Jean-Paul Sartre establishes the difference between Christian and Atheistic existentialism. He believes that existence precedes essence, which means that the physical being/presence comes before the purpose/reason you are here. He discusses the limits of human essence: anguish, abandonment, and despair. By anguish he means that humans have a responsibility to humankind when they make a decision. By abandonment he means that there is no one to blame other than ourselves. By despair, he means that we are limited to what we can realistically do and hope for. Humans are creatures of possibility, and they have a capacity to transcend. We do not agree with Jean-Paul Sartre’s idea that humans are abandoned and that their decisions are solely attributed to them.
Jean-Paul Sartre claims “the existentialist, when he portrays a coward, shows him as responsible for his cowardice [...] he is like that because he has made himself into a coward by actions” (Sartre, 1946, p.21). The fault in this is that he does not account for all factors that affect judgement and decisions. These factors include external influences such as cultural
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A person has an independent consciousness, and if they are to have their own free will, they must take responsibility for their own actions, regardless of what influences may have previously affected them. Sartre states “that there is always a possibility for the coward to give up cowardice and for the hero to stop being a hero,” which accounts for the possibility that the individual has considered their environment and made the conscious decision to change their behaviour, in spite of their external influences and values (Sartre, 1946, p. 22). While it does not explicitly seem that Sartre takes external influences into account, he, in fact does, in a more subtle