Existential humanism
Template:Humanism Existential humanism is humanism that validates the human subject as struggling for self-knowledge and self-responsibility.<ref name=":0">G. B. Messer/A. S. Gurman, Essential Psychotherapies (2011) p. 261-2</ref>
Concepts
Søren Kierkegaard suggested that the best use of our capacity for making choices is to freely choose to live a fully human life, rooted in a personal search for values, rather than an external code.<ref name=":0" />
Jean-Paul Sartre said "existentialism is a humanism" because it expresses the power of human beings to make freely-willed choices, independent of the influence of religion or society.<ref>{{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}</ref> Unlike traditional humanisms, however, Sartre disavowed any reliance on an essential nature of man – on deriving values from the facts of human nature – but rather saw human value as self-created through undertaking projects in the world: experiments in living.<ref>B. Leiter/M. Rosen eds., The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy (2007) p. 674-7 and p. 691</ref>
Albert Camus, in his book The Plague, suggests that some of us may choose to be heroic, even knowing that it will bring us neither reward nor salvation;Template:Citation needed and Simone de Beauvoir, in her book The Ethics of Ambiguity, argues that embracing our own personal freedom requires us to fight for the freedoms of all humanity.<ref>Ethics of Ambiguity by Simone de Beauvoir</ref>
Criticism
Martin Heidegger attacked Sartre's concept of existential humanism in his Letter on Humanism of 1946, accusing Sartre of elevating Reason above Being.<ref>E. Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan (2005) p. 16</ref>
Michel Foucault followed Heidegger in attacking Sartre's humanism as a kind of theology of man,<ref>G. Gutting ed., The Cambridge Companion to Foucault (2003) p. 161</ref> though in his emphasis on the self-creation of the human being he has in fact been seen as very close to Sartre's existential humanism.<ref>B. Leiter/M. Rosen eds., The Oxford Handbook of Continental Philosophy (2007) p. 702</ref>