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According to Kaufmann, Sartre makes factual errors, including misidentifying philosopher Karl Jaspers as a Catholic, and presenting a definition of existentialism that is open to question. [2] Thomas C. Anderson criticized Sartre for asserting without explanation that if a person seeks freedom from false, external authorities, then he or she ...
In it, Sartre puts forward a revision of existentialism, and an interpretation of Marxism as a contemporary philosophy par excellence, one that can be criticized only from a reactionary pre-Marxist standpoint. Sartre argues that while the free fusion of many human projects may possibly constitute a Communist society, there is no guarantee of this.
As a result, for Sartre, "existence precedes essence" not only defines and determines his own existential thinking or interpretation of existentialism, but also any thinking or philosophising that declares itself to be existential. Despite Sartre's later efforts to distance himself and his thinking from this remark and its consequences, it has ...
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.
While existentialism is generally considered to have originated with Kierkegaard, the first prominent existentialist philosopher to adopt the term as a self-description was Sartre. Sartre posits the idea that "what all existentialists have in common is the fundamental doctrine that existence precedes essence ", as the philosopher Frederick ...
According to Sartre, a person can only be defined negatively, as "what it is not", and this negation is the only positive definition of "what it is". [3] From this, an individual is aware of a host of alternative reactions to our freedom to choose an objective situation, since no situation can dictate a single response.
So Sartre claims at the end of his first nonfiction book that, given that life is without meaning, as he spent the whole book arguing, we, as individuals, must make an existential leap, which is our pretense that life is meaningful. It doesn't matter what you believe or who you are or your money or race or sexuality.
Sartre depicted a man in a café who has applied himself to a portrayal of his role as a waiter. The waiter thinks of himself as being a waiter (as in being-in-itself), which Sartre says is impossible since he cannot be a waiter in the sense that an inkwell is an inkwell.