Word: existentialist
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Americanism, announced Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre in the Nation, is "a great external reality rising up at the entrance to the port of New York . . . and the daily product of anxious liberties. The anguish of the American confronted with Americanism is an ambivalent anguish, as if he were asking, 'Am I American enough?' and at the same time, 'How can I escape from Americanism...
...Philosophy Is Born. Some light is shed on the new philosophy by the way in which Sébille, anxious to clamber on to the lurching bandwagon of postwar Parisian culture, hit upon its name. One day Sébille met a charming girl in an existentialist bar. Said he: "After dinner I proposed to her that we get to know each other more intimately. She replied with a disarming smile: 'Of course. I'm an intimatist.' The name of my philosophy was found...
...Anti-Existentialist. Like many other Frenchmen, Sébille was "profoundly disturbed" by the moral decay and physical degeneration of French youth. The present was empty and the future bleak. This state of mind was played upon by Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre. Sébille, who is a jolly fellow beneath his solemn surface, reacted sharply against that philosophy of despair. What was "lost in the smoke of the past," he reasoned, had to be "recouped in the fire of the present...
...Reason is an attempt to translate philosophy into fiction. The Age of Reason is the first volume of a trilogy which will chart the salvation of contemporary man. In this first installment, however, nobody is saved; the characters are condemned, instead, to simmer in their own existentialist juices-a form of Sartrian purgatory from which they all will presumably be able to free themselves in the other two books...
Free to Be a Fool. It is only after the hero has sampled the conventional attitudes of Bohemia that he realizes their inadequacy and achieves absolution by embracing "the age of reason" (i.e., an understanding of his own self-dependence). Writhing in an existentialist trance, he proclaims the Sartrian gospel: "... It is by my agency that everything must happen." The author sums up: "Even if he let himself be carried off in helplessness and in despair ... he would have chosen his own damnation: he was free, free in every way, free to behave like a fool or a machine...