TYPES OF EXISTENTIALISM
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the Western world in our time; Feuerbach still awaits his proper
recognition.
Kierkegaard is .an existentialist who takes his point of departure
from man's subjective experience, supposedly universal, of incom–
pleteness, insufficiency, and despair, "an anxious dread of an un–
known something." On the basis of this and similar subjective exper–
iences Kierkegaard postulates, he cannot rationally establish the exist–
ence beyond an "infinite yawning abyss" of an objective Absolute,
completely transcendent to man and therefore essentially unknowable
and mysterious. In the words of Karl Barth, a lineal theological
descendant of Kierkegaard, God is "wholly other than man."
Feuerbach is an even more radical existentialist than Kierke–
gaard. He interprets man's religious beliefs as projections of human
needs and care. They are either ideal liberations from his most press–
ing concerns or, when they express longings, ideal fulfillments. For
him "the secret of theology is anthropology." This is meant in two
senses: the first as a heuristic principle in the study of comparative
religion; second, and more important, as a naturalistic interpretation
in cultural and psychological terms of belief in the supernatural. "Re–
ligion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do
not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the
realm of reality."
The school of existential theism from Kierkegaard to Barth recog–
nizes the fact that Man's nature is expressed in his religious beliefs.
It places, however, an altogether different interpretation from that
of Feuerbach upon this fact. It dismisses the Feuerbachian approach
as a stupendous but dangerous commonplace; a commonplace be–
cause everything man does and thinks bears witness to his faltering
mortality; a dangerous commonplace because unless disciplined by
the humble realization that the conceptions of finite, wicked and
mortal creatures violently distort the nature of God, they inescapably
lead to idolatry, in which the part is worshipped as the whole, and
man impiously confused with God. Indeed some modem followers of
Kierkegaard regard Feuerbach's existential humanism as a
reductio
ad absurdum
of any interpretation which takes its point of departure
from the facts of religious experience alone independently of its on–
tological correlative.
The Kierkegaardian point of view is correct in pointing out that
