Sartre And The Existential Crisis

The term ‘existential crisis’ is relatively new. For most of history people followed the ancient Greek philosophers that people are born with their own essence, their own defining characteristic. The idea that nature or in the Christian Tradition God endowed each person with her own essential piece of being could give meaning and purpose to people’s lives, as there was a big guy in the sky dictating and creating everyone with a plan. However, the questioning of the ideal of an essence begins in the late 19th century and continues into modern discussion as new theories emerge. Nietzsche suggested “God is dead, and we killed him”, this isn’t meant to say that there is a literal Celestial Being who has been brutally murdered, but rather that the …show more content…
Living Authentically means making choices contingent on the values which the individual deems the most important. An individual will want to look up to some authority, but to Sartre this is ‘bad faith’. Following someone else’s outline to life is a denial of humanities absurd condition and thus stops the individual from experiencing the full capacity to choose. Aside from a denial of the state of humankind all the authorities one may look to are fake. Be it parents, government, philosophers, or educators they are all people just like the individual. They have no more answers than the next person, they are all people who had to figure out her own values and way to live. Simply following someone else’s choices is not the way to exist. Sartre tells of a student who had to choose between staying with his old mother and making a huge impact on one life or going to help with the war effort, playing a small part in a much larger cause. Sartre told the student that there was no correct answer, but he must decide for himself what he felt was right. Sartre states that there is no ‘correct’ answer until the student chooses one for himself, this choice, when made alone, is living authentically. Because his choice is authentic to the student it is the correct choice …show more content…
In acknowledging the inherent meaninglessness of life, Sartre notes how this allows for an infinite amount of freedom on the individual. While this amount of choice all placed on the shoulders of the individual, with no authority to place control with it places individuals in their own anguish. However, while existentialism suggests all this it also says that by living authentically, and making our own choices we may develop our own