life as a result of her work in the resistance movement. John, the leader of the group, sends her out on

a mission with a bomb, and as a result, she is fatally wounded. The events of the novel, "The Blood of Others," have actually not taken place as I have been discussing them here in the same order. The whole novel is done as a series of story reconstructions and flashbacks, partly in the mind of John, partly a matter of what one might call the omniscient author's interpretation. Nevertheless, it gives us the events which John had known and known about, and supposedly all of this is being retold as John is sitting by the bed of the dying

Elin. Not only is he thinking about his relation with her, but he's thinking of what this means in terms of his next action, for he is supposed to give the order that another friend is to go out and lay a bomb, or on the other hand, he can stop him if he likes. Unless he can somehow justify the fact that he has been responsible for Elin's death, he doesn't feel that he can give the order for his other friend. John, from the beginning, had recognized his responsibility, but he had always been terrified of the results

that his actions might have. Earlier in his life, a friend had been killed because John had asked him to go with him to a political meeting, and in the riot that ensued, the friend had been killed. Jean felt almost paralyzed with regard to any action. How could he take any step whatsoever when another person might be harmed or killed by it? Was this not an assault on the precious freedom of the other? During the time before the war, he tried to maintain a position of non-intervention, but gradually he came to see that neutrality, whether for

better or for worse, is not a passive thing; it is an active position. Not to choose is already to have chosen. In anguish, Jean learned another existentialist lesson: he realized that the other person changes, distorts the meaning of my acts, and this is the cause of human despair. I recognize my total responsibility at the same moment that I realize my complete inability to control an act or to judge its outcome. As Elin dies, she finally gives to John some assurance. She explains to him that people, just like the things in the world, have to be,

in a sense, the objects within which my freedom chooses itself and makes of itself a life. But just as I need the resistance of the outside world in order for me to take any action whatsoever, just as it is I who gives significance to these actions, so with other people, I come to them. I interfere with their freedom; whatever I do is an assault upon it. If I tried to prevent them from risking their lives, this is just as much an assault as if I were to try to force them forward. But basically, I am

to them just like the material world in which they live. I may assault their freedom by my action, but it is they who choose what significance to give my act. Let us look at the scene in which Elin tries to tell John not to feel guilty. "You awake? What did the doctor say?" "He didn't give much hope." "I thought so." "I don't mind, Elin." "You're here and it's my fault." "Wherein lies the fault?" "It was I who wanted to go, but I could have forbidden you." "You had no right to decide for me." "That's what

you used to say." "But I let you choose." "Did you know what you chose?" "I chose you, and I would make the same choice over again." "No, I wouldn't have wanted any other life." "You didn't choose me; you stumbled against me as you stumble against a stone." "And now—" "No, but what is there to regret? Was it really so necessary for me to grow old?" "Is it true you regret nothing?" "Nothing. And above all, don't feel guilty." "I'll try." "You mustn't feel guilty; I did what I wanted." "You were just a stone." "Stones are necessary

to make roads. Why, otherwise, how would one choose a way for oneself?" "If it were true—" "But it is true; I'm certain of it." "Why? What would I have been if I had never done anything?" "If I could believe you—" "Whom will you believe?" "When I look at you, I believe you." "Look at me. I'm going to sleep for—" A little while longer, tired, I must believe you: no harm came to you through me. Under your feet, I was an innocent stone, as innocent as the stones [Music], as that piece of steel that tore your

lungs. It was not I who killed you, Ellen. Ellen, what is it? I want your answer. Yes, it's over. Did she suffer much? No. The time bomb can be laid within an hour. Do you agree or not? For you, only an innocent stone. You had chosen; those who will be shot tomorrow have not chosen. I am the rock that crushes them. I shall not escape the curse forever; I shall be to them the blind force of fate. But if only I use myself to defend that supreme good, which makes innocent and vain all the stones,

all the rocks— that good which saves each man from all the others and from myself—freedom, then my passion will not have been in vain. You've not given me peace; and why should I desire peace? You have given me the courage to accept forever the risk and the anguish to bear my crimes and my guilt, which will render me eternally. There is no other way. Don't you agree? Yes, I agree. There we saw the full scope of the paradox of the existentialist view of responsible freedom. The existentialists accept Dostoevsky's statement that everybody is responsible for everything

and to every human being. And I know that in the anguish of my decision, the world and others will steal my action from me and make of it what they will. There is no escape, and yet whatever I do to others, whatever others may do to me, cannot be made by either one of us a way of evading our own responsibility. We are all, each one of us, totally responsible and wholly without excuse. [Music] [Music] Mmm [Music] Material for self-encounter was taken in part from *The Literature of Possibility: A Study in Humanistic Existentialism* by Hazel

E. Barnes, published by the University of Nebraska Press, *The Devil and the Good Lord* by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated by Kitty Black, and *The Blood of Others* by Simone de Beauvoir, translated by Yvonne Moyes and Roger Senhouse. Both books are published by Alfred A. Knopf Incorporated. [Music] So [Music] man is free, but his freedom has no value for himself or for anybody else until he learns to engage it. Engaged freedom, which the existentialists have made such an important concept, means that one involves oneself, one commits oneself to something or somebody. The existentialists have been accused of

saying that any commitment is better than no commitment; this is obvious nonsense, and they did not intend such an idea. What they do mean is that if man is to live completely and with integrity, his condition is man. He will first find out what he does believe, and then, having decided, he will commit himself wholly and consistently to it. I think we can understand the idea best perhaps in terms of the religious commitment; whatever our own view may be, I think we all tend to admire more a person who knows what he believes in religious

terms and lives consistently with his ideas and is willing to stand up for them. Such a person we admire much more than the man who is nominally something or other but who doesn't live at all consistently with what he professes. When it comes to political commitment, there is no one position which naturally and of necessity goes with existentialism. If we look historically, we find that Martin Heidegger, on the one hand, seriously compromised himself by working with Hitler, and on the other hand, at the other extreme, we have Norman Mailer in America, who calls himself the

first American existentialist and who holds a philosophy which is an almost anarchist individualism. The French existentialists and Christian existentialists here in America have been almost entirely on the liberal or even radical side. I think the leftist position, though not the totalitarian position, is a natural and logical one for existentialism, for it holds that man is responsible for his fellow men and that all men are equal—that no accident of birth or wealth or even intelligence gives a person or a class any natural rights over another person or class. And yet there is a paradox, a kind

of tension in any political idea which existentialism can back: on the one hand, they do emphasize the individual and never forget him, and yet one is responsible for all other individuals. There is also the community. On the one hand, again they call for action in the real world, but on the other hand, they refuse to compromise with what they consider a true principle. And so we have the demand for purity of principle over here, and yet the insistence on immediate action over there, and a rejection of quietism. I think it's particularly interesting to see how

they have attempted to resolve this tension by noticing the different positions assumed by Jean-Paul Sartre and by Albert Camus. Sartre posed the question fairly in a play which came out about 1948, *Dirty Hands*. In this play, we see the question: can an intellectual who believes in truth and freedom work for a party which, even in the name of ultimate justice and good for all, sacrifices both truth and freedom? A young man, Hugo, has been sent by the Workers' Party to serve as a secretary to a party leader. Murder! In reality, he is supposed to assassinate

Herder, for the party believes that Herder is pursuing his own policy, which is against the interests of the party. For Hugo, the problem is simple: Herder is ready to sacrifice principle for immediate expediency. “How you cling to your purity, young man! How afraid you are to soil your hands! Well, stay pure. What good will it do?” "You, why did you join us? Purity is an idea for a yogi or a monk. You intellectuals and bourgeois anarchists use it as a pretext for doing nothing—to do nothing, to stand motionless. Arms are just eyes wearing kid gloves.

Well, I have dirty hands right up to the elbows; I've plunged them in filth and blood. Now, what do you hope to do? Do you think you can govern innocently? You'll see someday that I'm not afraid of blood—really red gloves. Well, that's elegant. That's the rest that scares you. It's that that stinks to your little aristocratic nose. Oh, we're back to that, are we? I'm an aristocrat, a guy who's never gone hungry. Unfortunately for you, I'm not alone in my opinion. So you misunderstand something, my boy. I know these people of the party who disagree

with my policy. I can tell you that they are of my tribe and not of yours. If they oppose these negotiations, it's simply because they think them inopportune. Under other circumstances, they would be the first to launch them. But you are making it a matter of principle. Who spoke of principle? Well, aren't you trying to make it into a matter of principle? Oh good, then here's something that ought to convince you: If we deal with the Regents, he'll call off the war. But if we break off these parlis, hundreds of thousands of men will lose

their hides. Now, what do you say to that? Can you scratch out a hundred thousand men at the stroke of a pen? Can't make revolution with flowers. But if there's no other way, then so much the worse. There you are, you can see for yourself. You don't love men; you only love principles. I joined the party because its cause was just, and I shall leave the party when its cause ceases to be just. As for men, it's not what they are that interests me; it's what they can become. And I love them for what they

are: soiled hands or blood-stained gloves. With such an alternative, it is easy to see why Sartre has declared that it is Urdur's position which he favors. Hugo is willing to sacrifice men to principle, and the list of those who throughout the century have been willing to kill and torment other people in the name of a religious ideal or a national loyalty or even some private belief is sickeningly long. And yet, I don't think we can be quite satisfied with Urdur's position as the only alternative. In terms of the play, what he does is realistically humane,

and yet his doctrine comes dangerously close to saying that the end justifies the means. It does raise the question as to whether we dare adopt the opponent's methods—work with the opponents and yet not become like the opponents. Is there perhaps a limit beyond which we cannot compromise without betraying the very thing we are trying to accomplish? Sartre, of course, did not mean to say that the end justified the means, and yet it seemed to many of us who watched him during the years accompanying the production of this play and following it that he himself was

too much inclined to go along with Urdur. He worked with the communists, though he never became a member of the Communist Party. He seemed to advocate all that they advocated until the time that Russia attacked Hungary in 1956. At that point, he broke with the party completely. But many people asked whether this was because he disagreed in the doctrine that the end justifies the means or whether it was just that he had become disillusioned about the end. If we try to see the difference between Sartre and Camus, I think one of the best ways to

approach the problem is to see how they use the words rebel or rebellion or revolt on the one hand, and revolutionist or revolution on the other. For Sartre, the rebel is simply the one who is responsible for a negative rebellion. He rebels, but not in the name of anything; he is inefficacious. It is the revolutionist who, by committing himself to a party and an institution, accomplishes enough to make the necessary sacrifice worthwhile. For Camus, the opposite is true. He feels that institutionalizing—that organizing a revolution—usually ends up in betraying it; that it ends up in simply

codifying political murder. The true rebellion to which we might give our loyalty, he says, is that movement of revolt which acknowledges limits. Such a revolt always maintains the individual at its very heart. It begins with the assumption that there are certain things which simply are not permitted, and at no time will this revolt be itself guilty of transgressing those limits. Have you admitted that violence is not something we may rule out completely? If we had a philosophy of eternity, perhaps we could. If we knew that when we died, we would be reincarnated immediately again, then

we might say we will suffer anything, rather than to be guilty of murder or violence. But if we have only one earthly life, then we cannot stand by and let the violence of the other man go unchecked. But Camus feels that in our concern for accomplishing a society where there will be no violence, we must not sacrifice the present generation. If we resort to violence, we must never do so in the name of any institution which would make violence a part of its structure, but only take up violence as an extreme to another violence and

then work in the direction of getting rid of violence completely. Camus, a rebel like Camus himself, would join in fighting in World War II, for example, on the side of the Allies, but he would not subscribe to any totalitarian state." Would he subscribe to legalized violence, which we call capital punishment? The literary presentation of Camus' doctrine of a revolt with limits is found in a play called "The Just Assassins." Here we have a group of Russian terrorists in about nineteen five; these are historical people, and Camus respects them. He calls them the fastidious or scrupulous

murderers, for if they committed an act of violence, they did so on the condition that they knew they would pay for it with their own lives. They were not simply trying to bring in another society that would support itself by violence. In the play, the young man Yannick agrees to throw a bomb at the carriage in which the Grand Duke is sitting, but then he doesn't throw the bomb. For as he is just about to let it go, he sees that there are two children in the carriage. Afterwards, he finds it difficult to explain himself

to the other members of the group. "Open your eyes, Stefan, and try to realize that the group would lose its entire driving force were we to tolerate the idea of children being blown to pieces by our bombs. I'm sorry, but I don't suffer from a tender heart; that sort of nonsense cuts no ice with me. Not until the day when we stop sentimentalizing about children with the revolution triumphant. When that day comes, the revolution will be hated by the entire human race. What's the matter? If we love it enough to force our revolution on it,

can't you see what is at stake? Just because Yannick couldn't bring himself to kill those two, thousands of Russian children will go on dying of starvation for years to come. Have you ever seen children dying of starvation? Well, I have. Yannick's ready to kill the Grand Duke because his death may bring nearer the time when Russian children no longer starve to death. Even that, in itself, is none too easy for him, but the death of the Grand Duke's niece and nephew won't prevent any child from dying of hunger. Even in destruction, there's a right way

and a wrong way, and there are limits. There are no limits. The truth is that you don't believe in the revolution, any of you. If you did believe in it, if you felt that by the dent of our struggles and sacrifices someday we could build up a new Russia redeemed from despotism—a land of freedom that will gradually spread out over the whole earth—and that then man, freed from his masters and his superstitions, could at last look up toward the sky a god in his own right, how, I ask you, can the death of two children

be weighed in the balance of such a faith? Stefan, I cannot let you continue. I am ready to shed blood, to sow, to overthrow the present despotism, but behind your words I see the threat of a despotism which, if ever it comes into power, will make of me a murderer. What I want to be is a doer of justice, not a man of blood. As long as justice is done, even if it's by assassins, what does it matter? Men do not live by justice alone when their bread is stolen. What else have they to live

by? Why, justice! And don't forget, by innocence. Innocence, yes, maybe I know what that means, but I prefer to shut my eyes to it for the time being, so that one day it will have a worldwide meaning. You must feel very sure that day is going to come soon if you are willing to repudiate everything that makes life worth living today on its account. I'm certain that day is coming. You can't be that sure. By the time that all this blood has dried off this earth, we will long since have turned to dust. Then others

will come, and I will hail them as my brothers. You say others? Well, I can tell you that the men that I love are the men who are alive today, that walk this earth; it's they whom I hail. It is for them I am fighting; for them, I am willing to lay down my life, and I will not strike my brothers in the face for the sake of some far-off city which, for all I know, may not even exist. No, I will not add to the living injustice I see all around me for the sake

of a dead justice. Killing children is against a man's honor, and if one day the revolution chooses to break with honor, well, I am through with the revolution. Yannick's reference to the coming despotism is Camus' condemnation of the Soviet totalitarian state. If the society which comes into being upholds political murder, then the people who had, by supposedly heroic exploits, brought it into being become simply political assassins. Does the end justify the means? As can you possibly? Yes, but the answer to this question, which historical thought leaves dangling, is only this: what can justify the end?

Only the means. If we could foresee the future, if we could see absolutely what will come into being, and if we could see that what comes into being is a perfect state and total happiness for mankind, then possibly we could justify the arbitrary sacrifice of other people as well as ourselves. But since we can't foresee the future, then it seems that there is nothing to justify our designating as victims the men with whom we share our present existence. And yet, says Camus, our only recourse is what you might call a calculated culpability. There is no

innocence, for one cannot refuse to act at all, and if one acts at all, one is in all probability going to sacrifice someone. If one tried to attain a position of absolute innocence, it... Would be just like the act of the man who, in his fear of death, resolves to commit suicide; for by not acting at all, we are simply allowing violence to go on unchecked. Sartre criticized the rebel, calling it a selling out to the forces of reaction on Camus's part, and a quietism. Camus, on the other hand, felt that Sartre had compromised to

the point where he was no longer living even by the principles of his own philosophy. The two men never reconciled their quarrel, and yet it has always seemed to me that it was a quarrel which existed more in the application to specific actions than in the real formulation and intent. For one thing, Sartre, in criticizing Marxism, has always felt that it was wrong in assuming that a sort of economic determinism was acting, forcing men to do things, instead of recognizing people as free agents. He has always insisted that a state is nothing except a collection

of individual real people and that consequently individuals shouldn't be judged in terms of the whole. Also, Sartre, in his recent years, has said over and over again that a country must not take the position that any action is justified so long as it accomplishes a national goal. In his play "The Condemned of Altona," again in his introduction to Andrea Lag's question, when he takes up the question of torture, he says as emphatically as anyone could that neither France nor any other nation must use torture or political murder unless it wants to lose everything for which

it is struggling to keep alive as its own ideal. I think that Sartre has actually sought throughout his life some sort of reconciliation of these demands, just as Camus has felt that somehow or other the extremes must be limited so that there can be some proper meaning found between quietism and compromise. In one of his plays, a scenario called "In the Mesh," Assad very pessimistically describes how a certain Jean gradually becomes a dictator of a small country, only to find that, like those who preceded him and like those who are going to follow him, he

must compromise until all the ideals for which he fought have been lost. He had first condoned violence against his enemies and then gradually, in order to keep himself going, he had to use it even against his friends, especially against his close friend Lucian, who, not understanding Jean's motives, had attacked him over and over in the newspapers. Finally, Jean has Lucien imprisoned, and when Lucian is at the point of death, Jean comes to visit him in the concentration camp. "Well, little fellow, I thought you'd come. Are you in pain?" "No, I should never make all bones."

"Lucian, do you hate me?" "No, I pity you. I shall have kept my hands clean to the last. I regret nothing." "Your hands are covered with blood." "I know. Don't you think I would have liked to stay clean? But if I'd been like you, the regent would still be on the throne. Purity is a luxury you could afford because I was on hand to do the dirty work." "It's not for myself I'm angry with you, it's because of the others. I tell you, I regret nothing. I had to save the revolution by nationalizing oil. It

would have meant war." "Why didn't you say so?" "I couldn't." "Did you have to report so many people to save the revolution?" "If the foreigners had reinstated the regent, don't you think there would have been a hundred times as many deported? I had to choose, Lucian. The whole country is against me. One year, maybe two, I shall be overthrown and shot." "Well, but I shall have hold on for five years. The revolution is saved. In a few years, the deported will be able to return, they will be able to nationalize oil, and men will be

happy thanks to me. The tyrants whom they will still curse." "And what have you done? What is the sense of babbling about justice if you don't do anything about it?" "Why do you say that to me? Do you want me to die in despair?" "No, no, no, Lucian. Don't you think I'm in despair myself? Taking everything on my shoulders, all the murders, even your death? And I blow with myself." "Jean, I think I understand you. Do you think it was a crime to want to remain unsullied?" "I don't think so." "Lucian, there have to be

men like you and men like me. We've both done everything we could. We've both gone to the limit. But listen, one day they'll invade the palace and condemn me to death. I almost hope for it, but there's one thing which counts: I must know if you acquit me." "You did what you could, my little brother." Thus Sartre artistically whether or not an actual life has found a reconciliation between the conflicting needs for purity of principle on the one hand and the need for concrete action in the real world on the other. But someone might say,

"This is all very well, this talk of commitment for a dictator or a ruler or a person of responsibility in a war, but what about me? What difference does it make to history and the people of the future whether or not I commit myself this way or that way?" But we, you and I, will all be part of those nameless dead who, together, enable historians to sum up a period. You know the kind of statement we make when we are trying to get what the Germans call the Zeitgeist, or the spirit of the age—something like

this: "In the Middle Ages, European man was, on the whole, content to accept the place in the universe which the church gave to him." And the social status into which he was born; or, in the first 50 years of America, men pushed on restlessly farther and farther against the frontier, tired of stability, and seeking to wrest ever more and more greatness from the boundless wilderness. Or, in the 20th century, man was so content with the material comforts of which he was understandably proud that he felt suspicious and resentful of those people who tried to tell

him that all was not well with the world. Or isn't this the way to sum up the 20th century? It depends on you and me how the future will sum it up. We are now, by our commitments and our evasions, writing that statement for the future historian to decipher. [Music] So [Music] "Dirty Hands" by Jean-Paul Sartre was translated by Lionel Abel. "The Just Assassins" by Albert Camus was translated by Stuart Gilbert. Both books are published by Alfred A. Knopf, Incorporated. [Music] So [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] there's an old syllogism which goes like this: All

men are mortal, Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal. This obvious, although impeccable logic seems to be merely an application of a universal theme to a particular incident, but it contains within it the deepest emotional experience that man can have. It is the movement from "People die" to "I die." On the whole, society tries to hide from us the thought that I, as an individual, must die, but this is perhaps a commentary on society and on us ourselves. Tolstoy, in his short story "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," shows how his hero, like most of

us, goes through life thinking always that death is something which belongs to other people, not to him. And then, one day, when he falls ill, he suddenly realizes that the question is not one of an appendix or a kidney, but of the life and death of him, Ivan Ilyich. And then he begins a scream which lasts for three unendurable days—a scream which is partly a protest against the fact of death, but even more a scream of regret against the wasted life behind him. If we knew that we had exactly one year to live, I think

most of us would say we must make the year count, broaden our experience, deepen it, question ourselves in our lives. Suppose we had five years or ten; we would still feel that if we must die, then what we do now must count. But what is the difference between five years or ten years or three score years and ten, especially since for most of us, it will not be three score years and ten? The existentialists feel that we do not really live authentically unless we do confront this fact of our ultimate death and deliberately and fully

choose the kind of life we want to have in the face of it. Some of them, of course, say that death means the end of everything; others would say that we must somehow, despite all lack of compulsive evidence to the contrary, believe in the possibility of our own immortality. One example of the latter point of view is the Spanish philosopher Unamuno. He feels that although our minds would have us say that death is the end, we must somehow go beyond where our minds would lead us and believe, despite everything, that death is not the end.

In his short story "The Madness of Dr. Montarco," the hero falls mad, to be sure, but with what Plato called a divine madness—something which is not a mere departure from normalcy but rather an inspiration, an adventurous quest for something more. In the scene which is about to be before us, we see Dr. Montarco talking to a friend who questions him about some short stories which Montarco has recently written. "I don't know whether you're doing the wisest thing by publishing these stories." "By heaven, I have to! I simply have to express myself and work off my

feelings. If I didn't write out these atrocities, I'd probably end by committing them." "It's begun to be whispered that the doctor is a haughty man, a man who gives himself airs, considers himself a genius, and regards other people as poor devils incapable of understanding him." "Hearty and proud am I? No, only ignorant people—fools—are ever really haughty, and frankly, I don't consider myself a fool; my type of foolishness doesn't qualify me. What is all this talk about pride and the struggle for superiority worth, anyway? The truth is, my friend, that when a man tries to get

ahead of other people, he is simply trying to save himself. When a man tries to drown out the names of other men, he's merely trying to ensure that his own be preserved in the memory of living men, because he knows that posterity is a close-meshed sieve which allows few names to get through to other ages." "Have you ever noticed the way a fly trap works?" "What do you mean?" "One of those bottles filled with water that one sees set about the countryside to trap flies. Well, the poor flies try to save themselves, and since there

is only one way out, and that's to climb on the backs of their fellow flies, they navigate on cadavers in those enclosed waters of death, and a tremendous struggle ensues to see which ones will save themselves. Now, they do not, in the least, intend to drown one another; they are merely trying to stay afloat. And so it is with the struggle for fame, which is a thousand times more terrible than a struggle for bread. And just so, in the struggle for life. Darwin says—Darwin? Have you ever read 'Biological Problems' by William Rolfe?" "No." "Well, read

it, and you will see that it is not the multiplication of a species that..." Necessitates more food and leads to such struggle. It is a tendency toward needing more and more food—an impulse to go beyond the merely necessary—that causes a species to grow and multiply. It is not an instinct towards self-preservation that impels us to action, but an instinct toward expansion, toward invasion and encroachment. We do not strive to maintain ourselves merely, but to be more than we are already—to be everything. In the strong words of Father Alonso Rodríguez, we are driven by, uh, an

appetite for the divine, and whoever does not strive to be everything—well, he will not be anything. All or nothing! Now, there is profound meaning in that, and whatever reason may tell us—reason, that great liar who was invented for the consolation of failures—the doctrine of the golden mean, and whatever reason may tell us in our innermost soul, which we now call the unconscious, the depths of our spirit, we know that if we are going to avoid becoming nothing, the best course to follow is to strive to become all. Ah, the struggle for life is an offensive

struggle, not a defensive one! Let them say what they will about me; I'll not hear them. I'll close my ears. But this purely offensive system of yours—yes, it has its flaws and even one great danger, and that is the moment my arm weakens or my sword becomes blunted. They will trample me under their feet and turn me to dust. But before that happens, they will already have accomplished their purpose; they will have driven me mad. And so it was to be, says the man who looked after Montarco in the last hours. He says this: you

know, it often strikes me that the feeling of veneration accorded mad men in certain countries is quite justified. It's simply that I think they say the things that we all think but don't express because of timidity or shame. But who can say that the inextinguishable longing to survive, this thirst for immortality, is not the proof, the revelation of another world—a world which envelops and also makes possible our world? And who can say that when reason and its chains have been broken, such dreams and delirium, such frenzied outbursts as Dr. Montarco's, are not desperate attempts by

the spirit to reach this other world? But suppose that opposite to Unamuno, we say that death is the final annihilation. What then? The great Epicureans, of course, had a lovely way of dealing with this. They said that if death is a nothingness, all this means is that there’s nothing there for us to fear. So long as I am alive, I am conscious. Now, perhaps the idea of not being conscious doesn't appeal to me, but when I'm dead, I won't be there to know it. All of which is very good logically, but I don't think that

it does much to console the human spirit. When we come to modern existentialists, we find that Martin Heidegger, the German existentialist, has tried to make something positive out of this negative fact of death. Since only I can die my own death, he says, this means that if I resolutely confront my own death, I somehow bestow upon my life a unique and authentic value. Objecting to this, he feels that in one sense it is not correct to say that I die my own death or at least not that I live my own death, as Heidegger would

put it. For in reality, César, it is not I but the other person who lives my death. So long as I was alive, the meaning of my acts, the significance of my past, was constantly changing—forever in suspense—for I constantly redetermined what it all was. When I die, then my dead life becomes a prey to others, and they become its guardians, and they determine what its significance or meaning has been. In any case, says Sartre, it's ridiculous to say that I can even comprehend death. Death doesn't come as a final resolving chord, giving my life a

meaning, an addition, as it were, with a fixed sum, for I can't determine the time at which I am to die. Sartre tells us the story of two brothers who went up before God at the Day of Judgment. The younger one said, "God, why did you make me die so young?" And God said, "Because if you had lived to be older, you would have committed a crime, as your older brother did." And the older brother said, "God, why did you let me wait and die so old?" There has sometimes been a comparison of man to

the condemned in a cell. We see each day a person being led off to execution, and we know that sometime—but we don't know when—it will be our day to be let off. Sartre objects that this is not quite a correct image; it is more as though the condemned man did everything possible to get ready for the day of his death and to meet it courageously, and then he's taken off by an attack of flu. Sartre doesn't offer us very much in the way of consolation for all of this. I suppose the most we can say

is that we should live in such a way that when the unexpected summing up of our acts occurs, we will not be too reluctant to leave it there to the mercy of the other who will judge it. Simone de Beauvoir, in her novel *All Men Are Mortal*, has made the most detailed study of death and mortality in existentialist literature. She uses a sort of science fiction gimmick, representing to us her hero, Fosca, who in 13th-century Italy, in the city Carmona, is actually offered the opportunity of drinking an elixir of immortality. Well, speak in this bottle...

"Is the elixir of immortality? Is that all? You don't believe me? But if you're immortal, why are you so afraid of being thrown off the ramparts? But I'm not immortal. The bottle is full, and why haven't you dropped any? Would you dare to drink it? You drink first. No, is there a living animal here? A small animal? My son has a white mouse. Go get it, Katharina. The elixir of immortality! Why didn't you think of selling it to me sooner? You'd never have had to beg again. It's that cursed bottle that made me a beggar.

How did that come about? My father was wise; he hid the bottle in his attic and forgot about it. When he was about to die, he told me its secret but advised me to forget it too. When I was 20, I was made a prisoner of eternal youth. What did I have to worry about? I squandered my father's fortune. Each day I said to myself, 'I will drink it tomorrow.' And you never drank? Poverty struck me, and I didn't dare drink. Old age came, and I said to myself, 'I'll drink it the moment I'm about

to die.' A little while ago, the guards discovered me where I was hiding, but I didn't drink. There is still time. I'm afraid to die. But an eternal life, how long it must be! Watch carefully. It's dead! No! Watch! Watch! It was dead; it will never die again. Make him leave; he's a sorcerer! Must I drink the whole bottle? Yes. Will I ever grow old? No. You are not going to drink it. He's not lying. Why would he lie? That's just it. When Christ wanted to punish the Jew who laughed in his face, he condemned

him to live forever. The things I'll be able to do! Don't drink! If you really were offered a chance at immortality, would you have the courage to accept it, or would the horror of feeling that you could never, never die be even worse than our customary feeling of distaste or fear for death? In Foska's case, he regrets it deeply. He finds, in the first place, that there is no common measure between a mortal and an immortal. When he tries to do something for his city, he sees things in terms of the future. For him to

keep the city alive, it seems justifiable to sacrifice one, two, three generations. But for those who are living then, this is diabolical. He can't find any joy in human relations. One woman tells him that she feels repelled by him, as though he were a member of another species. His best friend curses him as the friend dies because he feels that he's put more into their venture than Fasca ever has, and yet Fasca alone will live to enjoy it. As Vasco lives on to the 18th century, he meets one woman who means more to him than

the rest, and for a while, he feels that the very shortness of her days gives the joy of preciousness to his life, which he hadn't known for a long time. Her time gives value, but when she discovers the truth about him, she too rejects him, and inevitably, in time, she seems to have dropped out of the world for him. Fasca learns also that basically one can't do things for other people. The only good, he finally concludes, is to act freely in accordance with one's own conscience. But if this is the case, what can one do

for mankind? And perhaps worst of all, Bhaskar decides that as soon as one takes the point of view of Sirius, as the French like to put it, then all human endeavors, with their limited futures and ends, seem to have lost all meaning. To be a bit of trivia, Foska tells this story, actually, in the 20th century to an actress, Regina. At first, Regina had been terribly excited by the thought that she was going to be seen through the eyes of an immortal and remembered forever. But as she listens to Foska's story, she grows more and

more horrified. He concludes his list of adventures with an account of what happened in the 1840s when he had lent himself, so to speak, to the workers in their struggle for freedom and recognition. At a banquet, he lingers afterwards and talks to a friend about his new decision. 'I'm sorry.' 'There's nothing to be sorry about.' 'I'm sorry because I realized I could no longer work with you.' 'Why not?' 'I don't believe in the future.' 'There will be a future; that at least is certain.' 'But all of you speak of it as if it were going

to be a paradise.' 'There won't be any paradises; that's equally certain.' 'Of course not; paradise for us is simply the moment when the dreams we dream today are finally realized. We're well aware that after that, other men will have new needs, new desires, and will make new demands. How can you have any desires at all, knowing that man will never be satisfied?' 'Don't you know what it's like to have desires?' 'Yes, I once wanted my city, Carmona, to be free, and because I saved her from being subjugated by Florence and Geneva, she was lost along

with them. You want the republic, freedom. What makes you so sure that if you succeed, your successes won't lead eventually to the worst tyrannies? If one lives long enough, one sees it; every victory, sooner or later, turns to defeat. Everything that's ever done eventually ends up by being undone, and from the moment you're born, you begin to die.' 'But in between birth and death, there's life. I suppose the difference between you and me is that a human destiny for you, an ephemeral human destiny, isn't very important in your eyes.' 'That's correct. You're already far...'" Off

in the future, you look upon these moments as if they were part of the past. That Carmona was great and free for 200 years doesn’t move you much today, but you know how much she meant to those who loved her. You admit that you’re working for only a limited future, a limited future, a limited life; that’s our lot as men, and it’s enough. Tomorrow we may have to fight again, but today we’re victorious, and whatever may happen, this is a real victory. I walked toward the door. Today, the word had a meaning for them, and

they knew too that it was important to be alive, to be victorious. They had risked; had given their lives to convince themselves of it, and they were convinced there was no other truth for them. I could not risk my life—a man of nowhere, without a past, without a future, without a present. I advanced step after step—a dead man, an outsider. They were men; they were alive. I went out the door, and on the other side of the door, was there still something? Yes, Paris and the road which led off into the country—a woods, thickets, sleep.

I slept sixty years. When they awakened me, the world was the same as ever. I said to them, "I slept sixty years," and they put me into the asylum. Oh, I wasn't unhappy there. Don’t go so fast; there's nothing more to tell. Every day the sun rose and set. I went to the asylum; I came out. There were wars, and after each war, peace; and after the peace, another war. Men are born every day, and others die. Stop it! Stop it! What are you going to do now? I don’t know. Sleep? No, I can't sleep

anymore; I have nightmares. You? Nightmares? I dream that there are no more men. They're all dead. The earth is white, the moon is still in the sky, and it lights up an earth that's completely white. I'm alone with the mouse, the little accursed mouse. There will be no more men, and the mouse will go on turning round in circles through eternity. It was I who condemned it; that was my greatest crime. It doesn’t know, and it goes on spinning in circles. And then one day, there will be nothing but that mouse and I on the

surface of the earth, and I—I'm going to leave now. Where are you going? Anywhere. It doesn't matter. And why go? There is a desire in my legs to move; I must take advantage of that desire. And me? Oh, you—it will come to an end. Let him go; let him disappear forever in horror and terror. She accepted the metamorphosis—a gnat, a bit of foam, an ant—until her death. To me, "All men are mortal" is the most pessimistic thing in existentialist literature, and I believe that it contains both an aesthetic and a philosophical flaw. Fosca regrets what

he has done, but why? He lives on and on, but he never grows in wisdom; he never learns anything. Furthermore, he finally concludes that men never change, and consequently everything remains the same. In these terms, one can see why he finds immortality so dreadful. The moon is used throughout as an image. Bosca hates it because it will go on there, sneering in the sky when the earth and the people on it—all except him and the mouse—are gone. But why, if he says, one would have to go to the moon in order to get out of

this impasse? Why not try it? One can’t blame de Beauvoir for not having in 1946 anticipated the possibility of moon expeditions any more than we could expect her to have foreseen the use of mice in outer space investigations. But is there any reason why an existentialist, who holds that there is no fixed human nature and that man does determine his destiny, is there any reason why man could not change? Granted that Columbus's discovery didn't qualitatively change the human condition, but simply gave more scope to our greed, hostility, and avarice, but is there any reason why,

with or without outer space, we couldn't change our existence qualitatively? If one knew that man's limitations could never be changed, then I think it's impossible to think that anybody would ever be willing to accept the challenge of immortality. But if it were all left open—not being either one way or the other—then what? The person who ought to accept it is the one who believes in man and in an open future, who is willing to make a passionate commitment without any kind of guarantee. He ought, in short, to be an existentialist. Whether we take Unamuno’s way

and dare to hope for immortality, or whether we feel that this life is the only thing, perhaps there’s nothing better to do than to do what Unamuno says: live so that we deserve immortality. In that case, possibly we may find it after all, or perhaps we will discover that it no longer makes so much difference to us. So [Music] "All men are mortal" by Simone de Beauvoir was translated by Leonard Friedman and is published by the World Publishing Company. [Music] So [Music] So [Music] [Music] The word sin holds for us all the fascination of the

forbidden. Selfish, a social acts do not attract us, but sin—that conjures up visions of loveliness dancing there, tantalizingly just beyond the no trespassing signs. And yet the concept of sin is not fashionable in today’s society. We speak a great deal about guilt, but it’s mostly guilt feelings, as though in some strange way we had guilt without sin. I believe there are only two groups which really take sin seriously: one is the fundamentalists who are still with... Us and the other is the existentialists. If we look back at the traditional meanings of sin in religious terms,

we find two that are fundamental. There's, first of all, the idea of sin as transgression, or now, this is disobedience to the will of God. One can overcome this kind of sin by repentance, by saying "I'm sorry," by works of penance perhaps, and by resolving to obey God actively in the future. The other sort is original sin. Original sin is what we're born in, and one can't get out of original sin—not, at least, without God's grace. What one has to do is to admit one's total unworthiness of having God's grace, so that, curiously, we are

saved by faith from original sin by the hope that we will be given what we have decided we don't deserve. In religious existentialism, the idea of sin—both original sin and sin as transgression—still makes sense, although the difference is that religious existentialists no longer feel that there is any clearly defined moral code there before us or that we have any rational guarantee that we can ever be sure that we know God's will. For humanistic existentialism, the situation is more difficult, and some people declare flatly that it is perfectly meaningless to talk about good, evil, right, or

wrong if there is no God to refer to. I remember that one time when I was talking about humanistic existentialism, someone in the audience said, "But if these people are right, is there any reason whatsoever why I should not go home and beat my wife?" The existentialist would say that if the only reason this man does not beat his wife is because he fears or even loves God, then he is in sin, whether he knows it or not. Why shouldn't he beat his wife? Well, because he loves his wife—or at least he esteems her as

a human being whose joys and sorrows are as important as his own are. But I'll admit that there is a tremendous difficulty here. Dostoevsky said it in very strong terms as he has one of his characters remark, "If God does not exist, then everything is allowed." If everything is allowed, does it make any difference whether we are good or evil, or is it meaningful even to speak of the terms? Albert Camus, in "The Myth of Sisyphus," declares that the concept of sin without God is one more manifestation of the absurd. In another of his works,

"The Plague," he raises the question, but this time in rather more positive terms. In one scene, his two principal heroes, Dr. Rieux and Taru, are talking together on the terrace, and Taru asks Dr. Rieux, "Why, if he doesn't believe in God, he spends so much energy trying to cure men of the plague." "Do you believe in God, Doctor?" "No, but what does that prove? I'm fumbling in the dark, struggling to find something out, but I've long since ceased finding that original. May I ask you another question?" "Yes, fire away." "My question is this: Why do

you show so much devotion considering that you don't believe in God?" "If I believed in an all-powerful God, I would cease curing the sick and leave that to Him. But no one believes in a God of that sort—not even the priest Paneloux, who believes that he believes in such a God; and this is proved by the fact that no one ever throws himself on providence completely. Anyhow, in this respect, I feel myself to be on the right road, fighting creation as I've found it." "So that’s the idea you have of your profession, more or less?"

"You're thinking it calls for pride to feel that way, and I assure you I have no more than the pride that's necessary to keep me going. I have no idea what will happen when all this ends or what's in store for me. For the moment, I know this: There are sick people, and they need curing. Now, later on perhaps they'll think things over, and so shall I. What's wanted now is to make them well. I defend them as best I can against whom? I haven't a notion." "To Rieux, I assure you, I haven't a notion.

When I entered this profession, I did it abstractedly, because I had a desire for it, because it meant a career like another. Then I had to see people die. Do you know that there are people who refuse to die? Have you ever seen a woman scream, never, with her last gasp? Well, I have, and I saw; I could never get hardened to it. I was young then and outraged at the whole scheme of things. I grew more modest, but I could still never get used to the idea of seeing people die. Well, after all, after

all, after all, it's something that a man of your sort can understand most likely.” "But since the order of the world is shaped by death, might it be better for God if we refuse to believe in Him and struggle with all our might against death without once raising our eyes to the heaven where He sits in silence?" "Yes, but your victories will never be lasting ones, that's all." "Yes, a never-ending defeat. Who taught you all this, Doctor?" "Suffering." Dr. Rieux has demonstrated for us the possibility of love and responsibility without God. He finds that the

solidarity of mankind is based upon the recognition of our common suffering, as though men stand together against the hostile universe. In later conversation, the two men are discussing this kind of metaphysical question or ethical question together once more, and this time Taru raises the problem of evil—not in the sense of suffering, but in a moral sense. He says that he has found that our society is permeated by an... Absolute evil. He is speaking not only of outright acts of criminal violence but of what seems to him even worse: men's attempt to justify evil. He speaks

of political groups that rationalize murder as they sacrifice some individuals for what supposedly is a struggle for a better state for all of mankind. He speaks of that form of legalized murder which society calls capital punishment. Taru finds himself weary of it all. It seems to him that this evil is indeed a pestilence among men, and he longs nostalgically for purity. I know that each of us has the plague within him; no one, no one on earth is free from it. I know, too, that we must keep a constant vigil lest, in a careless moment,

we breathe in someone's face and fasten the infection on him. In this world, there are the pestilences and there are the victims, and it's up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences. Now, I grant you we should add a third category: that of the true healers. But one doesn't come across many of them, and anyhow, it must be a hard vocation. That's why I've decided, in every predicament, to take the victims' part, so as to reduce the damage done. At least among them, I can hope for finding a path

toward attaining to the third category, that is to peace. Do you have an idea of the road to follow for attaining peace? Yes, the path of sympathy. It comes to this: what interests me is learning how to become a saint. But you don't believe in God. Exactly. Can one be a saint without God? That's the problem—in fact, the only problem that's facing me today. Another skirmish at the gates, I suppose? Well, it's over now. No, it's never over. There will always be more victims; that's in the order of things. I suppose so, but you know

I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with the saints. Heroism and sanctity have never appealed to me. What interests me is being a man. Yes, we're both interested in the same thing, but I'm less ambitious. Dr. Rue and Taru both want to live, developing their highest potentialities as human beings. But Dr. Rue has chosen the path of service, whereas Taru is still seeking some way of uprooting all of the seeds of pestilence within him. He wants to be a saint; but before we can ask the question of whether, if grace is withdrawn, there can

be saints without God, we must ask another question: can there be sin without God? I think that there can. If one looks at the essential nature of sin, one finds that there is always, somewhere, the idea of a discrepancy, some sort of gap between what is set up as needing to be—that it ought to be—and what actually is. But man has within himself this discrepancy, this gap, this cleavage, this nothingness. For there exists a space, as it were, a psychic space between himself and his projects, between what he is at any one moment and what

he aspires to be. Out of this nothingness, there comes, of course, man's freedom; but out of this nothingness, too, comes the possibility of his sin. I believe that sin, for the existentialist, may exist in either of the two senses of which I spoke earlier. First, let's take the matter of sin as transgression. A sinner's transgression here is no longer a broken bargain or disobedience; it is rather a discrepancy between the fact of man's freedom and the lie he tells of himself. It is based upon cowardice, upon the rejection of an open future, upon a refusal

to accept the human condition as what it is—a rejection which is based upon fear. The existentialists call this kind of sin bad faith. Bad faith tells a man that he is whatever his situation is, that he is absolutely and must be the role which he plays in society, usually a role which he feels has been thrust upon him. Bad faith tells man that he is determined, that he is not himself responsible, that the things from the outside have made him what he is and caused him to do what he did. When I speak of my

relation to myself as being in bad faith, I am basically living what is called the unauthentic life, and unauthenticity is bad. It is bad because, in the first place, it is false: I am free and responsible, no matter how much I might tell myself that I am not. Furthermore, it doesn't work; it's always a failure. For no matter how much I may try to pin down and glue down the wings of my consciousness, it will soar free at inconvenient moments, leaving anguish in its wake. Bad faith refers also to my attitude toward others. In bad

faith, I try to say that a man is only what his situation is—what his color of skin is, or his religious background, or national background, or his education, or his social environment. Bad faith says that some men, by their natures, are superior to other men, and hence it justifies racism, oppression, and religious prejudice. In bad faith, I am willing to sacrifice men for ends which they themselves have not chosen, as in political murder or as in war. In bad faith, I identify the existing standards of society with the absolute right and wrong that I pose.

In bad faith, I assume that what may be simply society's expedient device is to refuse to avoid having to decide whether, after all, the values it places are the best values. I pretend that these standards or laws are somehow sacred and cannot be questioned. Bad faith is perfectly content to say that non-conformity is social crime. Bad faith is quite... Willing to have a discrepancy exist between theory and practice, of all those who have denounced a society in bad faith, I think one of the most vehement and effective may be found in the work of Richard

Wright. In his later years, Richard Wright was willing to identify himself openly with existentialism, but I would like to refer to an earlier work, *Native Son*. In a play which Wright and Paul Greene based upon the novel called *Native Son*, we find a great trial scene for Bigger Thomas. A Negro is being tried for the murder of Mary Dalton, but his defending attorney tries to show that, in reality, it is not Bigger Thomas who is on trial; it is we—that is, society—in all of us. "Your Honor, when I took this case, I thought at first

that it was the same old story of a boy who ran afoul of the law. But it is more terrible than that, with meaning more far-reaching. Where is the responsibility? Where is the guilt? For there is guilt in the rage that demands that this man's life be stamped out. Your Honor, I wish I could bring to you evidence of a morally worthier nature. I wish I could say that love or ambition or jealousy or any of the more romantic emotions were behind this case, but I cannot. Fear and hate and guilt are the keynotes of

this drama. You see, Your Honor, I'm not afraid to assign the blame, for thus I can the more honestly plead for mercy. I say that this boy is a victim of a wrong that has grown like a cancer into the very blood and bone of our social structure. Bigger Thomas sits there as a symbol of that wrong, and the judgment that you deliver upon him is a judgment upon ourselves and upon our whole civilization." "Your Honor, I object." "The court is still waiting for you to produce mitigating evidence, Mr. Max." "Farewell. Then let us look

back into this man's childhood. On a certain day, he stood and saw his father shot down by a southern mob while trying to protect one of his own kind from hate and violence. Then Bigger Thomas fled north to this great city, hoping to find here a freer life. And what did he find here? Poverty, idleness, economic injustice, race discrimination, and all the squeezing and oppression of a ruthless world. It is that way of life that stands on trial today, Your Honor, in the person of Bigger Thomas. Like his forefathers, he is a slave, but unlike

his forefathers, there is something in him that refuses to accept this slavery, because through the very teachings of our schools he was led to believe that in this land of liberty, men are free. With one part of his mind, he believed what we had taught him, that he was a free man; with the other, he found himself denied the right to accept that truth. Out of this confusion, fear was born, and fear breeds hate, and hate breeds guilt, and guilt in turn breeds the urge to destroy, to kill." "I object. All this is merely an

attempt to prove the prisoner insane." "Objection overruled. In this fear-crazed, guilt-ridden body of Bigger Thomas, a vast multitude cries out to you: Give us our freedom, our hope, and our chance to be men. Can we deny these cries? Can we boast to every medium of public utterance that this is a land of freedom and justice for all, and in our behavior tear these all down? Bigger Thomas sits as a symbol—an organism created by the political and economic hypocrisy of our time. We stand condemned before mankind. Your Honor, I beg you, not in the name of

Bigger Thomas, but in the name of ourselves, spare this boy's life." "The counsel for the defense may criticize the American nation and its methods of government, but that government is not on trial here today. Only one person—the defendant—is on trial. He pleads guilty; the rest is brief and simple. Punishment must follow, punishment laid down by the sacred laws of this commonwealth to protect that society and social system of which we are a part. A criminal is one who goes against those laws; therefore, the laws must destroy him. The ruined, the rotten, and degraded must be

cut out, cleansed away so that the body politic itself may keep its health. Yes, if the defense wishes, let us not speak in terms of crime but in terms of disease. I pity this diseased and ruined defendant, but as a true surgeon looking to the welfare of the organic body of our people, I repeat that it is necessary that this diseased member be cut off and obliterated, lest it infect us all unto death. Bigger Thomas is sane and responsible for his crimes, and all the eloquent tongues of angels or men cannot convince this honorable court

that it—and I, and the others gathered here—are the guilty ones." "Your Honor, in the name of the people of this city, in the name of truth and almighty God, I demand that this Bigger Thomas justly die for the brutal murder of Mary Dalton. Bigger Thomas, stand up!" Bigger Thomas was condemned to death, and for the moment at least, the jury persuaded itself that it was not on trial. Wright's novel and play are more than an attack on segregation; even more than a description of society in bad faith, I think it contains a suspicion of the

existentialist original sin. Sartre, in his book *Being and Nothingness*, says original sin is my upsurge in a world where there are others. My original fall is the existence of the other. Once again, we find that original sin contains a discrepancy; we live, we have to live, as if there were only... One world, the same for everyone, but there is not one world; there are as many worlds as there are individual and independent subjectivities. In my daily life, I cannot avoid treating at least some men as if they were objects and thinking of them as such.

But no man is an object; we are all subjects, and the world for us is the world which our own subjectivity experiences. There is no other. Again, I live and have to live full responsibility for my acts, but this responsibility is accompanied by so terribly limited a knowledge that, in a sense, I must act responsibly and blindly. Paraphrasing the old catechism, we may say that every day I assault the other's freedom and thought, word, and deed. I may say that I do so for his good, but good from whose point of view? Even if it's

for his own good, still, if his own good is his own freedom, then I am the enemy. Our social structure is based on original sin, for no matter how enlightened, the majority does and must live at the expense of the minority. But there is no arithmetic by which we can add up human souls and justify this kind of attitude. We might get rid of political oppression and maybe capital punishment, but what about the old idea of a criminal who needs punishment? Can we justify this? There is salvation by works from bad faith; we may improve

our conduct, but there is no salvation for original sin, if by this we mean that the saint may be cleansed of existential guilt and washed clean. In fact, sainthood may be the greatest temptation, for if a person actually shuts himself off from mankind and withdraws to preserve his purity, this is simply an avoidance of that responsibility which we ought to recognize. It is just as though one committed moral suicide by refusing guilt, as though one tried to escape God's judgment by killing himself. Does this mean that man is going to replace God? No; in fact,

the greatest sin of all would be trying to take on God's absolute judgment— to sacrifice people because one pretended one could see the ultimate outcome. Again, it does not mean that we are to take on God's judgment, but there is one way in which the existentialist saint does choose to imitate God. The existentialist saint wants, like God, to be aware at every moment that an act is not the same to the man who performs it in the inward life as the same act is when judged from outside. This realization is inevitably going to mean that

we will try to cultivate God's forgiveness if we care to respond to the challenge. The existentialist saint, baptized in the sins of the world, wants to understand men, to accept them without condemning them, to help them without passing judgment upon them, or living their life for them. He is saved by faith, by faith and the lovability of mankind. Thus we find that there are the same demands, the same temptation, the same challenge for the existentialist saint as for the traditional saints and religious heroes. But for him, there is no divine part, no grace, no paradise.

His passion is not the reliving of the crucifixion and resurrection, but the reenactment of the original fall. [Music] [Music] Material for self-encounter was taken in part from *The Literature of Possibility: A Study in Humanistic Existentialism* by Hazel E. Barnes, published by the University of Nebraska Press. *The Plague* by Albert Camus was translated by Stuart Gilbert and is published by Alfred A. Knopf, Incorporated. [Music] [Laughter] [Music] This is N-E-T, National Educational Television.