Six Existentialist Thinkers [antikvár]

PREFACETXh.he purpose of this book is exposition, not criticism nor advocacy. There have been enough popular accounts of the general ideas of existentialists. It is time to discriminate between these thinkers; they are not exponents of a school, and yet not the least impressive thing about their highly individual thought, separated by age, nationality, and temperament, is the interrelatedness of their thinking: they lead into each other; they form a natural family; each throws light on the others, and together they develop the content of certain common themes. For this reason, the book should be read as a whole.The excuse for trying to get these writers a hearing in English in summary form is that the contemporary ones are not yet fully translated and are voluminous and not easy to read. These studies may serve as an introduction and as a clue. The final essay is not intended as a critical assessment; it is still interpretative, and designed to remove some of the prevalent misunderstandings and dispose of some of the fanciful criticisms.Although these studies appeal to the reader to take each thinker individually on his merits and not as the exponent of a school, it is permissible to try to see the movement in the grand perspective of human thought. It appears to be reaffirming in a modern idiom the protestant or the stoic form of individualism, which stands over against the empirical individualism of the Renaissance or of modern