The avant-garde are people or works that are experimental, radical, or unorthodox with respect to art, culture, or society. It may be characterized by nontraditional, aesthetic innovation and initial unacceptability, and it may offer a critique of the relationship between producer and consumer.
The avant-garde pushes the boundaries of what is accepted as the norm or the status quo, primarily in the cultural realm. The avant-garde is considered by some to be a hallmark of modernism, as distinct from postmodernism. Many artists have aligned themselves with the avant-garde movement and still continue to do so, tracing a history from Dada through the Situationists to postmodern artists such as the Language poets around 1981.
The avant-garde also promotes radical social reforms. It was this meaning that was evoked by the Saint Simonian Olinde Rodrigues in his essay “L’artiste, le savant et l’industriel” (“The artist, the scientist and the industrialist”, 1825), which contains the first recorded use of “avant-garde” in its now customary sense: there, Rodrigues calls on artists to “serve as [the people’s] avant-garde”, insisting that “the power of the arts is indeed the most immediate and fastest way” to social, political and economic reform.
Theories
Several writers have attempted to map the parameters of avant-garde activity. The Italian essayist Renato Poggioli provides one of the earliest analyses of vanguardism as a cultural phenomenon in his 1962 book Teoria dell’arte d’avanguardia (The Theory of the Avant-Garde). Surveying the historical, social, psychological and philosophical aspects of vanguardism, Poggioli reaches beyond individual instances of art, poetry, and music to show that vanguardists may share certain ideals or values which manifest themselves in the non-conformist lifestyles they adopt: He sees vanguard culture as a variety or subcategory of Bohemianism. Other authors have attempted both to clarify and to extend Poggioli’s study. The German literary critic Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) looks at the Establishment’s embrace of socially critical works of art and suggests that in complicity with capitalism, “art as an institution neutralizes the political content of the individual work”.
Bürger’s essay also greatly influenced the work of contemporary American art-historians such as the German Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (born 1941). Buchloh, in the collection of essays Neo-avantgarde and Culture Industry (2000) critically argues for a dialectical approach to these positions. Subsequent criticism theorized the limitations of these approaches, noting their circumscribed areas of analysis, including Eurocentric, chauvinist, and genre-specific definitions.
Relation to mainstream society
The concept of avant-garde refers primarily to artists, writers, composers and thinkers whose work is opposed to mainstream cultural values and often has a trenchant social or political edge. Many writers, critics and theorists made assertions about vanguard culture during the formative years of modernism, although the initial definitive statement on the avant-garde was the essay Avant-Garde and Kitsch by New York art critic Clement Greenberg, published in Partisan Review in 1939. Greenberg argued that vanguard culture has historically been opposed to “high” or “mainstream” culture, and that it has also rejected the artificially synthesized mass culture that has been produced by industrialization. Each of these media is a direct product of Capitalism—they are all now substantial industries—and as such they are driven by the same profit-fixated motives of other sectors of manufacturing, not the ideals of true art. For Greenberg, these forms were therefore kitsch: phony, faked or mechanical culture, which often pretended to be more than they were by using formal devices stolen from vanguard culture. For instance, during the 1930s the advertising industry was quick to take visual mannerisms from surrealism, but this does not mean that 1930s advertising photographs are truly surreal.
Various members of the Frankfurt School argued similar views: thus Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in their essay The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass-Deception (1944), and also Walter Benjamin in his highly influential “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935, rev. 1939). Where Greenberg used the German word kitsch to describe the antithesis of avant-garde culture, members of the Frankfurt School coined the term “mass culture” to indicate that this bogus culture is constantly being manufactured by a newly emerged culture industry (comprising commercial publishing houses, the movie industry, the record industry, and the electronic media). They also pointed out that the rise of this industry meant that artistic excellence was displaced by sales figures as a measure of worth: a novel, for example, was judged meritorious solely on whether it became a best-seller, music succumbed to ratings charts and to the blunt commercial logic of the Gold disc. In this way the autonomous artistic merit so dear to the vanguardist was abandoned and sales increasingly became the measure, and justification, of everything. Consumer culture now ruled.
The avant-garde’s co-option by the global capitalist market, by neoliberal economies, and by what Guy Debord called The Society of the Spectacle, have made contemporary critics speculate on the possibility of a meaningful avant-garde today. Paul Mann’s Theory-Death of the Avant-Garde demonstrates how completely the avant-garde is embedded within institutional structures today, a thought also pursued by Richard Schechner in his analyses of avant-garde performance.
Despite the central arguments of Greenberg, Adorno and others, various sectors of the mainstream culture industry have co-opted and misapplied the term “avant-garde” since the 1960s, chiefly as a marketing tool to publicise popular music and commercial cinema. It has become common to describe successful rock musicians and celebrated film-makers as “avant-garde”, the very word having been stripped of its proper meaning. Noting this important conceptual shift, major contemporary theorists such as Matei Calinescu in Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (1987),[page needed] and Hans Bertens in The Idea of the Postmodern: A History (1995),[page needed] have suggested that this is a sign our culture has entered a new post-modern age, when the former modernist ways of thinking and behaving have been rendered redundant.
Nevertheless, an incisive critique of vanguardism as against the views of mainstream society was offered by the New York critic Harold Rosenberg in the late 1960s. Trying to strike a balance between the insights of Renato Poggioli and the claims of Clement Greenberg, Rosenberg suggested that from the mid-1960s onward progressive culture ceased to fulfill its former adversarial role. Since then it has been flanked by what he called “avant-garde ghosts to the one side, and a changing mass culture on the other”, both of which it interacts with to varying degrees. This has seen culture become, in his words, “a profession one of whose aspects is the pretense of overthrowing it”.
Examples
Avant-garde in politics
The concept of the avant-garde found its way into the political language, especially of revolutionary parties and movements. Thus Lenin, and with him the later Marxism-Leninism, understood the Communist Party as the “avant-garde of the working class.” Already Marx wrote in the manifesto of the Communist Party that the Communists are “the most decided, ever-expanding part of the workers’ partiesall countries; theoretically, they have before the rest of the mass of the proletariat the insight into the conditions, the course, and the general results of the proletarian movement. “(MEW 4, p. 474.) At the same time, however, Marx emphasized that the communists were, above all, also part of the proletariat The proletariat itself is: “The proletarian movement is the independent movement of the immense majority in the interest of the immense majority” (p. 472).
Lenin, on the other hand, organized a mass party with the Bolsheviks, but at the same time formulated a leading claim of the avant-garde to the rest of the proletariat. This avant-garde, which brought the revolutionary ideas from outside to the workers, was necessary, according to Lenin, because the proletarians by their own power are only capable of a trade-unionistic, that is, trade union consciousness: “The history of all countries shows that the working class can produce only a trade-unionistic consciousness solely by its own power “(Lenin, What to do?, in: Werke, Vol. 5, p. 386). This doctrine was instrumental in justifying the Party’s dictatorship over the workers.
The political avant-garde of the revolutionary movement was also considered to be the Communist sailors, who had played a driving role in the Russian October Revolution of 1917, but also in the German November Revolution of 1918.
Avant-garde in fine art
In the history of the fine arts, the term avant-garde stands for the artistic movements of the (beginning) 20th century and is linked to the concept of modernism or modern art. Strangely, many of the artistic avant-garde movements of modernity aspire to the ” abolition of art in life practice”.
An important role in the history of the artistic avant-garde played the Russian avant-garde as well as the Italian Futurism, who in his manifestos of the “art of war” gave his own aesthetics, perceived as revolutionary. Also Cubism, Cubofuturism, Vorticism, Constructivism, Suprematism, Dadaism, Surrealism, Expressionism, Tachism, Action Painting, Minimal Art, Op Art, Pop Art, Lettrism, Situationism, Fluxus, Happening, the Viennese Actionism and the so-called conceptual art are considered to be art movements of the avant-garde.
For the art in Soviet Russia, the term had a double meaning, because in the Marxist-Leninist theory under avant-garde and above all a political avant-garde was understood, whereby the subsequent transformation of the Russian avant-garde to the so-called, artistically hardly avant-garde, ” socialist Realism “was created.
In the German Reich avant-garde art was fought from 1933 by the National Socialists as ” degenerate art “. Artists who did not adapt to the aligned ” German art ” and remained connected to the avant-garde were persecuted (if they did not flee in 1933 or went into exile in the years that followed). Modern works of art were confiscated as “Jewified”, partially destroyed or in many cases auctioned in Switzerland. Jewish artists who could not leave Germany in time were murdered in the Holocaust.
After National Socialism was defeated in 1945, the German art landscape slowly recovered from this political and intellectual catastrophe in the early / mid-1950s. In the Federal Republic there were activities of some artists who had found with their informal painting the connection to the avant-garde movements of French Tachism and the US Abstract Expressionism or Action Painting. In the 1960s and in the course of the 1968 movement, German art development became increasingly important for Europe and the United States.
At the same time, the post-war new avant-garde already marked the creeping end of the avant-garde concept. If in the modern age each of the avant-gardes, often in close succession in time, claimed to represent the most recent and “valid” state of artistic development, a parallel existence of the various avant-gardes was observed in the art of postmodernism, often eclectic with each other mixed. Developments seem possible in many directions, there is no consensus on where to go. The word “avant-garde” thus loses its original meaning and hardly seems appropriate for describing contemporary art.
Instead of “avant-garde” and “modern art” one speaks for the contemporary art of contemporary art. In doing so, it can equally pursue avant-garde strategies, reinvent the sometimes cramped search for innovation, or revive older traditions.
Avant-garde in literature
The beginning of the literary avant-gardes and thus of modern literature in general can be determined at the end of the 19th century with French symbolism, with poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Charles Baudelaire and Arthur Rimbaud, in Germany with Stefan George and the poets of Expressionism, With the First World War, the avant-garde movements radicalized and conceived their work increasingly as socially critical and provocative protest art. Characteristic of the avant-garde is that it sets itself apart from the prevailing literary trends in terms of content, style, technique and / or form (eg by developing new forms such as phonetic poems, collages, random poems). Nevertheless, avant-garde movements such as the circle of artists around Stefan George often understood themselves as elite, because the concept of the avant-garde includes strong artist figures. In addition, the avant-garde elites were often structured hierarchically (as well as the circle around George).
To the literary avant- gardes Surrealism, Dadaism, Expressionism as well as Scapigliatura and Futurismus are counted.
Avant-garde in the performing arts
In the theater, the term avant-garde is associated with a break with illusions, a clearing out of the stage, and an outburst of representational conventions. The naturalism is – perhaps radically, with the exception of social criticism variants – not counted in the vanguard, but he prepared them. Radical political engagement and radical turning away from reality are equally among the characteristics of the theatrical avant-garde.
A departure from psychology and inwardness is common to most currents. Literary movements such as Dadaism and Surrealism provided a new kind of theatrical text that moved away from the convention of “distributed roles”. The director Edward Gordon Craig designed the “over-puppet” as the ideal of the new actor, Wsewolod Meyerhold went from Taylorism to create a physical and multicultural basis for the play. Erwin Piscator promoted the use of state-of-the-art technology on stage with film and sound recordings. Even Bertolt Brecht was influenced by the anti-naturalistic avant-garde.
The avant-garde currents in the visual arts as well as Cubism influenced the design of stage designs and costumes. Adolphe Appia contrasted empty “rhythmic spaces” with differentiated lighting of the naturalistic illusion stage with its multitude of props. Image, movement and music were combined in a new way as in Oskar Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet. The technique of movement was revolutionized by expressive dance (such as Isadora Duncan), from which modern dance theater emerged.
Important avant-garderegisseurs after 1945 included Jerzy Grotowski, Eugenio Barba, Tadeusz Kantor and Robert Wilson.
Avant-garde in music
As a musical avant-garde styles are in classical music since the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, here they were often under the heading of new music together. Important pioneers of the late 19th century were Wagner, Liszt, Scriabin and, in particular, Debussy; Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Hindemith or Stravinsky, while in the second half Stockhausen, Xenakis or Ligeti were regarded as important impulses. Common to all is the break with traditional listening habits, such as the striking use of dissonances, irregular rhythms, and above all by atonalityand polytonality. Examples of musical avant-gardes are the music of expressionism, impressionism, twelve-tone music, later serial music, aleatoric music, sound composition, minimal music and the musique concrète composed of recorded sounds. Since the post-war period, avant-garde forms have emerged outside of the realm of electronic music, here are genres such as free jazz, the resulting free improvised music and industrial and noise Even some film scores can show significant avant-garde influences, such as Don Davis soundtrack to the 1999 feature film “Matrix”.
Avant-garde film
The avant-garde film appeared already in the early days of cinematography and was then, as later, closely connected with the visual arts. For example, in France, Italy and Germany, there were film works that emerged from Futurism, Dadaism, Constructivism and Surrealism. With the development of this cost-effective 16 mm film, the avant-garde film was given a new impetus after the Second World War in America, Europe, Australia and Japan. This time, the overarching terms were calledStructuralism, Pop Art, Happening, Fluxus, Concept Art.
The formal possibilities of the film, which has no other art form, made the traditional attachment to the visual arts always weaker. For example, in the abstract film of the 1920s (“Cinéma pur”) or in the underground film of the 1960s. In addition, the avant-garde film began to refer to its own medium (material film, expanded cinema, found footage).
The film is the only modern art form that can not dispense with the term avant-garde in order to distinguish itself from its other commercial and artistic manifestations. Confusing is the almost synonymous use of the term experimental film. The experimental short film was understood as a precursor to the feature film, especially in the 1950s. This is related to the fact that in Germany (with an impact on Austria) in intellectual discourse the experiment was devalued – especially by Hans Magnus Enzensberger 1962 in his ” Aporienthe avant-garde “- because nails should also be brainstormed in art during the period of reconstruction.
Still, many filmmakers did not shy away from understanding their films as experiments, but not all of them are from their concept or their production. Therefore, avant-garde film can be understood as the broader term. Another ambiguity arises from the fact that directors of artistic films such as Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein, Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard or David Lynch is often spoken as an avant-gardist. Although they are influenced by the avant-garde and take a special position in the feature film, they remain largely conventional in their overall picture, as measured by the avant-garde film.
Characteristic of artistic avant-garde
In spite of all differences, the diversity of artistic, literary and musical movements and styles reveals some common tendencies that allow the concept of the artistic avant-garde to be delimited from other epochs and styles. The avant-garde art often appears as a deliberately provocative, emphasizes innovative as well as highly self-reflective art.
Provocation
It is an essential drive in the avant-garde, the unusual, to seek new. In particular, the end of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, the goal was taken frequently close it, the educated middle class to shock. Baudelaire’s Poetry Collection The Flowers of Evil is one of the earliest testimonies to this. The novelty of these poems was to allow the ugly metropolitan life as material for poetry. He reaches a certain climax in Dadaism, which snubs the audience with nonsense literature, and later in Viennese ActionismWho chooses the “good taste” as the actual point of attack and provokes by extreme performances.
Innovation
The overarching structural problem of the avant-garde is hereby already marked. Avant-garde forms a self-dynamic type of excellence: What was unusual yesterday established gradually and is often assimilated in the mainstream and soon appears familiar. Such situations meet avant-garde approaches, in and between the avant-gardes, therefore, a development pattern has emerged that understands more and more formal innovation as essential.
Self-reflection
Another feature of many avant-gardes is their theoretical grounding, and often an extra-aesthetic, theoretical commentary emerges. Avant-garde art forms thus provoke a permanent reflection about themselves, which often also raises questions about why, for whatever reason, art can still be perceived and what art is.
Criticism of the avant-garde term
At the end of the 20th century, the concept of the avant-garde and the ideas associated with it increasingly came under fire. The assumption that persons or groups “progress” in the process of progress and the rest, the ” mainstream “, whose example follows or must follow, was increasingly doubted. The background to this development is, on the one hand, to be sought in the at least temporary drying up of artistic avant-garde movements and in the failure of many political, revolutionary movements. On the other hand, the ideas of postmodernism are accompanied by a deliberate departure from the concept of the avant-garde, which is criticized as authoritarian by its leadership claim. Instead, that willpluralistic juxtaposition of developments and movements valued higher.
The French writer and director Romain Gary († 1980) took his criticism in the bon mot “Avant-gardists are people who do not know exactly where they want to go, but are first there.”
The avant-garde and its expressions
Within the avant-garde currents, the isms emerged as a proposal contrary to supposed aging trends and proposed radical innovations of content, language and vital attitude. Among them are the following:
Impressionism
Impressionism was not really an avant-garde ism, but rather an antecedent against which the avant-gardists reacted. His main contribution to the avant-garde was the liberation of the expressive power of color led by Claude Monet. The impressionists learned to handle the freest painting, without trying to hide their fragmented brushstrokes, and the light was becoming the great unifying factor of the figure and the landscape. But the Impressionist painters were artists who no longer intended to exercise with their art a radical change in the customs of their time nor were they committed to the will of a great social change. They are the consequence of the failure of the pretensions of the revolution of 1830, that of 1848 and theCommune of Paris. The discussions of the Impressionists were basically technical and their painting can be considered an exacerbation of naturalism to such a point that it would end up opposing the origins. Courbet’s realism affirmed that in reality he found hope for a change, the power of real men, the movement of revolutionary forces. The Impressionists replace the discussions of content with those of technique, light and the objective of pictorial transcription.
At the end of 1870 the main Impressionist painters already knew each other well. At that time the Guerbois coffee, in the street of Batignolles, near the workshop of Édouard Manet (who seems that for the moment was the dominant personality) became the headquarters of this artistic circle. The attitude of solidarity of the Impressionists at the beginning of the 1870s was expressed in a very revealing way in some group portraits, such as Fantin-Latour (Workshop in the neighborhood of Batignolles, 1870) or Bazille (The workshop of the artist in rue de la Condamine, 1870).
For the first time, during the Franco-Prussian War the Impressionists had to separate: Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Manet remained in Paris, Bazille died at the front and Monet and Camille Pissarro met in London, where they met Paul Durand-Ruel, since then the dealer of the group. In fact, in 1873 Durand-Ruel was already confident enough to prepare a complete catalog with the stock of his gallery that was never published.
Expressionism
Expressionism was a pictorial current that was born as a movement in the early twentieth century, between 1905 and 1925, in Germany and other central countries in Europe of Germanic and Austro-Hungarian, linked to French Fauvism as expressive and emotional art that diametrically opposed to impressionism. It was brought together in the decade of 1910 around two groups: Die Brücke (The Bridge) and Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider). At the same time, the Secession group developed its activity in Vienna, which included Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele among others. In Germany the greatest exponent of expressionism was Edvard Munch with his work The Scream (1893).
In the 1920s Expressionism influenced other arts. The cabinet of Doctor Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1919) and Nosferatu, the vampire (Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, 1921) initiated the cinematographic expressionism, and the poets Georg Trakl and Rainer Maria Rilke took the movement to the field of lyricism. Frequently it has also been included in this movement apart from the enigmatic literary work of Franz Kafka.
Between the principles of this artistic current they are indicated: the reconstruction of the reality, the relation of the literary expression with the plastic arts and the music and the expression of the anguish of the world and of the life through novels and dramas where is spoken of the social limitations imposed on the freedom of man. It aims to express philias and phobias of the human being. Therefore, it does not require a good technique or an aesthetically beautiful result.
It would face basically like the aesthetic theory to the realistic ideas, to the old impressionist ideas that had appeared in Europe in the last twenty years of the XIX century, and would pose that the real thing is not fundamentally what we see in the exterior, but what arises in our interiority when we see, perceive, intuit or produce something new.
Fauvism
Fauvism was a movement of French origin that developed between 1904 and 1908, approximately.
The important Autumn Salon of 1905 was the first exhibition for the group whose objective was linguistically the form-color synthesis. The representation of objects immersed in sunlight was not sought, but rather the freest images that resulted from the superposition of colors equivalent to that light. In effect, the Fauves considered that feelings could be expressed through color. Henri Matisse was one of the greatest representatives of this vanguard.
Cubism
Cubism was born in France in 1906. Its main features are the association of impossible elements to concretize, unfolding of the author, graphic disposition of the words, substitution of the sentimental for the humor and the joy and the portrait of the reality through geometric figures. The inspirers of the movement were Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Some of the main masters were Juan Gris, María Blanchard, Fernand Leger, Jean Metzinger and Albert Gleizes, but previously Paul Cézanne would have marked the way.
Among the techniques used is the collage, and mainly the decomposition of the images into geometric figures to represent the object in its entirety, including all its planes, in the work.
It had two stages: an analytic cubism, which sought the total decomposition of the object, and a synthetic cubism, in which the perspective is discarded to represent all the planes of the object in the same work. In poetry, his most popular style was calligraphy, whose main exponent was Guillaume Apollinaire.
Futurism
Futurism is an initial movement of avant-garde artistic currents, emerged in Milan (Italy) driven by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, who compiled and published the principles of futurism in the manifesto of February 20, 1909, in the newspaper Le Figaro from Paris. The following year, the Italian artists Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo and Mario Jordano signed the so-called Manifesto of Futurism.
Although it had a short existence, approximately until 1944 ending with the death of Marinetti, its influence can be seen in the works of Marcel Duchamp, Fernand Léger and Robert Delaunay in Paris, as well as in Russian constructivism and futurism. Futuristic texts brought a new myth: the machine.
This movement broke with tradition, the past and the conventional signs of art history. He considered courage, audacity and revolution as the main elements of poetry, since he proclaimed the aggressive movement, the feverish insomnia, the gymnastic step, the dangerous jump and the slap.
According to his manifesto, his postulates were the exaltation of the sensual, the national and the warrior, the adoration of the machine, the portrait of reality in movement, the objective of the literary and the special disposition of the written, in order to give it a plastic expression He rejected traditional aesthetics and tried to extol contemporary life, based on his two dominant themes: machine and movement.
Dadaism
It arose in Zurich, Switzerland, between 1916 and 1922. Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara were noted as founders and main exponents. The movement grew and quickly spread to Berlin and Paris. One of the reasons that led to the emergence of DADA was the extreme violence and loss of meaning brought by the First World War. Revealing itself against the status quo, the literary and artistic conventions and rejecting the conventions of the gentrified society – which they considered selfish and apathetic – the Dadaists made their art a modus vivendi.
The Dadaist poem used to be a succession of words and sounds, which makes it difficult to find logic. It was distinguished by an inclination towards the uncertain and the absurd. On the other hand, the Dadaist procedure sought to renew the expression through the use of unusual materials, or by handling plans of previously unmixable thoughts, with a general tone of rebellion or destruction.
Ultraism
Ultraism appeared in Spain between 1918 and 1922, promoted by Rafael Cansinos Assens, as a reaction to modernism.
It was one of the movements that most projected in the Spanish-speaking world, contributing to the use of free verse, the banning of anecdote and the development of metaphor, which would become the main expressive center.
Surrealism
Excision of dadaism, whose main representative was André Breton. The surrealist movement was organized in France in the 1920s around André Bretón who, inspired by Sigmund Freud, was interested in discovering the mechanisms of the unconscious and surpassing the real by means of the imaginary and the irrational. Of him and the times when he met him he spoke in “The communicating vessels”, an emblematic title that would become a metaphor for part of his creative aesthetic, as well as automatism or automatic writing, through which they would experiment with the dream and spiritualism, seeking to find pure art, not contaminated by conscience.
Estridentismo
The estridentismo was born of the mixture of several movements. It took place between 1922 and 1927 in Mexico and was characterized by modernity, cosmopolitanism and the urban, as well as by nonconformity, black humor, snobbery, irreverence and rejection of everything old. His immediate antecedent was Russian Futurism. Among its most important representatives is Germán List Arzubide and Manuel Maple.
Arieldentismo
The arieldentismo is a philosophical movement that postulated fundamentally that are the human beings, in individual form, those that create the meaning and the essence of their lives. It emerged as a movement in the literature and philosophy of the twentieth century, heir to the arguments of philosophers such as Sören Kierkegaard, Friederich Nietzsche and Miguel de Unamuno.
This movement usually describes the absence of a transcendental force; This means that the individual is free and, therefore, totally responsible for his actions, without the presence of a superior force that could determine his actions. This attributes to humans the creation of an ethic of individual responsibility, apart from any belief system external to it. This personal articulation of being is the only existing way to overcome, generally, religions, which deal with suffering, death and the end of the individual.
Source from Wikipedia