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I would recommend "Existentialism and Human Emotions" to anyone who wants to understand Existentialism without getting a headache from reading more complicated works(i.e. "Being and Nothingness," Heideggar etc..) I am an avid reader of Philosophy and I always refer back to this book when pondering a question about Existentialism. A must for anyone who is interested in Philosophy.
Sartre shows on the one hand that existentialism was a movement born out of the rejection of ideology. Ideas that come packaged and defined and handed to the individual for unquestioning acceptance hold no interest for the existentialist. While Sartre makes few, if any, explicit references to the disastrous totalitarian mass movements that gave rise to World War II, it's clear that these -- along with organized religion -- are his targets.
The core of Sartre's analysis lies in his assertion that "existence precedes essence." Every other piece of existentialism flows from this idea that Man, at birth, is a being for whom nothing is determined. Man, Sartre argues, creates the story that becomes his life through living, pure and simple.
From this it follows that all of our lives are shaped by choice. Another of Sartre's famous contentions emerges from the book, that even if one does nothing, that in itself is a choice. Man cannot escape that responsibility for his actions. There is, as Sartre was to famously and dramatically delineate later, "no exit."
For me, the most important idea in the book is that it convincingly refutes the shallow attack often leveled at existentialism: that it is dressed-up nihilism. Sartre shows that the existentialists do not reject meaning; they simply insist that there is no a priori meaning. In fact, in their rejection of ideology and determinism, the existentialists embrace meaning, for what is meaning unless it is that which one discovers on his own, through his own questing?
You can read this book in a couple of hours. For some of us, though, its material has given us a lifetime of things to think about.
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