Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities, the political, the religious, the educational authorities who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing, forming in our minds their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable, open-mindedness; chaotic, confused,vulnerability to inform yourself.

Think for yourself.
Question authority.

One always dies too soon - or too late. And yet one's whole life is complete at that moment, with a line drawn neatly under it, ready for the summing up. You are - your life and nothing else.

Consciousness implies and refers to an existence other than its own and to its own existence as a question. Knowledge is necessarily intuition, the presence of consciousness to the object which it is not. This is the original condition of all experience. Before the object is defined and interpreted, consciousness constitutes itself by separating itself from it.consciousness is a nothingness. It is a nothingness in the sense that it is always not that thing. It is always in the making, and to try to view it as permanent is to do injustice to its very definition. From this arises the assertion that there is no set of permanent entity which is the human self.

Being is. Being is in-itself. Being is what it is. Being, as all embracing and objective, is not existence, which is individual and subjective. the being of phenomenon is radically different from the being of consciousness. The latter he discusses in his discussion of being-for-itself as contrasted against being-in-itself.Being-in-itself refers to the totally unrelated, uncharacterized being found in the transphenomenal realm. It just is. It is neither active nor passive, and harbors no potentiality, no possibility whatsoever. It is the meaningless being.On the other hand, Being-for-itself refers to the transcendent being characterized by consciousness and freedom. It is the being of man, one who defines his own essence and gives meaning to his own existence through the choices he makes. It is the realm of the human being, characterized by consciousness and freedom, which enables man to decide meaning for himself. By nurturing his own meaning, man gives his own existence. Moreover, the for-itself exists in so far as it is a nihilation of the in-itself. Without this relation to the in-itself, there can be no for-itself. Finally, the nothingness of the for-itself necessitates its project, its perpetual struggle towards the in-itself.God does not exist for the reason that the concept of God entails self-contradiction. God is a being-in-itself-for-itself. He is an in-itself in so far as the concept of the divine presupposes that He be an existing entity, complete in himself and totally unrelated. On the other hand, he must likewise be a for-itself in so far as He must be completely free and not beholden to anything else. Since such a synthesis is impossible for the reason that it involves a contradiction, then the logical conclusion must be to deny the existing of such a being.

The existence of a God limits man's freedom.

Man condemned to be free carries the whole world.

Absolute freedom is thus ultimately translated into unlimited responsibility. Man, as completely free, has the complete responsibility over his freedom. As a result of the burden of his immense responsibility, man experiences anguish, abandonment, and despair. Anguish refers to the feeling that man cannot escape from the sense of complete and profound responsibility, upon the realization of the almost unbearable responsibility placed on his shoulders, a responsibility not only for himself but for allThe Existentialists say at once that man is anguish. What this means is this: the man who involved himself and who realizes that he is not only the person he chooses to be, but also a lawmaker who is, at the same time, choosing all mankind as well as himself, cannot escape the feeling of his total and deep responsibility.abandonment or forlornness as nothing else but the acceptance of the fact that man is alone in a frightening cosmos, left without a God, and that he must draw all consequences of the absence of God right to the end. We find in his lecture Existentialism is a Humanism a description of forlorness

God does not exist and that we have to face all the consequences of this

despair means that "we shall confine ourselves to reckoning only with what depends upon our will, or on the ensemble of probabilities which make our action possible."Being-for-another belongs to the very being of man. Yet the moment this relationship is analyzed, it is seen that the Other pushes against my freedom and circumscribes it. At one and the same time, the Other, who helps establish my freedom, also destroys it; being-for-itself and being-for-another shatter each other.

I AM I