Sartre Vs Kierkegaard Essay

Jean-Paul Sartre and Soren Kierkegaard are two widely known existentialists who agree on many of the main principles of existentialism, but also disagree on several of the finer details. For example, they both agree that what matters most is action. What a person actually does is what defines the person, and the process of defining one’s self never ceases. By comparing and contrasting how they portray the emotion of anguish - specifically, in Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and Sartre’s The Humanism of Existentialism – we see another example of the two agreeing on some principles while disagreeing on others. First, I will examine what Sartre means by anguish. It is important to understand that Sartre believes man is “condemned to be free.” We are abandoned into

Having this absolute freedom means that every action we take is the result of a conscious choice from many possibilities. We are free to choose whatever we want, and any situation that involves making a choice has countless options. We cannot deny this fact, as doing so would be in “bad faith”. The next critical point to understand is that since our actions define who we are, man is responsible for himself. But, as Sartre explains, we are not only fully responsible for ourselves, but we are also responsible for every other human being and for mankind as a whole. In his own words: “Therefore, I am responsible for myself and for everyone else. I am creating a certain image of man of my own choosing. In choosing myself, I choose man.” (EE, p. 37) All of this information is tied together to fashion Sartre’s concept of anguish. That we have total freedom to act in any way we choose, knowing that there are no constraints or pre-defined values that we must adhere to, paired with the enormous responsibility of knowing our choice impacts all humanity is what causes one to be in anguish. Man is in anguish because he “can not help escape the feeling of his total and