There are at present two moods in contemporary philosophy, the existentialist’s and the technician’s. The existentialist mood is disillusioned, sophisticated, desperately mature. The technical mood has no illusions; is without suspicion of naïveté, confidently accepts itself as adult. For they are both moods that belong to our time, one of the more terrible features of which is that its children go to the wall.

To the existentialist, the world in which he lives, with its everyday concerns, its inventions and schemes, is through and through suspect. He sees past its pretences. At its noblest, at its most pretentious, no less than in its trivialities and ignominies, he knows it to be flat and uninteresting, a substitute world, unauthentic. He sees through it to the basic nothingness that its false pretences disguise. He knows, besides, his own core of nothingness. And he dares to face his consequent consuming passion for the destruction of that substitute world which it is the doom of his own unqualified freedom to project upon the undifferentiated ground of nothingness that encompasses him. So with the emancipated cynicism of a man not only lacking hope, but lacking even the desire of hope, he descends (impregnably arrogant in his anguish) into the pit of absolute despair. He recognises his proper human status as cast there; recognises the radical absurdity of his existence at the edge of the irrational abyss of un-being.