▷ Abandonment (existentialism) - PhilosophyProfessor.com

Abandonment (20TH CENTURY).

Concept central to atheistic existentialism.

According to existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre, God does not exist and life therefore has no intrinsic purpose or meaning. Man has been “abandoned” in the universe and must create his own morality and code of values without the assistance of any divine being.

Søren Kierkegaard and Frederich Nietzsche, the supposed originators of the existentialist school of thought, constrained their theories to theological systems. Both were concerned with the “singularity of existence” and the fact that “existence comes before essence”; but neither of them approach the belief that God never existed and therefore never controlled individual will. The first to do so were Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger.

The absence of God in the conceptualization of life came to be known as “abandonment” because of Sartre’s 1946 lecture L’Existentialisme est un humanisme in which he says:

…when we speak of “abandonment” – a favorite word of Heidegger – we only mean to say that God does not exist, and that it is necessary to draw the consequences of his absence right to the end. The existentialist is strongly opposed to a certain type of secular moralism, which seeks to suppress God at the least possible expense.

Also see: atheism.

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