I am always impressed by the frisson in my class when students realize that there’s a sense in which Sartre is right: they could, right now, get up, leave the classroom, drop out of school, and go live as beach bums in a perpetually warm climate. But it’s equally impressive to see them — still stimulated by what they’re read in Sartre and other existentialists like Camus and Merleau-Ponty — reflect on why this sense of radical freedom is far from the whole story of their lives as moral agents. This combination of drama and reflection is the reason existentialism will always be with us.
