Dostoevsky VS Sartre
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Existentialism has been among the most influential philosophy on the European continent in the twentieth century. The strong appeal and popularity of existentialism in the post-war era owes to the confusion, the crisis, and the feeling of rejection and rootlessness during the World War II and its aftermath. At present, while existentialism has lost much of its former glory, its temperament is still rampant and wields powerful influence on writers and artists. The most prominent exponent of existentialism in the modern times is the French writer Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre's theory is compared, in this essay, to Dostoevsky's existentialist theory, debating essential themes such as free will, anguish or consciousness, with particular attention to their works, Existentialism and Human Emotion and Notes From the Underground, respectively.
Sartre first gave the term existentialism general currency by using it for his own philosophy and by becoming the leading figure of a distinct movement in France that became internationally influential after World War II. Sartre's philosophy is explicitly atheistic and pessimistic; he declared that human beings require a rational basis for their lives but are unable to achieve one, and thus human life is a "futile passion." A number of existentialist philosophers used literary forms to convey their thought, and existentialism has been as vital and as extensive a movement in literature as in philosophy. The 19th-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky is probably the greatest existentialist literary figure. In Notes from the Underground, the alienated antihero rages against the optimistic assumptions of rationalist humanism...