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Kierkegaard uses the example of a man standing on the edge of a tall building or cliff. When the man looks over the edge, he experiences an aversion to the possibility of falling, but at the same time, the man feels a terrifying impulse to throw himself intentionally off the edge.
Not only is man what he conceives himself to be, but he is also only what he wills himself to be after this thrust toward existence" (Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York, 1947)). Sartre wrote other works in the spirit of atheistic existentialism (e.g. the short stories in his 1939 collection The Wall).
Like Kierkegaard, Sartre saw problems with rationality, calling it a form of "bad faith", an attempt by the self to impose structure on a world of phenomena—"the Other"—that is fundamentally irrational and random. According to Sartre, rationality and other forms of bad faith hinder people from finding meaning in freedom.
Many of Kierkegaard's earlier writings from 1843 to 1846 were written pseudonymously. In the non-pseudonymous The Point of View of My Work as an Author, he explained that the pseudonymous works are written from perspectives which are not his own: while Kierkegaard himself was a religious author, the pseudonymous authors wrote from points of view that were aesthetic or speculative.
Sartre synthesized Husserl and Heidegger's ideas. His modifications include his replacement of Husserl's concept, epoche , with Heidegger's structure of being-in-the -world . [ 9 ] His existential phenomenology, which is articulated in his works such as Being and Nothingness (1943), is based on the distinction between being-in-itself and being ...
Martin Heidegger attacked Sartre's concept of existential humanism in his Letter on Humanism of 1946, accusing Sartre of elevating Reason above Being. [5]Michel Foucault followed Heidegger in attacking Sartre's humanism as a kind of theology of man, [6] though in his emphasis on the self-creation of the human being he has in fact been seen as very close to Sartre's existential humanism.
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (/ ˈ s ɒr ə n ˈ k ɪər k ə ɡ ɑːr d / SORR-ən KEER-kə-gard, US also /-ɡ ɔːr /-gor; Danish: [ˈsɶːɐn ˈɔˀˌpyˀ ˈkʰiɐ̯kəˌkɒˀ] ⓘ; [1] 5 May 1813 – 11 November 1855 [2]) was a Danish theologian, philosopher, poet, social critic, and religious author who is widely considered to be the first Christian existentialist philosopher.
The philosophical school known as existentialism is generally regarded to have begun with the writings of the Danish Søren Kierkegaard (b. 1813 – d. 1855). Other important thinkers include the German Friedrich Nietzsche (b. 1844 – d. 1900), the French Jean-Paul Sartre (b. 1905 – d. 1980), and the German Martin Heidegger (b. 1889-1976).