Remarkably violent attacks issued from both these camps, and set off all the more sharply by the enthusiasm, here and there, of small welcoming bands of the avant garde. That the welcomers were no less informed about Existentialism than the attackers, didn't help matters.Nevertheless Existentialism, gradually and then more rapidly, won adherents, people who took it seriously. Someone has said that Existentialism is a philosophy---if a philosophy at all---that has been independently invented by millions of people simply responding to the emergency of life in a modern world. Coming to the first time to the works of Jean Paul Sartre, Karl Jaspers, or Albert Camus is often like reading, on page after page, one's own intimate thoughts and feelings, expressed with new precision and concreteness. Existentialism is a philosophy, as a matter of fact, because it has been lengthily adumbrated by men trained in the philosophical diciplines; but it is also and more fundamentally a shift in ordinary human attitudes that has altered every aspect of life in our civilation. --by Hayden Carruth
