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But between the past which no longer is and the future which is not yet, this moment when he exists is nothing.
In spite of so many stubborn lies, at every moment, at every opportunity, the truth comes to light, the truth of life and death, of my solitude and my bond with the world, of my freedom and my servitude, of the insignificance and the sovereign importance of each man and all men.
From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity. It was by affirming the irreducible character of ambiguity that Kierkegaard opposed himself to Hegel,
His being is lack of being, but this lack has a way of being which is precisely existence. In Hegelian terms it might be said that we have here a negation of the negation by which the positive is re-established.
Existentialist conversion should rather be compared to Husserlian reduction: let man put his will to be “in parentheses” and he will thereby be brought to the consciousness of his true condition.
And just as phenomenological reduction prevents the errors of dogmatism by suspending all affirmation concerning the mode of reality of the external world,
And the truth is that outside of existence there is nobody. Man exists. For him it is not a question of wondering whether his presence in the world is useful, whether life is worth the trouble of being lived. These questions make no sense. It is a matter of knowing whether he wants to live and under what conditions.
However, far from God’s absence authorizing all license, the contrary is the case, because man is abandoned on the earth, because his acts are definitive, absolute engagements.
A God can pardon, efface, and compensate. But if God does not exist, man’s faults are inexpiable.
But for him particularity appears only as a moment of the totality in which it must surpass itself. Whereas for existentialism, it is not impersonal universal man who is the source of values, but the plurality of concrete, particular men projecting themselves toward their ends on the basis of situations whose particularity is as radical and as irreducible as subjectivity itself.
Now, neither scorn nor esteem would have any meaning if one regarded the acts of a man as a purely mechanical resultant. In order for men to become indignant or to admire, they must be conscious of their own freedom and the freedom of others.
As for us, whatever the case may be, we believe in freedom. Is it true that this belief must lead us to despair? Must we grant this curious paradox: that from the moment a man recognizes himself as free, he is prohibited from wishing for anything?
The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.
Freedom is the source from which all significations and all values spring. It is the original condition of all justification of existence. The man who seeks to justify his life must want freedom itself absolutely and above everything else.
To will oneself moral and to will oneself free are one and the same decision.
There is no more obnoxious way to punish a man than to force him to perform acts which make no sense to him,
Life imprisonment is the most horrible of punishments because it preserves existence in its pure facticity but forbids it all legitimation. A freedom can not will itself without willing itself as an indefinite movement. It must absolutely reject the constraints which arrest its drive toward itself. This rejection takes on a positive aspect when the constraint is natural.
We, too, define morality by this adhesion to the self; and this is why we say that man can not positively decide between the negation and the assumption of his freedom, for as soon as he decides, he assumes it.
Men do not like to feel themselves in danger. Yet, it is because there are real dangers, real failures and real earthly damnation that words like victory, wisdom, or joy have meaning. Nothing is decided in advance, and it is because man has something to lose and because he can lose that he can also win.
To exist is to make oneself a lack of being; it is to cast oneself into the world.
The fact is that no man is a datum which is passively suffered; the rejection of existence is still another way of existing; nobody can know the peace of the tomb while he is alive.
Ethics is the triumph of freedom over facticity, and the sub-man feels only the facticity of his existence.
He forgets that every goal is at the same time a point of departure and that human freedom is the ultimate, the unique end to which man should destine himself.
he feels himself as a negation and a freedom, but he does not realize this freedom as a positive liberation.
There is no way for a man to escape from this world. It is in this world that — avoiding the pitfalls we have just pointed out — he must realize himself morally.
An end is valid only by a return to the freedom which established it and which willed itself through this end. But this will implies that freedom is not to be engulfed in any goal; neither is it to dissipate itself vainly without aiming at a goal.
But here too we must not confuse the present with the past. With regard to the past, no further action is possible.
doubtless he has a good case for proving that, strictly speaking, he is not stealing from the worker the product of his labor,
what right does one have to want something for others?”
But a genuine ethics does not teach us either to sacrifice
nothing is useful if it is not useful to man;
Every war, every revolution, demands the sacrifice of a generation, of a collectivity, by those who undertake it.
For it is quite clear that if the individual is a pure zero, the sum of those zeros which make up the collectivity is also a zero: no undertaking has any importance, no defeat as well as no victory.
fascist ideology and Marxist ideology converge.
one can not, without absurdity, indefinitely sacrifice each generation to the following one;
Through all this learned dialectic we finally come back to the sophism which we exposed: if the individual is nothing, society can not be something.
A collectivist conception of man does not concede a valid existence to such sentiments as love, tenderness, and friendship; the abstract identity of individuals merely authorizes a comradeship between them by means of which each one is likened to each of the others.
That is why Saint-Just, who believed in the individual and who knew that all authority is violence, said with somber lucidity, “No one governs innocently.”
But is the cause of Man that of each man?
The present is the transitory existence which is made in order to be abolished: it retrieves itself only by transcending itself toward the permanence of future being; it is only as an instrument, as a means, it is only by its efficacity with regard to the coming of the future that the present is validly realized: reduced to itself it is nothing, one may dispose of it as he pleases. That is the ultimate meaning of the formula: the end justifies the means: all means are authorized by their very indifference.
freedom will never be given; it will always have to be won: that is what Trotsky was saying when he envisaged the future as a permanent revolution.
But the truth is that if division and violence define war, the world has always been at war and always will be; if man is waiting for universal peace in order to establish his existence validly, he will wait indefinitely: there will never be any other future.
Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death.
Society exists only by means of the existence of particular individuals;
Existence must be asserted in the present if one does not want all life to be defined as an escape toward nothingness. That is the reason societies institute festivals whose role is to stop the movement of transcendence, to set up the end as an end.
That is the modern meaning of the festival, private as well as public. Existence attempts in the festival to confirm itself positively as existence.
But the tension of existence realized as a pure negativity can not maintain itself for long; it must be immediately engaged in a new undertaking, it must dash off toward the future. The moment of detachment, the pure affirmation of the subjective present are only abstractions; the joy becomes exhausted, drunkenness subsides into fatigue, and one finds himself with his hands empty because one can never possess the present: that is what gives festivals their pathetic and deceptive character.
The notion of ambiguity must not be confused with that of absurdity. To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed, that it must be constantly won.
Every construction implies the outrage of dictatorship, of violence. This is the theme, among others, of Koestler’s Gladiators.
To want to prohibit a man from error is to forbid him to fulfill his own existence, it is to deprive him of life.
