Existentialism In The Early 19th Century

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argued that no objective, rational basis can be
found for moral decisions. The 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche further contended that the individual must decide which situations are
to count asmoral situations.

Subjectivity

All existentialists have followed Kierkegaard in stressing the importance of
passionate individual action in deciding questions of both morality and truth.
They have insisted, accordingly, that personal experience and acting on one's
own convictions are essential in arriving at the truth. Thus, the understanding
of a situation by someone involved in that situation is superior to that of a
detached, objective observer. This emphasis on the perspective of the individual
agent has also made existentialists suspicious of systematic reasoning.
Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and other existentialist writers have been deliberately
unsystematic in the exposition of their philosophies, preferring to express
themselves in aphorisms, dialogues, parables, and ...

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must accept the risk and responsibility of following their
commitment wherever it leads.

Dread and Anxiety

Kierkegaard held that it is spiritually crucial to recognize that one
experiences not only a fear of specific objects but also a feeling of general
apprehension, which he called dread. He interpreted it as God's way of calling
each individual to make a commitment to a personally valid way of life. The word
anxiety (German Angst) has a similarly crucial role in the work of the 20th-
century German philosopher Martin Heidegger; anxiety leads to the individual's
confrontation with nothingness and with the impossibility of finding ultimate
justification for the choices he or she must ...

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