"Some group the existentialists into two major camps: the ungodly and the godly.
Ungodly
(These French writers had significant experience in the Resistance during the Nazi occupation of France in WW II. Out of the despair which came with the collapse of their nation they found unexpected strength in the single indomitable human spirit. Even under severe torture, they maintained the spirit of resistance, the un-extinguishable ability to say, “No.” “I can say No, therefore I exist.”
Sartre
Camus
Simone de Beauvoir (She brought to existentialist morality, which exalted freedom, awareness of the importance of the social context of choice, and in particular of the pwer relations between the sexes.
Godly
Kierkegaard
Marcel and Maritain (Catholic)
Tillich and Berdyaev (Protestant)
Buber (Jewish)
Other Extentialists:
Pascal, Nietzsche (“God is dead.” Theme of spiritual barrenness is commonplace in literature of the 20th century. Spiritual emptiness appears in Eliot, Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Anderson. Anderson argued that Puritanism and the industrialism which was its offspring had sterilized modern life, and proposed that men return to a healthful animal vigor by renewed contact with simple things of the earth, among them untrammeled sexual expression.), Bergson, Heidegger, Tolstoy and Dostoievsky" |
