Existentialism: A Theory of Man

Existentialism is not part of our classical inheritance. Nor it is peculiar to contemporary civilization. It can trace its lines back to the urgent tones of Biblical Christianity and Judaism, its philosophical analyses to Saint Augustine. Its exasperated rhetoric is at heart religious; as a philosophy it pleads for assent. What we now associate with Sartre and Kierkegaard, as well as with much of the art and thought of the past hundred years, reaffirms the initial article of any Western "first philosophy," a respect for oneself: "Love thy neighbor as thyself."