ABSTRACT
This chapter summarises the purpose of the ‘new existentialism,’ and provides it with a direction in which to advance, and with a philosophical method. The ‘new existentialism’ accepts man’s experience of his inner freedom as basic and irreducible. The truth is that existentialism has more in common with science fiction than with academic philosophy. Its concern is ‘the fundamental alienation of beings from the source of power, meaning and purpose’. Existentialism said: there are no transcendental values; therefore man should not look for values outside his everyday consciousness. In his story The Wall, Jean Paul Sartre has a passage that illustrates his theory of the emotions, and that enables to go a step further into the phenomenology of value-consciousness. The experience of ‘being in love’ has the effect described by William James of widening the horizon of facts that are present to consciousness.
