@Marxist @nomesorah: The term ’emancipation of Jews’ as was used by the philosophers of the nineteenth centuries are anti-Semitic in essence. There is a marked difference in the goal of the Jewish ‘enlighteners’ vis-a-vis the broader enlightenment project. Where for Mendelsohn and the Berliner group Enlightenment ideology was a form of separation of Church and State, for the secular enlighteners it was quite different.
Mendelsohn was more or less an observant Jew, and was espousing a form of integration, he was however a firm believer in making a religion a private affair as he famously puts in Jerusalem. The Jewish enlighteners were very much for rationalizing religion.
However, for the secular world, the culmination of the Enlightenment was a revolution of religion as a whole, and in which there was no place for Judaism. Let me contextualize this. It is telling that the early Jewish Enlighteners were more aligned with the Wollfian school of classical metaphysics, and not with the ‘Copernican revolution’ proposed by Kant. (Maimon being a noted exception, although he was not a typical Jewish Enlightener). [And the later Jewish Enlightener were at the most Neo-Kantians, think Herman Cohen]. The reason why this is of note is because it is precisely the insistence of Kant’s Transcendental Metaphysics, which relegates religion to nothing but the adherence to “Categorical Imperative” which is a frontal attack against Judaism and all that it stands for. A ‘Clerical Religion” vs. an “Ideal Religion”. The infamous Jacobian Controversy would be a historical case study.
As for the comments on Sartre being a founder of Existentialism, even if one were to grant him this dubious title the criticism is way off mark; especially the critique of Kierkegaard. If anything this would be a critique of Phenomenalism which is a system of epistemology not existentialism. As Kierkegaard, who is actually considered to have laid the groundwork for existentialism, puts it an objective truth can also be experienced and become a subjective truth. In other words, Kierkegaard never denied objective truths, nor is there any room in any of his arguments to interpertate this. Rather all he does is add another layer to truths, through experience. This does not in any way negate objectivity in any way.
If one wants to blame postmodernisms subjectivity blame it, however absurd, on Cartesian in its’ radical forms such as Berkeleyan Idealism. Or perhaps on the critique of Kant’s ‘Thing in Itself’….