Word: existentialist
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...existentialism with its rejection of a priori moral authority is likely to have an opposing urge to commit himself entirely to authority. That is a commonplace in psychology, but it is often forgotten by those who notice the intellectual inconsistency between the two positions. Sartre easily fits the existentialist-Marxist pattern of deep ambivalence to authority, if the childhood he describes in The Words is any indication. But before he became a Marxist he had already expressed, in his novels, plays, and essays, an important existentialist philosophy. When he became disillusioned with Western capitalist society, instead of abandonning existentialism...
Jean-Paul Sartre, the most thorough Existentialist critic of Marxism, oddly enough has taken it upon himself to serve as mediator between these two fundamentally opposed philosophies This role appears to have developed from the fact that Sartre is a man of action as well as a theoretician. He maintains a philosophical premise which states there is no reality except in action and that a man is only what his life is. Philosophically he believes that Existentialism provides a true intrepretation of man and reality. But practically he concedes that Existentialism has no effective social theory and therefore can have...
...reflect this attempt at union. If they ever succeed in gaining some social power, what was of philosophical interest becomes of immense practical importance. Which will succeed, the socialist or the individualist elements in their philosophy? The answer is far from clear. For if Sartre fails by turning from existentialist liberalism to Communism, it can also be argued (as Sartre does in "Reply to Albert Camus," reprinted in Situations), that existentialists who do not make this choice fail worse. Sartre made this argument when he pointed out to Camus that Camus had not hesitated to oppose Hitler...
Most Protestant theologians take a cautious view of process thinking. Existentialist John Macquarrie of Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary argues that while the idea of an incomplete God on the way toward perfection is intellectually attractive-it helps explain why an all-powerful Creator has not yet triumphed over evil, for example-it also seems spiritually unsatisfying...
...Verge? How, he asks, can such a God evoke the awe and reverence that is at the heart of religion? Arnold Come of San Francisco Theological Seminary makes his critical point with an example: "Two men, an existentialist and a process theologian, go to Selma. The existentialist goes saying, 'The love of Christ that has been born in me responds to the brutality and the terror, and because it does, I have to go and stand beside my Christian brothers.' Is this really self-sacrificing love? Or is it really self-seeking love? The process theologian goes...