Existential humanism is humanism that validates the human subject as struggling for self-knowledge and self-responsibility.[1]
Søren Kierkegaard suggested that the best use of our capacity for making choices is to freely choose to live a fully human life, rooted in a personal search for values, rather than an external code.[1]
Jean-Paul Sartre said "existentialism is a humanism" because it expresses the power of human beings to make freely-willed choices, independent of the influence of religion or society.[2] Unlike traditional humanisms, however, Sartre disavowed any reliance on an essential nature of man – on deriving values from the facts of human nature – but rather saw human value as self-created through undertaking projects in the world: experiments in living.[3]
Albert Camus, in his bookThe Plague, suggests that some of us may choose to be heroic, even knowing that it will bring us neither reward nor salvation;[citation needed] andSimone de Beauvoir, in her bookThe Ethics of Ambiguity, argues that embracing our own personal freedom requires us to fight for the freedoms of all humanity.[4]
Martin Heidegger attacked Sartre's concept of existential humanism in hisLetter on Humanism of 1946, accusing Sartre of elevatingReason aboveBeing.[5]
Michel Foucault followed Heidegger in attacking Sartre's humanism as a kind of theology of man,[6] though in his emphasis on the self-creation of the human being he has in fact been seen as very close to Sartre's existential humanism.[7]
