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Existentialism — the philosophy that begins from concrete individual existence rather than abstract systems, and dwells on freedom, choice, anxiety, authenticity and death — stands in a famously double relation to religion. Its founder, Kierkegaard, was a passionate, if unconventional, Christian for whom existentialist categories drove towards faith; its most famous twentieth-century exponent, Sartre, made the non-existence of God the very engine of his thought; and Nietzsche, in proclaiming that "God is dead," diagnosed the collapse of the whole framework of meaning that theism had underwritten. In between stand the religious existentialists — Tillich, who reconceives God as the "ground of being," and Bultmann, who demythologises the New Testament into a summons to authentic existence. The shared move is to relocate the question of God from cool metaphysics to the lived predicament of the existing individual. This lesson sets out Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Sartre, Tillich and Bultmann (with Buber and Heidegger as supporting figures) precisely, and asks the evaluative question that runs through the topic: does existentialism enrich religious faith by restoring its personal depth, or dissolve it by reducing God to a function of human existence?
One orienting clarification will save much confusion. "Existentialism" is not a single doctrine but a style of philosophising, united by a handful of shared convictions rather than shared conclusions: that the existing individual, not the abstract system, is the proper starting point; that human beings are characterised by freedom and possibility rather than fixed essence; that moods such as anxiety, dread and despair are disclosive, revealing the structure of existence rather than being mere psychological noise; and that the urgent questions are first-personal — how am I to live, choose, and face death? — rather than third-personal and detached. Precisely because these convictions can be held by believer and atheist alike, existentialism cuts across the theism/atheism divide: it is a lens, and what one sees through it depends on whether God is in the picture. That is why the same vocabulary of anxiety, authenticity and decision appears in Kierkegaard's defence of Christian faith and in Sartre's case for its abandonment.
Soren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) is generally regarded as the father of existentialism, though the label was applied after his death. He revolted against the grand system-building of Hegel, in which the individual is a moment in the unfolding of Absolute Spirit. Against this he set the existing individual and the truths one must live: "the thing is to find a truth which is true for me, to find the idea for which I can live and die" (journal, 1835).
Key term: Existentialism — the philosophical outlook that gives priority to concrete individual existence, freedom and choice over abstract systems and essences; "existence precedes essence" in the human case.
Kierkegaard analysed anxiety (Angest) as the "dizziness of freedom" — not fear of a particular object but the vertigo of facing one's own open possibilities. The properly religious response is the leap of faith: a passionate, decisive commitment to God that outruns objective proof. Faith is necessary because God's existence cannot be demonstrated; if it could, the venture and inwardness that constitute faith would be lost. For Kierkegaard "truth is subjectivity" — in the religious sphere, what matters is not detached correspondence but the passionate how of appropriation.
Key term: Truth is subjectivity — Kierkegaard's claim that, in the religious sphere, what matters is not the detached correctness of a proposition but the passionate inwardness with which an existing individual appropriates and lives it.
He dramatised this through Abraham in Fear and Trembling (1843, under the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio): Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac at God's command is a teleological suspension of the ethical, in which the "knight of faith" is willing to set aside the universal moral law for an absolute duty to God — an act that looks, from the outside, indistinguishable from murder, and that can be sustained only "by virtue of the absurd." Faith here is not comfortable assent but fear, trembling and paradox.
Key term: Teleological suspension of the ethical — Kierkegaard's claim (in Fear and Trembling) that faith may require setting aside the universal ethical law for the sake of a higher, absolute duty to God, as Abraham was willing to do with Isaac.
Kierkegaard set this within his account of the three spheres or stages of existence, which a self may traverse. The aesthetic life is lived for pleasure, novelty and the immediate moment; its sophisticated form is the seducer or the connoisseur, but it ends in boredom and despair because the aesthete has no enduring self, only a series of moods. The ethical life is lived under duty and universal moral law; the ethical individual commits, marries, takes responsibility, and gains a continuous self — but the ethical confronts the person with a guilt it cannot discharge, for no one perfectly fulfils the law, and so the ethical, taken to its limit, points beyond itself. The religious life is reached only by a leap: it is the individual's passionate, paradoxical relation to God, in which (as with Abraham) the ethical may even be suspended for an absolute duty. Crucially, one cannot reason one's way from sphere to sphere; the transitions are qualitative leaps, decisions that remake the self rather than conclusions that follow from premises. The schema matters for the philosophy of religion because it locates faith not as a belief added to an otherwise unchanged life but as a transformation of existence — which is precisely why Kierkegaard thinks the attempt to settle God's existence by detached argument misses the target: it treats as a spectator's question what is really a question of how one exists.
The Abraham story repays close attention because it concentrates everything distinctive and everything troubling in Kierkegaard. Distinctive: Abraham cannot explain himself. If he could give ethical reasons for raising the knife — "the greater good required it" — he would be a tragic hero (like Agamemnon sacrificing Iphigenia for the fleet), admirable but comprehensible. Instead Abraham acts on a private command that suspends the very ethics that would condemn him, and so he must remain silent; faith here is radically singular, a relation of "the single individual" to the Absolute that cannot be mediated by the universal. Troubling: this seems to license exactly the kind of unconstrained, unaccountable conviction that, in other hands, produces fanaticism — how, from the outside (or even the inside), is Abraham distinguishable from a deluded man who hears voices? Kierkegaard does not flinch from this; the "fear and trembling" is the recognition that faith of this kind is dreadful, not cosy, and stands perpetually on the knife-edge between sanctity and madness. For the philosophy of religion the example poses the permanent question raised against all fideism: once faith is detached from public rational and ethical assessment, what protects it from arbitrariness?
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) gives the atheistic existentialist diagnosis. In The Gay Science (1882) his madman runs into the marketplace crying, "God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him." The claim is not a metaphysical proof that no God exists; it is a cultural-historical observation: belief in the Christian God has lost its grip on European life, and with it the entire scaffolding of objective values, meaning and purpose that it supported. The madman's horror is that those who have "killed" God have not grasped the magnitude of the deed: "Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing?" Nietzsche feared that the death of God would issue in nihilism — the collapse of all values into meaninglessness — and his constructive response is the revaluation of all values and the project of the Übermensch (overman), who creates new, life-affirming values out of the will to power, the fundamental drive Nietzsche took to underlie life.
It is essential to read the parable correctly, because it is widely misquoted as a triumphant atheist boast. The madman's tone is not triumph but horror and grief: "How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?" Nietzsche's point is that the consequences of the death of God have not yet been felt; the madman comes "too early," and the very people who no longer believe have not reckoned with the abyss their unbelief opens. For Nietzsche, Christianity had underwritten not only doctrine but the whole moral framework of the West — compassion, equality, the value of truth, the meaning of suffering — and you cannot quietly remove the foundation while keeping the building. This is his charge against the comfortable Victorian agnostics (and, in effect, against a thinker like George Eliot): they want Christian morality without the Christian God, but the morality has no standing once its source is gone. Nietzsche's own response — the revaluation of values, amor fati ("love of fate"), the eternal recurrence as a test of life-affirmation, and the Übermensch who creates values rather than receiving them — is an attempt to face the abyss honestly and build anew on the far side of nihilism. For the philosophy of religion he poses the sharpest possible question, and one a Christian apologist can even turn to advantage: if theism goes, can objective meaning and morality survive its loss, or do they go down with it? (Notably, the contemporary moral argument for God — that objective moral values require a theistic foundation — is in part a response to Nietzsche's warning, conceding his "if" while resisting his atheism.)
Key term: "God is dead" — Nietzsche's claim that belief in God has ceased to function as the foundation of Western meaning and value, threatening nihilism unless new values are created.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–1980) developed the most influential atheistic existentialism. In Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946) he announced the slogan "existence precedes essence." A paper-knife has its essence (its design and purpose) before it exists, in the mind of the artisan; for human beings there is no such artisan, no divine designer, and so we first exist and then define ourselves through our choices. There is no fixed human nature, no blueprint, no assigned purpose. We are, in his phrase, "condemned to be free."
Key term: Existence precedes essence — Sartre's claim that human beings have no predetermined nature or purpose; we exist first and create our essence through free choice.
The non-existence of God is, for Sartre, the starting point, not a casual addendum. He works out its consequences honestly: there is no God to ground objective values, so "if God does not exist, everything is permitted" (he borrows the worry from Dostoevsky); we face abandonment (left without external guidance), anguish (the dread of total responsibility, for in choosing for myself I "choose for all"), and the temptation of bad faith (mauvaise foi) — fleeing the burden of freedom by pretending we are not free, that our role, nature or circumstances made us act. Religious belief, on Sartre's analysis, is a prime case of bad faith: it surrenders responsibility to a God who supposedly assigns us essence and duty, sparing us the anguish of self-creation. Authentic existence requires facing the absence of God and owning one's freedom.
Key term: Bad faith (mauvaise foi) — Sartre's term for the self-deception by which a person denies their own radical freedom, treating themselves as fixed by a role, nature or external authority (including, for Sartre, God) in order to escape the anguish of responsibility.
Sartre's atheism is unusually consistent, and this is both its strength and its exposure. Where many atheists quietly retain a belief in objective moral values, human rights and the meaningfulness of life — values that historically grew in theistic soil — Sartre insists on paying the full price of God's absence. With no divine designer there is no human essence, hence no "human nature" to ground a natural law, no purpose written into us, no values guaranteed from beyond. We are "abandoned" precisely in the sense that "we find no values or commands to legitimise our conduct"; the moral law is not discovered but invented, choice by choice. This is austere, but Sartre denies it is despairing: in Existentialism Is a Humanism he argues that the very absence of a given essence is what makes us free and responsible, the authors rather than the products of our lives, and that in choosing for myself I implicitly hold up my choice as a model for all humanity — which is why anguish, not licence, is the honest response to freedom. The theological reply runs in two directions. The Christian existentialist (Kierkegaard, Marcel) agrees that freedom and responsibility are central but argues that they are fulfilled, not abolished, in relation to God — that authentic selfhood is found before God, not in God's absence. The natural-law theist objects that Sartre's denial of any human essence is too radical: if there is genuinely no human nature, it is unclear why cruelty should be worse than kindness, or why Sartre can commend "authenticity" as if it had a claim on us. Sartre's later turn towards Marxism can be read as an attempt to supply the objective grounding for value that his early existentialism conspicuously lacked.
Martin Buber (1878–1965), the Jewish existentialist philosopher, offers a religious existentialism centred not on the solitary individual (Kierkegaard) or radical freedom (Sartre) but on relation. In I and Thou (1923) he distinguished two primary modes of relating, captured in two "primary words." In the I–It relation I treat the other as an object — something to be experienced, analysed, used, categorised; the stance is detached and instrumental. In the I–Thou relation I meet the other as a subject, a genuine you, in mutuality, presence and directness; here there is no using, only encounter. Both modes are necessary — we could not live without the I–It of practical and scientific dealing — but a life lived only in I–It is impoverished and depersonalising.
Key term: I–Thou / I–It — Buber's distinction between meeting the other as a subject in mutual presence (I–Thou) and treating the other as an object to be used or analysed (I–It); God is the "eternal Thou" who can never become an It.
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