Be this as it may, Sartre's own creative intention is of the utmost importance, and to understand it we may need to review his well-known but highly paradoxical conception of man's "total responsibility" in a world that is stigmatized as purely "absurd." Throughout his philosophical career Sartre has always denied that the universe has any ultimate ground or origin—divine or otherwise. In other words it is simply a brute, inexplicable fact; it is simply there, the product of irrational energies that are milling around for no reason. And yet, in spite of the assumed groundlessness of existence, Sartre places at the center of his thought an obligation—to find one's genuine self, or rather to create it out of nothing.

He is not, to be sure, very fond of Heidegger's word "authenticity," doubtless because the term denotes the kind of authority which a document...