Theist and atheist grounding of life and ethics in existential philosophy: Jaspers and Sartre

The efforts to search for the ethical foundations of human life and to make sense of life is a philosophical problem that is at the same age as the history of human existence and has preserved its strong position until today. Existential Philosophy; It is the product of a period in which people find themselves far from the place they imagined after scientific revolutions, commit mass murders through world wars, and naturally face ethical crises. So, as Nietzsche stated "it is the product of a period in which "values must be re-evaluated". In our study, two philosophers, who are considered within the Existentialism school, and who belong to the theist and the atheist community, will be evaluated in terms of the suggestions they bring to "human's search for value" and "ethical dilemmas". While Jaspers, one of the philosophers to be discussed, determined that the most important ethical problem of his period was the alienation and "depersonalization" of people under the pressure of science or religion, Sartre underlined that the conditions affecting people can exist depending on the decisions of people, and states that we can overcome these problems based on a consciousness-based understanding of freedom. In this study, it will also be tried to offer solutions to today's ethical dilemmas, which do not seem very different in content, through the perspectives that philosophers bring to ethical problems.