ABSTRACT
Existentialist philosophy1 takes seriously the fact of God’s death and will not find any solace in positivism and functionalism. For the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre:
Without God man must invent his own values; he must freely choose his destiny and his social meaning. In the existentialist orientation the vertigo of freedom is ever present; modernity breeds perpetual anxiety. The German theorist Heidegger identified this as the essential human characteristic:
It is not the environment which prevents freedom, but the refusal of being true to oneself. The freedom to act is replaced by the ideas of spontaneous, or sincere action which seeks to cope with the ambiguous concept of freedom. We bear responsibility for our actions in the sense that we must think contemporaneously to our actions. As moral-cultural creatures, mankind have an obligation (which can be incurred or rejected) to remain attentive to the forms which experience (our actions and their results) directly assumes. Existentialism demands we avoid becoming dulled to the intensity of our life through familiarity, schematised through intellectual or moral laziness, or standardised through desire for conformity or habitual action. A free act is a significant act.
