EXISTENTIALISM. — It represents the latest and most vigorous form of reaction against idealism, which took its name and program from the Danish thinker Sören Kierkegaard (1813–55), but did not gain ground 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 itself and neo-Kantianism, and dialectical theology.
Opposition to idealism in Kierkegaard was sustained by an intense religious experience and was directed above all against Hegelian panlogism, to which he attributed most of the responsibility for the moral and spiritual degeneration of the nineteenth century. Against the dominion of abstract “essence,” in which quantitative Hegelian dialectic moves, Kierkegaard set the “existence” of the concrete individual and the “qualitative dialectic” of freedom; against the overcoming of the opposition of contraries by the trick of mediation, he set the “situation” in which crises of conscience agitate every human being and in which each person is compelled to make the “leap” of choice; against the empty totality of the impersonal spirit embodied in the State and in universal history, he affirmed the unsurpassable individuality of the “single individuals” who, in their nature as “spirits,” unlike the animal immersed in its species, each find themselves “before God,” isolated in their own secret of guilt, faith, hope, and 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 confusing everything. Therefore, the Hegelian method, which dialectically develops essences and overcomes oppositions while remaining within the objectivity of abstract thought, must be replaced by the “indirect method,” which appeals to the “subjectivity” of the individual’s being and is expressed only in the categories that set individual freedom in motion and keep it under tension.
Alongside the fundamental category of the “single individual,” Kierkegaard develops many others (sin, anxiety, choice, repetition, the instant...); but their meaning varies profoundly according to whether the “single individual” moves within the sphere of pure ethicality, as Socrates does, or has entered the authentic religious stage, the Christianity of the New Testament. The purely aesthetic stage, into which, together with ancient paganism, romanticism, the Enlightenment, and Hegelian neo-paganism also fall, remains outside the authentic existential sphere: they represent pure aestheticism, devoid of an authentic relationship to the Absolute.
The proponents of contemporary e. seek to organize Kierkegaardian themes within a more rigorous doctrinal, philosophical, or theological structure. The theological e. of “dialectical theology” has deepened, by making it more stringent, the relationship between man and God in which Kierkegaard placed the essential moment of existence that does not wish to be dispersed in the shoreless sea of finitude. By radicalizing, in a Calvinist sense, what the Danish philosopher, in opposition to the reduction of Hegelian dialectic from the infinite to the finite, had called the “infinite qualitative difference” between God and man, K. Barth first denies every possibility of a relationship between the two terms within the order of nature, and then understands this possibility within 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 greatest distance to which the sin with which one is irremediably clothed can carry one (Der Römerbrief, Zurich 1949, p. XIII). In the more recent development of his dogmatics, however, Barth tacitly repudiated this adherence of his to e., denying theology every opportunity and possibility of “existential” rethinking, since this would bring humanism within the sphere of Faith (Die Kirchliche Dogmatik, 5th ed., I, 1, Zurich 1947, p. 19). Thus, whereas for Kierkegaard the “paradox” constitutes one of the moments of existence, the one that precedes Faith and that Faith itself overcomes through its higher positivity, and therefore within a new sphere victorious over doubt, for Barth the paradox is the impact, the absurd, and the permanent scandal; likewise, “sin” is not remitted through Redemption, but it is precisely because of Redemption that man suffers its accusation and must bear all its weight and condemnation. More positive, on the other hand, is the existential impulse developed by other dialectical theologians (Gogarten, Tillich, K. Heim, R. Bultmann, M. Buber...) around the relationship of “I–Thou,” of evident Romantic derivation and appearing already in Feuerbach, though confined to 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), whereas these authors seek in various ways to find in God the ultimate “true ‘Thou’” of the dialogue in which human consciousness awaits the word of truth and salvation. In Kierkegaard, in accordance with his sound theological realism, this divine “Thou” is offered only through the work of Jesus Christ, as grace and as example; it is therefore in him that the divine “Thou” can and must be encountered.
The task of the philosophical e. of the German Kierkegaard Renaissance was to give a rigorously “human” structure and content to the “theological categories” of Kierkegaardian existence: the “dialectic of transcendence” within the metaphysical-theological sphere, by which Kierkegaard reached Faith as the authentic sphere of absolute truth, is replaced by a “dialectic of transcendence” in a merely actualist sense. Man’s being is posited as a function of a “possibility” of being which, insofar as it is “freedom,” is called to actualize itself in the world in which he lives (situation), and existence becomes precisely this freedom, which continually transcends itself in the “world” of things and persons with which it lives: a transcendence, therefore, that does not oppose immanence but interprets it as the sphere of finitude constitutive of the consciousness and freedom of the individual.
There have been two principal directions in German philosophical e.: one, represented by K. Jaspers (1883), refers, especially for the theory of consciousness, above all to Kant; the other, represented by M. Heidegger (1889), has remained, at least in its principal work (Sein und Zeit, Halle auf der Saale 1927), more closely attached to the dialectic of Hegelian negativity. Jaspers conceives man as immersed in the being that surrounds us everywhere (hence the expression: das Umgreifende); the only task is to find one’s orientation in order to move and actualize oneself. Jaspers therefore distinguishes between the being “that we are,” which is the central and active nucleus of being, and the being that we are not but which 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 Kantian fashion, as “being in itself” (v. Vermut und Existenz, Groningen–Batavia 1935, p. 39). In his more recent work, Jaspers develops further the relations between consciousness and the twofold sphere of reality 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 that which sustains us in the tension of the opposing polarities of consciousness as it turns toward the world and toward transcendence (Der philosophische Glaube, Munich 1948, pp. 16 ff.), and man’s faith in his possibility, in which he breathes his freedom (ibid., p. 50). Thus the mediation of Christ in Kierkegaard is replaced by individual autonomy and the absoluteness of reason, which subordinates religion to itself (ibid., pp. 85 ff.).
Heidegger eliminates any reference to transcendence in the metaphysical sense, even as a simple “limit-situation” (Grenz-Situation), as 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 the being of man “as existent lies entirely in his ‘transcending himself,’ in referring himself to something else (‘intentionality’); consciousness in itself is ‘nothing’ without reference to the object, and it is this nothing that forms the ground of existence; in other words, the being of the existent must be conceived according to this nothing. Under the impetus of this nothing, Heideggerian transcendence is first realized as “being” in the “world” (in “der Welt sein”), conceived as a collection of “utensils” to be used; but this first degree 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 or “projected” toward an end which it approaches and which is, ultimately, death itself (Sein zum Tode). Thus Heidegger can affirm that the essence of truth is itself “freedom” as an act (Ermöglichung), and no longer in the Aristotelian-Thomistic sense as adequation between the subject and reality (Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, c. 3; French trans., Louvain 1948, p. 72). The entire perspective, therefore, of Heidegger’s philosophy has been understood as antimetaphysical; fundamentally, in it the categories of Kierkegaardian e. (anguish, decision, sin, guilt...) have been completely inverted so as to signify worldly and indifferent contents. In the latest essays published after the Second World War, Heidegger seems to offer an interpretation of being akin to that of the pre-Socratics (especially Parmenides); there is even some mention of the problem of God, but it is declared to remain outside the sphere of being and of philosophy, which can pronounce neither for nor against it, and it is said to be thinkable only from the “essence of holiness” (Brief über den Humanismus, in Plateau Lehre von der Wahrheit, Berne 1947, p. 101 ff.). These hints are wholly insufficient, because he does not “understand how a holiness can be ‘posited’ for a being, namely man, whose potential being is rooted in and culminates in nothingness.
A rectification of Heideggerian existence in a positive direction has been attempted in Italy by Abbagnano (b. 1901) and in France by J.-P. Sartre (b. 1906). Whereas in Heidegger the foundation of existence and of its relation to being is, so to speak, its “insistence” in nothingness, or the impossibility that existence should not be nothingness; and whereas in Jaspers this foundation is instead given by its transcending toward being without ever reaching it, that is, by the impossibility that existence should be being, Abbagnano identifies existence with the very relation it has to being and defines it as the “possibility that it be the relation to being” (Introduzione all’e., 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, while on the other it is his very “freedom” in action, in which existence unfolds: a variety of attitudes which in the latest writings are simply traced back to faith, understood as “the fundamental mode of being in which all the manifestations of man can take root and from which all can derive their specific meaning” (Filosofo, religione, scienza, Turin 1947, p. 73). This “faith” Abbagnano still seems to limit to the sphere of immanence, or, as he says, “bringing Kierkegaard back to Kant” (cf.: E. positivo, Turin 1948, p. 36 ff.), because value can 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” may be indicated as the “ontologization of the phenomenon,” in which he sees the result of the whole of 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 remainder, with appearance; and appearance does not refer to a hidden being underlying it or other than it, but to the “total series” of appearances themselves: the being of these appearances in turn becomes immediately present in the negative situations of boredom, nausea... to which Sartre reduces Kierkegaard’s theological anguish and Heidegger’s cosmic anguish. This appearance has the function of “activating” consciousness toward the world, which the phenomenon precisely has the function (intentionality) of presenting; and thus Sartre has been able to formulate the extreme principle of e., according to which “existence precedes essence,” and consequently to define consciousness as “a being for which, in its being, there is a question of its being insofar as this being implies a being different from itself” (ibid., p. 20; author’s italics). It is therefore the “negative” that lies at the foundation of existence, which fails to be joined in a higher synthesis, as in Hegel, but rather persists in deepening the opposition between the two terms which, in Hegelian terminology, Sartre calls the En soi (world) and the Pour-soi (consciousness), each of which is constituted according to the negation it exercises with respect to the other (cf. ibid., p. 232). The ideal would be to achieve a type of synthesis like the Hegelian one, to “metamorphose,” as Sartre says, one’s 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 an “useless passion” (ibid., p. 708). Sartre has categorically affirmed that his atheism is the only truly coherent one and that it enables man simultaneously to find himself again in his action, which is his self-making (cf.: L'existenzialismo est un humanisme, Paris 1946, pp. 21 ff., 94 ff.). All of Sartre’s writings were condemned by the Holy Office on 6 November 1948. A. Camus, A. Malraux, and S. de Beauvoir are associated with Sartre’s moral and theological nihilism.
A positive e., inspired by the originality of spiritual life, is instead asserted by the dramatist and art critic G. Marcel (1883), who converted to Catholicism in 1920 and who currently conducts an energetic critique of the e. opposed to Sartre. Proceeding from a conception of man’s being as a “having,” that is, as “being in a body,” as the situa-
fundamental situation of existence with the opposition between external and internal, Marcel has concentrated existential dialectic around spiritual life as the “communion” of love between the self and others. In this sphere, existential categories such as anguish, decision, project... give way and rather become transfigured into an attitude which Marcel designates with the theological terms faith, hope, charity..., specifying that he limits himself to analyzing the spiritual structures as they are given in existential dialectic, without prejudging 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 exercised against the life of the spirit by the negative internal and external factors present in the situation. Thus, for Marcel, hope is “essentially” the availability of a soul that is inwardly engaged in an experience of communion, in order to perform the act that transcends the opposition between willing and knowing, by which it affirms the living perpetuity of which this experience at once offers “the pledge and the first fruits” (Homo viator, Paris 1944, p. 7). In every analysis Marcel makes existential problematic gravitate around two moments: the problem with which it begins, and the mystery toward which its movement leads, in which there is therefore accomplished a kind of passage to the limit toward the suprarational, which is also supra-relational and consequently belongs to the Absolute (cf. ibid., p. 47). This is therefore a dialectical and spiritualistic phenomenology, rich in profound intuitions that may prove capable of considerable development when both their point of departure and their method succeed in imposing themselves with greater consistency, freeing themselves from the anti-metaphysical prejudice.
Among others in France, R. Le Senne and L. Lavelle also appear to adhere to positive existentialism; particular mention should be made of N. Berdiaeff (d. 1947) for his metaphysics of creative freedom and his Boehmian-Schellingian background. In Germany, forms of Christian existentialism were defended by P. Wust (d. 1942) and Th. Haecher (d. 1946): the former, a disciple of Max Scheler, was an acute phenomenologist of “piety,” while the latter was one of the finest translators and expositors of Kierkegaard, vigorously combating the Protestant or atheistic Kierkegaard-Renaissance.
It is therefore not easy to offer an overall judgment of existentialism. As a point of departure and “symptom” of the definitive decline of the “Enlightenment man,” existentialism has 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,” existentialism has not yet clarified itself sufficiently, and often seems to return to one or another of the philosophies 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 its definitive attitude, it must be acknowledged that existentialism is difficult to reconcile with traditional Christian thought. On the other hand, it is not clear why this same thought, while remaining faithful to essences and to their ontological hierarchy, should not leave open the possibility of an authentic dialectic of an existential type within the sphere of freedom and the life of the spirit, of which not only Kierkegaard but already Pascal, the finest mystical tradition, and s. Agostino himself have offered splendid illustrations.