The Oxford Companion to Philosophy

Edited by Ted Honderich, 1995

ABANDONMENT. A rhetorical term used by existentialist philosophers such as Heidegger and Sartre to describe the absence of any sources of ethical authority external to oneself. It suggests that one might have expected to find such an authority, either in religion or from an understanding of the natural world, and that the discovery that there is none leads one to feel ‘abandoned’. For existentialists such as Sartre, however, this sense of abandonment is only a prelude to the recognition that ethical values can be grounded from within a reflective understanding of the conditions under which individuals can attain *authenticity in their lives. Thus the conception of abandonment is essentially an existentialist dramatization of Kant’s rejection of heteronomous conceptions of value in favour of the autonomy of the good wil.

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