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Where Hegel had advocated a form of determinist dialectic in which all oppositions would be collapsed, existentialism was essentially concerned with the irreducibility of subjective experience. For example, FriedrichNietzsche held that any collapse of distinctions between objective and subjective would be meaningless since objective experience lay completely beyond human terms of understanding. Conversely, Kierkegaard held that it was in the very crisis of subjectivity that the inadequacies of aesthetic, as opposed to ethical, existence were exposed. Later, JeanPaulSartre held that ethics only becomes possible once we realise we are condemned to freedom. The Virian emphasis on ethics rather than morals reflects the importance assigned by existentialism to the situational and the subjective.
Other existentialists have included Heidegger, Merleau Ponty and Jaspers.
See other PhilosophersAndBrigands.