
Existentialism Is a Humanism
1946 · 128 pages
Existence precedes essence, Sartre told a packed Paris hall in 1945: you invent yourself by choosing and may blame nothing. The student torn between the Resistance and his mother is told to choose.
★ 6.3

Existence precedes essence, Sartre told a packed Paris hall in 1945: you invent yourself by choosing and may blame nothing. The student torn between the Resistance and his mother is told to choose.

Despair, Kierkegaard argues, is not a passing mood but the standing condition of a self refusing to be itself. He catalogs its forms with clinical precision, and the diagnosis reaches everyone.