Haase_UZ_x007E_DTh (2).pdf - South African Theological Seminary

The works of Arthur Schopenhauer, Soren Kierkegaard and the Germans Friedrich
Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger inspired existentialism. It was
popular around the mid-20th Century through the French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre
and Simone de Beauvoir. Other major contributors were: Karl Jaspers, Fyodor
Dostoevsky, Gabrielle Marcel and Franz Kafka. Existentialism looks at life as a detached
spectator. The most famous existentialist dictum is Sartre’s -- ‘existence precedes and
rules essence’ (Being and Nothingness. 1943) -- which is generally taken to mean that
there is no predetermined human essence, that life is what we make it, and only after man
‘exists,’ does he define himself. For Sartre, man is thrown into the world, suffers and
struggles there, and through it defines himself.
Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return -- that things lose value because they cease to
exist -- is another important existentialist dictum. If things just ‘are,’ without direction,
or purpose, then truth is merely the product of the collective human experience. Thus,
truth is a social construct, not an objective reality, a theme that reaches a great crescendo
in postmodernism, and is amplified even further in the total distrust of all truth constructs.
Professor H.B. Acton summarizes existentialism this way:
The word is then used to emphasize the claim
that each individual person is unique in terms
of any metaphysical or scientific system; that
he is a being who chooses as well as a being
who thinks or contemplates; that he is free and
that, because he is free, he suffers; and that
since his future depends in part upon his free
choices it is not altogether predictable. There
are also suggestions, in this special usage, that
existence is something genuine or authentic by
contrast with insincerity, that a man who merely
contemplates the world is failing to make the
acts of choice which his situation demands.
Running through all these different though
connected suggestions is the fundamental idea
that each person exists and chooses in time
and has only a limited amount of it at his
disposal in which to make decisions which
matter so much to him. Time is short; there
Are urgent decisions to take; we are free to
take them, but the thought of how much
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University of Zululand, KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa