Summary Of Sartre's Existentialism

In his work ( Existentialism is Humanism), Sartre, one of the most influential figures in western philosophy emphasis free will and work from every aspect to prove the absolute freedom of decision of a human beings. Perhaps Sartre was influenced by the historical events of his time, or, perhaps he was defending existentialism as a philosophical perspective. But what matters is that in the end, Sartre puts freedom of choice first and last.
To demonstrate or to prove per se this freedom of choice and decision, Sartre utilizes ethos, pathos and logos by using personal stories, using inductive reasoning and employing several analogies.
The analogy of the knife is the center of his thesis. In this analogy, Sartre, starting from the presumed fact …show more content…
Since an individual has ultimate control over his/her decisions, these decisions that are made by that person are a result of what he is, and what that person is, is a consequence of his decisions.
To make things clear, we have to agree on two points, first, a human being has no predetermined properties what so ever and that he/she came to existence before any essence was to be established. And second, a human being has a ultimate freedom of choice and decision.
The first is self evident if we are to agree that there is no God, however, for the second notion of freedom of choice, Sartre argues that since God does not exist we have ultimate freedom of choice since we have no predetermined essence that drives us to make this or that decision in particular.
Hence, Sartre states that we are condemned to be free and that fact comes from the absence of God that was agreed upon earlier. Since God does not exist, there exists no moral reference to measure right or wrong against and so the individual person is condemned with absolute freedom of …show more content…
Anguish basically comes into play since a man -or a woman- has to take a decision not only for himself/herself, but the decision is made for all humanity. It is not clear how Sartre makes this leap from individual decisions to make them affect all humanity, but it appears that when a person makes a decision within a society, his/her decision becomes a norm within that society and other people could measure their decisions against it, and therefore, he/she bears the weight of the anguish of having to make a decision for all humanity and not just for himself/herself.
When it comes to how free is a person to be himself, I must disagree with Sartre who neglected the factors of nature and socialization in making a person what he is. A person is only free within the limitation of her nature and environment and the way her character was shaped. On the other hand, I must agree with Sartre that life choices do give life meaning, in the sense that we are what we decide. This comes back to the notion of no predetermined essence to human beings, and thus we are left to our decisions to determine our true