Sartre and Beauvoir rejected Kierkegaard’s religious leap of faith

Evidence

Sartre did not care for this. He had lost his own religious beliefs early in life: apparently it happened when he was about eleven years old and standing at a bus stop. He just knew, suddenly, that God did not exist. The faith never came back, so he remained a stalwart atheist for the rest of his life. The same was true of Beauvoir, who rejected her conventional religious upbringing. Other thinkers followed Kierkegaard’s theological existentialism in various ways, but Sartre and Beauvoir were repelled by it. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 62

Categorization

• CANDY: Sartre losing his faith at eleven standing at a bus stop is a light, memorable biographical nugget.