Atheist existentialism or atheistic existentialism is a kind of existentialism which diverged from the Christian works of Søren Kierkegaard and recasted into atheist form.[1]
The philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard provided existentialism's theoretical foundation in the 19th century. It became evident in atheist form after the 1943 publication of Being and Nothingness of Jean-Paul Sartre and later explicitly alluded to in Existentialism is a Humanism in 1946. But also previously Sartre wrote works in the spirit of atheistic existentialism, i.e. the novel Nausea (1938) and the short stories in his 1939 collection The Wall. After Sartre in such spirit are the works of Albert Camus and also Simone de Beauvoir can be considered a writer in the spirit of atheist existentialism.
The novel The Nausea is in some ways a manifesto of atheism in existentialism and is an important books in this way. Sartre deal with a dejected researcher (Antoine Roquentin) in a anonymous french town, where Roquentin becomes conscious of the fact that the vegetable nature as a root tree, and obviously every inanimate objects, are indifferent towards him and his tormented existence. Besides they show to be totally extraneous to any human meaning, while no human conscience can see something significant in them.
In Camus we have a sort of dualisms between happiness and sadness, life and death, and the human condition is fleeting in it. In Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus - 1942) such dualism becomes paradoxal, because the man value greatly our existence while we know our endeavours be meaningless. So he becomes in a contradicting absurd, because if he asserts: I can accept periods of unhappiness, because I know I will also experience happiness to come, then assert cannot live with the paradox: I think my life is of great importance, but I also think it is meaningless. Therefore Camus spoke of experience the Absurd, but together of a some strange acceptation of it.
Principles
The term 'atheistic existentialism' refers to an existentialistic way excluding any transcendental, metaphysical or religious factor from its horizon. Therefore it shares with the religious existentialism (typical in Kierkegaard), the element of anguish and defeat for human finitude, together its limitations. Its particular is all absence of any reference to the transcendence, because its exclusive recognition of immanence.. The atheistic existentialism is consequently an independent type of existentialism, without any relation with the religious one (in Kierkegaard) and only a few (through of Husserl Phenomenology) with the metaphysical one (Heidegger), but instead quite cole to Philosophical atheism.
The atheistic existentialism shares with the religious one the torment and the anguish, but while this one is able to have an optimistic item in communion with God, or at least with reference to him, the atheist has nothing to rely, being alone in front of his existential malaise. But we must also see how this malaise is real and not just theoretical, because, for example Jean-Paul Sartre, was certainly a great existentialist philosopher, but in his life does not seem to have been so impressed by existentialistic anguish, while that was certainly in Albert Camus.
History
Antiquity
From an historical point of view we can see the origin of an atheistic existentialism already in the poetry of Lucretius, which, in many passages of the De rerum natura, evokes problems and feelings typical of modern existentialism [2]. We read in Book III:
Mind and soul, I say,
are held conjoined one with other, And form one single nature of themselves; But chief and regnant through the frame entire Is still that counsel which we call the mind, And that cleaves seated in the midmost breast. Here leap dismay and terror; round these haunts Be blandishments of joys; and therefore here The intellect, the mind. The rest of soul, Throughout the body scattered, but obeys— Moved by the nod and motion of the mind. This, for itself, sole through itself, hath thought; This for itself hath mirth, even when the thing That moves it, moves nor soul nor body at all.
(Lucretius, On the nature of Things, III Book, vv.136-146) [3]
Early Modern Period
The first modern period is mainly represented by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, the first by means whether of his philosophy or his novels and plays, the second through his novels and plays. Albert Camus in 1942 published with Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus), a philosophical-literary essay on the Absurd.
Late Modern Period
The last modern period has seen two types of atheistic existentialism, the one proposed by Carlo Tamagnone and an other by André Comte-Sponville.
Notes
- ^ [1]
- ^ Such thesis was recently asserted by Carlo Tamagnone in a philosophic essay titled Philosophic Atheism in the Ancient World, Florence 2004, pp.227-240
- ^ http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/785