Jean Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir on Freedom, Being-for-Others, And Sartrean Despair

Simone de Beauvoir and JP Sartre were two famous existentialists that converged and diverged on various concepts. These included the existentialist concepts of freedom, being-for-others and transcendence or despair. Their converged and divergences will be addressed in this essay.

Sartre was one of the most famous existentialists of all times. For him, existence did not base itself on an ethos of God-ordained morality nor did it have any transcendental meaning. Rather meaningfulness of life -- or liberty / freedom -- depended on the meaning that one arbitrarily accorded life and he claimed that man is "what he makes of himself," or in other words "in the end one is always responsible for what is made of one" In this way, Sartre's philosophy integrated both optimism and despair: optimism in the belief that one can resolutely make something...
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