Existentialism. (See Existence.) Although modern existentialism as a fashionable philosophy on the continent of Europe had its heyday about the middle of the 20th c., its roots go much further back, not least in the French philosophical tradition in which it is adumbrated in various ways before. Jean-Paul Sartre, now its best-known modern exponent, popularized it. Existentialism is not necessarily either sympathetic or hostile to religion. Nevertheless, when it takes a religious form it is critical of certain aspects of religious thought and, when it takes a nihilistic, antireligious form, it is no less critical of certain traditionalist types of philosophy. Most noteworthy among Christian existentialists is Kierkegaard ( 1813-55), one of the most penetrating religious thinkers in human history, who took his starting point in a critique of Hegel, whose influence in his time and for long afterwards was paramount in Western philosophical thought, not only in Germany but in France, England, and America too, despite the traditionally empiricist tendencies of British and American philosophy. Kierkegaard sought to introduce, against the widely accepted Hegelian presuppositions of the academic world of his day, which emphasized rationality, objectivity, and essentialism, the importance of concepts such as subjectivity. God, he contended, in the face of a view that Hegel had made fashionable, is "pure subjectivity." By this he meant, inter alia, that God is totally unknown until confronted in what Buber was later to call an I-Thou relationship. Pascal, a mathematician and also one of the greatest religious geniuses in history, had long before, in his 17th c. French intellectual ambiance, presented insights into the nature of spirituality that show much affinity with Kierkegaard's. Kierkegaard put Angst at the heart of human experience as the most central of all human emotions and the basis of all others. By Angst he meant not ordinary fear or dread or anxiety such as we feel from time to time about this or that concern (e.g., our health, our financial future, and the like) but a radical anguish underlying all life's other concerns. The English translators have usually rendered Angst as "the sense of dread" while in French it is usually angoisse (anguish) and in Spanish agonia (agony), all expressing an irreducible and fundamental malaise at the root of human existence. Kierkegaard, through religious satire, in which he was a master, ridiculed the traditional, especially Hegelian, modes of thought as involving an outrageous arrogance: an attitude in which the philosopher is, as we might say, not only playing God but identifying himself with God. By contrast, Kierkegaard contended, authentic Christianity requires an attitude of faith, a trust in the One who reveals himself in personal relationship and in so doing discloses both the immensity of the gulf between God and man and the awesome and surprising intimacy that God's initiative makes possible, when man takes the "leap of faith" that opens up his awareness of both the distance and the proximity of God. Kierkegaard, neglected for some seventy years after his death, was a catalyst in the emergence of the existentialist types of philosophy that emerged in Germany after World War I. Later in the twenties such influences entered the French intellectual scene, issuing in an enormous resuscitation of themes implicit in much French thought. Sartre, in his novels and plays, gave these expression and was followed by others in the same nihilist vein, while no less affected were many of the great Protestant thinkers of the earlier part of the 20th c., including Tillich, Bultmann, and (in his earlier thought, at least) Barth. In more philosophical circles, Unamuno expressed in his Spanish idiom many such themes, such as "the tragic sense of life" and the importance of the individual. Probablythe most important among modern existentialists and one who immensely influenced Sartre is Heidegger, who emphasized the great existentialist themes: freedom, authenticity, and others. Bultmann was, among Christian theologians, especially influenced by Heidegger. Some French philosophers who were really in the Neo-idealist tradition were sometimes classified as demi-existentialistes, but that was largely because existentialist attitudes and themes had so affected all European thought by that time that no one could entirely escape their influence. Perhaps the most important element to note in viewing modern existentialism is that it has provided a vocabulary and an outlook by means of which both the protagonists and the antagonists of traditional religion can discuss the nature of their differences. Resistance to existentialism came from many diverse quarters, e.g., from idealists, from the earlier logical positivists, from Marxists, and from various highly traditionalist religious groups, Catholic and Protestant. It has indubitably altered, however, the course of both "secular" and "religious" thought.
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