Facs
Transcript
analysis of the human predicament. But there is no possibility of deriving answers out of existential analyses.
So we can say: It is the greatness of existentialism that it has liberated us from the deceptive forms of an essentialism which believed it could produce a natural theology, in terms of arguing from the human situation to God. The impossibility of this has been seen by all those who criticized these arguments. Its impossibility has become even more manifest by the existentialist analyses.
Now I would call existentialism, wherever it appears, an expression of the religious style in philosophy. The style becomes religious in the moment in which the surface of reality is shaken. And that's what I wanted to show you in the visual arts, but which I can also show you in the depth psychology, for which we have decided and which will prepare you then for the next semester, when we start with art.
Philosophy also has style. The word “style” is not a prerogative of the arts. There are styles not only of artistic creation but also of philosophical thinking, of political and ethical action. The question which will lie very much behind our whole discussion of the arts is: what is a religious style? – first in the arts, but then also in all the other realms of life. Not the content, not the subject matter, but the style, and that is the most important thing for the understanding of religion and culture.