Sartre bridged generations of students back to Nietzsche and Kierkegaard.
Evidence
Sartre was then just short of his sixty-third birthday. His listeners were young enough to be his grandchildren. Few would have remembered the end of the war, let alone those early years of the 1930s when he had begun thinking about freedom and existence. They would have seen Sartre more as a national treasure than as truly one of themselves. Yet they owed even more to him than they could have realised, in a way that went beyond political activism. He formed a link between them and his own generation of dissatisfied students in the late 1920s, bored with their studies and longing for ‘destructive’ new ideas. Further back, he connected them to the whole line of philosophical rebels: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and the rest. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 75
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the broader thesis Bakewell develops about existentialism as a lineage of rebels — sets up the chain from Kierkegaard through Nietzsche to Sartre and on to 1968. — connects to: Heidegger reanimated past philosophers so students felt thinking itself had revived — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 193; Hegel and Kierkegaard together form the twin sources of existentialism — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 460; Nietzsche and Kierkegaard defined existence as choice, action and self-assertion (+3 more)
Broader Connections
- Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were deliberately provocative contrarian precursors to existentialism
#expands(0.80) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 56 - Heidegger reanimated past philosophers so students felt thinking itself had revived
#expands(0.78) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 193 - Hegel and Kierkegaard together form the twin sources of existentialism
#expands(0.75) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 460 - Nietzsche and Kierkegaard defined existence as choice, action and self-assertion
#expands(0.75) - Sartre’s atheism was more thoroughgoing than Heidegger’s or even Nietzsche’s.
#expands(0.70) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 1017