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“Life in itself is neither good nor evil, it is the place of good and evil, according to what you make it.” —Montaigne.
But between the past which no longer is and the future which is not yet, this moment when he exists is nothing. This privilege, which he alone possesses, of being a sovereign and unique subject amidst a universe of objects, is what he shares with all his fellow-men. In turn an object for others, he is nothing more than an individual in the collectivity on which he depends.
And the ethics which they have proposed to their disciples has always pursued the same goal. It has been a matter of eliminating the ambiguity by making oneself pure inwardness or pure externality, by escaping from the sensible world or by being engulfed in it, by yielding to eternity or enclosing oneself in the pure moment.
It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our life that we must draw our strength to live and our reason for acting.
From the very beginning, existentialism defined itself as a philosophy of ambiguity.
existentialism is a philosophy of the absurd and of despair.
By uprooting himself from the world, man makes himself present to the world and makes the world present to him. I should like to be the landscape which I am contemplating, I should like this sky, this quiet water to think themselves within me, that it might be I whom they express in flesh and bone, and I remain at a distance. But it is also by this distance that the sky and the water exist before me.
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.
But if man is free to define for himself the conditions of a life which is valid in his own eyes, can he not choose whatever he likes and act however he likes? Dostoievsky asserted, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.”
It is up to man to make it important to be a man, and he alone can feel his success or failure.
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?
Freedom is the source from which all significations and all values spring. It is the original condition of all justification of existence.
If a door refuses to open, let us accept not opening it and there we are free.
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.
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.
Man’s unhappiness, says Descartes, is due to his having first been a child.
the body itself is not a brute fact. It expresses our relationship to the world, and that is why it is an object of sympathy or repulsion.
To exist is to make oneself a lack of being; it is to cast oneself into the world.
one does not readily accept becoming simply a man with all his anxiety and doubt.
After a more or less long crisis, either he turns back toward the world of his parents and teachers or he adheres to the values which are new but seem to him just as sure.
Rejecting his own existence, the nihilist must also reject the existences which confirm it.
The nihilist attitude manifests a certain truth. In this attitude one experiences the ambiguity of the human condition. But the mistake is that it defines man not as the positive existence of a lack, but as a lack at the heart of existence, whereas the truth is that existence is not a lack as such.
No man can save himself alone.
Oppression divides the world into two clans: those who enlighten mankind by thrusting it ahead of itself and those who are condemned to mark time hopelessly in order merely to support the collectivity;
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.
it is because man’s condition is ambiguous that he seeks, through failure and outrageousness, to save his existence.
