Quickly (25 April 1956)
The Village Voice, 25 April 1956; transcription provided by Jerry Lucas; proofread against the source 2026-06-01.
Column Sixteen: The Hip and the Square
To a Square, a rapist is a rapist. Punish the rapist, imprison him, be horrified by him and/or disinterested in him, and that is the end of the matter. But a hipster knows that the act of rape is a part of life too, and that even in the most brutal and unforgivable rape, there is artistry or the lack of it, real desire or cold compulsion, and so no two rapists nor no two rapes are ever the same.
Hip is an exploration into the nature of man, and its emphasis is on the Self rather than Society. As one of the neo-Medieval philosophies which the agony of the twentieth century is bringing to birth, the ultimate tendency of Hip is to return man to the center of the universe rather than to continue his reduction into less and less of a biochemical mechanism placed in some insignificant corner of the rational and material universe which we have inherited from the nineteenth century.
Moreover, Hip is an American existentialism, profoundly different from French existentialism because Hip is based on a mysticism of the flesh, and its origins can be traced back into all the undercurrents and underworlds of American life, back into the instinctive apprehension and appreciation of existence which one finds in the Negro and the soldier, in the criminal psychopath and the dope addict and jazz musician, in the prostitute, in the actor, in the—if one can visualize such a possibility—in the marriage of the call-girl and the psychoanalyst. Unlike the rationality of French existentialism, which has its point of inauguration in the work of Sartre, Hip is an American phenomenon, and it has come into being without an intellectual mentor. It is a language to describe states of being which is as yet without its philosophical dictionary.
Yet, Hip as a philosophy is still metaphorically at the back of the body, it is passive, it is the all-but-despairing philosophy of all the sensitive congeries of the defeated, the isolated, the violent, the tortured, and the warped, and so it is still a vast human and historical distance from the philosophy which may follow it, a philosophy which may be imbedded some day in a four-letter word so famous and infamous that this newspaper would be destroyed if I were to put it into print.
So, passive, despairing, a philosophical yeast which has arisen almost spontaneously out of the very conditions of existence of so many of the alienated in America, Hip with its special and intense awareness of the present tense in life, is I believe one of the philosophies of the future—assuming we have a future—and because Hip is not totally negative, and has a view of life which is predicated on growth and the nuances of growth, I intend to continue writing about it for at least the next few weeks.