EXISTENTIALISM. - It represents the last and most energetic form of reaction against idealism, which took its programmatic name from the Danish thinker Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55), but which did not gain a foothold in European culture until the first decades of our century with the German Kierkegaard-Renaissance, under the influence of multiple currents of thought such as the philosophy of life, phenomenology, Nietzschean titanism, psychoanalysis, idealism and neo-Kantianism themselves, and dialectical theology.
The opposition to idealism was sustained in Kierkegaard by an intense religious experience and was directed first of all against Hegelian panlogism, to which he attributed most of the responsibility for the moral and spiritual degeneration of the nineteenth century. To the dominion of abstract "essence," in which the quantitative Hegelian dialectic moves, Kierkegaard opposed the "existence" of the concrete individual and the "qualitative dialectic" of freedom; to the overcoming of the opposition of contraries by the trick of mediation he counterposed the "situation" in which the crises of conscience agitate every man and the "leap" of choice imposes itself upon each one; against the empty totality of the impersonal spirit that is concretized in the State and in universal history, he affirmed the insuperable individuality of "single individuals" who, in their own nature as "spirits," unlike the animal immersed in its genus, each find themselves "before God," isolated in their own secret of guilt, of faith, of hope, of love: like Socrates, Abraham, Job... To claim, as Hegel does, that "essence" and therefore reason explains everything and that "the inner is also the outer," means abolishing the very originality of spiritual life and confounding everything. Therefore the Hegelian method, which dialecticizes essences and overcomes oppositions while remaining within the objectivity of abstract thought, must be replaced by the "indirect method" that appeals to the "subjectivity" of the individual's being and expresses itself only in the categories that move and hold individual freedom in tension.
Alongside the fundamental category of the "single individual," Kierkegaard develops many others (sin, anguish, choice, repetition, the instant...); but their meaning varies profoundly according to whether the "single individual" moves on the plane of pure ethics like Socrates and has entered the authentic religious stage, the Christianity of the New Testament. The purely aesthetic stage, into which fall, along with ancient paganism, also Romanticism, the Enlightenment and Hegelian neo-paganism, remains outside the authentic existential sphere: they represent pure aestheticism, devoid of an authentic relation to the Absolute.
The proponents of contemporary existentialism aim to organize the Kierkegaardian themes into a more tightly knit doctrinal structure, whether philosophical or theological. The theological existentialism of "dialectical theology" has deepened, while hardening it, the relation of man to God in which Kierkegaard placed the essential moment of existence that does not wish to disperse itself in the shoreless sea of finitude. Exasperating, in a Calvinist sense, what the Danish philosopher, against the reduction of the Hegelian dialectic of the infinite to the finite, had called the "infinite qualitative difference" between God and man, K. Barth denies first of all any possibility of relation between the two terms in the order of nature, and then includes this possibility in the order of Grace, insofar as it is bestowed in Christ, not in the sense of drawing near to God but rather of projecting oneself far from him to the maximum distance to which the sin with which one is irremediably clothed leads (Der Römerbrief, Zurich 1949, p. XIII). In the recent elaboration of his dogmatics, however, Barth has tacitly disavowed this adherence of his to existentialism, denying to theology any opportunity and possibility of "existential" rethinking, insofar as it would bring humanism back within the ambit of the Faith (Die Kirchliche Dogmatik, 5th ed., I, 1, Zurich 1947, p. 19). Whereas therefore for Kierkegaard the "paradox" constitutes one of the moments of existence, the one that precedes Faith and that Faith itself overcomes with its higher positivity and thus in a new sphere victorious over doubt: for Barth the paradox is the clash, the absurd and the permanent scandal, just as "sin" is not remitted with the Redemption but it is precisely through it that man suffers its accusation and must bear all its weight and condemnation. More positive, on the other hand, remains the existential cue developed by other dialectical theologians (Gogarten, Tillich, K. Heim, R. Bultmann, M. Buber...) around the "I-thou" relation, of evident Romantic derivation and which appears in Feuerbach himself but confined within immanence ("Die wahre Dialektik ist kein Monolog des einsamen Denkers mit sich selbst, sie ist ein Dialog zwischen Ich und Du"; L. Feuerbach, Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft, § 64, Zurich 1843, p. 83), while these authors seek in various ways to find in God the ultimate true "thou" of the colloquy in which human consciousness awaits the word of truth and salvation. In Kierkegaard, in conformity with his sound theological realism, this divine "thou" is offered only through the work of Jesus Christ, as grace and as example, and it is therefore in him that the divine "thou" can and must be encountered.
The task of the philosophical existentialism of the German Kierkegaard-Renaissance has been to give a rigorously "human" structure and content to the "theological categories" of Kierkegaardian existence: to the "dialectic of transcendence" in the metaphysical-theological ambit, with which Kierkegaard reached the Faith as the authentic sphere of absolute truth, is substituted a "dialectic of transcendence" in a merely actualist sense. The being of man is posited in function of a "possibility" of being which, insofar as it is "freedom," is called to actualize itself in the world in which it lives (situation), and existence becomes precisely this freedom that continually transcends itself into the "world" of things and persons with which it lives: a transcendence therefore that is not opposed to immanence but interprets it as the sphere of finitude that is constitutive of the consciousness and freedom of the individual.
Two have been the principal directions of German philosophical existentialism: the one, with K. Jaspers (1883), appeals (for the theory of consciousness) above all to Kant; the other, with M. Heidegger (1889), has remained, at least in its principal work (Sein und Zeit, Halle on the Saale 1927), more adherent to the dialectic of Hegelian negativity. Jaspers conceives man as immersed in the being that surrounds us everywhere (hence it is called: das Umgreifende); it is merely a matter of finding one's orientation, in order to move and actualize oneself. Jaspers therefore distinguishes the being "that we are," which is the central and operative nucleus of being, and the being that we are not but that forms our limit, as our "other" (als das Andere), whether it be simple empirical reality (the world), or transcendence as such, which Jaspers understands, in the manner of Kant, as "being in itself" (v. Vernunft und Existenz, Groningen-Batavia 1935, p. 39). In his more recent work Jaspers further develops the relations between consciousness and the double sphere of the real that limits it, concentrating them in what he calls "philosophical faith," which is defined as the supreme moment of being, insofar as it consists in the act of existence in which transcendence becomes "consciousness of its actuality" (Wirklichkeit); it is therefore what sustains us in the tension of the contrasting polarities of consciousness in its turning toward the world and toward transcendence (Der philosophische Glaube, Munich 1948, p. 16 ff.), and man's faith in his possibility in which he breathes his freedom (ibid., p. 50). Thus the mediation of Christ, of Kierkegaard, is replaced by individual autonomy and by the absoluteness of reason, which subordinates religion to itself (ibid., p. 85 ff.).
Heidegger eliminates any reference to transcendence in the metaphysical sense, even as a simple "limit-situation" (Grenz-Situation) as the Divinity is conceived in the philosophy of Jaspers. Philosophy, according to Heidegger, must be "ontology," and its task is "to unveil" the truth of being that things conceal ("λάβεινε"). The truth of man's being "as existing" lies entirely in his "transcending himself," in referring to something else ("intentionality"); consciousness by itself is "nothing" without reference to the object, and it is this nothing that serves as the ground of existence, or rather, according to this nothing the being of the existent must be conceived. Under the impulse of this nothing, Heideggerian transcendence is realized first of all as "being" in the "world" (in "der Welt sein") conceived as a set of "tools" to be used; but this first level would be meaningless if man's action were not coordinated with that of others, if it were not "for others" and "with others" (Mitschi); finally his action would lack its ultimate meaning if it were not referred to, or "projected" toward, an end that it encounters and which is, in the final analysis, death itself (Sein zum Tode). Thus Heidegger can affirm that the essence of truth is "freedom" itself as act (Ermöglichung) and no longer in the Aristotelian-Thomistic sense as adequation between the subject and reality (Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, ch. 3; French trans., Louvain 1948, p. 72). The entire perspective of Heidegger's philosophy has therefore been understood as anti-metaphysical, and fundamentally it is so, since in it the categories of Kierkegaardian existentialism (anguish, decision, sin, guilt...) have been completely overturned to signify worldly and indifferent contents. In the last essays that appeared after the Second World War, Heidegger seems to give an interpretation of being akin to that of the Presocratics (especially Parmenides); there is even some mention of the problem of God, but it is declared to remain outside the scope of being and of philosophy, which cannot pronounce either for or against it, and it is said to be thinkable only starting from the "essence of holiness" (Brief über den Humanismus, in Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit, Bern 1947, p. 101 ff.). These are entirely insufficient hints, because he does not "understand how a holiness can 'posit itself' for a being, as man is said to be, whose potentiality-for-being is rooted in and comes back to nothing.
A rectification in a positive sense of Heideggerian existence has been attempted in Italy by Abbagnano (b. 1901) and in France by J.-P. Sartre (b. 1906). While in Heidegger the foundation of existence and of its relating to being is, so to speak, its "insistence" in nothing, or the impossibility that existence not be nothing; and in Jaspers such a foundation is given instead by its transcending toward being but without ever reaching it, that is, by the impossibility that existence be being. Abbagnano identifies existence with the very relation it has with being and defines it as "the possibility that it be the relation with being" (Introduzione all'esistenzialismo, Milan 1942, p. 28). This relation is man's activity in the world and with his fellow men, so that on the one hand it constitutes the "problematic" constitutive of his being, and on the other it is his very "freedom" in act in which existence unfolds: a variety of attitudes which in the last writings are traced back without further ado to faith understood as the fundamental mode of being in which all of man's manifestations can be rooted and from which all can derive their specific meaning (Filosofia, religione, scienza, Turin 1947, p. 73). This "faith" Abbagnano seems still to confine within the sphere of immanence, or, as he says, "by bringing Kierkegaard back to Kant" (cf. Esistenzialismo positivo, Turin 1948, p. 36 ff.), because value comes to be founded in the sphere of the purely human.
The negation of every value seems instead to lie at the root of Sartre's literary and philosophical work. Its "beginning" can be indicated as the "ontologization of the phenomenon," in which he sees the result of all modern philosophy, which would have reduced "the existent to the series of appearances that manifest it" (L'être et le néant, Paris 1948, p. 17). Thus being is identified, without residue, with the appeared; and appearance does not point back to a hidden being behind it or other than it, but to the "total series" of appearances themselves: the being of these appearances in turn makes itself present immediately in the negative situations of boredom, nausea... to which Sartre reduces Kierkegaard's theological anguish and Heidegger's cosmic one. This appearance has the function of "activating" consciousness toward the world which the phenomenon has precisely the function (intentionality) of presenting, and thus Sartre was able to give the extreme formula of existentialism according to which "existence precedes essence," and consequently to define consciousness as "a being for which there is in its being a question of its being insofar as this being implies a being different from it" (ibid., p. 20; author's italics). It is the "negative," therefore, that lies at the foundation of existence, which does not succeed in welding itself into a higher synthesis, as in Hegel, but rather insists on rooting more deeply the opposition of the two terms which, with Hegelian terminology, Sartre calls the En-soi (world) and the Pour-soi (consciousness), each of which is constituted in function of the negation it exercises with respect to the other (cf. ibid., p. 232). The ideal would be to be able to reach a type of synthesis like the Hegelian one, to "metamorphose," as Sartre says, one's own Pour-soi into an En-soi-Pour-soi, realizing that "causa sui" which religions call God...: an absurd undertaking because the idea of God is contradictory and man is a "useless passion" (ibid., p. 708). Sartre has categorically affirmed that his atheism is the only truly coherent one and that it allows man at the same time to find himself again in his acting, which is his making himself (cf. L'existentialisme est un humanisme, Paris 1946, pp. 21 ff., 94 ff.). All of Sartre's writings were condemned by the Holy Office on 6 Nov. 1948. To Sartre's moral and theological nihilism A. Camus, A. Malraux, and S. de Beauvoir draw near.
A positive existentialism, on the other hand, inspired by the originality of spiritual life, is affirmed in the dramatist and art critic G. Marcel (1883), who converted to Catholicism in 1920 and who currently brings a critical energy to bear against Sartre's antagonistic existentialism. Moving from a conception of man's being as a "having," that is, as "being in a body," as the situation fundamental to existence, with the opposition of external and internal, Marcel concentrated the existential dialectic around the spiritual life as a "communion" of love of the self with others. In this sphere the existential categories such as anguish, decision, project... give way and rather are transfigured into an attitude that Marcel indicates with the theological terms of faith, hope, charity..., specifying that he limits himself to analyzing the spiritual structures as they are given in the existential dialectic, without prejudice to what may come to man from a higher source. Each of the structures just mentioned constitutes the effective "overcoming" of dispersion and the victory over the dispersive pressure exerted against the life of the spirit by the negative factors, internal and external, present in the situation. Thus for Marcel hope is "essentially" the availability of a soul that is intimately engaged in an experience of communion in order to accomplish the act that transcends the opposition of willing and knowing, with which it affirms the living perenniality of which this experience offers at one and the same time "the pledge and the first fruits" (Homo viator, Paris 1944, p. 7). In every analysis Marcel makes the existential problematic gravitate around two moments: the problem with which it begins, and the mystery to which its movement leads, in which there is therefore accomplished a kind of passage to the limit toward the suprarational, which is also a supra-relational and belongs therefore to the Absolute (cf. ibid., p. 47). It is therefore a question of a dialectical and spiritualistic phenomenology, rich in profound intuitions that may be susceptible of notable developments when both their point of departure and their method succeed in imposing themselves with greater consistency, freeing themselves from the antimetaphysical prejudice.
To positive e. there seem to adhere in France, among others, also R. Le Senne and L. Lavelle; particular mention is deserved by N. Berdyaev (d. 1947) for the metaphysics of creative freedom and a Boehmian-Schellingian background. In Germany forms of Christian e. were defended by P. Wust (d. 1942) and Th. Haecker (d. 1946): the first, a disciple of Max Scheler, was an acute phenomenologist of "piety," while the second was one of the best translators and expositors of Kierkegaard, struggling vigorously against the Protestant or atheist Kierkegaard-Renaissance.
It is therefore not easy to give an overall judgment of e. As a point of departure and "symptom" of the definitive decline of "Enlightenment man," e. has a decisive importance insofar as it vindicates the freedom and dignity of the individual and shows the inconsistency of the finite and the impossibility of transforming it into the infinite. As a "method" e. has not yet sufficiently clarified itself, and often it seems to return to one or another philosophy that it wishes to criticize, especially if it persists in excluding every metaphysical foundation by admitting the absolute priority of existence over essence. If this were the definitive attitude, one must recognize that e. is hardly reconcilable with traditional Christian thought. On the other hand, one does not see why this same thought, while remaining faithful to essences and their ontological hierarchy, should not leave open the possibility of an authentic dialectic of an existential type within the sphere of freedom and of the life of the spirit, of which not only Kierkegaard but already Pascal, the best mysticism and St. Augustine himself have offered excellent illustrations.