Word: existentialist
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...unbelievable elements as its heaven-above, hell-below framework. But demythologizing, Robinson points out, threatened to end up with "the conclusion that the Jesus of the kerygma could well be only a myth." Deprived of its link with the historical Jesus, Christianity might end up as some kind of existentialist philosophy, of which Christ was little more than a mythological symbol...
...Darkling Plain. Arnold began, almost a century before Sartre, as something very like a modern existentialist. "Let us be true to one another.'' he wrote in Dover Beach, for the world Hath really neither joy, nor love nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain ; And we are here as on a darkling plain Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night...
...wonder the existentialist suffers from irremediable anguish, James might say. He exalts the self and existence at the expense of instinct, sensation, and being. Life is absurd for the existentialist; it is not for the female fly on the bit of dung. The existentialist moans, "I am." The fly simply shakes with a "voluptuous thrill," as her ovipositor discharges...
This is not to say that the female fly possesses greater wisdom than the existentialist. Assuredly she has little capacity for refining and broadening her faculties of appreciation. And he, on the other hand, can alter many of the organic and social rules that control his behavior. Nonetheless, the fly attains fulfilment--she achieves the "only fitting thing." Would we not condemn the fly as the victim of a perverse obsession if she never discharged her ovipositor, but instead fretted continuously about her existential plight? No doubt we would be forced to conclude that her life was absurd...
...times James seems so close to the existentialists that it may be misleading to stress the differences. Yet he never extols the virtues of existential dread. For the sensitive human being, he knew, anxiety of this sort is unavoidable. But it is something to recover from, not a state in which to remain--except for the purpose of writing existentialist manifestos. In short, the plight of man is his sense of existence; his salvation, the concomitant power to mediate and refine. The sense of individual existence is not the "absolute truth" for James. Indeed, the realm that confers meaning upon...