9

Existentialism: the fruit

of liberation

A

dmitting that“it is not pleasant to be taken for a public
monument while one is still alive” (Sitii: 43 ) Sartre nonetheless
had to live with gradually becoming an institution in France and around
the world. He learned to use his fame to foster various political and social
causes. Sartre’s name along with those of Beauvoir and, to a lesser
extent, Camus and Merleau-Ponty have come to be associated with the
philosophical movement known as “existentialism.” Correctly or not,
they and that movement have commonly been identified with the years
immediately following the liberation of Paris on the 26 th of October
1944. The second half of the 1940 s was the period of their emerging
celebrity, thoughNauseaand several short stories (published as The
Wall) had introduced Sartre to the literary public by the time he was
called to active duty on September 2 nd, 1939 and Camus’sThe Stranger
had appeared in 1941.
But what is this philosophical “school” that bears the label “existen-
tialism”? To start with, it is more an attitude and a manner of living than
an abstract, systematic doctrine. As such, one can trace its roots through-
out western philosophy at least to Socrates and his notion of philosophy
as a way of life (“care of the self ”). Indeed, one of Sartre’s critics, Julien
Benda, remarked that existentialism “is simply the modern form of an
eternal philosophical stance.”^1 And while it is tailor-made for what one
of its two nineteenth-century progenitors, Søren Kierkegaard, called
“indirect” or “oblique” communication by means of imaginative litera-
ture and thus fits quite well a master of the imaginary like Sartre, this

(^1) Julien Benda,Pour ou contra l’existentialisme(Paris: Atlas, 1948 ), cited inLife 260.
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