Sartre Vs Nietzsche

Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche and Jean-Paul Sartre are considered some of the most central figures in the existentialist philosophical movement. These three philosophers have shaped their existentialist attitudes through their sense of uncertainty and puzzlement in the seemingly meaningless and absurd universe in which we all live in. They believe that human beings are much more than they perceive themselves to be in the sense that they are not only existent creatures, but also creatures who can chose their own destiny and what their purpose in the world should be. They also all agree that human existence is essentially freedom because humans can chose how they wish to engage themselves in the world. Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Sartre

Unlike Nietzsche and Sartre who are considered atheists, Kierkegaard is a devout Christian who believes that ultimate happiness comes through faith in Christianity. Kierkegaard claims that objective truth, such as science, is okay, but it lacks one important thing: a method on the proper way to live your life and how to reach a satisfying spiritual experience. He believes that the only helpful guide to a meaningful life is faith, which is found through discovering subjective truths. Passionate inwardness and the way individuals control their spiritual self and subjective sense is the key to finding the subjective modes of truth. Kierkegaard makes the extreme claim that all human beings are in a state of despair because of their perceived failure to be a human being in the fullest possible sense. He says that despair is our “default condition” whether we are conscious of it or not, and the only way to eliminate despair is to take a leap of faith, establish a subjectively spiritual relationship with God and to live a metaphysically religious way of life. However, before reaching a religious life a person must first pass through two other states of life: the aesthetic and ethical life. The aesthetic life is the immediate way of

However, unlike Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, Sartre does not believe that there is only one way to find the truth of morality or the meaning of life. He does not trust the power of will or guidance through personal intuition, and he does not believe that the leap of faith should necessarily mean devoting yourself to a religious way of life. Sartre claims that existence precedes essence and that nothing in life can define a person’s character or the goals that they might have, only the individual can define the nature of his/her own essence. Sartre strongly believes that we become what we chose and that man defines himself through his/her own choices, which he also says is not necessarily a good thing. He claims that man is “condemned to be free” because we are entirely accountable for everything in life; we are not only responsible for our own actions, but for all of humanity’s actions. Sartre lists the three main primordial attitudes that people have in life: the feeling of abandonment, where we feel like we were thrown into the world with no pre-established values because God abandoned us and now we are all alone; anguish, where we realize we are not only responsible for ourselves, but for all human beings; and despair, where we grasp the fact that we are free but we have no control over the outcome of our actions, and must therefore act