Word: existentialists
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Critics sometimes point to his Tragic Sense of Life as one of the works that inspired the existentialist movement in Paris after World War II. Influenced by the moral austerity of Ibsen and the mystical ruminations of Danish Theologian-Existentialist Sören Kierkegaard, the book argued the toss between faith and reason in a way that could not fail to cause offense to the Spanish hierarchy. In Unamuno's picture of man, man's worst friend was his dogma. He argued: flesh-and-blood man must assert his identity in the face of death. This seemed...
...bestsellers went on the Catholic Index of Forbidden Books: The Second Sex (TIME, Feb. 23, 1953) and The Mandarins (TIME, May 28), both by French Existentialist Simone de Beauvoir. Her works, said Osservatore Romano, " spread a deleterious atmosphere of existentialist philosophy ... a subtle poison . . . Madame de Beauvoir defends emancipation of women from moral laws...
...identifiable Lost Generation, but it did bring a word for intellectuals to play with: existentialism. At first it appeared to be nothing but a new French fad-redolent of sex, sidewalk cafes, tight blue jeans and Communism. But on examination it seems that all kinds of respectable thinkers are existentialists, and that France's Atheist Jean-Paul Sartre represents merely a quasi-Communist splinter group in a movement that grew out of the thoughts of the great 19th century Danish religious thinker, Sören Kierkegaard. What is a modern-day existentialist? One who asks the great questions...
...against existentialism generally. The churches believed they had all the answers. But in believing they had all the answers, they deprived the answers of their meaning. These answers were no longer understood because the questions were no longer understood, and this was the churches' fault ... I believe that existentialist art has a tremendous religious function . . . namely to rediscover the basic questions to which the Christian symbols are the answers, in a way which is understandable to our time. These symbols can then become again understandable to our time...
...Tillich concludes, there is really no such thing as Christian existentialism. Christians who question life in existentialist terms answer as Christians. "For this reason, I do not believe that the ordinary distinction between atheistic and theistic existentialism makes any sense. As long as an existentialist is theistic, he is either not existentialist or he is not really theistic...