



What is existentialism? my standard reply to this is by saying existentialism is the philosophy of existence that emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of the will. I'm talking about existentialism because apart of Marxism there is being no philosophy that has such a radical impact on the western culture as this philosophy has had in the last 50 years or so. The philosophy the is called existentialism has it roots in the 19-century they are two kinds of it, on the one hand, there is a pessimistic existentialism or atheistic existentialism which is distinguished from an existential movement that aimed to set a synthesis with historic Christianity and the most important figure of the in existentialism in the 19 century is the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard and many regards as the father of modern existential thought at least his impact on theology.

the pessimistic existentialism has it own hero as well his the father of the 19-century atheistic existentialism whose name is Friedrich Nietzsche everybody is hard of Nietzsche he is most famous for saying that God is dead.





Nietzsche was born toward the middle of the 19 century in 1844 and he died at the turn of the century in 1900, the last 11 years of his life were spent in insanity and he is being committed to a lunatic asylum for that final period of his life.





Nietzsche is often considered to be the modern father of nihilism, and nihilism basically have the creed that there are no eternal truths, that there is no eternal purpose no ultimate meaning or significant to human existence, that in the final analysis what we meet is life is " Das Nichts " or the nothingness, there is no God and because there is no God

there is no ultimate meaning of the human life that is what it was meant by the nihilism.

he was a prophet of what he called SELBSTUBERWINDUNG or self-overcoming, the process by which a great should person what he called an ubermensch rises above their circumstances and difficulties to embrace whatever life throws at them.

He systematically attacks the pillars of modern life: our faith in family, our trust in work, our attachment to love, and our general sense that life has purpose and meaning.

He tells us, “As I grew up I opened my eyes and saw the real world, and I began to laugh and I haven’t stopped since. I saw that the meaning of life was to get a livelihood, that the goal of life was to be a High Court judge, that the brightest joy of love was to marry a well-off girl, that wisdom was what the majority said it was, that passion was to give a speech and that the fear of God was to go to communion once a year. That’s what I saw and I laughed. the key to his philosophy is that: the only intelligent tactical response to life’s horror is to laugh defiantly at it. Rarely has a philosopher taken humor as seriously.

The book that fascinated the existentialists was Kierkegaard’s, “The Concept of Anxiety”, published in 1844, in which he emphasized a new word, “angest”, or “angst”, as we know it in English, a condition where we understand how many choices we face, and how little understanding we can ever have of how to exercise these choices wisely. As Kierkegaard wrote, “Life can only be understood backward, but must be lived forwards”.

Our constant angst means that unhappiness is more or less written into the script of life.



