Now we have arrived at something the executive can grasp: the notion of
action. In truth, existentialism, which is life view rather than doctrine, is
the most activist of all philosophies. Sartre himself writes that "man is
nothing else but what he makes of himself."* The key is man's conscious
intentionality, for this is what commits him to action, and his actions determine
what he is, his being. People (as opposed to machines) are uniquely
self-activating; that is, they initiate the getting of knowledge from their environments,
which knowledge leads to immediate and suitable actions.
Where we fear to know, we fear to act, as with those Germans who chose
to be ignorant of the Nazi persecutions of the jews.